My review of Star Wars: The Essential Atlas is up at GameCryer.com. While not an official source book for Star Wars: Saga Edition, I strongly recommend that game master’s at least check it out.

This book has extensive maps of the entire Star Wars galaxy, including the Deep Core, Core, Colonies, Inner Rim, Outer Rim, and other major regions, as well as time line maps depicting major events like the Mandalorian Wars, Jedi Civil War, the Clone Wars, and the plots of all six movies. Great stuff and an excellent in-game reference to give players a sense of the galaxy’s scale.

I’ve updated the Bonus Feats Index to include new feats from the Rebellion Era Campaign Guide, Galaxy at War and Galaxy of Intrigue. The Jedi Academy Training Manual is not included because there were no bonus feats in it; I’ll add feats from The Unknown Regions Campaign Guide when it’s released later this year.

Wizards of the Coast has announced its not renewing its Star Wars license for role-playing and miniatures games. As a result the last release for Star Wars: Saga Edition will be The Unknown Regions later this spring.  Former lead developer Rodney Thompson posted his thoughts on the end of the line to his blog: So Long, And Thanks For All The Mon Calamari.

As I wrote over on Nuketown, it’s a sad day for Star Wars. But there’s a silver lining too — Rodney gave us a great game with campaign books for almost every era you might want to run in (with the sole exception of The New Jedi Order) as well as supplements like Scum and Villainy and Galaxy of Intrigue that offer plenty of genre-specific options as well as tools to make the GMs job easier.  The game’s going out on top, without any of the end-of-edition crap books that we saw with D&D 3.x and D&D 2nd Edition.

For our part, Shadows of the Force will likely run for another year or two as we progress through the Mandalorian Wars and Jedi Civil War. Beyond that, I don’t know — we’ve discussed running a “Dark Times” legacy campaign focusing on the descendants of our original KOTOR heroes during the time of the Sith Triumvirate, but it’s nice to know that I could just as easily run a Rebellion Era or Clone Wars game.

I find your lack of applause … disturbing.

Wizards of the Coast has released the Galaxy at War source book just in time for our Star Wars campaign to plunge into the Mandalorian Wars. You can read my review of the book at GameCryer.com.

It’s a good book, and I’ll so far as to say it’s must-have book for anyone running a war-based campaign. There’s good advice on running such games, a new martial artist prestige class (and a host of feats and talents that go along with it), mini adventures, a short campaign, and my favorite part, a Bases and Battlestations section that’s sure to shave hours off your game prep.