Category Archives: News

GameCryer.com: Galaxy at War

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Cover: Galaxy at War 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.

Prepare to jump to hyperspace…

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Though you wouldn’t know it from looking at this blog, our Knights of the Old Republic campaign is still going strong.  We’re in the process of wrapping up our adventures in the tail-end of the Restoration Period: our Jedi padawans have all officially been promoted to Jedi Knights, and the “crew” of Binary Transport now has a fleet of starships at their disposal. Well, more like two ships, but it’s a start.

We’ll be wrapping up this part of the campaign soon, and then jumping into the Mandalorian Interlude, a series of 4-6 adventures in which will play out the opening salvos of the Mandalorian Wars from the point of view of the Mandalorians themselves. After that we’re jumping the timeline ahead to the first full year of the war, returning to our original characters (who will have advanced to 10th level in the intervening years)

As the campaign advances, expect this blog to change; we’d originally planned to use it as a sort of lightweight wiki … but we’ve come to the conclusion that we’ve just got too much stuff to use the WordPress that way. Instead, we’ve launched a formal campaign wiki at holocron.griffcrier.com; look for all of the background content on this site to be migrated there this spring.

The KOTOR site isn’t going away though; this will still be the place where we make campaign announcements, update folks about new wiki entries, and post about new Star Wars news & reviews.

GameCryer.com Rebellion Era Campaign Guide

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Cover: The Rebellion Era Campaign GuideMy review of the Rebellion Era Campaign Guide for Star Wars: Saga Edition is up at GameCryer.com. I was skeptical of this source book — did we really need a source book for an era that’s been covered exceedingly well in a half-dozen previous source books? The answer is “no … but there’s good stuff here regardless.”

They had to dig through the depths of Star Wars canon to come up with new Rebellion era content, but what I liked most about the book (and what’s seen the most use in my campaign) are the new Background and Species Feats mechanics.

GameCryer.com: Star Wars Legacy Era Campaign Guide

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star_wars_legacy_campaign_guideMy review of the Star Wars: Legacy Era Campaign Guide is up at GameCryer.com. As I mentioned in the review, the Legacy Era is a real hodgepodge of Star Wars tropes, species, technology and heroes. I was skeptical about it at first — did we need yet another Sith Empire? Did the Jedi need to be extinguished again? But as I’ve read through the graphic novels and reviewed this campaign guide, I came to the conclusion that the answer is a “yes”.

Legacy is a great time period for a sandbox-style game where you want to be able to draw on an entire galaxy’s worth of stuff. It’s perfect for those who find themselves unable to commit to any one era when running a game, as well as those who don’t want to muck about with continuity. Check out the review or buy the book on Amazon.com.

GameCryer.com: The Clone Wars Campaign Guide

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Clone Wars Campaign GuideMy review of The Clone Wars Campaign Guide for Star Wars: Saga Edition is up on GameCryer.com.

What I liked best about The Clone Wars Campaign Guide are its combat options, specifically its new squad, mass combat and follower subsystems. As I mention in the review, The Clone Wars mass combat system is the first d20 rule set that I felt really worked at the character and army level.

We’ve tried a bunch of options, from D&D 2nd Edition’s Battle System to Malhavoc’s Cry Havoc to a home-brew mass combat system, and none of them did a good job of really integrating heroes into combat. This did.