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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Trouble beneath the waves! The Quarren allies of the would-be warlord Tolvis Maltern have seized an undersea mining facility on the frontier world of Maltern’s Folly, trapping Jedi Master Qillion Kree in one of the facility’s barracks. While Kree’s padawans have managed to defeat Tolvis and his Obsidian Way followers in his cliff stronghold of Uplift, the Quarrens are now in control of not just the planetary mines, but also Hardrock, the planet’s major city and only starport.