GameCryer.com: Scavenger’s Guide to Droids

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Scavenger’s Guide to Droids is the definitive droid sourcebook for Star Wars: Saga Edition, introducing a new chassis-based system for creating droids, a new streamlined “protocol” format that lets players run droids as equipment rather than NPCs, new droid manufacturing traits and personality quirks and a 96 page codex containing dozens of droids.

The Droid Codex, with its myriad combat, technical and utility droids, makes it tremendous resource for game masters, particularly for those running Clone Wars or other droid-heavy campaigns. This is easily the most statblock-heavy book since Threats of the Galaxy, which may makeScavenger’s Guide to Droids less essential for players. Those who enjoy playing droids will find plenty of new options for their characters, and tech specialist types should appreciate how the protocol format allows them to put their creations to work, but even they may be disappointed by how much of the book has been dedicated to the codex.

Read my full review of the book at GameCryer.com.

Holocron Update for 4/13/2010

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The Holocron of Zend is the companion wiki to Shadows of the Force; while our original intent was to include all of the campaign information in the blog, after a year of gaming it became clear that option was untenable. There’s just too much information.

To that end, we’ve been migrating content to the Holocron. Hardcorhobbs and I recently returned to that task, and I’m pleased to announce we’ve made some significant headway. Here’s what’s new:

  • The Episode Index: The Shadows of the Force episode index is almost current; it now includes entries for Episodes 1-8, representing over a year of real-world gaming. Each episode’s chapter entries include at least the crawl for that chapter; we hope to add summaries later on.
  • The Primer: The Primer lists major PCs, NPCs, starships, organizations, and locations in our campaign. It’s a great way to get an overview of the major and minor players in Shadows of the Force.
  • The Ghost Walk Cluster: I’ve uploaded my notes for this remote Outer Rim star cluster to the wiki.

The wiki remains a work in progress, but I think we’ve made some good headway. Next up will be tweaking the theme so that it better represents the campaign (including a campaign specific header) and adding information to support our upcoming “Mandalorian Interlude” mini-campaign (in which we’ll be putting aside our normal characters to play Mandalorians during the initial days of the Mandalorian Wars.

Nuketown.com: Episodic Storytelling in the Star Wars RPG

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I’ve posted some thoughts on Nuketown about running the advantages of running an episodic-style Star Wars game as opposed to the more traditional “thousand plot points” approach we used during our Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

It’s not that one is objectively better than the other, but I’ve found that the episodic approach works well with our increasingly increasingly erratic group roster, as people drop in and out of game days because of family and job commitments (not to mention outright exhaustion.

GameCryer.com: Six-Shooters & Spaceships

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The Six-Shooters & Spaceships sourcebook for the Serenity RPG provides plenty of what a body needs to stay alive in Joss Whedon’s space western universe: weapons, equipment and spaceships. My review of the book is up on GameCryer.com. While it’s not a Star Wars source book, the numerous deckplans for freighters and transports in this book are handy for anyone running a fringer-style game.

Star Wars: The Essential Atlas

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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.

Bonus Feats Index Updated

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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.

WotC announces end of Star Wars line

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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.