19th Level

Welcome to the penultimate entry in this journey that has lasted a lot longer than I'd anticipated. I'm one of those Star Wars fans who were there at the beginning, seeing it for the first time at the age of five in a Brooklyn movie theatre - a big one, one with balconies. In the mid 1980s, Star Wars entered a lull. I still loved it but popular interest in it had waned. At Quassy Amusement Park, where I worked in high school, we had a few gazillion Snowtrooper figures redeemable with tickets from Whack-a-Mole and Skee-Ball. But it began picking up steam slowly. I remember being overjoyed at the first Star Wars Encyclopedia  that I picked up from a Stop & Shop that had a small book section. And in 1987 I remember seeing advertisements for a new Star Wars RPG. I was overjoyed. I'd tried my hand at adapting AD&D for Star Wars but it wasn't right. I'd had better luck with the Marvel Superheroes RPG oddly enough. The West End Games Star Wars RPG is my f...

On August 11, when describing the Dead Game I'd Most Like to Return  I nominated the original D6 Star Wars. Yesterday, just five days later, while waiting for a subway train I received an email from a player in our gaming group sharing with me the news that Fantasy Flight Games had just announced a limited edition reprint of the original D6 Star Wars game and its first sourcebook. I'm going to live with the illusion that someone at Fantasy Flight Games read my post and made the arrangements in record time. In all seriousness, I'm quite happy with this news. I've played D6 Star Wars recently and it has aged remarkably well. 

Grok means "to understand," of course, but Dr. Mahmoud, who might be termed the leading Terran expert on Martians, explains that it also means, "to drink" and "a hundred other English words, words which we think of as antithetical concepts. 'Grok' means all of these. It means 'fear,' it means 'love,' it means 'hate'—proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you—then you can hate it. By hating yourself. By this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate—and (I think) Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called mild distaste.  Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land  introduces the term "grok" which is a bit difficult to understand - I've always viewed it as a full and total understandi...

I noticed I've been flipping through my Star Wars books over the past few days, both the old West End Games resources and the newer Fantasy Flight Games ones. Must be a new Star Wars movie coming out. It's been about a year since I played a Star Wars game so the stars could be right for that this winter. But it seems I really need to be independently wealthy to have time for lots of campaigns. I'm a bit jealous of those people who are able to participate in or, in some cases, even run, multiple campaigns. I've written about the original D6 Star Wars system a number of times and had a chance to explore its predecessor, Ghostbusters , this summer. It's far from a perfect system but it has the virtue of being incredibly easy to play. Fantasy Flight Games' versions of Star Wars is a lot more crunchie than the D6 incarnation - in my experience prepping takes a bit longer, though it does make for some rather interesting characters. Oddly, while I played th...

I really hate giving gifts when I don't know the recipient. Does he or she own a ton of games and I want to present something unusual? Or do I want to break someone into gaming? And is money an object? Is being in print one? However, I'm going to make a few assumptions. I'm going to assume this game is a gift for someone who is into some moderately geeky stuff but isn't a gamer. And I want to get him or her hooked. With that in mind I'm going to go with a game that I've used to introduce lots of people to gaming - the West End Games incarnation of Star Wars . Back in the day, I'd have a new player, usually a friend of someone in the group, show up for a game at my apartment, and within about fifteen minutes I'd have explained the rules and had a character ready for them. The D6 incarnation isn't flashy and it does have its flaws, like any game, but it is incredibly easy to grasp, slides out of the way, and feels appropriate for the genre. It ...

 I don't blog a whole lot about systems but when going over some older games and adventures I've picked up lately I came to the realization I seem to have a lot more luck in games that have a certain level of simplicity to their rules - especially the D6 System and BRP-based games. I always get a kick out of the fact that the Chaosium team that wrote West End Games' Ghostbusters RPG is made up of people who had major roles in developing RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu , and Pendragon , all three of which are BRP-based games. While the two systems are fairly different from each other, they both have in common a very straightforward and unobtrusive system. I've explained games like Ghostbusters , Star Wars , and Call of Cthulhu  in minutes to new players. I'm the last person in the world to preach the virtues of "one true system" - or even "two true systems" for that matter - I've got some Gumshoe and Fate in my future I'm pretty certain,...

I suppose it's a good sign that my favorite session over the past year is also the most recent - a Ghostbusters  game. Like I mentioned in the writeup for that session, we've been having some hiccups with attendance of late - real life and all that. Icons has been a bit tough to keep going with variable turnout. I'd been thinking about perhaps Star Wars D6 in the autumn and the groups been talking about Ghostbusters what with the new movie... So we figured a one-shot might be in order. We thought we'd only have three players plus GM (our group is five plus GM) but as it turned out we only had two but had one of those "what the hell let's go for it". It wound up being a ton of fun. What worked? To begin, I think we were all in the right mood for a something a little bit silly and everyone just dove into character. It didn't help that two out of the three of us lived in Brooklyn once upon a time, really helping with the accents (and the third ...

I recently saw on Blue Max Studios a reference to The Force Accounted , an analysis of all the times the Force is actually used in the prequel and classic Star Wars trilogies. The authors determine there are ten Force powers used in these six films. They are: Force Leap - A supernaturally high or long jump. Used very frequently in the prequels and occasionally by Luke. Sense - Amplified physical and metaphysical senses - sensing danger, disturbances in the Force, impressions of the feelings of others, visions of the future and events far away. This is probably how Luke blew up the Death Star, using his Sense instead of his computer as well as fighting blind in his training. Telekinesis Force Push - Arguably part of Telekinesis Force Lightning - Only used by Palpatine and Dooku Jedi Mind Trick - Interestingly, only used by light siders. Probably includes Obi-Wan sneaking around the Death Star and distracting stormtroopers with false sounds. Force Spirit - Communication wit...

Defending yourself with just 1D in Sense is not easy, as Luke discovers when training with a remote. My previous post discussed the proto-D6 System as found in the Ghostbusters RPG. For those unfamiliar with the D6 System and the way it does the Force (or for a brief review) the essentials are: You roll a bunch of six sided dice against a target number, typically ranging from 5-ish (easy) to 20 or even higher. Your rating is listed as something like 2D+2 which means roll 2d6+2. By default, most normal/non-heroic people have 2D in most stats.  Starting heroes will might have their best skill be at 5D or a touch higher. You can take as many actions as you want in a round. However, taking two actions in a round reduces all dice codes by 1D, taking three reduces all by 2D, etc. Starting with Force skills will lower a characters starting attributes. Unlike most skills they start off at 1D. There are three Force skills - control, sense, and alter. Control lets you contr...

In the early 2000s one of the complaints I recall about Wizards of the Coast's d20-based  Star Wars RPG   was it was simply "D&D in space" vs. the previous Star Wars RPG as put out by West End Games. While I had a number of fun Star Wars games using the d20 versions, I have to confess to a bit of a preferences for the West End Games versions. Though in a sense, you could have called that game "Ghostbusters in space". Alas, my copies of Ghostbusters suffered in the regrettable basement flood several years ago triggered by the kiddies forgetting to turn off the bathroom sink. Oops. I've managed to reassemble some bits of it and hypothetically speaking there might be some scanned copies out there. Of course with the new movie coming out I saw a copy of the original RPG going for $3000.00 on Amazon. I'm thinking some automatic pricing algorithm is going a little loony right there... Anyways, recently flipping through the original version of the...

Discover all the technical and natural wonders of the fantastic Star Wars saga. Here are sleek starfighters that clash with mile-long Star Destroyers, tilling the void with streaks of laser fire and blazing wrecks. Here are armor-clad stormtroopers battling desperate-Rebels across the galaxy. Here are detailed descriptions of the bizarre aliens, devastating weapons, amazing Droids, courageous heroes and cunning villains of the Star Wars universe. - Back cover text for West End Games' The   Star Wars Sourcebook [Note I'm going with this post I'm defining an accessory as an add-on to a game - I see a number of other people are going with non-gaming accessories- I might make a supplemental post along those lines.] Shortly after 1983 Star Wars as a franchise began to rapidly dry up. The Marvel comic continued after Return of the Jedi  but limped to an end in 1986 as a bimonthly comic. There were cartoons about Ewoks and Droids. And some absolutely horrible live-action ...

Free? Free is good. I think we can ignore scurvy pirates. Most RPGs are available for "free" if you're willing to go to some sketchy sites and be willing to justify doing so to yourself. Rather we'll be focusing on free RPGs that the creators intended to be free... I'm also going to be focusing on free complete games, not free teasers or introductions. For this, I'm going to go back to Evil Hat's Fate Core  RPG. You can go to RPGNow right now and get yourself a copy of it and pay absolutely nothing for it. That is a great deal. You get an absolutely complete game that you can use for years. I'll also give a few honorable mentions. Stars Without Number - A game I'm itching to try someday - almost went with it in place of our current Star Wars game. Kevin Crawford's games do a lot better than tell you "oh set your game in a sandbox" - they give you a ton of tools and awesome backgrounds to do so. In Stars Without Number  yo...