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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8636747" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 103: January 1995part 3/5Weasel Games: This time, Lester turns his attention to a very particular weasel archetype - the thief which steals from their own party. There are plenty of examples of this in books and movies, characters who steal from everyone out of greed or whimsy and regularly get into arguments with the other heroes as a result. The interesting thing is that the old school corebooks actually encouraged this, or at best, sent mixed messages about whether that was an expected part of D&D play, which meant a lot of players did it with their early characters, and had to learn how badly other players tend to react to that stuff the hard way. Eventually, the designers decided this was a bad idea after all when developing 3e, and not only changed their roleplaying advice, but also the name of the class to discourage this kind of sneaky PvP shenanigans. So this is a reminder of a particularly interesting little thread of game design history, wrapped up in his own personal experiences of stealing from people, then weaselling out of the consequences with begging and sycophancy, which then ironically turns into a more respectful bond with that character because they've established a proper pecking order. Like becoming friends with someone through having a bar fight, that seems a very male way of socialising. At least doing it through the secondhand removes of your characters saves on medical treatment. Prophets of the Dark Side: "There are only ever two Sith at a time" sounds cool in a movie where you're the big damn heroes of the story, and everything is wrapped up neatly at the end of the trilogy, but in an ongoing Star Wars campaign, you'll want some more variety of antagonists than that. The EU books have already established quite a few other Dark Side users, some connected to Palpatine but remaining in the shadows for the previous conflicts, and others just plain secret or from outside the empire entirely. So here's stats for three of these potential antagonists to use in your game. All are powerful members of the crumbling empire hierarchy, with both decent personal combat skills and minions to order around, but varying levels of subtlety in how they wield their power. Decent enough as plot hooks, but another good example of how the Star Wars worldbuilding has always been based around the story at hand rather than the other way around, with a fair bit of retconning away stuff that happened in subsidiary media when the next series of movies starts up. As such it feels a bit inconsequential. This is why you don't let yourself get overly constricted by canon when playing in a licensed setting, because the original designers sure as hell aren't.</blockquote>

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