(un)reason
Legend
Portentious scrolling text about what has come before:
Star Wars Gamer was a magazine published by WotC in the early 2000's, when they were producing the first d20 edition of the RPG. It was published bimonthly (in theory, in practice it was often late due to delays in Lucasarts approvals process) and lasted for 10 issues before folding. Let's find out what's within it, what's good, what's bad, what's still useful for gaming today and what has been retconned out of existence when Disney took over.
Star Wars Gamer 1: November 2000
116 Pages. Well, here we are at the start of another little journey. WotC use pretty similar production values to Dragon and Dungeon in this era. A cover that's a close shot of a single person looking at the camera (in this case, Boba Fett, although whether he's going raar underneath the mask will eternally remain a mystery) with lots of tabloid style bits of writing around the edges to hype up the contents. Just inside is a clean version of the same image that's slightly more zoomed out, just like the D&D magazines. The color scheme might have a few less reds and more greys, but this already feels very much like home. Let's find out what mix of game material, fiction and promotion of other parts of the Lucasarts media empire these magazines will contain and how much more I'll know or care about Star Wars as a whole by the time I get through all 10 of them.
Editorial: This also continues the general feeling of familiarity. Jeff Quick from Polyhedron & Chris Perkins from Dungeon as editors, Johnny L. Wilson in the publisher's chair and Downer creator Kyle Hunter in charge of the art. I'm already very aware of both their good and bad points by now, and hopefully the need to go through an extra layer of approvals will mitigate the bad. It also confirms that while this is going to be all Star Wars, all the time, it is going to cover not just the RPG, but fiction, computer games, card games, comics, minis and anything else vaguely related to the franchise, which is still considerably more variety than the 4e issues of Dragon & Dungeon are managing. Whether they'll be permitted to be critical of those products like the reviews in Dragon in the 80's & 90's often were remains to be seen, but this already feels like a loosening of the straitjacket compared to what I've been dealing with for the past year. They're even encouraging freelancers to submit stuff instead of doing nearly everything in-house! Who'll get to be a small part of the expanded universe because of that? I'm actually pretty excited to find out.
Force Feedback: A letters page! Another of those things you don't miss until they're gone, and really contributes to the electronic issues of Dragon feeling like they're developing stuff in a bubble without listening to what their audience actually wants. Let's find out how diverse and contradictory a bunch star wars fans are around this time period.
First letter is only interested in RPG material, in particular wanting serious, grounded, internally consistent setting material covering everyday life in the empire & rebellion. Sounds like the Fox only, no items, final destination of Star Wars fans. The franchise will disappoint you many many times over the next 25 years.
Second wants them to get together with Decipher and cover the collectible card game. They would also very much like that if they can deal with all the legal wrangling.
Third wants more material on the Tales of the Jedi era. This is also very much an option if they can get the submissions.
Fourth is an enthusiastic 16-year old who wants to submit fiction. This one they have to turn down. One of the clauses in their licence is that they can only accept fiction from already published authors, and to be fair, even that way they still have a surplus. Since Dragon in many eras got more system-free fiction submissions than everything else put together even though that was only a small part of their output, to the point where they needed a specific editor just to comb through them and pick out the best ones that's not too surprising.
Fifth wants lots of game material that's useful in actual play. Character stats, place maps, rules variants, that's the stuff that'll make you come back rather than just reading once and putting it on a big pile. Another one the editors are entirely in favor of so send that stuff in.
The final one also wants stuff you can actually use, with floor plans and stats and enough info on how the tech works to extrapolate even if they wouldn't pass the hard sci-fi test. Another one that puts the tension between the game designers and the writers of the actual movies into sharp relief.
Imperial Dispatch: One of the less fun bits of writing an RPG is when you realise you made a mistake after going to press. Despite the extra layers of approval all their Star Wars products go through, they still managed to screw up the math on the crimelord and present a revised table here. Looking ahead, this is a regular column, so I guess there’s a fair few more things to slip through the net. Let’s hope none of the errors were critical ones, because you just know only a small fraction of the people who bought the corebook will also be buying all the magazines.
Fiction - The Starfighter Trap by Steve Miller: Now there’s another familiar name, and not just because he shares it with the guy who speaks of the pompatus of love. He’s worked on several D&D products and recently got a profile in Dragon 271. Here, he takes us off to Naboo to show us what happened to some of the lower ranking starfighters in the prequel era. Flight instructor Essara Till gets dragged away from her paperwork by an attack of Headhunters and has to prove that she’s got what it takes in a real fight to both her students and her insufferable R2 unit. As the title says, it seems easy at first but turns out to be a trap, one of the other pilots is a traitor and she has to do some dramatic comms talking while also trying to stay alive in the middle of the dogfight. Eventually she wins through using her brain, the traitor dies in suitably dramatic fashion and it’s all over bar the debriefing. So this fall into the category of fast, action-packed romp rather than revealing anything new about the setting, with what characterisation there is built up in brief flashbacks between the present day action. Entertaining, but not deep, this definitely won't be sticking in my memory like many of the better bits of short fiction in Dragon.
Fiction - Fair Prey by Daniel Wallace: Two bits of pure system-free fiction in succession? Now that's a sign that their priorities are a little different to Dragon, which only did that once in over 30 years. This one takes us to Kabal, where a rich big game hunter seeks ever more dangerous prey to test his skills upon, eventually upgrading to sentient beings. A small time crook trying to sell him a prototype gun sees him simply take it and tell him to run, or he'll be the next target. Nah, he's going to hunt him anyway, because he's just that kind of bastard. Can he escape the grounds of his opponent's mansion alive, maybe even figure out some way to turn the tables? Thankfully the rest of his crew back at the spaceship notice his comlink has been destroyed and get to work hacking the systems. But it's one of his other prey that really turns the tide, a psychic lamproid that realises they're in the same predicament and eases his pain before turning its attentions to their common enemy, sacrificing its life to save him. Eventually he gets rescued by his companions and they leave an explosive booby-trap behind to take out the hunter in thoroughly unsporting fashion. So this feels like an adventure from a boys own magazine from the early 20th century given sci-fi trappings, with the protagonists aware that similar kinds of media exist in the star wars universe, but also that knowing the tropes doesn't necessarily mean their triumph is guaranteed. It manages to be just the right level of meta without undercutting the tension and reminds us that Star Wars' primary influences were from those cheap pulp books and magazines, for better and worse, only it had a bigger budget. This one definitely gets my approval.
Understanding the Jedi Code: This one is also system-free, but much more directly aimed at gamers, as plenty of them play Jedi and have to deal with varying DM interpretations of what actions give you dark side points. This reminds us that just by looking at their actions in the movies, there are a whole lot of things that would be considered crimes by modern day society that the light side has no problem with. Obi-Wan engages in mind-control and casually dismembers a guy in a bar fight. Further out in the EU, there are species that consider cannibalism the normal, culturally polite thing to do with the dead, and a wise jedi does not consider that a reason to start swinging their lightsaber. Basically, they may have a code, but they’re definitely not D&D paladins who lose their powers or have to become blackguards after a single intentional transgression and this code is loose enough that there’s room for ecumenical debate, even to the point of coming to blows without either side being a cackling bad guy. If your DM tries to punish players for playing their jedi characters as flawed heroes with doubts and indiscretions they’re not running the game in the spirit of the source material and you can use this as a pointed reminder.
Duel of the Fates: On the other hand, this is extremely specific to the rules of the current d20 version of the Star Wars RPG and their most recent movie release, as it shows the battle between Obi-Wan and Darth Maul turned into a round by round fight with all the actions they take detailed. While it doesn’t go as far as to detail the precise rolls, it does detail the number of vitality points they’re losing and force points spent to power their special abilities. They use full attacks, single attacks, full defence, sunders, knockdowns, tumble, held actions, sense motive. It’s all over in 12 rounds, which isn’t actually that far off from the time it takes in the actual movie. So this does feel like they’ve put a fair bit of effort into making sure that the math lines up with the onscreen actions, even if an RPG will never be as freewheeling in letting you pull previously unseen tricks out of your ass as a movie can. The d20 framework might be a bit too crunchy to truly capture the feel of a movie, but they’ve still given it a good try and it works well enough to stick with for a couple of editions. (cross compatibility with D&D doesn’t hurt that bit even if it makes genre emulation trickier)
Shipbuilding Secrets: This one is also aimed at gamers, but significantly less crunchy. It’s essentially reminding you that you should treat your ship in the same way that you treat creating characters. How did the PC’s get hold of it, what kind of ship is it, what is its history, what quirks and flaws distinguish it from an average ship of that model and often most difficult of all, how to come up with a name, which has a helpful random table to speed you along your way. It has exactly the same vibe as many of the short pieces of roleplaying advice I saw in Dragon over the years, which isn't surprising because Thomas M. Reid is another of the writers who has also appeared in there. A solid but unexceptional piece made more useful to me by including a specific ship complete with diagrams as an example rather than just general advice. That's the bit that actually has in game value to me at this point.
The University of Sambra Guide to Intelligent Life: There are plenty of alien races statted up for PC's to choose from in the corebook, but this is another area where Star Wars and D&D fans share the same endless appetite for new options. (and now you can mix and match them too!) This is one that’s going to be a regular column, which bodes well in terms of giving me more material that’s useful for actual play.
The Em'liy are desert-dwelling nomads who are well adapted to their native environment and can go into a deadly rage like barbarians. They abandoned their civilisation out of shame after the empire destroyed their holy city. They seem like they could be ported into a fantasy d20 game with zero changes.
Iskalonians are a group of aquatic races that live in harmony with each other. Only one of them is capable of venturing onto land and serving as emissaries to air-breathing races, so they’re the only one that gets stats. They get a bonus to int, a penalty to wis and a mild bonus to their Listen skill along with the obvious swim speed and water breathing, but don’t do well if they spend more than a few hours at a time out of water.
Stenaxes are a toned down ECL+0 version of gargoyles, with their flight, keen senses and +4 modifier to physical stats compensated for by a -8 total penalty to their mental stats. Despite this they’re actually capable of surprisingly co-ordinated long term planning as a group, slowly building up their power base for sudden strikes of conquest. There’s definitely more that could be done with their hidden depths.
S’kytri are a prettier race with innate flight and a total +6 modifier to their ability scores, meaning they definitely merit at least a +1 LA, maybe 2 to balance them with the others. Tall, thin and elegant, with a superiority complex over non-flyers, they hit many of the same roleplaying beats as D&D elves, but have a distinctive enough history and individual quirks to not be complete carbon copies.
Nagai are basically humans but gother, with pale skin, black hair that naturally forms into elaborate hairstyles without the need for hairspray, skinny bodies and soft voices that lead people to underestimate them, but plenty of agility in a pinch. Pretty obvious what kind of players they’re designed to cater to, with White Wolf still hanging onto the number two spot in roleplaying for several years to come.
Zeltrons are the Star Wars equivalent of Star Trek’s Orions, also basically just humans, but with brightly colored skin and pheromones that make their emotions contagious. This means they’re excellent diplomats and performers, but their hedonism can get out of control and they’re vulnerable to the strong negative emotions of dark-siders. Also pretty obvious what kind of classes and roleplaying style they favor. So there are a fair number of obvious tropes here but they all look playable, and apart from one, fairly balanced in terms of stats and powers. This is another one I could easily tap for use in other d20 games.
Tatooine Grudge Match: Similar to the Duel of the Fates article, this takes a tiny part of a movie and deconstructs it into round by round game mechanics. Every little twist and turn of the pod race between young Anakin and Sebula is deconstructed and turned into dice rolls and modifiers so you could have your players race on the same course and each section of the match would have its own dangers and optimal tactics. Since encouraging conflicts other than lethal combat is something I’m strongly in favour of, this is highly relevant to my interests and Star Wars d20 has enough in common with d20 Modern that I could convert this for slightly less high-tech settings like Thunderball Rally. One of the most useful articles in here yet.
Peril in the Ionosphere: Continuing to run through the checklist of stuff they said they’d be doing, we get to the adventures section. The PC’s are heading from Naboo to one of its moons when the ship gets hit by a small piece of debris and springs a gas leak. Unfortunately, the pilot is an Ithorian and the atmospheric disturbance sends him into a frenzy. You need to figure out how to subdue him before he does any more damage to you or the ship’s controls and get it back under control. Of course, since this is a commercial flight, all your weapons are locked away, making the most obvious solution a lot harder. So this is a 6 page, single scene adventure that’ll probably last less than a session, that’s definitely aimed at less experienced players and GM’s, walking you through the various options you could try in a step by step fashion with a list of DC’s. It’s slightly more advanced than a CYOA book or the Fast-Play adventures, but does still feel a little bit patronising. It does get a little extra credit for being an adventure where you’re not supposed to kill anyone, but overall, this is a little subpar compared to the average Dungeon magazine adventure.
Rendezvous at Ord Mantell: As with the fiction section, we get a second adventure in quick succession. This one is a little more complex than the first - 8 pages long and aimed at 1st-2nd level characters, but still on the basic and linear end of the adventure spectrum. The PC’s are drinking in atavern spacer bar, when they’re asked for help by a rebel spy who’s in a bit of a pinch. She crashed her ship and needs help to get back to it and repair it. Before you can make a firm decision, a couple of thugs burst through the door and start aggressively questioning everyone, attacking her if they recognise her. You’ll have to either help her sneak away or wind up fighting them if you want to see the rest of the adventure. You’ll have to spend several hours making survival & tracking rolls to successfully follow the trail back to her ship, with wandering monster encounters rolled each hour. When you get there, you find a group of raiders from the badlands has dragged it away. This is a much easier tracking roll to follow, but you’ll still need to do so, then fight the raiders and their bantha mounts at the end to get it back, which is at least a properly mapped location with 6 described sections that you can handle with stealth or a full-frontal attack. Once you’ve beaten them you can carry out the repairs without further interruption, get paid and depart on good terms, with the possibility of more rebellion related adventures now you have a contact on the inside. So this is a linear sequence of several scenes that gives you several different options how to solve them, but still expects you to follow them in strict order with no provision for what happens if you go off and do something different. About on the level of your typical single session Polyhedron tournament adventure, this also shows that they’re doing the adventures entirely in-house rather than having hundreds of submissions a month that they then choose the very best of like Dungeon and I should calibrate my expectations accordingly for the subsequent issues.
The Anzati: Vampires, in my Star Wars? It’s more likely than you think! In fact, we’ve already seen one variant a few years ago, in Polyhedron 104. The specifics are completely different though, and feel like they were made up independently without any knowledge of the other's existence. The force vampire from there was a singular being created by accident, which means that while it might be terrifying, once you've beaten it that's the end of the story. The Anzati are a whole race of aliens that need to drain the life force of sentient beings to survive, although obviously they spread themselves thin and keep a low profile because you don't want to overfeed the herd and have them become aware of your existence. They can look just like any other alien until they unfurl their cheek proboscises and send them through your soft cavities into your brain, where they drain a couple of levels of life force per round until the victim either dies or manages to break free. (and since they don't have any memory erasing powers, they prefer to kill in one go rather than feeding a little and giving victims a chance to recover) So conceptually, they have as much in common with Illithid as vampires, long-lived creatures that see themselves as superior to other sentients, only without the obvious supernatural powers. Because they apparently have to tie everything into the movies at the moment, there's one in Jabba's entourage, and he had his sights on Han Solo during the events of RotJ, not that it turned out to matter to the plot. So there is a bit of EU retconning wankery here, but this does still seem solidly constructed enough to be usable in game and at least the visuals of how they feed are distinct from most vampire variants. This gets my approval overall.
Deck Plans: They said there'd be some CCG coverage each issue, and as usual, the column name is a pun. This devotes a full four pages to showing you how to build a deck themed around Endor Operations, which means it might not be completely optimal mechanically, but at least you’ll be playing with style. Lots of bikes, along with several support cards to enhance them, a hidden base with a decent amount of defences, and a very specific set of NPC’s from the movies. Can you rescue the princess, find the good in Darth Vader and win, or will you fall before the might of the second death star? Since I’ve never really got into CCG’s I can’t really give any assessment on the mechanical side of this, but they sure are managing to pack in a lot of familiar catchphrases and the visual layout is pretty good as well. This also falls into the category of welcome variety after the desert of homogeneity that is trying to review 4e even if it’s of no real use to me at this point.
State of the Arts: This is the computer game column, also a pun. As this is a licenced magazine, there’ll be no critical reviewing taking place here, so these are pure promotional previews with lots of screenshots to pad them out. Could be worse. At least some of them have RPG stat translations of characters in them so they’re not completely useless once you’ve bought them.
Star Wars: Starfighter gets by far the longest piece, talking about the three heroes, their respective crafts and the difference in mission types they face, including full RPG stats for Nym the Feeorin, the heavy blaster of the trio. While it’s all flight sim action, they make a big deal about how they’re mixing big missions and small, shoot-em up, stealth and escort missions so you won't get bored, with some of the largest levels covering literally thousands of miles of (low-res polygon) terrain. There are a few complaints about the dangers of going into crunch time, but overall, they do seem to genuinely excited about this one and the new things they can do with the PS2 architecture.
Star Wars: Demolition is basically their spin on the Mario Kart formula, giving you an array of different vehicles from the franchise and setting them on each other in demolition derbys in scenic locations that also span the whole lore even if they stretch credulity. (how does Jabba the Hutt have enough influence to stage one on the surface of the still under construction second death star?) Reviews show that while amusing initially, it didn’t have enough variety to hold up under sustained play, so it won’t have any kind of competitive scene like old versions of Mario Kart or Smash Bros.
Star Wars Episode One: Obi-Wan lets you experience events around the phantom menace from his viewpoint, using the right analog stick or mouse to give you a greater flexibility of lightsaber moves than just a single button. That kind of trick will become more common in shooters over the next couple of decades, but this one isn’t particularly highly reviewed in itself, and also apparently had a lot of material cut in development.
Star Wars Episode One: Battle for Naboo got somewhat better reviews (although the console version did better than the PC one), letting you fight enemies in both air & land vehicles and filling in a whole bunch of lore on the planet in the process. There might be some useful stuff for RPG players in there, especially if you use the maps as backdrops for your own game.
Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine takes us back down to earth to see another part of the Lucasarts media empire. The N64 version has been reworked to make it more action-packed and easier to control, with the analog stick following the camera movements Mario 64 style rather than remaining fixed to the game axes like many older 3d games. Another thing that shows how they’re rapidly improving based on feedback in this era and the second generation of 3d action games will be a lot more standardised in control schemes.
Escape from Monkey Island takes us even further afield, bringing back the obtuse puzzles and goofy humour of the monkey island series, now in 3D. Can you save the islands from the horrors of gentrification that would price out the pirates? Expect plenty of pop culture references along the way, especially Star Wars ones. Ultimately, reviews are mixed, and the early 3d visuals definitely look a bit clunky these days, but there are still things to enjoy here so it’s a worthy part of the still ongoing series.
Light Side Dark Side: Aaron Williams takes a brief break from churning out Nodwick to apply his particular brand of humor to the Star Wars universe. First one references the jedi mind trick from episode IV, but stretches it out until it breaks the brain of the poor beleaguered stormtrooper trying to find those dang droids.
We finish off with a special page containing a temporary tattoo for you to apply to your skin. Not a gimmick Dragon or Dungeon ever did, which does slightly surprise me since they did include hologram covers, collectible cards, full cardstock games for you to cut out and assemble and all sorts of other things over the years. That's definitely fresh and welcome to see.
Some good and some dull articles, but overall, a solid start to the magazine. There's not as much variety in terms of topics as the classic issues of Dragon magazine, but more than either the 3e or 4e eras, and while RPG material gets a plurality of the page count, it's done in a way to keep it friendly to general fans of the franchise who might have picked this up on the newsstands out of curiosity. If they keep this level of quality up, this should wind up a useful diversion from my main journey once I'm done with it. Let's see if the next issue is better or worse.[/url]
A long time ago (2008), in a forum far far away, (operating on vbulletin) a young hero set out on an epic quest to read and review every issue of Dragon Magazine. This took multiple thrilling instalments over the course of six years, by which time there were a whole new slew of merged electronic issues to get through. Already exhausted by their previous trials and not wanting to tackle the combined issues until they had read all the previous issues of Dungeon as well for context, our hero withdrew from the battlefield for now. Several years of relative peace followed, only broken by a minor sidequest involving ARES magazine. But in 2020, our hero returned, a little older but no wiser, ready to take on the combined forces of Polyhedron and Dungeon magazines. Once again, this was an epic task, but nothing beyond their abilities, or so they thought. Things proceeded smoothly for several more years, until, in their hubris, they decided to actually play some of the games contained therin. Assembling companions and keeping them together turned out to be far more challenging than any solo quest, involving many outright failures and a couple of near successes that collapsed after a few sessions. Eventually, they did manage to get a stable team together and have spent the last year questing asKnights of the Lich-queen. It seemed as if the original quest had stalled entirely. Nevertheless, our hero has kept on reviewing in the background and eventually reached the 4e era. Here, they hit another challenge, as the sheer monotony and formulaicness of the 4e issues made them start blurring into one, making it difficult to find the will to continue. In desperation, our hero cast their mind back in time again, searching for something else to interleave their reviews with and provide some variety. Which leads us here. What trials will our hero face, and will they come out the other end stronger, or will this be their final resting place?
Star Wars Gamer 1: November 2000
116 Pages. Well, here we are at the start of another little journey. WotC use pretty similar production values to Dragon and Dungeon in this era. A cover that's a close shot of a single person looking at the camera (in this case, Boba Fett, although whether he's going raar underneath the mask will eternally remain a mystery) with lots of tabloid style bits of writing around the edges to hype up the contents. Just inside is a clean version of the same image that's slightly more zoomed out, just like the D&D magazines. The color scheme might have a few less reds and more greys, but this already feels very much like home. Let's find out what mix of game material, fiction and promotion of other parts of the Lucasarts media empire these magazines will contain and how much more I'll know or care about Star Wars as a whole by the time I get through all 10 of them.
Editorial: This also continues the general feeling of familiarity. Jeff Quick from Polyhedron & Chris Perkins from Dungeon as editors, Johnny L. Wilson in the publisher's chair and Downer creator Kyle Hunter in charge of the art. I'm already very aware of both their good and bad points by now, and hopefully the need to go through an extra layer of approvals will mitigate the bad. It also confirms that while this is going to be all Star Wars, all the time, it is going to cover not just the RPG, but fiction, computer games, card games, comics, minis and anything else vaguely related to the franchise, which is still considerably more variety than the 4e issues of Dragon & Dungeon are managing. Whether they'll be permitted to be critical of those products like the reviews in Dragon in the 80's & 90's often were remains to be seen, but this already feels like a loosening of the straitjacket compared to what I've been dealing with for the past year. They're even encouraging freelancers to submit stuff instead of doing nearly everything in-house! Who'll get to be a small part of the expanded universe because of that? I'm actually pretty excited to find out.
Force Feedback: A letters page! Another of those things you don't miss until they're gone, and really contributes to the electronic issues of Dragon feeling like they're developing stuff in a bubble without listening to what their audience actually wants. Let's find out how diverse and contradictory a bunch star wars fans are around this time period.
First letter is only interested in RPG material, in particular wanting serious, grounded, internally consistent setting material covering everyday life in the empire & rebellion. Sounds like the Fox only, no items, final destination of Star Wars fans. The franchise will disappoint you many many times over the next 25 years.
Second wants them to get together with Decipher and cover the collectible card game. They would also very much like that if they can deal with all the legal wrangling.
Third wants more material on the Tales of the Jedi era. This is also very much an option if they can get the submissions.
Fourth is an enthusiastic 16-year old who wants to submit fiction. This one they have to turn down. One of the clauses in their licence is that they can only accept fiction from already published authors, and to be fair, even that way they still have a surplus. Since Dragon in many eras got more system-free fiction submissions than everything else put together even though that was only a small part of their output, to the point where they needed a specific editor just to comb through them and pick out the best ones that's not too surprising.
Fifth wants lots of game material that's useful in actual play. Character stats, place maps, rules variants, that's the stuff that'll make you come back rather than just reading once and putting it on a big pile. Another one the editors are entirely in favor of so send that stuff in.
The final one also wants stuff you can actually use, with floor plans and stats and enough info on how the tech works to extrapolate even if they wouldn't pass the hard sci-fi test. Another one that puts the tension between the game designers and the writers of the actual movies into sharp relief.
Imperial Dispatch: One of the less fun bits of writing an RPG is when you realise you made a mistake after going to press. Despite the extra layers of approval all their Star Wars products go through, they still managed to screw up the math on the crimelord and present a revised table here. Looking ahead, this is a regular column, so I guess there’s a fair few more things to slip through the net. Let’s hope none of the errors were critical ones, because you just know only a small fraction of the people who bought the corebook will also be buying all the magazines.
Fiction - The Starfighter Trap by Steve Miller: Now there’s another familiar name, and not just because he shares it with the guy who speaks of the pompatus of love. He’s worked on several D&D products and recently got a profile in Dragon 271. Here, he takes us off to Naboo to show us what happened to some of the lower ranking starfighters in the prequel era. Flight instructor Essara Till gets dragged away from her paperwork by an attack of Headhunters and has to prove that she’s got what it takes in a real fight to both her students and her insufferable R2 unit. As the title says, it seems easy at first but turns out to be a trap, one of the other pilots is a traitor and she has to do some dramatic comms talking while also trying to stay alive in the middle of the dogfight. Eventually she wins through using her brain, the traitor dies in suitably dramatic fashion and it’s all over bar the debriefing. So this fall into the category of fast, action-packed romp rather than revealing anything new about the setting, with what characterisation there is built up in brief flashbacks between the present day action. Entertaining, but not deep, this definitely won't be sticking in my memory like many of the better bits of short fiction in Dragon.
Fiction - Fair Prey by Daniel Wallace: Two bits of pure system-free fiction in succession? Now that's a sign that their priorities are a little different to Dragon, which only did that once in over 30 years. This one takes us to Kabal, where a rich big game hunter seeks ever more dangerous prey to test his skills upon, eventually upgrading to sentient beings. A small time crook trying to sell him a prototype gun sees him simply take it and tell him to run, or he'll be the next target. Nah, he's going to hunt him anyway, because he's just that kind of bastard. Can he escape the grounds of his opponent's mansion alive, maybe even figure out some way to turn the tables? Thankfully the rest of his crew back at the spaceship notice his comlink has been destroyed and get to work hacking the systems. But it's one of his other prey that really turns the tide, a psychic lamproid that realises they're in the same predicament and eases his pain before turning its attentions to their common enemy, sacrificing its life to save him. Eventually he gets rescued by his companions and they leave an explosive booby-trap behind to take out the hunter in thoroughly unsporting fashion. So this feels like an adventure from a boys own magazine from the early 20th century given sci-fi trappings, with the protagonists aware that similar kinds of media exist in the star wars universe, but also that knowing the tropes doesn't necessarily mean their triumph is guaranteed. It manages to be just the right level of meta without undercutting the tension and reminds us that Star Wars' primary influences were from those cheap pulp books and magazines, for better and worse, only it had a bigger budget. This one definitely gets my approval.
Understanding the Jedi Code: This one is also system-free, but much more directly aimed at gamers, as plenty of them play Jedi and have to deal with varying DM interpretations of what actions give you dark side points. This reminds us that just by looking at their actions in the movies, there are a whole lot of things that would be considered crimes by modern day society that the light side has no problem with. Obi-Wan engages in mind-control and casually dismembers a guy in a bar fight. Further out in the EU, there are species that consider cannibalism the normal, culturally polite thing to do with the dead, and a wise jedi does not consider that a reason to start swinging their lightsaber. Basically, they may have a code, but they’re definitely not D&D paladins who lose their powers or have to become blackguards after a single intentional transgression and this code is loose enough that there’s room for ecumenical debate, even to the point of coming to blows without either side being a cackling bad guy. If your DM tries to punish players for playing their jedi characters as flawed heroes with doubts and indiscretions they’re not running the game in the spirit of the source material and you can use this as a pointed reminder.
Duel of the Fates: On the other hand, this is extremely specific to the rules of the current d20 version of the Star Wars RPG and their most recent movie release, as it shows the battle between Obi-Wan and Darth Maul turned into a round by round fight with all the actions they take detailed. While it doesn’t go as far as to detail the precise rolls, it does detail the number of vitality points they’re losing and force points spent to power their special abilities. They use full attacks, single attacks, full defence, sunders, knockdowns, tumble, held actions, sense motive. It’s all over in 12 rounds, which isn’t actually that far off from the time it takes in the actual movie. So this does feel like they’ve put a fair bit of effort into making sure that the math lines up with the onscreen actions, even if an RPG will never be as freewheeling in letting you pull previously unseen tricks out of your ass as a movie can. The d20 framework might be a bit too crunchy to truly capture the feel of a movie, but they’ve still given it a good try and it works well enough to stick with for a couple of editions. (cross compatibility with D&D doesn’t hurt that bit even if it makes genre emulation trickier)
Shipbuilding Secrets: This one is also aimed at gamers, but significantly less crunchy. It’s essentially reminding you that you should treat your ship in the same way that you treat creating characters. How did the PC’s get hold of it, what kind of ship is it, what is its history, what quirks and flaws distinguish it from an average ship of that model and often most difficult of all, how to come up with a name, which has a helpful random table to speed you along your way. It has exactly the same vibe as many of the short pieces of roleplaying advice I saw in Dragon over the years, which isn't surprising because Thomas M. Reid is another of the writers who has also appeared in there. A solid but unexceptional piece made more useful to me by including a specific ship complete with diagrams as an example rather than just general advice. That's the bit that actually has in game value to me at this point.
The University of Sambra Guide to Intelligent Life: There are plenty of alien races statted up for PC's to choose from in the corebook, but this is another area where Star Wars and D&D fans share the same endless appetite for new options. (and now you can mix and match them too!) This is one that’s going to be a regular column, which bodes well in terms of giving me more material that’s useful for actual play.
The Em'liy are desert-dwelling nomads who are well adapted to their native environment and can go into a deadly rage like barbarians. They abandoned their civilisation out of shame after the empire destroyed their holy city. They seem like they could be ported into a fantasy d20 game with zero changes.
Iskalonians are a group of aquatic races that live in harmony with each other. Only one of them is capable of venturing onto land and serving as emissaries to air-breathing races, so they’re the only one that gets stats. They get a bonus to int, a penalty to wis and a mild bonus to their Listen skill along with the obvious swim speed and water breathing, but don’t do well if they spend more than a few hours at a time out of water.
Stenaxes are a toned down ECL+0 version of gargoyles, with their flight, keen senses and +4 modifier to physical stats compensated for by a -8 total penalty to their mental stats. Despite this they’re actually capable of surprisingly co-ordinated long term planning as a group, slowly building up their power base for sudden strikes of conquest. There’s definitely more that could be done with their hidden depths.
S’kytri are a prettier race with innate flight and a total +6 modifier to their ability scores, meaning they definitely merit at least a +1 LA, maybe 2 to balance them with the others. Tall, thin and elegant, with a superiority complex over non-flyers, they hit many of the same roleplaying beats as D&D elves, but have a distinctive enough history and individual quirks to not be complete carbon copies.
Nagai are basically humans but gother, with pale skin, black hair that naturally forms into elaborate hairstyles without the need for hairspray, skinny bodies and soft voices that lead people to underestimate them, but plenty of agility in a pinch. Pretty obvious what kind of players they’re designed to cater to, with White Wolf still hanging onto the number two spot in roleplaying for several years to come.
Zeltrons are the Star Wars equivalent of Star Trek’s Orions, also basically just humans, but with brightly colored skin and pheromones that make their emotions contagious. This means they’re excellent diplomats and performers, but their hedonism can get out of control and they’re vulnerable to the strong negative emotions of dark-siders. Also pretty obvious what kind of classes and roleplaying style they favor. So there are a fair number of obvious tropes here but they all look playable, and apart from one, fairly balanced in terms of stats and powers. This is another one I could easily tap for use in other d20 games.
Tatooine Grudge Match: Similar to the Duel of the Fates article, this takes a tiny part of a movie and deconstructs it into round by round game mechanics. Every little twist and turn of the pod race between young Anakin and Sebula is deconstructed and turned into dice rolls and modifiers so you could have your players race on the same course and each section of the match would have its own dangers and optimal tactics. Since encouraging conflicts other than lethal combat is something I’m strongly in favour of, this is highly relevant to my interests and Star Wars d20 has enough in common with d20 Modern that I could convert this for slightly less high-tech settings like Thunderball Rally. One of the most useful articles in here yet.
Peril in the Ionosphere: Continuing to run through the checklist of stuff they said they’d be doing, we get to the adventures section. The PC’s are heading from Naboo to one of its moons when the ship gets hit by a small piece of debris and springs a gas leak. Unfortunately, the pilot is an Ithorian and the atmospheric disturbance sends him into a frenzy. You need to figure out how to subdue him before he does any more damage to you or the ship’s controls and get it back under control. Of course, since this is a commercial flight, all your weapons are locked away, making the most obvious solution a lot harder. So this is a 6 page, single scene adventure that’ll probably last less than a session, that’s definitely aimed at less experienced players and GM’s, walking you through the various options you could try in a step by step fashion with a list of DC’s. It’s slightly more advanced than a CYOA book or the Fast-Play adventures, but does still feel a little bit patronising. It does get a little extra credit for being an adventure where you’re not supposed to kill anyone, but overall, this is a little subpar compared to the average Dungeon magazine adventure.
Rendezvous at Ord Mantell: As with the fiction section, we get a second adventure in quick succession. This one is a little more complex than the first - 8 pages long and aimed at 1st-2nd level characters, but still on the basic and linear end of the adventure spectrum. The PC’s are drinking in a
The Anzati: Vampires, in my Star Wars? It’s more likely than you think! In fact, we’ve already seen one variant a few years ago, in Polyhedron 104. The specifics are completely different though, and feel like they were made up independently without any knowledge of the other's existence. The force vampire from there was a singular being created by accident, which means that while it might be terrifying, once you've beaten it that's the end of the story. The Anzati are a whole race of aliens that need to drain the life force of sentient beings to survive, although obviously they spread themselves thin and keep a low profile because you don't want to overfeed the herd and have them become aware of your existence. They can look just like any other alien until they unfurl their cheek proboscises and send them through your soft cavities into your brain, where they drain a couple of levels of life force per round until the victim either dies or manages to break free. (and since they don't have any memory erasing powers, they prefer to kill in one go rather than feeding a little and giving victims a chance to recover) So conceptually, they have as much in common with Illithid as vampires, long-lived creatures that see themselves as superior to other sentients, only without the obvious supernatural powers. Because they apparently have to tie everything into the movies at the moment, there's one in Jabba's entourage, and he had his sights on Han Solo during the events of RotJ, not that it turned out to matter to the plot. So there is a bit of EU retconning wankery here, but this does still seem solidly constructed enough to be usable in game and at least the visuals of how they feed are distinct from most vampire variants. This gets my approval overall.
Deck Plans: They said there'd be some CCG coverage each issue, and as usual, the column name is a pun. This devotes a full four pages to showing you how to build a deck themed around Endor Operations, which means it might not be completely optimal mechanically, but at least you’ll be playing with style. Lots of bikes, along with several support cards to enhance them, a hidden base with a decent amount of defences, and a very specific set of NPC’s from the movies. Can you rescue the princess, find the good in Darth Vader and win, or will you fall before the might of the second death star? Since I’ve never really got into CCG’s I can’t really give any assessment on the mechanical side of this, but they sure are managing to pack in a lot of familiar catchphrases and the visual layout is pretty good as well. This also falls into the category of welcome variety after the desert of homogeneity that is trying to review 4e even if it’s of no real use to me at this point.
State of the Arts: This is the computer game column, also a pun. As this is a licenced magazine, there’ll be no critical reviewing taking place here, so these are pure promotional previews with lots of screenshots to pad them out. Could be worse. At least some of them have RPG stat translations of characters in them so they’re not completely useless once you’ve bought them.
Star Wars: Starfighter gets by far the longest piece, talking about the three heroes, their respective crafts and the difference in mission types they face, including full RPG stats for Nym the Feeorin, the heavy blaster of the trio. While it’s all flight sim action, they make a big deal about how they’re mixing big missions and small, shoot-em up, stealth and escort missions so you won't get bored, with some of the largest levels covering literally thousands of miles of (low-res polygon) terrain. There are a few complaints about the dangers of going into crunch time, but overall, they do seem to genuinely excited about this one and the new things they can do with the PS2 architecture.
Star Wars: Demolition is basically their spin on the Mario Kart formula, giving you an array of different vehicles from the franchise and setting them on each other in demolition derbys in scenic locations that also span the whole lore even if they stretch credulity. (how does Jabba the Hutt have enough influence to stage one on the surface of the still under construction second death star?) Reviews show that while amusing initially, it didn’t have enough variety to hold up under sustained play, so it won’t have any kind of competitive scene like old versions of Mario Kart or Smash Bros.
Star Wars Episode One: Obi-Wan lets you experience events around the phantom menace from his viewpoint, using the right analog stick or mouse to give you a greater flexibility of lightsaber moves than just a single button. That kind of trick will become more common in shooters over the next couple of decades, but this one isn’t particularly highly reviewed in itself, and also apparently had a lot of material cut in development.
Star Wars Episode One: Battle for Naboo got somewhat better reviews (although the console version did better than the PC one), letting you fight enemies in both air & land vehicles and filling in a whole bunch of lore on the planet in the process. There might be some useful stuff for RPG players in there, especially if you use the maps as backdrops for your own game.
Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine takes us back down to earth to see another part of the Lucasarts media empire. The N64 version has been reworked to make it more action-packed and easier to control, with the analog stick following the camera movements Mario 64 style rather than remaining fixed to the game axes like many older 3d games. Another thing that shows how they’re rapidly improving based on feedback in this era and the second generation of 3d action games will be a lot more standardised in control schemes.
Escape from Monkey Island takes us even further afield, bringing back the obtuse puzzles and goofy humour of the monkey island series, now in 3D. Can you save the islands from the horrors of gentrification that would price out the pirates? Expect plenty of pop culture references along the way, especially Star Wars ones. Ultimately, reviews are mixed, and the early 3d visuals definitely look a bit clunky these days, but there are still things to enjoy here so it’s a worthy part of the still ongoing series.
Light Side Dark Side: Aaron Williams takes a brief break from churning out Nodwick to apply his particular brand of humor to the Star Wars universe. First one references the jedi mind trick from episode IV, but stretches it out until it breaks the brain of the poor beleaguered stormtrooper trying to find those dang droids.
We finish off with a special page containing a temporary tattoo for you to apply to your skin. Not a gimmick Dragon or Dungeon ever did, which does slightly surprise me since they did include hologram covers, collectible cards, full cardstock games for you to cut out and assemble and all sorts of other things over the years. That's definitely fresh and welcome to see.
Some good and some dull articles, but overall, a solid start to the magazine. There's not as much variety in terms of topics as the classic issues of Dragon magazine, but more than either the 3e or 4e eras, and while RPG material gets a plurality of the page count, it's done in a way to keep it friendly to general fans of the franchise who might have picked this up on the newsstands out of curiosity. If they keep this level of quality up, this should wind up a useful diversion from my main journey once I'm done with it. Let's see if the next issue is better or worse.[/url]
