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Message: <blockquote data-quote="trancejeremy" data-source="post: 2009010" data-attributes="member: 924">Disclaimer:  I do not have the d20 rules for Star Wars. However, I am a huge fan of the old Star Wars RPG from West End Games, and have just about every book made for it (I'm missing a few Adventure Journals and a handful of the old adventures).I wasn't actually planning on buying anything from the new SW game, not so much because of the conversion to d20 (I love D6, I like d20 enough) but because Mr. Lucas is, in my opinion, a jerk*. But I've heard a lot of good things about this book. And I do love the Star Wars universe.  After a quick flip through at my local GS, I bought it.As the name implies, it's a sourcebook devoted to the Dark Side of the force.  It's fairly large for a sourcebook at 160 pages.  It's also priced large, at $30, though it's both in color and hardback, which makes up for it somewhat. (I got mine used for $12). The artwork is something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, it's in color. On the other hand, most of it's really really ugly. For instance, on the cover, the red haired woman is apparently Mara Jade. Yet the woman on the cover barely appears to be human, much less extremely attractive. (Bea Arthur, from the Star Wars x-mas special, looks attractive than the woman on the cover...) Most of the art is like this, though some seems to be from the comics (or comic book inspired) and some are stills from the various movies. This is a huge step down from the art in the WEG books. It's also odd because some of them do work for Dragon Magazine now or other d20 companies.Anyway, on to the content itself....Chapter one is awfully short and just describes the basics of what the Dark Side is. About 6 pages. What I like about this is that they have combined the Sith of the Sith comic series, the Sith in the movies (or rather, Ep I) and with the Sith of the later novels. It sort of combines them together. Pretty good job of melding all the other material into a fairly coherent history.Chapter two is about 25 pages. It's on playing Dark Side characters.  This is something new to me, as the old WEG SWRPG wouldn't let PCs play them.  Anyway, this mostly is just the mechanics of it - new templates, skills (and new uses for old ones, I think) and some Dark Side prestige classes. Some of these classes seem to be new, while some are based on things from various novels and previous RPG products (including from WEG).  For instance, there is a 'Dark Force Witch' class, which is from the novel The Courtship of Princess Leia.  And the 'Imperial Inquistor' class, the concept of which was invented by WEG (I think) and later showed up in novels and such. So again, interesting to see how they melded past stuff with new. Chapter 3 is on gamemastering Dark Side characters.  It's not that long, but has advice, and goes into the stages of being corrupted by the Dark Side. Nothing terribly new here if you are a Star Wars fan.Chapter 4 is on Dark Side Equipment. Pretty boring.  New droids and ships and such (though not many). Chapter 5 is very large at about 42 pages. It's on various Dark Side organizations and traditions. This is probably the most interesting chapter. It's start off with the Sith from the Tales of the Jedi comics (set in very early days of the Republic), going into descriptions and stats for the major characters, then goes into the "New Sith", which comes from Episode I (or the novelization of it), which was started by a guy named Darth Bane. It then moves towards the era of the movies with the Nightsisters of Dathomir (again, from the Courtship of Princess Leia book), Darth Maul & Darth Sidious, then some from the original trilogy and then it moves to the New Republic era.  Lots and lots of different sources are used - various novels, comics, even prior WEG characters like Grand Inquistor Tremayne. Even from the Young Jedi series (or whatever it's called), and the Dark Forces video/PC games, so it's pretty comprehensive.Chapter 6 is on critters and generic NPCs, and is about 30 pages.  The critters are okay, as are some of the NPCs. But there should not be such a thing as a 'Generic Emperor's Hand' (I'm not even sure there was another Emperor's Hand besides Mara Jade)Chapter 7 is on types of Dark Side campaigns and is about 15 pages. It includes several plot hooks and a couple locations.  I think part of this chapter should have been placed in Chapter 2.Lastly, there is a short index.Just how valuable this book is is hard for me to judge. Since I don't play or run a d20 Star Wars game, but d6, most of the rules stuff in this is not terribly useful. But it seems to be well done. I'm really not sure the Emperor's Hand deserved it's own prestige class. And the stats for Mara Jade are pretty wimpy - in d6, she was by far the most skilled of any published character (202 skill dice total, by comparison, Boba Fett has 145 and Grand Inquisitor Tremayne 34). Mara Jade is the top assassin in the galaxy, yet she's only 11th level in this book (Tremayne by contrast is 15th).  The creator of Mara Jade worked with WEG, so presumably her stats in WEG's books are close to the creators visions. And the guy who created Tremayne was the head of the Star Wars line for WEG in the later days (Eric Trautmann), so presumably he knows what he was capable of.On the other hand, it's almost an encyclopedia in terms of what it covers (in terms of the Dark Side). It seems to ignore the Emperor is reborn story arc of the Dark Empire comic book series (which might be a good thing, as many people hate it), but even so, it uses at least one thing from it. As I said, it covers all sorts of sources - novels, graphic books, comics, video games, previous RPG - they did a great job of keeping this product in tune with the entire Star Wars universe.So, I think this is worth 4 stars.  It's packed full of Dark Side info, but is a bit pricey, has some stat problems (characters are not what they creators intended)**, has ugly artwork, and the text could be denser. I would recommend not paying full price for this - if you can get it used for about half price, it's worth it. But it's only worth $30 if you plan on running a Dark Side campaign. *(I think it's a shame they can't just dual stat new SW books, and it's part of why I think Lucas is a jerk - I know for a fact that WEG were willing to go along with it. If he can make his fans learn an entirely new CCG and make their old CCG collection completely worthless, he doesn't care about fans who spend $100s on old SW RPG books. But that has no bearing on the score. )**(I wasn't impressed by the d20 stuff in this book to use it in my regular d20 game. Or even Dragonstar.  But some of that has to do with the d20 SWRPG not being fully compatible with D&D or regular d20, since it uses the VP/WP system. But I haven't tried it, so take my comments with a grain of salt, and I didn't count them in my score)</blockquote>

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