One of the challenges of running a Star Wars campaign is finding a way to incorporate plenty of Jedi and their Sith nemeses without tearing asunder the canonical Star Wars timeline. The Expanded Universe has helped with this, providing a number of Dark Apprentices to serve as fodder for Jedi who some how escaped Palpatine's murderous purge, or rose with the New Jedi Order, but even then the Sith "Rule of Two" ties the hands of GMs looking to unleash their own Dark Lord on the galaxy.
One area where Star Wars: Saga Edition could use some help are its creatures. There are certainly a number of them out there, particularly the iconic ones from the movies, but the system tends to come up a little short with more mundane critters.
After my third session of Star Wars, I thought back our summer playing D&D 4th Edition, and got to wondering about converting monsters from that book with use in Star Wars. Now I should note that I think that at a fundemental level, Star Wars plays differently than D&D. It's less about dungeon crawls and more about relationships - relationships between characters, between master and apprentice, between organizations. Those were always the main drivers in the movies, and in almost every case the heroes only came up against monsters/creatures as a consequence of the story.
For example, the encounter with the trash compactor beast in A New Hope came into play because Han and Luke were rescuing the princess. Luke's random encounter with a wampa ice beast on Hoth led directly to his vision of Obi-Wan, and his training on Dagaboh with Yoda. Han and Luke were going to be fed to the sarlac because the crossed Jabba the Hutt. Because of this, Star Wars needs fewer monsters (and more NPCs) than D&D, but it's still nice to have choices.
The November 2008 edition of SF Site is online, with reviews of the far-future space opera House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds, the modern fantasy/demon hunting novel The Outlaw Demon Wails by Kim Harrison and the Robert E. Howard-inspired Adventuers of Corwyn by Chad Corrie, which (like Conan) looks at the hero at different points in his lifetime.
Its TV column Babylon 5.1 looks at Doctor Who, Smallville and The Sarah Connor Chronicles while Nexus Graphica looks at the new Joker graphic novel.
A few years back i bought a HP 1020 LaserJet printer; I'd just gotten one at work and found it worked great with my Mac. When I saw one on sale at Staples, I lept at the chance to get a good USB laser printer for about $100. It turns out there's one problem with the 1020; while it's kissing cousin -- the 1022 -- has drivers for the Mac, the slightly older 1020 does not.
When I first got the printer, I couldn't find any 1020 drivers for Mac OS X. I went with the 1022 instead, which was fine because the driver worked like a charm. And then HP changed them. Apparently, the 1020 was never supposed to work on the Mac, and when updated 1022 driver was released, it stopped working for the 1020.
This has proven problematic when I've occasionally had to reinstall the drivers, but fortunately folks have figured out how to work around HP's wrongheaded decision to drop 1020 support on the Mac. This article details how to get the functional driver and install it on your Mac (up to and including 10.5 Leopard):
They also suggest an open source driver that should work with this line of printers (Warning: Unix command line magic ahead):
I got off to a great start to my summer reading list, but it slowed down significantly after July, when my spring-summer run of work conferences ended (which had given me plenty of time to read on cross-country plane trips), and I had to double-down on my projects to meet start-of-semester deadlines.
The other problem? I ran into Moon of Skulls, a collection of short stories by Robert E. Howard.
Three weeks into our new Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic campaign it became obvious: we needed a blog. Or at least, I needed a blog.
Even without leaving the Vargis Tau star system and its binary world of Zebulon we'd still managed to accumulate a dozen-odd NPCs, three or four ships, three adventure write-ups, a handful of locations. While I had references to all this stuff on my computer, it was in the form of adventure notes, and not readily browseable.
Thus, the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Blackrazor Edition) blog was born.
It's a WordPress blog, and there's a reason I went with that instead of a wiki: I'm looking at rolling out WordPress Mu at my day job and I needed to quickly get up to speed with the standalone version. I have a lot of questions about how to effectively use WordPress to manage a large-scale web site (and by 'large scale' I mean several dozen pages that you actually need to be able to find stuff on, rather than just a stream-of-life style blog).
WildFire's horror vs. mech CthulhuTech RPG is moving to Catalyst Games. It's a logical fit, given that Catalyst has taken over publication of the classic Battletech miniatures game (and seems to be doing a great job of it, given the reactions from the Battletech fans in my gaming group).
I don't know how if feel about the basic premise of this setting. On the one hand, I can appreciate the attraction: if you're going to be fighting Ancient Old Ones risen from the depths of the oceans, you're going to want the biggest damn guns you can get your hands on. At the same time though, the Cthulhu Mythos is about a subtle, insideous horror that inevitably gives rise to insanity. While this would change in a world in which the Stars Are Right, I'm not sure you can have infinite cosmic horrors fighting giant robots and still retain the fundamental horror aspects of the mythos.
Still, I'm curious, and if I ever get a chance to play in a game, I'll take it.
It's been a while since I've talked about the podcast I listen to, partly because for much of the late summer and early fall I really wasn't listening to many of them (save the Order 66 podcast, which I've listened to slavishly since realizing my Star wars campaign was really going to happen). That's changed over the last few weeks as I've made an effort to queue up and listen to a summer's worth of podcasts.
Skill challenges were one of the best things to come out of our D&D 4th Edition playtest. Building on earlier versions that appeared in Spycraft and Unearthed Arcana, skill challenges provided an in-game mechanic for resolving non-combat conflicts and complex tasks.
We used it to handle the exploration a lava tube complex leading to a red dragon’s volcano and an escape from an angry horde of goblins on an ice world. In both cases, we found it really enhanced our game, turning what could have another dungeoncrawl or a case of DM fiat into a dramatic, player-driven story.
It’s a good idea, and one we’ve been eager to use in our Star Wars campaign (even our anti-4E contingent wanted to try it). We did exactly that in our third session (“Chapter 3: The Lingering Twilight”), with equally good results.
Thousands of kids could end up playing D&D at their local library on November 15 as the American Library Association hosts a nationwide National Gaming Day. Kids will have a chance to play board and video games, but Wizards of the Coast is also donating a thousand Dungeons & Dragons kits (so says this article at Wired.com). You can learn more at the ALA web site for the event: