My review of the Rebellion Era Campaign Guide for Star Wars: Saga Edition is live at GameCryer.com. The book deviates from the standard content of recent campaign guides -- there are no new Force powers or techniques and no new species -- but it makes up for those with a new Background system and dozens of species feats.

It was a hard book to review: on the one hand, it has a lot of nitty gritty detail about the era, but as I said in the review, a lot of this the Rebellion Era information was already covered in the core rule book and other releases. So if you're really into the Star Wars Expanded Universe, then you'll probably love this book. If the EU makes your head hurt, then you can easily get by without picking up this book.

Having said that, the Backgrounds system is definitely worth checking out; it replaces the Destiny system, and allows you to front-load your characters capabilities by defining who they were before the Rebellion began. The Backgrounds -- event, planetary, and occupation -- grant you access to extra class skills, conditional feats, and/or additional languages. As such, they help combat one major criticism I've seen of Saga Edition, which is the inflexibility of its skill system. Like standard D&D 3.5, if you want a skill that's not a class skill (e.g. Persuasion for a soldier) then you'd need to take a level of noble or scoundrel to get it. That's fine if you want a level of those classes, but if not, it can be frustrating. Backgrounds fix this, and I can easily see using them in my campaign as an either/or option (e.g. you can have a Background or a Destiny, but not both).