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.

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.

One of the problems I’ve found with action points, bennies, plot points, and other similar mechanics is that unless they’re crucial to the game, players tend to forget about them. And even when they are important, keeping track of them can be a challenge as the light-weight chips or tokens get covered up, buried, or pushed out of the way.

Our solution has been to use plastic poker chips, which have the advantage of being large enough to seen and thus, remembered. They’re easy to toss around the table (important for games like Serenity or Spycraft where the points tend to fly fast and furious) and while they can make an annoying sound that grates on the nerves when ground together, mostly they get the job done. Except, of course, when the light plastic chips go rolling off the table, or bounce where you weren't expecting.

My gaming group's used minis in our Dungeons & Dragons campaign for years, and when we playtested Star Wars we continued that tradition. I’m blessed with two players who have large collections of Star Wars minis that I can borrow and I’ve spent the last few days organizing them.

Quest Fios faces off against the Scarbrother Gang.

Our Dawn on Zebulon prelude campaign for Star Wars: Saga Edition hit Episode II last night, and I think to say we've hit our stride. Even with two new players joining the session with no Saga experience, our second game went as well as the first.

Unlike our initial game, which focused on three Jedi padawans and their training droid, JPD-14, hunting for the wreck of a starship on the jungle world of Zebulon Prime, this time around our heroes were divided between two padawans and the hired crew of a the star freighter Aeon Harrier.

These new characters – a pilot callsigned Highlife (human noble 1, played by Cory),  his wookie friend Shim'kworr (Wookie scoundrel 1, played by Brendan) and ship mechanic Zulen Tek (Arkanian offshoot scoundrel 1, played by me).

This is brilliant. And yes, I have occasionally felt this way. I have no idea who came up with this poster (and unfortunately can't remember the blog where I first saw it) but I think it's a sentiment that just about every GM has felt at one point or another, especially when a particularly bad intra-party fight breaks out.

For me, the best antidote is to switch gears for a session or two. Rather than forcing people to play rabbits (while I loved Watership Down, I'm not sure my friends feel the same way about it) what we've done is broken out the board and card games. Too much inparty squabbling? Play Illuminati and let them get it out of their systems. Need to build group cohesiveness? Break out Arkham Horror and let everyone work as a team to defeat an ancient cosmic evil. Looking for something more non-confrontational? Go with Settlers of Catan or Carcassone. Just need to vent and blow up the world? Sounds like it's time for some Risk 2210.

Of course, board games aren't for everyone. When we have board game weeks, not everyone shows up, but even then the downtime ends up doing everyone some good.