Never, ever fly a TIE Fighter.

That's the most important thing we learned during our initial playtest of the Star Wars: Saga Edition combat rules as our squadron of three TIE fighters was torn to pieces by an X-Wing and the Old Republic-era S-250 Chela starfighter. It's as it should be -- Imperial propaganda aside, TIE fighters don't last more than a few seconds in most battles in the Star Wars universe -- but our playtest drove home that point in game.

The playtest also revealed other things about this aspect of the game, and in particular the supplemental rules in Starships of the Galaxy.

After five sessions of fighting pirates and swoop bike gangers, the heroes of my Knights of the Old Republic campaign went up against their first Sith: Kaldros Ygin, an arrogant self-assured student of the Dark Lady Aldera. I've been dropping hints over the last few weeks that Ral Duris, leader of the pirates of Zebulon Prime, had a Sith advisor. Ygin was the first evidence that she might not be the only Darksider on the Prime.

He was also my first chance to try my hand at force powers in the game. I threw a Sith at my players during our first, long-ago playtest of the game for SCIFI.com, but I've purposefully avoided introducing Sith in the regular campaign too early. I wanted the Jedi padawans to get comfortable with their powers while I figured out the best way to run grunt NPCs. I also wanted the introduction of a Sith to be suitably dramatic moment; introducing them early in the game would make them seem too common place, and I want them to be more exotic and exceptional opponents.

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).

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).

Our Star Wars: Saga Edition campaign kicked off on Friday with our first full-fledged Knights of the Old Republic session. Since my Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Annotated Playtest went over so well  I decided to do the same for this Saga Edition.

This one will work a little differently; instead of annotating a single combat ecounter, I’m going to offer my thoughts on the game session as a whole, discussing both combat and role-playing aspects of the game. If there's enough interest, I'll also do a round-by-round combat playtest for melee and starship comba.