Star Wars: Saga Edition

It's been a while since I did a Star Wars roundup, but thankfully the rest of fandom has continued churning out content in recent months. I think this is essential for Star Wars role-playing to carry on; many times when an RPG goes out of print, players move on to other, better supported games. Star Wars is somewhat different in this regard, as fan support for d6 Star Wars shows.

Another MEPACon has come and gone, taking with it two weeks of frantic game preparation and 12 hours of actual play. The convention was held in Clarks Summit, near Scranton Pa. on November 12-14 and looked to have the typical attendance of 100 gamers playing a mix of board games, organized play, and one-shot RPGs. I ran three events, all of which had 5 to 7 players.

My review of Unknown Regions, the final source book for Star Wars: Saga Edition is up on GameCryer.com.

My events for MEPACon Fall 2010 are up and ready for registration on Warhorn. The convention is being held Friday, 11/12 through Sunday, 11/14 at the Ramada Clarks Summit in Clarks Summit, PA. I'll be running three events -- "Catch and Release" (Star Wars: Saga Edition), "The Champions of New York" (The Day After Ragnarok), and "The Rise of the Ur-Flan".

Scum and Villainy is an essential source book for those running a Star Wars: Saga Edition game on the fringes of galactic society, whether that’s trolling for would-be passengers in a Mos Eisley cantina, smuggling spice out of Kessel, or engaging in piracy against the Galactic Empire.

The book does for crime what the earlier Starships of the Galaxy did for starships and space combat, providing scoundrels, bounty hunters and outright criminals with a host of new game rules and options for running a campaign that interacts with the galaxy’s dark underbelly.

My Star Wars: Saga Edition game has hit the summer doldrums, as our Friday sessions fall victim to August vacations, Musikfest, and back-to-school crush. We're about three-quarters of the way through our Mandalorian Interlude story arc (in which we're all playing Mandos in the opening days of the Mandalorian War), and while it's been fun, we're looking forward to getting back to our regular characters. Thanksfully, the rest of the net is keeping the Saga Edition fires burning during our downtime.

The storm dragons are magnificent creatures hunt the hurricanes of the storm world of Tarl. The Outer Rim planet's binary stars provide a constant source of energy for its moisture rich atmosphere, giving rise to an unending series of cyclones. The dragons constantly ride these storms, hunting the great airbag herbivores that dwell in storms' eyes and battling each other for arial supremacy.

It's a sad time for Star Wars: Saga Edition -- Wizards of the Coast has killed its official web site for the role-playing and the miniatures games and is redirecting visitors to their home page. Fortunately, Rebel Alliance fans have managed to secure hidden caches of PDFs while Wizards has announced plans to restore some of the lost material to their forums.

The cornucopia of Star Wars: Saga Edition content continues this week with a 5-part series from Wizards of the Coast about "Mythmaking in Star Wars", which talks about adapting Joseph Campbell's monomyth theories to role-playing games. They've also go two new ships detailed in "Message to Spaces": Crusader-class Corvette and the Heraklon-class Transport.

The first iPad showed up at my gaming table two weeks ago, and I have to say -- it was pretty damn cool. It's got a bright, clean screen, and while my friend didn't have a native PDF viewer on the device, I can definitely see the potential there. Comic books looked beautiful, and surfing with it was a breeze. That said, not everyone's sold on the iPad, and I haven't seen any reviews of it up on RPG blogs -- if you've done one, please let me now in the comments.

That said, there are other tablet computers out there, and Chaos Crenade looks at one with A Tabletop Gamer Look: ASUS T91 Tablet PC. It's a netbook-style computer running Windows XP, and the reviewer takes a look at how well common RPG tooks like the D&D Character Builder and Hero Lab work on the device.

Wizards of the Coast has been busy with D&D 4E since the last time I did a reviews round up. The first of the big 2010 releases is Player's Handbook 3, which includes the bedrock psionics character classes needed to power the Dark Sun Campaign Setting being released in August. Critical Hits reviewed the book and liked what they saw. This lengthy review offers an overview (and thoughts on) all of the new races, classes and skill powers.