After 47 chapters, 10 episodes, and 2.5 years, our Star Wars: Shadows of the Force campaign has come to an end. What started with a fight against pirates on the jungle world of Zebulon Prime ended with against grey market salvagers in the depths of a planetary nebula. In between we saw the rise of Binary Transports, the promotion of three Jedi Knights, the training of two padawans, the discovery of an alien holocron , and numerous battles against the Force knowledge cult known as the Sith Ascendancy.

But the campaign was about far more than numbers. Along the way we changed how we play RPGs, incorporating narrative mechanics like skill challenges that created truly exceptional, truly memorable encounters, including hot-wiring a speeder while fending off high plains lizards and bouncing a starship through a proto-star nebula. We also told some really cool stories, including the adoption of a young Force sensitive Twi’lik and his training as a padawan, the epic battle with the fleet of the pirate lord Ral Duris, and lightsaber duels amid alien ruins in the sunward desert of Ryloth.

Savage Insider Issue 1 is a new Savage Worlds PDF magazine by Mystical Throne Entertainment. You can download it via RPGDriveThru.

Included in its inaugural pages is a one-sheet adventure, the first part of a The Crypts of the Crystal Lich serial fiction series, and a round robin Q&A session with Savage Worlds licensees.

It's nice to see Savage Worlds getting some periodical support; there's a lot of third-party product out there, but there hasn't been much in the way of a periodical to help keep the community informed about what's available. With any luck, the Savage Insider will help with that.

When the iPad hit a little over a year ago, there was a flurry of posts in RPG circles about tablet gaming. Since then we haven’t seen a lot of talk about them – I’m not sure if folks grew bored with the topic, or if they’ve now become so common place that they’re not worth commenting on any more.

I suspect it could be the latter. At my game table we have three iPads (two first generation, one second) and an Android tablet. For my last two sessions I ran Paizo’s Crypt of the Everflame for Pathfinder almost entirely off the iPad, using the PDF of the module and the iTunes Remote app to control music playlists on my Mac. I wasn’t entirely digital – I still used index cards to track initiative (old habits diehard) and looked up a few rules in the Pathfinder core book and the Bestiary, but I was just as likely to look up something in the Pathfinder SRD.

My review of the Savage Worlds Super Powers Companion is up at GameCryer.com. This book is a setting agnostic version fo the supers rules from Necessary Evil, with a bunch of non-player characters and headquarter design rules thrown in.

I approached the review from the standpoint of using these rules to replace the Mutants & Masterminds rules that powered my group's Infinity Storm campaign. I like the M&M rules well enough, but in the end they were just too damn crunch for our needs. Savage Worlds is a better fit, providing much of the same diversity of powers, but without all of the rules overhead.

I don't expect that we'll return to Infinity Storm on an ongoing basis, but it's my hope that we can continue the campaign in the form of one shots at our homegrown Nuke(m)Cons. If we do so, it'll be because of the Super Powers Companion rules.