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.
In other semi-official news Unknown Regions authors Dan Wallace and Sterling Hershey have posted their end notes for the book to their respective blogs. In non-Wotc news there's new material for the d6 and d20 editions of Star Wars, Order 66 has a number of new shows out, a review of Unknown Regions is up at Robot Viking and Bioware has preview of the new Sith Warrior class for its upcoming The Old Republic MMORPG.
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.
In blog news, Level 1 GM details the opening of her new Star Wars campaign, the d6-powered Emergence Campaign Blog offers a NPC villain write-up and a recounting of a recent game session, and Newbie GM talks about adapting the Saga Edition condition track to Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. Finally, Order 66 is back with two new episodes -- the first discussing NPC creation with Sterling Hershey and the second talking about ways to incorporate Star Wars imagery and a 3D feel into your campaign.
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.
When we were starting our Star Wars campaign and were kicking around where we wanted it to fall within the Knights of the Old Republic timeline, we struck up on the idea of the Mandalorian Interlude.
We knew we want to start the campaign in the Restoration Period -- a relatively quiet, calm time after the Great Sith Wars -- but at some point we'd enter the Mandalorian Wars, followed by the Jedi Civil War.
What we didn't want to do was slog through every era. The idea was to skip the campaign forward every few levels, allowing us to hit the high points of each era, but not get bogged down in none of them. At the same time though, we thought simply skipping forward 3-4 levels and five years would feel disjointed without some sort of transition.
Enter the Mandalorian Interlude.
For 6-8 self-contained adventures we're going to trade in our regular characters for Mandalorians from Clan Olan. They're old school, individualist Mandalorians who aren't sure what to make of the neocrusaders who are trying to establish order and conformity throughout the clans. The interlude gets everyone -- casual and diehard Star Wars fans -- up to speed on the Mandalorians and their culture while simultaneously showing everyone exactly what it is the Mandos are fighting for.
Wizards of the Coast's Star Wars license expires in May, and their web site is going away in August, so they're posting as much of their unpublished content as possible to the web. There's so much, in fact, that I can't include it all in one round up -- look for another edition later this month.
At the same time, things have gotten epic at the Order 66 podcast, which just released its supersized 100th episode, Saga-Edition.com's released a new species and feat for the game, and I've added a write-up on the Ghost Walk Cluster to my campaign wiki.
My review of Scavenger’s Guide to Droids is up on GameCryer.com. Scavenger’s Guide to Droids is the definitive droid sourcebook for Star Wars: Saga Edition, introducing a new chassis-based system for creating droids, a new streamlined "protocol" format that lets players run droids as equipment rather than NPCs, new droid manufacturing traits and personality quirks and a 96-page codex containing dozens of droids. Read the rest of the review.
When I ran my Dungeons & Dragons/World of Greyhawk campaign, I constantly spawned new subplots, new NPCs, and new locations. It was intentional; my goal was to throw a wide net of possible plotlines, and let the players choose which ones to follow. By campaign's end we probably had hundreds of unresolved storylines, but it wasn't a problem because the important storylines – the defeat of the giants in the Grand Duchy of Geoff, the defeat of the orcish overlord Turrosh Mak, the liberation of Obsidian Bay – did reach their climatic ends.
My review of Star Wars: The Essential Atlas is up at GameCryer.com. While not an official source book for Star Wars: Saga Edition, I strongly recommend that game master's at least check it out.
This book has extensive maps of the entire Star Wars galaxy, including the Deep Core, Core, Colonies, Inner Rim, Outer Rim, and other major regions, as well as time line maps depicting major events like the Mandalorian Wars, Jedi Civil War, the Clone Wars, and the plots of all six movies. Great stuff and an excellent in-game reference to give players a sense of the galaxy's scale.
Without a doubt, the big news Star Wars this month is the announcement that Wizards of the Coast is not renewing its Star Wars license and is ending the Star Wars: Saga Edition RPG and Star Wars Miniatures product lines. It's a sad day for Star Wars gamers but I suspect that the game will continue to have a small but fierce following in coming years, just like West End's d6 Star Wars does.
In happier news, Galaxy of Intrigue was released in late January, and we have one more source book -- The Unknown Regions -- before the end of the line