For years, Order 66 was the only Star Wars: Saga Edition podcast. Now there are two, thanks to Threat Detected, a show dedicated to playing through the Dawn of Defiance campaign. In other Star Wars RPG news, Saga-Edition.com resumes publication with write-ups for the VCX-700 Heavy Courier and the HWK-290 while Dice of Doom tries … Read more
It’s Game Day, and for the first time in years I’m running Dungeons & Dragons. Well, technically I’m running Pathfinder, but in all the ways that matter it’s the thematic and mechanical successor to the flavor of D&D my group liked best. This session is a long time coming. I’ll save the story of the … Read more
A round of Star Wars RPG-related posts and web links, including Sterling Hershey’s “Star Wars Wednesday” posts about “Adventuring in the Tree”, “Running Published Campaigns” and “Species Creation”. There are also revised vehicle design rules for Star Wars d6, an adaptation of the AGE system from Green Ronin’s Dragon Age RPG, a love letter to … Read more
MEPACon Spring 2011 is being held Friday, April 8 through Sunday, April 10. It’s the 10th anniversary of the convention, and they’re going to be having a special reception Friday night. As always I’m looking forward to the convention, but this time around I’m taking my own advice and only running two RPGs. Given that … Read more
One of the big differences between running a fantasy campaign and a science fiction campaign is that when playing SF, I find myself constantly looking for starship deckplans.
With a fantasy campaign, many of the maps revolved around buildings, dungeons or overland adventures, and those sorts of maps were easy to knock out over lunch. Failing that, I had plenty of maps from 20+ years of Dungeons & Dragons that I could fall back on.
With my Star Wars campaign though, the adventures are split between world-based exploration and starship- or space station-based combat. Starship based adventures represent perhaps 1/8 to 1/4 of the encounters I run, but when I do run them I often find myself scrambling for deckplans.
The big reason there is that it takes more effort to come up with a rational-seeming starship. A dungeon can be as simple as a series of rooms, but with a starship players always want to know where to find the bridge, engineering, jeffries tubes, etc.
The Dragon Age RPG intrigues me. With a lightweight rules system, mana pool-based magic, and a killer background setting, it seems like the sort of game that could help pull me back into fantasy role-playing. After spending a night learning more about the game for a Knights of the Dinner Table column, I decided to … Read more
Master mapmaker Chris West has launched a kickstarter project to fund “Deep Vistas”, his latest collection of maps. These six maps are focused on underground adventuring and include: Stalactite Gate, Slave Pits, Chapel of Scarabs, Dark Elf Courtyard, Silent Garden and Chasm Bridge. They’re gorgeous looking maps, and although they’re obviously fantasy themed, and have a very “Vault of the Drow” feeling to them, it’d be easy enough to use them in horror or science fiction campaigns as well. There are different funding options but the best is likely the $36 for all three double-sided maps.
My “Summon WebScryer” column for Knights of the Dinner Table kept rolling along in 2010, continuing a run that began in 2000. Some months it’s a struggle to come up with ideas, other times the stars align and the column writes itself, but it’s always fascinating to see how folks are using technology to promote, … Read more
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 … Read more
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. … Read more
