The Unknown Regions

An assortment of aliens in the foreground; U-shaped spacecraft in the background.

The Unknown Regions is the final sourcebook for Wizards of the Coast’s Star Wars: Saga Edition Role-Playing Game. The book serves as a placeholder for all the books left unpublished, and promises to carry players to the unexplored corners of the Star Wars galaxy. It does this by venturing into The Unknown Regions to explore what fans know — the Chiss, the Rakata and the Sorcerers of Rhand — and plenty that they don’t.

The Unknown Regions details eight worlds created just for the book, introduces a planet generator that game masters can use to make their own, and debuts creature generation rules to populate them. Since Scouts are essential to exploring these brave new worlds, they get a variety of feats and talents, and because no final frontier should be without its dangerous challenges, the book re-envisions “Hazards” as Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition-style threats that require a combination of brawn and skill to defeat. The end result is a toolkit that gives players everything they need to continue their adventures beyond the last book in the Star Wars Saga Editions line.

Galaxy of Intrigue

Skill challenges were the best thing to emerge from our Dungeons Dragons 4th Edition mini-campaign, and when we started playing Star Wars: Saga Edition, we pieced together our own version of the rules. We based them on 4E’s examples, the skill DCs established in Scum and Villainy, and personal experience. The end result created some of the most memorable moments in our campaign, including the heroes’ disastrous attempt to escape a proto-star nebula.

Galaxy of Intrigue formalizes these ad hoc rules by creating a Skill Challenge system for Saga Edition that improves the 4E iteration in every way. The source book introduces new feat and talent options for skillful characters, nine new species (including the Bith, Defel and Neimodian), an entire world dedicated to intrigue, eight mini-adventures, and the “The Perfect Storm” campaign.

Star Wars Round Up: AGE of Rebellion, X-Wing Mini Game, new d20 rules

It is a dark time for Star Wars role-playing games. There’s no official role-playing game being released, and fan-generated content for older games is tapering off. Fortunately though the Order 66 podcast continues to pump out new content for Saga Edition, there’s a new AGE-powered Rebellion Era playtest document, and an X-Wing miniatures game from … Read more

Star Wars Round Up: Starships, Dragon Age, Rodney Thompson interviewed

It’s been a long time since I did a Star Wars RPG round up — unfortunately without an active campaign I find it’s all to easy to let the months slip by without searching the internet for material. For my part, my campaign isn’t entirely dead. I ran a Star Wars: Saga Edition one shot … Read more

Game Day: The Saga Ends

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 … Read more

Star Wars Roundup: New Starships, Threat Detected Podcast, Battlestations

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

Star Wars Roundup: Mysticism, Chevin, Vehicle Rules, Dragon Age Adaptions

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

Starship Deck Plans Links Compendium

Starship deck plans for the U.S.S. Enterprise, rendered as line art.

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.

Star Wars Roundup: Dathomir Witches, Clone War Source Books, Skill Challenges

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