New Year

The sun has set. When next it rises it will be another year. Hopefully 2016. Good luck all!

I endeavoured to post every day this year, and (looks at 2015 postcount) overdid it by about 50%. Some days had to be scheduled when I had nothing or was busy, but I got pretty close at least. Thank you for reading.

Characters and their families

It’s December 30th, the day before New Years Eve / Hogmanay. In this household it’s my mother’s birthday. Ever had a character have to shop for a parent’s birthday? Or a friend’s wedding anniversary? This kind of day-to-day activity can make an unusual feature in long-running campaigns, and is easiest in modern-day games where we can draw that kind of minutiae from real life. Making an adventure out of going to a cousin’s wedding is easier if you know what weddings are like in a given culture. It can all make a change from the common pitfall of using PCs’ families as hostages, which leads to PCs with no attachments in the first place.

Priest Suspended For Hoverboarding In Church

Priest Suspended For Hoverboarding In Church in the Philippines. A quick reminder that we are living in a cyberpunk madhouse.

Star Wars Miniatures. Why? Because.

Considering I’ve used miniatures twice in the last ten years, my interest in them is pretty much aesthetic.

Of course I’m buying the Imperial Assault Han Solo and Chewbacca figures.

This page of painting and custom/conversions and this Lead Adventure thread will just make me glare at my brushes though... (And get me to buy strange offshoot Mars Attacks figures from Mantic for a Mass Effect type RPG I will probably never run.)

Looking to see where I put my WEG miniatures.

And still somewhat irked that I managed to miss an entire short-lived licence, so missed out on the Knight Models range of beautiful 30mm (and 70mm!) miniatures. Grumble grumble grumble.

And due to a thread on RPGnet I may have just spent a few hours looking at kitbashed vehicles and scenery, carrying on the noble Star Wars tradition of building models out of bits and pieces. (See also lightsabers.)

And wishing I had bought the Kenner Micro Collection thirty-five years ago...

And downloading the unofficial 7TV wargame rules out of curiosity...

And looking at the new Millennium Falcon models and the Micro Machines playset and wondering about their scales...

Christmas 2015 haul

With a couple things left to come in but everything here opened:

Christmas (Or Not) In Genreland

io9 on the four kinds of Christmas-type events one sees in other settings. Yes, they include Life Day.

Merry Happy Creepy Christmas

The Twelve Days Of Onyx Condition Cards.

Yippee-Ki-Yay!

Compliments of the season

Compliments of the season, in whatever form it takes for you.

Be a hero

Slightly off topic, but hey, it’s Christmas Eve.

Joss Whedon is matching every donation to Equality Now until the 31st, and adding $50 for every new monthly subscription to Planned Parenthood.

What if the Star Wars Holiday Special was good?

Because it was not. But had it worked it could have been. It might have become a strange annual tradition, a new little story every year...

Considering the generally-not-so-poorly-received animated section, that would seem to be the way to go - a cartoon mini-movie. But that would have taken more time, I suppose.

What would the terrible Holiday Special of your game be like? Note that it need not necessarily reflect the game in any real way...

These so ARE the Droids I'm looking for

Must not buy £50 expansion for Imperial Assault just because it has HK droid miniatures.

The Long Night

Tonight is the winter solstice in this hemisphere.

A good time for vampires, but what else?

Rituals to mark the turn of the year, bid the sun return?

Supervillains holding the city power grid hostage?

A really good look at the UFO lighting up the sky?

And now I want to run a classic WEG adventure

Specifically Black Ice. Because pro 3D graphics modeller Fractalsponge is making it.

I don't have the money with me...

I was going to talk about something other than Star Wars...

... then I found a Saga Edition rulebook in the window of the local Oxfam bookshop for £19.99.

Another Star Wars RPG... on the computer, anyway

A big open-world kind of thing.

If nothing else, it could have a fantastic character avatar system...

Star Wars: The Bookshelf Awakens

Probably a one-stop shop for sourcebook-y material, the Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary series is full of high-quality photos of characters, props, costumes, vehicles and the like, short biographies and the like. Nothing in-depth, but enough to run a shortish game that covers as much story as a movie at least. From checking The Force Awakens book I know enough about the Republic from a two-page spread to use it in-game.

The Art Of books are full of used and unused concept art, model shots, storyboards and the like. The prequels involved so much brainstorming that major elements of the Clone Wars like Asajj Ventress came from unused designs.

The novels have less immediate “take this and run with it” use than the visual books, providing plots and descriptive imagery. The Aftermath series by Chuck Wendig is the big hitter here, big hardback novels charting the time between trilogies, while Before The Awakening by Greg Rucka covers events closer to the new film and gives a look at how the Resistance and First Order work within the Republic Senate.

The Force Awakens keeps up a glorious tradition

... of having cool toys for aliens, droids and monsters who barely appear in the film at all.

Star Wars games I have been in

This is going back decades, so will be a tad shaky.

What makes a Star Wars game... Star Wars?

How do you make a Star Wars RPG adventure feel Star Wars-y?

Steve D has great answers here...

I’ll add some thoughts of my own, having just read dozens of RPGnet threads and my thoughts across a few years. I still like this bit from 2002...

Scale
Star Wars is at once panoramic and personal. There are huge battles, but there are small character moments in the middle of them. The PCs should never get lost in the general melee - they should always be doing something significant, from helping get the wounded to safety to sabotaging the main Imperial weapon. This is ideal in all RPGs (unless they're about insignificant PCs, like Paranoia) but it's vital in Star Wars to cut between the big picture and the closeup action that determines how the main event goes.

The Backdrop Is Really Impressive But Not Generally Important
The Cantina scene is the classic example here. Every other character is a member of a highly peculiar alien species, and it isn't important. It could just as easily be a Wild West saloon. I once set a battle in a spaceship tumbling out of control just to test the rules for moving while shooting. Insert background details to interest the players, even if the characters don't look twice at them. "Cast" important NPCs (Christopher Walken as Darth Bane, maybe?) and use visual cues for them if possible. The PCs might react to an assassin Droid with a blaster in each of its four telescoping hands no differently than a man in a dark suit with a gun, but the players should.

What To Follow
George Lucas lifted chunks of mythology, Samurai films, pulp sci-fi and Westerns.

And this list from a couple years ago...

A massive conflict that the PCs are front-and-centre of. At any point in the timeline there should be fleets of pointy capital ships and funky-looking fighters going at each other.
Mooks that I can blast (or sabre) my way through with abandon.
Battles that effectively boil down to what the PCs and their direct opponents are doing, with hundreds of extras fighting in the background.
Planets with one kind of scenery. Two at a pinch.
Unsubtle demarcation of heroes and villains. If a villain is "subtle" it should still be blindingly obvious to the audience.
Chases.
Explosions.
Monsters.
Droids. Totally amazing technology but absolutely unremarkable to all concerned.
Plans created on the fly. Any good plans are to be created by NPCs in positions of authority off-screen.

The Force Awakens at play?

We already have a Resistance era X-Wing starter set from FFG, and now individual fighters... hoping for more. A lot more. An Armada set for the big ships seems likely. A miniatures skirmish game like Imperial Assault could be great, especially with single miniatures and vehicles. The other eras have had various 25/28/30mm miniatures lines, and the IA miniatures are very nice and look great painted up, albeit by a better painter than me...

And RPG material? Fingers crossed... and I don’t even like their system.

(Their latest RPG launch, this week, is a book on Jedi Guardians, featuring Kanan and the Ghost from Rebels.)

In other tie-ins we’ve had a lot of bridging stories, and some looking back connecting to Rebels in particular. Now I expect to see Resistance era stories start to appear. Some of our new heroes have had adventures already, so they could star in books and comics easily.