19th Level

Welcome to the penultimate entry in this journey that has lasted a lot longer than I'd anticipated. I'm one of those Star Wars fans who were there at the beginning, seeing it for the first time at the age of five in a Brooklyn movie theatre - a big one, one with balconies. In the mid 1980s, Star Wars entered a lull. I still loved it but popular interest in it had waned. At Quassy Amusement Park, where I worked in high school, we had a few gazillion Snowtrooper figures redeemable with tickets from Whack-a-Mole and Skee-Ball. But it began picking up steam slowly. I remember being overjoyed at the first Star Wars Encyclopedia  that I picked up from a Stop & Shop that had a small book section. And in 1987 I remember seeing advertisements for a new Star Wars RPG. I was overjoyed. I'd tried my hand at adapting AD&D for Star Wars but it wasn't right. I'd had better luck with the Marvel Superheroes RPG oddly enough. The West End Games Star Wars RPG is my f...

On August 11, when describing the Dead Game I'd Most Like to Return  I nominated the original D6 Star Wars. Yesterday, just five days later, while waiting for a subway train I received an email from a player in our gaming group sharing with me the news that Fantasy Flight Games had just announced a limited edition reprint of the original D6 Star Wars game and its first sourcebook. I'm going to live with the illusion that someone at Fantasy Flight Games read my post and made the arrangements in record time. In all seriousness, I'm quite happy with this news. I've played D6 Star Wars recently and it has aged remarkably well. 

There is still a Star Wars RPG   being published - three actually, by Fantasy Flight Games. I ran a campaign with Edge of the Empire and found it to be a perfectly enjoyable game. But for my money the incarnation I've the fondest memories of is the D6-based RPG put out by West End Games in the 1980s and 1990s. I literally played my first game of it the day I got it. It was so easy to play and so easy to GM - and it felt like Star Wars. The system wasn't perfect - I can see areas where a 3rd edition might have cleaned some things up. The Force rules worked well for wanna be Jedi type characters like Rey and Luke prior to being trained by Yoda. It required a bit too much dice rolling in combat. I found the stats for major film characters to be a bit over the top. But I played a game a few years back and it still played just fine. I know sometimes licensees get permission to republish old versions of products that they didn't make. For example, Marvel has republished St...

Grok means "to understand," of course, but Dr. Mahmoud, who might be termed the leading Terran expert on Martians, explains that it also means, "to drink" and "a hundred other English words, words which we think of as antithetical concepts. 'Grok' means all of these. It means 'fear,' it means 'love,' it means 'hate'—proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you—then you can hate it. By hating yourself. By this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate—and (I think) Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called mild distaste.  Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land  introduces the term "grok" which is a bit difficult to understand - I've always viewed it as a full and total understandi...

I really hate giving gifts when I don't know the recipient. Does he or she own a ton of games and I want to present something unusual? Or do I want to break someone into gaming? And is money an object? Is being in print one? However, I'm going to make a few assumptions. I'm going to assume this game is a gift for someone who is into some moderately geeky stuff but isn't a gamer. And I want to get him or her hooked. With that in mind I'm going to go with a game that I've used to introduce lots of people to gaming - the West End Games incarnation of Star Wars . Back in the day, I'd have a new player, usually a friend of someone in the group, show up for a game at my apartment, and within about fifteen minutes I'd have explained the rules and had a character ready for them. The D6 incarnation isn't flashy and it does have its flaws, like any game, but it is incredibly easy to grasp, slides out of the way, and feels appropriate for the genre. It ...

In the early 2000s one of the complaints I recall about Wizards of the Coast's d20-based  Star Wars RPG   was it was simply "D&D in space" vs. the previous Star Wars RPG as put out by West End Games. While I had a number of fun Star Wars games using the d20 versions, I have to confess to a bit of a preferences for the West End Games versions. Though in a sense, you could have called that game "Ghostbusters in space". Alas, my copies of Ghostbusters suffered in the regrettable basement flood several years ago triggered by the kiddies forgetting to turn off the bathroom sink. Oops. I've managed to reassemble some bits of it and hypothetically speaking there might be some scanned copies out there. Of course with the new movie coming out I saw a copy of the original RPG going for $3000.00 on Amazon. I'm thinking some automatic pricing algorithm is going a little loony right there... Anyways, recently flipping through the original version of the...