Star Wars: The Essential Atlas

February 6th, 2010 by NukeHavoc

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.

Hello world!

February 5th, 2010 by NukeHavoc

Welcome to The Griffin’s Crier. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Bonus Feats Index Updated

February 4th, 2010 by NukeHavoc

I’ve updated the Bonus Feats Index to include new feats from the Rebellion Era Campaign Guide, Galaxy at War and Galaxy of Intrigue. The Jedi Academy Training Manual is not included because there were no bonus feats in it; I’ll add feats from The Unknown Regions Campaign Guide when it’s released later this year.

WotC announces end of Star Wars line

February 3rd, 2010 by NukeHavoc

Wizards of the Coast has announced its not renewing its Star Wars license for role-playing and miniatures games. As a result the last release for Star Wars: Saga Edition will be The Unknown Regions later this spring.  Former lead developer Rodney Thompson posted his thoughts on the end of the line to his blog: So Long, And Thanks For All The Mon Calamari.

As I wrote over on Nuketown, it’s a sad day for Star Wars. But there’s a silver lining too — Rodney gave us a great game with campaign books for almost every era you might want to run in (with the sole exception of The New Jedi Order) as well as supplements like Scum and Villainy and Galaxy of Intrigue that offer plenty of genre-specific options as well as tools to make the GMs job easier.  The game’s going out on top, without any of the end-of-edition crap books that we saw with D&D 3.x and D&D 2nd Edition.

For our part, Shadows of the Force will likely run for another year or two as we progress through the Mandalorian Wars and Jedi Civil War. Beyond that, I don’t know — we’ve discussed running a “Dark Times” legacy campaign focusing on the descendants of our original KOTOR heroes during the time of the Sith Triumvirate, but it’s nice to know that I could just as easily run a Rebellion Era or Clone Wars game.

Lord Vader Directs the Imperial March

February 1st, 2010 by NukeHavoc

I find your lack of applause … disturbing.

GameCryer.com: Galaxy at War

January 22nd, 2010 by NukeHavoc

Cover: Galaxy at War Wizards of the Coast has released the Galaxy at War source book just in time for our Star Wars campaign to plunge into the Mandalorian Wars. You can read my review of the book at GameCryer.com.

It’s a good book, and I’ll so far as to say it’s must-have book for anyone running a war-based campaign. There’s good advice on running such games, a new martial artist prestige class (and a host of feats and talents that go along with it), mini adventures, a short campaign, and my favorite part, a Bases and Battlestations section that’s sure to shave hours off your game prep.

Prepare to jump to hyperspace…

January 21st, 2010 by NukeHavoc

Though you wouldn’t know it from looking at this blog, our Knights of the Old Republic campaign is still going strong.  We’re in the process of wrapping up our adventures in the tail-end of the Restoration Period: our Jedi padawans have all officially been promoted to Jedi Knights, and the “crew” of Binary Transport now has a fleet of starships at their disposal. Well, more like two ships, but it’s a start.

We’ll be wrapping up this part of the campaign soon, and then jumping into the Mandalorian Interlude, a series of 4-6 adventures in which will play out the opening salvos of the Mandalorian Wars from the point of view of the Mandalorians themselves. After that we’re jumping the timeline ahead to the first full year of the war, returning to our original characters (who will have advanced to 10th level in the intervening years)

As the campaign advances, expect this blog to change; we’d originally planned to use it as a sort of lightweight wiki … but we’ve come to the conclusion that we’ve just got too much stuff to use the WordPress that way. Instead, we’ve launched a formal campaign wiki at holocron.griffcrier.com; look for all of the background content on this site to be migrated there this spring.

The KOTOR site isn’t going away though; this will still be the place where we make campaign announcements, update folks about new wiki entries, and post about new Star Wars news & reviews.

GameCryer.com Rebellion Era Campaign Guide

January 21st, 2010 by NukeHavoc

Cover: The Rebellion Era Campaign GuideMy review of the Rebellion Era Campaign Guide for Star Wars: Saga Edition is up at GameCryer.com. I was skeptical of this source book — did we really need a source book for an era that’s been covered exceedingly well in a half-dozen previous source books? The answer is “no … but there’s good stuff here regardless.”

They had to dig through the depths of Star Wars canon to come up with new Rebellion era content, but what I liked most about the book (and what’s seen the most use in my campaign) are the new Background and Species Feats mechanics.

KOTOR campaign hiatus ends Friday 4/17

April 16th, 2009 by NukeHavoc

After taking a few weeks off to play Arkham Horror, White Plume Mountain (D&D 3.5) and paragon-level Planetorn one-shot (D&D 4E), we’re returning to our Star Wars campaign this week. As a result, you can expect updates to the Bonus Feats index and some additional campaign write-ups as I reboot my brain into a science fiction frame of mind.

GameCryer.com: Star Wars Legacy Era Campaign Guide

April 14th, 2009 by NukeHavoc

star_wars_legacy_campaign_guideMy review of the Star Wars: Legacy Era Campaign Guide is up at GameCryer.com. As I mentioned in the review, the Legacy Era is a real hodgepodge of Star Wars tropes, species, technology and heroes. I was skeptical about it at first — did we need yet another Sith Empire? Did the Jedi need to be extinguished again? But as I’ve read through the graphic novels and reviewed this campaign guide, I came to the conclusion that the answer is a “yes”.

Legacy is a great time period for a sandbox-style game where you want to be able to draw on an entire galaxy’s worth of stuff. It’s perfect for those who find themselves unable to commit to any one era when running a game, as well as those who don’t want to muck about with continuity. Check out the review or buy the book on Amazon.com.