Star Wars Wednesday - Crawling Along

One of the most iconic parts of Star Wars is the opening crawl. Recently, someone very cleverly coded a webpage to run the original Star Wars opening crawl, simply through html, css, etc. It and its code can be found here.  An article about it by the programmer is here.

The idea for the crawl came from earlier sources - Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, one of which is below. Skip to the 34:24 mark, as the embed code starts the show off at the beginning.

Ever since there has been a roleplaying game, GMs and players have looked for ways to kick off their games with crawls of their own. They've used various methods, such as this one someone created for my adventure, Core of Corruption (#6 in the Dawn of Defiance series for Saga Edition):

Of course, this illustrates one downside for using YouTube, or rather, using the original music score. Copyright issues. Of course, for those creating crawls for their own personal home games, this isn't a problem, unless you distribute it. Fortunately, there is another great method that I've mentioned before. There is a crawl generator starwars.com that can be edited and shared with anyone with access to a computer...that uses flash, that is. That's a bummer for many who would otherwise use a tablet at the table. Still, it works fine on a laptop.

I looked around and didn't see any for Beyond the Rim yet. With so many people getting into the adventure, I thought this would be helpful: 

Copy this link and paste it into the browser to get to the above crawl:

http://starwars.com/play/online-activities/crawl-creator/index.jsp?cs=q6nrs886a6

Now, writing an opening crawl is actually harder than it looks. There is an art to balancing information, reading time, attention grabbing prose and the proper voice. The crawl from Beyond the Rim was re-written by FFG, and is much better for it. The best advice is to just hit the highest of highlights and try not to use it to replace any opening box text or more complete introduction. Look at the original examples from the movies to see where they emphasize locations, etc. using ALL CAPS.

More discussion about opening crawls can be found here and here.