This week brings the official announcement that Episode VIII filming is underway. The announcement is brief and amusing. Tonight's Star Wars Rebels featured one of the smaller capital ships that could be useful to characters in an Age of Rebellion game.
First, the big announcement of the week:
Peter Mayhew started posting images of his original Episode IV script:
This week's Rebels episode Homecoming features an Imperial carrier. It was nice to see this added to the show - I always liked the illustrations of it. I was immediately reminded why I thought it was a good ship for the RPG, and the episode plays right along with those ideas. Essentially, the ship is big enough to serve as a mobile base of operations, while small enough that the PCs can serve in important roles without dealing with a large crew.
The ship is obviously perfect for the Rebel Alliance for similar reasons. It will be fun to see it used in upcoming episodes. It is a good base for an Age of Rebellion starfighter squadron based campaign. It's big enough to defend itself against smaller craft, and small enough to be threatened by medium to large Imperial capital ships. The PCs could even pilot it themselves for a short while. The ship is certainly a candidate for a campaign starting off with the PCs trying to defect with the ship to the Rebel Alliance.
While the episode itself gives a lot of good views of the interior, the episode guide has a few extra hidden gems, as usual. The concept art gallery has some detail views from around the ship, as well as a few notes. There's also a schematic illustration of the planet Ryloth, including some outlines of possible landforms. For those running games on Ryloth, check out the dynamics of the planet's atmosphere in the episode.
The episode guide also has another new audio track. It's not the one I thought it might be. The episode used some Empire Strikes Back themes. The one on the guide is new.