I've just become aware that the Lady Sabre Kickstarter books are going out in digital form to backers. I hope everyone enjoys them. My contributions are:
The Map - the mysterious document for which Volume 1 is named. This is actually shown within the comic itself in a very large panel. This also makes a similar appearance online.
The world maps in the various forms and books.
The Tanitin continent map.
The Pegasus deck plans, limited in the digital package to one elevation shown as a wall paper for use on various digital devices.
For those not on Twitter or paying a lot of attention online lately, it's been quite a week of Star Wars announcements, revelations, and more. It will be fodder for much discussion for a very long time to come. The common theme? Change, more or less.
Happy New Year! I was so distracted yesterday that I totally forgot about Star Wars Wednesday. I usually do some sort of grab bag post around this time, but I'm a bit busy for that at the moment. I do have a couple of items, though.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everyone. Last Friday night, my local hockey team, the Missouri Mavericks of the CHL, hosted a Star Wars Night. They handled it very well, and the game was great, since the Mavs beat St Charles Chill 6-1. I had a good time.
Sometime in the past couple of weeks, I received the latest Star Wars Insider. I've commented before that I think the recent issues have packed a lot of different Star Wars articles. It seems more diverse than past issues. Since that could just be me overlooking what came before, I pulled down a couple of the first issues I have...
Back from another KC Game Fair. I had a good time. I intend to post some of the adventure information and possibly the characters I used for The Sabacc Incident, but given that it is more of an outline than fleshed out, ready to run adventure, it will likely take awhile to get it better organized.
This week, the music of and in Star Wars has appeared in a couple of places. I've heard the music of the movies, Clone Wars and Shadows of the Empire over and over for years. As I've said before, for me, the original Star Wars soundtrack was a stand-in for the movie itself in the days before VCRs and video.
One of the maps I created for the Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether kickstarter hardcopies makes an appearance in last week's comic. You can see it here.
I'll be attending theKC Game Fair in Kansas City this weekend. I'll be running Star Wars Edge of the Empire each day, plus The Day After Ragnarok (Savage Worlds edition) and DeadlandsNoir.
Weeks ago, I received a couple of messages from brand-new gamemaster's looking for advice on how to create a Star Wars RPG adventure. Not all the nuts and bolts of detailed encounter and adventure design, but something more basic than that. In essence, they were asking how to begin creating the story itself. Obviously, this is a subject far beyond a single blog post, and entire books discuss story creation. In fact, I’ve started this post several times, setting it aside to try a different approach and simpler explanation.
I knew this past week would have some news about upcoming Star Wars stories and releases, but I didn't anticipate how much: RPG, new and old TV series, interviews, sneak peeks and a Blu-Ray release. Some are related. First, though, here's the latest on the RPG...
I knew I was doomed to be late this week once I tweeted out that I knew what the topic would be. Well, one of the topics, as it turns out. Waiting a day has turned out to work in my favor, with a new product announcement hitting the Fantasy Flight Games site today. Of course, it wasn't the original topic...
Another sneak peak for the Lady Sabre Kickstarter rewards is now up on the Lady Sabre site (and on the KS page, for backers). Among the items are one of the HMS Pegasus deckplans I drew. There is also some concept character art from Rick Burchett and an example of the Pocket Guide designed by Eric Trautmann.
Become a big enough fan of something - book, movie, TV series and so on - and eventually, you'll want to know more about how it came to be. Behind the scenes stories become a form of entertainment all their own, both part of and separate from the actual thing they produce. With a big enough property, like Star Wars, behind the scenes info from original or secondary sources becomes extremely useful and even vital to those working on various stories and products.
This week, someone released a demo for the classic Star Wars trench run using the Oculus Rift VR tech...it's cool and all, but somehow, I feel like I've seen this before....
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:
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.
Someday soon, I suspect I'll get some free time. In the meantime, this past week has seen a lot of adventure related announcements and releases from Fantasy Flight Games for Edge of the Empire.
I've just become aware that the Lady Sabre Kickstarter books are going out in digital form to backers. I hope everyone enjoys them. My contributions are:
