Life After the Zombie Apocalypse

Lurch (in my front yard...)

My last blog post dealt with the decidedly uncheerful post-apocalyptic novel The Road. It's a difficult book to read. I couldn't imagine ever wanting to play an RPG in such a setting. Heck after posting that marked the longest gap between posts I've had on this blog so it must have drained my will to post...

Aside from a few brief Aftermath and Gamma World games I've not done much gaming in the post-apocalyptic genre. Probably a bit too depressing for my tastes. I like intact societies, not remnants of civilization sulking in ruined cities. With that in mind, one "sub-genre" I have given some thought to gaming in is the "Zombie Apocalypse" genre. The basic premise is pretty simple. The dead rise in the form of zombies. Usually they bite people and the people bitten become zombies. I'm far from an expert in the genre but you can find examples it pretty easily - The Walking Dead comic book and television series comes to mind most easily.

Quite a few RPGs have delved into the zombie apocalypse genre as well. The most famous of these is probably Eden Studios' All Flesh Must Be Eaten RPG (AFMBE). AFMBE doesn't presuppose any specific form of zombie apocalypse, rather it has rules for designing your own zombies. Lots of AFMBE supplements are pistaches of other genres with zombies added in - D&D with zombies, Lord of the Rings with zombies, Star Wars with zombies, etc.

Beyond AFMBE I have a few other zombie-centric RPGs. There is Hunters Books' Outbreak Undead. I've only recently acquired it so I've yet to form a full opinion of it. It seems dedicated to being a type of survival simulation, with rules about establishing and keeping a home base. This strikes me as something which would be useful in a long-term game.

One of the more unusual zombie apocalypses I've seen is New Dark Age's Unhallowed Metropolis. It supposes that in 1905 the dead begin to rise. Now it is some two hundred years later and society has barely survived the apocalypse. The game is set in a largely isolated London in a "Neo-Victorian" society, kind of a cross between a zombie apocalypse and steampunk.


Unhallowed Metropolis in my mind addresses one of the big problems with the genre, that being the "and then what?" factor. AFMBE is often regarded as ideal for one-shot adventures and mini-campaigns. To me that seems an understandable assumption - it seems likely that a zombie apocalypse game would be very easy to start and be a blast for the first few adventures. But then comes the challenge of sustaining it. If your only challenge is zombies then the game is likely to lose steam fast. AFMBE has a supplement, One of the Living, which is dedicated in its entirety to examining the long-term impact of a zombie apocalypse. Unhallowed Metropolis takes it even further, with society having, at least in pockets, managed to rebuild. The Walking Dead comic book is still reasonably close in time to the outbreak of zombies - I believe it is under two years sine the outbreak. However even there the story has progressed to the point that the zombies, while still a huge threat, are not the only threat and are perhaps less dangerous than other survivors.

If you're looking to run a long term Zombie apocalypse game I suspect you don't need to have an answer to "and then what?" from the start but you need to be willing to answer it and not preserve a status quo.

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Fiction Review: "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy

“She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.”

It is possible that I've experienced a more depressing novel than The Road but I tend to doubt it. The key word here is experienced. The Road is not really a book you read, it is one which you experience.

Just describing the setting itself is depressing. Some ten years ago something really bad happened. We don't quite know what it is. We know there was a lot of fire and a lot of heat. We know that all the power is gone. And the Earth's biosphere has pretty much failed. All the trees and grass are dead. They are still there but they're dead. Doesn't appear that any animals have survived. The beach is littered with the bones of dead fish. The book mentions some migratory birds last seen a few years ago. There seems to be an awful lot of earthquakes in the course of the book. Everything is covered by ash and dust. It's getting colder.

We don't know if the initial disaster killed a lot of people or not. I get the impression it didn't. The houses, supermarkets, and the like have been picked nearly clean. Many of the few remaining humans have taken to eating each other, keeping their prey alive and cutting off pieces as needed. 

The book is written in extremely short prose. The Road makes Hemingway seem positively verbose. The Road also dispenses with unnecessary punctuation like apostrophes and quotation marks. Thankfully McCarthy allowed us commas and periods. Flippancy aside it works. The world of The Road is one of despair and desperation and the prose fits the setting perfectly. 

The story is a tale of the Man and his son, the Boy. We do not learn their names. The Boy was born shortly after whatever catastrophe descended on the Earth, with his mother being pregnant. His mother could not bear this world and took her own life, preferring that to being raped and eaten. 

The Man and Boy are traveling south on the road, trying to get to warmer climate, knowing they will not survive another winter where they were. The road is a dangerous place. While we are told the Man and Boy are "good guys" who are "carrying the fire", the road is full of "bad guys". And we do get to meet some of them. The Man is not being paranoid in his need to protect the Boy. McCarthy shows us clearly what sort of fate could await them.

That said, his desire to keep his son safe makes the Man himself rather brutal. A little googling will show lots of online debate as to if the Man really is truly "good". He doesn't trust others, he doesn't want to help anyone else but his son. I tend to side with him being essentially good - or at least as good as a person can be in this world. He truly loves his son and there are things he would not stoop to - he never considers resorting to cannibalism even as they are starving in points. As a father of children around the Boy's age I definitely empathize with him - I'd like to consider myself an essentially good person but I too would do anything for my children.

However, the Boy is most definitely good. He wants to help people even when doing so might not be wise. His goodness is an aberration in this colorless world and one that you would think would guarantee the death of both him and his father.

This is not a world of heroics. There are no mutant bikers facing off against warlords in the ruins of Nu Ork. This is a dying world. When the Man indicates the bravest thing he's ever done was "waking up" on that day I don't think he is being flippant. Facing another day in such a world is an act of supreme bravery. The Man is no superhero. He is not a deadly shot with his gun, a gun which has a pitifully depleted magazine. He isn't a survival genius, he does the best he can, day after day.

The Road is a mercifully short read and I'll avoid going any further into the plot. I'll freely warn it is an extremely difficult read. You of course put yourself in the place of the Man and possibly his wife. What would I do in such a scenario? Probably die pretty quickly. I actually hope I'd die pretty quickly. I love civilization. I love technology. I'm the type of person who is selling tablets and phones on eBay every few months so I can get the newest one. I love society, I think the social contract is an absolutely wonderful thing. I sense I'd not last long in that world.

But would I check out like the Woman? I don't know. I couldn't leave my children to face such horrors. Could I kill them "for their own good", as an act of mercy? I don't think so. If they were about to be captured by people who would rape and eat them, then yes. But aside from that? I don't think I could.

Most people reading this have hobbies similar to mine. Comic books. Role-playing games. Science fiction. Where does The Road fit in that, despite not being considered genre fiction? It's the extreme end. You couldn't make a setting more hopeless in an RPG. Interestingly, Hero Games' Post-Apocalyptic Hero supplement has a setting clearly based on The Road. I don't think I would ever want to play in such a setting. Maybe there's people who would.

I have a strange fascination with the post-apocalyptic genre. For me it is a genuine horror genre. That might be why some of Stephen King's works such as The Stand and The Dark Tower series fascinate me so much, being a blend of horror and post-apocalyptic fiction. As a child who came of age in the 80s I lived through the last gasp of the Cold War with movies like The Day After and the British equivalent Threads. There was a time in my life where the fear of nuclear war had me making sure I had my sneakers right next to my bed so I could get out in a hurry. Get out to where I'm uncertain...

The genre however often has people building something anew or fighting the efforts of an evil warlord trying to build something horrible. McCarthy gives us no such luxuries. Nothing to hope for but living another unpleasant day on a doomed Earth. An almost certainly literally doomed Earth which may soon be incapable of supporting any life at all. Read at your own risk. You will find it difficult to forget.

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Schedule Disruption of Doom!!!!

I'd originally hoped to be updating this blog on a 3-4 times per week basis. During the summer that was definitely doable but as we've entered the fall with back to school it's clear that I lack time for that.

It's not really that bad a thing though. I've got a challenging job but not one that has 16 hour days or backbreaking labor. The kids are back to school which is a good thing. In really good news my wife, after two years of unemployment and underemployment is back to teaching full-time - and at a better salary than her previous full-time job.

That's all pretty awesome. Hobbies have had to be shoved a bit to the backburner as we adjust to our new schedule. Gamings been on a little bit of a hiatus (hopefully kick it back off in two weeks) and I've been throttling the blog to 2-3 updates per week which seems a bit more manageable.

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Fiction Review: "The Man Who Folded Himself" by David Gerrold

If you have sex with yourself is that masturbation? Just to clarify, we're not talking about yourself by yourself but rather with you from another timeline.

I imagine that's a question few books outside of David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself have had to consider.

I just reread this book on my Kindle. I first encountered it in the early 1990s, buying a copy of it from the UConn co-op as part of my early experience with "good" science fiction. I'd of course heard of David Gerrold as the author of the classic Star Trek episode The Trouble with Tribbles and I'd followed his monthly column in Starlog magazine in the 1980s as he introduced Star Trek: The Next Generation. Rereading a book about time travel twenty years after you read it for the first time, especially a time travel book where the protagonist meets future and past versions of himself, is a rather odd feeling.

The Man Who Folded Himself is a brief book - pulling out my old paperback copy which has made its way from UConn to my parents' house to my first apartment in Massachusetts to my current house I see it clocks it in at 163 pages. It's the type of book you can read in a day or two.

It tells the story of Dan Eakin. And in a sense Dan is pretty much the only character of any importance. He inherits from his uncle a time travel device. The book then plunges headfirst into regions that most time travel stories tremble before - ideas of meeting oneself, changing history, and paradox. Dan quickly learns that he can indeed change the past. He can even change his own past. Though in so doing all he does is create another timeline and another Dan.

The Dans meet each other a lot. They usually get along pretty well. There are get-togethers where they meet up. Eternal poker games, summer parties. Over time some of the Dans become lovers with one another. Some of the Dans are very different from each other, whether in appearance, age, sanity, or other reasons. One pair falls deeply in love with each other. Another loses his mind and becomes homicidal. The book tends to follow just one of these Dans though every once in a while the narration switches to another Dan, especially done to illustrate differences between them - like when one of them loses his sanity. At one point our protagonist and narrator finds himself alone - he's still on a "normal" Earth but he's on a timeline where he can't find any other instances of himself - which makes him feel alone.

Dan experiments with changing history - he does the obligatory killing Hitler. He also experiments with eliminating Jesus of Nazareth and removes Christianity in one timeline. Dan prefers to stay near the his hometime and the resulting world is so alien to him he quickly undoes it. These are big ideas but they tend to get expressed compactly, in just a few paragraphs.

Dan isn't immortal. He's a tourist in the timeline but he tends to stay around the year he first received his time travel device. He forgets that the world around him progresses - the building under construction is always under construction. It's he that changes as he begins aging - as time travel is not a source of immortality. He still lives, just lives differently. He begins associating with older versions of himself. He is shocked to watch one of his selves die of old age.

Over time Dan seems to find more fulfillment as he decides to settle in one time and live a normal-ish life - not that he doesn't go on the occasional jaunt, but he finds a purpose in becoming a part of the world.


The Man Who Folded Himself is an unusual book. It is brief but it covers some enormous topics. Copyrighted in 1973 it deals with same-sex relationships with a boldness unusual for its time. Its protagonist wrestles with the idea of free will. He tries to find love - but what does it say about him that the person he loves the most is himself? Is that healthy or disturbing? The brief elimination of Jesus Christ and all of Christianity is handled in under a page or two.

Any of these things could really be made into an entire mammoth novel - or five-book trilogy. But Gerrold doesn't really provide answers so much as he gives you ideas to think about. Time travel is almsot a toy for all the good it can do - each jaunt creates its own universe, making the jumper the only "real" person in a sense. Time traveling in this setting is very much an act of personal vanity - the rest of people of the universe seems to be just a supporting cast for Dan.


I was about twenty when I first read The Man Who Folded Himself. I'd probably be somewhat horrified by my future self's lined face, grey hair, and middle-aged man gut (to quote Saturday Night Live - "My gut? Well, I'm working on it!”) But I'd probably also be in awe of the fact that I fell in love, got married, and had two daughters. I'm glad I got to experience the intervening years and to have lived through them.


One quick note - the version I read on Kindle is a 2003 republication which made minor changes such as changing Dan's home-time from 1975 to 2005. I'm not too crazy about this change - it only became noticeable once or twice but when it did I found it a bit jarring. I'm not certain if that would be the case were I reading it for the first time.

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RPG Review: Star Trek The Role Playing Game (FASA/1983)

It really isn't my fault that I'm a Trekkie. When I was a preschooler in the suburbs of Syracuse back in the early 1970s my mother would put WPIX Star Trek reruns (all the way from NYC, there was cable tv awfully early in that area) on for me while she made dinner every weeknight at 6 PM. I liked the funny guy with the pointy ears.

My uncle and godfather was the family Trekkie. He took me to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. Truth be told my 8-year old self found it a bit boring. However in 1982 I absolutely loved Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That was a movie an 10-year old (almost 11 that summer) could appreciate it. Though seeing ear-worms on a giant drive-in movie screen was incredibly gross.

By that time I had my first official D&D group. We used to meet in the Howard Whittemore Library in Naugatuck, CT. One winter I was hanging outside the library waiting for for my parents to pick me up after our game was complete when I ran into the GM of another gaming group - he was carrying with him a copy of the 1st edition Star Trek RPG. We got to talking and I was amazed at the idea of a game based on Star Trek. Up to this point I'd only been playing D&D/AD&D, though I was aware of other games and had TSR's Star Frontiers game - I might have even had Gamma World by then. Truth to tell I can't find for certain when the 1st edition of the FASA game came out. It has a copyright of 1983 but some web-searching seems to indicate it came out in 1982.

In high school my family got a VCR which allowed me to record WPIX's now-midnight showings of Star Trek, plunging me into full geekdom. With that I acquired my first copy of the Star Trek RPG, though it was the 2nd edition rules. This review will be of the 1st edition which I didn't acuire till years and years later.


Let's talk a bit about the 1st edition boxed set then. The Star Trek RPG was a thick boxed set, much larger than the boxed sets put out by TSR. Within it you got a ton of material.

• A perfect-bound rulebook, 128 pages in length. 
• Deck plans of U.S.S. Enterprise and a Klingon D-7 Class Cruiser.
• A book with three adventures and descriptions for the above deck plans.
• A hex map for starship combat.
• Counters (I think - I've never been able to get a copy with them).
• Starship data sheets.
• 20-sided percentile dice

The Star Trek RPG was built around a percentile system .Your character had both ability scores and skills typically ranked from 0 to 100. The character sheet, now that I think about it, looked a bit like a Call of Cthulhu one, with its abilities on top and percentile skills on the bottom. What made this RPG fascinating was its lifepath system. It's not the first game to use such a system - for example, Game Designers' Workshop Traveller RPG used such a system. However, with Star Trek the system was designed to produce your desired character instead of someone completely random. You watched your character go through life before Star Fleet Academy, gain skills at the Academy, go on a cadet cruise, go on various other tours and attend command school, etc. Your character might find himself in the merchant marine when he really wants to be on an exploration starship. But you eventually wind up with your desired character - typically a captain, first officer, or department head on a Star Fleet vessel. 

The game gave you a choice of species, the selection coming from the original (well, only) series as well as the animated one. You could be a human, Andorian, Caitian, Edoan, Tellarite, or Vulcan. Though later supplements dealt with the period of the films and later the 1st seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the game assumed a classic tv series Star Fleet game. Supplements, in addition to covering later periods, also opened up Klingons, Romulans, Orions, spies, and traders as player characters.

The main mechanic of the RPG was making skill rolls - rolling percentile dice and trying to get your score or lower, modified by difficulty - though you wouldn't typically roll for routine tasks. One oddity I found with this system was its use of an action point system - based on your characters Dexterity you had a certain number of action points to spend each round for moving, aiming, shooting, etc. Interestingly, nearly 20 years prior to D&D 3rd edition FASA Star Trek had opportunity actions, giving you the chance to interrupt your opponents. Combat was exceedingly deadly - most characters could not survive a single hit with a phaser set on disrupt. This was not a game to get into a gunfight if you could help it.

The starship combat system was, as were those from many other science fiction RPGs, a type of board game, it was a very special board game. The various bridge positions all had different roles. The captain would give orders but it would be the players who carried them out as best they could - the engineer would allocate power to various systems, the players in control of those systems would make use of that power as best they could and make all the necessary skill rolls. It was a good time - indeed, FASA eventually released the system as its own separate game, a system that still has its fans some thirty years later.

The main rulebook was also loaded with background in the form of history, equipment, details on uniforms, Star Fleet procedures, planet generation, animals, aliens, etc. Today it is easy to underestimate how vital this all was - you couldn't just Google for information you wanted. It wisely in my opinion avoided any attempt at mapping the Star Trek universe. To this day there's argument in Star Trek fandom about mapping the Federation and surrounding space.

The set of adventures was rather handy, especially for those of us used to killing the monster and taking its stuff. As it turns out, Star Fleet did not encourage privateering... The first map was entitled Ghosts of Conscience. This is an excellent adventure that I've used in Star Trek games set in the Next Generation period using the Last Unicorn Game rules. One of those whacky Star Fleet admirals was behind a plan to generate an interphase weapon, using the concept of interphase as seen in the episode The Tholian Web. The players are assigned to a data retrieval of a ship caught in interphase, not knowing this ship was used to test this ill-advised weapon. Can the players piece together what happend? Can they rescue any crewmembers? This was not a black and white adventure. The players are sent in totally unaware of the true nature of their mission.

The second adventure is much lighter, Again, Troublesome Tribbles. As one might guess, it deals with Tribbles (and Klingons), this time at a genetic research station. The final adventure is more of a skeleton, dealing with the players needing to escape from a Klingon D-7 class cruiser.

By the late 1980s my gaming had transitioned from primarily fantasy to primarily science fiction, with a lot of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who. We played quite a bit of Star Trek back in my dorm in my earlier years at UConn but by my junior year we just didn't have much time for gaming - plunging deep into my major, part-time work, first serious relationships, etc. 

After graduation in 1994 exploring the new-fangled web using Mosaic I came across one of this incarnation of Star Trek's website, Guy McLimore. He talked about his time working with FASA and the Star Trek RPG. I had the opportunity to have a small amount of correspondence with him, a percursor to the direct contact we have with many gaming authors now in this era of social media. A few years later I moved to Massachusetts and armed with my own storage space for a website from my dial-up ISP I created my first website, a simple site dedicated to the FASA Star Trek game. This got me associated with members of the FASA-Trek online community which in turn brought me into Last Unicorn Games' incarnation of Star Trek. I became a moderator on Don Mappin's FASA-Trek website. A lot of the people I met on that site are now friends through the miracle of social media. My first gaming group in Massachusetts used LUG-Trek. Even though LUG used their own ICON System for their Trek game, the DNA of the old FASA game could still be found - everyone remembered how fun it was to build your character up through a lifepath system. When Decipher took the license and did their own system they still instituted a lifepath system. I've not played FASA Star Trek in years but I've held onto my old books, unlike a lot of other games I've gone ahead and sold on ebay or to places like Noble Knight. It was a game written by people who clearly loved the source material and produced something whose influence is still felt decades later. 

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Thoughts on Historical Gaming

I love history. Living in Massachusetts I enjoy taking opportunity of many of the historical sites available to visit - U.S.S. Constitution, Plimouth Plantation and Mayflower II, Boston's Freedom Trail, Old Sturbridge Village, etc. My family has paid multiple visits to Virginia's Colonial Williamsburg. My Kindle and physical library are full of history books and works of historical fiction.

With that in mind I'm surprised to see how little "historical gaming" I've done. It's not that I've done none - one of my more successful recent campaigns, and one I might go back to, was a 1920s Call of Cthulhu game. But aside from that most of my historical gaming has been more of dabbling than full-fledged campaigns.

I think for me at least a lot of this comes from the desire to "get everything right". On the surface that's a good desire but taken too far it can be crippling. I'm unlikely to run into players shouting at me "Omigod I can't believe you had the King using a fork, everyone knows the fork wasn't in use in Europe at that time. This entire adventure is now pointless!"


Beyond getting past that mental hangup there have been two real challenges for me. The first is one on the smaller level. How does one present the setting? For example, the tavern is a classic location for Dungeons & Dragons adventures. What about in Ancient Rome or Greece? Did they even exist? Were they remotely like how we picture a tavern? And is that even important?

At a certain level, getting some of these details is important. If you're using a historical setting you want to at least get the feeling that the adventure takes place in another time. The balance seems to be between getting the feel of the setting vs. making those you game with suffer for your historical research. Unsurprisingly I've found this easiest to do with those periods closer to modern time. In such cases one can inject little details here and there to make the period feel a little bit foreign but a lot of the concepts we are familiar with today are still present throughout most of the 20th century. For example, an adventure in the 1920s or 30s can safely have automobiles, albeit different ones. Simply giving the name of an automobile no longer even being made but familiar-sounding helps set the tone. Depending on the feelings of the group, showcasing the casual racism, sexism, and homophobia present throughout much of history is another mechanism. Throwing out a few names in conversation that players are sure to know can help. So can the omnipresent flask of whiskey.

I have to confess to being curious how this will go for the next generation of gamers. When I talk with my ten-year old daughter it is difficult to communicate what a non-digital world I grew up in throughout the 70s and 80s - and for much of the 90s as well. There was no internet to get an instant answer. No cell phones. Yes, she knows that was the case. But it is very difficult for her to picture how people got things done. How did we know what movies were playing theaters? What was on television? What did we do if we missed a tv show? How did we know when something was coming out? How did we do any research for papers at school?

Thinking about these questions brings me personally to mind of earlier periods than the 20th century. At this point those types of questions become more difficult for me to answer. What happened when you entered a medieval city? Where would you spend the night? Could you carry weapons? What sort of entertainment was there? In cases like this I think the key is again to get the feel. You're never going to get every detail right. Rather your challenge is to set the stage so that it feels like a different period. A few sprinkles of detail can go a long way to making it not feel like the 21st century. I've found George R..R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series a good inspiration for how to do this. Though the setting is a fictional one, it borrows much from medieval Europe and a few details about the way people ate, how they traveled, etc. really drives home the feeling of a medieval setting.


The preceding paragraphs cover the smaller details. There are also larger details to consider. If, for example, you are playing a World War II superhero game, can the players kill Hitler, if so, what happens? If you are playing a game where the players are portraying the movers and shakers of the setting as a whole then I think the answer has to be that yes, they can have an impact on the history of the setting. On the other hand, if the game is a smaller scale - for eample, using the WWII model, if the players are running mildly super-powered grunts like you might find in the Godlike RPG, then no, it is not likely the players will ever be in a situation to kill Hitler.

This is the same sort of challenge you might find if you set a game in a well-known fictional universe. For example, in Star Wars the heroes are Luke, Han, Leia, and the like. If you set a game in the Star Wars universe, an the players change events? If not, how do you make adventures so that the players do not feel like they are unimportant to the setting as a whole?

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RPG Review: Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game (1987)

Born in 1971, Star Wars cast a wide shadow on the culture of my youth. There's a joke on the internet along the lines you can tell you grew up in the 70s and 80s in that by the time of Return of the Jedi you thought Princess Leia or Han Solo were hot...

We had our action figures. Our bed sheets. Our narrated storybooks (on vinyl!)  I remember anxiously awaiting the release of the Star Wars Holiday Special in 1979 (note - even at the age of eight I managed to be disappointed).  After Empire Strikes Back there were massive debates as to whether Darth Vader was telling Luke the truth regarding being Luke's father.

After 1983 it kind of fizzled out. There were some odd Ewok tv-movies and the Droids and Ewoks television shows but neither lasted very long. The Marvel Star Wars comic book lasted until 1986.

In 1987 West End Games placed advertisements in Dragon magazine announcing their Star Wars RPG. I was an excited fan - I'd experimented with adapting Star Wars to AD&D without much success though I'd had better success tweaking TSR's Marvel Super Heroes RPG for it. West End, as I recall, advertised three core products - the main RPG, the Star Wars Sourcebook and the Star Warriors starship combat game. In this review I'll just be talking about the original RPG.

The Star Wars RPG was a fairly compact book, about 140 pages in length, black and white with color inserts. It was illustrated with stills from the movies as well as Ralph McQuarrie concept art. The color was used to great affect, with some memorable in-universe advertisements and propaganda. There really wasn't much in the way of background - it was Star Wars. Three movies, that was it. No expanded universe references. And everyone knew Star Wars.

As far as the rules engine went, it was a dice pool system based off one of West End Games' previous RPGs, Ghostbusters (which had actually been designed by Chaosium, creators of the Call of Cthulhu RPG). I was always a little amused by people who stated a d20 Star Wars RPG must be "D&D in space" - by that standard the original RPG was "Ghostbusters in space". (Though in truth I think it's fair to say it took Wizards of the Coast three tries to get Star Wars right.)

You had six attributes in Star Wars. Each attribute had a set of skills which were based off of it. For example, the Blasters skill was under the Dexterity Attribute while the Starship Piloting skill could be found under Mechanical. Each attribute was rated by the number of dice (always six-sided) that you rolled - from 2D (i.e. 2D6) to 4D. Modifiers could often be found with an attribute rating - you could have an attribute of 2D, 2D+1, 2D+2, 3D, 3D+1, 3D+2, 4D. If you lacked a skill you just rolled the attribute. Having a skill gave you a bonus above your attribute. You rolled against various difficulty ratings or the rolls of opponents.

While there were no character classes the game did make use of templates - starting points for characters which you would then customize. Templates included concepts like Brash Pilot, Laconic Scout, Failed Jedi, Smuggler, Alien Force User, Young Jedi, Wookie First Mate, etc. While they didn't reveal how to make your own templates until the 2nd edition they weren't so complicated that you couldn't figure out the "secret formula" with a few minutes consideration.

The game encouraged cinematic behavior. Multiple actions were easy to adjudicate - for every action after the first you lost a die from your roll. If you would normally roll 5D+2 for Blasters and fired three times then each shot would be 3D+2. Characters had Force Points to allow them to modify fate - spending a Force Point allowed you to double all your abilities for a round. If you spent it heroically you got the Force Point back at the end of the adventure. Spending it at a dramatically appropriate moment - like blowing up a Death Star, you got it back with an extra one.

Speaking of the Force, you could be a Force-user.  Force-users had three additional skills, unattached to any attribute - Control, Sense, and Alter. Each of these skills had lists of powers that could be used with them, with some powers requiring the use of two or three Force skills. The use of the Control and Sense skills also allowed you to improve your ability to hit with a lightsaber, parry blaster bolts, or do additional damage. Force-users were tough to play, resembling low-level magic-users in D&D at first - typically your Force skills would be low - often just 1D, and the difficulties were often high. This, though was in keeping with what we knew of the universe at the time - the only Force-users in the movies were Luke, Obi-Wan, Yoda, Darth Vader, and the Emperor. And it wasn't until Return of the Jedi that Luke, the only PC-like character, truly emerged as a force to be reckoned with.

The game came with a simple starship combat system - it wasn't designed to be a tactical representation but rather covered the types of dogfights you saw in the movies. The Millenium Falcon vs. a few TIE fighters. X-wing vs. TIE fighter.

While lacking a large equipment list, the game did cover all the basics and gave you enough starships to get started. A starting adventure was included - Rebel Breakout - kind of a dungeon crawl through a mine trying to avoid stormtroopers and get the heck out of there while trying to join the Rebel Alliance. There were also several adventure seeds to give GMs ideas on where to go next.


One thing the West End Games incarnation was legendary for was its ease of play. I can definitely attest to that. I received the game Christmas Eve in 1987 and the next morning my brother and I were playing the introductory adventure. I've probably introduced more people to RPGs via incarnations of this game than any other game, including Dungeons & Dragons. But it worked well for long-term play - I've played and GM-ed in numerous Star Wars campaigns. It had some weak points - Force users eventually become quite potent to the detriment of other characters - but it captured the universe of the original movies splendidly. I've found it worked well for small and large groups and in addition to campaign-play made a fine system for a quick pick-up game. West End Games hit a home run with their first at-bat with Star Wars.

West End Games hit hard financial times just before The Phantom Menace was released and the license went to Wizards of the Coast. I think the final incarnation Wizards produced, Star Wars Saga Edition was by far their best version. It was an excellent game but unlike the West End incarnation, it was not a game geared towards novices - nor was it one that encouraged lightning fast play. Now Fantasy Flight Games is taking their turn at making a Star Wars RPG with a public beta going on (one that as of this moment I'm not very familiar with). If the copyright gods could ever align perfectly I'd love for some way to be found to re-release the original West End Games Star Wars RPG in a way similar to the recent Advanced Dungeons & Dragons re-releases. It should be doable - Dark Horse Comics has, for example, been able to republish the old Marvel Comics Star Wars material.

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