Forgive the unusual timing, but this news couldn't quite wait until my regular Wednesday post. Star Wars roleplaying is about to enter the Old School Renaissance!
Thanks to the Open d6 license, a few of us old and new school SWRPG designers have gotten together to take the Star Wars RPG back to it's earliest roots. With the popularity of old-school gaming with simplified retro-mechanics taking the hobby industry by storm, this is the prime time for us to take advantage of the ultra-nostalgic vibe.
So, after careful assessment of all of the various SW RPG systems to date, it was obvious we needed to return to WEG's original incarnation of the d6 rules. While later systems added really useful features like skills, talent trees and feats, it was obvious that the boundless energy of the Star Wars storylines and characters could not be so strictly defined. Besides, the rules minutia and stat block creation were driving us batty, and we suspect inevitable errors subconsciously added to the ranting of the Internet.
However, dispensing with complex character creation and statblocks wasn't enough. We really wanted to simplify movement and combat. Why worry about weapons ranges, when basically any character with a blaster is in range of 95% of all targets on the gaming table? And to really give Star Wars the cinematic feeling everyone craves, we felt that a rigidly defined movement system interfered too much with GMs ability to paint a riveting and nail biting scene with just his or her words. Given all of this, we decided that even the original d6 Star Wars version was too complex. No, we needed to return to the prototypical system to achieve all of these goals.
Thanks to the aforementioned Open d6 license, we've been able to reverse-engineer the system back to the original d6 experience we think serves the game the best: the Ghostbusters RPG 1. Clearly, the intervening 30 years of RPG design has really just cluttered and warped this original vision.
Now, obviously we don't actually own the Star Wars RPG license. That's why we'll soon be launching a new Kickstarter campaign to fund the simultaneous creation of Anotherspace Studios and our flagship non-infringing product, Planet Battles: Space Opera Renaissance. I'm sure our fans will have no problem adjusting to the slight changes we'll have to make in the universe.
So, help us bring PB:SpOR to market, and get ready to join the never ending battles! It's Jed's Knights of the Insurgent Alliance versus the Dark Furher and the Interstellar Empire! Use the Psyforce, Jed!
1 - Click here for more info on the prototype system.