Star Wars Wednesday - Previews Everywhere

As expected, there was a ton of Star Wars news last week. Much of it was thanks to San Diego Comic Con, so much so that it will be interesting to see what was saved for Star Wars Celebration next month. However, a few unexpected sources cropped up as well, which made for an entertaining week. 

Comic Con news first. There was a lot, more than I'll try to cover. I'll just hit a couple of items that caught my attention.

  • A lot of books books and comics were announced, and the Official Star Wars blog has the list and descriptions. There are a lot coming. Some new, some renewals of past series and more. Several of my favorite Star Wars authors are on the list, which is great to see.
  • Clone Wars Season 5 clips - I'm looking forward to this season, once again. If you still haven't checked it out, I highly recommend it.

Speaking of the Clone Wars, Pablo Hidalgo tweeted out the following fact:

The Clone Wars = 33 hours 54 min of canon content vs. the films = 13 hours 22 min.

And the Clone Wars number will just get higher.

One sort of side note was this blog post by KotoR author John Jackson Miller, and "getting Gryphed".

On the offbeat side, webcomic XKCD calculated the power output of Yoda....sans prequels.

And in the run up to GenCon, Fantasy Flight Games continues to feature their new X-Wing Miniatures game. I look forward to picking it up at the show.

And on a complete tangent connection that only makes sense to me, because this is blog post, not a conversation, I rediscovered some great visual images that could serve Star Wars RPG GMs well, in certain circumstances. Last night, I caught the end of the 1979 James Bond movie Moonraker on TV. While there are numerous difficulties with the film, there is no doubt that the ending space battle sequence was directly a result of Star Wars' popularity.

That's not the part I'm referring to.

No, I'm talking about the scenes set during and prior to the shuttle launch sequence. Any GM looking for a little more inspiration for underground hangars and hidden launch facilities should check it out. The entire thing seems heavily influnced by the Yavin IV hangar scenes. They even have pilots riding around on and in carts. It's acutally one of my favorite James Bond villain evil lairs.

And...the internet is cool. I was looking for a picture or two to illustrate the point above. I couldn't find exactly what I wanted....but I did find a webpage dedicated to the designer of many of the 007 evil lairs, and it's fantastic.  Bonus: he was trained as an architect.