Star Wars Wednesday - Adventure Creation

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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.
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Star Wars Wednesday - Looking Behind the Scenes

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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.
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Star Wars Wednesday - Crawling Along

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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:

http://starwars.com/play/online-activities/crawl-creator/index.jsp?cs=q6nrs886a6

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.

 

Star Wars Wednesday - GenCon 2013

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GenCon Game Fair was a great time once again this year. As usual, new games, new releases, news, previews and more filled the Indianapolis convention center and surrounding hotels. GenCon reported today that there were nearly 50,000 unique attendees, up 20% from last year. So it's big and only getting bigger. Every type of tabletop game seemed to be represented, and there were a lot of board games this year. Clothing booths seemed to expand over past versions, usually with some sort of fantasy or steampunk focus, if not T-Shirts. At least two booths featured quality looking fezzes with logos or art on them, most likely thanks to Dr. Who. Several former kickstarter projects and games also appeared on the show floor.

And, of course, there was the Star Wars gaming news and releases...

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Beyond the Rim Released...and sold out...at GenCon

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My Star Wars Edge of the Empire adventure Beyond the Rim released at GenCon on Thursday...and sold out sometime Friday afternoon!

FFG announced at the InFlight Report that it should reach stores in 3-4 weeks.

The new beta for the next core book, Age of Rebellion was also released. I worked on that as well, but most of my contribution isn't in the beta.

More on all of this coming in this week's Star Wars Wednesday blog post.

Star Wars Wednesday - Celebration Europe

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As expected, Star Wars Celebration Europe held the biggest Star Wars news of the convention season. There were plenty of previews and interviews. My twitter feed basically exploded with live tweets and summaries from a variety of sources. I didn't make the trip, but thanks to the magic of the internet, I could see some of the best parts and get the news as it happened. I'm not covering all of that here - there are other sites that do that far better - but I'll share a bit about what I'm looking forward to...
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