Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Sources of Inspiration #1: The Star Wars Sourcebook



For the last few games that I’ve written, I’ve cast off ‘old school sensibilities’ as such, wanting to make the cleanest, fastest game I could with the most intuitive rules I could make. I’m going back a bit for the new Ants game.

My primary source of inspiration for this edition of the MTDAA RPG is the 2nd edition of the same RPG, which I published in 1998. In that edition, I borrowed heavily from my favorite sourcebook of all time, the Star Wars Sourcebook from WEG… so before I get into my book, let’s talk about what makes that sourcebook so awesome: EVERYTHING.


I digress. It has stats for your favorite characters from the Star Wars Universe. That’s a given, but still nice to have. However, it really shines in its treatment of the world of Star Wars outside the movies. It fleshes out this universe in a way that makes it a living environment you can actually play in and explore; it shines lights into the corners you didn’t know were dark. I know that today we have more information about the back story of Bib Fortuna than we know what to do with, but in the days of the SW Sourcebook, this was it – if you wanted to know about some of the vehicles used during the Clone Wars, this was the only place you were going to find out about it. I know I’ve read that for some time, this became a bible of sorts for Lucasfilm and its affiliates in what was canonical and what wasn’t outside of the films.

I find this inspiring, because that’s one of the things the new MTDAA RPG has to do – really paint a solid picture of the world as a gaming environment, one that offers a wide range of possibility, and that has an authentic history that has shaped it.

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