Setting Guide- Star War: Tales of the Jedi

Lucasfilm

The Tom Veitch and Kevin J. Anderson Tales of the Jedi miniseries might not have been the best Star Wars comics ever published. But that's only because they had such stiff competition. Released throughout the 90s by Dark Horse Comics, they depicted the Galaxy Far Far Away four thousand years before the events of A New Hope. The writing and art might have been questionable in places but it was bursting with great ideas. It fleshed out the setting in a way few other licensed works did and laid the groundwork for some strong Expanded Universe stories, most notably Knights of the Old Republic.

Tales of the Jedi's writing had a mythological air surrounding it, featuring characters closer to half-remembered heroes than more traditional protagonists. That created a sense of atmosphere (and some characterization issues) but it also means there's plenty of room for a Game Master and his party to find their niche in the era. Even the central plot points, like Exar Kun and Ulic Qel Droma's armies razing the Republic or the exiled Dark Jedi corrupting the Sith Empire into a vessel for the Dark Side happen in fairly broad strokes, leaving enterprising roleplayers to fill in the gaps.

Tales of the Jedi era stories have a lot of narrative freedom without abandoning the iconic themes and symbols of Star Wars. It also offers a genuinely fresh take on the series, totally divorced from the characters and events of the films. Give your players a chance to forge a name for themselves, whether it be in the name of justice or oppression, without having to worry about a Skywalker stealing their thunder.

Power beyond Imagination

Lucasfilm

By Tales of the Jedi, the Jedi and Sith have solidified into something more or less recognizable. The Jedi uphold peace and justice in the galaxy, while the Sith plot from the shadows and launch ruthless attacks when the time comes. However, their understanding of the Force is still steeped in a superstition and ritual that will fade over the centuries. There's no midichlorians in a Tales of the Jedi story, just mysticism and mystery.


Unlike the arrogant Jedi and Sith of later eras, characters in Tales of the Jedi stories accept the Force is beyond their comprehension. They wield it unpredictably, through spells and prayers, with dramatic, fantastical results. In a Tales of the Jedi story, the Force is almost indistinguishable from magic and the characters will react as such. Force users are less concerned with understanding the power they wield, instead hoping to use it as a means of self-reflection or a path to power. Of course, Exar Kun falls to the dark side in his quest for knowledge, so trying to grasp the impossible isn't totally off the table...

In line with the more mystical depiction of the force, Tales of the Jedi stories are filled with powerful artifacts. Sith amulets and lost holocrons shape the characters' stories, if not the flow of history itself. Regardless of whether someone is seeking enlightenment or domination, they'll have to do some antiquing to get there. Of course, few of these artifacts are just repositories for force power. They will have a lasting effect on the wielder. Especially if the souls of their creators cling to these trinkets. Especially since death has done little to distract them from their personal agendas. Regardless of how it takes shape in Tales of the Jedi, the Force is a barely understood source of power that carries heavy consequences no matter how it's used.

Epic Scale to Personal Struggle

Lucasfilm

Star Wars does struggle with obsessing over huge, galaxy spanning conflicts. While those are nice and all, it's easy to overshadow the characters' personal journeys or generally get too lost in huge battles. Additionally, it's hard for even experience game masters to handle those sorts of narratives in a coherent or satisfying way. This fixation is also a shame because Star Wars often works best at a smaller scale. The Rebel fleet's attack on the Death Star II is impressive but the naval clash doesn't carry the same weight as Darth Vader becoming Anakin Skywalker again.

Thankfully, the Tales of the Jedi era covers all scales of narrative and gives the opportunity to tell big or small stories. Exar Kun and Ulic Qel Droma wage war across the galaxy but that's the culmination of numerous minor events. In Tales of the Jedi stories, protagonists often fight to save a single world, city, or even soul. The absolute peak of this time period is Redemption, an introspective story in which an exiled Ulic Qel Droma copes with the loss of his connection to the Force as well as his monstrous actions as a Sith. The central conflict is nothing larger than his own allies coming to terms with the actions of their former friend and accepting their own failures in the process.

At its worst, Star Wars tries to combine internal and external conflicts with disastrous results. The small narratives will feel disconnected from the rest of the story and the large narratives will feel soulless without clear character development. Tales of the Jedi constructs a setting where the two are clearly delineated and in which relatively minor events can properly escalate into major disasters and vice versa. When telling Tales of the Jedi stories, a game master taps into a mythology in which narratives of all scales are given equal consideration. That's rare for any series, especially Star Wars.


The Shape of Things to Come

Lucasfilm

As previously mentioned, Tales of the Jedi stories take place millennia before the events of the movies. The few entities that do make an appearance are a far cry from what they become but it's easy to tell where they're heading. For example at this point, the Mandalorians are a united warrior-culture with a single ruler, mostly made up of the alien Taung, waging crusades against the galaxy. That's a far cry from the individualistic mercenaries and tight-knit, multi species clans they become but it's evident what brought them to that point.

Tales of the Jedi stories are in the distant past and they commit to that. Veitch and Anderson show remarkable self-restraint by avoiding any film characters' distant ancestors. Instead, they revealed the ancient history of the organizations prominent in the films and offer insights in how the cards fell the way they did. Admittedly, much of Exar Kun's story was written to flesh out his post-mortem appearance in the Jedi Academy trilogy. But by and large, a Tales of the Jedi story's main connection to "contemporary" Star Wars is how it presents the historic state of a galaxy we know well.

Of course, the main elements of Star Wars are still there. Blasters, lightsabers, droids, and hyperspace are all still prominent features. They're just more recent developments (or rediscoveries) as opposed to being ancient, accepted parts of everyday life. That also means they might not work quite the same way as their modern counterparts. Most of the Tales of the Jedi stories played around with the depiction of these well known objects. Even the overall visual style was much more fantastic and primordial, especially compared to the adjacent Knights of the Old Republic era which played it comparatively safe.

Aside from the more material components of Star Wars, Tales of the Jedi stories also incorporate the fundamental themes of the series. Corruption, redemption, betrayal, selflessness, and holding on to hope all feature prominently. The characters archetypes we've come to associate with Star Wars are also still there. However, they're now isolated from the more immediately recognizable characters and events. By stripping Star Wars down to its fundamental aspects, Tales of the Jedi stories pose a unique challenge to game masters and players alike. By the same merit, it also gives them a chance to create their own take on Star Wars and cut right to what makes us bother with Jedi knights and dark lords in the first place.

Book Review- Gaunt's Ghosts: Necropolis

                                                         Black Library

Dan Abnett's Necropolis is the third book in the Gaunt’s Ghosts series, which follows the heroic commissar Abram Gaunt and his dwindling Imperial Guard regiment as they fight across countless warzones in the 41st millennium. Even a military fiction writer as competent as Dan Abnett can’t make an uninterrupted stream of battles interesting. Thankfully Abnett’s strong point is that his Warhammer fiction is never just about the fighting.

A considerable amount of Necropolis lacks Gaunt and his Ghosts. Most of the opening act is spent establishing Vervunhive and its rival Ferrazoica. Both are “hive cities,” termite mound like superstructures that house a considerable portion of the Imperium’s population.

Seven Pages of Horror- "Night of Blood" for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

                                                                                                                 Cubicle 7

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1st edition earned its legendary status through high quality pre-written adventures. The six-book long Enemy Within campaign is regarded as one of the best ever written, and with good reason. But WFRP had plenty of other scenarios that have gone largely overlooked. My personal favorite has always been Night of Blood.

Originally published in issue 87 of White Dwarf magazine, Night of Blood was only seven pages long. Written by Dungeons & Dragons mainstay Jim Bambra, it’s nothing short of a triumph of game design. The adventure perfectly conveys the tone, themes, and gameplay that defined classic Warhammer.

Like all great WFRP stories, Night of Blood starts with a stage coach crash. Stranded in the middle of a thunderstorm on a secluded, wooded road in the Empire, the adventurers find themselves surrounded by the mutants responsible for the accident.

Night of Blood is one of the rare examples of “in media res” storytelling in a published RPG scenario. It does away with any awkward introductions and plunges the players right into WFRP’s “grim world of perilous adventure.” Emerging from the crash to discover a dog headed mutant devouring the coachman tells the players more about Warhammer than any exposition ever could.

Aside from its effective simplicity, the opening sets up Night of Blood’s “out of the frying pan into the fire” narrative. The adventurers quickly discover that the only respite is the nearby Hooded Man inn. Unfortunately, what lies within is much worse.

While the roadside inn is a well-established part of RPG mythology, Night of Blood uses it in a very novel fashion. Bambra offers a quick summary of its secret, dark history as a place of chaos worship. But the players aren’t privy to that information. 

Even then, it’s immediately clear that something foul is afoot. The Hooded Man inn’s inhabitants have been butchered or captured by chaos cultists, in preparation for a ritual. The cultists don’t expect the adventurers’ arrival. They pose as the owners and patrons they’ve attacked while they figure out how to deal with their unexpected guests.

While not particularly well defined, the chaos cultists are memorable adversaries. They offer a wealth of roleplaying potential. The cultists also serve as a realization of Warhammer Fantasy’s dark humor.

All things considered, they're a relatively mundane bunch, aside from some mutations that range from awkward to horrifying. To even the fight against any nosy adventurers, the cultists rely on dirty tricks. They force the players into unfortunate circumstances any chance they get.

The cultists’ constant deception offers a perfect example of good enemy design. None of them are particularly imposing, neither individually nor together. But the scenario forces the adventurers to fight them alone in confined spaces, atop slippery roofs, or under the influence of sleeping draughts.

And that’s assuming they even manage to see past the bloodstained disguises in time.

Just about every GM is tempted to make custom, beefed out adversaries to throw at their players, each one with a wealth of homebrewed abilities. Meanwhile, Night of Blood takes some of the most basic enemies from the core book and makes them lethal by placing them in the right circumstances.

Night of Blood eschews the cycle of introducing bigger and badder monsters. Instead, it shows the value of an “average” adversary that strikes the players at the worst possible moment and in a cunning way. The is much more engaging than the former.

As is appropriate for such underhanded enemies, the cultists are doomed regardless of the player’s actions. Even if they successfully complete the ritual, they discover summoning a daemon is a death sentence without a binding spell at the ready.

Like most of Night of Blood, the climax is mechanically and narratively fulfilling. The daemon’s betrayal ties into the self-destructive nature of chaos and its followers, as well as Warhammer’s larger themes of lethal failure.

The nameless daemon breaks up the player/enemy/ally dichotomy that so many games fall into, as the nightmare can’t be bothered to make those kinds of distinctions. The daemon is the “final boss” but the context surrounding it ensures that the adversary is properly integrated into the story and not just a gameplay contrivance.

Like any good scenario, there are multiple ways the Night of Blood can unfold. It’s plotted loosely enough that the GM doesn’t have to railroad the players for the story to unfold as intended. Regardless of whether the adventurers are triumphant, they have to answer for their actions in the morning.

At the end of Night of Blood, Roadwardens arrive at the Hooded Man Inn and discover the carnage. With no one else left alive, it’s up to the adventurers to get themselves out of trouble.

In WFRP even the most seemingly defensible of actions have consequences. In Warhammer, victory is never as simple as killing the enemy and Night of Blood conveys that all important theme.

Night of Blood is a perfect example of something more than the sum of its parts. By pulling together various elements, Bambra produced the perfect introduction to the tone, themes, and concepts of Warhammer. The adventure’s a constant fight for survival, one so vicious that it swings between being absurd and terrifying when it doesn’t fall somewhere in between.

Night of Blood has been updated and reprinted a few times, most recently as a free PDF release for WFRP 4^th edition, published by Cubicle 7. I can’t think of a piece of media that captures the horror, brutality, and comedy of Warhammer Fantasy so succinctly, so it's a good choice for a free adventure.

This newest rendition of the adventure removes some of the flair from Bambra's writing and lacks Russ Nicholson's appropriately grimy art. Scott Purdy's new illustrations at least have an appropriately Warhammer flair that nearly all of the modern artists to work on the franchise have lacked. More importantly, the rewrite keeps the narrative core of the adventure while still delivering it to a modern audience.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter which version of Night of Blood you end up running. Just so long as your players end up paying a visit to the Hooded Man Inn.

3 Things a Game Master Can Learn From The Pokémon Games

                                                                                                                Nintendo

 

As much as I enjoy the tabletop side of roleplaying games, I can't deny that it was surpassed by its electronic counterparts a long time ago. Admittedly, this is partially because when talking about video games an RPG can range from anything from an automated pen and paper system to a more action driven, cinematic experience. Then you have the likes of Pokémon, the multimedia franchise that began in Japan and swept through the rest of the world. While we’re long past the 90s heyday of the franchise, it’s still popular enough to generate widespread excitement for the newest games and receive a major Hollywood film.

The Pokémon games draw heavily from JRPGs. Mainly in the sense that while there are characters and a main storyline, it’s typically very linear. The player’s ability to affect the narrative is almost entirely nonexistent, leaving the player effectively on rails. The RPG element manifests almost exclusively through the gameplay, in which the player is given considerable options throughout the game. In Pokémon, that comes in the form of the creatures you send to battle, as well as the abilities each one has. While it seems far removed even from the likes of Dungeons & Dragons, Pokémon is the bestselling RPG of all time for a reason. And that means there's a lot a Game Master can learn from the games.

If isn’t broken, don’t fix it

Pokémon is hardly the only series to have a formula. But there’s clearly something different when Nintendo has essentially released the same game seventeen times, without a single failure to speak of. Aside from consistent core gameplay, even the storylines are largely the same. Each game follows the player character leaving home to become a Pokémon trainer, beat gym leaders, and save the world at some point along the way. A malevolent organization and overly persistent rival are also in the mix. The specifics vary from game to game but there’s yet to be a mainline Pokémon game that deviates from this basic format. This isn’t a bad thing by any means. Not many are playing Pokémon for an in-depth, dynamic story. And certain games do manage to produce some memorable if not particularly complex moments and characters. Some entires certainly handle it better than others.

It can be hard for more ambitious GM’s to accept that there’s a place for a formula. If you’re planning multiple campaigns and sessions, there’s no harm in replicating what works. Originality is important but that doesn’t justify throwing away a perfectly good story or gameplay element just to be different. As long as you put enough effort to come up with some differences and focus on other parts of your plans, it shouldn’t be an issue to fall back on a formula. Just make sure that your players don’t feel like they’re in some kind of Groundhog Day like limbo or that you’re being lazy. The Pokémon games are likely the most obvious example of finding a formula and using it for all its worth while still maintaining a certain level of quality and novelty.

Have a Clear Focus- then change it

As I said, every major Pokémon game has a fairly consistent storyline. One of the more interesting recurring themes is how each game builds up to its central plotline. At the start of each game, the player is tasked with cataloguing every Pokémon they can find, when you’re not proving your worth as a trainer. At some point along the way, you run into an absurdly dressed evil “Team” who go from trying to steal your Pokémon to entirely remaking the world to suit their whims. The better games find some way to integrate the two but that’s not the point. What does matter is how each game starts out with a fairly simplistic premise and then branches outward from it.

Despite the big jump from what’s essentially bug collecting to stopping Cobra Commander, it never feels unnatural. The good games gradually introduce their respective antagonists and never leads with world domination. They’re clearly up to no good, judging by their typically small time introductory antics, which tends to be stealing other people's Pokémon. That frames the "Team" in the Gotta Catch 'Em All goal. Additionally, you usually have to defeat the team to move forward, as they start getting involved in your business.

The scale of each "Team's" villainy only becomes apparent much later on in the game. They also tie the “Team” storyline back to your original objective by having a unique, legendary Pokémon lie at the center of the antagonist’s dastardly plans. This gives the more selfish player an incentive outside of saving the world, as they get a chance to complete their Pokédex. Despite or possibly because of the relatively simplistic storylines, Pokémon offers a good model for GMs for introducing their antagonists and the stakes of the narrative. As well as how to it with overshadowing other aspects of the story.

Don’t limit your player’s options

The Pokémon series' enduring appeal can be at least somewhat credited to the sheer variety offered by the games. The original games, Red and Blue, contained 151 distinct Pokémon for the player to battle as enemies and acquire as potential allies. Aside from “evolutions,” these were all unique creatures and not just endless recolors like in most other games. On top of that, you had the type system, as well the multiple moves each one can learn. Each installment adds a little more to this foundation, but that basic core is still there. All in all, every Pokémon game gives its players a staggering numbers of ways to battle through it, even if the ending is always the same.

This doesn’t seem particularly feasible to an outsider. It can easily sound needlessly complex but anyone who’s played the games can attest that it’s all relatively straightforward. The game wisely limit’s what the player can do. You can never have more than six Pokémon at a time and they can never know more than four moves. As a result, the player is constantly forced to make choices, altering them depending on the specifics of the situation. The type system also ensures that each Pokémon has a clearly defined set of strengths and weaknesses. With a handful of exceptions, there’s no take-all-comers creature, so the player will find themselves frequently switching out their teams.

The lesson for a GM is that they shouldn’t limit the players’ number of options but rather how many they can actually use at a time. This makes it easier for everyone to keep track of things, while still ensuring it isn't all too linear. With this approach, you can avoid having to make any major compromises. Also make sure to look at how Pokémon rations out its content. The games present you with basic features and Pokémon before gradually working in the more complicated elements. If a GM follows this path, the players feel like they have a variety of options in front of them without making the campaign feel overwhelming. Just don’t come up with the tabletop equivalent of making two identical games, distinguishable only by whether or not they have certain Pokémon.