[Star Wars] Deathstars & Droids (was: Star Wars – Galactic Adventures)

Ages ago (2011?) I found a Star Wars OSR retroclone called Star Wars – Galactic Adventures on the venerable wizardawn.com page, now lost to the wages of net history.

(…that was before there was an actual Star Wars product, a kids’ book, using the same title…)

For some reason it never really caught on in the glut of B/X rules variations at the time, and when people were thinking about doing an old school DnD kind of flavor of Star Wars they seem to mostly do their own thing afterwards, trying to clone it into White Box DnD for example, or things like that.

And of course there’s the whole point that the whole structure of old school Dungeons and Dragons does not really fit with most people’s idea about the Star Wars universe. And believe me, people have tried. They even tried it officially, there were after all multiple editions of a licensed Star Wars roleplaying game from Wizards of the Coast to cash in on the prequels and the concurrent release of 3e.

And yet when you ask people about Star Wars as a tabletop roleplaying game most people will go back to the old West End Games D6 Star Wars game. That one seems to have captured the sheer cinematic feel of the setting and the hearts of Star Wars fans.

In fact, they did so more than you might even realize: at a time when there was not much more Star Wars stuff coming after the first three movies it was the D6 Star Wars system that came up with new information about the whole setting. When Timothy Zahn started writing his Heirs to the Empire trilogy, which kickstarted the whole expanded universe started coming together, he was given a setting guide of the West End Games RPG as a guide. Arguably the Roleplaying Game shaped the whole of Star Wars afterwards. Even things like Coruscant were introduced first in the game, then the novels, and only showed up in the actual movies very belatedly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2nn_q1xAXI

(Specifically Coruscant first appeared on screen in the 1997 Special Edition of Return of the Jedi, and no, younglings, that small snippet wasn’t even there in the first release. In fact the current version on Disney+ is an even more altered version that shows Naboo as well).

Which of course goes to say that… yeah, I don’t actually want to play the D6 system. It’s fine. It’s a fine system. I appreciate it. But I kinda want to do a Star Wars DnD game. And not the D20 system either. The whole trend of putting the D20 system EVERYWHERE was a cancer on the hobby in the early 2000s.

I want to play Star Wars as if it was a DnD ripoff from the early 80s. Like what Starships and Spacemen basically did for Star Trek (before there was a proper Star Trek RPG).

Anyway, D20 Star Wars was not bad as D20 variants go…

…but I really enjoyed this little retroclone when I found it. You see, D20 Star Wars did an interesting thing where they put much more emphasis onto saving rolls than normal D20 DnD had. And this was something done here as well. In a way it feels like the author took D20 SW and retro-fitted it into a B/X framework, which is way more work than I would have done but also kind of cool.

By this point I am on my second house-ruled version of it. I took the original document and condensed it down into a variation I called Darths and Droids (after the the eponymous webcomic which imagines the movies as a science-fiction DnD campaign), while using all kinds of Ralphy McQuarry concept art for it. Lately I did that again, condensed my previous version even further, and replaced all the art with black and white art I found on the net (also because we only have a black and white printer at home), and called it Deathstars and Droids.

I think I need a better name for that.

Anyway, the actual reason I was doing that was because my kids are really into Star Wars lately, both the movies, the animated series, and playing the last LEGO game, and I was hoping that it would be a good way to introduce them to roleplaying.

My older son already decided he wants to play a B1 battle droid, which kinda killed my ideas for the first few scenarios I had. Oh well.

I also have to adapt the rather freeform droid rules into something that gives him the satisfaction of playing a B1 droid instead.

Which goes to explain why there might be some Star Wars content coming up on the blog which doesn’t actually concern any game you might have heard of.

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