I was fortunate enough to be sitting in the Fantasy Flight Games 2012 In-flight report at GenCon this year when the new Star Wars RPG (Part one), Edge of the Empire, was announced. For those of you who have been lucky enough to avoid hearing me talk about it, this is the first of three planned releases of "seemlessly interchangable" standalone Star Wars RPG products:
- Edge of the Empire (due out early 2013), focusing on fringe campaigns
- Age of Rebelion (due out early 2014), focusing on military (Rebel v Imperial) campaigns
- Destiny of the Force (due out early 2015), focusing on force use campaigns
Edge of the Empire Beta started in the presentation, and, amazingly, everyone in the presentation all got Oprah'd:
EVERYBODY GETS A FREE COOOPPAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!!
For everyone else, copies were available for $30, but unfortunately, I've heard since that FFG is sold out of them, and are now only available from local retailer. Only 5000 were published.
The system uses specialized narrative dice system adapted from FFG's Warhammer Fantasy RPG system. Stickers were included with the book, and dice rolling app is available for $5 on iOS and Android. There are classes, but no levels; character advancement is achieved by spending earned experience points to purchase talents & skills or access to new specializations (new word for "class"). Characters creation in a nutshell: Characters are built by selecting race, career (groups of three specializations), specialization w/in that career, and are then given a pool of XP points to buy their initial toys. There are other systems ancillary to these basics, but are not vital to understanding how the system works.
There is a novel 6 attribute system. There are 23 general skills, 6 knowledge skills, and 5 combat skills; each skill is associated with a prime attribute. There are 6 careers (Bounty Hunter, Hired Gun, Explorer, Colonist, Technician, and Smuggler). Each career has 3 specializaions. Each career and specialization has a set of associated "class" skills, and each specialization has a 5 tiered talent tree with a talents that provide a wide variety of bonuses, e.g. increased damage resistance, additional boost dice, ability to ignore some penalties, new exclusive actions, and novel ways to spend destiny points.
Some characters from previous d20 editions will translate with almost no effort. Personally, I've found that the scout (which was a bit of a catch all in Saga editions) translates poorly in this system, and these characters will probably see a substantial 're-imagining' in their core concept. But that's cool, continuity reboots are 'in' these days. If you had previous played (or are currently still playing) the d6 systems, translation should be pretty easy.
I'm very pleased with the product. It does a great job of capturing the feel of Star Wars, and sticks to the Rise of the Empire, Dark Times and Rebellion eras. The system is flexible and provides enough examples to give a GM enough tools to build what he needs to bring what exists in his imagination (and the imaginations of his players) to paper. Really, the game feels much closer to West End's d6 system than WotC's more contemporary d20 versions, and thats a good thing. The rules are more flexible and tone is darker.
And the dark side. There are some issues with the game and the resolution system, but its in beta. The purpose of beta is to tweak what can be tweaked to improve the game, so hopefully the devs will be responsive to feed back.
Get settled in... I'll probably be posting impressions and info about the game for the foreseeable future. I'm also posting on FFG forums as "LethalDose" if you feel the need to troll me more publicly.
/endofline
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