For Michele.

In a year of
outstanding anniversaries,
ours was the one I was
most grateful to celebrate.
Here’s to the next
twenty years!
 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Chapter One: May 25, 1977 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Chapter Two: The Star Wars Phenomenon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Chapter Three: A Dark Time for the Franchise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Chapter Four: That’s No Moon, That’s the Star Wars License . . . . . . . 37

Chapter Five: Orchestrating a Rebel Breakout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

Chapter Six: Research Before the Internet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

Chapter Seven: A Star (Wars Sourcebook) Is Born . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

Chapter Eight: Tatooine Manhunt and the Rise of Adventures . . . . . . 99

Chapter Nine: The Galaxy Guides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

Chapter Ten: The Sourcebooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

Chapter Eleven: The Universe Expands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

Chapter Twelve: Prequels and D20 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

Chapter Thirteen: The New (Disney) Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

Chapter Fourteen: A Year of Celebrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149

About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

 CREDITS
Writer: Bill Slavicsek
Editor: Michele Carter
Publisher: Owen K.C. Stephens
Cover Starscape: Nasa ESAHubble & NASA, RELICS;
Acknowledgement D. Coe et al.
Cover Photography: Bill Slavicsek
Cover Design and Layout: Lj Stephens
Produced by: Rogue Genius Games
Project Manager: Stan!
Consigliere: Stan!
Text Copyright 2018 Bill Slavicsek
Layout Copyright 2018 Rogue Genius Games
For more information about
Rogue Genius Games, follow us on Facebook:
www.Facebook.com/RogueGeniusGames
on Twitter: @Owen_Stephens
All logos are the trademark of Rogue Genius Games,
all rights reserved
Disclaimer: This book is solely the work of the author and
has not been endorsed, approved, authorized, or licensed by,
and is in no way affiliated with Lucasfilm, Ltd. LLC
or The Walt Disney Company or any of their related companies.
Star Wars is a registered trademark of Lucasfilm, Ltd. LLC.

Thanks to Stan!, Owen K.C. Stphens, and Lj Stephens

of Rogue Genius Games,
and to all the creators, past and present,
who helped bring the Star Wars universe to life.
 INTRODUCTION
From a Certain Point of View

M emories are imperfect things. Recollection is not a flawless

process. Reminiscences jumble up, events coalesce,
people’s words combine, and important bits fade away altogether.
Still, our memories allow us to look back across the years and
remember friends, places, and experiences that made lasting
impressions. Sometimes, something triggers those memories
and they come flooding back, making us happy or sad, wistful or
excited, depending on the reminder and the events being recalled.
2017 triggered plenty of good memories for me, and that’s what
I’m going to write about. What follows describes my lifelong
involvement with Star Wars, from the debut of the original film
to the current day. I started as a fan, became a professional who
helped create the formative roleplaying game and many of the
elements of the Star Wars story that still influence the ongoing
adventures in that galaxy far, far away.
In case you’re not familiar with me or my work, I’m a game designer
and writer, an editor and game developer, and a narrative designer. I’ve
been a journalist, a cartoonist, a graphic designer, a creative director,
and a director of R&D. I’ve created roleplaying games (RPGs), game
systems, campaign settings, adventures, and board games. I’ve written
sourcebooks, short stories, and novels. My work can be seen in the
tabletop industry and in computer games. I’ve produced material for
West End Games, TSR, Inc., Wizards of the Coast, and Zenimax
Online Studios, among others. I’ve freelanced. I’ve been on staff. I’ve
labored in the trenches and I’ve served as the boss. If you search for my
name on the Internet, you’ll see that I’ve written and designed a great
many things. But back to memories and 2017.
What was so special about 2017? For me, it was a year full of
anniversaries near and dear to my heart. Starting with the most
significant in terms of number of years, 2017 was the fortieth
anniversary of the release of the original Star Wars film. To
commemorate the occasion, my wife Michele and I attended Star
Wars Celebration in Orlando, Florida. I hadn’t been to one of
these events since Celebration III in Indianapolis back in 2005,
DEFINING A GALAXY

and we had a blast getting caught up in the nostalgia regarding the

old and the excitement surrounding all the new stuff in the works.
Star Wars has played a decisive role in my life since I first
saw the film on its opening day in 1977. It was one of the huge
influences on my development, helping to shape so much of what
I went on to do as both a hobby and a career. Later, after Michele
and I met at work (she was already an established editor at TSR
when I joined the staff), I got to know her better thanks to Star
Wars, and we got married on the twentieth anniversary of the
original film. (That’s another significant milestone of 2017, our
twentieth wedding anniversary!)
2017 was also the twentieth anniversary of the Alternity Roleplaying
Game that I designed with Richard Baker for TSR, Inc. His current
company, Sasquatch Games, Kickstarted a new version of the
game earlier that year. And another one of my game designs, Torg:
Roleplaying the Possibility Wars, created by Greg Gorden and me
when we were with West End Games, had a huge Kickstarter in 2017
as well. It’s surreal and exciting at the same time to see something
you created and were intimately involved with come back to life with
little or no involvement on your part. I wish both of these relaunches
luck and look forward to seeing where they take the concepts.
I noticed all these anniversaries and the coincidental and
surprising return of my old work early in the year. When we
decided to attend Celebration, it occurred to me that 2017 was
also the thirtieth anniversary of my first big project, the one that
more or less put my name on the hobby game industry map. Thirty
years ago, ten years after the original film debuted, I made my
professional reputation thanks to Star Wars. In October of 1987,
West End Games released The Star Wars Roleplaying Game,
designed by Greg Costikyan and edited by Paul Murphy and
me. It was followed in November by The Star Wars Sourcebook,
written by me and Curtis Smith.
Prior to Celebration, I exchanged emails with Pablo Hidalgo, Story
Executive at Lucasfilm and former West End Games freelancer,
and we discussed the idea of doing a panel to commemorate the
anniversary of the Roleplaying Game and Sourcebook. Unfortunately,
we couldn’t make that come together for the show. At Celebration, I
made contact with Sterling Hershey, a freelancer who has worked on

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 DEFINING A GALAXY

every edition of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game. Sterling asked if I

would be available to participate in a panel at GenCon—the premier
tabletop gaming convention—if he could put such an event together.
I assured him that I would love to, and with the gracious sponsorship
of Fantasy Flight Games—current holder of the Star Wars RPG
license—the seminar was arranged. Somewhere during all this, I got
the idea to write down how the original Star Wars RPG came together
and how we created the Sourcebook and the subsequent products that
laid the foundation for much of how Star Wars would develop in
the years after the original trilogy of movies. I wanted to preserve
the history of how a mid-list hobby game company and a handful
of creative fans-turned-professionals helped define and influence
so much of the Star Wars universe, from the dawn of the Expanded
Universe in 1991 to the newest tv shows, novels, comics, theme park
attractions, and movies coming out today. I wasn’t sure what I was
going to do with the story, but I wanted to write it to safeguard the
memories as best I could, fragile things that they are.
The GenCon panel brought together Sterling, Pablo, Sam
Stewart (line editor of the current Star Wars RPG), and myself
to reminisce about thirty years of products from three different
companies and across three different game systems. We spoke
to a packed room, telling stories and sharing memories. It was a
fantastic experience.
What follows is my version of that seminar. The extended
director’s cut, if you will. It includes my best memories, imperfect
though they may be, along with whatever research I could put
together to fill in the gaps. It also includes a lot of autobiographical
information because Star Wars has been a significant part of my
life through the decades and I couldn’t quite figure out how to
separate one from the other.
This is the story of how a small team of designers at a mid-list
hobby game company got together and laid the foundation for
the Star Wars Expanded Universe—a foundation that’s still being
utilized in the new canon as defined by Lucasfilm and Disney. As
we celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of those original products,
there’s no better time to tell this story.
This is the way it happened, and it’s all totally true … from a
certain point of view.

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Chapter One:
MAY 25, 1977
A Long Time Ago, In a Summer Far, Far Away ….

M ay 25, 1977. The premier of the original Star Wars film.

A couple of friends and I had been waiting for this day,
but no matter how prepared we thought we were, we had no real
idea what we were about to see. I read all the articles surrounding
the build-up of the film in Starlog Magazine. I devoured the
novelization, cover to cover. I even poured through the first two
issues of the Marvel Comics movie adaptation. I believed we
were ready for a great movie experience, something we’d enjoy,
talk about for a while, and then turn our thoughts to the next big
thing that would grab our attention.
That’s not even close to what happened.
We decided to skip high school on that overcast day, hopping
onto the Q10 Bus that took us from Richmond Hill in Queens to
the F Train station at the far end of Lefferts Blvd. Then it was a
short subway ride into Manhattan. We were the first people to line
up in front of the Loews Astor Plaza, and we were there with plenty
of time to spare so that we could purchase our matinee tickets and
secure the perfect seats for watching a big screen extravaganza.
This was before the days of advanced ticket sales and reserved
seating. It was even before the arrival of the multiplexes (though
I remember theaters being carved up to make room for multiple,
smaller theaters while Star Wars was still playing). There was an
art to the process of securing movie tickets back in those days!
Eventually the line grew to a whopping three or four small
groups of two to four people each. When the box office opened,
we paid with cash (as people did back in those days). With tickets
in hand, we rushed to find the exact center of the auditorium—
close enough so the huge 70mm screen filled our field of vision
but not so close that we had to tilt our heads back to enjoy the
show. We took turns, alternating between staying behind to save
our seats and visiting the concession stand and restroom. Then,
fully stocked up with popcorn and sodas, we sat back and waited

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DEFINING A GALAXY

for the previews to begin. (I always loved watching the previews

back then! They usually tantalized you without spoiling too much
of the story, something that isn’t necessarily true about movie
trailers today.) I have no memory of what previews we saw that
day, but I definitely remember what happened next.
The 20th Century Fox fanfare played (something I still miss in
the new films and hope might be restored someday—and with the
possible purchase of Fox by Disney, who knows?) and the words
“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away …” were emblazoned
across the dark screen. This was followed by the first thrilling
notes of John Williams’s brilliant score and the title “Star Wars.”
(It wasn’t Episode IV: A New Hope yet; that wouldn’t get added
until the 1981 rerelease of the film.) Then came the amazing
opening crawl! “It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships,
striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against
the evil Galactic Empire.” I was enthralled! How did they get the
letters to tilt into infinity like that? For the next two hours, my
senses were inundated with a barrage of awe and wonder—and I
mean that in the most positive way possible. If you’re of a certain
age and were lucky enough to see Star Wars on the big screen, you
must remember the first time you saw:
• The blockade runner being chased by the star destroyer as it
filled the screen. (It seemed to go on forever!)
• The first appearance of R2-D2 and C-3PO, dodging blaster
bolts in the corridor of a gleaming starship while exchanging
amusing quips. (Quips and beeps, if you want to get technical.)
• Darth Vader! (The ultimate villain!)
• A lightsaber! (The ultimate weapon!)
• Obi-Wan Kenobi describing the Jedi Knights and the Clone
Wars (whatever those were)!
• Mos Eisley, a most-wretched hive of scum and villainy!
• The cantina and its collection of disreputable aliens!
• The Millennium Falcon! (What an amazing hunk of junk!)
• The first jump to lightspeed! (Wow!)
• The Death Star! (That’s no moon!)

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And the list of things that made my jaw drop goes on, and on,
and on—just like Darth Vader’s star destroyer at the beginning of
the movie!
To say that the original Star Wars film left an impression on
me would downplay the revelations racing through my mind.
The galaxy glimpsed in that movie had a lived-in feel unlike any
science fiction movie or tv show I had ever seen. It hinted at a
depth and history that made my imagination run wild. What were
the Clone Wars? How did Darth Vader hunt down and destroy
the Jedi? What was the Force and what else could you do with
it? What was this Old Republic that the Empire replaced? How
did Han Solo and Chewbacca get mixed up with someone or
something called Jabba the Hutt? Forget that, how did Han wind
up in the company of the big, hairy Wookiee in the first place?
All these questions and more bounced around in my head as the
movie started to play for a second time. This was before ushers
cleared auditoriums after each showing, when they didn’t care if
you spent the day in the air-conditioned darkness and repeatedly
watched whatever film they were showing. When the credits
rolled after that second viewing, we just had to stay and watch
it again. We watched the film three times in a row on opening
day, filling our bellies with soda, popcorn, hot dogs, and a warm
feeling about the Force.
As we finally got ready to leave the theater, our bodies literally
buzzing with excitement and caffeine, we noticed that the
auditorium was a lot more crowded after the third showing than
it was when we first got there. Instead of the handful of people
who joined us for the first showing (which was usual for weekday
matinees at the time), now the theater was filled to capacity. When
we stepped back out into the light of day, there was a line outside
the theater—a line that grew longer as the summer stretched on.
I saw the movie thirty-eight times throughout the summer and
fall of 1977. Sometimes it was with my usual gang of gaming
friends, but whenever possible I went with someone who hadn’t
seen it yet, like my mother or sister, my uncle, or a friend from
school. I wanted to see their reactions. I wanted to experience the
freshness and excitement of their first time because I thought it was
important that everybody see this movie. It was a game changer.

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For me, the summer of 1977 revolved around Star Wars, comic
books (Marvel Comics, for the most part), reading The Sword
of Shannara, discovering the novels of Stephen King (Salem’s
Lot and The Shining were the first two I devoured, and they
remain among my favorites), and playing endless sessions of the
Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game (or D&D, for short). I
didn’t know it at the time, but that was the summer when I began
training for my professional life in earnest, even if I was still two
years away from attending college and figuring out what I actually
wanted to do with my life. The Force moves in mysterious ways.

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Chapter Two:
THE STAR WARS
PHENOMENON
Episode IV? What now?

S tar Wars changed the movies. It changed the way movies were
made from that point forward, and it changed the way they
were licensed and marketed. More than that, George Lucas’s film
made movies a destination event again. The lines never seemed to
waver that first summer, and Star Wars remained in theaters into the
fall and winter, sticking around for 44 weeks, which allowed me
to attend thirty-eight separate viewings during its initial theatrical
run. But it wasn’t just taking over the movie houses. Magazine
stories and newspaper articles tried to describe and analyze what
was behind the growing phenomenon. Time and Newsweek, among
others, featured Star Wars characters on their covers, which was
unheard of at the time. Suddenly a space fantasy movie was big
news, and everyone wanted to get a piece of the action.
Then there were the toys. Since no one expected Star Wars
to come out of the gate like it did, no one was prepared to take
advantage of the unprecedented response to the film or the high
demand for related products of all types. Kenner picked up the
toy license after Mego (the premier action figure producer of
the time) turned it down. Unable to meet the demand in time for
the holiday toy-buying season, Kenner offered an “Early Bird
Certificate Package.” And yes, I bought one. It consisted of a
cardboard sleeve that contained a certificate that could be mailed
in and redeemed for the first four Star Wars action figures (Luke
Skywalker with a lightsaber that slid out of his arm, R2-D2,
Princess Leia, and Chewbacca). It also featured a plastic stand
to display the soon-to-be-released action figures, stickers, and
a membership card for the Star Wars Fan Club. It was kind of
cheesy, but also kind of brilliant. I know I couldn’t wait to collect
all the figures and display them on the plastic diorama stand.

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There were additional novels beyond the film novelization.

In 1978, Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye debuted,
which contained elements that seem strange in light of how the
story in the films developed—most notably the sexual tension
prevalent between Luke and Leia. In 1979, we got the first of a
trilogy featuring Han Solo, written by science-fiction author Brian
Daley. There were the Marvel Comics series, too, which not only
adapted the original film but continued the story of the Heroes of
Yavin after the destruction of the Death Star.
Star Wars, the film, was unlike any movie that had come before
it. Sure, it was inspired by other films that George Lucas admired,
such as The Hidden Fortress, The Searchers, and Flash Gordon
Conquers the Universe, even going so far as to re-create scenes
from some of his favorites, but the final package felt new and
unique. It had an unparalleled energy, and a sense of reality
created by the look and feel of the movie—especially because its
characters existed in a lived-in universe. Things didn’t look new
and shiny like they did in most of the science fiction films that had
come before it. Luke Skywalker and the Rebel Alliance inhabited
a universe where the starships and landspeeders appeared worn
and weathered, making the events playing out on the screen all
the more real. Add to that the special effects (many created using
techniques Mr. Lucas and his crew invented specifically for the
film), the engaging heroes, the evil villains, and the mystery and
grandeur of the Force, and you can begin to see why Star Wars
changed the movie landscape.
After watching Star Wars a few times, it became evident to me
and just about everyone else that we were eventually going to get
more movies. Early interviews with George Lucas revealed that
Star Wars was the first film in the middle trilogy of the series and
that a sequel would be released in 1980. First, however, we had to
endure the Star Wars Holiday Special, which aired on November
17, 1978. I don’t really remember how I reacted to the special
when I first saw it. The only thing that stands out from that original
viewing was the animated short that introduced the world to the
bounty hunter, Boba Fett. The armor and the attitude added up to
create an amazing new character in the Star Wars universe, and
I couldn’t wait to see the live-action version of him. Sometime

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in 1979, we finally got a trailer for the next film in the series,
The Empire Strikes Back. It showed fast clips of all the main
characters, including new additions such as Lando Calrissian and
Boba Fett. It showed action scenes, quick peeks at the Battle of
Hoth, the Millennium Falcon’s race through the asteroid field, and
Han Solo drawing his blaster against Darth Vader. For me, at least,
the trailer did its job. I couldn’t wait for the new movie to debut!

HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE

My original dream job was to become an artist for Marvel
Comics. Growing up, I loved comic books and I was developing
into a decent artist. I drew constantly, creating my own comics as
well as drawing my favorite Marvel characters in the styles of my
favorite artists. When it came time to decide on which high school
I wanted to attend, I applied to one of New York City’s specialized
schools—the High School of Art & Design in Manhattan. To
gain admittance to the school, I had to demonstrate good grades,
provide a portfolio, and take an art test. In short order, my
application was accepted and I was enrolled in the Cartooning
and Animation program.
During high school, we visited the offices of the local comic
book publishers, including Marvel, DC, and Archie. There were
internships, guest speakers, photocopies of penciled comic book
pages that we could use to practice our inking skills on, and a
variety of similar activities. It was during my Sophomore year at
A&D that Star Wars debuted, and I skipped school to attend the
opening show.
In my junior year, I took an Advanced English class and
discovered that I also had some amount of talent at writing. Not
only that, I actually liked it! Writing reminded me of developing my
campaigns for Dungeons & Dragons, and I already had a backlog
of stories I wanted to tell based on the games I had been running.
When I started to contemplate which college I wanted to attend,
I discovered that art colleges (like the School of Visual Arts,
Cooper Union, and Parsons) were serious about art. They required
hours and hours of studio time with almost no other course work
to speak of. About this time, I also came to the realization that art
was hard. I had to work infinitely harder to get my illustration work

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up to the level I demanded of myself, whereas my writing flowed

much more naturally and easily. When St. John’s University
offered me a bunch of financial aid and free credits because of my
score on the English AP test, I decided to go for a more rounded
education and pursue writing as a career instead of art.
During my time at SJU, I worked on the college newspaper,
The Torch. I served as a reporter, Managing Editor, and Editor in
Chief over the course of my college career. Working on The Torch
and producing articles every week on deadline made my writing
faster and better. The newspaper had four dedicated typesetting
machines that we wrote our articles on. These were shared by
all of the editors, reporters, and layout people, so we had to
work fast to make room for the next person who needed to use
the machine. I also kept my hand in art, doing graphic design for
the paper, drawing editorial cartoons, and developing an ongoing
comic strip called Longacre that appeared in every issue while I
attended college. One year, we did a special feature section on
interesting jobs and the people who perform them. The article I
wrote focused on comic book editor Louise Jones (later Louise
Simonson), describing her career and what she did for Marvel
Comics on a regular basis (she was the editor of the X-Men titles
at the time). I guess she was impressed with the finished article
because she passed my name to the editor of Marvel’s new fan
magazine, Marvel Age, and I got my first paid writing assignment
(not counting the grants I received for working on the college
paper). It was for an article about an upcoming mini-series
starring the X-Men’s Kitty Pryde. I almost didn’t want to cash the
$50 check I received for completing the assignment—it had an
image of Spider-Man emblazoned across it.
While I was in college, the Star Wars trilogy rolled on. In 1980
and again in 1983, I was once again first in line to see the newest
installments in the Star Wars franchise.
As graduation loomed, I wound up with two money-making
endeavors to occupy my time. First, I got a job with The Queens
Chronicle, a local weekly that needed an editor and typesetter.
Meanwhile, a new editor had taken over Marvel Age and found
my name in the Rolodex. (For those of you too young to remember
the time before cell phones, a Rolodex was a case that held index

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cards you could clip a business card to or write on, allowing you
to keep track of valuable contact information. Unless you lost
the entire Rolodex, which happened more often than you might
think.) I wrote for Marvel Age for a few years (from 1984 to 1987),
eventually becoming “The Mutant Reporter” and churning out a
monthly column that covered all the X-Men titles in publication
at the time.

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

By May of 1980, I was wrapping up my freshman year of college,
but I couldn’t wait to experience another Star Wars movie. The
Empire Strikes Back revealed itself to be Episode V during the
opening crawl. I knew this from articles I read in Starlog and other
places, but actually seeing it up there on the big screen made it all
too real. Even as I was trying to absorb the details about Hoth and
Dagobah and Cloud City, and the revelations concerning the true
relationship between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, part of my
mind was imagining what might possibly happen in the as-yet-
unmade Episodes I, II, and III. (Spoiler alert: Mr. Lucas’s version
didn’t even come close to what I had conjured in my imagination.)
But what about The Empire Strikes Back? Did it live up to the
promise of the original film? I can answer that with an unequivocal
“yes.” Sure, I understand the arguments that claim Episode V isn’t
a complete movie. That it leaves you hanging for three years to
see what happens to Han Solo. And I know that nothing can beat
the first film for originality, tension (the Death Star emerging from
orbit to attack Yavin IV as the super laser heats up provides a
countdown and an intensity that makes that climax a real nail-
biter!), and for how it established the conflict between the Rebels
and the Empire. But I love The Empire Strikes Back. It’s a darker,
more layered story that still manages to provide laughs at the
appropriate moments. And the script explodes with quips and
one-liners that fans have been gleefully quoting for almost forty
years. Letting a new director and new screenwriters take charge
of the project brought new insights and a fresh perspective to the
film. And the emergence of new characters such as Yoda, Lando,
and Boba Fett helped push Episode V to the top of my Best Star
Wars Movies list.

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What stands out in my memory about seeing The Empire Strikes

Back for the first time? Let’s go to the bulleted list!
• The creepy and sinister probe droid, skulking across the
snowy landscape as it searches for the Rebels.
• Tauntauns! (And you thought they smelled bad on the
outside!)
• Imperial Walkers!
• The Millennium Falcon’s race through the asteroid field!
(Never tell me the odds!)
• Darth Vader and the bounty hunters! (No disintegrations!)
• Dagobah and Yoda! (Do or do not, there is no try.)
• Cloud City!
• Lando Calrissian!
• Han frozen in carbonite!
• “I love you.” “I know.”
• “Apology accepted, Captain Needa.”
• The lightsaber duel between Luke and Darth.
• Luke loses his hand!
• “I am your father!”
• Luke gets a cybernetic hand.
I could watch that movie over and over. (And I have.)
Yoda. Who would have thought that a puppet could be an
ancient Jedi master? To make Yoda more alien, they made him
speak in anastrophe, where the normal order of the subject, object,
and verb in a sentence are changed. A simple thing that went
lightyears toward defining the character and making him unique.
The way he talked made Yoda instantly interesting and made you
remember the words of wisdom he uttered to Luke on Dagobah.
After the release of The Empire Strikes Back, the marketing
machine really got going. Toys and other merchandise exploded
onto the scene, and this time it was all ready to release with the
movie. Empire was a rare sequel for the time, one that was as

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good as the original film and may have even managed to surpass it
(I certainly think so). Action figures and accessories, more comic
books, a trilogy of novels featuring Lando Calrissian, bedsheets,
t-shirts, drinking glasses, and more filled the aisles at stores and
fast-food franchises from New York to California as Star Wars
became even more popular than it had been three years earlier.
They even re-released the original film the following year, adding
Episode IV: A New Hope to the opening crawl so that it matched
Empire’s opening.

RETURN OF THE JEDI

This inundation of Star Wars as a cultural phenomenon continued
to the release of Return of the Jedi in 1983. Episode VI premiered to
larger crowds and made more at the box office than its predecessor,
but I consider it to be the weakest of the three original films.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy Return and think it deserves to be
looked upon favorably as part of the original trilogy. I don’t think
it comes close to the originality of the first film or the brilliance
of the sequel though. First off, even though the stakes appear
higher, the use of a second Death Star feels been-there, done-that.
I would have preferred to see something new and different instead
of just a bigger version of what the Rebels defeated in the first
movie. I also dislike the way they decided to deal with Boba Fett,
turning the bad-ass bounty hunter into a bumbling joke taken out
accidently by a half-blind Han Solo.
What do I like about Return of the Jedi? Back to the bulleted list!
• The opening sequence, from C-3PO and R2-D2 approaching
Jabba’s Palace to the rescue of Han and our heroes flying
away from the exploding sail barge (the Boba Fett situation
notwithstanding).
• Leia as Boush and the thermal detonator ploy.
• Luke in the Rancor pit.
• Leia dispatching Jabba the Hutt.
• The speeder bike chase through the trees of Endor’s forest moon.
• Ewoks!
• C-3PO as a golden god!

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• C-3PO as a masterful storyteller, again proving that he’s

either a liar or a great exaggerator of the truth. (Remember
that in A New Hope he tells Luke that he’s “not much more
than an interpreter and not very good at telling stories.”)
• The Emperor. He throws Force lightning!
• Luke’s confrontation with Darth Vader.
• The Millennium Falcon (with Lando at the controls) racing
through the narrow confines of the half-completed Death Star.
In the end, Luke redeems his father, the Emperor is defeated,
and another Death Star is destroyed. The heroes celebrate
alongside their Ewok allies with a party—yub yub!—where
Leia tells Han that Luke is her brother as she expresses her true
feelings for the scruffy-looking scoundrel. Even though there’s
still a lot of Empire out there in the galaxy, the film ends with the
suggestion that the Rebel Alliance has achieved victory and the
New Republic will rise shortly.
But that was that. With the release of Episode VI, it appeared
that George Lucas had had enough of that far, far away galaxy. At
least for a little while. At the moment of its greatest triumph, Mr.
Lucas turned his attention to other projects. Darkness was about
to descend upon the franchise, but it was a darkness that would set
the stage for West End Games.

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Chapter Three:
A DARK TIME FOR
THE FRANCHISE
Between Trilogy and Hobby Game, Oblivion

B y the end of 1983, the Star Wars trilogy was complete. From
the looks of things, Han and Leia were going to live happily
ever after, Luke was going to restore the Jedi Order, and the Rebel
Alliance was well on its way to defeating the Empire and forming
a New Republic. All was well in that galaxy far, far away.
But here in the real world, the arrival of the mid 1980s saw a decline
in all things Star Wars. Even though the films were now labeled as
Episodes IV, V, and VI, George Lucas let the world know that Episodes
I, II, and III were a long way off, and the once-discussed Episodes
VII, VIII, and IX might never happen. Fans were devastated. Well,
at least I was devastated. I had imagined how those potential films
might play out, and I wanted to see them on the big screen. I wanted
to discover which of my guesses would turn out to be correct, which
hunches would pay off when the next movie lit up the silver screen.
Unfortunately, more Star Wars films didn’t seem to be on the horizon.
I think Berkeley Breathed summed it up best in his Bloom
County comic strip in 1983. Binkley chops off George Lucas’s
head with a lightsaber as he proclaims, “Jedi Knights don’t wait
15 years for a sequel.” It turned out to be more like sixteen years,
and we got a prequel instead of a sequel. But that was later. Let’s
talk about the Dark Times.

GAME EDITOR FOR HIRE

1985 was drawing to a close and Star Wars was fading from the
public consciousness. Sure, we had the VHS tapes, and we played
them until the tapes snapped and we had to buy new copies, but
that didn’t do anything to make good on the promise of an entire
galaxy filled with action and adventure. Fans were promised
lightsabers and repulsorlifts and lightspeed jumps, damn it!
Instead we got a whole lot of nothing and our attention began—
reluctantly—to turn to other things.

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For me, that meant finding a real job. After college, I spent
a little over a year working as a reporter and editor for the
Queens Chronicle, a weekly tabloid that served the borough of
Queens with local news and provided coupons and ads for local
businesses. It was a great learning experience, but after that first
year the news cycle began to repeat itself and I started to get bored.
I needed a new challenge. I began scouring the want ads, looking
for something that would make use of the Communications (with
a concentration on Journalism and Print Media) degree I earned at
St. John’s University and would hopefully advance my eventual
goal of becoming a Writer (whatever that meant).
I sent my resume to a lot of places that fall and winter, and
I went on a lot of interviews. I was far along in the process of
becoming an editor for the Vending Machine Times when a blind
ad that I responded to finally paid off. The ad had been placed
in the New York Times and gave no indication what company it
pertained to or what I would actually do for them if they hired me,
but it intrigued me nevertheless. I don’t recall the exact wording,
but it went something like this: “WANTED: GAME EDITOR.”
There was a short paragraph that followed, but it didn’t reveal
very much. It just asked for a resume and provided a Post Office
box address to send it to.
I don’t remember if I got a letter or received a phone call
(this was before cell phones, but we did have one of those fancy
answering machines at my house, so I probably got a recorded
message after the beep). The blind ad was placed by a company
called West End Games and they wanted to interview me. They
asked that I bring along a writing sample, something very specific.
They asked me to write a review of a hobby game, describing what
I liked or didn’t like about it and why. In hindsight, I suppose they
wanted to see how I thought about games as a way to determine if
I had the skills to become a game developer as well as an editor.
Game development as a distinct step in the game design process
was a hallmark of the West End Games method of game design,
and they liked their creative staff to be able to switch roles as the
project or schedule demanded.
I dressed in my best (and only) interview suit, braved the cold
December wind, and took the bus to the subway, and then the

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subway into Manhattan. There, in the shadow of Madison Square

Garden, on the upper floor of a decrepit office building just up the
block from a women’s homeless shelter, I first set foot inside the
offices of West End Games.
To tell you the truth, I had never heard of the company before
this. Sure, I was a long-time game player and Dungeon Master,
and I owned most everything TSR, Inc. had published up to that
point for Dungeons & Dragons and Star Frontiers and Boot
Hill. My gaming group had even tried to play GDW’s Traveller,
although we never quite made it out of character creation. But I
never noticed Paranoia in the hobby shop and I wasn’t into the
heavy-duty war games such as Killer Angels that had thus far been
West End Game’s claim to fame. (Some think the name for the
company came from the location of the office on the west side
of Manhattan. In an interview with original owner Scott Palter, it
was revealed that the name came from the bar where the company
was formally created and the legal papers were signed—the West
End Bar near Columbia University.)
With portfolio in hand, freshly printed copies of my resume on
gray parchment, and my review of a hobby game—I chose Wabbit
Wampage, a recently released board game from Pacesetter that
played as an homage to wacky Warner Bros. cartoons—I stepped
inside and rode the rickety elevator to the 11th floor. The interview
went by in a blur. I spent a lot of time with Paul Murphy and
Jeff Briggs, West End’s editorial team at the time, discussing my
background, the games I played, what kind of books I read, and
topics along those lines. I briefly met Greg Costikyan, West End
Game’s lead designer. And I remember answering some questions
for Eric Goldberg, who ran the studio back in those days. They all
told me that if I got the job, I was never ever to wear a suit to the
office again, even though Eric was decked out in a suit and wore
one regularly. I also got the grand tour of the facilities, which
occupied the entire floor of the building and was built around the
central elevator shaft. The editorial pit was on the same side of the
building as the art room, and a huge playtest area was set up just
off the corridor from reception.
I left the interview process feeling pretty good, but you can
never tell about these sorts of things. The waiting was the worst.

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More than a week went by without a word. Then the Vending

Machine Times called and offered me a job. Not sure what to do,
I said “Thank you, I’ll take it!” I immediately began to regret
my decision. Writing about vending machines didn’t seem like
something that was going to hold my interest for more than a
couple of hours at most. The coins go in, the product comes out.
What else was there to say? Making sure I was gainfully employed
and adding to my resume, however, was more important than
keeping me professionally excited. Besides, everyone needs a first
(or second, in my case) job, if only to succeed at something and
move on. At least, that’s what I told myself at the time. I had a
starting date when, finally, Paul Murphy contacted me and offered
me a job as a games editor at West End Games.
Of course, I said “Thank you, I’ll take it!” It was only after the
call ended that I had to deal with the situation I had gotten myself
into. I had a starting date at two different companies. Since there
was no way I could be in two places at the same time, I had to
decide which job offer I was going to renege on. I agonized over
it, not because the choice wasn’t clear cut, but I hate going back
on my word. I felt guilty about having already accepted a job that
I didn’t really want in the first place. I took a few deep breaths,
compared the positive and negative aspects of both potential
employers, and made the call. I let the guy over at the Vending
Machine Times down as gently as I could, then started making
plans for my first day at West End Games.
It was suddenly a very exciting holiday season for this soon-to-
be game editor.

WHO YA GONNA CALL?

About this time, Star Wars wasn’t at the forefront of my mind. It
wasn’t at the forefront of anybody’s mind. Episodes of the animated
Droids and Ewoks shows were keeping young kids engaged, even
as Kenner released its last wave of Star Wars action figures and
Marvel Comics was winding down its long-running Star Wars
comic book. Sure, fans popped in the VHS tapes and watched
the trilogy every few months or so, but that wasn’t the same as
waiting with baited breath for the next installment in the series and
having endless discussions with likeminded friends as to what was

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definitely going to happen (or not happen) in the next movie. As

1986 dawned and Star Wars drifted into the background of popular
culture, I began working at West End Games (affectionately called
WEG by gamers and people in the industry).
When I started on that cold January morning, West End was just
beginning to transition from a company that primarily produced
hobby board games to a company that primarily produced
roleplaying games. What’s the difference? A board game is a
tabletop activity that covers a fixed topic with components and
rules that define the set-up, play, and victory conditions of the
game. Board games often fell into three broad groups: mass-
market board games (such as Monopoly, Risk, and Stratego),
hobby board games (such as Junta, Kings & Things, and Cosmic
Encounter), and historic board games or wargames (such as Air
& Armor, The Battle of Shiloh, and Eastern Front Tank Leader,
for example). At the time, hobby board games primarily utilized
poster-sized paper maps, cardstock counters, and often dice of
some sort to resolve game mechanics. In contrast, mass-market
board games like the ones produced by Milton Bradley at the
time, provided solid, card-stock game boards and plastic pieces.
A few of my favorites from the latter category include Fortress
America, Shogun, and Axis & Allies. Board games set limits based
on their rules set and components. While the way a board game
develops over the course of play depends on the strategies and
moves made by the players, a board game always plays more or
less along the same lines. The rules and play space are fixed and
usually unchangeable.
A roleplaying game, meanwhile, is basically an advanced
version of “Make-Believe” or “Cops-and-Robbers.” You know,
those fanciful games of the imagination we played when we were
kids. Only an RPG (as we like to refer to them) has structure and
rules so that the game never devolves into a shouting match of
“I got you!” “No you didn’t!” “Yes I did!” “That’s it, I’m going
home to play with my action figures!” A roleplaying game
serves as a vehicle for group storytelling. One player, called the
gamemaster, adjudicates the rules, narrates the adventures, and
plays all the roles not filled by the primary characters in the
story (the other players). This includes helpful or not-so-helpful

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supporting characters, extras, and the villains that oppose the

player characters. So, where a board game is limited in play to
the scope of its topic and the components provided in the box, an
RPG has relatively few components (usually a character sheet and
some dice, the rules, and maybe miniatures and a play surface,
though those aren’t strictly necessary for play).
It’s the presence of the gamemaster, in fact, that makes tabletop
RPGs uniquely different. Because the cooperative story that we’re
telling when we play an RPG isn’t restricted by anything other than
the imagination of the gamemaster and the players, you can literally
go anywhere and do anything in a tabletop RPG. The gamemaster
has the ability to add or subtract from the rules of the game as
necessary, whether to advance and serve the story the group is
telling, or to account for whatever amazing or foolhardy (or both!)
action the players may attempt over the course of the game.
The gamemaster uses the rules to help determine the results of
actions taken by the player characters. Exactly how the GM (short
for gamemaster) does this depends on the play style of the GM’s
group. Some groups focus on the story and character interplay,
improvising and acting in character as the GM narrates their tale.
For other groups, the game mechanics are the big attraction, and
players can’t wait to optimize their characters and show off their
skills in battle against the enemy. Most groups I’ve observed over
the years tend to mix and match these two extremes to play games
where the interplay of game mechanics and story are balanced,
getting the most out of the experience.
Players create and play a single character in any given
roleplaying game. They put all their time and effort into making
their characters unique and fun to play. Whereas the gamemaster
has a solid grasp of the rules and knows the secrets of the current
story (usually referred to as an adventure), the players in a group
might range from experienced rules lawyers who know the rules
like the backs of their hands to complete novices that need to be
reminded which dice to roll and when. A player needs to know the
basics of the rules and how to read a character sheet, at the very
least. The rest is just deciding what to do after the GM describes
the situation and asks the most important question in the game:
“What does your character want to do now?”

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It’s important to note that while the GM knows the secrets of

a gaming group’s current adventure (whether the GM created the
scenario or uses a published adventure module), that scenario
consists primarily of an outline that features locations, scenes,
and opponents, as well as an overall plot and goal for the villains.
The players bring the protagonists to the table in the form of their
characters, and through their actions they determine the course
of the story and the outcome of events. The group—gamemaster
and players together—tells the story through their interplay, their
imaginations, and the results of their die rolls. The GM might have
an order of events and a finale in mind, but the narrative and the
ending aren’t predetermined. They’re the result of what happens
when the players take action and interact with the situations
described by the gamemaster.
The roleplaying game category debuted in 1974 when Dungeons
& Dragons first hit the scene. By 1986, a number of companies
were producing a variety of RPGs that served different genres,
including TSR, Chaosium, GDW, FASA, and Pacesetter. More
would enter the field later, but in 1986, it was WEG’s turn. The
company had dabbled with RPGs before, releasing the original
edition of Paranoia in 1984 and following that up with a few
adventure modules, but at this point they were still considered
to be primarily a board game company along the lines of the old
Simulation Publications, Inc. (or SPI) and Victory Games.
My initial role in the company, the job I was hired to do, was as
a game editor and typesetter. My experience operating typesetting
machines on my college paper and at the Queens Chronicle helped
get me the WEG job, since they desperately needed someone to
backstop their dedicated typesetter. For most of my first year with
the company, I spent part of each day editing and the other part
typesetting the latest product in the production queue.
The designers, developers, and editors worked on Apple IIe
computers back then. When files reached the editors, we had to
insert codes to turn on and off special font functions (such as
bold face or italics), to create headers, and to relay other type-
related requests before running the file through a program called
Apple Turnover, which would convert the file into something
the dedicated typesetting machine could utilize via an oversized

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floppy disk. Once the file was converted to typesetting, we would

do a quick proof on screen and make any corrections we noticed
(usually involving those special font functions that either failed to
turn on or off somewhere in the translation process). Then we’d
print the galleys—long strips of typeset photography paper—and
hang them on bulletin boards to dry until the editors were ready
to proofread them.
Proofing was accomplished by reading through the galleys and
marking corrections with a non-repro blue pen using copyeditor
symbols. These marked up strips, in turn, would then go back to
the typesetters to input the corrections and run out fresh versions.
When the galleys were finally declared “ready for publication,”
they’d go to the art department where, through the wonders of
paste-up boards (basically heavy cardstock), straight edges, and
waxing machines, the graphic artists would assemble all the parts
into pages we could send to the printer. For the time, the WEG
system was practically state of the art!
Compare that process to how RPG products are created today.
When I first entered the field, companies employed teams of
trained professionals to design, write, edit, layout, and produce
publishable products using equipment that was large, expensive,
and often required specialized training. The first adventure I
wrote started on a desktop computer, traveled by floppy disk to
the translation station and then to the large typesetting machine,
emerged as galleys that were carried to the art department, where
they were run through hot wax machines and trimmed with
X-Acto knives, and meticulously pasted to layout pages before
being physically carried to the printer. Today, most of the steps
can be accomplished using your smart phone, so anybody with
an idea and a little time can create an RPG product. The process I
described now takes place completely inside a single computing
device before being sent to the printer with the press of a single
button. And then you have the option of turning a manuscript into
a bound book or a digital file that can be read on the electronic
reader of your choice. Living in the future is amazing.
When I started at WEG, I was given a desk in the large, open
room that served as the editorial pit. A wall of windows to my
left looked down upon the roof of Madison Square Garden. The

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lead editor and my boss Paul Murphy, who had previously worked
at Victory Games, occupied the first desk. The middle desk was
filled by Jeff Briggs who, in addition to being a game editor and
developer, was a music composer and Civil War expert. I got the
last desk, the one next to the small antechamber that housed the
typesetting machine and served as headquarters for the typesetter-
in-residence, Carl Skutsch.
As my first editing assignment, I got to proof the galleys for a new
roleplaying game that was about to go to the printer. Ghostbusters:
A Frightfully Cheerful Roleplaying Game had been designed by the
team responsible for The Call of Cthulhu game (from Chaosium).
While they would end up with cover credit for Ghostbusters, much
of what WEG published was heavily redesigned and developed by
Greg Costikyan and Ken Rolston. (At least, that’s the story I heard
during my first few days at the company.)
Greg Costikyan started out at the legendary board game company,
SPI. He designed Bug-Eyed Monsters (published by WEG in 1983)
and Toon (published by Steve Jackson Games in 1984), before
licensing Paranoia (a game he co-designed) to WEG in 1984,
which eventually led him to take on the role of lead designer at the
company. Greg could be brusque, but he was a brilliant designer
who taught me a lot. It could be daunting to venture into his office,
where he’d carry on a conversation with you while continuing
to type a mile a minute on whatever design he was currently
engaged in. Working with Greg Costikyan and Paul Murphy laid
the foundation for the designer, developer, and editor I would grow
into. Neither Greg nor Paul set out to formally teach me while we
worked together. But listening to their insights during playtests,
taking their feedback when they provided it, and studying the way
each of them approached the tasks at hand showed me how to grow
as a creative game producer. They provided an education and hands
on experience that forged my developer skills, strengthened my
editing skills, and gave me the courage to leap into design work
when the opportunity presented itself.
Ken Rolston started out writing for Chaosium, working on the
Basic Role-Playing, Stormbringer, and Superworld RPG lines. He
joined the WEG staff in the early 1980s, first lending his unique
and humorous style to the first edition of Paranoia and then to

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Ghostbusters. When I came aboard, Ken had already abandoned

his staff position for the life of a freelancer and was serving as
a consultant/knight errant for the company. He’d appear in the
office every so often, lighting the place up with his infectious
good humor and amazing sense of design and story. If you’ve
never met Ken, he’s an extremely funny guy. And if you ever get
a chance to play Paranoia with him, I highly recommend it!
Ghostbusters, a boxed roleplaying game, included a rulebook,
character sheets, an adventure, and the beloved ghost die (a six-
sided die with the Ghostbusters logo on one face). It featured an
easy-to-play game mechanic that was the precursor to the D6
System that would power the Star Wars RPG. What WEG did
with Ghostbusters set the stage for what was to come with Star
Wars. Ghostbusters was also one of the first products to introduce
the WEG style that would serve the company so well during my
tenure there. That style was categorized by fun, easy-to-read
material, a cinematic approach to roleplaying, and a deep and
abiding respect for the source material. Anecdotally, many of our
customers commented that they bought WEG products to read
them rather than to play them. (That was a common occurrence
among RPG fans in those days; many of them didn’t have a
gaming group to play with, but they still bought the material to
read.) In general, the WEG products made for very good reads.
The Ghostbusters game reviewed well, won numerous industry
awards, and was a financial success for WEG. It demonstrated the
company’s ability to work within the framework of a cherished
license, expand the story of the license, and create new material
that joined seamlessly with what was seen at the movies.
Moreover, it showed a respect for the property and the fans who
loved it. All these qualities would help during the negotiations
for the Star Wars license. In my mind, WEG’s Ghostbusters line
served as an audition of sorts for acquiring the Star Wars license.
Why do companies pursue licenses, as opposed to creating their
own material? The reasons typically revolve around the fact that the
holder of the license (the licensor) is usually a much bigger player
with the marketing clout to promote the property far beyond what
the licensee (the smaller company that paid to utilize the property
within a limited category as defined by the license contract) could

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accomplish with its more limited resources. For the cost of the
license, the licensee gets to produce products within its defined
category, and use the trademarks, copyrighted material, logos, and
art associated with the property to the exclusion of other parties.
In theory, a good license has a much broader appeal and greater
user recognition than anything a small company could create on
its own. It isn’t impossible to produce a hit product line with a
brand-new creation, but a license—especially of a major media
property—is often a safer bet.
When all was said and done, Ghostbusters propelled WEG from
a board game company that dabbled in RPGs to a roleplaying
game company that dabbled in board games. It provided a new
style and approach to product design that would develop more
fully with the launch of Paranoia 2nd Edition and set the stage for
the next big thing—The Star War Roleplaying Game.

BOARD GAMES
In 1986, though, West End Games was still a contender in the board
game arena. I cut my developmental and design teeth, as it were,
on a few board games during my inaugural year at the company.
The first product I got to edit on my own (not just help one of the
other editors by proofing galleys) was a solitaire board game called
RAF: August 1940, The Battle of Britain. It was designed by one
of the premier freelance war game designers of the day, John H.
Butterfield. As my first full-on editing task, I played it safe. All the
development work had already happened, so my job was to make
sure that the rulebook was complete, clear, and easy to use during
play. I had to play the game numerous times to accomplish this, and
the design gave me a deep and abiding appreciation for designing
a solitaire game that I would draw upon later in my career, whether
to create a solo adventure for the Alternity RPG or to make sure that
the Castle Ravenloft board game could be played by a single player
as well as with a group.
That year, WEG had a joint publishing arrangement with
Games Workshop, a game company based in Great Britain. This
arrangement included at least two board games that I wound up
working on, Cosmic Encounter and Kings & Things. Under the
agreement, WEG handled the design, development, and editing,

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as well as produced the version of the game to be sold in the

United States, while Games Workshop took our files, upgraded
the components (they used plastic pieces instead of just cardstock
counters!), and released their own version in Europe.
Cosmic Encounter, a beloved board game originally published
in 1977, had a loyal and devoted fan base. WEG wound up with
the rights to the game and other properties created by Eon Games.
I owned the original and had played the hell out of it with my
gaming group over the years, so I jumped at the chance to work on
the WEG version. It was a game of alien powers, shifting alliances,
and deal making with relatively simple and straightforward rules
that were then modified or even changed by other elements in
the game. For me, the original game worked great. My job as
the developer and editor of the new edition was to clarify the
rules and make sure the text on each power card was as clear and
succinct as possible.
Kings & Things, on the other hand, started out as a mini-game
by Tom Wham called King of the Tabletop that originally appeared
in issue #77 of TSR’s Dragon Magazine. WEG entered into an
arrangement with designer Tom Wham, and although at least two
of his game designs were actively worked on during my time at the
company, WEG published only Kings & Things. As with most of
Wham’s designs, K&T was a fast, light-hearted game. It involved
exploration and kingdom building, and included a wide variety
of wacky creatures and bizarre items. The game board consisted
of hex tiles that changed configuration every time you played,
making every game different. Between the art style and the tone
of the game, I knew I wanted to play up the humor as I started
my developmental editing pass. That required expanding the story
inherent in the background and creating an in-game mythology
that merged the rules and game play with the story elements.
My first draft of the rulebook was hysterical. The tone of the
game came to life as I explained “The Order of Things” and
described how to set up, play, and eventually win the game. It was
a masterpiece! Also, it was completely wrong. Greg Costikyan
reviewed my work and taught me a lesson that helped refine my
burgeoning design and development talents. Greg told me that the
humor was all well and good, even necessary, but it was getting

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in the way of the rules. “People need to open the rulebook and
find the rule they’re looking for quickly,” he explained. “They
don’t want to have to figure out what’s flavor and what’s game
mechanics.” And Greg was one hundred percent correct. So I
separated the humorous flavor from the rules, setting the funny
bits in italic type to make it clearly different from the rules
material. That worked much better. Now the rulebook read well
and set the tone for the game, but the rules were clear and easy to
find, making for a winning combination.
Kings & Things won the Origins Award for Best Board Game
in 1986—which marks that as the first product I contributed
substantial work to that went on to win an industry award.
I learned another valuable lesson in that first year at WEG: Not
everything that gets designed and edited winds up being published.
I worked on at least three board games during 1986 and 1987 that
never saw the light of day. They were good games, each in their own
way, but for whatever reason the company decided not to bring them
to market. These were War Starz, Amber, and Extreme Paranoia.
War Starz was another Tom Wham game. Doug Kaufman, who
helped bring Kings & Things to completion, was the in-house
designer/developer on this one, and I was assigned to the project
as his editor. That meant I got to playtest the game over and over,
give my opinions, and help steer the development as the iteration
process continued. This humorous game revolved around aliens
and space battles, where the most-powerful ships in your fleet
were the dreaded War Starz. I remember liking this game a lot,
but we weren’t able to make all the elements click in the same
way they had for K&T. Eventually the project was abandoned and
the rights reverted back to Tom Wham.
Amber, a board game based on The Chronicles of Amber novel
series by the famed science fiction and fantasy author Roger
Zelazny, also never made it out of design. WEG had acquired the
rights to produce games based on the property, and Doug Kaufman
was hard at work putting a game together when I volunteered to
help playtest the work in progress. It was an intriguing game,
all about building pathways through shadow as you tried to take
control of the Courts of Chaos. Unfortunately, the design never
really came together and WEG eventually shuttered the project.

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Interestingly, a couple of years later when I was running the

WEG studio as Creative and Editorial Director, game designer
Erick Wujcik reached out to me because we still held the Amber
license. Erick set up a meeting at GenCon to show me a game
concept he was working on and wanted to sell to WEG. It was a
roleplaying game set in the world of Amber. The unique element
was that the RPG didn’t use dice—it was diceless! I sat in on a
game session that Erick ran with his group of dedicated playtesters
as an audition and proof of concept. I observed a remarkable
session that demonstrated the skill of both the gamemaster and
his players. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure how the play pattern was
going to translate into a printed RPG manual. Erick promised me
it would, but even after numerous requests on my part, he never
did turn over a manuscript so that I could see how he was going
to teach people the intricacies of this complex narrative exercise.
I told him I couldn’t commit to a project like this without seeing
at least a version of how he planned to present the rules. He
never got around to providing that sample and WEG’s license
eventually expired. Erick found a home for the game with a
different publisher a few years later, and his Amber product marks
a significant milestone in RPG history. It just wasn’t the right fit
at the time for me or for West End Games.
Extreme Paranoia, a board game based on WEG’s Paranoia
RPG, should have made it to the game store shelves. Unfortunately,
board game sales numbers at WEG had been dropping steadily.
By the time this one was ready for publication, the company had
decided to spend its dollars on more practical investments. Doug
Kaufman was the lead designer for the game. I served as his co-
designer, developer, and editor. The board game detailed a darkly
humorous competition between clones trying to survive in Alpha
Complex and advance to the lofty level of Ultraviolet. It was the
first game design I worked on where the game itself competed
against the players. In this case, the all-powerful but paranoid
Computer controlled the board and could win the game—and
often did!—if the players weren’t careful. We took this all the
way to the final stages of production, producing box art, plastic
Troubleshooter clone pieces in all the Paranoia colors (ROY G
BIV: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and white

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for ultraviolet), an illustrated game board, decks of cards and

dice, and even an introductory comic book illustrated by fan-
favorite artist Jim Holloway. I still have a copy, which may be the
last existing prototype. But alas, WEG never saw fit to publish
the finished product. And that’s too bad. I think it was a perfect
addition to the Paranoia universe. It captured the tone of the
RPG, as players sent their Troubleshooters on missions to uncover
commies, mutants, and traitors, all the while trying to survive the
ever-changing whims of the mad Computer that controlled Alpha
Complex. I wish you could have played it.

ROLEPLAYING GAMES
In 1986, when I started at the company, West End Games had two
roleplaying game lines in its catalog: Paranoia and Ghostbusters
(which was published shortly after I joined the company) . The
first edition of Paranoia, released in 1984 and billed as a darkly
humorous RPG with the infamous tag line, “Stay alert, trust no
one, keep your laser handy,” featured a relatively complex rules
set and a dark, dystopian and humorous setting. Ken Rolston
developed and edited the game, then helped churn out adventures
and supplements that helped establish the mix of slapstick, satire,
and backstabbing that become the hallmark of the property.
I proofread the galleys for Acute Paranoia, which was my first
real dive into the setting inhabited by clones, commies, mutants,
and the all-powerful, totally insane Computer. This grab-bag-style
RPG book boasted “New rules to ignore, new secret societies,
bots as player characters, and psychological tests to evaluate
the suitability of your clones.” It also packed a bunch of mini-
adventures into its overloaded pages, including Steve Gilbert’s
stand-out, “Me and My Shadow, Mark IV.”
Next, I edited Ken Rolston’s Orcbusters adventure, which
was a Paranoia-themed send up of the classic D&D dungeon
crawl. When a dimensional rift brings a fantasy world into Alpha
Complex, the Troubleshooters have to investigate DND Sector in
this parody of a typical Dungeons & Dragons adventure.
Finally, I edited Ken Rolston’s HIL Sector Blues campaign
pack, in which I also received my first design credit. I wrote one

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of the three mini-adventures included in the product—“One of

Our Petbots is Missing,” in which a DNA cloning experiment
goes awry and unleashes a reborn Tyrannosaurus Rex upon the
Computer’s Alpha Complex (and this was a couple of years
before Michael Creighton published his novel with a similar
theme, Jurassic Park). Of special note, this is the product that
first introduced Cardstock Commies, cardboard cutouts that could
be used in place of miniatures for RPG tactical scenarios. I don’t
know if anyone ever played Paranoia as a tactical game, but the
players really loved the Cardstock Commies!
All in all, my first year at WEG was a whirlwind of on-the-job
training in a variety of disciplines. I had learned about deadlines
working on a weekly newspaper all through college and in my
first professional job after college at The Queens Chronicle, but
wrangling the components of a board game or roleplaying game
and getting them ready for publication made me even faster as
a writer and editor. As the year progressed, I began to transition
from game editor to game developer and designer, ultimately
combining the three distinct roles and switching hats and functions
as the product-of-the-moment required. I learned a ton working
with Paul Murphy, Jeff Briggs, Greg Costikyan, Ken Rolston, and
Doug Kaufman, as well as with the other developers and artists on
the staff. With the year drawing to a close, I realized my education
was just getting started.

THERE WASN’T SO MUCH AS A PEEP IN THE FORCE

1986 gave way to 1987, and Star Wars continued to fade from the
public consciousness. Toy and merchandise revenue was in a steep
decline, the Star Wars comics ended publication, and there weren’t
any new novels or movies on the horizon. The future looked dark
and empty as far as that galaxy far, far away was concerned. As
the tenth anniversary of the original film approached, other than
a new ride at Disneyland, it appeared that Star Wars was going to
sink into obscurity.

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Chapter Four:
THAT’S NO MOON,
THAT’S THE
STAR WARS LICENSE
Wherein the Secret Plans are Revealed

T he company did a good job of keeping a secret. The

Powers at West End Games must have been negotiating
with Lucasfilm Licensing for the Star Wars license as 1986
rolled on, but those of us in the trenches never heard a word
about it. At least, I never heard a word. I was going about my
business, working on various RPG and board game products,
as well as writing articles and a column every month for
Marvel Age Magazine.
We first heard the news about the Star Wars license around
October of my first year at the company. Eric Goldberg and
Greg Costikyan brought Curtis Smith aboard, specifically
to work on Star Wars products. Curtis started out at TSR
as an editor, where he helped develop one of my favorite
adventures of all time, I6: Ravenloft by Tracy and Laura
Hickman. He had freelanced for WEG, designing a couple
of Paranoia products, when they decided to give him a full-
time job and bring him to New York City. Shortly after he
joined the company, Curtis was promoted to Director of
R&D so that Greg could concentrate fully on the design of
the Star Wars RPG. Everyone demonstrated the appropriate
amount of surprise and excitement upon hearing the news
about the license. I may have actually cheered out loud in the
editorial pit. But exuberance was soon tempered by the cold,
hard facts. There was Star Wars, and there was Everything
Else. Someone had to work on Everything Else, since there
weren’t that many initial Star Wars products to go around. I
got assigned to the Everything Else team. At least that’s how
it lined up at the start of the process.

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Here’s the original product list for the new line:

• Star Wars Roleplaying Game, designed by Greg Costikyan,
edited by Paul Murphy, with an adventure by Curtis Smith,
scheduled for release October 1987.
• Star Wars Sourcebook, designed by Curtis Smith, scheduled
for release November 1987.
• Star Warriors board game, designed by Douglas Kaufman,
scheduled for release October 1987.
• Star Wars Campaign Pack, designed by Paul Murphy,
scheduled for release December 1987.
• Tatooine Manhunt adventure, designed out-of-house by freelancer
Daniel Greenberg, scheduled for release January 1988.
What about the rest of us? What were we going to work on?
Quite a bit, actually. And it started with a new edition of Paranoia.

THE COMPUTER IS YOUR FRIEND

We got the news about Star Wars and then everything went back to
normal for a while. Before any of the products in the new line could get
underway, Greg Costikyan had to design the game that everything else
would be based upon. Plus, he had another design in the works that he
wanted to finish first, a little RPG called The Price of Freedom.
The Price of Freedom was a strange little conservative RPG
designed by a non-conservative designer. It dealt with a fictional
invasion of the United States by the Soviet Union, and players
took on the roles of resistance fighters struggling to turn back the
invaders. While I can’t say for certain, I think that movies such
as Red Dawn and the board game Fortress America influenced
Greg’s design of The Price of Freedom. It debuted late in 1986
as a boxed RPG. All I remember from playtesting the game
system is that the game mechanics leaned heavily toward realistic
combat, but the adventure scenarios tried to use WEG’s cinematic
approach to storytelling. This led to well-developed villains who
went down quickly in a hail of bullets as the playtest GM tried
to monologue during the villain’s major scene. In the end, the
product didn’t sell very well and WEG only wound up releasing
the core boxed set and a couple of adventures.

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While all that was going on, I was working on board games and
supplements for the Paranoia and Ghostbusters lines, including a
Ghostbusters adventure that was cancelled before we completed it,
titled “They Saved Queen Victoria’s Brain.” Ken Rolston and Paul
Murphy, in the meantime, were putting the finishing touches on
the second edition of the Paranoia RPG. Revamped to fall in line
with the new WEG style, this would become the ultimate version
of Paranoia, fulfilling the promise of the original by providing
easy-to-use rules that encouraged a fast and entertaining pattern
of play. The game mechanics were simplified considerably from
the first edition and the humorous possibilities of life under the
watch of a paranoid, all-powerful Computer were expanded upon
and emphasized. I lent a modest hand to the project by proofing
the galleys as they flew out of typesetting. Otherwise, I just stood
back and admired the work as it stormed toward publication. A
review in Dragon Magazine called the new edition “slick” and
said that “as a tongue-in-cheek science fiction game, this one is
hard to beat.”
I want to take a moment to better explain the phenomena that
was Paranoia. As I heard the tale, the Paranoia roleplaying
game began life as a straightforward and serious science fiction
game about a dystopian world ruled by an artificial intelligence
as designed by Dan Gelber. That version, however, never got
published. Instead, Gelber teamed up with Greg Costikyan and
Eric Goldberg, and together they designed the first edition of the
game that was published by WEG in, appropriately, 1984. This
version established the basics of the setting. It was an unspecified
date in the future, after a nuclear war or other disaster sealed
off an installation known as Alpha Complex. The underground
vault was protected by a one-time benevolent Computer that
had become paranoid and thus made all of the citizens of Alpha
Complex paranoid, too. They were convinced that the Commies
were on their doorstep, that the Mutants were ready to revolt, and
that the Secret Societies were planning to destroy the Computer
and take over Alpha Complex for themselves.
It was in the adventures and supplements, mostly shepherded to
publication by Ken Rolston, that the humor inherent in the setting
began to blossom. With such classics as The Yellow Clearance

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Black Box Blues, Send in the Clones, Clones in Space, and Acute
Paranoia, the setting and the promise of the game crystallized
into a great platform for short campaigns that served to fill the
space between a gaming group’s regular RPG campaign (usually
some form of D&D back in those days).
When Greg Costikyan, Ken Rolston, and Paul Murphy teamed
up to create the second edition, Greg streamlined the rules and Ken
and Paul cranked up the humor and satire, bringing the ultimate
version of Paranoia to life. Nothing before or since has served
as a better showcase for the world of Alpha Complex and Our
Friend the Computer—to say otherwise is Treason! In addition
to helping proof the core rulebook, I also edited The Compleat
Troubleshooter, a small booklet included in the boxed version of
the release that introduced Mandatory Bonus Duties for the player
characters (called Troubleshooters in the setting).

WHEREIN I GET MY FIRST COVER CREDIT!

I finally got to design my first product for the company sometime
in mid-1986, before Curtis Smith came aboard. It was an adventure
for the Ghostbusters line called Scared Stiffs. Originally, I was
only supposed to edit the project. It was designed by science
fiction and fantasy author, John M. Ford, who might be best
known for his Star Trek novel, How Much for Just the Planet? The
year before, Ford had contributed his talents to the now-legendary
Paranoia adventure, The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues. That
was before I joined the company, and I’m not sure how much
of that was pure Ford and how much Ken Rolston added when
he did his development and editing pass. But what I received to
work with for Ghostbusters wasn’t an adventure. It was a short
story with a good idea but not much in the way of encounters and
roleplaying notes. In short, it wasn’t a game product. I worked up
a new outline and proposed what needed to be added to turn the
material I was provided with into a publishable adventure. This
included reworking the plot into a framework a gamemaster could
run, establishing a format for ease of use, and creating hand-outs
and other material to enhance game play. Paul Murphy agreed
and Greg Costikyan gave the go-ahead. And that was how I got
my first design credit: Scared Stiffs, A Ghostbusters Adventure by

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John M. Ford and Bill Slavicsek. The inside repeated that credit
under the title and then gave me sole credit as the designer of the
work in the credits box below. I remember that Ford’s original
treatment was much heavier on the aliens and relatively light on
the ghosts. I tried to inject more supernatural elements into the
story, but in retrospect we relied a little too much on aliens for the
first few Ghostbusters adventures and not enough on ghosts and
other things that go bump in the night.
Billed as an “Ethereal Escapade,” the adventure takes
place at the First Annual QUACKS Convention and Ski Party
Weekend, where the Ghostbusters have been invited to speak
on the paranormal.
If I had done the amount of work I did to turn Scared Stiffs into
an adventure later in my career, I would have taken the sole design
credit and given Ford a “based on a story by” credit. But this was
my first time taking the design reins and people above me had a
say in the way the credits would be doled out. I’m just grateful
that they recognized the amount of work I did and were good
enough to allow me a co-credit on the cover. My first!

ORBITING THE LICENSE

As work on non-Star Wars-related material continued, I began
getting pulled into the real Star Wars design process. Slowly at
first and then with more regularity, I was invited to help playtest
the new material that Greg Costikyan (the RPG) and Doug
Kaufman (the board game) were developing.
For the roleplaying game, we’d create characters using character
templates that were still under development. The character
template concept, which grew out of the pre-generated player
characters of the early TSR D&D adventures and was later utilized
in Ghostbusters as pre-made characters that you could modify and
customize, was taken to the next level in the Star Wars RPG. In
Star Wars, templates were full-blown character concepts—Rebel
Pilot, Smuggler, Failed Jedi, and so on—that players used as
the basis for their characters. Greg or someone else on the team
would run us through a short adventure or a combat encounter,
something that would allow us to play the game and test the rules
at the same time.

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The RPG turned out to have more meat on its bones than the
Ghostbusters game that preceded it, which makes sense for a game
that aimed to provide more depth and a full campaign mode—
WEG’s first RPG designed to be played as your primary game and
not just used for one-off sessions. A robust skills system, in-depth
advice for gamemasters, and detailed rules for using the Force were
just some of the topics covered in the rulebook. With all that, it was
still easy to play, easy to gamemaster, and it had a cinematic feel
that meshed perfectly with the universe it was designed to portray.
How can a tabletop roleplaying game feel cinematic? It’s
a matter of having a rules mechanic that’s quick to play and a
narrative approach to the game that allows stories to develop fast
and furiously. Like Ghostbusters before it, just by the nature of
trying to encapsulate the physics of the Star Wars universe into a
set of game mechanics, the Star Wars roleplaying game provided
the framework for creating characters and situations that felt like
they belonged in a Star Wars movie. The hallmarks of a cinematic
RPG include fast play around the table and action that feels like
it sprang from the big screen. In turn, these elements help the
players envision their game as a movie in their minds, providing
plenty of opportunity for the players to contribute to the story
in fun, interesting, and relatively quick ways. The rules need to
assist in this by encouraging players to attempt cinematic actions,
such as leaping across a chasm with a blazing blaster in each
hand. Cinematic games usually provide reasonably tough player
characters, dangerous but not extremely lethal combat, and a tone
that matches the films they propose to emulate. Ghostbusters
accomplished this, and later, so did the Star Wars RPG.
For the board game, we’d select our ships and push counters
around the map and roll dice as we helped fine tune game balance,
play, and the fun factor of ship-to-ship combat. Doug Kaufman
wanted to capture the feel of the starship battles we saw in the
movies. It was a tall order, but I think Star Warriors exceeded
its goals and made for a fun—if slightly more complex—game.
With the components and scenarios provided in the box, players
could re-create their favorite space battles from the Star Wars
movies, including the Millennium Falcon’s escape from Tatooine,

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the Death Star battle over Yavin Four, and the chase through the
asteroid field in The Empire Strikes Back.
I was working on something else at the time, though I can’t for
the life of me remember what it was. Maybe that Ghostbusters
adventure that never quite came to fruition. I was sitting at my
desk, typing away on my computer, when Eric Goldberg walked
up and handed me a piece of paper.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“An ad announcing the Star Wars Roleplaying Game,” Eric
said. “I want to know what you think.”
All these years later, I don’t remember the exact details of the
ad Eric handed to me. Or why he decided to ask my opinion in the
first place. I do remember that my initial reaction was that the ad
read more like it belonged to the Star Trek franchise than to Star
Wars. (WEG also held the license for Star Trek board games at
the time. We weren’t producing anything new, but Star Trek: The
Adventure Game was still available for sale through our catalog.)
I love Star Trek: The Original Series, and Captain Kirk remains
one of my all-time favorite heroes. But Star Trek is more cerebral
and deliberate in its storytelling (new movies and later television
series aside), whereas Star Wars is all about opening the throttle
full blast and navigating the asteroid field at top speed while the
pilot yells, “Never tell me the odds!” That’s the feeling I expected
to get from the ad. It wasn’t there.
“There’s no whoosh,” I told him, “no wahoo in this text. It
doesn’t feel like Star Wars to me.”
Eric thanked me and wandered off. I went back to work and
forgot all about it. An hour or so later, Greg Costikyan stormed
into the editorial pit, walked up to my desk, and threw a sheet of
paper down in front of me. Then he turned and left without saying
a word. (Greg could be intense back when I worked with him.)
I glanced at the paper before giving it a thorough read. It was
a new version of the ad, this time written to take advantage of
the space-opera excitement inherent in the Star Wars franchise. I
thought it captured the tone of Star Wars much better. If nothing
else, I felt like I did my part and contributed, at least in some small
way, to the upcoming game release.

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THE APOCRYPHAL TALE

OF THE STAR WARS LICENSE
Bear in mind, I never heard any of this back in the day. Oh, I had
my theories, but the negotiations that resulted in West End Games
acquiring the Star Wars master game license were a closely
guarded secret. It wasn’t until I was perusing an interview that
I had done with Rolling Stone Online (“How a Pen and Paper
RPG Brought Star Wars Back from the Dead” by Chris Baker,
December 21, 2016), that I saw this quote from Greg Costikyan:
“We flew out to California to meet with Lucasfilm. We made a
bid of $100k. We later learned that TSR had tried to get the license
too, but they only bid $70k.”
Back in the day, all that negotiating was happening above my
pay grade. Later we heard rumors of a bidding war, and it wasn’t
hard to spot a few other space-opera-type RPGs that came out
right around the time WEG released Star Wars. I assumed that at
least a few of those designs were re-worked after the companies in
question weren’t able to secure the rights to Star Wars.
I recently asked a friend who had been at FASA at the time if
his company had indeed bid on the Star Wars license or not. My
friend explained that not only had FASA been pursuing the license,
they were the ones who had gotten Parker Brothers to release the
master game rights so they would be available in the first place.
FASA planned to produce board games related to Star Wars and
sublicense the RPG rights to Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE).
“But our sales manager spilled the beans at a convention,” my
friend went on to say, “and we got into a bidding war. We lost.
But it all turned out good. Renegade Legion: Interceptor was a
reskinned version of the Star Wars starfighter game we would
have published, and it did just fine.”
I’m not sure about all the intrigue, but I do know that one of the
artists recently hired at WEG, Richard Johnson, had come from
Parker Brothers. Prior to this bidding war, Parker Brothers held
the master game license for Star Wars. This gave the company the
rights to produce any kind of games using the Star Wars property,
but in reality they made use of only a portion of the license—the
part that pertained to mass-market family games. They had no

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interest in getting into the relatively small hobby game market

or in producing a roleplaying game. Either through their own
impetus or at the encouragement of Lucasfilm Licensing (LFL),
Parker Brothers agreed to give up the hobby game rights for Star
Wars. This allowed West End Games and other interested parties
to bid for the newly carved out license.
Maybe Richard brought the news about the rights becoming
available to WEG’s management when he joined the company?
Or maybe LFL reached out to a few companies as part of their
own due diligence after FASA approached them? However it
worked out, I’m glad the license ended up with West End Games
and that I got to work on it. That license included not only
roleplaying games and ancillary products such as sourcebooks
and adventures, but hobby board games, card games, and even
miniatures. It was the motherlode, and West End Games had won
the bidding and secured the rights.

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 DEFINING A GALAXY

Chapter Five:
ORCHESTRATING A
REBEL BREAKOUT
Editing Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game

T he schedule set forth to produce the initial slate of Star Wars

products was aggressive, to say the least. West End Games
wanted to release the Star Wars Roleplaying Game during the
ten-year anniversary of the original film, which meant they were
shooting for a shelf date around the holiday season of 1987 for the
RPG and the follow-up products.
By the beginning of 1987, it was evident that the core team
of designers and editors needed help. Greg Costikyan started
working on the rules set around the middle of 1986, but it wasn’t
until October of that year when Curtis Smith was brought on
board that the news of the license was revealed to the rest of the
company. That meant we had less than a year to design and edit
the RPG, the Sourcebook, the board game, the Campaign Pack,
and the first adventure. The RPG needed to reach the printer by
the beginning of July, the Sourcebook by the beginning of August,
the Campaign Pack by September, and the adventure by October.
(From turn over to the printer to warehouse took about three
months, with another two to four weeks to go from warehouse to
store shelves if I recall correctly.)
I was initially drafted to give Paul a hand editing the roleplaying
game. In addition to backstopping him and taking on a few of the
more story-oriented chapters, it was decided that I would develop
and edit the short adventure that would serve as everyone’s
introduction to the game and the Star Wars RPG universe, “Rebel
Breakout” by Curtis Smith.
Before I get to the story of that initial, introductory adventure,
I want to talk about the rest of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game.
The topic, the game design, the market’s hunger for the property—
everything came together to make the RPG a success and a bona
fide hit for West End Games. But the game endures to this day
because of the innovation and care that went into its crafting.

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ECONOMY OF RULES
The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, designed by Greg Costikyan
and developed by Paul Murphy, was presented as a 144-page
hardcover book—relatively small when compared to other
roleplaying games released around the same time and in the
years that followed. The trend (even for later editions of the
WEG product) would be to create larger, more comprehensive
rulebooks. But this volume was compact, lean and trim and
devoid of any extraneous material that the player or GM didn’t
immediately need to play the game.
Character creation rules took up a mere four pages, explaining
how to select and customize a character template, modify
attributes and skills, and determine connections with the other
player characters in the campaign. Six pages were used to present
the bare bones of the game rules, explaining how to use Attributes
and Skills to make opposed rolls or to beat a Difficulty Number.
Those scant rules even included basic information about the Force
and the Jedi.

GAME DESIGN
The game mechanics were elegant, engaging, and fun to play.
The game used exactly one type of die, the common six-sided
die familiar to anyone who had ever played Monopoly or Clue
or Craps. In gamer lingo, we call it a D6. Every character in the
game consisted of six Attributes that defined their natural talents:
Dexterity, Knowledge, Mechanical, Perception, Strength, and
Technical. Each Attribute had a series of learned abilities associated
with it, referred to as Skills. Skills could be improved beyond the
base Attribute scores, demonstrating the knowledge and training
the character earned through education and experience.
A player selected one of the twenty-four character templates
presented at the back of the book to create the character he or
she wanted to play. These templates featured already generated
Attribute scores; a player only had to assign values to the skills
they wanted their character to excel in. So, a Smuggler with a
Dexterity of 3D+1 could have a related Blaster Skill of 5D+1,
showing that the player had put two extra dice into improving his
or her character’s ability to use a blaster pistol.

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Once a player understood how to read the character sheet and

roll the dice, that was really all there was to it. The player serving
as the gamemaster had a few more rules to learn, but they all
worked off the idea of rolling a specific number of six-sided dice,
adding them up, and trying to get as high a result as possible. The
result of the dice roll was either compared to another character’s
result (called an Opposed Roll) or to a number set by the adventure
or the GM (called a Difficulty Number).
For example, if the Smuggler’s player was told to make a
Dexterity check to dodge a runaway landspeeder, she’d roll
3D6+1 (roll three six-sided dice and add 1 to the result) to try to
get a result that was equal to or greater than the Difficulty Number
assigned to the task by the gamemaster. If that same Smuggler
wanted to fire her blaster at a charging Wampa, she’d roll 5D+1 to
beat the Wampa’s opposed roll.
How did this look in play? Using the two examples above,
here’s the way it could play out. In the situation where a
runaway landspeeder races toward our Smuggler hero, the GM
tells the player to make a Dexterity check. The GM decides that
the Difficulty Number to avoid the oncoming landspeeder is 12,
but the GM doesn’t reveal that just yet. Instead, the gamemaster
describes the scene: “A small Twi’lek child gets away from her
parent and runs into the path of a landspeeder. The driver spots
the child at the last moment and swerves to avoid running her
down. But now the landspeeder is out of control and rushing
straight toward you! Make a Dexterity check.” The player
examines her character sheet and determines that her Dexterity
score is 3D6+1. She rolls the dice and gets the following result:
6, 4, 4 on the dice, adding +1, for a total of 15. Her character
easily beats the Difficulty Number (12) and leaps out of the way
as the landspeeder zips by.
In the case of the charging Wampa, the unfortunate Smuggler
wandered into the large creature’s lair. The Wampa sees the
Smuggler as lunch and raises a clawed paw to strike. The Smuggler
decides to fire a shot from her blaster to drive the creature back.
Her blaster skill is 5D+1 and she rolls 6, 1, 1, 6, 5 on the dice,
adding +1, for a total of 20. Instead of a Difficulty Number, she’s
trying to beat the Wampa’s opposed Dodge roll. The gamemaster

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rolls for the Wampa, using its Dexterity score of 3D. Even with
a good roll of 5, 6, 6 for a total of 17, there’s no way for the
Smuggler to miss as the Wampa comes barreling toward her.
Beyond these basic concepts, the rules also covered the Force,
combat damage and healing, and using starships. The rest of the
rulebook featured GM advice, story ideas, and a miscellany of
material necessary for any roleplaying game campaign. A chapter
on roleplaying included a solitaire adventure, an example of
regular play with a gamemaster and group of players, and a little
bit of information about playing a role, handling banter around
the table, and inspiring cooperation among the players—all in a
tight eight pages! By page 25 of the book, the player section was
complete and the gamemaster section was about to get started.

FORCE RULES
It wouldn’t be a Star Wars game if it didn’t talk about the Force.
In the section that covered the Force, the rules established the
Jedi Code and described the basic Force skills of Control,
Sense, and Alter. The Jedi Code provided a way to limit Force-
using characters by burdening them with Dark Side Points if
they violated the strict tenets of the Jedi Order—a useful game
mechanic for dealing with super-powerful Jedi characters.

“A Jedi may not kill, except in self-defense or the defense of others.

“A Jedi may not act for personal gain, of wealth or power.
“A Jedi must never act from hatred, anger, fear, or aggression.”

And later, the book presented the actual Jedi Code:

“There is no emotion; there is peace.
“There is no ignorance; there is knowledge.
“There is no passion; there is serenity.
“There is no death; there is the Force.”

GAMEMASTER MATERIAL
The gamemaster section, also a study in efficiency and
conciseness, explained the role of the GM and described the
three activities that make up that role: refereeing the game,
roleplaying the personalities that fill the world alongside the

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player characters (patrons, villains, and various supporting cast

members), and sustaining the suspension of disbelief by making
the imaginary world come alive through vivid descriptions,
consistency of details, and responsiveness to the actions of the
players. The advice ended with eight useful things to remember
about gamemastering and a general admonition to relax and have
fun. The rulebook gave GMs permission to wing it! I still apply
that advice to the games I run, no matter the game system I’m
using, to keep the story flowing and to avoid pauses in the action.
You can always look up an obscure rule later, but during the game
session, the play’s the thing.
Quotes from the movies were sprinkled throughout the chapter
on the Force, adding a sense of authenticity to the material. The
words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Grand Moff Tarkin, and Yoda helped
remind the reader that this material was part of a bigger universe
and that everything was connected. I’d use the same technique
with a much wider application in later products and in the products
released when Wizards of the Coast held the license.

ADVENTURE ADVICE
The section on adventures brought everything together and
showed gamemasters how to use all the rules and guidance to
create fun and authentic Star Wars experiences. It contained
advice regarding whether to use a published adventure or one of
your own creation, how to prepare for a game session, and how to
best start a new adventure. Specifically, it set forth two techniques
for Star Wars adventures.
The first technique revolved around an interesting idea utilizing
a player hand-out, specifically a script to get the action started.
The script included with the sample adventure in the rulebook, for
example, had parts for six player characters. The idea of the script
was to impart information in a more interactive way than the GM
read-alouds that usually marked the beginning of a published
adventure. In addition, the goal was to help set the mood, get the
players moving in the right direction, and otherwise establish the
scene for the action to come.
Of course, to make the scripts usable by the widest possible
section of the audience, the dialogue provided for each part had to

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be relatively flat and neutral. We never wanted to tell players what

their characters were feeling or how they were acting. And we
didn’t want these opening scenes to go on too long. We just wanted
to provide enough information to set the scene in a relatively
interesting way. Whether or not the technique succeeded, I’ll
leave that for someone else to judge.
The second technique was more universal and wound up finding
its way into adventures I would later write for Torg, Dungeons
& Dragons, and other games I worked on. It encouraged
gamemasters to start their adventures “in media res”—in the
middle of the action. This means that every adventure begins
with something interesting taking place. No more worrying about
whether it will take your players an hour or more to find the fun.
Like the best action movie, an adventure that starts in the middle
of a blazing blaster battle or a daring starship chase through an
asteroid field allows the players to know exactly what they need
to be doing right now. They can figure out how they got there and
what else is going on along the way.
Other useful advice packed into the eight-page chapter included
ways to maintain the pace of your adventure, with admonitions
not to get bogged down in details. When in doubt, it encouraged
GMs to improvise wildly and keep the action moving. It talked
about when to fudge the rules and how to use Force Points so that
players could fudge them too when the need arises. It provided
suggestions on penalties to impose on characters that didn’t just
involve character death, and talked about maintaining a Star Wars
atmosphere. This could be done through the villains you selected,
the scope of the stories you decided to tell, and by utilizing props
and music. It even suggested the GM make funny noises to mimic
droids, blaster bolts, and stormtrooper voices.
Want to know the best way to end a game session and make
your players want to come back for more? The rulebook taught
me this: End the game session on a cliffhanger! Pick a tense
moment, describe the scene, and then say, “and that’s we’re
we’ll pick things up next time!” You’ll know you did your job
as gamemaster when your players cry out that they want to keep
playing. But stick to your guns and make them wait for the next
play session.

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REBEL BREAKOUT
Curtis Smith designed the introductory adventure included
in the core rulebook, an eleven-page extravaganza entitled
“Rebel Breakout.” Curtis put together a solid story and good
introduction to the Star Wars universe. Of course, we had to
figure out just where in the Star Wars universe we were going to
set the game. At the time, we had the original trilogy timeframe
to work in. Should we set it at the beginning of Episode IV,
before the discovery of the first Death Star? We could have tried
to set it after Episode VI, but Lucasfilm wasn’t ready for anybody
to explore what happened after the Battle of Endor and the death
of the Emperor. At least not yet. Besides, we wanted to set the
game firmly within the action of the movies. “Rebel Breakout”
utilized a character from Episode IV, Tiree (also known as Gold
Two), who had the distinction of being the first Rebel pilot to get
shot down by Darth Vader. Therefore, the introductory adventure
had to take place before those events and was set shortly before
the Battle of Yavin.
Later, as we were working on The Star Wars Sourcebook, we
came to the conclusion that the three-year period immediately
following the Battle of Yavin and prior to the Battle of Hoth was
going to be the sweet spot to set our adventures and campaign
material. That would allow us to utilize all the pieces of the Star
Wars saga, making the destruction of the Death Star and the fame
of the Heroes of Yavin part of the roleplaying game campaign’s
back story. After the more generic information provided in the
rulebook, the game universe was established to take place
between Episode IV and Episode V, during a period where the
Rebel Alliance was intimately engaged in battle against the
Galactic Empire.
The introductory adventure was an origin story, a way for
one group of Rebels to join the Alliance and set out to do its
part to overcome the Empire. Curtis wrote the initial treatment
and I got to develop it and edit it for publication. This included
creating a format for Star Wars adventures that we could utilize
in subsequent products. As I had done with Scared Stiffs, I started
reworking the original material to shape it into a finished product.

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Some of the highlights of that first adventure include:

• The script provided to start the adventure describes how
Rebel Agent Tiree has arranged for you and your companions
to join the Rebel Alliance.
• The player characters acquire Tiree’s old astromech droid,
R2-D0 (affectionately referred to as “Deo”).
• The adventure introduces the concept of the Imperial Security
Bureau (ISB), in the form of the villainous ISB officer Mar Barezz.
• Navigating the ruins of an old mine, Barezz taunts the group
via the mine’s communications system. This allowed us to
build up the villain’s personality and motivations without the
player characters immediately taking him down in a hail of
blaster bolts.
• In the mine, the player characters must find a way to get
across a seemingly bottomless mine shaft, reminiscent of
Luke and Leia swinging across the chasm on the Death Star.
• The final encounter pits stormtroopers and a pair of AT-AT
walkers against the Rebel hopefuls as they attempt to carry a
wounded Tiree to the Y-wing starfighters and escape.
• The map of Mesa 291, which included two levels of the
complex and a side view of the mine shaft.
In addition to developing and editing the adventure, I remember
running it countless times at GenCon when we were demoing
the game during the summer of 1987. I also used it as a starting
point for most of the Star Wars campaigns I gamemastered over
the years, including the five-year campaign I later ran for my
colleagues at TSR, Inc. It’s full of tension, great moments, and
plenty of ways for players to improvise and make the story their
own. Because of that, I don’t think the adventure has ever played
the same way, no matter how many times I’ve run it.
Speaking of GenCon and demos, WEG somehow convinced
Lucasfilm to lend us an authentic set of stormtrooper armor to
help promote the upcoming game release. The suit of armor
was extremely fragile, and West End had to take out insurance
to guarantee its safety, but it was cool to have a stormtrooper

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guarding our booth at the cons. This was long before the formation
of the 501st Legion of cosplay stormtroopers (they first appeared
in 1997). Only a couple of people in the company had the height
and physique to wear the suit, but we made extensive use of the
borrowed armor throughout 1987 as the build up to the release of
the game took on a head of steam.

THE REST OF THE RULEBOOK

The introductory adventure was followed by seven pages of
adventure ideas that gamemasters could develop into full-scale
adventures. Ken Rolston designed these, with some assistance
from me and Paul Murphy as we did our development and editing
passes. These short hooks included a mission to search Obi-Wan
Kenobi’s Tatooine dwelling for Jedi heirlooms, a light-hearted
encounter with unknown aliens where both the Alliance and the
Empire seek to make a good impression, a quest to find a way off
Hoth after the last Rebel transport has gotten away, and a tense
negotiation with space pirates. (You can see we were still all over
the time frame of the films at this point in the process.)
The rulebook also included a full-page character sheet that could
be photocopied and twenty-four different character templates
for players to select and modify so they could create the exact
characters they wanted to play. Choices included the Armchair
Historian, the Bounty Hunter, the Brash Pilot, the Ewok, the
Failed Jedi, the Minor Jedi, the Old Senatorial, the Outlaw, the
Smuggler, and the Tongue-Tied Engineer.
I remember one of my players selected the Ewok. The rest of
the group hollowed out an old R2 unit to hide him in whenever
they went to an Imperial planet. Using pedals to propel the droid
casing and poking his spear through one of the droid’s hatches
when combat was necessary, he created a memorable character
with an interesting shtick that still makes me smile when I think
about the adventures that group used to get into.
I should spend a moment to talk about color and the Star Wars
hardcovers. Sometime during the production process, the Powers-
That-Be decided that they wanted the rulebook to include full-color
plates to show off the gorgeous artwork we had access to as part
of our license. That decision made Star Wars one of the first major

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roleplaying game products to incorporate full-color printing into its

production. Four four-page signatures were spread throughout the
book. The first signature at the very front was used to showcase our
opening crawl, the title and credits pages (featuring a pair of B-wing
starfighters zooming away from an exploding star destroyer), and a
table of contents page utilizing Ralph McQuarrie’s painting of Luke
staring off into the twin suns of Tatooine. The second signature
was bookended by color stills from the movies and more full-color
McQuarrie art, with the spread featuring a recruitment ad for the
Imperial Navy. The ads were the brainchild of staff artist Richard
Johnson, who had come to WEG from Parker Brothers. The third
signature featured more stills from the movies, including heroes,
villains, droids, aliens, and starships. The final signature featured
three more in-world ads: one announcing the production of the new
X-wing Space Superiority Fighter from Incom, one proclaiming that
“no job is over this little guy’s head” as a sales pitch for Industrial
Automaton’s R2 astromech droid, and a two-page extravaganza
proudly presenting Galaxy Tour’s “Grand Galactic Tour” with
leisurely stops on Tatooine, Endor, Bespin, and Imperial City, all
aboard the Kuari Princess luxury starliner. The ads helped give our
rendition of the Star Wars universe the same lived-in feeling presented
in the movies, albeit in a way better suited to a hardcover book.
After we announced that the Star Wars Roleplaying Game
hardcover book would include sixteen pages of full color, the rest
of the hobby game industry must have taken notice. At GenCon
the year after we released the two hardcover books, Jim Ward,
head of the design and editing teams at TSR, Inc., complained to
Curtis Smith that because of what we did, he had to go and make
the second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons a full-color
hardcover book. I guess we started a trend, and full-color printing
became the standard for most major RPG products going forward.

CHANGING OF THE GUARD

The first shake-up in management at West End Games occurred
during the production of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game. I don’t
know all the details, and this isn’t a topic I want to speculate about.
Suffice it to say that shortly after Greg Costikyan turned over
the manuscript for the RPG, he and Eric Goldberg parted ways

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with the company. This put more pressure on Curtis Smith, as

management of the staff and production schedule fell completely
upon his shoulders. With the additional responsibilities, Curtis
shifted more of the work on the Star Wars Sourcebook to me until
I wound up writing most of that product.

LAST WORDS ON THE ROLEPLAYING GAME

If West End Games had done nothing else but produce the Star
Wars Roleplaying Game, that single volume would still hold
a place among the great RPGs of all time. It created a fun and
faithful way to play cinematic games in the Star Wars universe.
But what came next, the sourcebooks and galaxy guides and
adventures, went on to define and add to the lore of the Star Wars
universe in an unprecedented way. What we created continues to
influence the brand even now, thirty years later.
And that’s the next topic for discussion ….

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 DEFINING A GALAXY

Chapter Six:
RESEARCH BEFORE
THE DIGITAL AGE
Gathering Material for The Star Wars Sourcebook

T he Star Wars Sourcebook, the companion volume to the Star

Wars Roleplaying Game, now stands as a pivotal work that
helped define the Star Wars universe. The original plan had Curtis
Smith designing the entire book on his own. Various factors
contributed to how I wound up as Curtis’s co-designer, including
an extremely tight schedule, Curtis’s duties as Director of R&D
(especially in light of Eric Goldberg and Greg Costikyan’s
departure from the company), and the time he was spending
overseeing the production of the Star Wars line and the rest of
WEG’s publication schedule. I was eventually assigned to the
product and immediately got to work determining what had already
been created and what remained to be written before the looming
deadline was finally upon us. During this phase, I reworked the
outline to make sure it was covering as much material as possible
and added a few things that I really wanted to write about.
Up to that point, which was sometime in early 1987, Curtis
had written or started working on the following sections of the
book: General Spacecraft Systems, Starfighters, Lightsabers, and
Rebel Bases—about 34 of the 144 pages when all was said and
done. I wound up writing the other 110 pages. Back in those days,
West End Games printed the covers of the books in advance of
the interior pages. Curtis, recognizing my contribution even while
we were still in the early stages, convinced the Powers-That-Be to
add my name to the cover credit, which would read:

The Star Wars Sourcebook

by Curtis Smith and Bill Slavicsek
Later, as we were preparing the final pages for the printer, Curtis
graciously ordered me to change the title page credit to “by Bill
Slavicsek & Curtis Smith” in recognition of the amount of work

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I did to complete the project. It was too late to change the cover,
but he wanted to acknowledge my place in the design order on the
credits page of the book.
When Fantasy Flight Games announced that they would be
releasing a commemorative edition of the RPG and Sourcebook
in a slipcase for the thirtieth anniversary, internet news site i09’s
headline read “The Insanely Influential Star Wars Sourcebook
….” Thirty years ago, we were just trying to get it done on time
and make it as good as we possibly could. We had no idea it would
be influential—insanely or otherwise—thirty years later.

SKYWALKER RANCH
Curtis decided that the first order of business once I was brought
onboard the project required us to take a trip to the Lucasfilm
offices in California. He wanted us to dig through the legendary
Lucasfilm archives to find photographs, artwork, and other
materials we needed to research and fill the Sourcebook and
subsequent products. The plan was to utilize existing concept
art, movie stills, and production paintings to serve as cover
illustrations and interior art for our upcoming products. The more
we could pull from the movies, we figured, the more official our
products would appear to the public. Plus, new art was expensive.
Considering how much the company had already spent to acquire
the license, it made sense to us to try to save some money as far as
product art was concerned.
Soon we were off to California—me, Curtis, and art director
Stephen Crane. We decided to make a stop in Los Angeles to visit
Disneyland and see the new Star Tours attraction—for research
purposes. It was glorious! A piece of the Star Wars universe
come to life in a small corner of the Happiest Place on Earth.
We rode that ride three or four times during our visit, soaking
up all the atmosphere and studying how the Disney people had
created a true-to-life Star Wars experience. I even purchased
a cool silver Star Tours jacket and a bunch of post cards that
were crafted as though they were bought on Endor or Hoth or
Tatooine. The whole idea of Star Tours was so captivating that
we included our own version of “Galaxy Tours” in one of the
color ads in the RPG.

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Since we were there anyway, we explored the rest of the

theme park and made a work-vacation out of the visit. Then we
were off to Skywalker Ranch. This meant taking a plane to San
Francisco, renting a car, driving across the Golden Gate Bridge,
and then navigating our way into the San Rafael countryside until
we reached Lucas Valley Road. Our contacts at LFL claimed
the road was named long before George Lucas built his facility
there, but it certainly was rather convenient. A solid country fence
surrounded the property, and a wooden gate with a plaque that
simply displayed four numbers—the address of the property—
marked the way inside. No fancy sign. No indication at all that
you were entering a special place.
Until you got to the guard house, that is. You couldn’t just
drive up to Skywalker Ranch to look around and say hello. You
had to check in with the uniformed guards (no, they didn’t wear
stormtrooper armor), who diligently confirmed that the names of
everyone in your car was on their list. Then they called ahead
to the person you were scheduled to visit to make sure it was
still all right to let you through and onto the property. Once you
cleared security, the guard provided a cardstock map of the area
and pointed out where to go to park your car and enter the Ranch.
Unfortunately, even after all the trips I made to the Ranch over the
years, I never got to keep one of those cool little maps. The guards
collected them as you checked back in at the gate before you were
allowed to leave the property.
The peaceful drive up Skywalker Ranch Road featured beautiful
scenery and breathtaking views. A short distance along, the
Skywalker Ranch Fire Brigade could be seen out the driver’s side
windows. It contained an old-fashioned but honest-to-goodness
working fire truck, housed in a brand-new building designed to
look like something from the turn of the last century. Farther
along and you passed by the serene Lake Ewok before the ranch
house finally came into view.
Back then, the Main House included the offices of Lucasfilm
Licensing (the people we dealt with on a regular basis), a
multistoried library with a cool spiral staircase, a theater, a
cafeteria and dining room, and a company gift shop. Many of the
walls were decorated with vintage movie posters from George

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Lucas’s private collection. The Main House also featured Mr.

Lucas’s office on the upper floor. We received strict instructions
on what to do if Mr. Lucas was in residence during our visit.
Namely, leave the man completely alone. Don’t talk to Mr. Lucas
unless he talks to you. Don’t look at him. Don’t go anywhere near
him. Those were the rules, so we adhered to them religiously. In
all my visits to Skywalker Ranch, I can’t remember more than two
or three times that Mr. Lucas was actually on the premises. More
often than not, it was a moot point.
That first visit in early 1987 included a tour of the facilities
at the Ranch, and meetings with Howard Roffman, Louise Riley,
and Anita Gross of Lucasfilm Licensing (our primary contacts) to
discuss the approval process, present product line plans, and get
to know each other. We had lunch at the Ranch cafeteria and went
out to dinner at one of the nicer restaurants in the area. And we got
to peruse the company gift shop. In the early days, the gift shop
was small and carried only a few items—t-shirts, sweatshirts, caps,
and jackets emblazoned with either the Lucasfilm or Skywalker
Ranch logos. The shop would grow as the licensees increased
over the years, but back then I splurged and picked up a t-shirt and
a sweatshirt: souvenirs of my very first visit to Skywalker Ranch.
Eventually, we got down to the business that brought us to
Lucasfilm headquarters. Curtis and I spent a little time with art
director Stephen Crane at the Ranch, looking through files of
photographic proof sheets. The process back in the day was to
indicate which photos we wanted from the proof sheets, then
order physical copies that we could use in our publications.
Although we knew we were going to have to create new art along
the way, we wanted to use as much of the material as we could
from the Lucasfilm archives in as many creative ways as possible.
We planned to utilize movie poster art and pre-production art by
Ralph McQuarrie for covers and illustrate interior pages with
as many stills from the movies and black-and-white concept art
as we could get our hands on. After a while, we left Stephen to
continue to hunt through the stacks and stacks of proof sheets.
Curtis and I had another destination to explore.
Louise Riley drove us into San Francisco, if I recall correctly,
where Lucasfilm had a warehouse full of material that was too

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bulky to store at the Ranch. She unlocked the place and showed us
to a large work table with a single spotlight over it that provided
illumination. She pointed out the large flat drawers nearby and
explained that all the set plans from the three films were stored
there. Then she left us to our search, told us she’d be back soon,
and locked us inside. We had the next couple of hours to dig
through the set plans and see what we wanted to get copies of for
use in our products. Set plans don’t provide the whole story, of
course. Filmmakers rarely create more than what they need to film
and show on the screen. So you might get a set plan that shows
half of a building, or part of a starship, or a block or two of a city,
but you rarely find the plans that depict the whole thing.
We found quite a few usable blueprints during that visit,
including the plans for the Rebel base on Hoth, the schematics for
an X-wing starfighter and a section of the Millennium Falcon, and
the layout of that most wretched hive of scum and villainy, Mos
Eisley. We even found the plans for the interior of the cantina!
We worked all of these into products, most notably The Star
Wars Sourcebook and Tatooine Manhunt, our first stand-alone
adventure. All in all, time well spent. But there was more to the
location than we initially realized.
After about an hour or so of studying blueprints, discussing
options, and making notes, Curtis started to look around. “Bill,”
he said, evident wonder creeping into his voice. “Do you know
where we are?” Of course I did. What kind of question was that?
We were in … the Lucasfilm … warehouse! Remember that scene
at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? The one where they roll
the crate containing the Ark of the Covenant into the massive
warehouse? That’s where we were, but instead of row upon row
of sealed up arcane artifacts, we were standing amid remnants of
our three favorite movies of all time!
Over there were the massive matte paintings depicting the
backgrounds of iconic locations, on racks so that you could flip
between them like the pages of a giant book. Scenes painted on
glass depicted the approach to Cloud City, or the Imperial base on
Endor, or one of another dozen or so iconic landscapes from the
films. There were models of Imperial star destroyers as long as a
dining room table, racks of stormtrooper armor and Wookiee fur,

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an AT-AT walker that was almost as tall as I was, a model of Darth

Vader’s castle that never made it into any of the original films, and
boxes of blaster pistols, comlinks, insignia ranks, helmets, and
more. Scale model TIE fighters and X-wings. Y-wings. A-wings.
A Millennium Falcon and Jabba the Hutt’s desert skiff. Parts of
the Death Star trench. The place went on and on. Bear in mind,
props for movies weren’t built to last any longer than the time
needed to film them. It was rare that a studio would save stuff like
this. Many of the items we saw that day were in various states of
disrepair. That said, they were still magnificent!
At one point, I found a box of lightsaber handles. We had been
good up until then. We hadn’t taken any pictures. We hadn’t
touched anything. But come on, these were lightsabers! I had to
hold one, just for a second or two. I reached into the box and
gripped one of the handles. It felt so … right! But when I lifted it I
almost threw it across the room. It looked as heavy as an industrial
flashlight, but it was extremely lightweight. It must have been
made of balsa wood. I quickly put it back, since I certainly didn’t
want to break any of these marvelous relics.
We pulled ourselves together, damped down on our fanboy
excitement, and went back to digging through the blueprints until
Louise came to collect us. We gave her the list of what we needed
copies of. Then she was gracious enough to give us a quick tour
of the place with the lights on before we headed back to the Ranch
to pick up Stephen Crane.

RESEARCH BEFORE THE INTERNET

After our successful and quite wondrous trip to Skywalker Ranch,
we returned to the New York office and I set out to finish the
Sourcebook. The next step was to compile everything I could get
my hands on that discussed elements of the film. This was before
Wookieepedia and other helpful Internet web search sites came
into existence. I had only a limited number of sources to draw
upon for the research I needed to do. After that, I’d have to wing
it and make stuff up to round out the entries I planned to include
in the book.
What did my research collection look like during the spring
of 1987? It started with a VCR and tapes of the three original

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movies. I watched them repeatedly, wearing out the pause and

rewind buttons on the controls as I jotted down notes. I also had
copies of the scripts to pull quotes from and to glean additional
information from stage and direction notes, as well as names of
characters. Then there were the novels—novelizations of the
three films, as well as the Han Solo novels by Brian Daley and the
Lando Calrissian novels by L. Neil Smith. (We were told to ignore
the Splinter in the Mind’s Eye novel that was released after Star
Wars but before The Empire Strikes Back, because of … things.)
There were the “Art of” books and the “Sketch Books.” There
was a handy little book called A Guide to the Star Wars Universe
by Raymond L. Velasco. (I’d wind up writing two expanded
and updated versions of that book a few years later.) There was
my collection of Starlog Magazines, which contained various
articles leading up to and discussing the release of each film in
the series. And that was about it. We could also ask George Lucas
questions, but they had to be written on an index card in a form so
that he could provide a simple yes or no answer. Other than that,
precious little else had been written about the aliens, planets, and
technology of the Star Wars universe up to that point in time.
Not really knowing any better, my assumption was that if it
didn’t exist, I could go ahead and create it. And that’s how The
Star Wars Sourcebook came into being.

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 DEFINING A GALAXY

Chapter Seven:
A STAR
(W ars S ourcebook )
IS BORN
Creating The Star Wars Sourcebook

T he Star Wars Sourcebook. Of all the things I’ve written over

the years, this single volume may have had the most far-
reaching and long-lasting impact on both me and the people who
read it. It defined and gave names to key elements of the Star Wars
universe, though at the time many of the entries dealt with minor
background characters, some of which you would have missed if
you blinked for the second and a half they filled the screen. Many
of them would show up later in novels, short stories, comics,
and even in the new movies, but at the time they were just brief
glimpses in establishing scenes before I gave them names and
backgrounds. There were challenges inherent in a project such as
this, and they all revolved around the fact that we were creating
the first product of its kind for Lucasfilm Licensing. I don’t think
they expected us to propose something as complex as what was
essentially a campaign setting for Star Wars.
The first major challenge we had to overcome was convincing
LFL to let us go ahead with our proposed outline. In other
words, they had to agree to let us make stuff up. Initially,
they were quite adamant that if something wasn’t specifically
spelled out in the films or the approved novels (of which there
were exactly nine in existence at the time), we couldn’t use
it. If you ever tried to design a roleplaying game campaign
setting under those kinds of restrictions, you’d understand how
impossible that would be. Unless we simply wanted to give
players the tools to re-create the movies frame by frame, we
needed to provide more depth than what was available in either
the movies or the novels.

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I remember explaining it to Louise Riley and Howard Roffman

like this: “George Lucas only built what he needed for the camera
to film, what he wanted to appear on the screen. We have to be
allowed to build the rest of the universe.” In other words, we
couldn’t get away with two walls and half a room such as they
might create for a movie set. We had to be able to build the other
two walls, the other half of the room, and the whole house it
was attached to. More, we needed to create the block, the city,
and the whole planet the house was set upon! A roleplaying
game campaign allows players to explore the world (or in the
case of Star Wars, worlds) as they see fit, without boundaries or
restrictions. Players can’t do that if we don’t provide them with
the tools and information. Luckily, LFL relented and agreed to
let us do what we thought was necessary. I’m sure it helped that
there were no other major Star Wars projects in production at
the time—no movies, no novels, no comics. Nothing. We didn’t
have to coordinate with any other creative entities except for the
approval people in Lucasfilm Licensing.
Once we were past that hurdle, it was clear sailing. Well, that
wasn’t quite true, as you’ll see as I describe how the book came
together. I tend to write in order. I start at the beginning of a project
and work my way through to the final page. I don’t usually jump
around, and I try my best to work to word count and page design
when those happen to be known at the time of the writing. I seem
to recall that I couldn’t quite work like that on the Sourcebook, but
let’s pretend I did so I can discuss the process of creation in the
order of the book’s table of contents.

CREDITS
In addition to myself and Curtis Smith, a few other notable WEG staff
members contributed to the creation of The Star Wars Sourcebook.
Jeff Briggs and Paul Murphy made a development and editing pass
as pages flew out of my word processor, and developer Peter Corless
and designer Doug Kaufman contributed ideas and opinions along
the way. At the end of the process, I made one final pass on the entire
volume, making sure the voice was consistent and the tone was
appropriately Star Wars—a method of writing and editing that has
become my signature approach as my career developed.

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INTRODUCTION
The one-page introduction was one of the last pieces of the book
that I wrote. It featured two essays of approximately equal length,
each filling one of the two columns of text on the page. The first
essay described the state of the Star Wars galaxy at the beginning
of our established campaign—right after the end of Episode IV: A
New Hope. (While we hadn’t defined the time frame of our Star
Wars campaign in the Roleplaying Game, we settled on the period
between the first two movies by the time we were wrapping up the
Sourcebook.) I started with the material written in the prologue
from the film novelization and expanded from there to describe
the origin of the setting. The Old Republic and the Jedi Knights,
the rise of Emperor Palpatine, the creation of the Empire, the
birth of the Rebel Alliance, and the victory against the Death Star
by the Heroes of Yavin—this was the galaxy that heroic player
characters were born into, a galaxy where the mighty Imperial
war machine currently was hot on the trail of the elusive Rebels
after suffering a major defeat in the burgeoning civil war.
The second essay described the contents of the Sourcebook.
I explained that while no single volume could cover everything
that existed across a thousand-thousand worlds, we did our best to
pack as much as we could into the book. I went on to clarify that
we’d be detailing the state of the galaxy at the end of A New Hope.
Empire and Return were still in the future of the game setting.
Here’s how I phrased what went into making the book:
“After countless hours of research—studying the movies,
reading the books, and perusing the incredible amount of source
material at Lucasfilm—West End has collected this fascinating
information, much of which appears here for the first time.”
I ended the essay with an invitation to “grab your blaster” and
return to that far-away galaxy. It was an invitation that the fans
gleefully accepted.

GENERAL SPACECRAFT SYSTEMS

Curtis Smith wrote the bulk of this chapter before I was part of the
project, doing a good job of providing enough of an explanation
about how hyperdrives and sensors worked without incorporating
too much techno-babble that would have made it sound more like

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Star Trek than Star Wars. I did an editing pass on the chapter and
added the material on life support and escape pods at the end.
This served as the origin of one of the in-world corporations
we introduced, Hoersch-Kessel, creators of the H-K ion engine
sublight drive. We also presented a brief discussion on cloaking
devices, mentioned once during The Empire Strikes Back but
requiring an explanation here so that player character groups
didn’t try to take advantage of such powerful technology. As
we hear in the film: “They can’t have disappeared. No ship that
small has a cloaking device!” We added that this technology was
expensive, hard to maintain, and rare even among Imperial ships.
A cloaking device on a small Rebel ship was just unheard of.
Gamemasters would thank us for the clarification later.

STARFIGHTERS
Another one of Curtis’s chapters that I tweaked for publication,
this one described the most important starfighters featured in the
films, including the A-wing, B-wing, Y-wing, X-wing, and TIE
fighter. It also included the Z-95 Headhunter, a ship introduced in
the novel Han Solo at Stars’ End by Brian Daley.
This chapter provided the first example of game statistics in the
book, demonstrating our desire to make them appear recognizable
and useful to readers who came to the volume as fans of Star Wars
and not necessarily as gamers. We tried not to fill the statistics with
too much gamer jargon so that everyone reading the material would
not only be able to understand it, they’d hopefully get something
out of it. The only actual game element in the stat blocks were the
dice codes—1D, 2D+1, 5D, and so on. Even if you couldn’t quite
figure out what that strange mix of numbers and letters stood for,
it was (hopefully) obvious that a starfighter with sublight speed of
3D+2 was faster than a craft with a speed of 3D.
The two-page spread featuring the schematics for the Incom
T-65C-A2 X-wing Space Superiority Fighter (whose manufacturer
and model number we made up) was based on some of those
blueprints we dug up in the Lucasfilm archives. Curtis figured
out how to label and name the fifty separate components that
constituted a complete X-wing, though I think developer Peter
Corless might have offered a little assistance along the way.

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The diagram describing the standard TIE fighter complement

for an Imperial Star Destroyer, as I recall, was my creation.
I developed the make-up of a TIE fighter wing (the number of
fighters a star destroyer could carry), how many squadrons were
in the wing, and which TIE models were part of each squadron.
Further, I broke down a squadron into three flights, determining
that each flight contained two elements—a pair of TIEs that
worked in tandem and trained to watch each other’s six (that’s
the rear arc of the fighter, for those not up on their military lingo).
Sometimes I get emails from fans who ask me questions about
some point of Star Wars lore or another. Sometimes they want to
know something specific about one of the products I worked on.
Early in 2017, I received an email from a fan and blogger located
in Malaysia. Here’s what he asked about:
“Hi Mr. Slavicsek,
“I’ve been a Star Wars RPG GM since 1989, and I’ve been lugging
around The Star Wars Sourcebook with me all over the place since
then. (I’m now GMing for my son.) And I’m from Malaysia.
“I wrote a blog article earlier this month about the four-page
X-Wing tech commentary that highlights what appears to be
transliterated Malay (or Indonesian?) language words in the text.
“Then it just occurred to me to email you for some background
on the matter.
“Is this a coincidence or did you have a book or a person to
refer to for the words?
“Thanks for the many years of fun!”
Hmm, I said to myself. I need to go back to the source and see
what he’s talking about. According to this fan from Malaysia, the
following words appeared to be of Malaysian origin.
In the entry describing the X-wing’s primary sensor array,
two components were called out: the Melihat “Multi-Imager”
dedicated energy receptor, and the Tana Ire electro-photo receptor
for enhanced low-level terrain following. Melihat, according to
the fan, can be translated as “seeing.” Tanah Air, in Malaysian,
literally means “soil and water,” referring to the starfighter’s
terrain-following sensor.

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In the entry describing the X-wing’s sensor jamming system,

we referred to the Bertriak “Screamer” active jammer. According
to my fan/Malaysian expert, this is a derivative version of the verb
teriak, which means “crying” or “screaming.”
And in the entry describing the X-wing’s laser cannon, the
manufacturer is identified as Taim & Bak. In Malaysian, the word
tembak literally means “to shoot.”
Here’s my response, which he added to his blog entry when he
updated it.
“Turns out my co-author Curtis Smith traveled to Malaysia and
other locations as a child with his parents. He wrote the X-wing
section and must have snuck in those words when I wasn’t looking.
I thought he just made them up! Even after all these years, I’m
still learning new things about The Star Wars Sourcebook!”

COMBAT STARSHIPS
The chapter describing what we called “combat starships,” or capital
ships—basically military vessels larger than the one-to-three crew
starfighters—was the first chapter (not counting the frontis and
introduction) that I handled from start to finish. It was also the first
chapter in the book to include sidebars featuring in-world stories
that expanded upon the topic of the chapter. I’ll let you in on a little
secret: I was having a tough time writing enough material on the
ships to fill the pages we had allotted to the topic in the outline. I
came up with the idea to include sidebars that featured in-world
stories to fill up the space in (I hoped) interesting and useful ways.
In addition to the details concerning such military vessels as
the Corellian corvette (also known as a blockade runner and first
seen at the beginning of the original Star Wars movie), escort
frigates (such as the Nebulon-B), the Victory- and Imperial-class
star destroyers, and the Mon Calamari star cruisers, I added two
sidebar stories. The first, “Against the Pirate Armada,” described an
Imperial assault on a pirate armada and demonstrated the awesome
firepower of two “antiquated” Victory-class star destroyers left over
from the Clone Wars. Interesting to note, we invented the Victory-
class star destroyer specifically for inclusion in the Sourcebook, to
round out the chapter on capital ships and to show the evolution
of these massive weapons of war. We even got to say they were

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introduced near the end of the Clone Wars, allowing us to tease at

the history of the universe without actually giving too many details.
The second detailed “Lord Vader’s Squadron,” a special star
destroyer group put together after the Battle of Yavin and placed
under Darth Vader’s direct command. Only three of the five star
destroyers in the group were identified—the super star destroyer
Executor, and the Imperial-class star destroyers, Avenger and
Devastator. The remaining vessels were deemed “classified” and
therefore not included in the report.
Among the tidbits of information jammed into this chapter were the
manufacturers of the Nebulon-B escort frigate (Kuat Drive Yards), that
the older Victory-class star destroyer came into fashion near the end
of the Clone Wars and was primarily designed for planetary defense
and attack, that the newer Imperial-class star destroyer emerged from
drydock only 50 million credits over budget and was considered a
bargain at twice the price, and that every Mon Calamari star cruiser
was a work of art, hand-crafted so that no two vessels looked exactly
the same. We also revealed that the bulk of the Mon Cal fleet joined
the Rebellion as part of their effort to throw off the yoke of Imperial
tyranny after their planet was invaded by the Empire. (This has been
recounted in the newest issues of the Star Wars comic from Marvel
Comics, though many of the specifics have changed from the story
we presented in the Sourcebook.)

SPACE TRANSPORTS
This chapter covered the vessels required to keep the galactic
economy in motion, the transports—both registered and illegal—
that carried goods, services, and news across the hyperlanes and
from star system to star system. Using concept art for vessels
that were never used in the movies, we churned out information
about space barges that moved foodstuffs from worlds with
abundant supplies to planets that desperately needed to feed hungry
populations. We also described a specific class of transport, the
stock light freighter. These Corellian-built small trading vessels
were among the most commonly encountered ships in the galaxy.
Once, they formed the backbone of trade and commerce, but since
the move toward larger bulk freighters and giant container ships,
they have been relegated to the Outer Rim Territories and become

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the primary mode of transportation for small, private shipping

concerns, criminal organizations, and hyperspace pirates. We
highlighted perhaps the most famous of these vessels (at least as far
as its captain has always been concerned), the Millennium Falcon.
We created the first map of the interior of the Falcon,
extrapolating from the set blueprints we had access to. We
explained how the Falcon was far removed from factory standards
due to the use of whatever spare parts the owners of the transport
could get their hands on over the years. Every part of the vessel
was modified, upgraded, and altered—often illegally—so that
it took an especially talented engineer to keep the ship running
more-or-less smoothly. As often as the Falcon pulls off a miracle
maneuver, it suffers from its jury-rigged and heavily modified
systems, breaking down at the most inopportune moments. But
Han Solo, its current owner, wouldn’t have it any other way.
The chapter was rounded out by sections on bulk freighters and
massive container ships (also called super transports), explored the
passenger liners (such as the luxury starliner Lady of Mindor) that
move people from one part of the galaxy to the other in comfort and
style, and concluded with a discussion about Rebel transports and
how they were equipped to defeat Imperial scrutiny—up to a point.

DROIDS
What would a book detailing life in the Star Wars galaxy be
without a chapter devoted to the ubiquitous and often-taken-for-
granted droids? We utilized a bunch of Lucasfilm concept art to
illustrate types of droids we created to fill the necessary niches
to round out this integral part of galactic society. In addition, we
described the classification system used to identify droids, from
first-degree droids skilled in physical, mathematical, or medical
sciences, to fifth-degree droids created for menial labor, mining,
salvage, and sanitation work.
Astromech and protocol droids were covered in detail, since
those are the types of droids we knew the most about back then.
Of course, we mostly knew about two specific droids—R2-D2 and
C-3PO—who I would describe later in the book as definitely not
typical. Still, we were able to determine the functions they were
built to fulfill, and that allowed us to extrapolate on the general

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models as opposed to the specific units we saw in the films. We

also detailed medical droids, including the various models of the
Emdee (MD) series and the Too-Onebee series surgical droid
(as seen in The Empire Strikes Back). Note that the former was
something I’m pretty sure I made up for the book, while the latter
name comes out of the script for Episode V. Healing, being an
important part of any roleplaying game (usually required after
combat), meant that the need for medical droids would probably
come up often during game sessions.
We also spent a lot of space on two types of droids that could
be used as opponents for the player characters: probe droids and
assassin droids. Both types of droids appeared in The Empire
Strikes Back. For probe droids, we detailed the commercial and
military versions, including models with pursuit, rescue, patrol,
and hunter mission profiles. The probot depicted in the scenes
on Hoth, for example, was an Imperial hunter/killer probe droid,
known as the Arkayd Viper.
Not knowing what would come in the prequels years later, the
assassin droid entry talked about how these deadly droids and
similar “war droids” had been all the rage during the time of the Old
Republic. Under the rule of the Empire, however, most such droids
had been outlawed, except for those utilized directly by the Empire.
Rogue assassin droids still operated in the Outer Rim Territories,
we posited, usually as freelance bounty hunters or as employees of
various criminal syndicates. Interesting to note, the first mention of
Imperial Inquisitors (who would gain infamy years later in the Star
Wars Rebels animated television series) appeared in the assassin
droid entry, which mentioned that an assassin droid was responsible
for the death of Lord Torbin, the Grand Inquisitor.

REPULSORLIFT VEHICLES
Like lightsabers, repulsorlift technology remains one of the
hallmarks of the Star Wars universe. This chapter delved into
the specifics concerning repulsorlifts and repulsorlift vehicles,
including landspeeders, airspeeders, and speeder bikes.
Repulsorlift vehicles were defined as any of several types of
atmospheric craft fitted with repulsorlift engines that served as
their primary means of locomotion. These engines create a repulsor

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field that pushed against a planet’s natural gravity and propelled the
vehicle forward. In addition to ground and air vehicles, starships
could also be fitted with repulsorlift engines for maneuvering inside
a planet’s gravity well and atmosphere. (In the movies, we see the
Falcon utilize this type of engine when it takes off and lands on a
planet. At least, that’s how I explained the maneuvers.)
Landspeeders, also called floaters and skimmers, provided
ground transportation for most of a planet’s population. We
identified a few specific landspeeder models, including the Bespin
Motor’s Void-Spider TX-3, the Ubrickkian 9000 Z001, and the
new SoroSuub XP-38 (the one mentioned by Luke Skywalker in
A New Hope).
Airspeeders, meanwhile, were the aircraft of the Star Wars
universe, utilizing a combination of repulsorlift engines and ion
engines for lift and thrust. Examples of this type of craft included
the T-16 Skyhopper (the same model Luke used to target womprats
back on Tatooine) and cloud cars, such as the ones in service on
Bespin’s Cloud City.
We utilized unused concept art from the Lucasfilm archives to
create a variety of speeder bikes, including models for personal
transportation, law enforcement, and military purposes. We detailed
companies that built these craft, such as Aratech, Ikas-Adno, and
Mobquet. Beyond that, we were the first book to describe swoops
(first mentioned in the Han Solo novels) in any great detail. Swoops
were souped-up speeders defined as “high-powered engines with
seats.” They figured into a popular spectator sport called swoop
racing and were the vehicle of choice for the dreaded Outer Rim
swoop gangs. Swoop gangs, including the Nova Demons and the
Dark Star Hellions, were wanted by the Empire for the crimes of
piracy, airway robbery, and murder, creating additional opponents for
player characters to encounter as they explored the Star Wars galaxy.

IMPERIAL GROUND ASSAULT VEHICLES

This chapter could have been called “Imperial Walkers,” since
it just covered the lumbering AT-ATs and the smaller AT-STs.
In addition to describing the two types of assault vehicles and
detailing how the gigantic All-Terrain Armored Transport
operated, it featured a full-page sidebar (the longest one in the

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book) that told the story of “The Promotion of Lieutenant Veers.”

One of my favorites, this is another sidebar I wrote to fill out the
chapter’s allotted pages.
The story demonstrated the ruthlessness and brilliance of the
AT-AT commander who would one day become a general and lead
the ground assault against Rebel forces on the ice planet Hoth.
Relegated to garrison duty on the planet Culroon III as punishment
while his senior officers were treated to a welcome celebration by
the local population, Veers watched from a distance and realized
that the Culroon had set a trap for his superiors. Ordering his AT-
AT forward, Veers and his crew arrived in time to save the senior
officers. The general who had disciplined Veers earlier, instead of
being grateful, threatened to court martial him for disobeying a
direct order. Luckily, the second in command relieved the general
of duty—permanently—and offered Veers a field promotion to
major if he extradited them from the hostile situation.
Just another uplifting Imperial-officer-makes-good story.

ALIENS
This might be my favorite chapter in the book. It certainly vies
with “Heroes and Villains” for that distinction. The chapter on
aliens—the intelligent species that inhabit the Star Wars galaxy—
represents the first major disagreement I remember having with
Lucasfilm Licensing over the contents of the Sourcebook. It
started something like this when I said:
“I propose we call them Ithorians.”
“No, the name of that alien is Hammerhead.”
“Respectfully, Hammerhead is the name of a mask so the prop
department could identify and keep track of the costume. At best,
in the Star Wars galaxy, Hammerhead is a slang term or an insult.
As an intelligent species, they need a proper name. The name that
they call themselves. I’m sure that name isn’t Hammerhead.”
I eventually wore LFL down and convinced them that proper
names were important for establishing the universe as a real
place. After that, I got to name the various aliens that populated
the backgrounds of the original Star Wars movie trilogy. And it all
started with this chapter.

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Ewoks were the first species covered in the chapter. The primitive,
tribal Ewoks were natives of the forest moon of Endor. For the most
part, this initial entry stuck to what we saw in Return of the Jedi
and learned from the novelization. I extrapolated a little, especially
concerning their religion, their understanding of the Force (which
they never mentioned by name), and their love of music.
This section included a short sidebar, written to length to fill
a blank spot on the page. It detailed one of the initial Imperial
scouting reports concerning Endor’s moon, addressed to Imperial
Command. The report confirmed that a system and world had been
located that fit Lord Vader’s requirements precisely. The forest
moon was inhabited, but the “laughably primitive” species posed
“no threat” to the Empire’s stormtroopers. The report ended with
the fateful prediction, “We can safely ignore these contemptable
little fur-balls.”
This is probably a good time to talk about humor in the Star
Wars galaxy. One of the key components to the longevity and
adoration of these films and the universe they spawned is the
inherent use of humor as a counterpoint to the serious events
taking place in the movies. Whether it’s a quippy one-liner such as
Luke intoning with all sincerity, “I care,” or Han Solo pointing out
with great confidence, “I can arrange that!,” the Star Wars films
sprinkled moments of levity throughout the original trilogy. In
addition, the droids that have appeared in almost every Star Wars
movie to date (Solo: A Star Wars Story being the one exception),
C-3PO and R2-D2, stack right up there with the greatest comedic
duos of all time as they provide many of the most memorable
light-hearted scenes in the films. That’s why I thought it was
important to include touches of humor in the Sourcebook, such as
seen in the short story about the first encounter with the Ewoks.
Star Wars has funny moments and humorous lines. I wanted the
RPG material to reflect that in appropriate ways.
Gamorreans, the green-skinned, porcine species, represented
by the guards that served in Jabba’s palace on Tatooine, were
notable for their raw strength and savage natures. For this entry,
I didn’t have to invent the name as they came up with a good
one. I did invent the world that spawned them (Gamorr), their
history (marked by constant warfare), and the difference between

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the genders. Specifically, the Gamorrean females produce goods

and run Gamorr society, while the males spend their time training
for and fighting in wars. The matrons control the clans, negotiate
alliances, and order the males into battle at the start of every
campaign season. I further postulated that the Gamorreans were
experts in the use of primitive melee weapons, which was the
height of their planet’s technology. These remained their weapons
of choice for their constant clan wars, but when they discovered
the existence of an entire galactic society, the matrons required the
males to learn how to use blasters and other high-tech weapons
for off-world missions. Soon, the matrons were hiring their male
warriors out as mercenaries for use throughout the galaxy.
Two bits of lore I created for the Gamorreans still make me
smile when I re-read the material. First, the morrts, bloodsucking
parasites about the size of field mice that held the distinction of
being the only creatures the porcine species showed any hints of
affection for. I explained that the morrts clung to their hosts, with
the greatest numbers attached to the most powerful warlords and
clan matrons. I just love the idea of a powerful Gamorrean matron
covered neck to ankle in the disgusting but beloved parasites.
Second, I detailed how the Gamorreans discovered the rest
of the galaxy. When the first trading vessel landed on Gamorr,
the traders had to wait for two days as five different clans fought
over the right to approach the strange craft that descended from
the heavens. When a victorious clan emerged, the triumphant
Gamorreans moved forward in what the traders thought was a
greeting—and then the clan bashed their prize from the sky into
small, unrecognizable pieces. This pattern repeated itself six more
times before the traders finally sent a heavily armed warship to
subdue the Gamorreans and take them as slaves.
I’m asked again and again at conventions and interviews: “How
did you come up with the names and backgrounds for the Star
Wars aliens?” Names are easy. I’ve always had a good ear for
naming things. I follow two simple rules: make sure the name can
be pronounced, and make sure it sounds authentic to the world or
setting I’m working in. Both rules can be subject to interpretation,
but I suppose it’s how I interpret them that matters since I’m
doing the naming. I’ve joked that I smash letters together until

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something good emerges, but that’s not entirely true. I start with
a sound that I feel fits the species in question, then I build it and
change it until it’s just the right length (long species names are
right out, unless there’s a good reason not to go for the short and
sweet), it doesn’t have too many vowels or consonants in a row,
and it looks good in print.
As far as backgrounds, that’s a little more complicated. But not
by much. I start with something I know or can readily ascertain
about the species in question. Then I riff on that until a theme
forms and I let that idea direct the rest of the writing. For the
Gamorreans, at least the ones we saw in the films, we had tough,
disgusting, piglike creatures with huge weapons. It was simple
enough to build on that and imagine a world where Gamorrean
clans waged constant battle against one another, where their
favorite pets were gross parasites, and where the females ruled
and the males fought. So, my recipe for species design: pick a key
feature, riff on that feature until a story forms, then write and see
where the story takes you.
Anyway, back to the aliens.
Ithorians, the aliens known as Hammerheads until The Star Wars
Sourcebook came along, had fascinated me since the original
movie and after I picked up the first version of the action figure.
This was going to be a tricky one to write, because we saw a
single Ithorian in the cantina scene for a half a second, and the
only other information I had at the time consisted of a few notes
scribbled in the Star Wars Sketchbook that made mention of their
double mouths that generated stereophonic sounds. What was I
going to do with that? In the film, we only see the species from the
shoulders up, but the action figure I had featured these powerful,
treelike legs that ended in three wide toes. Around this time, I had
just finished reading Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
The idea of elephantlike aliens with a herd-based culture intrigued
me and seemed perfect for the species, so I borrowed the
notion to create a background for the Ithorians. I kept the name
“Hammerheads” in the background, using it as slang employed by
other species when referring to the Ithorians, though the Ithorians
considered the nomenclature to be an insult. After that, I let the
idea of the herd guide the development of the species.

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I made the Ithorians highly technological while instilling them

with a deep and abiding respect for the nature of their homeworld.
They hailed from a jungle world and were among the first eco-
friendly Star Wars species. They left large swathes of their planet
in its natural, pristine condition, living in vast floating cities
called “herds” that hovered above the dense jungles. Gentle and
peace-loving, some left the “Mother Jungle” behind and traveled
the galaxy in spaceworthy herd ships. They became a species of
traders, and the appearance of one of their market vessels in orbit
around a planet was often cause for celebration.
The sidebar that accompanied the Ithorian entry was all about
“Iggjel and the Mother Jungle,” the story of how an Ithorian was
chosen to serve as a priest for their nature religion. It was told by
Iggjel’s herd-friend, and it’s moving and bittersweet.
Jawas were another species that came with a solid name and an
extensive background. We knew they were native to Tatooine.
We knew they were scavengers who sometimes traded with the
moisture farmers out in the desert wastes. We knew they traveled
around in giant sandcrawlers—enormous rolling vehicles that
served as both storehouse for the junk they traded and living space
for the small, jabbering species. And we knew they didn’t smell
particularly pleasant. These high-tech junk dealers didn’t require
much elaboration, but I did wind up expanding on what was
already revealed about the Jawas. I explained that the Jawas were
inherently fearful, especially of Sand People and Krayt Dragons.
I described the sandcrawlers as mobile fortresses, speculating
that the slow-moving vehicles provided the protection required to
keep the scavengers safe in the wilds of Tatooine. I saw the Jawas
as rodentlike, so I used words like “scurry” when I described their
actions. They were tinkerers, capable of repairing technological
contraptions even if they might not understand the theory behind
robotic engineering or repulsorlift mathematics. Despite this lack
of total understanding, they could get a broken droid working
again or tune a landspeeder engine as well or better than the
garages in Anchorhead.
The Jawa sidebar described “Life in a Jawa Sandcrawler,” as
told by the protocol droid, QT-3PO. The droid, “invited” aboard at
the barrel of a Jawa blaster, talked about how the interior reminded

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him of a Silurian rodent’s nest, riddled with hidden entry tubes,

access hatches, and ladders leading in every direction. The droid
commented on how cramped and full of junk the interior was, and
how the Jawas were completely oblivious to such social graces
as bathing or cleaning their clothes. Where or how the Jawas
acquired these multi-storied vehicles was only speculated upon
and never fully explained. At least not in the Sourcebook.
Mon Calamari was a species name I would have changed if I
could, but LFL was insistent that we keep this one just the way
it was. I decided to link the obviously amphibian Calamarians
with the Quarren (see the next entry), making both species the
inhabitants of the watery world of Calamari. I wrote that the
Mon Calamari were shore dwellers, living on the few islands that
dotted the water’s surface and upon floating, artificial continents
created to house their growing population. I made the Calamarians
peaceful by nature, artistic by design, and technological by
development. Art and science developed together on their world,
advancing to an elevated state. We saw their artistic flare in their
starship design, which appeared organic, with vessels constructed
so that no two were the same.
When the peaceful Mon Cals went into space, they stayed in
their own star system initially before branching out to explore
neighboring systems. They first encountered the Empire in the
new government’s earliest days. The Empire, already showing a
disdain for species that weren’t human, didn’t see an advanced
culture with which to trade or partner with. They saw a planet
they could enslave, full of resources they could exploit. When the
Mon Cals engaged in passive resistance, the Empire retaliated by
destroying three floating cities. Instead of cowing these peaceful
aliens who had no prior history of violence, the action taught the
Mon Cals how to wage war. Turning their vast industrial capacity
to military munitions, the Mon Cal expelled the Empire from their
planet and became the “soul of the Rebellion.” They vowed to see
the galaxy set free or the Calamari erased from existence.
The sidebar I created for this section provided background
on the most famous Mon Calamari we knew about at the time,
Admiral Ackbar. I posited that Ackbar had been a leader on Coral
City when the Empire arrived. He was one of the first Mon Cals

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to be enslaved, assigned to the fleet flagship as an interpreter

and personal servant of the fleet commander. When Grand Moff
Tarkin arrived to inspect progress on the subjugation of the world,
the commander presented Ackbar as a gift to the Imperial leader.
While serving Tarkin, Ackbar learned of the growing Rebellion,
studied Tarkin’s theories of war and strategy, viewed select
military documents, and heard whispers of a new secret weapon
under construction somewhere in the dark reaches of space. When
an elite squad of Rebels arrived to assassinate Tarkin, Ackbar was
left behind in the Grand Moff’s hasty escape. Rescued by the
Rebels, Ackbar became an indispensable member of the Alliance
and a key figure in bringing the entire Mon Cal industrial power
into the Rebellion.
When the prequels were released years later, they showed Mon
Cals in the Republic Senate, so my version of history didn’t stick.
On the other hand, much of the tone and feel of the entry worked
its way into the species’ background as it was developed by others
in the years that followed.
Quarren were another one of those background aliens with an
insulting name. Called “Squid Head” because that’s what the
costume looked like, I knew I had to come up with something
better. I called them Quarren and decided to link this aquatic-based
species to our other aquatic-based species, the Mon Calamarians.
Instead of living on the surface of their watery planet like the Mon
Cals, I posited that the Quarren dwelt under the sea. Where the
Mon Cals were artists and dreamers, the Quarren were practical
and conservative. The two species worked together to create the
Mon Cal civilization, with the Mon Calamari providing the ideas
and the Quarren providing the raw materials and the labor to turn
those ideas into reality. The Mon Cal occupied the highest levels
of society, both figuratively and literally, while the Quarren lived
in the bowels of the floating cities, deep beneath the waves. The
Quarren depended upon their more inventive cousins, but this also
led to friction and jealousy among the deep-sea dwellers. Still,
when the Empire invaded the planet, the Quarren helped repel
them. The cost, however, was high, and the oceans ran red with
blood as the Empire blasted entire floating cities out of existence.
Afterward, while the Mon Calamari turned their efforts toward

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helping the Rebellion, the Quarren fled their planet and decided to
avoid both the Empire and the Alliance as best they could, finding
new lives among the fringe of Imperial society.
The associated sidebar, “The Shame of Seggor Tels,” relates the
confession of the Quarren who sought to teach the pompous Mon
Cals a lesson by lowering the planetary shields and granting the
Empire access to their shared world. Later, in an effort to atone
for what he had done, Seggor Tels helped convince his people to
stand with the Mon Cals against the invading Imperial forces. And
in the end, while most of his people were leaving to find a new
place to call their own, Seggor Tels stayed behind to try to alleviate
the shame that haunted him and to discover a dream of his own.
Sand People, or Tusken Raiders, came complete with two names,
and I decided not to mess with what had been established. This was
the shortest of the alien entries because, honestly, I didn’t have a
lot to say about these people. Others did interesting things with the
Sand People later, during the period of the Expanded Universe, but
nothing groundbreaking came to me as I tackled this entry. I doubled
down on what we knew from the film and the novelization, playing
up the ongoing struggle between the Sand People and the human
settlers who were encroaching upon their ancient hunting grounds.
The sidebar, “Song for a Fallen Nomad,” showed a glimpse of Sand
People culture and rituals as a young human settler comes upon the
funeral song for a dying Tusken Raider. This story also hinted at the
connection between the Sand People and their Banthas that we’d
develop further in future products.
Sullustans, as far as I recall and from what research I’ve been
able to do, weren’t actually named in the film (Return of the Jedi)
or its novelization. The planet, however, was. So I extrapolated
that a native of Sullust would be known as a Sullustan. By looking
at the one Sullustan in the movie, Nien Nunb, I determined the
Sullustans were small in stature and had the large eyes of a species
that was either nocturnal or dwelt in dark places. This led me
to formulate the backstory for the planet, making it a volcanic
world with an inhospitable surface where the inhabitants lived
within underground warrens. The planet was home to the mighty
SoroSuub Corporation, one of the key technological conglomerates
we invented. The entry explained that while the Sullustan people

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openly supported the Rebellion, SoroSuub supported the Empire.

The corporation even dissolved the planetary government and set
itself up as the planet’s ruling authority for the duration of the
Rebel crisis. The sidebar, “SoroSuub Corporation Proclamation
Number 137d,” praised the Empire and promised the full support
of the corporation and the planet to Emperor Palpatine’s New
Order. All for the love of credits.
Twi’leks grew out of two minor characters in Return of the Jedi
to become one of the most popular alien species in Star Wars:
Jabba the Hutt’s majordomo, Bib Fortuna, and the dancing girl,
Oola. I like to think some of that popularity started with the entry
in The Star Wars Sourcebook. This was another one of those
moments when I had to convince LFL to let me make some stuff
up. They insisted that the species was called Bib Fortuna, but
I pushed back and explained that Bib Fortuna was the name of
Jabba’s henchman, not the entire species. After a few back and
forth exchanges, they agreed and allowed me to name the species
the Twi’leks. The origin of the name comes from me taking the
first three letters of the word “twin,” relating to the species most
prominent feature, their twin head tails, and adding a suffix in the
form of “lek.” I’m sure I was thinking that the word meant “twin
head tails,” but it wasn’t until later that someone else described
“lekku” as the Twi’lek word for head tail. In addition to the name,
there’s a whole lot of cool detail in this entry, including the name
of the Twi’lek homeworld (Ryloth), their primary export (the drug
ryll), and their view on the galactic conflict. The Twi’leks see the
Empire and the Rebel Alliance as opposing heat storms sweeping
across the galaxy. They believe that both storms will eventually
pass, as such storms always do on their homeworld, and they
intend to be around to profit when the galaxy once again cools to
a more comfortable level.
The sidebar, “Twi’leks and Their Head Tails,” described how
Twi’leks treat their head tails as other species care for their hair
or wings, decorating them and displaying them proudly for all
to see. The head tails helped with balance, reflected the mood
of their owner, and even provided a level of body language that
Twi’leks innately recognize but that other species have a difficult
time understanding.

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Wookiees had been named and some of their background had

already been revealed through the Han Solo novels by Brian
Daley and the (infamous) Star Wars Holiday Special that was
shown on television. Concepts such as the Wookiee life debt, the
name of the Wookiee homeworld (Kashyyyk), and the idea that
the planet had an arboreal ecology all came from the novels or
the tv special. I just put it all together and tried to emphasize the
most compelling aspects of what we knew at the time. I played up
their reputation for strength and ferociousness while explaining
they were also technologically advanced. I extrapolated on the
concept of the life debt to describe the practice of establishing
“honor families.” When describing Kashyyyk, I explained how
the Wookiees lived in cities built among the highest levels of
the tree canopy, while fearsome and dangerous beasts roamed
the lower branches and the ground below. I also reiterated that
the Wookiees, in general, were considered a slave race by the
Empire, used to perform hard labor for various Imperial projects.
The sidebar, “Wookiee Customs,” explained the Wookiee life debt
and the concept of the honor family, using the bond between the
Heroes of Yavin to show how it can extend not only to Wookiee
groups but to mixed species relationships as well.
I admit it. The Wookiees are among my favorite of all the
Star Wars aliens. They might even be my most favorite. Large,
strong, and hairy creatures tend to find a special place in my
heart, whether we’re talking about werewolves, weren (creatures
I created for the Alternity game), or Wookiees. I loved taking
what we knew about Wookiees and expanding upon it in logical
ways. For example, in later products I would riff on the arboreal
nature of Wookiees and make them great and powerful climbers.
This meant I had to give them claws. So why didn’t we ever see
Wookiees employ these claws in battle? Easy. I made it a rule
of Wookiee society that they would never employ their claws
in combat. Only a Wookiee that was desperate or insane would
ever pop its claws in anger or aggression.
There were more aliens than these featured in the Star Wars
movies, but I only had so much room in the book. The others
would get the same treatment in later products, but for now I
thought this was a good start.

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CREATURES
The chapter on creatures filled only eight pages in the book,
covering six beasts seen in the original trilogy: Banthas, Dewbacks,
Mynocks, the Rancor, Space Slugs, and Tauntauns. I’ll briefly go
over what I invented to add to the lore of these Star Wars creatures.
For Banthas, I decided that Tatooine wasn’t their planet of
origin—you usually don’t see shaggy coats on desert-dwelling
creatures. In fact, I posited, no one knew what planet originally
produced the Bantha. Somehow, Banthas wound up spread across
planets in different parts of the galaxy as colonization expanded
out from the Core Worlds. Moreover, Bantha subspecies vary
in size, behavior, and coloration. Primarily raised for food and
clothing, travelers could find Bantha steaks on the menus in
dozens of different space ports, and Bantha-skin cloaks and boots
were all the rage in certain parts of the galaxy. Some indigenous
species formed symbiotic relationships with the Banthas and
employed them as companions and beasts of burden, such as the
behavior seen among the Sand People of Tatooine.
I made Dewbacks (seen briefly in the original version of A New Hope
and then expanded upon for the Special Edition) native to Tatooine,
where some were domesticated for use as riding animals, since they
tended to handle the heat and blowing sand better than landspeeders.
(A riff on the Tauntauns of Hoth.) Some have even been turned into
pets by the moisture farmers, while in the wild both Sand People and
Krayt Dragons hunted them as a source of food.
Mynocks, the batlike creatures that swarmed the Millennium
Falcon when it took refuge in a hollow asteroid during the events
of The Empire Strikes Back, were described as one of the few
species that thrived in the vacuum of space, living off stellar
radiation and the energy emissions of starfaring vessels. Spacers
considered the creatures to be a nuisance that could cause a great
deal of damage if they weren’t spotted and removed from the
hulls of ships quickly.
The Rancor from Return of the Jedi provided the most fun of
the creatures I wrote about. I described how some speculated that
Jabba the Hutt had the beast genetically engineered, but then I
went on to say that considering Jabba’s frugal nature, it was more

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likely that his crime syndicate simply knew where to find the
beasts and kept that location secret for its own use. The sidebar
that accompanied the entry, a full-page story of how “A Rancor
Comes to Tatooine,” told the tale of the rivalry between the human
Bidlo Kwerve and the Twi’lek Bib Fortuna for Jabba’s attention.
In the story, Jawas brought Kwerve news of a crashed freighter in
the Tatooine wastes. The freighter had been carrying the Rancor,
which escaped in the crash. After a series of escapades, Kwerve
managed to subdue the creature. But he needed Bib Fortuna’s
help to present the huge beast to the crime lord. Jabba, touched
by the gift, decided to reward both of his trusted henchmen. He
promoted the Twi’lek to chief lieutenant and major domo. Then
he presented Kwerve with the singular honor of becoming the
Rancor’s first meal in its new home, showing the extent of Jabba’s
generosity and affection. I love that story!
And here’s something I found out while researching this book.
Bidlo Kwerve enjoyed a storied life after the tale presented in
The Star Wars Sourcebook. He appeared in Dark Horse Comics,
trading card games, and short stories. Other people added to his
legend, determining that, among other things, he was the one who
received the call from Han Solo to inform Jabba that his shipment
of spice had been dumped. In 1998, Decipher’s customizable
card game identified the skull that Luke picked up in the Rancor
Pit and used to activate the switch that dropped the gate on the
savage creature as belonging to—ready for this—Bidlo Kwerve!
That little tidbit could have been relegated to the new canon
classification of “Legends,” except that in 2016 the Star Wars:
Complete Locations book from DK confirmed that the skull was
indeed Bidlo’s. I’m glad he survived (as it were) to become part
of the current canon.
Space Slugs roamed the space lanes, preying upon Mynocks
as their primary source of nutrition, and some space ports
utilized the creatures to control increasing Mynock populations.
I suggested that Space Slugs normally ranged from six to ten
meters in length, and that tales of Slugs large enough to swallow
entire starships were nothing more than spacer legends. The
sidebar “The Slug Named Grendel” expounds upon the legend

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of Flandon Sweeg and the starship Darkfire. Captain Sweeg

hunted for the giant Space Slug known as Grendel, who was “a
million kilos if it was a gram.” And, of course, the one we saw in
Empire was massive enough to contain the Millennium Falcon
with plenty of room to spare.
Tauntauns, the riding beasts seen in The Empire Strikes Back, were
native to the ice planet Hoth. A primary food source for the Wampas,
Tauntauns navigated the frozen terrain with ease and could survive
for long periods in Hoth’s extremely cold environment. (Though
even they had to find shelter when the even colder night fell across
the planet.) Not bad for creatures that allowed Luke Skywalker and
Han Solo to patrol the snow-covered planet while the snow speeders
were being upgraded to deal with the planet’s frigid temperatures.
They could also be utilized as survival gear when they died and
night was falling—as long as you had easy access to a lightsaber
or other cutting implement in order to slice them open. And they
smelled bad—both inside and out!

GENERAL EQUIPMENT
This chapter was necessary but not my favorite to write. Every
adventurer needs access to armor, weapons, and essential gear,
but I’ve never found writing about such items to be particularly
interesting. Still, the chapter covered melee weapons such as
movie staples like the gaderffii (used by the Sand People) and
Force Pikes (employed by the Emperor’s Royal Guard), as well
as items from other sources, including the vibroblades described
in the Han Solo novels. We detailed blasters and bowcasters,
grenades and thermal detonators, armor, and medical equipment,
putting everything on a chart that listed the items, their cost, and
their use in the roleplaying game.
The medpac, our version of a first aid kit or healing potion for
the Star Wars universe, first appeared here and in the Star Wars
Roleplaying Game rulebook. The game needed it, so we created
it. Later, it would show up in novels and comics and even gets
mentioned in one of the new movies, serving the same purpose.
Kind of like a portable bacta tank for when heroes inevitably
receive some sort of wound.

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LIGHTSABERS
Curtis Smith wrote the bulk of the chapter on lightsabers before
turning the rest of the book over to me. It was a single two-page
spread, describing the history of the lightsaber and its place in the
galaxy (which I expanded upon from what Curtis outlined), as well as
delving into the technology behind how a lightsaber functions (which
was mostly Curtis). This was the first real attempt by anyone to do
this, and the entry talked about power cells and jewels long before
the Expanded Universe introduced Kyber Crystals. We described
how novice wielders were as likely to injure themselves with the
weapon as their opponents, and only Force-users could truly master
the lightsaber due to the weightless nature of its blade of light. All the
various colors and the meanings associated with them would come
later, though we did mention that the handmade weapons came in a
variety of styles and sported different colored blades.

STORMTROOPERS
The chapter on stormtroopers was one that I inherited as other duties
took Curtis away from the project. I described their armor, and how
they were totally loyal to the Emperor; they could not be bribed,
blackmailed, or seduced into betraying the Empire. I detailed how
different environments required different stormtrooper squads,
specially equipped to deal with whatever planet they were called
upon to invade or defend. Cold assault troops (the snowtroopers),
zero-g stormtroopers equipped with armor that served as a personal
spacecraft and attack vehicle (one of my favorite inventions), and
scout troopers were all described. The sidebar in this chapter, “The
Briefing of Spacetrooper Platoon 243-XT,” reproduced the personal
audio log of a zero-g trooper, who, when presented with a nearly
impossible mission asked, “What are we doing after lunch?”
The one thing that LFL would never let me do was come out
and say that stormtroopers were clones. If you read between the
lines in all the pieces I’ve written concerning stormtroopers over
the years, you’ll get a sense that they aren’t like other troops in
the Empire. I was able to hint at my suspicion even if I couldn’t
confirm it. Later, of course, we’d find out that the predecessor
to the stormtrooper was the clone trooper, but we still haven’t
gotten absolute confirmation as to who or what was inside the

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stormtrooper armor during the days of the Galactic Civil War.

Someday, maybe, we’ll find out the definitive answer. (I’m still
sticking with clones—probably the last copies of copies still
available—until told otherwise, by the way.)

REBEL BASES
Nine pages were allotted for the chapter about Rebel bases, but
Curtis had only turned over six pages of text, including the two-
page spread of the map of a Rebel outpost. What he had written was
good, and I couldn’t figure out any clever way to expand upon it.
By the time I got around to this chapter, the deadline was looming,
so even coming up with a sidebar story was out of the question.
This chapter features a bit more art than the rest of the book. I
decided to fill the blank space with concept art from the movies.
The base described in the chapter, Tierfon Rebel Outpost and its
starfighter squadron, was based upon one of the set blueprints we
uncovered during our delve into the archives. Curtis took the set
of the hangar bay on Hoth and altered and expanded it to create
Tierfon Outpost, a totally new Rebel Alliance base. It served as
the basis for many home campaigns, I’m reasonably certain.

IMPERIAL GARRISONS
As a counterpoint to Rebel bases, we presented details on Imperial
garrisons. I wound up writing this chapter, where I first posited
the idea that a lot of what the Empire created was modular and
standardized, as if it was pressed out of a mold. I got the idea
from the way they apparently churned out TIE fighters and made
the assumption that the entire Imperial military machine would
operate this way. Standardization made training faster, allowed
for resources to be moved and shared with greater ease, and
contrasted the Imperial method to the Rebel method of cobbling
together whatever they could find quite nicely. (I would expand
upon this idea a few years later while writing The Death Star
Technical Companion.) I worked with WEG art director Stephen
Crane on the design of the Imperial base plans, creating a
protective fortification that could be dropped from a star destroyer
to quickly establish an Imperial presence on whatever planet
required a show of force or a defendable installation.

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HEROES AND VILLAINS

The longest chapter was also the last chapter in the book. Here’s
where I got to describe and define the main characters from
the original movie trilogy. I invented a Rebel historian, Arhul
Hextrophon, and imagined his seminal work, the Official History
of the Rebellion, Volume One, as the source which the various
entries were drawn from. Supposedly written shortly after the
destruction of the Death Star over Yavin Four, it was appended
with material on Yoda and Lando Calrissian from the historian’s
personal files and utilized intercepted Imperial communiques to
expand what was known about Boba Fett and Darth Vader. In
retrospect, the use of the imperfect narrator in the form of the
historian served the material very well. It allowed me to write
more freely, since any discrepancies in content could be attributed
to personal opinion or flaws in the historian’s research. Plus,
it provided a voice for the entire chapter. Arhul Hextrophon
would show up again in later products, continuing his chronicles
concerning the Heroes of Yavin and other figures important to the
Alliance to Restore the Republic.
The historian described Luke Skywalker, the hero of Yavin, as an
orphan raised by Beru and Owen Lars, and intimated a relationship
with the famed Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker, though this
connection could not be verified. I had the historian detail Luke’s
early life, growing up on a moisture farm and hanging around
Anchorhead. He honed his natural skills as a pilot in Beggar’s
Canyon, flying full throttle through the twisting corridors of rock
and sand. He dreamed of going to the Academy, but events would
conspire to send the young man to the Rebel Alliance instead.
When a pair of droids purchased from Jawas to help with the new
harvest revealed a holographic message from a beautiful young
woman who needed help, Luke found himself on a course he never
imagined. He discovered that Old Ben Kenobi was actually Obi-
Wan Kenobi, the Jedi Knight; that the droids belonged to Princess
Leia of Alderaan; and that the Empire would stop at nothing to
get their hands on the droids—including murdering Luke’s aunt
and uncle. It was fun writing the story of Luke Skywalker as a
series of events pieced together by a historian who got most of

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the details correct but missed a few important facts. A sidebar,

“Imperial Communique #87341.36a,” reproduced a report from
an Imperial intelligence officer providing details on fugitive and
Rebel operative Luke Skywalker to the Emperor. Skywalker was
charged with a variety of crimes, including breaking into and out
of a top-secret Imperial facility, high treason, and destruction of
Imperial property (namely the Death Star), each charge warranting
his execution.
Princess Leia Organa required a little more inventiveness on
my part since we weren’t privy to as much of her background as
we were with Luke. I described her as a “brilliant organizer and
ruthless fighter,” giving her the honor of being the third most-
wanted criminal currently hunted by the Empire. From her line in
the film about Alderaan being a peaceful planet with no weapons,
I decided that after the Clone Wars Bail Organa led his world into
a pacifistic period and promoted a philosophy of peace. When
the Emperor rose to power, however, Organa made Alderaan
the center of resistance to the Empire’s tyranny. I explained how
he taught his adopted daughter leadership, diplomacy, and self-
defense (despite his pacifistic stance), and she was elected as one
of the youngest senators to ever serve in the Galactic Senate. She
was tough, smart, charismatic, and a natural leader.
Han Solo’s entry started with a long explanation by the historian
to try to get to the bottom of who the real Corellian happened
to be. A smuggler and a pirate, he considered Han Solo to be a
criminal and a complete and utter rogue. However, he also noted
that the man was a study in contradictions. The historian related
how three years earlier his ship had been attacked by Zygerrian
slavers and he and his family were taken captive. After months in
the ship’s hold, they were rescued by Han Solo and Chewbacca,
who left them with the ship and its treasure after they drove away
the slavers. The entry went on to describe Solo’s reputation and
legend, how he was discharged from the Imperial Navy after
rescuing a Wookiee from slavery. (Unfortunately, that aspect of the
story didn’t survive the new Han Solo movie, Solo: A Star Wars
Story.) The Wookiee refused to leave his side due to the concept
of the life debt, and eventually the duo turned to smuggling to

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make ends meet. He acquired the Millennium Falcon by winning

it from Lando Calrissian in a cutthroat game of sabacc (which was
portrayed in the new film), and it was then that Solo’s reputation
really began to soar. Arrogant, reckless, overly confident, and
extremely lucky, Han Solo also possessed a good heart—most
notably in the form of his friend and copilot, Chewbacca, who
had a strict code of honor and a habit of helping people in distress
(often to Solo’s chagrin). Another one of my favorite sidebars can
be found in this entry. “Balancing the Books” featured a letter from
Jabba the Hutt’s accountant, detailing the extent of Han Solo’s
debt to Jabba’s organization. At the time the letter was written,
Solo owed Jabba—including bounty hunter fees and compounded
interest—almost two-hundred-and-twenty-five thousand credits!
Chewbacca provided another opportunity to add to the known lore,
since very little concerning the Wookiee’s background was available
back when we were writing The Star Wars Sourcebook. Jabba’s line
“the mighty Chewbacca” had always resonated with me, as did the
scene where Chewbacca, bowcaster at the ready, stands revealed in
the open doorway to the Endor bunker, roaring a challenge while
Han gives a knowing smirk. And even though it’s probable that
the Wookiee’s legend is as inflated as his partner’s, I nevertheless
decided to make Chewbacca a real hero. As a relatively young
Wookiee of two hundred or so, he obviously lived through the Clone
Wars. But that was a topic we were ordered to avoid at all costs, so I
described Chewbacca’s early training as a pilot and ship mechanic,
how he studied Wookiee martial arts and perfected his skill with the
bowcaster, and I described his love of tinkering with mechanical
devices. Wanderlust took him when he turned fifty, and he spent over
one hundred years visiting new places, meeting new people, and
expanding upon his skill set. Then the Empire came into being. He
heard rumors that his homeworld of Kashyyyk had been turned into
a slave camp by Imperial forces, but before he could return to witness
the devastation for himself, he was captured by slavers and forced to
endure a period of heavy labor. A young Imperial officer named Han
Solo threw away his career to help Chewbacca and set the Wookiee
free. Of course, the now-discharged officer didn’t understand why
the Wookiee refused to leave his side after that. Chewbacca’s honor

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demanded that he fulfill the life debt he felt he owed Solo. This life
debt eventually evolved into a deep and abiding friendship, and the
two became fast friends as well as partners.
I waited eagerly to see what was going to be officially revealed
about Chewbacca in the Solo: A Star Wars Story movie. I enjoyed
the movie and love what it showed us about Han, Lando, and the
Millennium Falcon. But I do think it missed the mark with the way
it established how Han and Chewie met. What did Han really bring
to the table that our 190-year-old adventuring Wookiee couldn’t
have done on his own whenever he wanted to? And where was the
connection that formed the friendship that would last for decades?
I think our version of Han saving the enslaved Chewbacca and
thereby losing his position in the Empire, coupled with the idea of
the Wookiee life debt, makes a more compelling story. Ah, well.
Mon Mothma wasn’t in The Return of the Jedi for very long,
but I felt she belonged in this chapter. The information about her
provided by the film was rather sparse, but the novelization told
us that she was a senator in the Old Republic when Palpatine rose
to power, and that she retained her position until the Senate was
disbanded shortly before the Battle of Yavin. She helped form
the Alliance to Restore the Republic and organized resistance
cells across the galaxy. I came up with her planet of origin
(Chandrila), developed more about her background and early life,
and expounded upon her ability to select outstanding leaders and
delegate her authority to best make the Rebellion work. I was
happy to see her appear in this role in later years, most recently in
the Rebels animated series and the Rogue One movie.
Lando Calrissian presented a similar challenge. Even though he
starred in a trilogy of novels, not much had been revealed about
the gambler’s background. I wrote his entry as another Imperial
Intelligence report, where the writer made educated guesses as to
where Lando came from and what his stance might be regarding
the Empire. It talked about his incessant gambling and how he
lost the Millennium Falcon to Han Solo, then turned around
and won Cloud City. The conclusion reached by the report was
that Lando was an able pilot, a fair smuggler, a con artist and
gambler, and surprisingly, a good administrator. He had grown

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accustomed to the finer things in life, and while he had no great

love of the Empire, he would gladly take their credits and do what
was needed when called upon, thus hinting at what would happen
in The Empire Strikes Back.
See-Threepio (C-3PO) and Artoo-Detoo (R2-D2), the droids who
have appeared in almost every Star Wars film to date, also presented
a challenge. I had a lot of guesses as to where the droids came from
and how they figured into what happened before Episode IV, but
there was only so much that LFL would let me put into the entry.
For example, I speculated that the droids had belonged to Leia’s
then-mysterious mother before Leia inherited them, since they were
aboard her starship when we first meet them in A New Hope. Turns
out I was only half right. R2-D2 belonged to Padme Amidala while
C-3PO was built by Anakin Skywalker and left in Padme’s care after
the events on Mustafar. However, back in 1987, none of this was
even a twinkle in George Lucas’s eye (I’m fairly certain). I did get to
say that the droids were the property of Princess Leia, but that was
about all I could reveal in the Sourcebook. Other things I assumed
back in the day (and still secretly believe in my version of the Star
Wars universe) include that Artoo has never been memory wiped (or
at least very rarely), which has permitted him to learn skills that far
exceed the standard programming for astromech droids and allowed
him to rise to the level of a hero; that Threepio is an accomplished liar
(one of his first lines in the first movie mentions the Princess, though
later he lies straight to Luke’s face and tells him he has no idea who
she is); and that Artoo curses up a storm while all we hear are beeps
and whistles. Poor C-3PO, of course, must endure it all. He is fluent
in more than seven million forms of communication, after all.
Obi-Wan Kenobi’s entry comes primarily from the historian’s
interviews with Bail Organa (before the destruction of Alderaan) and
Luke Skywalker. This allowed for errors based on perceptions and
hearsay in case I wrote anything that LFL wasn’t comfortable with. I
was able to cover Kenobi’s early years, Jedi training, and the Clone
Wars in vague terms and generalities while still making the entry
interesting. I speculated about Kenobi’s hermitage on Tatooine, his
stewardship from afar of young Skywalker, and his feelings about
Vader’s betrayal. Since this was supposedly written right after the

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Battle of Yavin but before the events of Episode V, I didn’t connect

Anakin Skywalker with Vader. I included a sidebar, a report from
Darth Vader to the Emperor, that explained that “Their Fire Has Gone
Out of the Galaxy.” Sent right after the Millennium Falcon escaped
from the Death Star, Vader related how he encountered his old master
and cut him down in battle, promising that soon the Rebellion would
fall as well. Overconfidence: It’s a Skywalker tradition.
Yoda’s entry was written as part of the historian’s personal records.
I had all kinds of restrictions placed upon me when it came to
discussing the Jedi Master. I couldn’t talk about Yoda’s species
or planet of origin. I couldn’t speculate too broadly about the
Clone Wars, and I couldn’t reveal anything about Yoda’s abilities
beyond what we saw in The Empire Strikes Back. The historian’s
notes describe how he found references to Yoda in ancient records
and tracked him to the swamp planet Dagobah. There, after Yoda
decided not to use the Force to wipe all knowledge of himself and
his hiding place from Hextrophon’s memory, he allowed himself to
be interviewed. The bulk of the entry resides in a half-page sidebar,
“Selected Teachings of Yoda, the Jedi Master.” Here, I collected all
of Yoda’s best quotes from the movies, including “A Jedi uses the
Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack,” and “Try not.
Do. Or do not. There is no try.” It was the best I could do, working
in the confines I was given regarding this pivotal character.
Boba Fett is one of my favorite Star Wars characters, despite the
abrupt way George Lucas decided to deal with him in The Return
of the Jedi. To detail the infamous bounty hunter, I framed the entry
as an Imperial Intelligence communique to Lord Darth Vader. The
purpose of the report was to provide the Dark Lord with information
about a variety of bounty hunters, focusing on the best of them, Boba
Fett. I built upon the details presented up to that point about Fett’s
background, which I think mostly came from an animated short
that was shown as part of the Holiday Special. It was intimated that
Fett wore the armor of a Mandalorian warrior—the same warriors
who had battled the Jedi Knights during the Clone Wars. (Later, this
wouldn’t exactly turn out to be true, since for the most part the clones
were based on a single Mandalore and they fought alongside the Jedi.
At least they did until they received Order 66. Then they didn’t so

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much as fight against them as ambush the Jedi and slaughter them.) I
described the key features of Boba Fett’s armor, including its weapons
and jet pack, and talked about how Fett was both feared and respected
by criminals and law enforcers alike. The communiqué ends with a
sterling recommendation from Major Herrit that previewed events to
come in The Empire Strikes Back: “Hire him.”
Darth Vader, the final entry in the chapter, in the final chapter in
the book, used interviews with Luke Skywalker and Bail Organa
of Alderaan, conducted before the destruction of the planet, to craft
a portrait of the dread figure. It played up the idea that even in the
Rebel Alliance, where members regularly proclaim, “May the Force
be with you,” the concept of a mystical Force was no longer seen as
a given fact in most corners of the galaxy. It built upon the version of
the tale that Obi-Wan told Luke on Tatooine, describing how Kenobi’s
promising student turned to the Dark Side and slaughtered the Jedi
Knights. Vader served the Emperor and rose through the Imperial
ranks to earn command of the Imperial fleet charged with hunting
down the Rebel Alliance. The entry ended with a cautionary warning.
If someone as strong and ruthless as Darth Vader could bend a knee
and call the Emperor “master,” how much more powerful must
Emperor Palpatine be to command such subservience?
That’s the story of how The Star Wars Sourcebook came together.
With the publication of the Roleplaying Game in October 1987,
followed by the release of the Sourcebook one month later, players
and gamemasters had everything they needed to play adventures
in the Star Wars galaxy. We had more products planned, of course,
but it was a significant accomplishment getting these two hardcover
books into print. I think we knew at GenCon in August, when we
were running demos of the game system, that we had a hit on our
hands. Both books quickly sold out of their initial print runs, and
we went back to press a couple of times during my tenure, which
was unheard of for most of the other products in WEG’s catalog.
During the convention season the following year, both books won
a number of industry awards, including the prestigious Origins
Awards for Best Roleplaying Game and Best Roleplaying Game
Supplement. And, of course, the Sourcebook became the foundation
for the Expanded Universe. That was still a few years away, and we
had more products to create before that could happen.

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Chapter Eight:
TATOOINE MANHUNT
AND THE RISE
OF ADVENTURES
On Creating the Key Adventures for the Line

T he first full-length adventure for the Star Wars RPG was

planned to come out in January 1988. Tatooine Manhunt was
assigned to freelance designer Daniel Greenberg, who wrote the
product remotely, as most freelancers do. Curtis Smith insisted
on handling the development and editing of the project himself.
I can understand that. I had the same inclination regarding
important products when I was in similar positions later in my
career. Unfortunately, time never seemed to be on Curtis’s side
after Eric Goldberg and Greg Costikyan left the company, and so
the manuscript for Tatooine Manhunt sat on the corner of his desk
as the deadline loomed closer and then passed by.
Deadlines weren’t the only thing interfering with business as
usual for the design, development, and editing teams. Key staff
members had decided to move on after we finished the RPG and
Sourcebook, and both Paul Murphy and Jeff Briggs departed
shortly after Eric and Greg. Add to that the other major news we
were dealing with, and you can see why we were scrambling—
West End Games was moving its office from New York City to the
wilds of Pennsylvania.

HONESDALE AND THE OUTER RIM TERRITORIES

For someone who had grown up and spent his life up to that point
in the crowded and cosmopolitan expanse known as New York
City, the idea of moving to the Middle of Nowhere was, frankly,
terrifying. We got the news just as summer in the Big Apple was
turning to fall. WEG’s owner, Scott Palter, wanted to consolidate
his two businesses into a single location so that he could better
manage them and save some money in the process. His other

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company, and the more profitable of the two at the time, was Bucci
Imports, which operated out of an office on Long Island, if I recall
correctly. Richard Hawran, Scott’s operations manager, found
land in Pennsylvania where they could build a single facility to
house both companies.
Honesdale had numerous advantages. The land was cheaper,
first off, and they could buy a lot and put up a building for less
than what it cost them to rent offices in Manhattan and on Long
Island. Plus, the workforce was theoretically cheaper in rural PA,
especially for the staff needed to operate Bucci Imports. Bucci’s
claim to fame was as an importer of Bruno Magli Italian luxury
footwear, and it’s where Scott put most of his effort in those days,
at least as far as I was aware. Plans were set and ground was
broken on a two-story office building and attached warehouse.
Bucci Imports would occupy the first floor of the new building,
while the offices of West End Games would move into the second
floor. The warehouse, meanwhile, would handle stock for both
businesses. It was a great idea from a corporate perspective, but it
seemed drastic to me at the time.
While we were wrapping up the two inaugural products in the
Star Wars line, Curtis Smith was drawing up plans for the move
to Honesdale. He took the staff on field trips to show off the site
of the new facility and to promote the benefits of staying with
WEG and moving to Pennsylvania. Being from Wisconsin, Curtis
had loads of fun facts and interesting stories about living in what
we jaded New Yorkers considered to be “the Wilderness.” Paul
Murphy and Jeff Briggs decided to move on instead, so Curtis
spent his efforts convincing me, Doug Kaufman, Stephen Crane,
production manager Steve Porpora, and new hire Mike Stern to
make the move to Honesdale. During this period, he also hired
Jonatha Caspian and Greg Gorden, setting it up so they’d join
the company in Honesdale when the building was completed
in January. Unfortunately, like most schedules and deadlines,
sometimes things slip. The building wasn’t ready on time, so Greg
and Jonatha wound up commuting into the New York office a few
days each week until the building was finished and the rest of us
could make the move.

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UPGRADING THE RULES

Greg Gorden came to West End Games with a powerful resume.
In the early 1980s, he worked on the James Bond 007 RPG
for Victory Games, including designing the Q Manual book
of gadgets. Then he designed the DC Heroes RPG for Mayfair
Games. Curtis brought him aboard to bolster WEG’s design chops
in the wake of Greg Costikyan’s departure.
The first thing Greg Gorden did when he joined the company
was work with me to fully review the game mechanics in the
recently released Star Wars rulebook. This in-depth study
resulted in a four-page pamphlet we would later include in every
shrink-wrapped supplement and adventure (including Tatooine
Manhunt), the Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game Rules Upgrade.
We made a few important tweaks to the rules to make sure the
game would survive more-than-casual play and would live up to
the idea that you could create and run long-lasting campaigns with
the rules set. This meant concentrating on three key areas of the
rules and making them as perfect as possible: difficulty numbers,
combat, and starships.
The rulebook implied that the difficulty number chart was a
scale, but it wasn’t presented that way. Instead, it just listed task
descriptions (such as Easy) and cross-referenced each with a
single number (10, as the Difficulty Number for Easy tasks). We
revised the chart to transform it into an actual scale. So, Easy tasks
now ranged from 6–10, giving the gamemaster more flexibility
with which to design adventures and assign difficulty numbers.
We further suggested that GMs start out at the low end of the scale
until characters had advanced in skill, then slide toward the top
end of each category.
For combat, we sought to make play faster and simpler by
redefining the sequence of play. We divided play into rounds and
further divided a round into five segments. To make stormtroopers
and other opponents more challenging, as well as to provide
players with a compelling tactic, we created the combined
action. This allowed a gamemaster to declare that a squad of five
stormtroopers were combining fire to target a single opponent,
reducing the number of die rolls needed from five to one,

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while increasing the squad’s chance to hit with what effectively

represented a volley of fire. (Damage wasn’t increased in this
way, only the chance to score a hit.) This greatly sped up play at
the table and turned a squad of stormtroopers into a more capable
and threatening opponent.
These were the biggest changes we made to the game system,
and the fans seemed to appreciate the tweaks and additions.

A WRETCHED HIVE OF SCUM AND VILLAINY

Curtis, with some reluctance, eventually relented and gave me
the Tatooine Manhunt project. We received the manuscript from
Daniel Greenberg as scheduled, but the original publication
deadline passed due to the issues I outlined above. I don’t have a
copy of the original manuscript anymore, but I recall that Daniel
worked mostly in prose, since the rules weren’t finalized while he
was doing his writing. Just as I had done with “Rebel Breakout” and
Scared Stiffs, I developed a format that would suit our full-length
Star Wars adventures. As I started to review what we received and
began outlining my plan for the project, the first major deadline
snuck up on me. I had to write an art order for the poster map so
that art director Stephen Crane could send it to the out-of-house
artist to illustrate. That artist was the extremely talented Jennell
Jaquays, who I’ve had the great honor and pleasure of working
with several times over the years (including sharing a stint at
TSR, Inc., where she created some early Alternity artwork for that
science fiction project).
For the poster map, I decided that one side would depict the
Tatooine city of Mos Eisley, where Luke and Old Ben take the
droids in search of transport off planet to Alderaan. For the other
side, I settled on presenting a detailed view of the interior of
the Mos Eisley Cantina. I worked with our art director to create
sketches for the artist to use. For the Mos Eisley map, we used
some of those set blueprints we uncovered during our visit to
Skywalker Ranch for the basis. To fill in blank spots not shown in
the blueprints, we spent a lot of time with the VCR and video tape
of Episode IV, rewinding, fast-forwarding, and pausing as Luke
drove his landspeeder through the city. We wanted to figure out
where he turned and what was around that we could see and add to

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the map. Jennell did a wonderful job interpreting our sketch and
bringing the place that Old Ben called a “wretched hive of scum
and villainy” to life in vivid color. The completed map depicted
residential buildings, shops, docking bays, the Cantina, and other
important locations around the city’s central district.
The Cantina, where droids were refused service, Han Solo shot
Greedo (and Han did shoot first, but Greedo had it coming), and
two aliens wanted for various violent crimes picked a fight with
the wrong farm boy, was modeled after another set of blueprints.
One wall of the place was missing from the schematic to provide
the film crew with a place to put the cameras and lights, which
meant that we had to extrapolate to design a complete interior.
The two maps helped elevate the product’s perceived value,
setting a standard for quality components that we’d carry forward
throughout my tenure with the company.
With the poster map art order out of the way, I got down to
business with the rest of the manuscript. After a thorough review
of the material that Daniel turned over, I presented Curtis Smith
with my plan for reformatting the adventure, adding encounters to
round out the story, and making sure the adventure worked with
the products we had already completed or that were in the early
stages of development. I don’t want to give the impression that
I approach every editing and development job with the intent of
burning it to the ground and rebuilding it from scratch. Daniel’s
manuscript was solid and featured the core of the adventure that
was eventually published. But we had created a new format for
presenting adventures by the time I got around to working on
the manuscript, the game rules had been finalized, and we had
come up with the idea of adding cut-away scenes to enhance the
cinematic feel of the adventures. Plus, more material was needed
to fill the final page layout, and we wanted to add tie-in scenes to
cross-sell the Star Warriors board game. After all these necessary
additions were included in the final product, Curtis decided that I
produced enough new material to warrant a design credit. Daniel
and I shared the cover credit, with an additional credit for me to
account for the development and editing work.
Another bonus included with the finished product was a
cardstock strip of counters for use with the Star Warriors board

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game. I wrote the end scene, an RPG encounter where the player
characters had to escape from Tatooine by running a gauntlet
of TIE Interceptors. They could accomplish this in their space
transport or by utilizing some Z-95 Headhunters they find parked
in the docking bay. Doug Kaufman translated the RPG encounter
into a scenario for Star Warriors, which could be used for the final
scene if the gamemaster and players wanted to engage in a more
tactical encounter to wrap up the adventure.
Thinking back, I can’t accurately point to which part of the
adventure is mine and which part is Daniel’s, though I have some
hazy memories. For example, at some point we settled on the Ralph
McQuarrie production painting depicting the bounty hunters from
The Empire Strikes Back to use as the cover art. As this was one of
the pieces we collected during our trip to the Ranch, the decision to
use this piece of art for the cover was probably reached after Daniel
turned over the manuscript, but I can’t recall for sure. Of course,
we couldn’t throw the heavyweights shown in the art, including
Boba Fett and IG-88, at new players for their first adventure (or
second if you count “Rebel Breakout” from the RPG). Instead, at
some point I equated the villains of the adventure with look-alikes
for the famous bounty hunters featured in the cover art. Boba Fett,
for example, became another Mandalore-armor-wearing bounty
hunter who went by the name of Jodo Kast. I made sure that
the cover art and the interior details meshed. Beyond that, I did
my usual development and editing pass, making sure the entire
product had the proper voice and structure, and adding material as
necessary to create the finished product. Even though Daniel and
I worked separately and at different times, and I’m not sure we
even communicated once I took over the product, I still consider
it a masterful collaboration that perfectly kicked off the Star Wars
adventure line.

TATOOINE MANHUNT FIRSTS

A number of key Star Wars elements were first introduced in
Tatooine Manhunt. For example, the maps of Mos Eisley and the
Cantina were never shown in such detail prior to the release of the
adventure, but those aren’t the only now-familiar people, places,
and things that made their debut within these 32 pages.

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The background of the adventure ties into the story of A New

Hope, something that I tried to do whenever it made sense. When
the stormtroopers arrive to search for the droids that escaped from
the Tantive IV, a hero of the Old Republic hiding on the planet
thinks the Empire has come for him at last. This sets off the events
of the adventure.
Jodo Kast, a formidable bounty hunter who operates in Boba
Fett’s shadow, made his first appearance here before appearing in
the Expanded Universe in short stories and a computer game. He
even received his own action figure a few years later!
Kwenn Space Station, a Mid Rim waypoint that included space
docks and other facilities, was created specifically for use in
Tatooine Manhunt and later adventures. I’m pretty sure the name
and look of the place were my creation, as I have vivid memories
of drawing the map as part of the art order for the product. After
appearing exclusively in RPG products, it made its way into
novels, comics, and other expressions of the brand.
For an encounter on the streets of Mos Eisley, I added a scene
involving a Dim-U preacher expounding upon one of the tenets
of their faith—that the bantha is a gift from beyond whose
meaning has not yet been made clear. “Do not harm the bantha,”
he preaches, “do not eat of its meat or wear its regal hides! Would
you harm a welcoming friend?” I thought the idea of a cult of
bantha-worshiping devotees was amusing and quirky, and it made
its way into a few Expanded Universe products and guide books
beyond the RPG.
Cut-away scenes for Star Wars adventures were first introduced
in Tatooine Manhunt, and they were my idea. They allowed
me to show what the villains were up to without placing them
immediately in range of the player characters’ blasters. It helped
enforce the cinematic feel we were going for. Plus, it allowed
me to end the adventure with a cut to the final scene of our
“movie” aboard the Imperial star destroyer Relentless after the
player characters escape. We see Darth Vader’s holographic form
clench its fist as Captain Parlan crashes to the floor. “Apology
accepted, Captain Parlan,” Vader says, and we cut to CREDITS
AND TITLE THEME. A brilliant little gamemaster storytelling
tool that started in this adventure.

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HONESDALE AND ANOTHER DEPARTURE

Tatooine Manhunt, with its collection of iconic characters and
locations, turned out to be an excellent way to kick off the Star
Wars adventure line. But it missed its original release date. Then
February and March came and went, and Curtis Smith still
hadn’t turned over the finished files to production (even though I
completed all the necessary development and editing work in time
for it to have gone to press shortly after the beginning of the year).
We were supposed to be in Honesdale by this point, but we were
still waiting for the facility to be completed. We finally got word
that we could begin working in the new building at the end of
March, so we started making final preparations to move ourselves
and the office equipment from New York to Pennsylvania.
Then the other shoe dropped.
Curtis Smith decided he wasn’t going to go with us. He resigned
his position and moved back to Wisconsin. After working so
hard to convince the remaining staff to make the move, Curtis’s
decision left us all baffled. I, for one, didn’t see this coming
and was taken completely by surprise when Curtis made the
announcement. I never actually asked him what led up to this
decision, but when Curtis resigned from WEG, he abandoned the
hobby game industry entirely.
Curtis’s sudden departure left us in a strange situation. Who
was going to run the creative staff and manage the publication
schedule? Since I had pretty much taken over as liaison with
Lucasfilm by this point, Scott and Rich put me in charge of the
Star Wars line. Almost everything we were doing at the time
was for Star Wars, so I was effectively replacing Curtis. My first
action was to move Tatooine Manhunt into production (it finally
released in May 1988 after a rush printing job) and figure out how
to get the rest of the schedule back on track. Then I moved into a
rickety old house just off the main (if you could call it that) drag
in downtown Honesdale, a house that I rented from the publishers
of Highlights for Children magazine.
Upon getting the staff up and running in Honesdale, I
received the alarm code for the building, a key to the facility,
and the title of Creative and Editorial Director of West End

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Games. I was now in charge of the development and editing

team, as well as the master of the publication schedule. That
meant I decided what products we were going to produce,
I set the schedules, and I hired the freelancers necessary to
create the products. While the staff would still do some design
work, I transitioned us to become a studio that primarily used
freelance design so that the in-house staff could concentrate on
development and editing. This allowed us to get the products
out quickly and put our release schedule back on track. (WEG
released no products between January and May of 1988, which
was problematic for a company that relied on monthly releases
to maintain cash flow.) When Tatooine Manhunt shipped in
May, we got back onto a more or less monthly release schedule
fairly quickly, which was one of the goals I was charged with
when I was promoted.

STRIKE FORCE: SHANTIPOLE

We followed up the release of Tatooine Manhunt with another
adventure. Strike Force: Shantipole, written by Ken Rolston as
a freelance assignment and developed by Steve Gilbert, featured
the origin of the B-Wing starfighter. This adventure was one of the
last things Steve worked on as a WEG staffer before we made the
move to Honesdale; Steve decided not to come with us. I edited
the adventure, and cover credit was given to both Ken and Steve.
The adventure concerned the creation of a new type of
starfighter, the B-wing. Most of the adventure takes place on
the asteroid base known as Research Station Shantipole, and it
included a poster-sized map of the facility, as well as more Star
Warriors counters and a scenario. Rebel operative Commander
Ackbar, a Mon Calamari who would one day rise to the top of
Alliance High Command, goes to the Roche Asteroid Field
to enlist the aid of a species of insectoid aliens renowned for
their shipbuilding skills—the Verpine—to design and build the
B-wing. The Verpine name and background were developed to
match an insectoid alien drawing we found among the concept art
we pulled from the Lucasfilm archives.
An Imperial spy on Ackbar’s team reveals the location of the
facility to the Empire and endangers the entire operation. Player

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characters need to navigate the asteroid field and sneak onto

Shantipole Station to recover the prototype starfighters before
they fall into the Empire’s unrelenting grasp.
The adventure ends with Commander Ackbar’s promotion to
Admiral, the Rebels gaining the new B-wing starfighter, and the
introduction of a new Imperial that gamemasters could use as a
recurring villain, Commander Bane Nothos.
This is another adventure often cited as a favorite among Star
Wars RPG fans, and it contains many of the same features that
made Tatooine Manhunt so memorable: lots of references to
things seen in the movies, recognizable and iconic characters, and
the ability to participate in a key part of Star Wars history—a
part that we, admittedly, made up, but felt like it belonged in the
extended Star Wars story. (Years later, Strike Force: Shantipole
would be reborn in the Star Wars Rebels animated series, but not
as an exact adaptation of the adventure.)

OTHER LANGUAGES
It would be remiss of me not to mention that we worked with
publishers in other countries to release the Star Wars Roleplaying
Game line in other languages, most notably French, German,
Swedish, and Italian. In addition to working on the English
language products, I helped shepherd the international products
through the approval process with LFL once we were firmly
entrenched in Honesdale. It was amazing how well one of my
counterparts could speak English when they needed something
or just wanted to have a pleasant conversation, but how fast they
forgot all the words when I had to make them change something
at LFL’s request.
Some of the more impressive versions looked totally different
from the products we produced for English-language customers.
The Swedish version of the Sourcebook, for example, was
produced as a boxed set! I still have a copy of that version on
my shelf, shrink-wrap totally intact, which means I have no idea
what’s actually inside the box anymore. The French products, on
the other hand, were basically copies of what we produced for
sale here in the United States, just in French instead of English.

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OTHER NOTABLE EARLY ADVENTURES

Three other early adventures helped establish the West End Games
tone and showed that there were stories that could be told in the
Star Wars universe that didn’t constantly draw from the existing
films. We published all of these adventures in 1989.
Starfall, designed by Rob Jenkins and Michael Stern and
released in May of that year, was our attempt to present a disaster
movie in the Star Wars universe. Jenkins, a freelancer, turned over
a manuscript that Mike developed and reworked to bring it up to
the standards we had established throughout the previous year. I
edited the project, adding various bits to turn it into a complete
adventure and to make sure the story felt like it belonged in Star
Wars. This was one of our first 40-page adventures, where we
added a half signature to boost the amount of content and add
value for the slight price increase we introduced at the time. It
included a poster-sized map of a star destroyer, a scenario and
counters for running an AT-ST skirmish battle, and loads of
details concerning the interior of the massive capital ship. Starfall
could be used as a stand-alone adventure or as a follow up to any
scenario in which the player characters wind up captured by the
Empire. From the back cover: “Nine hundred meters of twisted,
battle-torn star destroyer stand between imprisoned Rebel heroes
and freedom in this disaster-filled Star Wars adventure.” It had the
same vibe as The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno,
and it was a great adventure to run as well as to play in.
Otherspace, written by me and edited (in a rare flip of positions)
by Greg Gorden, was our attempt to present a tale of horror in the
Star Wars universe. In the RPG, we described “realspace” and
“hyperspace,” so it occurred to me that there could be something
between the two. I posited “otherspace” as an unexplored
dimension where the death-worshiping Charon ruled supreme.
Taking inspiration from Alien, among other sources, I crafted
a scary tale of Rebels and Imperials (including Bane Nothos,
first introduced in Strike Force: Shantipole) lost in this parallel
dimension after a terrible space battle. They find themselves in
a graveyard of damaged ships, orbiting a giant craft of unknown
origin as they become prey for the spider-like Charon. This was

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probably the furthest we pushed the envelope during my time

with the Star Wars license, but LFL liked the idea and gave us
permission to publish it. We followed it up with a sequel to finish
off the story later in the same year, Otherspace II: Invasion.
Crisis on Cloud City, designed by Christopher Kubasik and
edited by me, was released in November. This one presented a
murder mystery in the Star Wars universe and was set on Bespin’s
Cloud City. It included a guest appearance by Lando Calrissian
and featured a deck of sabacc cards and the complete rules for
playing the game—the first complete depiction of the gambling
game since its mention in The Empire Strikes Back and the
Lando Calrissian novels. Though probably remembered most for
the sabacc mini-game, the clever murder mystery presented the
players with situations that were both challenging and exciting.
Plus, the scenario was different from the usual types of missions
presented in the Star Wars universe. It was a nice way to cap off
the year.

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Chapter Nine:
THE GALAXY GUIDES
Creating a Line of Star Wars Products

W hen I took over as creative and editorial director, in addition

to getting the release schedule back on track, it fell to me
to figure out what the Star Wars line was going to look like and
develop into moving forward. Adventures were important and all
well and good, but these types of products were traditionally just
the purview of gamemasters. That severely hampered sales when
only one-fourth or one-sixth of a gaming group felt the need to
purchase any given product. We needed more than adventures if
the line was going to grow and blossom. That’s where the idea for
the Galaxy Guide series came in. We produced six Galaxy Guides
during my tenure as creative director, releasing four in 1989 and
two in 1990. I envisioned them as continuations and expansions
of The Star Wars Sourcebook, more for the fan of Star Wars than
the player of the RPG, but usable by both.
The initial idea resulted in the creation of three Galaxy Guides,
one covering each of the original films. I outlined the products and
then assigned them to writers to flesh out. Afterward, I developed
and edited the material, making sure everything contained inside
would pass scrutiny by our approval people at LFL. We used Arhul
Hextrophon, first seen in The Star Wars Sourcebook, to serve as
narrator and point-of-view character, expanding on the “Heroes
and Villains” chapter of the earlier volume in grand fashion. Plus,
we gave him an assistant, Voren Na’al, to help tell the stories.
These books were spaced out and released as Galaxy Guides 1,
3, and 5.
The writing assignment for Galaxy Guide 1: A New Hope went
to freelancer Grant S. Boucher. The material didn’t quite meet
the tone I had set in the Sourcebook, so I gave the manuscript
to Michael Stern to punch up before I did my development and
editing pass. Grant and Mike shared cover credit, while I did my
work behind the scenes to make sure the tone was correct, the
names and stories resonated, and that the finished package would

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get the approval of LFL. We created one- and two-page profiles

on every character we could pull from the movie, breaking
the material into sections covering characters encountered
on Tatooine, the Death Star, and Yavin, and finishing up with
interviews with the Heroes of Yavin. We included RPG stats, but
we tried to make those unobtrusive and understandable even if
the reader had no interest in the RPG. The book included sidebar
stories, like the ones I wrote for the Sourcebook, as well as art
depicting the characters being profiled. Interesting note about the
art. It just so happened that comic book artist Al Williamson lived
not too far from the new Honesdale offices. He had worked on
Star Wars in the past, drawing issues of the Marvel Comics series
and illustrating the daily newspaper strip. He agreed to create the
character illustrations for the Galaxy Guides, with a little help
from his associate, Michael Manley.
Much of the background material we created for the characters
was new, including details on most of the aliens seen in the Cantina.
This was the first time that Walrus Man and Werewolf Guy received
proper names and stories. This product defined such characters as
the Tonnika Sisters, Muftak and Kabe, Garindan, Dr. Evazan and
Ponda Baba, and Figrin D’an. It also provided names for alien
species, including the Bith, Talz, Chadra-Fan, and Aqualish.
For Galaxy Guide 3: The Empire Strikes Back, I gave Mike the
full writing assignment and then followed behind him to do the
development and editing work. Sections in this one included Hoth,
the Imperial Fleet, Bounty Hunters, Dagobah, Bespin, and the
Heroes of Yavin, which continued their tales into the timeline of
Episode V. More original backgrounds were created for characters
such as General Rieekan (his first name, we decided, was Carlist),
Too-Onebee, pilots Jansen and Hobbie, Admirals Piett and Ozzel,
bounty hunters Dengar and Bossk, and even Lando’s aide, Lobot.
Galaxy Guide 5: Return of the Jedi, once again written by
Mike and developed and edited by me, completed our series of
profiles based on the films of the original trilogy. As with the other
two guides, this one created background material for characters,
most of which had never been seen before. It covered characters
that appeared in key locations like Tatooine (including many of
the characters seen at Jabba’s court, such as Bib Fortuna and

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Ephant Mon) and Endor (including the Ewoks and the Rebel
Commandos), as well as important Rebels (such as Mon Mothma,
Crix Madine, and Admiral Gial Ackbar), Imperials (including
Moff Jerjerrod and the Emperor), and ended with the ongoing
updates to the lives of the Heroes of Yavin.
For the other three inaugural Galaxy Guides, I tried a few different
directions. Each guide covered a particular topic, but I wanted to
deal with more than just characters in these companion volumes.
Galaxy Guide 2: Yavin and Bespin came back from one of the
freelancers in terrible shape. Specifically, I deemed the section
detailing Yavin to be unusable. This became one of our first
crunch projects once we got to Honesdale, and I threw every
available body I had at it to rewrite the Yavin section before the
deadline. I crafted a new outline, then got Jonatha Caspian and
new hire Charles Tramontana to start banging out pages. I took
on part of the rework myself, as well as edited and overwrote
Jonatha’s and Charles’s pages as they fired them to my desk.
Chris Kubasik, designer of the Cloud City adventure, provided
the section on Bespin, and luckily that came in perfectly fine. In
the end, the book turned out well, but it was definitely the weakest
of our initial slate of products released in 1989.
Galaxy Guide 4: Aliens, on the other hand, was a triumph. After
producing a couple of choose-your-own-adventure type books for
our Star Wars line, author Troy Denning took on the challenge of
creating a “monster manual” of sorts for the Star Wars universe.
Galaxy Guide 4 included aliens from the films as well as new aliens
created by Troy. My job, as usual, was to develop the manuscript
and bring it in line with other material we were producing. I had to
make sure each new creation fit into the universe and would get past
the approval process, as well as edit the book for print. This meant
that I tweaked some of the backgrounds Troy created or made slight
adjustments to names here and there. Many of the aliens created
for this book would later show up in products released by other
licensees, and like the rest of the material WEG was producing in
those initial years of the license, we were setting the foundation for
the Expanded Universe by defining the width and breadth of the
galaxy. Troy, who had begun his career as a game designer at TSR,
Inc., would later go on to help create the Dark Sun campaign setting

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for D&D and write a ton of novels, including a number set in the
Star Wars universe.
The assignment for Galaxy Guide 6: Tramp Freighters went to
the writing team of Mark Rein-Hagen and Stewart Wieck. Paul
Murphy, who hired me and then left the company after finishing
the Star Wars RPG, spent a year working in England for Games
Workshop. There, he helped create the memorable Space-Hulk
board game. When he returned to the States, we got back in touch
and I hired him to come work in Honesdale. I assigned him to write
the Rebel Alliance Sourcebook and the adventure Black Ice, and
to develop and edit Galaxy Guide 6. This product presented a sort
of mini-campaign for Star Wars, providing rules for smuggling
and modifying tramp freighters (such as the Millennium Falcon),
discussing life on the fringe of galactic society, and detailing a
section of space known as the Minos Cluster—a great place to
set adventures for characters with a little bit of scoundrel inside
them. Mark and Stewart used the money we paid them for Galaxy
Guide 6 to help fund the publication of their new game, a little
roleplaying game they called Vampire: The Masquerade.
More Galaxy Guides would appear later, taking the count to
a total of twelve by 1995. But the six described here were the
ones I spearheaded and worked on. Now that we had a line of
adventures and guide books established, I didn’t want to stop
there. I had ideas for additional hardcover sourcebooks to serve as
the flagship titles of the line.

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Chapter Ten:
THE SOURCEBOOKS
Nothing Beats a Good Hardcover at Your Side

T o reiterate, my first task when I took over the creative reins at

West End Games was to get the products already in the pipeline
finished and out the door. Then I had to formulate a publishing
schedule to keep the products flowing. Other than the Campaign
Pack, everything we had in the pipeline when Curtis Smith
departed was adventures. Once I got production back on a regular
schedule and we were settled into the new offices in Honesdale, we
released three adventures in quick succession during the latter half
of 1988: Tatooine Manhunt, Strike Force: Shantipole, and Battle
for the Golden Sun. We also had Paul Murphy’s last design for us
before he went to Games Workshop, a board game to follow Star
Warriors called Assault on Hoth. While I was wrangling these into
finished form, I tasked Greg Gorden with two key assignments.
First, I wanted him to put together a supplement focused on game
mechanics and built upon the work we did for the Rules Supplement.
This became the Star Wars Rules Companion. Second, I asked him
to design our second hardcover sourcebook, this one focusing on
the Empire. We called that one The Imperial Sourcebook.
I playtested Assault on Hoth with Paul during the design process.
I suggested we play a relatively new game from Milton Bradley,
Fortress America, because I thought the card mechanic they used
could inspire the design of our re-creation of the battle scene from The
Empire Strikes Back. Paul agreed and worked his own version of the
mechanic into the game. He wrapped up the design and Jeff Briggs
completed the development before they both exited the building.
Doug Kaufman did some final clean-up work before we published
the boxed set in the latter half of 1988. I thought the product turned
out well and I have fond memories of playing the game, trying to
keep the Imperial forces at bay until the last Rebel transport got away.
The Rules Companion was our first release of 1989. Greg
started with the material we created for the Rules Upgrade and
expanded from there. It included new rules options, clarifications,
and revisions to existing Force powers, as well as new powers for

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use in the game and a short adventure. Many players believe that
the original rules don’t work nearly as well without adding the
material from this product. I won’t disagree with that assessment.
Greg put a tremendous amount of effort into detailing the Empire
in The Imperial Sourcebook. I developed and edited the book, our first
hardcover after the original core products. Greg’s deft hand shines
in sections defining the organization and structure of the Empire, the
creation and organization of COMPNOR (the Commission for the
Preservation of the New Order), providing additional details about the
Imperial Security Bureau (ISB), the Imperial Military and Navy orders
of battle, custom ordnance, and recruitment and training. I wrote the
introduction, the prologue by our fictional historian Arhul Hextrophon,
and the primer on Imperial power. That section included background
material on the Empire and the Emperor that I wanted to handle, since
I knew LFL would be most concerned about what we said there. It also
featured the sidebar I wrote, “By His Own Hand,” which described the
rise of the Emperor by an unknown devotee of his work.
One of my favorite sections of the book, a two-page spread titled
“Imperial Capital Ship Recognition Guide,” features all the capital
ships detailed in the product, illustrated in scale to one another.
Greg and I worked with art director Stephen Crane to compile this
spread. You can see how small a system patrol craft appears in the
shadow of an Imperial star destroyer, for example. It even shows
the silhouette of a super star destroyer, which starts on page 64 (the
first page of the spread) but then continues with every turn of the
page until you reach the bow of the craft on page 71!
Much of the material still informs how the Empire’s organization
is described in novels, comics, and animated shows to the current
day, and it was Greg’s attention to detail that helped craft much of
that hierarchy and background.
Since we had a sourcebook devoted to the Empire, it seemed
only fair that we add one dealing with the Rebels. I charged Paul
Murphy with the task of designing the Rebel Alliance Sourcebook
after he returned to the company. We published that volume in
October 1990. Paul led the design, with additional material
provided by Mike Stern and Greg Farshtey (one of the editors
I hired after we settled into the Honesdale facility). Editing was
handled by another new hire, Jennifer Williams.

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Unlike a lot of the products we had released up to this point, the

Rebel Alliance Sourcebook was full of art created specifically for
the book and not illustrated with material pulled from the archives.
Artist Allen Nunis created wonderful black and white ink drawings
of characters and action scenes, making the book come alive. As
for content, Paul built his outline using the Imperial Sourcebook as
a guide, but he deviated as necessary to cover topics specific to the
Rebellion. From the “Birth of the Rebellion,” which detailed those
first crucial meetings between Mon Mothma and Bail Organa and
reproduced the “Formal Declaration of Rebellion,” to the state of
the Alliance to Restore the Republic as it stood after the Battle of
Yavin, the book covered the Rebels in glorious detail. It described
the organization of Rebel cells, defined Alliance High Command
and Fleet Command, and provided details on Rebel special forces.
Paul’s wargame background could be clearly seen in his diagrams
showing the fire arcs of various capital ships, battle lines, and starship
maneuver depictions (such as “the Brawl” and “the Ackbar Slash”).
He came up with some new ships, including the Rebel assault frigate
(based on the design of the Nebulon-B) and the Corellian gunship.
He described the five-stages of starfighter combat (detection, closing,
maneuver, attack, and disengagement), as well as various maneuvers
used by Rebel pilots (including the “feint and backstab” and the
“Tallon roll”). Paul, a Civil War buff, used some historical inspiration
to diagram a few famous ground-based battles the Rebels engaged
in, such as showing how the Battle of Tiems played out under the
command of General Rieekan.
With that release, the Star Wars line now included four
hardcover rulebooks and sourcebooks, two board games, multiple
Galaxy Guides, and numerous adventures.

THE SECRET PROJECT

Sometime in the latter half of 1988, Greg and I were having lunch one
day when he described an idea he had for a new roleplaying game. He
wanted to make something that would serve as a universal system, a
game that could be used to play whatever type of campaign interested
a particular game group. I was intrigued, and we talked for hours about
how to approach such a product, eventually coming around to the idea
of utilizing multiple genres in the same overarching story. This initial
discussion led to the creation of Torg: Roleplaying the Possibility Wars.

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The first step in launching a new product line was to prepare enough
material to get the project green lit by WEG’s owner, Scott Palter.
Then we had to scope the project, determine what the product line
would look like, and figure out how we were going to get the products
produced while maintaining our aggressive Star Wars schedule and
continuing to turn out the occasional product for the Ghostbusters
and Paranoia lines. The plan we set forth included an increase in staff
for the duration of the initial design period. Once WEG owner Scott
Palter approved the plan and agreed to a budget, we started looking
for a couple of game designers we could put on short-term contracts.
We approached freelance game designers Christopher Kubasik and
Ray Winninger, who agreed to spend a few months in Honesdale,
working with us to develop the rules and craft the initial products.
Greg and I split the primary design duties: He led the creation of
the rules and game mechanics, I led the creation of the campaign
setting(s) and story. Torg set forth a world much like our own, what we
referred to as “the Near Now,” and postulated an invasion by enemies
from parallel dimensions, what we called “cosms,” that each utilized
different rules of reality. These included Orrorsh, the realm of Victorian
horror, the pulp-action realm of the Nile Empire, and the prehistoric
realm of dinosaur people, the Living Land, among others. In addition
to the setting, Torg featured an innovative exploding d20 die mechanic
(meaning, you rolled again on a 10 or 20 and added the number to get
an even greater result) and a drama deck of cards that could be used by
both gamemasters and players to influence actions during play.
As the work on Torg drew more and more of my attention, certain
Star Wars products (such as The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook) went
through the system with very little oversight or involvement on
my part. It was hard to pull myself away, but I was also invested
in making sure Torg came out of the gate strong and lived up to
the vision Greg and I had for it.
Two stories about the creation of the Torg RPG.

STORY NUMBER ONE:

ALWAYS CHOOSE A CODENAME WITH CARE
It was never Greg and I’s intention to call the new game Torg. Torg
was our codename for the project. Here’s a secret. The word was an
acronym. It stood for “The Other Roleplaying Game.” Meaning, it was

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our attempt to create an RPG that could stand beside the giant in the
industry, Dungeons & Dragons. We used the codename throughout the
design process, and when the time came to actually name the product
we ran into a little problem. WEG owner Scott Palter really liked the
name Torg. Worse, he didn’t like any of our other suggestions. These
included Storm Knights, Reality Runners, and a bunch more that I no
longer remember. Once it was clear that we weren’t going to change
Scott’s mind, I set about trying to come up with a way to make the
made-up word mean something in the game. Eventually, I settled on
the idea that all the High Lords of these various invading cosms were
vying for the title of Ultimate High Lord—the Torg.
And so was born Torg: Roleplaying the Possibility Wars.

STORY NUMBER TWO:

GREG GORDEN’S MIND WORKS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS
We put in a lot of late nights when we were designing Torg: Roleplaying
the Possibility Wars. Sometimes it was the entire team, but more often
than not it was just me and Greg, working in the quiet building out in the
middle of nowhere well into the night. After we moved to Honesdale,
upper management decided that to be fair to the employees of both
companies (WEG and Bucci Imports), the WEG staff would have to
punch time cards just like the Bucci Imports employees who worked
on the first floor. We weren’t paid by the hour, like they were, but
rules were rules. Anyway, I remember one afternoon I was called into
Denise Palter’s office (Scott’s wife and one of three executives above
me in the WEG hierarchy; the other two were Richard Hawran and
Scott himself). She wanted me to explain why one of my employees,
Greg Gorden, had clocked in at 8:56 am and clocked out at 10:02 am.
“We expect a full day of work, Bill,” Denise said. I looked at the time
card, smiled, and handed it back to her. “Greg clocked in yesterday and
clocked out today. He was here all night, working.” After that, they
decided WEG staffers didn’t have to punch the time cards anymore.
During one of those late-night work sessions, as we were approaching
our final deadline, Greg and I were hammering away at our keyboards.
I was working on the campaign setting World Book while Greg was
struggling with a math problem related to the mechanics of the game.
Torg was built on a logarithmic scale, which was a level of math that
wasn’t exactly in my wheelhouse. I could see that Greg was dead on
his feet and suggested he take a nap. He could get back to the problem

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later. Greg agreed and went to lie down on a couch in one of the other
offices. A few hours later, he rushed back in. I could clearly see that he
was excited. He figured out the math problem! When I pressed him
for details, he admitted that the answer came to him in a dream. “An
elf told me,” he said. Then he grabbed a calculator to make sure the
answer was correct. It was. That’s Greg Gorden: solving complex math
problems in his sleep—with the help of an elf.
We announced the new game with a teaser campaign that began
at GenCon 1989 and continued through flavorful but mysterious ads
in Dragon Magazine until we finally revealed that “the Storm has a
Name: Torg.” We released the boxed set and first novel at GenCon
1990. I kept an eye on Star Wars during this period, but I was fully
engaged in helping Greg and the team craft our new game line.

THE END OF AN ERA

As 1990 drew to a close, I spent the bulk of my time finishing up
the Torg novel trilogy. Over in the Star Wars line, other members
of the staff were dealing with the newest adventures (including
The Isis Coordinates and Death in the Undercity) and the Rebel
Alliance Sourcebook. Mike Stern resigned his position before
we got too deep into the creation of Torg. Then Paul Murphy
decided to move on again after completing the Rebel Sourcebook,
followed shortly thereafter by Doug Kaufman and Jonatha
Caspian. Meanwhile, Greg Gorden was juggling the new Torg
line while I brought the novel trilogy to a climactic finish.
Late in 1990, after I turned in the third novel that completed the Torg
trilogy, I was told that West End Games no longer required my services.
Bucci Imports wasn’t the cash cow it had been, and I suppose money
was getting tight. I still had my New York-based salary, after all, and
WEG had shown that it could hire editors and game developers more
cheaply in Honesdale. I later learned that WEG hired three people after
I left for about what they were paying me at the time.
I learned a lot working at WEG and accomplished some memorable
things, not the least of which were the early Star Wars products we’ve
been discussing up to this point. I regretted the way West End let me
go and I knew I was going to miss helping bring more Star Wars
and Torg products to the public, but there were other changes on the
horizon that were going to make working on Star Wars very different.
And that leads us to the start of the Expanded Universe ….

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Chapter Eleven:
THE UNIVERSE
EXPANDS
I Shall Become More Powerful Than You Can Imagine

W hen one door closes, three more open. But that process can
be slow and painful before things turn around and get better.
I decided to embrace the life of a freelance game designer after
parting ways with West End, at least until I could find another staff
job that interested me. The new people hired to run the Star Wars
line in my place recognized that I could still be of service, and
since I continued to live in Honesdale—it was cheap, and I didn’t
want to pick up and move until I had a job and a destination in
mind—they decided to call on me for advice and to see if I wanted
to design a few more products for the line.
Prior to being laid off at WEG, I began to see the first signs
of what would become the Star Wars Expanded Universe. At
one point, Lucy Autrey Wilson (early on in the life of the WEG
license, Louise Riley moved on to do other things at Lucasfilm
and Lucy took over the publishing program for LFL) brought
me in to meet with Tom Veitch and Cam Kennedy, who were
in the process of creating a new Star Wars comic called Dark
Empire. Lucy had a plan to add new licenses to the brand, and
she wanted them to work together to develop a cohesive universe.
Specifically, she saw the products we had created at West End
as the foundation of this new Expanded Universe (although that
term wouldn’t come into play for a few more years), and she made
sure that Veitch and Kennedy had copies of the sourcebooks and
supplements we had created up to that point in time. And right
before I moved on, Lucy told me about a new book deal LFL
had signed. Author Timothy Zahn would write a trilogy set after
the events in Return of the Jedi. Exciting stuff, but it meant the
landscape was changing. New West End Games staff Bill Smith
and Ed Stark, along with remaining staffer Greg Farshtey, would
have to navigate an increasingly crowded licensing empire, and

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the days of creating material from scratch and defining large

portions of the universe was going to shift from the little hobby
game company to the bigger publishers such as Bantam Spectra
and DK Publishing.
(What about Greg Gorden? Greg resigned his position shortly
after I was let go, sticking around just long enough to point new
staffers Bill and Ed in the right direction.)
One of the first things I did to occupy my time after going
freelance was to read Tim Zahn’s manuscript for his novel Heir to
the Empire. Lucy asked me to review it and give her my opinion.
LFL had provided Zahn with a box of WEG products and told
him not to contradict anything we had already established.
As Tim tells the tale, he was slightly taken aback by having to
adhere to material produced for a game, but once he dug into the
books he found lots of ideas he could use in his story. He could
concentrate on plot and characters and let the WEG material
provide background and everyday ships, aliens, and equipment
for him to use. Not having to reinvent the wheel gave him more
time to put his efforts into the story itself. Things he drew from
our material to use in his story included the interdictor cruiser and
zero-g troopers from The Imperial Sourcebook. I sent my notes to
Lucy, and Zahn made many of the changes I suggested.
Around the same time, Bill Smith asked me to design a couple
of products for the Star Wars line. He let me decide what I wanted
to work on, and I pitched an adventure (Graveyard of Alderaan)
and a supplement (Death Star Technical Companion). Bill
had also decided to produce a second edition of the Star Wars
Roleplaying Game, and he would come by my house after work
on many evenings to discuss his plans and get my feedback on the
changes he wanted to make to the game.
Graveyard of Alderaan hit the shelves early in 1991, followed by
the Death Star Technical Companion in October of the same year.
The former was a straightforward adventure where player
characters were sent to the ruined asteroid field known as the
Graveyard—all that remained of the planet Alderaan after it was
destroyed by the first Death Star—to recover the lost secret of the
Royal Family of Alderaan. The adventure took place, in part, on
the Ithorian herd ship Bazaar.

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The latter, a supplement for the RPG, detailed the Death Star in
all its glory. Much of the historical information I provided was made
obsolete twenty-five years later by the film Rogue One: A Star Wars
Story, but I’m still proud of what I came up with concerning the
“technological terror” the Empire developed. I defined Grand Moff
Tarkin’s doctrine of fear—the Tarkin Doctrine—his plan for using
the Death Star and other weapons of mass destruction to keep the
various star and planetary systems in line. Since there was no way
to fully detail a base the size of a moon in just 96 pages, I revisited
the idea of Imperial mass production to explain that the Death Star
consisted of zones that were self-sufficient and replicated multiple
times to form the giant sphere. What never occurred to me at the
time was that some engineer had actually built the flaw that the
Rebels took advantage of right into the structure. My wife Michele
figured that out some years later and was gratified to see it revealed
in the Rogue One film, but alas, I missed that plot point back when
I originally wrote the supplement. It would have been a great idea
to include if I had thought of it at the time.
With the release of Zahn’s novel in June, the Expanded
Universe was off to the races. From that point forward, WEG had
to reinvent its product line. The Death Star Technical Companion
was the last product to delve into an area of the films and set out
to explain it in great detail. After that, WEG’s supplements and
sourcebooks either covered a novel or comic from the growing
Expanded Universe, or they developed a region of space for their
own use, such as Brak Sector and the Darkstryder Campaign.
I’d wind up writing two more books for West End Games before
a new staff job took me away from the life of a full-time freelancer.
I wrote the sourcebooks for Zahn’s first two novels, Heir to the
Empire and Dark Force Rising. Shortly after I took on the contract
to write the sourcebooks for Zahn’s novel trilogy, I was hired by
TSR, Inc. (the publishers of Dungeons & Dragons) and moved
to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. After finishing the first two books, I
bowed out of the third because I was becoming too busy to devote
the time and energy needed to bring the final volume to its grand
conclusion. This was also the period when I was writing a book for
Lucasfilm, A Guide to the Star Wars Universe, and I deemed that
project to be more crucial than writing a third Zahn sourcebook.

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As my professional relationship through West End Games

developed with Lucy Autrey Wilson of LFL, she would talk about
finding a way to somehow have ready access to all the Star Wars
knowledge bouncing around in my head. We talked about whether
there was a position for me at Lucasfilm Licensing, but nothing
ever materialized while I was a free agent. But Lucy did figure
out one way to collect what I knew so others could make use of it.
She offered me a contract to create a new edition of a guidebook
that had been released back in 1984. That book featured 951
alphabetical entries spread across 215 pages. The one I wrote
expanded to 495 pages and was published in March 1994.
A Guide to the Star Wars Universe solidified my reputation as a
Star Wars expert and made me (along with my editor, Sue Rostoni)
the gatekeeper of what was and wasn’t canon. First, there was no
way to fit everything that had been created up to that point in the
pages I had been provided with. Entries had to be prioritized. I
started with people, places, and things from the movies, original
novelizations, and radio plays. Then I drew upon the best things
we created at West End Games, as well as the best ideas from the
new products emerging for the Expanded Universe. We included
a note at the beginning of the book, identifying entries that came
from an original Lucasfilm source and those that came from an
official licensed product that might or might not agree with George
Lucas’s ultimate vision. Plus, just as when I reviewed material at
WEG, if something in a book or comic didn’t feel particularly
Star Wars to me, I conveniently omitted it from the manuscript.

LIKE A PROUD PARENT

The Expanded Universe grew at an amazing rate, considering
how desolate the field had been when WEG first got the
license. Novels, comics, reference books, toys, statues, holiday
ornaments, and more were emerging with every new agreement
the Licensing team signed. And each of those licensees received a
box of WEG products or a copy of my guide to help them navigate
the complexities of Star Wars lore. As more new products
emerged, I would see more of the things I had created or help
create come into common usage as part of the Star Wars universe.
When Hasbro resurrected the action figure line and toys called

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Ithorians, Rodians, and Twi’leks began hitting the shelves, that

was mindboggling and gratifying to me on so many levels.
Meanwhile, I went on to work on products for the Dungeons
& Dragons roleplaying game and to create a new science fiction
roleplaying game called Alternity. And over at West End Games,
they continued to turn out products, including a new offering
for Star Wars called the Adventure Journal. This digest-sized
paperback featured adventures, game statistics, and short stories
(including a few by now fan-favorite Timothy Zahn). It also
gave Star Wars fan Pablo Hidalgo (later to become the face of
the Lucasfilm Story Group) his first professional work in the
Star Wars universe. Nothing lasts forever, though, and even as
the Expanded Universe was growing larger and stronger, West
End Games was nearing its end. The final Star Wars product in
the WEG line was published in 1998, right before the company
declared bankruptcy.

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 DEFINING A GALAXY

Chapter Twelve:
PREQUELS AND D20
They Keep Drawing Me Back In

I went on several promising interviews that didn’t result in

any actual job offers during 1991-92, the period when I was
freelancing. FASA, Origin Systems, and TSR, Inc. flew me out
for interviews, but for one reason or another, nothing clicked.
During this period, I produced products on a freelance basis for
West End Games, GDW, and TSR, Inc., and I secured the contract
with Lucasfilm to write the second edition of A Guide to the Star
Wars Universe. As my second full year as a freelancer neared
completion, I was beginning to go a little stir crazy. I admit it. I
missed working in an office, and I missed collaborating with other
people. You do some collaboration as a freelancer, but mostly
you sit alone in an empty house (or wherever your designated
workspace happens to be) and try to stick to your deadlines by
avoiding all the things that try desperately to distract you. And
when you’re not doing the work (I freelanced as both a designer
and an editor during this time), you’re making calls or sending
notes to secure your next contract to keep the cash flowing and
the bill collectors at bay.
Shortly after GenCon 1992, Tim Brown at TSR, Inc. called
me. He had been the Creative Director (also known as a CD) for
a few of the projects I had worked on for the company during
my freelance period, including the Ravenloft adventure Night
of the Walking Dead and a couple of products for the new Dark
Sun campaign setting. He wanted to let me know that he was
taking over as the Director of R&D, replacing Jim Ward, who
was moving on to a special assignment for Lorraine Williams,
the president of the company. If I was still interested in the job I
interviewed for the year before, he wanted to offer it to me.
With the caveat that I be allowed to fulfill my existing
freelance contracts (including a couple of books for WEG and
the LFL contract for the guide), we came to terms and I started
as a designer/editor at TSR, Inc. in January 1993. (I remember

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making the drive to Lake Geneva so that I could arrive in time

to watch the premier of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which aired
Sunday night on January 3; my start date was Monday, January
4.) I worked on a bunch of projects during the Lake Geneva
years, including Council of Wyrms (which provided rules for
dragons as player characters), a couple of Planescape adventures,
projects for Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Dragon Dice, and the Alternity
Science Fiction RPG. The latter came out of a pitch I put together
and delivered to upper management at the local movie theater,
complete with slides shown on the big screen, hand-outs, and a
stirring soundtrack. I put forth that TSR could dominate all genres
of roleplaying if we released an RPG that covered science fiction
the way D&D covered fantasy. The proposal outlined a pair of
rulebooks (one for players and one for gamemasters) and add-on
campaign settings along the lines of D&D’s Forgotten Realms
and Ravenloft. The first of these would cover the far-future of the
Star-Drive universe, followed by the modern-day conspiracies of
Dark Matter (“all that we see is not all that there is”).
Before we delve too deeply into Alternity, which happened near
the end of TSR’s existence, there were some Star Wars things that
occurred along the way. I wrote the Heir to the Empire and Dark
Force Rising Sourcebooks while I was freelancing, and they were
published in 1992. When I got to TSR, I was actively working on
both A Guide to the Star Wars Universe and the third Zahn tie-in,
The Last Command Sourcebook. With the new day job, though,
time was slipping away. I decided to concentrate on the book for
LFL and requested that WEG let me out of the contract for the
sourcebook. They agreed.
Shortly after joining the TSR staff, a couple of my new
colleagues talked me into running a Star Wars game. Thus began a
long-running campaign using the D6 System that lasted well into
our first few years in Seattle, after Wizards of the Coast purchased
the company and moved much of the staff to the West Coast.
The first players in that campaign included Steven Schend, Dale
Donovan, Michele Carter, and Lester Smith. Other notables, such
as Wolfgang Baur, Jeff Grubb, David Wise, and Thomas Reid came
and went as the campaign progressed. Developing and running
that campaign reinvigorated my love of Star Wars and helped

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me make the big push to finish up the Guide. I even dedicated

the volume to the four primary players and their characters from
the initial months of the campaign. Of course, I also discovered
that the D6 System wasn’t designed to take the same group of
characters through five years of constant play. Somewhere along
the line, Lester’s Jedi (Fahjay) was rolling seventy or more six-
sided dice and we had left the Difficulty Numbers Chart a few light
years in the dust. By that point, I was winging it, making things
up as we went along. Whatever served the story and advanced the
plot while keeping the players engaged and having fun, that was
my mantra. We all rolled buckets full of dice, compared some
numbers, and I decided what happened. We had a grand time and
it turned out to be one of the most memorable campaigns I ever
ran—even as the game system became increasingly unwieldy as
the campaign rolled on.

ANOTHER SCIENCE FICTION GAME

I made the Alternity pitch sometime in late 1995 or early 1996.
This was before the problems at TSR became readily apparent
to the staff. Lester Smith worked with me to brainstorm the
rudimentary game mechanics we were going to utilize for the
presentation. Lester would have been my co-designer on the
project, but right after we got the go-ahead to put the product line
on the schedule, he decided to leave the company. He wanted to
design games that interested him more than what we were doing
at TSR. Lester loved board and card games, and while he enjoyed
working on roleplaying games, he really wanted to create little
games that he could own all the rights to. I wished him well and
looked around for another designer. My next choice was Richard
Baker, who I had collaborated with a bit on Dark Sun products.
Upper management agreed.
The Alternity team consisted of me (the lead designer), Rich
(my co-designer), David Eckelberry and Jim Butler (development
and additional design), Kim Mohan (editing), and eventually
R.K. Post (art). The first series of layoffs hit the company just
as we were getting started. Our Creative Director was one of
the people let go, so I was given the task of both managing the
team and serving as lead designer. The one good thing to come

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out of this period was that my team had something interesting

and engaging to work on while the rest of the company was
floundering. Other brand teams slowly ran out of projects as
future schedules remained unapproved and in limbo, but my
team soldiered on, making sure Alternity was going to be ready
regardless of whatever else happened.
Rescue eventually arrived in the form of Peter Adkison and the
company he founded, the creators of the collectable trading card
game, Wizards of the Coast. Flush with money from the success
of Magic: The Gathering, Peter decided to diversify the Wizards
portfolio by adding the TSR properties. Besides, he really loved
D&D. He could have purchased the company and its assets without
retaining any of the staff, but he went out of his way to keep as
much of the TSR team together as possible. He even allowed us
to print a limited edition of the Alternity Player’s Handbook to
release at GenCon 1997, just a couple of short months after the
purchase was finalized. (At the time, the GenCon game fair was
run by TSR.) I still remember sitting in the warehouse with Rich
Baker, numbering the freshly printed books by hand and adding
our signatures so we could sell them at GenCon. And right after
GenCon ended, those of us who were making the trip to the West
Coast packed up our belongings and headed for Seattle.

R&D DIRECTOR
Once we were safely entrenched in the Wizards offices in Renton,
WA (we always said Seattle, but the offices were just to the south
in Renton), Peter had to determine who was going to run the TSR
division. He decided to keep TSR mostly intact, a subsidiary inside
the larger organization. He selected me to serve on a committee to
find a suitable leader. Peter had initially planned to handle the job
himself, but the board of directors wanted him to concentrate on
another important task and he didn’t have the time to devote all
his attention to TSR. (Later, we would learn that Peter was going
to be busy determining whether to take the company public or sell
it to a larger conglomerate. Eventually, selling the company won
out, and by late 1999 Wizards, with its little TSR division, would
become part of Hasbro—makers of action figures, family board
games, and toys of all shapes and sizes.)

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The committee interviewed something on the order of a

dozen different contenders for the position of head of TSR. This
included people from Wizards, people from TSR or who had ties
to TSR before it was purchased, and a few likely prospects from
elsewhere in the hobby game industry. None of them exactly fit
the bill, and the committee couldn’t agree to select any of them.
One night after we had finished another grueling interview
session with another hopeful but ultimately unsuitable candidate,
I got a call from Peter. He told me that he was kicking me off the
committee. Not sure what I had done wrong, I naturally asked
why I was being removed. “Because we’re going to interview
you tomorrow,” he said. “For what?” I asked. “For the TSR lead
position.” I never put my name in the running for the position and
hadn’t even considered such a leap up the ladder. I was just happy
to still have a job and content to continue working as the Creative
Director for the Alternity line, but the decision was out of my
hands. “Talk to your wife. See you tomorrow.” And that was that.
Peter and the committee, minus myself, interviewed me the next
day. I assumed that the result was going to be the same as with
the previous candidates, but my assumption was wrong. After the
interview ended, Peter had a brief conversation behind closed
doors with the committee. Then he informed me that he was
putting me in charge of the TSR unit inside Wizards of the Coast.
Initially, that included the creative staff and product line schedule,
as well as the brand and financial aspects of the business unit.
My primary goal in that first year was to meld the TSR business
into the Wizards hierarchy by keeping what I considered the best
parts of how we worked while incorporating the best practices
we saw at WotC. I needed to get the publication schedule back on
track and settle the staff into a new environment, because just as
with West End years before, we had suspended publication and
moved to a brand new location. Later, the brand and business
functions would be spun off and I would concentrate on the area I
preferred to deal with, which was developing the product lines and
managing the creative aspects of the business. I transitioned to the
position of R&D Director for D&D and roleplaying games (and
later, miniatures, novels, and board games). I held that position
for fourteen years.

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TSR AND THE ROCKY ROAD TO SCIENCE FICTION

TSR, Inc. had a long history with genres other than Dungeons
& Dragons, but none of them really stuck, at least not the
way D&D did. From the early days of Metamorphosis Alpha,
Gamma World, and Star Frontiers, to Buck Rogers and Amazing
Engine, and finally to Alternity, TSR tried to make science
fiction as popular as medieval fantasy for the roleplaying game
aficionado. Each game had its fans and time in the sun, but
for a variety of reasons, none of them ever made a splash the
way D&D did. Alternity, my attempt at giving the company a
SF game with the potential to be as big as D&D, achieved a
certain level of success before it was sidelined by a change in
business plans.
Remember, we conceived Alternity as a companion line to TSR’s
flagship Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition line back
when we thought TSR was still a vibrant and ongoing business.
After the collapse of TSR and the purchase of the company by
Wizards, the old business plan’s days were numbered. When it
became clear that we were going to produce a new edition of
Dungeons & Dragons (this would drop the word “Advanced” and
add the moniker “3rd Edition” or “3E”), we came to the decision
that we wanted to concentrate our efforts and the attention of the
fans on a single game system—the D20 System at the core of the
new edition of D&D. The D20 System learned a few lessons from
the Alternity game, including the idea of a core mechanic, but it
appeared that science fiction was going to once again take a back
seat to the crown jewel of TSR, D&D.
With the release of 3rd Edition in August 2000, we retired the
TSR logo and started publishing all products under the Wizards
of the Coast banner. D&D now had a version that was built upon
a core game mechanic. A mechanic that, at its heart, was easy
to understand and relatively easy to utilize: roll a d20 and add a
modifier to try to get as high a result as possible.
The idea of science fiction wasn’t completely dead at the
company, however. We’d use the core D20 System mechanic
to expand WotC’s roleplaying game offerings into other genres,
starting with Star Wars in November of that same year.

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ANOTHER STAR WARS LICENSE

The first new Star Wars film in sixteen years debuted in May 1999.
As the build-up to the release approached, I was busy working on
the 3rd edition of A Guide to the Star Wars Universe (this was a
revised and expanded version of the book I wrote and published in
1994) in my free time, while overseeing the D&D creative team and
the development of the 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons during
the day in my role as R&D Director. Around that time, Wizards
of the Coast decided to approach Lucasfilm Licensing and make a
pitch to acquire the license to produce Star Wars hobby games now
that West End Games was out of the picture. Prominent members
of the WotC team involved in the negotiations included Brand
Director Ryan Dancey, Brand Manager Lisa Stevens, Marketing
Director Liz Schuh, and myself as the R&D lead. My connection
and existing relationship with LFL helped kick off the conversation,
but the deal didn’t come together overnight.
We made multiple trips to Skywalker Ranch, showing
presentations and promoting the benefits and advantages of
working with Wizards of the Coast. We finally reached a
tentative agreement when the landscape dramatically changed.
In September 1999, Hasbro finalized the deal to purchase WotC.
Now that WotC was part of the Hasbro family, who already had
an ongoing business relationship with LFL, the deal for the RPG
license was rushed to completion.
As part of the negotiations process, I outlined the parameters of the
RPG design and presented it to Lucasfilm Licensing. Lucy Autrey
Wilson, somewhat nervous about us creating a new game system and
abandoning the original D6 System, eventually saw the benefit of
building the new game system on the same engine we were creating
for the new Dungeons & Dragons game. Suddenly the huge number
of D&D players would immediately understand how to play Star
Wars because both games would utilize the same core mechanics. To
assuage any remaining trepidations, we built an in-perpetuity clause
into the contract. After WotC’s license ended, if LFL wanted, they
could have passed the D20 System version of the game on to the next
publisher. By the time that happened, though, different people were
running LFL and the new license (with Fantasy Flight Games) would
decide to utilize a third new game design.

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D20 STAR WARS

I served as lead designer for WotC’s Star Wars Roleplaying Game.
Andy Collins and JD Wiker were my co-designers. We created a
game that was as robust and expandable as D&D 3E, but wherever
possible we simplified the mechanics to make gamemastering
and play faster and easier, always pushing the game toward a
cinematic feel and trying to make it good for storytelling. Wizards
published the Star Wars Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook in
November 2000, just a few months after the launch of D&D 3E.
This was followed by the Revised Core Rulebook in May 2002 (to
coincide with the release of Episode II: Attack of the Clones) and
the Saga Edition (by Christopher Perkins, Owen KC Stephens,
and Rodney Thompson) in June 2007.
At WotC, creating products for Star Wars faced different
challenges from the ones that the original line of Star Wars
RPG products for West End Games had to deal with. Unlike
when I first worked with the license, we were no longer the
only source of Star Wars information being produced. Heck,
we weren’t even the primary source. In a market dominated by
novels, computer games, comics, toys, and anything else LFL
thought a Star Wars logo would look good on, hobby games
came in at the bottom of the ladder. We simply didn’t have the
customer base or channel placement at the time to generate the
revenue of the bigger licensees. Plus, everything related to the
original trilogy had already been defined and expanded upon
by WEG, and the new films had the Cross-Sections and Visual
Dictionaries from DK Books, among a host of other products
releasing at a constant rate. This time out, Wizards would have
to produce products specifically for use with the roleplaying
game, which was a fine thing to be doing. But it did require
that I adjust my approach to creating a Star Wars product line
and determining how we would go about writing Star Wars for
the D20 System.
We threw relatively big launch events for D&D 3rd Edition and
D20 Star Wars. One of the events we held for the new Star Wars
game took place at the local Planet Hollywood in Seattle. We
invited the press and the public to come in, enjoy refreshments,

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mingle with Star Wars personalities Jake Lloyd (young Anakin

Skywalker) and Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca), and play the game
with various members of the WotC design team. Now, roleplaying
game sessions don’t often translate into a spectator sport. But
we wanted to make our game demos as splashy and intriguing
as possible. So, utilizing techniques we introduced a few months
earlier at GenCon that were inspired by practices I used in my
home campaigns, we ran the game sessions using Star Wars action
figures and detailed dioramas. The familiar action figures made
the strange dice and group storytelling a little more accessible to
new players—plus, they were just fun to play with. By the end
of the event, we had talked to the press, played lots of games,
and introduced the idea of roleplaying to a number of people who
came in just because what we were doing looked interesting and
dealt with Star Wars. (And serving free refreshments might have
helped a little, as well.)
WotC published eleven products for use with the Core
Rulebook, including three I worked on: Star Wars: Invasion of
Theed Adventure Game (basically a starter game for the RPG),
Rebellion Era Sourcebook (co-designed by Steve Miller and Owen
KC Stephens), and The Dark Side Sourcebook (co-designed by JD
Wiker). For the Revised Core Rulebook, WotC added another nine
products. For the Saga Edition, named for the fact that it was the
first rules set to include all the movies released up to that point
in time (it spanned the entire Star Wars saga), WotC produced an
additional fifteen products.
Thomas Reid, one of the TSR transplants from Lake Geneva,
initially served as my Creative Director for the Star Wars line.
When Thomas decided to move his family back to their native
Texas, I brought Christopher Perkins over from the Wizards
magazine team to take control of the line. Chris had lent his
considerable talents to Dragon and Dungeon Magazines, as well
as to Star Wars Gamer, a magazine we started to support the game
license after Wizards acquired it. It was his work on Star Wars
Gamer in particular that convinced me he was the right person
to manage the line, and it wasn’t long before he became my right
hand for all things D&D and Star Wars.

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KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC

When BioWare began to work on the Knights of the Old Republic
computer game, LFL asked them to utilize the D20 game
system we had just designed for Star Wars. I spent a few months
reviewing material and making suggestions to their paper design
documents—a huge stack of pages that more or less resembled
one of our RPG rules manuscripts—helping to guide them to use
just enough of the tabletop game to make it recognizable but not
so much that it slowed down the fast play of a computer game.
The plan was that KotOR would release bearing the D20
System logo and credit me, Andy, and JD for the creation of the
original game system utilized by the computer game. It would
have been a great promotion for the RPG line and probably
would have brought a few computer and console gamers our
way to at least check out our product offerings. Unfortunately,
Wizards’ relationship with our new parent company, Hasbro, got
in the way of those plans. Even though the KotOR deal had been
well underway at the time, when Hasbro sold its computer game
division to Infogrames (including the rights to make games for
D&D and our other properties), it was decided that it was best
not to confuse the issue and cause any complications with the
new partners. We were asked to request that LFL not include our
information on the KotOR box. We were disappointed, and many
of our fans were confused since they recognized that KotOR used
the D20 game system, apparently without giving us any credit.
Some of them thought that BioWare had ripped us off. But no, we
worked with them to create the game mechanics for the computer
game and then requested that the work remain a secret. I still
wonder if the success of KotOR would have translated into more
players for the D20 System had our logo and cross-promotional
information been included as originally planned.

MEMORIES AROUND THE D20 SYSTEM

We made a lot of trips to Skywalker Ranch leading up to finalizing
the license and releasing the initial RPG products from WotC.
And we would continue to visit the Ranch a few times every
year during the life of the contract, discussing product plans and
participating in story meetings with other licensees.

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During the original negotiations, I was also busy finalizing

the manuscript for the 3rd edition of A Guide to the Star Wars
Universe. The revised and expanded volume, more than one
hundred pages longer than the previous edition, included material
from across the Expanded Universe and the new movie (Episode
I: The Phantom Menace). It was published in October 2000, just a
month before we launched the new Star Wars RPG.
I remember visiting Steve Sansweet’s ranch in Petaluma, about
forty minutes or so from Skywalker Ranch. Steve, head of Lucasfilm
Fan Relations at the time and perhaps the greatest collector of Star
Wars memorabilia on the planet, housed his vast collection in the
barn next to his house. We got to see the beginnings of what is now
Rancho Obi-Wan, a nonprofit museum, before it attained that lofty
position. Every time we came to visit and look around, Steve had
added something new or made an improvement to the facility, and
he always had interesting stories to tell concerning the many, many
items in his one-of-a-kind collection.
Being part of the extended Lucasfilm family during a period
when George Lucas was busy making new movies added a whole
new level of excitement to the process. We got to see the films in
various stages of production, and I fondly remember meeting with
art director Doug Chiang on at least one occasion to discuss the
look and feel of the new films and how we could utilize that look
in our product line. Being part of the family, however, meant that
you couldn’t be surprised by the new movies like a regular fan. We
got advance looks at concept art, photos, models, and scripts—the
ultimate spoilers for fans of the franchise. Security on this material
was intense, and things like scripts were available only to a select
few in our company, myself included. They were numbered and
watermarked so that if our copy happened to make it out into the
wider world, LFL would be able to trace the leak back to us. That
never happened, and we made sure to be extra careful with the
advance material they provided to us—material we used to produce
products to coincide with the release of the films.
The moments that stand out the most were attending Howard
Roffman’s presentation of each new movie to kick off that phase
of the license. A small group of invited guests, usually a couple
of people from Wizards and a couple of our counterparts from

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Hasbro, among others, filled into the small but comfortable theater
at Skywalker Ranch. Then, using concept art, story boards, photos
taken on set during filming, and animatronics, Howard would act out
the stories of Episode II and Episode III. I admit it, I liked Howard’s
renditions of these films better than the versions ultimately released
in the theaters. Howard’s telling had more heart and soul, and he
certainly brought a level of fun to the proceedings that somehow,
for me, never translated to the finished prequel films.
And at some point along the way, LFL moved out of Skywalker
Ranch and took up residence at the Presidio in San Francisco.
These facilities were no less awe-inspiring than the Ranch, but I
missed the quiet and the natural beauty that made those visits to San
Rafael so memorable. At the Presidio, there was more space, a cool
bronze statue of Yoda at the entrance, a huge cafeteria with multiple
food stations each serving different fare, and a larger company store
to shop in. Plus, they had loads of original art from our products
(among others) decorating the walls. The Presidio is cool, but to me
it was missing some of the charm and attitude of the Ranch.

KEEPER OF THE HOLOCRON

One of Lucy Autrey Wilson’s ulterior motives for getting me
to write A Guide to the Star Wars Universe was to create the
one reference that every licensee could use to make Star Wars
products. It was a noble goal, but one better suited to a computer
database than a thick book that could only be updated to include
new material every few years. Creating a database wasn’t part of
my skill set at that time, but the idea continued to nag at the back
of Lucy’s mind. So, as part of the contract with Wizards, we had
to provide a portion of the funds required to hire someone with
those skills who would work at Lucasfilm Licensing.
We interviewed a couple of people for the job, including Pablo
Hidalgo and Leland Chee.
Pablo had been a freelancer at WEG after my time there,
mostly contributing to the Adventure Journal. (Interesting story.
By the time Pablo had come on the scene, LFL had instituted
a new rule that WEG could only hire credited professionals
to work on anything related to Star Wars. When Pablo first
pitched some article ideas to editor Peter Schweighofer, they

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were rejected because Pablo had no previous published work.

The same restriction didn’t extend to artwork, however, so
Pablo was first hired to create cartoons for the Adventure
Journal. After that, as a credited creator, they were able to buy
his articles and adventures.) He was up for two possible jobs at
Lucasfilm—this one with Licensing and another working on the
Community Web Team with Steve Sansweet. I had met Pablo
at conventions and we were friendly, but I didn’t know him that
well back then. He was following in my footsteps, however,
going down a path that I might have pursued if I hadn’t hooked
up with TSR and Wizards. Pablo would eventually take the
latter position and now serves as a creative executive with the
Lucasfilm Story Group.
Leland, who was working at LucasArts at the time, did get
the job in Licensing. He immediately started work to create an
extensive database that he called “the Holocron” (named after a
Jedi and Sith artifact first introduced in the Dark Empire comic
series; the name was short for holographic chronicle and they have
since appeared in Star Wars Rebels). Leland became our primary
contact for material related to the new films, periodically sending
encoded disks full of images and other material. This version of
the Holocron could be installed and accessed on our computers
at work. We also received a passcode to connect with the live
Holocron, but that came a little later in the process.
At some point, I gave Leland the credit of “Keeper of the
Holocron.” The first published version of that title that I could
find appears in The Dark Side Sourcebook, August 2001. The
exact credit is “Special thanks to … Keeper of the Holocron
Leland Y. Chee.” It’s the perfect title, and one he uses to this
day. (It’s his credit at the end of The Force Awakens and The
Last Jedi, for example.)
Leland and Pablo have become the go-to people for continuity
issues related to Star Wars, expanding upon the role I initially
fell into through my work at WEG, my relationship with the LFL
team, and the publication of two editions of A Guide to the Star
Wars Universe. For me, it was just one of many roles I had to fill
in those early days when all this expanded material was starting
out. For Leland, it became his primary focus, and he excels at it.

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MINIATURES
Wizards produced more than just roleplaying game products
under the license from LFL. WotC released ten issues of Star
Wars Gamer Magazine, which helped bring Christopher Perkins
to the attention of the RPG team. He now serves as one of the
primary movers and shakers for D&D. We also created what
was perhaps the crowning achievement of the Wizards Star
Wars product line—painted plastic miniatures. Just as D&D 3E
laid the groundwork for our design of the Star Wars RPG, D&D
Miniatures served as a sort of proof of concept that we could take
to LFL when we pitched this expansion to our product line.
We brought the first production run of the painted plastic D&D
miniatures to LFL, along with sculpts of Darth Maul to show them
what we could do for Star Wars. The first set of D&D Miniatures
released in September 2003. They served as both game pieces for
a skirmish-based minis game and for use when playing the RPG.
Hot on the heels of that release, we immediately got to work on a
version of the product for Star Wars.
I put together a strike team to develop the rules for the Star
Wars Miniatures Game. It included myself, Jonathan Tweet, Jeff
Grubb, and Rob Watkins. We started with the rules used in the
D&D skirmish game, and I established the same caveats that
dictated the design of the RPG: wherever possible, simplify the
rules; strive to re-create the tone and energy of the Star Wars
films; and work to make the game fast to play and easy to learn.
The initial set, Rebel Storm, included sixty figures drawn from the
original Star Wars trilogy and featured a Starter Set for skirmish
play. It debuted in September 2004. The rulebook opened with a
section that described three ways to use the miniatures: you could
collect them (figures were rated from common to very rare), you
could play head-to-head skirmish battles against your friends, and
you could use them in your Star Wars RPG campaign.
Why did we go with painted plastic instead of metal? Well, D&D
had tried to sell metal miniatures with the Chainmail game that
debuted around the same time as 3rd Edition. The problem with
metal miniatures, in my estimation, is that they require a customer
who possesses three distinct skill sets and interests—someone
who wants to assemble the miniatures, who wants to paint the

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miniatures, and who wants to use them in either a roleplaying game

or a miniatures game. That’s a lot of interests to ask of a single
customer. Painted plastic miniatures, on the other hand, come ready
to use right out of the box, no assembly or painting required. Since
time was becoming even more of a premium for our customers, the
convenience of painted plastic made more sense to me. To avoid the
abundance of product stock keeping units (SKUs) that made many
metal miniatures lines problematic, we decided to adopt the blind
purchase model as developed by collectible games such as Magic:
The Gathering. A single SKU with each release was easier to stock
and display at the retail level, and the practice of selling single cards
had already been developed for Magic, so anyone who wanted to
collect a specific figure could find it if they were willing to pay for
a single or trade for it.
After the initial release, Rob Watkins was tasked with
developing the line. I worked with him to create a figure list for
each set and get it approved by LFL. Then I consulted with the art
director to create sketches for the sculptors in China to work from.
Rob, meanwhile, would create the game statistics for each figure,
playtest various scenarios, iterate as necessary, and then do it all
over again for the next set.
Between 2004 and 2010, Wizards produced more than 950 unique
character, vehicle, and starship miniature figures over the course of
seventeen standard releases and numerous special products. One of
my favorite pieces was the scale model of the All-Terrain Armored-
Transport (AT-AT) we released in 2005. This wasn’t a miniature,
it was massive! Shortly after we began working on the Star Wars
Miniatures line, I decided to see what a version of the Imperial
Walker would look like in the same scale as our miniature character
figures. I took one of the side-view illustrations of the AT-AT and
used our photocopier to blow it up until it looked right standing
next to one of our 30mm figures. To produce the AT-AT in scale, it
would be the largest miniature we had ever created—the Colossal
dragons for D&D wouldn’t come out until the following year. If my
calculations were correct, the AT-AT miniature would stand more
than a foot high and require a base that was ten inches long. I went
to the production person for the line (it was Chas DeLong at the
time) and asked if we could make a figure of this size in plastic.

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He shook his head and said no, but promised he’d think about
it. He came back a while later and said, “Yeah, we can do that.”
That’s what I wanted to hear! We started working on the product in
earnest, making sure to add a grid-lined base so that smaller figures
could move around beneath the AT-AT during play. I still have one
of these fine models on display in my home office, a fond memory
of a more civilized time.

LETTING THE LICENSE LAPSE

The problem with a license is that in addition to all the other
associated costs, you also must give a portion of the proceeds
to the licensor. As part of Hasbro, Wizards had certain profit
margins to maintain and returns on investments to achieve. We
had an extremely difficult time accomplishing that with the Star
Wars products, especially in the latter years of the license. In other
words, profit wasn’t good enough to maintain a corporate interest
in the line. We were tasked with earning a specific level of profit
with each product and over the course of the entire product line,
and that was hard to achieve when the percentage we had to pay
to LFL was factored into the equation.
As 2010 approached, the state of the Star Wars galaxy was almost
diametrically opposite from when WEG had originally acquired
the license, or even when WotC acquired it about ten years earlier.
The Expanded Universe continued to churn out material, but it was
becoming rote by then. The prequels were behind us, and although
an excellent new animated show called Clone Wars was playing
on Cartoon Network, there wasn’t anything Hasbro or Wizards
considered major on the horizon that would spur sales back to the
levels we saw when we first launched the product line.
When it came time to renew the license at the end of 2009,
Wizards informed LFL that they would not be exercising their
option. And that was the end of that. The last product for Star
Wars produced by Wizards of the Coast was released in April
2010. Another era for me and Star Wars ended. What happened
next? I experienced an entirely different level of excitement
as I transitioned from involved creator to interested fan and
enthusiastic bystander seeing things I helped create take on a life
of their own as Star Wars continued to produce new content.

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Chapter Thirteen:
THE NEW (D isney )
ORDER
What WEG Created Still Influences the Brand Today

I n 2011, Wizards of the Coast and I parted company. As with my

departure from West End Games twenty years before, I didn’t have a
lot of say in the matter. On the Star Wars front, the Clone Wars animated
series was still going strong, but the publishing program was slowing
down. The waves of new novels had become much less frequent, and
even toys and other licensed properties seemed to be entering a more
cautious stage of production and release. As the year came to an end,
I landed a job with ZeniMax Online Studios in Maryland, reuniting
with tabletop game design legends Zeb Cook, Lawrence Schick, and
Ed Stark. Also at the end of 2011, Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO
launched. Set thousands of years before Episode I, it provided a new
venue for stories in that galaxy far, far away.
By the end of 2012, I was firmly entrenched as a senior writer
for The Elder Scrolls Online computer and console game. Star
Wars, I thought, was behind me. That was another time, another
life, and not much was happening with the brand anyway. Nothing
until Fantasy Flight Games unveiled a new version of the Star
Wars RPG in August. And then the unimaginable happened. First,
George Lucas tagged Kathleen Kennedy to take over as the head
of Lucasfilm, indicating that he planned to retire and hinting
that Lucasfilm would become an active studio again. Then Mr.
Lucas sold the company to Disney in a deal that was finalized in
December of that year. I know people who immediately bemoaned
the sale and proclaimed that “the Mouse was going to ruin Star
Wars!” I didn’t share that fear. Disney had done well with Pixar
and Marvel, allowing those brands to more or less manage
themselves. Marvel, in particular, demonstrated what happened
when you allowed people who knew and loved the brand to make
movies: You got good movies that were faithful to the source
material. I assumed the same would be true for Star Wars.

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NEW MOVIES AND OTHER EXCITEMENT

A lot happened regarding Star Wars in 2013, and I paid rapt attention
from my place on the sidelines. First, Lucasfilm announced that J.J.
Abrams would direct the first movie of a new trilogy—the first new
Star Wars film since 2005. Then the Clone Wars animated series
came to an end, mostly it seemed, so Disney could start a new show
on one of its own channels. Shortly thereafter, they announced that
Star Wars Rebels was in early development. It wasn’t all sunshine
and happiness, though. Disney decided to shutter LucasArts, the
computer game division of Lucasfilm.
Other than the new series and the new movie, the biggest news for
me in 2013 was the announcement of the creation of the Lucasfilm
Story Group. This group, charged with maintaining and developing
Star Wars canon (as well as canon for other Lucasfilm properties),
was a natural outgrowth of the prior licensing team, but with what
seemed to me to be more power and a mandate to consult on
everything being produced for Star Wars. It was a brave and bold
addition to the Lucasfilm team, and one I applauded even as I was
surprised yet thoroughly pleased that it came together. Moreover, the
Story Group included two people I knew well and trusted implicitly
to maintain the integrity of Star Wars: Pablo Hidalgo and Leland
Chee. I dropped them notes to congratulate them and wish them well.
Along with the announcement of the creation of the Story Group,
Lucasfilm issued a statement meant to reassure fans. Kathleen
Kennedy explained that for the new content being developed, “in
order to give maximum creative freedom to the filmmakers and also
preserve an element of surprise and discovery for the audience,” they
were not going to be beholden to the Expanded Universe. While the
universe the fans knew was changing, “it is not being discarded.” The
“rich content” of the Expanded Universe was available to creators
to use as they saw fit, in consultation with the new Story Group.
The line that made me tear up a little was this one: “For example,
elements of the EU are included in Star Wars Rebels. The Inquisitor,
the Imperial Security Bureau, and Sienar Fleet Systems are story
elements in the new animated series, and all these ideas find their
origins in roleplaying game material published in the 1980s.” Wow.
In the very first press release, material I helped create for West End
Games was singled out as part of the continuing canon for Star Wars.

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STAR WARS REBELS

Star Wars Rebels debuted in September 2014 and from the beginning
it drew upon material created back in the heyday of West End Games.
Set approximately five years before A New Hope, the series was
created by Simon Kinberg, Dave Filoni, and Carrie Beck. The show
(which recently wrapped up its fourth and final season) followed
the adventures of a small team of Rebels operating aboard the star
freighter called the Ghost. Hera, Kanan, Zeb, Sabine, Ezra, and the
droid Chopper were basically a team of adventurers pulled right out
of somebody’s Star Wars Roleplaying Game campaign—and that’s a
good thing! I love the way Filoni and company ended the series, and
in a way I wasn’t expecting. I don’t want to spoil it for you, because
if you haven’t watched the series you really ought to. Suffice it to
say, the series ended in a way that presented a possible beginning for
stories yet to be told. Plus, it brought elements from the Expanded
Universe into the new canon, including Grand Admiral Thrawn and
the Unknown Regions. I’m going to miss that show!
In addition to the three elements from WEG called out in the
press release, a bunch of material that I had a hand in or created
whole cloth for the RPG made appearances as the series unfolded.
I can hardly count the number of times Michele and I would be
watching a new episode and something would jump out—a word,
a ship, a piece of technology—that would make me smile and
shout and wish I had royalties. And it was all treated with respect
and served the stories well, which is really all you can ask of other
creators who use your material.
Here’s just a sample of the material drawn from The Star Wars
Sourcebook and other WEG products that has been added to the
new Star Wars canon thanks to Rebels:
• the Inquisitors
• the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB)
• Sienar Flight Systems
• the words Twi’lek and Ryloth
• the Interdictor Cruiser
• Shantipole
• Sabacc game details

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I have to admit, when I created the alien species names and

planets, I never expected to hear them spoken out loud in an
official Star Wars show or movie. I found it surreal when they
started showing up on action figure packaging and in novels and
comics. I guess I first heard some of them spoken out loud when
listening to an audio book, but the thrill of hearing “Twi’lek” and
“Ryloth” spoken not just once but multiple times in an episode
of Rebels made me profoundly proud and happy. And of course I
dropped Pablo and Leland a note to say thanks for keeping those
elements in the canon.
The interdictor cruiser was another one of those happy surprises.
Greg Gorden and I came up with that vessel for the Imperial
Sourcebook, modeling it (if I remember correctly) from an early
piece of concept art for the star destroyer. The concept art featured
these four huge globes positioned in the widest portion of the
triangular-shaped ship, and we had to explain what these were in
some fashion. Greg said, “Gravity well projectors.” I nodded and
said, “Okay, what does the ship do with gravity well projectors?”
Greg considered the question for a moment: “Why, they project
gravity wells to knock ships out of hyperspace or prohibit them
from making the jump to lightspeed.” I smiled. “Perfect!” Later,
Timothy Zahn would have Grand Admiral Thrawn use these ships
to great effect in his original Star Wars novel trilogy. When Rebels
utilized the ship in exactly the same way, it was a confirmation
that the stuff we churned out ages ago was good and had stood
the test of time.
Probably the episode that most made my head explode (and I
mean that in a good way) was “Wings of the Master.” It looked
like someone needed an idea for this episode’s script and Pablo
handed the writer a copy of the old WEG adventure, Strike
Force: Shantipole. (That’s probably not the way it happened,
but I can imagine Pablo doing something like that.) Anyway, the
episode wasn’t a re-creation of the adventure, but it certainly drew
inspiration from it. Instead of Ackbar, the Mon Calamari behind the
B-wing project was Quarrie (named in honor of Ralph McQuarrie,
the concept artist for the original films). Shantipole was a planet, not
a secret project in a hidden asteroid field. Still, it was a remarkable
episode that served as a great homage to that classic adventure.

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In many ways, the whole series plays as an homage to the

classic RPG, with its band of adventurers going on quests every
week in service to the Rebellion. And whenever they decided to
pick something up from the WEG products and highlight it in an
episode, I smiled and sent a thank you note to Pablo and Leland
over in the Story Group. Thanks, guys, for keeping so many
elements of those foundational volumes alive in the new canon.

THE NEW MOVIES

I often get asked what I think of the new Star Wars material. I love
Star Wars Rebels and look forward to whatever Dave Filoni and
his team tackle next. As for Episode VII: The Force Awakens, I
enjoyed it. I think it did exactly what it needed to do to cleanse
the palate of the audience and bring them into a new era of Star
Wars storytelling. It may be a little derivative and familiar, but I
believe that was on purpose. It got us back to the mindset of the
original trilogy and helped erase the missteps of the prequel by
accomplishing something I feel those films failed to do: J.J. Abrams
and company made a fun and entertaining Star Wars movie.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, on the other hand, I thoroughly
enjoyed. It gives me hope that from here on out the new films
will offer not only great entertainment but will expand what we
know about the Star Wars universe in new and exciting ways. If
Rogue One has one flaw for me to point to, it’s the lack of aliens
and females in the strike team that goes to the planet Scarif with
Jyn Erso.
Carrying on a tradition I started back when the first movie
debuted in 1977, I took Friday, December 15, 2017 off from work
to see the 11:30 am showing of the new Star Wars film, Episode
VIII: The Last Jedi, at a theater Michele and I love. We ordered
the tickets when they first went on sale and selected our favorite
seats in the theater. (You can do that these days.) We spent the
next two-and-a-half hours glued to our seats and trying to absorb
everything the screen threw at us.
The Last Jedi is just packed. It’s a dense film, but dense in a good
way. I think. I liked the film, though it does have some flaws in the
story and the pacing. Some of the science was off, but the saga has
always been a space fantasy, not a hard science fiction universe.

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Some of the plot was a bit too contrived or went on a bit too long,
but I think it was done to serve the director’s overarching vision—
he wanted to make something new. I applaud that sentiment and,
mostly, I applaud the effort. I won’t say more until I’ve had an
opportunity to watch the DVD a few times and dissect the story.
I will say this, however. Finn said “medpac.” Twice. That was
pretty cool.
I talked about the latest film a little earlier in the book. Solo: A
Star Wars Story debuted just as I was wrapping up the final draft
of this recounting of my involvement with Star Wars. Of the four
new movies released under the Disney/Lucasfilm banner, this one
may be the most faithful to the tone and feel of the original trilogy.
And unlike Rogue One, I thought Solo did a good job including
alien and female characters into the mix. As I said earlier, I don’t
mind that they changed the details of how Han and Chewbacca
met and became friends. I just wish the new movie had given the
event the same amount of weight and meaning that I feel existed
in the entry that appeared in the original Star Wars Sourcebook.
In addition to the tv show and movies, the other storytelling
avenues of the new canon hold up their end of the bargain. The
new novels have been very good, and the comic books by Marvel
Comics are simply excellent. Stand-outs for me have been Thrawn,
by Timothy Zahn, and the Vader Down comics mini-event by
Jason Aaron and Kieron Gillen. Excellent stuff! I also love the
new comic character, Doctor Aphra (from the comic of the same
name by Kieron Gillen), and her pair of homicidal droids, Triple-
Zero and Beetee. Great additions to the universe one and all.

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Chapter Fourteen:
A YEAR OF
CELEBRATIONS
Yub yub!

L ast year brought with it a multitude of anniversaries relevant

to my general interests. As the year rolled on, I’d celebrate the
following anniversaries. In order of number of years, 2017 would
go down as the fortieth anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope,
the thirtieth anniversary of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game and
The Star Wars Sourcebook from West End Games, the twentieth
anniversary of the Alternity Science Fiction Game by me and
Richard Baker, and the twentieth anniversary of the day Michele
and I got married and moved from Lake Geneva to Seattle with
Wizards of the Coast. That’s a lot of memories and milestones to
cram into a single year!
The first thing Michele and I did to celebrate these momentous
events was to take a vacation at Disney World with a few good friends.
The second thing we did was arrange to attend Star Wars Celebration.

STAR WARS CELEBRATION

Star Wars Celebration took place in Orlando, Florida in April,
2017. It was the first Celebration that I attended as a civilian,
simply there to revel in the fortieth anniversary festivities with a
whole lot of like-minded fans. Also, it was a heck of a lot better
than the first Celebration I went to. This was back in 1999 in
Denver, Colorado. The event was held outdoors, and WotC
had a tent-covered stall from which we promoted our products.
Unfortunately, torrential rain dampened the proceedings, and
mostly what I remember from that convention was hoping we
didn’t get electrocuted as deep and widening puddles formed
around the wiring in our booth.
But this year’s Celebration had none of those problems, and I
wasn’t there to work. I was just there to have a good time. In addition
to attending panels about the making of Rogue One and previewing
the upcoming Episode VIII, we mourned the loss of Carrie Fisher,

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listened to Dave Filoni and Pablo Hidalgo talk about Rebels and
Forces of Destiny and other pertinent topics, and we wandered
around the enormous dealer’s room to marvel at everything from
a dewback-shaped couch to a TIE fighter barbeque grill, lightsaber
cooking utensils, and leather jackets and dresses modeled after
costumes from Rogue One. We had a grand time.
Pablo and I briefly discussed doing a panel for the thirtieth
anniversary of the RPG, but he couldn’t get anything onto the
Celebration schedule. I was slightly disappointed, but the lack of
such a panel let me fully concentrate on being a fan for the weekend.
The two highlights of the show, for me, were a surprising panel
and an unexpected dinner. The panel described plans for the new Star
Wars section being added to Disneyland and Disney World. What
surprised me was the extent of what they were building. Not only
was Disney creating an immersive environment that was going to
depict a brand-new location in the Star Wars universe, it was going
to include a corresponding resort as well. What they described was a
roleplaying game come to life, for those who wanted to go all in, or at
the very least an immersive experience where you could decide how
involved in the unfolding stories you wanted to be.
When one of the Disney Imagineers on the panel mentioned
the planet would be located in Wild Space, I was once again
flabbergasted by the depths to which the new powers-that-be were
willing to dig to create new material. Wild Space was a section
of the galaxy I created for the Heir to the Empire Sourcebook
to fill out the chapter on regions of space. It seemed to me that
the Unknown Regions (which first appeared in Timothy Zahn’s
Heir to the Empire novel) and the Outer Rim Territories (first
mentioned in the novelization of the original Star Wars film)
needed some kind of buffer zone. Hence, I added a write-up about
Wild Space that would eventually find an amazing expression
with the development of the new areas in the theme parks.
Even the description of what they’re planning sounds fantastic!
“Guests will be transported to a never-before-seen planet, a
remote trading port and one of the last stops before Wild Space,”
a place where Star Wars characters and their stories come to life!
You can bet your cred stick that Michele and I will be visiting this
planet as soon as we possibly can, though it isn’t scheduled to

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open until 2019. Maybe Pablo Hidalgo or Leland Chee can get us
an early tour. No, probably not.
As for that unexpected dinner, well, Leland Chee texted me and
asked if we were going to be around after the show. We cancelled
an existing dinner reservation and made a new one so we could
meet up with Leland and visit for a little while. It was a very nice
visit and we only talked about Star Wars briefly. Well, maybe a
little more than briefly.

THIRTY YEARS OF RPGS

Someone else tried to find me at Celebration, but we kept
missing each other. Sterling Hershey, who has freelanced for all
three versions of the Star Wars RPG (WEG, WotC, and Fantasy
Flight Games), later contacted me and asked if I was going to
attend GenCon in August. GenCon is the huge tabletop gaming
convention originally started by Gary Gygax (co-creator of
Dungeons & Dragons) and overseen by TSR for many years.
Speaking of anniversaries, this was going to be number fifty for
the grand old convention. I explained to Sterling that I wasn’t
planning on it, since I’d just attended Celebration and I’m
currently working in the computer game industry and not the
tabletop market. Then he laid it out for me. “If I can get a panel
set up to talk about the thirtieth anniversary of the Star Wars
RPG, would you be interested in attending?” I didn’t even have
to consider the proposition for very long. “I’ll be there,” I said.
Once Sterling secured space and got the panel officially added
to the list of events, Fantasy Flight Games agreed to sponsor it.
Sterling secured four panelists for the seminar, and we worked
together to create the Power Point that would be the focus of
our presentation. I drove from Maryland to Indiana on Friday,
wandered the convention halls all day Saturday, and then headed
to the seminar room in time to prepare for our 5:00 pm start time.
The panelists consisted of me (talking about the origins of
the original RPG and Sourcebook, as well as the Wizards D20
version), Sam Stewart (representing Fantasy Flight Games and
the current version of the RPG), Sterling Hershey (who served
as moderator and is one of the only people to have worked on
all three versions of the RPG), and Pablo Hidalgo (from the
Lucasfilm Story Group and a contributor to the latter WEG

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products, who spoke about—among other things—how the WEG

material was still being utilized today). Pablo pointed out during
the seminar that the foundational material created by WEG—the
planets, technologies, alien species, ships, orders of battle, and
so forth—described the workings of the Star Wars galaxy, and
he saw no reason to abandon them. Sure, certain story elements
from the comics and novels of the Expanded Universe era might
drop away in favor of events in new films and products, but the
underlying order of the universe as created by WEG served their
purposes and were essentially being used as depicted in those
early sourcebooks and adventures.
We prepared a Power Point presentation to use during the
seminar. As I was gathering the information for my slides, I
figured out how many words I had contributed to Star Wars over
the years, whether as writer, editor, or developer. Between West
End Games, Wizards of the Coast, and two editions of A Guide to
the Star Wars Galaxy, I’ve produced more than 2.5 million words
on the topic of a galaxy far, far away. That’s a lot of typing!
Near the end of the panel, Sam announced that Fantasy Flight,
in an arrangement with West End Games and Lucasfilm, was
releasing an edition of the original RPG and Sourcebook in a
commemorative slipcase to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary. The
products that started it all were once again going to be available.
As I type this, the Fantasy Flight website says that the slipcase is
on the boat. I can’t wait to see them!

NEW STORIES, FAMILIAR NAMES

I recently finished reading the collection of short stories published
by Del Rey, From a Certain Point of View. The book featured
forty short stories by forty different authors, celebrating the
40th anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope. It reminded me
of an expanded version of Galaxy Guide 1: A New Hope. For
that supplement, we created profiles and stories for most of the
characters that appeared in the original Star Wars film. For some
of these characters, we provided their names and backstories for
the first time. I was happy to see that, in general, the names and
backstories were mostly preserved by the authors writing the new
short stories.

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Some of the names first presented in that original volume that

appeared in the new stories included Figrin D’an, the leader of the
Bith band that played in the Cantina (name and alien species courtesy
of WEG), Muftak the Talz and Kabe the Chadra-Fan (the same),
Garindan (the long-snooted alien that tips off the stormtroopers,
named for the first time in the Galaxy Guide), Brea and Senni, the
Tonnika sisters (given names and backgrounds by WEG), and Evazan
and Ponda Baba, who also recently made an appearance in Rogue
One (we named these guys and gave them a story that continues to
make its way back into canon, which I find remarkable).
I look forward to seeing what future books and comics bring, as
well as the upcoming movies and the rest of the new material being
produced for Star Wars. It’s a good time to be a fan of the franchise.

LUCCA COMICS AND GAMES

I was invited by Mondiversi Games owner Amos Pons (thanks Amos!)
and the convention itself (thanks Andrea D’Urso!) to be a guest of honor
for the 2017 edition of the Lucca Comics and Games convention. For
five days in the beginning of November, the convention literally took
over the town of Lucca in Italy’s Tuscan region. A medieval wall and
moat surrounds the town, and pavilions were set up throughout Lucca
to showcase exhibits and dealer areas covering comics, tabletop games,
anime, computer games, and other media relevant to the interests of the
huge number of fans that descended upon the place.
Michele and I arrived in Milan the night before the start of the
convention. After resting up at a hotel, we hopped on a train to Florence
the next morning to meet my Lucca contact, Andrea, for the drive to
Lucca. Andrea filled us in on what to expect and how the convention
worked during the hour-long drive. He dropped us off and got us settled
into our hotel inside the town walls. Then we found some lunch before
I had to prepare for my first event, a panel with author Timothy Zahn.
Tim and I hadn’t seen each other in more than twenty years,
but we fell back into a friendly pattern very quickly. Our panel,
which we would present in English while a translator repeated
what we said in Italian for the audience, covered forty years of
Star Wars and thirty years of the RPG. It was like an abridged
version of this memoir, with a special guest star in the form of
Timothy Zahn! Tim even urged me to tell my story about George

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Lucas’s driveway—which I did. You can read all about it at the

end of this chapter.
After the panel and a few questions from the audience, we
adjourned to the Mondiversi booth for an autograph session. People
brought various versions of Tim’s Star Wars novels for him to sign,
many of them Italian editions, while I wound up signing products
from different eras and different companies, both English and Italian
translations. I signed plenty of Star Wars products, including The
Star Wars Sourcebook, Graveyard of Alderaan, and the Death Star
Technical Companion, D&D products such as Harbinger House and
Night of the Walking Dead, and copies of the new adventure I wrote
specifically for Mondiversi to publish in Italian for the convention,
The Everywhere Inn. (It’s called La Taverna Ubiqua in Italian.)
I also ran three games of the D6 Star Wars RPG (including one
for all-star guests Timothy Zahn, author Siri Pettersen, and game
designer John Wicks that they filmed and posted on the Lucca Comics
and Games YouTube channel if you want to take a look), a session
of D&D using the adventure I wrote specifically for Mondiversi, and
workshops on game design and gamemastering tricks. They also had
me hand out awards and sign a ton of autographs. The Lucca fans and
convention staff were all very welcoming and enthusiastic, which
made the entire event extremely memorable. Plus, the medieval town
of Lucca is probably the most intriguing venue for a convention that
I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting.

MODIFIED D6 SYSTEM
As I was preparing my Star Wars adventure for Lucca, I ran into
a few snags that the designer in me couldn’t let slide. The original
D6 System was ahead of its time. But that time was thirty years
ago. To me, some of those original mechanics just aren’t up to my
modern design sensibilities. The damage mechanics, in particular,
bothered me as I reread them and worked up the details of my
convention scenario. What worked great thirty years ago seemed
clunky and slow to me now. To make the scenario run smoothly
and to keep die rolling to a minimum, I made some changes for
my anniversary edition of the game.
Here’s the rule sheet that I prepared for my use at the convention.
Annotations [bracketed and italic text] show what I updated from
the original rules set.

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Star Wars D6 Rules Sheet

BY BILL SLAVICSEK
Force Points. Spend a Force Point to double all skill and attribute
codes for one round.
Dark Side Points. When you gain a Dark Side Point for performing
a hateful, vengeful, or evil act, roll 1D. If the result is less than the
number of Dark Side Points you currently possess, evil consumed you.

ACTIONS
• Use a skill to perform an action. Roll allotted number of dice
and try to equal or exceed a difficulty number.
• To perform multiple actions in a round, reduce dice by 1 for each
additional action attempted. For example, a Rebel with Blaster 4D
can take three blaster shots in a round, rolling 2D for each attack.
(1 action made at 4D, 2 actions made at 3D, 3 actions made at 2D.)

ATTACK ACTIONS
[This is the start of my modified rules. I wanted to eliminate the
back and forth of opposed rolls for combat to keep the action
moving and die rolls to a minimum.]
• The difficulty number for an attack action is the target’s
Defense (derived from the Dodge skill and any armor worn).
[I provided pre-generated characters for the players to choose from
and gave every character a Defense number. I derived the Defense
number from the average of a character’s Dodge skill and added
any bonuses for armor to determine a target value. For example, a
character with a Dodge score of 3D + 2 who was wearing a blast
vest received a Defense number of 13: 3.5 x 3, rounded down, for
the dice; +2 for the die bonus; and +1 for the blast vest. Now I knew
I needed to roll 13 or better to hit that character with an attack, and I
assigned similar values to all the NPCs in the adventure.]
• If the attack hits, roll damage. The result of the damage roll
determines what type of damage the target takes: Stun, Wound,
Incapacitated, or Mortally Wounded. When you take damage,
add a mark to the appropriate damage box on your sheet.

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[I divided a character’s damage into the four categories

described in the original rules Damage Summary. Take a look
at the accompanying character sheet on page 144. You’ll notice
that the Mon Cal Soldier has a Stunned value of less than 10, a
Wounded value of 10–19, an Incapacitated value of 20–29, and
a Mortally Wounded value of 30+. In the original game, after
determining if an attack hit, your damage roll was compared
against the target’s Strength roll and the type of damage inflicted
depended on whether the result was less than, greater than, twice
as much, or three times as much as the opposed Strength roll.
Again, opposed rolls have their place, but in a combat scene
where I want the action and story to take center stage, my goal
was to keep die rolling to a minimum.]
• A character’s damage codes are derived from the Strength attribute.
[I used the average of a character’s Strength dice to set values.
In the case of the Mon Cal Soldier, a Strength of 3D resulted in
a base number of 10, doubled to 20, and tripled to 30. (3.5 x 3 =
10.5, rounded down to 10.)
The number of hits (indicated by marks in the appropriate box)
the character could withstand was also determined by the Strength
dice. In the case of the Mon Cal Soldier, 3.]

DAMAGE RESULTS
[Here are the way damage results play out. I think this is more
in keeping with the cinematic nature of Star Wars combat, and it
played fantastically well at the convention.]
• Stun. For every stun a character receives, actions are reduced
by 1 point. So, if you have 2 stuns, your skill checks are made at
–2. If your stuns equal your stun number, you fall unconscious.
• Wound. A wounded character’s actions are reduced by 1D. If
your wounds equal your wound number, you are incapacitated
and receive 1 incapacitated mark.
• Incapacitated. An incapacitated character’s actions are
reduced by 2D. If your incapacitated equals your incapacitated
number, your character is mortally wounded and receives 1
mortal mark.

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• Mortally Wounded. If a character is mortally wounded,

actions are reduced by 3D and the character is dying. If
your mortal wounds equal your mortal wound number, your
character is dead.
• Healing (Healing must deal with the most serious condition first.)
• Stun. Stuns clear at the end of a combat scene. Remove
unconscious with an Easy Medicine check.
• Wound. After combat, Stamina check clears Wounds (6–10
= 1w, 11–15 = 2w, 16–20 = 3w). Medicine check and medpac
or medkit removes wounds (3–5 = 1w, 6–8 = 2w, 9–12 = 3w,
13–16 = 4w).
• Incapacitated. Incapacitated effects can only be healed using
Medicine and a medpac. (6–10 = 1 incap, 11–15 = 2 incap,
16–20 = 3 incap, 21–25 = 4 incap)
• Mortally Wounded. Mortal wounds can only be healed
using Medicine and a medpac. (11–15 = 1 m, 16–20 = 2 m,
21–25 = 3 m, 26–30 = 4 m)

DIFFICULTY CHART
[This is the Difficulty Chart that Greg Gorden and I presented in
the original Star Wars Rules Upgrade. The die codes are there so I
know what a character with a particular skill value is more or less
capable of accomplishing. That way, I didn’t throw out a difficulty
number that was impossible for a specific character to achieve. It
was a friendly convention game, after all.]

Very Easy 3–5 1D

Easy 6–10 2D–3D

Moderate 11–15 4D

Difficult 16–20 5D–6D

Very Difficult 21–25 7D

Impossible 26–30 8D–9D

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If you happen to have a copy of the original D6 Star Wars RPG

lying around, or if you pick up a set of the commemorative books
that Fantasy Flight released for the thirtieth anniversary, give
these slight rules changes a try. For me, they made the game move
faster and added even more to the cinematic feel of the original
combat rules.

PLAYING IN GEORGE LUCAS’S DRIVEWAY

So that’s the story of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game and its
influence on the entire Star Wars galaxy. It’s the story of a mid-
list hobby game company and a group of talented creators who
didn’t know any better and just decided to produce the best Star
Wars material they could. Material that, for thirty years at least,
has stood the test of time. And, as I mentioned when we started,
everything I just told you is absolutely true—to the best of my
recollections and research, and from a certain point of view.
As a friend and former colleague was fond of saying, “George
Lucas created three movies. West End Games built the Star Wars
universe.” I’d never put it that bluntly, but I can’t disagree with
the sentiment.
Howard Roffman of Lucasfilm Licensing told me a story once,
a long time ago. (Come to think of it, it might have been Lucy
Autrey Wilson. Or maybe it was something I made up, which is
what Tim Zahn thought when we talked at Lucca. It was one of
the three, so let’s go with Howard. I think that makes for a better
story, and I’m all about telling a better story.)
“Bill,” he said, “You’re making some really cool stuff. And so
are the other licensees we’ve recently added. But you know we’re
just playing in George’s driveway, right?”
I looked at him and asked, “What are you talking about,
Howard?”
Howard smiled and continued. “George’s driveway. And
it’s full of all of George’s toys. We’re playing with those toys,
right there in the driveway. We’re having fun. People are loving
what we’re doing. They’re having fun, too. But someday, maybe
tomorrow, maybe in fifteen years, George is going to once again
climb behind the wheel of his truck—the truck that is the next
Star Wars movie—and put it into gear. Then he’s going to back

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that truck up. When he does that, he isn’t going to care about
any of the toys we added to the driveway. He’s going to run right
over them. And that’s okay. That’s his prerogative. You can name
them Twi’leks, and we can get all the other licensees to call them
Twi’leks, but if George decides to give them a different name,
well, he can do that. I just wanted to make sure you understood
that. It’s George’s driveway, and they’re George’s toys. And it’s
George’s truck.”
When the truck representing the Prequel Trilogy started rolling,
remarkably few of the toys we added to the universe wound
up getting crushed beneath the wheels. And later, with the two
animated series and the formation of the Lucasfilm Story Group,
some parts of the Expanded Universe did get run over, but an
awful lot of the material I had a hand in creating has not only
survived, it’s been made integral to the very foundations of the
Star Wars galaxy.
I’m very proud that so many of my toys, as it were, found their
way into the truck. It’s still George’s truck, since he created the
universe, but now Kathleen Kennedy sits behind the wheel and
the Lucasfilm Story Group rides shotgun as they roll out new
stories in a variety of mediums. And it appears to me that the
road they’re driving down is paved with the foundational material
created for a roleplaying game thirty years ago.
When you think about it like that, it’s kind of amazing.
Bill Slavicsek
Towson, Maryland. May 25, 2018

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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR
B ill Slavicsek’s professional writing career began when he
was hired by West End Games in 1986. A year later, he
created The Star Wars Sourcebook and helped lay the foundation
for what would become the Star Wars Expanded Universe—
creating material that is still being drawn upon to bolster the many
expressions of Star Wars.
He has created worlds, including Torg: Roleplaying the
Possibility Worlds, Council of Wyrms, and the Eberron Campaign
Setting for Dungeons & Dragons.
He has created games, including the Alternity Science Fiction
Roleplaying Game, D20 Modern, D20 Star Wars, the Pokemon Jr.
Adventure Game, and the Castle Ravenloft board game.
He served as Director of R&D for Dungeons & Dragons for
fourteen years, shepherding the creative direction of the brand
from the end of 2nd Edition, through 3rd Edition and 4th Edition,
and the initial explorations for what would become the 5th Edition
of the world’s greatest fantasy game.
Today, Bill serves as a Senior Writer at Zenimax Online Studios,
helping to tell the amazing stories that populate the world of The
Elder Scrolls Online game. In his spare time, he still loves to
tinker with game mechanics, play games, write stories, and watch
with keen interest as the Star Wars universe continues to expand.