As many of you have gathered from my earlier posts about Star Wars I am a fan of the genre. Though in addition to the movies I am also a fan of the Star Wars RPG, which was my first experience playing a TTRPG. (I had purchased AD&D 2nd edition books before Star Wars though my first real gaming experience was playing the Star Wars game.)

I can still remember parts of that early game, which involved several bounty hunters and a Z-95 Headhunter plus an incident with a Jetpack. While 2nd edition AD&D had THAC0 and percentile scored tests the system for Star Wars RPG had a simple elegance.

Later released under the D6 moniker, the system works on a pooled D6 model where you roll several D6 based on attributes and skills toward a difficult number. If the total number rolled surpasses the target number then the action succeeds and if not it fails. It enabled me as a young Game Master to build encounters and focus on the story rather than looking up stat blocks.

Combat mirrored the movie’s tone too as it focused on avoiding being hit by a blaster and if you were hit it was rather deadly (armor was a factor though not much). West End Games sadly folded around 2000 and the Star Wars RPG license for the game has changed hands a few times (Wizards of the Coast, Fantasy Flight Games), but this game captures the look and feel of the universe.

When I came back to D&D during the pandemic and unearthed my TTRPGs I brought the StarWars book out of storage too. When there was a lull in the game due to life I proposed a Star Wars one-shot, which morphed into a campaign for several months. It was fantastic and the system was as elegant and story-focused as I remembered. We were able to run the game over Discord with no online tools and largely in the theater of the mind. The game was called Hollow Stars and took place about 2-3 years after the Battle of Endor in a highly splintered universe from the main Star Wars storyline (bear in mind this was pre-Mandolorian). It was my first time DM/GMing in years too and that went alright. It was before my deep dive into the Lazy DM methodology from Sly Flourish (aka Mike Shea) so there are things I would do differently now in terms of prep. I had some slightly overarching story threads though it was largely an episodic smugglers/scoundrels campaign with the characters trying to outwit or outfight the Empire or New Republic. The game ended as campaigns often do with us switching to a new game though recently the group has been thinking about returning to the world.