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Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game (D6)
Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ... Experience the drama and epic scope of the greatest space fantasy of all time! Adventure in a universe of epic heroes, fearsome villains, amazing technology and strange aliens. Pilot an X-wing against the Empire's devastating TIE fighters! Trade blaster fire with vicious bounty hunters! Smuggle contraband cargos through Imperial blockades! Learn the ways of the lightsaber-wielding Jedi Knights, and master the powers of the Force!
This 176-page rulebook features:
• Sophisticated yet simple rules covering all aspects of the Star Wars universe. Completely revised, with a conversion system for first edition materials.
• Extensive information on the Star Wars universe, with guidelines on designing your own adventures set during the time of the movies or after the Battle of Endor!
• Includes a beginning adventure.
• Detailed skill descriptions, with many new skills and special abilities for aliens!
• New movement, chase and combat rules covering everything from landspeeders to Imperial Star Destroyers!
• 16 full-color pages, with never before published material.
This 176-page rulebook features:
• Sophisticated yet simple rules covering all aspects of the Star Wars universe. Completely revised, with a conversion system for first edition materials.
• Extensive information on the Star Wars universe, with guidelines on designing your own adventures set during the time of the movies or after the Battle of Endor!
• Includes a beginning adventure.
• Detailed skill descriptions, with many new skills and special abilities for aliens!
• New movement, chase and combat rules covering everything from landspeeders to Imperial Star Destroyers!
• 16 full-color pages, with never before published material.
148 pages, Hardcover
First published November 15, 1987
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
July 25, 2021
Sit down kids. Here's a story. A story about the RPG that saved Star Wars.
It's 1987. Return of the Jedi has been out for four years. It's not that the Star Wars fandom is dying, per se. It's that, well, the saga is complete. Nothing else is forthcoming. The expanded universe novels weren't on the horizon yet.
And then West End Games (our lord and savior) releases this. Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game uses a very accessible rules-light system. The WEG D6 system, in fact. Essentially the system the current edition of Paranoia uses (Another reason that is something of a homecoming for Paranoia). Owing to that, this game is more commonly called Star Wars D6. And this was at a time where rules-light RPGs weren't really a thing. The whole book is constructed in a way so as to be accessible to non-gamers. They were very much reaching out to people who weren't really in the TTRPG umbrella. It works well, it covers everything you'd expect from a Star Wars game, and covers it all in really just 100 pages. It's an impressive feat and it is very well executed. There are rules for from-scratch character generation but also included are a bunch of slightly-bigger-than-bookmark sized templates that you drop skills in to and you're ready to go. It's just another nod to the rules-light approach to get people into the game as quickly as possible. You can even play an ewok. If that's your thing.
The included adventure is serviceable. It puts the PCs on the run from the empire and ends with them getting starfighters. It does what it needs to without much flourish. But it works. There's also a handful of adventure outlines for a budding gamemaster to flesh out. There's lots of options to play with and it's a really nice modular class-less system.
The interior art is pretty much exclusively stills from the movies. Which, for a licensed product, isn't entirely unsurprising I suppose. It's a bit disappointing but I'm sure it kept costs down for the time and came with the license.
So that's the game. It kept interest in Star Wars going for awhile longer. Fast forward to 1991. Timothy Zahn is gonna write Heir to the Empire and launch the Star Wars Expanded Universe. He loves world building and wants to know more about the greater Star Wars setting. So he phones up LucasArts and asks. He gets a shrug "Well, we kinda never really thought about it." But they have something that will help. West End Games produced a CRAPTON of sourcebooks for this games. A lot of things that stuck had their origins in these sourcebooks. Greedo is a Rodian because West End Games made it so. So, lacking a Star Wars bible on hand, they send Zahn a box full of WEG Star Wars sourcebooks. And the rest is history.
It's 1987. Return of the Jedi has been out for four years. It's not that the Star Wars fandom is dying, per se. It's that, well, the saga is complete. Nothing else is forthcoming. The expanded universe novels weren't on the horizon yet.
And then West End Games (our lord and savior) releases this. Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game uses a very accessible rules-light system. The WEG D6 system, in fact. Essentially the system the current edition of Paranoia uses (Another reason that is something of a homecoming for Paranoia). Owing to that, this game is more commonly called Star Wars D6. And this was at a time where rules-light RPGs weren't really a thing. The whole book is constructed in a way so as to be accessible to non-gamers. They were very much reaching out to people who weren't really in the TTRPG umbrella. It works well, it covers everything you'd expect from a Star Wars game, and covers it all in really just 100 pages. It's an impressive feat and it is very well executed. There are rules for from-scratch character generation but also included are a bunch of slightly-bigger-than-bookmark sized templates that you drop skills in to and you're ready to go. It's just another nod to the rules-light approach to get people into the game as quickly as possible. You can even play an ewok. If that's your thing.
The included adventure is serviceable. It puts the PCs on the run from the empire and ends with them getting starfighters. It does what it needs to without much flourish. But it works. There's also a handful of adventure outlines for a budding gamemaster to flesh out. There's lots of options to play with and it's a really nice modular class-less system.
The interior art is pretty much exclusively stills from the movies. Which, for a licensed product, isn't entirely unsurprising I suppose. It's a bit disappointing but I'm sure it kept costs down for the time and came with the license.
So that's the game. It kept interest in Star Wars going for awhile longer. Fast forward to 1991. Timothy Zahn is gonna write Heir to the Empire and launch the Star Wars Expanded Universe. He loves world building and wants to know more about the greater Star Wars setting. So he phones up LucasArts and asks. He gets a shrug "Well, we kinda never really thought about it." But they have something that will help. West End Games produced a CRAPTON of sourcebooks for this games. A lot of things that stuck had their origins in these sourcebooks. Greedo is a Rodian because West End Games made it so. So, lacking a Star Wars bible on hand, they send Zahn a box full of WEG Star Wars sourcebooks. And the rest is history.
October 27, 2020
A simple, fast, easy-to-learn set of rules for roleplaying in the Star Wars universe. Far less detailed than most... actually, probably ALL... of the RPGs I've looked at in my day, anyone can pick it up fast and customize it to their heart's content. A lot of the pages are dotted with quotes from the movies and some filler pages with colorful ads selling droids and so on.
June 9, 2018
Loved this game back in the day.... D6 all the way. Pre-ordered the 30th anniversary edition. Can't wait!
October 22, 2018
So there are really two books to look at here. The first is the actual core rules for the Star Wars RPG and the second is the Star Wars Sourcebook, which does include stats for the RPG but is mostly a sort of prototype of the Star Wars encyclopedias of the 90s or the modern day Wookiepedia.
The RPG is excellent and manages to really get at the heart of what makes Star Wars fun. It's sort of a nice mix of a class system and a point buy system, in that by default character creation entails choosing from various provided character archetypes and then tweaking their skills some. The archetypes are nice, including a few different kinds of minor Jedi, generic versions of the characters from the films, and even a tagalong kid character who's surprisingly prescient of Anakin from The Phantom Menace. There are also rules for making your own characters from scratch, which is nice, and I like that the approach to aliens is basically "make up something that sounds reasonable and cool". The archetypes are especially nice because this was probably a lot of peoples' first RPG and it's a nice way to get things started quickly. Related to that, this game does something similar to the classic red box D&D game by including a choose your own adventure type thing that introduces many of the basic rules concepts. I played through it twice and found it pretty enjoyable.
The rules do a pretty good job of covering everything that's likely to come up in a typical Star Wars adventure. Combat is fast and cinematic, with a system of wound levels rather than HP that reminds me of more modern systems like Savage Worlds. Skills and abilities are all done by rolling a pool of d6s, adding them together, and comparing them to a target number. It's possibly the main change I could see making - I'd rather have a WoD style dice pool. Still, it seems like it'd keep things moving pretty well.
There's a discussion of starship combat, which focuses primarily on dogfights. I think this is reasonable since in the original trilogy, capital ships are largely terrain and more abstracted obstacles for our heroes than things they can take on directly. (Barring exciting moments like the A-Wing versus the Exceutor's bridge.) Plus, at least back in the day, it seems West End Games also made a board game focused on larger space battles. I admit to some curiosity as to what that was like. Force powers are handled as a set of special skills, and using a particular ability requires passing one or more skill rolls. Interestingly there isn't inherently anything stopping you from trying this as often as you like, since the Force points metacurrency is just that - a way of making characters better at dramatic moments, not tracking their ability to use special powers. Force points are available to all characters, and form the main morality system, as using Force points or powers for bad ends can lead to Dark Side points, which can eventually remove a character as a PC and turn them into a villain. The requirement for working off these points is about as stringent as unfalling as a paladin in old school D&D and technically mean Vader shouldn't have become a good guy through his sacrifice.
The GM material is pretty good. There's a great discussion of the tropes of space opera, how everything is big and flash from technology to morality. There's black and white, good heroes and evil villains, and everything happens on a grand scale. It's nice to see a discussion of genre emulation rather than just leaving the GM and players to wing it as best they can. There's the typical advice on adventure creation and such, and in general it feels like one of the better GM advice chapters I've encountered, especially given it's length. I'm curious if there's a DM's Guide equivalent for this game. The big sample adventure is called Rebel Breakout and entails the heroes navigating a disused mining complex while dodging stormtroopers and natural hazards. It's in essence a dungeon crawl, but it's also a nice way to get the heroes involved in the Rebellion from the get go, especially as if they succeed, the Rebels will have at least some good will towards them. There's also a set of adventure seeds. Some are pretty good, a few feel overcomplicated, and there's one involving getting kidnapped by space aliens and forced to play a weird game with them that feels like it belongs in Star Trek, not Star Wars. Overall, though, there's a pretty good amount of material here, though I'm glad for the inclusion of the first supplement in this box set, and if I ever want to run this game, I'll likely seek out more supplements to expand my options.
The Sourcebook manages to pack a ton of cool stuff into just 144 pages. If it was in the original trilogy and it was important, it's in here. (There's a later trio of supplements, one for each movie, that covers absolutely everything that appears on screen. I'll probably read them at some point.) The book does what a good sourcebook of this type should - tell us not just what we know from the films, but add new details. There are schematics of the Falcon and a sample Rebel and Imperial base. There's details on how different fighters came about, hints at Han Solo's pre-rebellion exploits, and discussions of the various alien species and how they fit into the larger galaxy. The idea of different order droids is explained and there's enough vehicles for any aspiring star warrior to have plenty of adventures with.
Less exciting in the days of the internet, but certainly awesome in 1987 back when this is published are the myriad images that decorate the book. There's a mixture of stills from the films and concept art of various stuff, including things like swoop bikes that didn't make it onto the screen. There's also some pretty well done fiction pieces. Probably my favorite is about the early career of the man who leads the AT-AT assault in ESB. Gaming fiction can be hit or miss, as can Star Wars fiction, so it's nice to see a combination of the two that's so strong. Personally I'd likely want more information than what this book provides were I running a game, especially on some of my favorite bits of Legends stuff, but as a starting point this is pretty great, and I think a rerelease boxset without this would've been obviously lacking a lot of key Star Wars lore.
Basically, this was a lot of fun to read. It's a pretty great system that keeps things simple and yet fun in a way that seems like it'd model Star Wars really well. And reading this material, especially the Sourcebook, gave me the same excited feeling I had about Star Wars when I was a kid. I'm not sure if I'll actually play this any time soon, since I'm not sure how much I want to play a Star Wars game, but if I ever do, I'd use this system. (And I may check out it's descendant d6 Space at some point.) I think the $60 price tag is a little hefty for slightly fewer than 300 pages, though given how much cool stuff got packed in, it's definitely worth it for me. I mean who doesn't love in-universe ads for the R2 unit and the X-Wing? I had a ton of fun reading this and I imagine I'll get used copies of some of the supplements one of these days. Maybe I'll even get a game going after all, if I can find interested people.
The RPG is excellent and manages to really get at the heart of what makes Star Wars fun. It's sort of a nice mix of a class system and a point buy system, in that by default character creation entails choosing from various provided character archetypes and then tweaking their skills some. The archetypes are nice, including a few different kinds of minor Jedi, generic versions of the characters from the films, and even a tagalong kid character who's surprisingly prescient of Anakin from The Phantom Menace. There are also rules for making your own characters from scratch, which is nice, and I like that the approach to aliens is basically "make up something that sounds reasonable and cool". The archetypes are especially nice because this was probably a lot of peoples' first RPG and it's a nice way to get things started quickly. Related to that, this game does something similar to the classic red box D&D game by including a choose your own adventure type thing that introduces many of the basic rules concepts. I played through it twice and found it pretty enjoyable.
The rules do a pretty good job of covering everything that's likely to come up in a typical Star Wars adventure. Combat is fast and cinematic, with a system of wound levels rather than HP that reminds me of more modern systems like Savage Worlds. Skills and abilities are all done by rolling a pool of d6s, adding them together, and comparing them to a target number. It's possibly the main change I could see making - I'd rather have a WoD style dice pool. Still, it seems like it'd keep things moving pretty well.
There's a discussion of starship combat, which focuses primarily on dogfights. I think this is reasonable since in the original trilogy, capital ships are largely terrain and more abstracted obstacles for our heroes than things they can take on directly. (Barring exciting moments like the A-Wing versus the Exceutor's bridge.) Plus, at least back in the day, it seems West End Games also made a board game focused on larger space battles. I admit to some curiosity as to what that was like. Force powers are handled as a set of special skills, and using a particular ability requires passing one or more skill rolls. Interestingly there isn't inherently anything stopping you from trying this as often as you like, since the Force points metacurrency is just that - a way of making characters better at dramatic moments, not tracking their ability to use special powers. Force points are available to all characters, and form the main morality system, as using Force points or powers for bad ends can lead to Dark Side points, which can eventually remove a character as a PC and turn them into a villain. The requirement for working off these points is about as stringent as unfalling as a paladin in old school D&D and technically mean Vader shouldn't have become a good guy through his sacrifice.
The GM material is pretty good. There's a great discussion of the tropes of space opera, how everything is big and flash from technology to morality. There's black and white, good heroes and evil villains, and everything happens on a grand scale. It's nice to see a discussion of genre emulation rather than just leaving the GM and players to wing it as best they can. There's the typical advice on adventure creation and such, and in general it feels like one of the better GM advice chapters I've encountered, especially given it's length. I'm curious if there's a DM's Guide equivalent for this game. The big sample adventure is called Rebel Breakout and entails the heroes navigating a disused mining complex while dodging stormtroopers and natural hazards. It's in essence a dungeon crawl, but it's also a nice way to get the heroes involved in the Rebellion from the get go, especially as if they succeed, the Rebels will have at least some good will towards them. There's also a set of adventure seeds. Some are pretty good, a few feel overcomplicated, and there's one involving getting kidnapped by space aliens and forced to play a weird game with them that feels like it belongs in Star Trek, not Star Wars. Overall, though, there's a pretty good amount of material here, though I'm glad for the inclusion of the first supplement in this box set, and if I ever want to run this game, I'll likely seek out more supplements to expand my options.
The Sourcebook manages to pack a ton of cool stuff into just 144 pages. If it was in the original trilogy and it was important, it's in here. (There's a later trio of supplements, one for each movie, that covers absolutely everything that appears on screen. I'll probably read them at some point.) The book does what a good sourcebook of this type should - tell us not just what we know from the films, but add new details. There are schematics of the Falcon and a sample Rebel and Imperial base. There's details on how different fighters came about, hints at Han Solo's pre-rebellion exploits, and discussions of the various alien species and how they fit into the larger galaxy. The idea of different order droids is explained and there's enough vehicles for any aspiring star warrior to have plenty of adventures with.
Less exciting in the days of the internet, but certainly awesome in 1987 back when this is published are the myriad images that decorate the book. There's a mixture of stills from the films and concept art of various stuff, including things like swoop bikes that didn't make it onto the screen. There's also some pretty well done fiction pieces. Probably my favorite is about the early career of the man who leads the AT-AT assault in ESB. Gaming fiction can be hit or miss, as can Star Wars fiction, so it's nice to see a combination of the two that's so strong. Personally I'd likely want more information than what this book provides were I running a game, especially on some of my favorite bits of Legends stuff, but as a starting point this is pretty great, and I think a rerelease boxset without this would've been obviously lacking a lot of key Star Wars lore.
Basically, this was a lot of fun to read. It's a pretty great system that keeps things simple and yet fun in a way that seems like it'd model Star Wars really well. And reading this material, especially the Sourcebook, gave me the same excited feeling I had about Star Wars when I was a kid. I'm not sure if I'll actually play this any time soon, since I'm not sure how much I want to play a Star Wars game, but if I ever do, I'd use this system. (And I may check out it's descendant d6 Space at some point.) I think the $60 price tag is a little hefty for slightly fewer than 300 pages, though given how much cool stuff got packed in, it's definitely worth it for me. I mean who doesn't love in-universe ads for the R2 unit and the X-Wing? I had a ton of fun reading this and I imagine I'll get used copies of some of the supplements one of these days. Maybe I'll even get a game going after all, if I can find interested people.
April 14, 2021
What a great game. We still play second edition of this 80's powerhouse. All D6 with decent sized dice pools. I have always tried to play to the spirit of the movies and play for what would look good on screen.
December 22, 2017
I’ve never played a pen & paper RPG before but I’m ready to play this one!
September 25, 2018
A really good game, and one of the only options if you wanted a non-homebrewed Star Wars game in the '90s.
January 28, 2020
Outstanding system, mostly because I love the simplicity of it. Open-ended, sandbox-y, and full of potential!
November 26, 2022
The original - and still the best - Star Wars RPG. Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...
May 21, 2018
When I was younger and had time to run three different RPG campaigns at once, I had two main flavors of game inspiration: swords and guns.
For swords I usually drifted to D&D but for guns, I turned to Star Wars (at least until we got hold of Alternity). All of the excitement of blasters and spaceships without having to understand mass rations and deltaV and Hohmann transfer orbits.
Star Wars neatly fills a niche known as "Science-Fantasy" - all the fantastic story-telling benefits of science fiction with the implicit belief suspension of fantasy. Perhaps its my scientific bent, but almost every other scifi campaign I ran in any other system disintegrated after exposure to micro gravity, time dilation, and interstellar radiation.
For whatever reason, our games were always 95% Han Solo and Jabba the Hutt and 5% Empire and Rebellion, but knowing all that was going on in the foreground made the skulking back-alley deals and betrayals more interesting; all smuggling and bounty hunters, less epic battle between Light and Dark.
The d6 system itself holds up better than old versions of D&D, but still gets bogged down (if memory serves) under glacial character creation due largely to the need to look up every skill in the game while making a character then spending an hour flipping through tables buying equipment. Also, adding up huge piles of dice for every roll, then looking at charts...
In spite of the limitations of said mechanics, it's still probably my favorite Star Wars system.
All said, a solid staple of my roleplaying days of yore, including a game that ran from 8th grade until 10th with the same characters.
For swords I usually drifted to D&D but for guns, I turned to Star Wars (at least until we got hold of Alternity). All of the excitement of blasters and spaceships without having to understand mass rations and deltaV and Hohmann transfer orbits.
Star Wars neatly fills a niche known as "Science-Fantasy" - all the fantastic story-telling benefits of science fiction with the implicit belief suspension of fantasy. Perhaps its my scientific bent, but almost every other scifi campaign I ran in any other system disintegrated after exposure to micro gravity, time dilation, and interstellar radiation.
For whatever reason, our games were always 95% Han Solo and Jabba the Hutt and 5% Empire and Rebellion, but knowing all that was going on in the foreground made the skulking back-alley deals and betrayals more interesting; all smuggling and bounty hunters, less epic battle between Light and Dark.
The d6 system itself holds up better than old versions of D&D, but still gets bogged down (if memory serves) under glacial character creation due largely to the need to look up every skill in the game while making a character then spending an hour flipping through tables buying equipment. Also, adding up huge piles of dice for every roll, then looking at charts...
In spite of the limitations of said mechanics, it's still probably my favorite Star Wars system.
All said, a solid staple of my roleplaying days of yore, including a game that ran from 8th grade until 10th with the same characters.
October 8, 2014
I opened this book most days of the 5 years 1990-1994. I loved this game considerably more than my future employment prospects. And yet, those years of being a Star Wars RPG Game Master contributed significant amounts of moral fibre to the person I am today.
March 23, 2012
BEST GAME EVER!!!!! Simple,easy to use,easy to play.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews