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Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game (D6)
Star Wars Gamemaster Handbook for Second Edition
"Kid, I've been from one side of this galaxy to the other..."
Bring all the excitement of the Star Wars universe to your games with the Star Wars Gamemaster Handbook. This book is a collection of inspirational and entertaining essays on all aspects of game design, from encounters, to creating gamemaster characters, to how to really start a fun campaign. A complete guidebook on how to bring the Star Wars universe to life.
Complete chapters on each of these subjects:
• Beginning Adventures
• The Star Wars Adventure — The Universe And the Rules
• Exciting Locations
• How To Run Exciting Encounters
• Gamemaster Characters
• How To Improvise — And Make It Work
• Designing Equipment
• Running Campaigns
• A Bonus Adventure — Tales of the Smoking Blaster.
Bring all the excitement of the Star Wars universe to your games with the Star Wars Gamemaster Handbook. This book is a collection of inspirational and entertaining essays on all aspects of game design, from encounters, to creating gamemaster characters, to how to really start a fun campaign. A complete guidebook on how to bring the Star Wars universe to life.
Complete chapters on each of these subjects:
• Beginning Adventures
• The Star Wars Adventure — The Universe And the Rules
• Exciting Locations
• How To Run Exciting Encounters
• Gamemaster Characters
• How To Improvise — And Make It Work
• Designing Equipment
• Running Campaigns
• A Bonus Adventure — Tales of the Smoking Blaster.
128 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1993
34 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 3, 2008
I take gamemastering seriously. I've gamemastered half a dozen systems and read the manuals for dozens more. This book is hands-down the best tome on the actual art of gamemastering I have ever read. It doesn't matter if you play Star Wars or not, this book is about being a better gamemaster, regardless of system. It covers campaign design, adventure scripting, world building, description, mood-setting, improvisation, NPC development and characterization, managing player engagement (including fighting munchkinism), and more.
Not only a must-have tool for any gamemaster, I heartily recommend this for any aspiring novelist or screenwriter.
Not only a must-have tool for any gamemaster, I heartily recommend this for any aspiring novelist or screenwriter.
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.
April 18, 2016
A great guide to game mastering in general. So much great advice. I am so ready to run some Star Wars D6.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews