Star Wars - Edge of the Empire Beginner Game: Review/Session Recap

So I picked up Star Wars – Edge of the Empire Beginner Game this week. It's been out for a while (over a year), but this is the first Star Wars gaming I've done in a long time. I figured it was time to try it out. I went for the Beginner Game over the core rules for several reasons: A) I could get playing within minutes, B) the buddy I was gaming with was completely new to roleplaying, C) it came with dice, and D) it was cheaper than the core rules.

Everything except the map. Click for bigger version.

Box Contents

“What Is a Roleplaying Game?” sheet

Sheet advertising the core rules and a free adventure called The Long Arm of the Hutt

Four character folios

Adventure book

Rule book

Two-sided fold-up map

One page of punch-out tokens

Fourteen narrative dice

Before I get into the session recap, I've got some initial pros and cons.

Pros

1. The dice. I love the dice. They took some getting used to, but I really like that the rolls almost always come out as “you succeed/fail, AND/BUT...” instead of just the binary success/fail that a lot of other games have. That, and they're just good looking dice. Normally I don't like color coded dice, but it really helps with this system.

Cantina, Spaceport, and Mos Shuuta.
Click for bigger version.

2. The map. It comes with a gorgeous two-sided map showing the city of Mos Shuuta, the cantina, spaceport control building, and on the flip side, the YT-1300 Krayt Fang sitting in a spaceport docking bay.

3. Overall quality. Aside from the box itself, everything in the box feels very high quality. The books are sturdy, the rule book probably more so than the adventure book. The dice are good, the tokens are solid, and even the character folios are easy to write/erase on.

4. The adventure. Escape from Mos Shuuta is definitely railroaded at first, and the adventure acknowledges that fact at one point. That said, it's a solid opening scenario for a Star Wars game – you've crossed a Hutt and it's time to grab a ship and get out of town.

Cons

1. The box. I was really hoping the box was a standard board game-style “lift off the lid, set it aside” type box, and I was really disappointed to see that it's all one piece with an opening flap. It's also very thin and flimsy. I don't see this box really lasting too long, and I'll have to find something else to hold my Edge of the Empire stuff, especially if I get more. There's plenty of room in the box for extra stuff, but itjust doesn't feel like it'll hold up with a notebook, DM screen, extra dice, etc.

So flimsy, closing it has been damaging the flap.

2. The tokens. Now, the tokens are made very nicely, they're textured, and they look like they'll hold up to quite a bit of play. The only problems are that A) they have no real use since the combat system is not miniatures or grid-based, and B) even if it was, they're way too large to use on any of the maps aside from maybe the Krayt Fang map.

Session Recap

Initially I'd planned to play with at least two players, but for various reasons, ended up with only one interested player. We had the game, we both really wanted to play, so we gave it a shot. I ran the included adventure, which did a fairly good job teaching the rules in stages. I also gave my player the option to play two characters, and he chose Lowhhrick the Wookiee hired gun and Pash the human smuggler. He was channeling Han and Chewie, I guess.

The game started in the middle of the action, in a chase from Teemo the Hutt's Gamorrean enforcer dudes. The PCs started by hiding in the local cantina. Pash leapt over the bar, ducked down, and spit out some story about hooking up with a local's daughter and the local sending Gamorreans after him and his Wookiee partner. Amazingly, in one of a string of incredible rolls, he succeeded and the bartender let him huddle down out of sight.

Meanwhile, the Wookiee (because I can't spell that damned name) dove into a booth and laid down on the bench seat. “He's brown, and the chairs are brown, so maybe it'll work!” Spoiler: it didn't work.

So, two Gamorreans came in, spotted the Wookiee, and pulled their clubs. The Wookiee flipped a table, took cover behind it, and pulled a vibroaxe. Meanwhile, Pash calmly stood up, blasted one in the back, and took him out. The Gamorrean and Wookiee went hand to hand, but vibroaxe beats club in Star Wars rock/paper/scissors, so the second Gamorrean dropped.

Cantina map, with the Pash token. See the size difference?

The bartender gave the dynamic duo a helpful tip about the Krayt Fang, a ship stuck in the spaceport due to some mechanical problems, and added that the junkyard down the street has just the part they'd need to steal the ship. Then he told them to get the hell out of his cantina.

They booked it out of there, stop by the junkyard, and ended up paying 500 credits for this hyperdrive part they need. It took a Deceit roll, as they spun a cover story that they were there to pick up the part for Trex, the Trandoshan owner of the Krayt Fang, but it worked.

From there, it's on to the spaceport control center to get the ship clearance to leave. Blocked by security droids, they hotwired a side entrance and got in that way. Seeing the control officer, an attractive, mid-30s human woman, Pash immediately whipped out his Charm skill. In another surprisingly good roll, his spiel of needing to get the ship cleared for his boss and a promise to “have a drink next time I'm in the system...”, they miraculously succeeded. To my player's credit, it was a very "daring smuggler" thing to do.

After there, they went on a stroll through town, interrupted by two groups of Stormtroopers (who, unbeknownst to them, were working for Teemo). Seeing that they were right near the water tower (this is where the map came in handy), Pash decided to take a shot at it in the hopes of distracting the Stormtroopers. With another overwhelmingly successful roll, he punctured the water tower, causing it to catastrophically fail and take out one group of Stormtroopers entirely. The duo managed to take out the other group, with vibroaxe and blaster pistol, then stole their blaster rifles and ran for the docking bay.

A quick bluff by the security droids there got them into the hangar and into the ship, where they were confronted by Trex. Not quite believing their story of “look, we got this part for you after that guy upped the price, so we just want a ride”, Trex went to pull his blaster. Plenty of Advantage on that roll meant that the PCs had the chance to win Initiative and take him out first. They took out Trex in a couple rounds, managed to get the landing ramp sealed before security droids could show up, and blasted out of there.

Too bad for them that TIE fighters were waiting for them. A few rounds of evasive maneuvers, some shaky Mechanics rolls to install the hyperdrive part, and a couple rounds of trading shots (and nearly getting the Krayt Fang shot out of the sky) led to them going to hyperspeed and escaping. That's where we ended the session.

I'll leave you with some dice. Game on!

First Impressions

Overall, I really like this game. The dice work well, the symbols are easy enough to get used to, and I can't think of any rules stuff that really grated on me. It seemed pretty easy for my player to pick up, though he's new at this kind of gaming, and we didn't have any problems during the session. Every Star Wars fan should own either this, the core rules, or both.

D&D Next - Rolling Up a Character

So in addition to my Swords & Wizardry game (which, sadly, may not happen because of scheduling conflicts) and my Dark Dungeons play-by-post game, I'm also prepping to run a D&D Next play-by-post game on the RPG.net forums, running the Mines of Madness adventure that's included.

I'm using the last playtest (October 2013 version) packet, that you can pick up here. I've flipped through most of the files in the playtest, but I'm holding off on a full review until I can get some actual playtime in. However, I created a character so I'd know what my players were getting into and so that I'd have a better idea of what these characters can do.

I really hope my players end up fighting this dwarf-golem thing.
Picture from the podcast page on Wizards.com

First up, here's some of what I like about character creation:

• Feats are optional. I love that there's no massive feat list to comb through at first level and that it's very easy for a DM to just say "nope, no feats in this particular game."
• Ability scores can either be rolled, bought with points, or chosen with a standard array. I like 4E's tight balance, but it required a point-buy or standard array for ability scores. The default of rolling for scores makes D&D Next feel a little more old-school (though we'll see if actual play changes that).
• It's fast and simple. Even being mostly unfamiliar with D&D Next, I still was able to create a character in about fifteen or twenty minutes.

Now, some stuff that was not quite so good:

• The more traditional races (dwarves, elves, and halflings) have more diversity than the "unusual races." Most of the unusual races (drow, half-elves, half-orcs, kender, tieflings, and warforged) don't have any subrace or similar choices. Dragonborn and gnomes have some choices (draconic ancestry and gnomish subraces), but the other races, for whatever reason, do not.
• I couldn't find any concrete rules on tool proficiency overlaps. For example, the paladin I created got proficiency in Mounts (Land) from both his background (Soldier) and the paladin class, but I couldn't find any rules on how that would work in-game. I assume it would be similar to skill proficiencies where you can choose an extra tool to have proficiency in, but if the rules are in the playtest packet, I can't find them.

I'll have a more comprehensive post (or more probably, a series of posts) once I the game gets going for a while. It's a play-by-post game, so it won't be a particularly fast game, but once I get through a few encounters, I'll have some more information to post. Setting-wise, I'm going with the Nentir Vale for simplicity's sake (as I've already got that info for the S&W game I'm trying to get rolling), but I'm throwing the party in at the dungeon, rather than have a long, drawn-out "everyone meets up at a tavern" style scene (since that takes a long time in forum games).

So, how does my experience so far with D&D Next stack up with yours?

Module Review: The Tomb of Rakoss the Undying

The first product from Mischief, Inc., The Tomb of Rakoss the Undying is an adventure for characters between 4^th and 6^th level that is written to be compatible with most old school systems. The text doesn't refer to any specific system, but it does include monster stats that, while not exact to any specific system, are written to be reasonably compatible (though they may require some small tweaks) for most old school games. It is a location-based, dungeon crawl-style adventure.

This would fit right into any old-school module collection.

The adventure is sixteen pages (eighteen if you include the front and back covers). There is a Table of Contents that, despite being fairly brief, is perfectly adequate. The Tomb of Rakoss the Undying is, at the time of this writing, listed as Pay What You Want on DriveThruRPG and RPGNow. The PDF is bookmarked for all the relevant sections, but it is watermarked.

After the Table of Contents, the book has an Introduction that includes an explanation of the monster stat blocks, then moves into the Adventure Background, Getting the Players Involved, Default Narrative, and Alternate Plot Hooks. The background includes setting information, though the very next section, Getting the Players Involved, has some advice on how to tailor the adventure to a GM's individual campaign. The Default Narrative section is basically a plot hook and introduction for the players that the adventure assumes is used, though the next section, appropriately named Alternate Plot Hooks, provides some alternate means for the GM to get the players interested in the adventure.

SPOILERS

Getting into the meat of the adventure, the next section, entitled Getting There, deals with the party moving on from whichever city or town they start in to the actual adventure site. There's some basic information on an attack on the party from a roving band of ogres, but the details of the encounter (aside from the number of ogres) are left up to the GM. After that follows all the different rooms and encounters that the party may encounter within.

Most of the encounters in the adventure are fairly short, but interesting. The dungeon map is a standard 10-foot grid, and the module also includes a good hex map of the surrounding area (if the GM chooses to use the default module setting). The hex map features mostly terrain features, and is large enough for a GM to add plenty of additional dungeons or other challenges to the area.

The dungeon features multiple secret doors, though how difficult these doors are to discover is mentioned in vague terms like “difficult to discover” rather than explicit numerical values. This isn't a bad thing – it allows the GM to adjudicate for a variety of systems with multiple different methods of finding secret doors.

The necromancer the dungeon is named for, Rakoss, is not present in the module. Rather, the PCs have the opportunity to find a phylactery (which may or may not be real, according to GM preference) that could easily lead to more adventures related to the ancient necromancer.

Overall Impressions

Looking over the entire adventure, it's immediately clear that The Tomb of Rakoss the Undying has taken a lot of inspiration from old TSR modules and other old school adventures. The art is good; most of it looks like art that might have been in an AD&D module. Similarly, the boxed text for GMs to read and the simple page styling hearkens back to the aesthetics of classic modules like B2: The Keep on the Borderlands.

Some of the adventure's features are left vague or left to the GM. For a module designed to be broadly compatible with multiple game systems, this is just fine. Specifics like environmental effects on unprotected adventurers are explicitly mentioned to be up to the GM; rather than describing specific effects, this allows GMs to insert weather or exposure rules from whichever system they choose to run this module.

Overall, I would definitely recommend this module to any fan of old-school play or dungeon crawls. The cartography and art is solid, and the writing is clear and concise. The setting information is basic and provides just enough information to give context to the dungeon, while still being open enough for a GM to use the module in just about any fantasy setting. I would give this module a solid 4 out of 5 stars, and I'll be using it in the near future for sure.