Let me preface this by saying if you hated the Prequels or Sequels I don't care and I don't want to hear from you about it. Kindly scroll on past. If your comments are anti-prequel or anti-sequel, I WILL delete your comments without responding. They won't even be approved to show up on the blog. Now, that being said... I will NEVER forget how excited I was when the fanfare kicked up on December 18, 2015, at around 7:30 PM as I sat in the theater with my good friend Erika after a 24-hour marathon of all 6 prior Star Wars films, and that title: "EPISODE VII: THE FORCE AWAKENS" scrolled up the screen.  I'm not exaggerating when I say that moment was one of the greatest, most exciting times in my life. Now, my wedding day notwithstanding (which naturally stands head and shoulders above all others) the only other time I felt anything matching that level of anticipation was when the lights went down for  The Rise of Skywalker. But we'll get to that in a moment....

So a discussion arose on the ODD74 message forums awhile back, about how difficult it would be to run a Star Wars  game using the OD&D rules. The general consensus was that it shouldn't be difficult to do, but there was some disagreement on how to handle the Force--most people assumed Clerical magic would be the best approach. My own thought was that psionics, as presented in Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry  are a better, and near-perfect, approach to modeling the Force in a Star Wars game. This of course led to some disagreement, as psionics in Dungeons & Dragons, at least prior to third edition, have a reputation for being confusing, arcane, and complex. The truth is, however, that like much of the older editions of D&D, psionics aren't all that difficult--they're just poorly organized. After one goes through the rules and gets a handle on them, they are actually quite straightforward. I, thus, took it as something of a challenge to do up a full sourceb...

Sabacc I've done a couple of blogs recently about the official version of sabacc that was released as the Han Solo Card Game by Hasbro/Disney, how it's actually the Corellian Spike variant, and how it can be slightly altered to better reflect the betting nature of the game. This led me down the rabbit hole of securing a "full" sabacc deck, and exploring how to play the complete version of the game.  In doing so, I discovered that the rules that are all over the Internet are (perhaps unsurprisingly) confusing, arcane, and in some ways just don't make sense. This is particularly true in the area of "calling a hand." I strongly suspect that the people who wrote these rules (which I believe to originate with the West End Games Crisis on Cloud City RPG supplement) had no idea what calling is because they've never played poker.  Quite frankly, the rules make for a gambling game that nobody would really want to play, or one that would lead to a s...

My last post, put up just this morning , was about adding full betting rounds into the new Hasbro/Disney Han Solo Card Game, which is actually our first official release of Corellian Spike Sabaac. It also outlines the basic rules of the game, how it works, and clarifies some of the differences between Corellian Spike and standard Sabaac . A friend of mine, the esteemed Aaron Einhorn, mentioned it made him want to bring it into a Star Wars RPG session, just to add that element into the game. Here's a few thoughts on how that could be done. Sabaac in a Star Wars RPG The biggest trick when incorporating gambling or games of chance of any sort into a tabletop RPG is it in many ways removes the players from their characters. After all, your character might be an ace card sharp, but you may actually be kind of crap at cards. How do you model this?  The easiest way to do this is to tie in the character's gambling roll to the actual hand of cards, granting extra initial ...

First Things First First things first: Someday I'll get back to updating this blog at least three times a week. I appreciate everyone who's stuck with it through the lean years, and I'd love to see some more comments and discussion rocking. Bear with me if it takes a day or two for your comment to get approved until I get back into the swing of things. Like a lot of old blogs there's a TON of spam comments that come through, so I'm curating them for that reason only. Okay, now onto the topic of today's blog... Official Sabacc Exists at Last As you're aware unless you live under a rock, Solo: A Star Wars Story is in theaters, and you should absolutely go see it. It's probably my second favorite of the new canon films, after The Force Awakens. It's galaxies better than Rogue One, and I won't mention Last Jedi because quite frankly, the butthurt over that one is too controversial to bring it into this discussion. In any case, Solo gave us...