![]() Some of the characters in this book are repeated in previous iterations, such as Darth Vader and Grand Admiral Thrawn, but there are plenty of new offerings. But, on the other track, if you and your party are out to smash canon into more pieces than Alderaan, boy howdy, this is the book for you. If this is a concept that bothers you as a prospective GM, then perhaps some of these additions will be less useful for you. The idea of having Luke Skywalker, the Empire’s Most Wanted escorting them out for a mission might be a really cool idea, but the Dice Gods are fickle beings, and you could be one roll away from snuffing out a huge plot central character and destroying canon. There is a line of GM thinking that dreads such encounters, which relies on a simple (and often accurate) maxim: “If you stat it, they will kill it.” I love player ingenuity, and I have continued to tweak my GM style over the years because it seems as if they inevitably will come up with a sidestep or innovative solution to knock what I should have thought have been a real challenge out of the park. The second thing that Allies and Adversaries brings to the table is a bit more contentious: stats for canon characters and creatures from the series, offering specific threats for players to go up against. It’s a simple matter when your players need to deal with, say, a local bureaucrat to look up and quickly deploy a character with basic stats and gear without digging through notes, or speed reading a plethora of books to decide what to offer. Allies and Adversaries is an excellent tool for cases such as this: the types of characters are roughly laid out by faction (Rebels, Empire, Scum and Villainy) as well as the assorted creatures, with clear lists as to the type of character. Perhaps the pilot of your crew of scallywags on the edge starts to show signs that they might have a more than casual acquaintance with the Force, and a fallen Jedi apprentice might be an excellent foil. Perhaps your party of Rebels feel that they need to liberate a town from the oppression of a Black Sun Vigo before they have the chance to use a sympathetic planet as a base of operations. However, in my personal experience, a lot of campaigns include at least one character from a different “core”, and the actions of your campaign might drag you in one direction or the other. In fact, depending on the general overall feel that a certain campaign is going for, a GM may want to spend more time in the particular core book that they are planning to run in. It is not that previous iterations have failed to provide NPCs for players, or that A&A is an encyclopedic tome of every published NPC in the game (which it is absolutely not). The book is filled with stats of NPCs for GMs to throw at the players, with types that range across nearly every faction in the Galaxy. This appears to be part of the overall trend that Fantasy Flight is taking lately, streamlining releases to work for the Star Wars Narrative System at large instead of just one line. First, it’s a broad resource that can cover campaigns using any and all of the three core rulebooks, despite each individual game having a different focus. ) A&A changes the mold a bit by delivering a book that is purely about characters for a GM to populate the world with.ĭespite that pretty narrow focus, Allies and Adversaries offers up three very helpful things for people interested in running the game. (with a supplement for the prequels and Clone Wars cartoons incoming. įantasy Flight has been pumping out supplements of all sorts for the system fairly regularly for over five years now: they’ve produced expansions for literally every Career over all three core books, they’ve written about setting locations, and they’ve even produced a fairly comprehensive guide to playing the timeline of the original movies, supplemented by the events of Rogue One and Star Wars: Rebels. And, once in a while, we see something that makes us snort with laughter and say “Oh, I have to see that!” It was the final of these that had me take a look at the recent supplement for the Star Wars RPG from Fantasy Flight Games, Allies and Adversaries. Other times, it’s remembering a forgotten project that could use a bit more love. Sometimes, it’s excitement at projects to come. Sometimes, it’s because it is something at the cutting edge of mechanical development. In general, among the writers here at Cannibal Halfling Games, we are attracted to the things that we write about for a variety of reasons. ![]()
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