(Star Wars Saga Edition) Threats of the Galaxy

 I had a serious moment of self-reflection while reading Threats of the Galaxy. I was keeping a running list of "droids you can't be" vs "droids you can be," out of some critic's instinct that maybe the rules for which droids are and are not eligible to be player characters would be amusingly arbitrary, or at least feature one or two outrageously controversial calls. And it was going fine, though not in a particularly content-generating way. I was making observations like - an "assassin droid," as a broad description, sounds exactly like the sort of character someone would want to play, but maybe the non-humanoid assassin droid that tried to kill Padme Amidala in Attack of the Clones is reasonable to exclude from the list of playable droids. It was all very dull. Anodyne Star Wars nerd shit.

Then I got to the "Power Droid" entry. The name "Power Droid" might not immediately call an image to mind, but if you're a fan of the series, you undoubtedly know who this guy is. It's the incredibly useless-looking box on legs, first seen waddling around going "Gonk! Gonk!" and later seen being tortured in an uncomfortably foot-fetishy way in Jabba's palace. And the first time I read the entry, I thought it said you can't play one as a hero. But with second glance, I saw that actually you can. 

And in that moment of discovery, when my understanding of the role of the Power Droid in the rules of the game suddenly changed, I learned something about myself. Because unlike most of the other droids on my impromptu scorecard, I annotated the Power Droid's entry with my emotional response.

When I falsely thought you couldn't play a Power Droid, my extra note was "noo!" When I learned of my error, my tenor changed quickly to "what?" Do you know how rare it is to see the effects of irony poisoning in real time?

"Aww, man, I can't play as the gonk-gonk-box-with-legs? What a rip off! I will never forgive you . . . oh, I can? Ha. Ha. . . well, that's a relief. Um . . . maybe I'll think it over."

The book really did call my bluff. Actually, I think the Power Droid sucks so much that it's reasonable not include it as a playable option. Although I guess there's no particular harm in just letting a PC Power Droid slide. Deliberately underpowered character creation widgets are sometimes called "trap options," but there ain't nobody falling for that particular trap. You only pick that particular character if you're actively trying to troll the game, and the most fitting punishment is simply to let you get away with it.

Now, in my defense, I knew I was being ironic when I wrote that "noo!" I just thought I was being the charming kind of ironic and not the obnoxious kind of ironic. Lesson learned (I claim, with completely unearned confidence).

Now, I don't include this anecdote because droids (and my emotional reactions thereto) are a particularly large part of the book. It's divided into three chapters, one of which is "Droids," but the droid chapter is the shortest of the three. I tell this story because my irony poisoning is of a species with my appreciation of the Star Wars setting as a whole. It's genuine sentiment, mixed with playful affect, mixed with a little bit of unnecessary meanness that is directed more at my own embarrassment at once having been an easily-impressed child than at any particular fault of the source material.

And believe me, ,the sentiment I feel for the Power Droid is genuine. I remember seeing the movies and being like, "look at that dumb, fucking robot. They very obviously put legs on a trashcan. There's no way anyone would ever build something like that!"

. . . and there's a special cinema magic that comes from being allowed the opportunity to notice goofy things like that. Like, it's a dumb robot, but in some sense, it's my dumb robot. I noticed how dumb it was all on my own, even as a preteen. And a lot of the warmth and good will I feel towards Star Wars is just that lingering memory of a silly kid's joke, perfectly executed.

Which brings us to the . . . fraught part of Star Wars Saga Edition as a roleplaying game. It relies pretty heavily on the Expanded Universe, and the Expanded Universe . . . doesn't always have the wisdom to let the movies speak for themselves.

This is, of course, inevitable, almost to the point of tautological circularity. If the movies were enough, why would we even have an Expanded Universe? But I think there's a difference between EU materials that are in thoughtful dialogue with the movies, and EU materials that try to apologize for the movies.

Take our humble Power Droid. "The few people who are unaware of its function wonder why Veril Line Systems built it in the first place. Without power droids, however, modern society would grind to a halt."

I literally, no joking, hate that they did that. It's the right call for an rpg, because if you put these ridiculous fucking things in a game, the players are going to ask what they do, and I don't want that responsibility as a G, but I hate that playing Star Wars Saga Edition would put me in this position. They could have just not mentioned it. Maybe I get wild hair, or the players get mischievious, and one of those gonk-gonk droids gets table focus, and then the consequences of killing the movies' magic are on me, but I don't need a book to make that call on my behalf.

But I don't blame Threats of the Galaxy for that. I know that this sort of thing was inherited from some novel or comic book or George Lucas interview. It happens often enough that it's just part of a pattern. The "Bothans are widely acclaimed as the best spies in the galaxy." Jedi frequently use the term "aggressive negotiations" as "a euphemism for combat." And that thing that swallowed R2-D2 on Dagobah is part of a species that will "swiftly spit out objects that prove indigestible and can do so with surprising force."

Man, I love Star Wars, but the EU's genre illiteracy . . . can be a lot to deal with sometimes. Though it's not all bad. There are things that I like. We learned that Luke Skywalker once faced disciplinary action because he used the Force instead of his targeting computer and wound up blowing one of his squadron-mates out of the sky due to her being an undiscovered spy. Which is kind of a hilarious situation. The Rebellion brass are chewing him out for recklessly endangering his own people, but it turns out his mystic intuition correctly separated friend from foe and it (presumably) took the whole course of a novel to get that sorted out.

And Yoda gets some . . . challenging character development. [Queen Amidala's bodyguard] "Tycho sternly disapproved, stating that the risks were too high. Despite his reservations, the captain was coerced through the Force by Yoda to proceed with the rescue." 

I'm not a huge fan of "good guy character is secretly a dick" as a general trope, but I have had my suspicions about Yoda for awhile. They go back at least as far as Star Wars: Republic Commando, the video game where he was just a little too comfortable commanding a slave army of clones.

Finally, I actively enjoy when the EU speculates about Force users who developed their traditions entirely outside the culture of the Republic, the Jedi, or the Sith. The Force was first described to us as an energy field that connects all life, and it's fascinating to me to think of different ways that various cultures could approach the same universal mystic phenomenon.

Overall, I'd say that Threats of the Galaxy reminded me of what I love about the Star Wars setting . . . eventually. It had three chapters, one about Characters, one about Creatures, and one about Droids. And the chapters about Creatures and Droids were absolutely delightful. As for characters, well, I suppose there's some utility in having stats for both a doctor and a medic, a bureaucrat and a politician, or an officer, a commando squad leader, and a mercenary captain. But I'm not going to pretend that I loved reading about them.

Ukss Contribution: Though there was plenty I did love reading about. Like, there's this EU smuggler named "Talon Karrde" and his ship is called "The Wild Karrde." Or the surreal fact that Amidala's security team included several trained bodyguards who could all pass for body doubles. 

Although, in the end, I think my favorite thing was the colossal-sized construction droid. Conceptually, on it's own, it's merely interesting, but the art rendered it as a several-stories-tall beetle-like monstrosity, casually picking up a Millenium Falcon-type space freighter and gently stacking it in a salvage pile as it cleaned up and restored a devastated city like some kind of reverse-kaiju. And that's beautiful to me.