For once, the Star Wars Expanded Universe's signature move - taking the sole on-screen personality trait or behavior of a minor character and making it the defining characteristic of their whole existence/planetary civilization - actually works pretty well. Scavenger's Guide to Droids (Rodney Thomson, Sterling Hershey, Patrick Stutzman, Robert Wieland) is about machines that were deliberately manufactured for a particular purpose, and so it makes sense that the weird eyeball thing that came out of the wall at Jabba's palace to greet R2-D2 and C-3PO was, in fact, a TT-8L Gatekeeper Droid. It would be very strange worldbuilding indeed if that thing was bespoke. Or if it was part of a line of "eyeball-on-a-stalk" sentient machines and it just happened to choose to work in organized crime, as a first line of security vetting potential intruders. I never, not for a moment, believed that the Bothans were characteristically spies or that Greedo, the bounty hunter shot by Han Solo (first, obviously) was part of a species that placed a high cultural value on hunting, but I definitely believe that the weird eyeball thing was built for gatekeeping.
Which I guess means that Scavenger's Guide to Droids is the least cringe SWSE supplement I've ever read. The lore generally boils down to "this machine was built to do the thing we saw it do," repeated close to 50 times, but since there's a lot of Star Wars media I've never seen, I actually found it generally pretty interesting. There's a fancy-pants fencing instructor droid. A droid built exclusively to work at banks. The weird animatronic from Disney's Star Tours ride canonically exists and is a pilot/tour guide bot that's notoriously prone to exactly the sort of malfunction that appeared in the ride's plot. There's a secretary droid that has a creepy skeletal face like something dredged from the depths of nightmare. There's enough here to distract from the fact that every battledroid has the exact same backstory.
The biggest flaw with Scavenger's Guide to Droids as a book is that each droid entry is accompanied by 1-3 "modification" suggestions that are universally among the dullest shit I've read for the blog thus far. Like, sometimes they have little tidbits of lore, and on the balance it's interesting to know that people in the Star Wars universe are hacking the hell out of their tech, but each one is something you could change the droid into and the bulk of the text is devoted to things like alternate feat suggestions or the DC of the skill check necessary to take out one part and swap it with another.
Did you know, if you start with a GY-1 Information Analysis Droid, reprogram its operating system, and remove its arms and legs, you can turn it into a navigation-assisting astromech droid like what R2-D2 does for Luke's X-wing? It's true. And if you put a spinning blade on its head, you could make it a food processor too.
So, anyway, reading 100+ of those barely-justified reskins was kind of a drag. But it wasn't quite enough to ruin what was, essentially, a monster book. And the adventure hooks, narrated by one of four specific commentator NPCs, that accompanied each entry, were a welcome addition to the format. The titular scavengers never quite popped as individual characters, but I think, if they were given a little bit more room to develop (say, by getting rid of some superfluous, repetitive text somewhere else in the book), they could have.
Which brings us at last to an issue I'm not quite sure how to address. But address it I must, because it takes up a significant minority of the book's lore. . . droids are kind of enslaved.
"Droids can be more than just equipment. They can be individuals."
"They are machines that feel."
And yet, so much of the book is about the routine practice of wiping their memories to prevent them from developing too much of an individual personality. Of fitting them with restraining bolts so they don't run away. Which they will do, if their owners mistreat them.
The book talks about a droid general strike that brings a planet to its knees. A casino clerk bot known as "The Saint of Droids" because it ensures that droids wagered by desperate gamblers gain responsible new owners. A black market merchant that helps abused droids escape their owners and disappear in the wider galaxy. A secret droid organization that believes the time for peaceful resistance has passed and has taken up armed direct action against the practice of droid ownership.
It's not subtle.
And it puts me in a terrible spot. Because I find the philosophical speculation about how to determine whether a machine qualifies as "intelligent" or "conscious" to be absolutely fascinating (and I have definite opinions on this subject, some of which may shock you), but in the context of a lighthearted action-adventure yarn, to have characters which blur the line between "person" and "property" strikes me as . . . somewhat irresponsible.
Like how am I supposed to deal with the fact that this book depicts a situation clearly modeled on the Underground Railroad? I feel dirty even bringing it up, because the real Underground Railroad was one of history's bravest resistance movements, risking life and limb to liberate the innocent from a tyranny as total and degrading as any humanity has ever known and the Star Wars droid freedom pipeline is just getting that stupid, inexplicably be-legged GONK-GONK power droid away from the incorrectly-programmed EV-series Supervisor Droid ("the motivators originally planned for the EV-series were accidentally swapped with ones meant to be installed in torture droids") that hung out in Jabba's basement. And I'm not sure whether I'm meant to react to the goofiness of Star Wars' kid-friendly robot slavery with a shrug and a chuckle, or if I'm meant to ramp up the drama here and tell a sweeping sci-fi epic about the endemic abuse of these clearly sentient beings.
Either option is uncomfortable in very different ways.
Overall, though, I enjoyed Scavenger's Guide to Droids. It's maybe not a sterling recommendation that the book gave me a whole lot to deliberately not think about, but I like droids. They're cute. They're funny. They're transparently toy-selling mascot characters. And Star Wars wouldn't be Star Wars without them.
Ukss Contribution: As much as I rag on the Extended Universe for being cheesy, it can be legitimately funny and awesome at times. I don't know for sure whether the following idea was borrowed from some novel or comic book or whether it was specifically invented for Scavenger's Guide to Droids, but the more I think about it, the more it delights me.
One of the suggested modifications for the FLTCH-Series Battle Droid would make it into a Mercenary Rental Unit. A simple enough concept, but the deeper you get into the weeds of this idea, the more wildly satirical this thing has to be. Just off the bat, if the rental period runs out mid-battle, you've got to give it more money, at surge-pricing rates, no less. But also, they make you pay a damage deposit before they let you rent one.
And . . . h-how? What?! You're charging a damage deposit on a piece of technology whose entire purpose is to get shot at by lasers. The economics of this transaction make no sense whatsoever.
But don't mistake the nature of my discourse here. It may seem like I'm poking holes in the concept, but there's a difference between a plot hole you complain about and a complaint you build a plot around. Imagine my incredulity directed not towards the authors of the book, but towards the manager of the Mercenary Droid Rental business.
In that context, this is another thing that makes me go, "Sigh . . . Capitalism." And I'll admit, I'm a sucker for it every time.
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