I think it's time to face a difficult truth - I may be losing faith with the systematic nature of my mission. I've been doing this blog for 8 years and I'm starting to show noticeable signs of fatigue. I thought it might have been social media addiction that was slowing me down - I spend an absolutely shameful amount of time scrolling reddit, despite inevitably feeling bad emotionally and mentally when I notice how much of the night has passed. But I'm starting to think that's more of a symptom than a cause. It should not have taken me two weeks to read Rebellion Era Sourcebook (Bill Slavicsek, Steve Miller, Owne K.C. Stephens). When I was in peak form, this was the sort of book I could bang out in a night.
It is about a subject matter that I'm generally positive towards. It is competently assembled. It is broken down into a series of page-long encyclopedia articles, each one about a different aspect of the rebellion-era Star Wars universe - a format that is well-suited to rapid reading.
But, ultimately, I had to force myself to read it. I don't feel like I'm getting burned out with reading and reviewing rpgs in general. If a book is novel, a product of authorial passion, or even just controversial, I still get excited about reading it, even with my new habit of excessive doomscrolling. But when a book is paycheck-earning journeyman work from designers with a long resumes (including some absolute bangers, not currently in evidence), I inevitably start asking myself "Why am I doing this? What am I getting out of it?
For example, I got very little out Rebellion Era Sourcebook. Large parts of this book are spent recapping the movies, and those sections are broken up by recaps of various EU novels and comics. It nods towards being an rpg sourcebook by including stats for random bullshit (like the two different action-figures, sorry, specialized storm trooper units - cold troopers and scout troopers, one is a thug 1/soldier 3 and the other is a scout 4) or three different versions of Han, Luke, Leia, and Chewbacca, but it's not structered like an rpg supplement. It's not an rpg supplement in conception. It is ultimately and essentially a piece of Star Wars media. Tracking the level advancement of Luke Skywalker, comparing the combat abilities of the different trooper types - those are just a new lense for experiencing the plot of the movies.
It's not useless, exactly. Certain campaign models suggest themselves, and if you needed generic stats for one of Jabba's henchment, the book has you covered. It's just that the whole thing is best geared towards telling the one story in the entire Star Wars universe that you can't do at the table. Why are we getting so many stats for Luke Skywalker? Are we meant to fight him? How is that at all useful for playing one of the unnamed commando guys who rode in the casually-flying shuttle to the forest moon of Endor? Seriously, the main thing that Luke does with his Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi-era stats is fuck off on his own side quests. His wearabouts are well-accounted for, and it's highly unlikely that he's going to show up, even as a cameo.
And, okay, that's kind of a buzzkill attitude from yours truly, but this is a problem that could've been mitigated if Rebellion Era Sourcebook had been designed as an rpg first and a piece of Star Wars media second. What are the campaign models? Waging guerrilla warfare in a conflict of galactic-scale against one of fiction's most powerful governments? Maybe there could be sections on urban combat, influencing public opinion, and common insurgency and counterinsurgency ops. Underworld crime capers in seedy locales like Mos Eisley or Cloud City? There could be a list of seedy dive bars and upscale gambling dens, breakdowns of the criminal factions and their various rivalries, details about imperial prisons or even, forgive me younger John, a keyed map of the city.
Mos Eisley gets three-quarters of a page, approximately the same wordcount as devoted to as an imperial star destroyer's trash disposal. It should have been a whole chapter! It's like they're curating material based on the amount of screen time they got in the movies. Luke's got one good scene in the Mos Eisley cantina, Han's got one good scene where he tricks the star destroyer by floating away with its garbage (and apparently, Boba Fett was familiar with that exact trick and wasn't just waiting around on the off chance that something would give the Millennium Falcon away) and therefor the book concludes that both pieces of information would have exactly the same utility to people attempting to create their own action-adventure stories in the Star Wars universe.
Look, I like the movies. The moment-to-moment experience of reading Rebellion Era Sourcebook was fine. I enjoyed the nostalgia trip, seeing the name "Salacious Crumb" and being like, "ho, ho, I recognize that little freak." It just wasn't a very good rpg.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that this explains why I took so long to read this book. Like I said, it was perfectly fine. However, it was very obviously going through the motions, and I saw my own behavior reflected in that. Passion is important, and when you're just checking things off a list, it shows.
Maybe I'll shake up my methodology a bit. Spend a little time picking books based on how much I want to read them, instead of going with whatever's next on my list.
Ukss Contribution: For all the shit I gave it, the section about imperial garbage disposal does have the most interesting adventure suggestion in the entire book - someone threw away a broken assassin droid without bothering to deactivate it first. And while the book presents it as a random hazard for PCs who were hired to do the sci-fi equivalent of the rat-slaying adventure (tregoths are described as "trash bats," but it's the same concept), it's actually a strong enough idea to anchor an entire story. Sanitation workers and scavengers are turning up dead. Could there be a serial killer on the loose? Let's hire 4-6 wandering mercenaries to find out.
So yeah, it'll require some fantasy translation, but "semi-scrapped assassin droid" is an amazing thing to have in your rpg setting.
