Lurking Fears Blog of the Week!

Let’s talk about games!

Today I want to start my first blog talking about my first true love in RPG’s and that is West End Game’s Star Wars, otherwise known as D6 Star Wars, WEG SW, etc.

It was the first game I ran as a GM and I spent many years playing it.  Still do, in fact.  

The system was pretty simple: Each Ability and skill had an amount of D6’s you would roll and a modifier, like 4D would be 4 D6 Dice and 2D+1 would mean 2 D6 and add one point to the total. You would roll all the dice, add them up and try to hit a target number. Later they would add fun stuff like the wild die and so on, but that’s the basic part of it. You could spend Character points to add a die to the pool or add a Force point if you were lucky to have it and double it.  

It still is probably the most researched and heavily sourced game I think I have ever seen this side of D&D and Traveller. There were TONS of rule and sourcebooks, detailing planets, aliens, ships, scenarios, campaigns… it went on and on. As this became popular largely after Return of the Jedi, this was for many a major part of how we kept the Star Wars galaxy alive in our minds. I would spend hours reading a sourcebook, dreaming of how I could foil my players, that pitiful rebel band.  

I can’t speak of how much they collaborated with Lucas or others, but man they went through immense detail on many aspects of the Star Wars lore. Did you know that Jawas look like rodents underneath their robes?  I learned it reading the Galaxy Guide to Tatooine, and for all I know, it set the canon, as they were described similarly in the series Book of Boba Fett. 

I started running the game for my cousins, who were also big Star Wars fans, and even though we were separated by over 400 miles, every summer we would get together for a few precious weeks and spend every minute we could shooting imaginary blaster bolts and waving phantom lightsabers. Again, it was my first time as GM, and even though we were familiar with and played some other RPGs like D&D, this was what we were truly fanboys about, so we were ravenous for every syllable we uttered in our games. We had no thought-out campaign, our first adventure was Tatooine Manhunt, and we would just play out each scenario as one large disjointed story. 

Don’t get me wrong though. As I got older, Star Wars D6 became a 4 year campaign for me and my friends, ran by my mentor GM, Bob.

Many other fine editions have come out since then, but for me, nothing beats this classic. Sure the power creep is steep, but we are heroes of the rebellion...right?