The RPG books, though, were godawful. One of them had a table for generating Diablo-style random magic items, with a hodgepodge of effects that made no sense. The back cover boasted of the millions of items you could make with it.

The actual RPG content was just as bad. Bleh.

But the CRPGs? I played the hell out of Diablo, and then played twice as much hell out of Diablo II. I love those games.

Steven: Excellent points! I particularly like your advice about using the non-RPG source material, like “The Art of…” books. Good stuff.

1. Stay consistent with the story structure of the medium. Since I was stringing a series of adventures together in a property based off of a movie, I tried quite hard to retain the signiature feel of the movies. Lucas has the heros split off into two or more groups to achieve their objectives; I often did the same thing, making sure to intercut between the various groups frequently. This isn’t something I usually do as a GM, but I feel for Star Wars it really worked well.

2. Stay morally consistent with the source material. One group of my players played as NRI (New Republic Intelligence) agents from the post-trilogy continuum. They upheld the values of the nacient New Republic, first against the external forces of the Imperial remenants, and later on protected the government from internal or sub-governmental threats (sound familiar?). Thats a major variation from the tone of Star Wars, but the player’s objectives were morally consistent.

Running counter to that, my other campaign was a group of Imperial agents (in a campaign that began 7 or so years before episode 4). They were evil at all the right plot points, and hideous punishments (disapearance of a loved one, etc.) were exacted for failure. This campaign ended when the group’s web of deceit and lies fell apart and everyone wanted them dead (they died during a desperate attempt to bring the Rebels some information that the players faked that would give a rebel group reason to help hide them from the Empire. Evil is punished in Star Wars.

3. Know all the niggling technical details, and if expansive pictoral source material exists for the setting (offical artbooks/”technical” manuals, fan art from deviant art or somewhere), make use of it.

4. This is a personal thing, but I don’t alter cannon. It leads to player-GM arguements. The closest I let players get to cannon is directly experiencing off-screen action (what was going on at Coruscant when the Senate was disolved?). Normally, I simply let characters experience the ripple effects from the actions taken in the cannon arc (coming across Alderanian refugees, for instance).

Ralph: Good point about player buy-in — that’s huge!

Not only do I run licensed games all the time, I’ve written for three and consulted on a few others. It’s a lot of fun and provides a unique playing and writing skillset.

For running a game, such as my own Stargate SG-4 game, the GM is well-served by trying to understand what role the game fills. You can play space opera sci-fi without having to play in Star Wars; presumably there is something in the property that has value to you.

Traditionally it’s familiarity. When I say we’re playing Star Trek, everyone should (hopefully) know what I’m talking about. We can narrow it down to “Klingon spies” or “just like Enterprise but with less suck,” but we all have a common frame of reference. That tends to be the real appeal.

Dealing with canon is always a touchy subject. My preference is to understand and respect canon but to NEVER let it hold me back from a good story. As discussed earlier with the concept of “forks,” what happens at the table diverges from the property at some point. At the same time, being respectful of canon means not having TIE Fighters attacking the Enterprise while the Daleks invade; I’m not a big fan of getting my chocolate in my peanut butter.

Something new that I’ve been trying in my Stargate game is working hard to make the game *feel* like a television show. As such, I try to craft short, easily-digestable adventures do-able in one session. In fact, I tend to write them one week at a time to keep the “small screen feel.” Following things like the three-act model helps keep you on pace as well. I try to fit in things that you could see people doing on the show: focusing on a single character, have a B subplot, playing the theme music in the background, naming each episode, etc. The little things that make it feel complete.

Sadly, I kinda take the whole thing back a step with a pretty poor Daniel Jackson impersonation. Gotta work on that.

Running a licensed game has many perks as well as drawbacks. Fortunately, I think they’re worth it although they (licensed games) tend to get a bad wrap. (“What, you’re not creative enough to make up your own game?”) It’s the freedom to explore an already established property or setting that everyone is familiar with and focus on the characters.

…and that’s exactly where the focus should be, IMO.

Another one might be – “What if Cyre was never destroyed to become the Mournland?”. Would the five (human) nations of Khorvaire still be in a civil war? What about the warforged? Would they have any rights?

What if?… hmm, that was a Marvel Universe comic series. You could build a whole slew of adventures based on just one of the What if? comics. Just run with the end result, and boom, you have your own fork point.

Uh, no. Not…not really. I thnk you hafta just figure out the sources, research them, or…uh…be a big goofy Lucas nerd like I used to be.

I think, however, that you can reverse-engineer a setting’s influences pretty easily; it just takes paying attention to their effects, looking for them, sussing them out. With games based on movies, though, it’s pretty easy — just surf the web or watch the DVD commentaries!

And as with fork points, if it’s not already out there, it sounds like great wiki fodder.

Don’t worry so much about the universe. Worry about where it came from.

Look…George Lucas didn’t craft the Star Wars galaxy out of whole cloth; he cobbled together samurai flicks, WWII movies, adventure serials, Eastern mysticism, melodrama and hot rods.

I find that people often overlook the hot rods. George loved him sme hot rods, Chester, and you can see that love all over those movies. He took the wonder those things game him and piped it into his setting like pudding into an eclair.

Sure, know your Blastech DL-44 from your ICOM T-65. But if you can get into the mesh of the setting, its core inspirations — for lack of a better term, its source code, you cannot help but to present a game that feels like, oh, Hyboria. Or Firefly. Or “The Snorks”.

…

…Heh heh heh. Snorks RPG.