Any Star Wars EU fans here?
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I'm contemplating getting into the Star Wars EU, particularly Legends. I've already started compiling a list of media in in-universe chronological order that I would like to consume in that case, but are there any ones that I really shouldn't miss?
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@marczellm First of all, you should start learning French.
Macron to create French military space force
Donald Trump already pledged to create an American space force by 2020.
filed under: I'm pretty sure that's what he meant by "EU"
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@marczellm This is going to be Legends-heavy. I haven't been particularly enthused by much of the new stuff.
Stuff that's good:
- anything by Timothy Zahn (including the non-Legends Thrawn trilogy)
- anything by Michael A. Stackpole
- anything by Aaron Allston (although see last paragraph))
- anything by Matt Stover (including the Revenge of the Sith novelization)
- depending on your views on the prequels, most of the stuff by James Luceno
Stuff that's not as good but is plot essential:
- The Courtship of Princess Leia by Dave Wolverton
- The Jedi Academy Trilogy by Kevin J. Anderson
I think pretty much all of the Bantam-published novels get referenced at some point by The New Jedi Order or its two sequel series; but those four have the biggest impact.
I've read both Legacy of the Force and Fate of the Jedi, but wouldn't recommend reading them; I'd recommend you stop at the end of The New Jedi Order. You'll miss out on a number of Aaron Allston books (his contributions to those series, plus X-Wing: Mercy Kill); but it's a more satisfying ending and passing of the torch.
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@marczellm said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
I'm contemplating getting into the Star Wars EU
Going by the subject, I thought you wanted to ask Star Wars fans in the European Union about something. Now I realise it’s Expanded Universe you mean.
particularly Legends. I've already started compiling a list of media in in-universe chronological order that I would like to consume in that case, but are there any ones that I really shouldn't miss?
I read a fair number of the early novels when they had first come out, so 25 years ago and more, and as I recall they were quite good, though I gave up when they began to do things like write backstories for each and every one of the Cantina characters. I mean, who cares? Well, obviously a lot of people do, but it’s not for me. The initial Thrawn, though, and the ones that came not long after (by other authors) were good reads, I thought.
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@Gurth said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
I read a fair number of the early novels when they had first come out, so 25 years ago and more, and as I recall they were quite good, though I gave up when they began to do things like write backstories for each and every one of the Cantina characters. I mean, who cares?
If they were going out and doing books for each character I'd agree. But they limited that to one short story anthology (plus a second similar one about Jabba's Palace). I don't see the harm in side stuff like that.
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@Gurth said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
Going by the subject, I thought you wanted to ask Star Wars fans in the European Union about something. Now I realise it’s Expanded Universe you mean.
Thanks for the explanation.
Now I'm wondering WTF an "Expanded Universe" is...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
@Gurth said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
Going by the subject, I thought you wanted to ask Star Wars fans in the European Union about something. Now I realise it’s Expanded Universe you mean.
Thanks for the explanation.
Now I'm wondering WTF an "Expanded Universe" is...
In Star Wars (or even lots of other curated "shared world fiction", you have your Canon Universe and your Expanded Universe. The Canon is the things that the curators/owners say really, definitely, absolutely happened in-universe. The Expanded Universe are the other, deutero-canonical stories. In this case, marking something as EU is saying that it's set in a version of the same universe as the movies, but that movies (or other canon) can and will supersede the EU where they conflict.
Basically, it's a way of saying "those pieces that were pseudo-canon, but now have no official status." Professionally-written/produced fanon, really.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
Basically, it's a way of saying "those pieces that were pseudo-canon, but now have no official status."
I agree with your first paragraph. This sentence, not so much. The EU (everything slapped with the "Legends" banner now) was always pseudo-canon. Sure, Lucas cribbed some of it for the prequels (e.g. the name - but not the pronunciation - of the galactic capital), but he also freely contradicted them where he felt like it (e.g. Jedi not having families).
The current crop of tie-ins are in the same boat; they just don't have a nice name this time.
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
Basically, it's a way of saying "those pieces that were pseudo-canon, but now have no official status."
I agree with your first paragraph. This sentence, not so much. The EU (everything slapped with the "Legends" banner now) was always pseudo-canon. Sure, Lucas cribbed some of it for the prequels (e.g. the name - but not the pronunciation - of the galactic capital), but he also freely contradicted them where he felt like it (e.g. Jedi not having families).
The current crop of tie-ins are in the same boat; they just don't have a nice name this time.
In the official records, maybe, although the status wasn't clear at the time. They certainly had the imprimatur of LucasArts, and "supposedly" there was effort to keep the story-lines minimally-conflicting. But in the hearts of the fans? They were more official (at times) than the movies. This caused mega conflicts after the prequel trilogy came out, since it broke lots of things. It's part of what pissed a lot of diehard fans off about the prequels. So Disney, when they bought it did the sane thing of making it all officially deutero-canonical. And then proceeded to pour all that effort and everything else about the setting down the drain. Sigh.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
In the official records, maybe, although the status wasn't clear at the time. They certainly had the imprimatur of LucasArts, and "supposedly" there was effort to keep the story-lines minimally-conflicting. But in the hearts of the fans?
LucasArts was a video game company. They had nothing to do with determining canon, just creating tie-ins. If Lucasfilm can't even communicate their own name to everybody, no wonder people weren't aware that the tie-ins aren't as important as the movies.
This caused mega conflicts after the prequel trilogy came out, since it broke lots of things.
Although in the end I think pretty much everything ended up being retconned successfully, asides from some of the dates (which are easy enough to fudge).
So Disney, when they bought it did the sane thing of making it all officially deutero-canonical. And then proceeded to pour all that effort and everything else about the setting down the drain. Sigh.
As you said, dumping the old stuff was the sane thing to do. I'm actually glad they didn't keep any of it; things would have been... weird... had they kept stuff that fit and only dumped stuff from The New Jedi Order and beyond.
My bigger complaint is that Disney doubled-down on the Lucasfilm era's communication mistakes. Before, Lucasfilm Licensing had at least declared everything except the movies and The Clone Wars TV show as lower in the hierarchy (although obviously that didn't percolate to everyone). Disney started off claiming that all the new books/games/comics were as canon as the movies. That worked for a little while, but they shortly started contradicting each other; and then The Last Jedi and Solo came along and contradicted stuff as well.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
This caused mega conflicts after the prequel trilogy came out, since it broke lots of things.
such as?
@Unperverted-Vixen said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
they shortly started contradicting each other; and then The Last Jedi and Solo came along and contradicted stuff as well.
such as?
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
If they were going out and doing books for each character I'd agree.
That’s what happened in my recollection of events. Guess my memory isn’t as flawless as I remembered it to be.
But they limited that to one short story anthology (plus a second similar one about Jabba's Palace). I don't see the harm in side stuff like that.
I don’t think it’s harmful — I just didn’t see the attraction of reading books like that. Could just be that I was already starting to have my fill of Star Wars novels, though, and this was just the last drop for me.
@Benjamin-Hall said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
In the official records, maybe, although the status wasn't clear at the time. They certainly had the imprimatur of LucasArts
Lucasfilm, I think you mean.
and "supposedly" there was effort to keep the story-lines minimally-conflicting. But in the hearts of the fans? They were more official (at times) than the movies. This caused mega conflicts after the prequel trilogy came out, since it broke lots of things.
In the same boat as Star Wars RPG material (the original stuff by West End Games). Star Wars fans tended to see it as official, and Lucasfilm pretty much gave the impression that it was, too — as I recall, when Zahn was going to write that first trilogy of spinoff novels, Lucasfilm sent him a big box of WEG books to get him up to speed on the setting.
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@marczellm said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
@Unperverted-Vixen said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
they shortly started contradicting each other; and then The Last Jedi and Solo came along and contradicted stuff as well.
such as?
Finn and Rey's first meeting. What Kessel's like.
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@Unperverted-Vixen This is a pretty good summary. I did like Legacy of the Force, but Fate of the Jedi kind of fell apart at the end and had editing errors and seemed rushed in places.
The entire X-Wing series (except for Mercy Kill which I was completely lost on because it takes place decades later and I hadn't yet read Fate of the Jedi) is a great standalone work, probably the best in the entire EU. You might want to read The Courtship of Princess Leia after Solo Command for additional details, but it's not fully required.
If you like short stories, get all of the "Tales" anthologies. They tend to expand upon background characters from the original movies in interesting ways. Especially the first two in this list. (The Bounty Hunters one has a lot of problems because of Boba Fett and what George Lucas did with him in the prequels. I might also be conflating it with the Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy which kind of sucked.)
- Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina
- Tales from Jabba's Palace
- Tales from the New Republic
- Tales from the Empire
- Tales of the Bounty Hunters
The Han Solo Trilogy kind of serves as a prequel to the original movie, and establishes where Han came from, how he met Chewbacca, how he became a smuggler for Jabba, and why he was so reluctant to get involved in the Rebellion.
Shadows of the Empire was a good read as I recall. It sits directly between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi and covers the Rebellion's discovery of the second Death Star as well as getting a few things lined up for Han's rescue in Jedi.
The Truce at Bakura takes place the day after Return of the Jedi ends, and it was a pretty good one, too.
Anything by Kevin J. Anderson is just plain goofy, although the Jedi Academy Trilogy is pretty important to the EU's chronology. You can read Stackpole's I, Jedi if you want the basics of the Jedi Academy Trilogy without actually going there, because it covers a lot of the same events from a different point of view (Corran Horn from the X-Wing series).
The Black Fleet Crisis was an interesting one, a bit more political/military than most Star Wars novels but it showcases some of the New Republic's growing pains and I thought the Lando Calrissian storyline of chasing down the Teljkon vagabond was a lot of fun.
I haven't read the Corellian Trilogy in a long time, but Centerpoint Station has a few important roles in later series. The only thing I really remember is wondering why Han was so confused by the size of the Death Star in the original movie when he came from a star system that had a space station far, far bigger...
Finally, I'm going to be "that guy" and say you should read The Crystal Star. It gets a bad rap as the worst Star Wars novel ever, but I thought it was 50x less goofy than a semi-alien ambassador (to what?) in charge of an Imperial military (?), attacking a hidden planet that's actually three planets orbiting so closely they rub and scrape together, while trying to kidnap Anakin Solo to make him the new Emperor, and getting defeated by three infants and Winter. And at the very least, you'll understand what people mean by Waru, and that's worth something, right?
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@mott555 said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
The Han Solo Trilogy kind of serves as a prequel to the original movie, and establishes where Han came from, how he met Chewbacca, how he became a smuggler for Jabba, and why he was so reluctant to get involved in the Rebellion.
I assume that it bears not a single passing resemblance to Solo, and does not even have Woody Harrelson in it.
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@pie_flavor Every Star Wars movie released by Disney has completely shat upon the entire Expanded Universe. The George Lucas films and the EU form one coherent mostly-self-consistent universe and storyline. Disney breaks from that, pretends the EU never existed, and has storylines that are completely incompatible with it. Totally different universes.
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@pie_flavor said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
@mott555 said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
The Han Solo Trilogy kind of serves as a prequel to the original movie, and establishes where Han came from, how he met Chewbacca, how he became a smuggler for Jabba, and why he was so reluctant to get involved in the Rebellion.
I assume that it bears not a single passing resemblance to Solo, and does not even have Woody Harrelson in it.
It doesn't have Woody Harrelson in it, but it's not completely dissimilar. It's mostly small pieces that may have been cribbed, though, rather than the movie being an adaptation.
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Thanks y'all for the recommendations.
None of you mentioned comics or games yet.
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@marczellm said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
None of you mentioned comics or games yet.
I didn’t in so many words, no, but many of the West End Games Star Wars RPG books are quite good. As for comics, I still want to find my (or even a) copy of the Marvel adaptation of A New Hope, of which I used to have the first issue but not any others, and which included the deleted scenes with Jabba the Hutt etc.
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@marczellm said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
I'm contemplating getting into the Star Wars EU, particularly Legends. I've already started compiling a list of media in in-universe chronological order that I would like to consume in that case, but are there any ones that I really shouldn't miss?
I'm not a huge Star Wars fan, but Clone Wars and Rebels are both worth watching. Better than most of the movies.
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@marczellm said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
None of you mentioned comics or games yet.
Comics: Dark Empire is the only really plot-important one, and it's not very good. Some characters from the X-Wing: Rogue Squadron comics show up in later X-Wing books, but you can get by without them.
Recommendations for stuff that's good but not plot-important: Knight Errant, Knights of the Old Republic, and Legacy. From the new canon, the first Darth Vader series by Keiron Gillan, and its spinoff Doctor Aphra.
Games: The Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series is great, and the closest to plot-important (the main character shows up in some of the later novels). The Knights of the Old Republic series, X-Wing, and TIE Fighter are also great picks.
The Rogue Squadron series for N64/GameCube (plus Battle for Naboo, same style but in the prequels) was pretty good, but while Rogue Squadron had a PC port the rest require original hardware (and I'm not sure how playable the PC port is).
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
while Rogue Squadron had a PC port the rest require original hardware (and I'm not sure how playable the PC port is).
That one I played a lot on my old Win98 PC, IIRC. Great fun.
@Unperverted-Vixen said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
The Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series is great
I'm currently playing those and yes. Although the first one sucked.
@Gurth said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
West End Games Star Wars RPG books
What's a RPG book?
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@marczellm said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
Although the first one sucked.
Them are fightin' words! Dark Forces is one of the best FPS's ever, and easily the greatest of the Doom clones!
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@marczellm said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
What's a RPG book?
Source book for a Dungeons and Dragons-style Star Wars game, I believe.
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@marczellm said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
@Gurth said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
West End Games Star Wars RPG books
What's a RPG book?
West End Games (long since defunct) wrote the first tabletop RPG with the Star Wars license. It used their D6 System, so one nickname for it is Star Wars D6. (There have been a few others.)
Out of necessity, WEG's sourcebooks did a lot of world-building. Much of it has been retained post-Legends.
In the mid 90s-early 2000s I played in a few Star Wars D6 campaigns and one-offs that were good. My favorite was the adventure our Star Wars superfan wrote that put us on the Death Star while the Named Characters were rescuing Princess Leia. At one point we're running around in Stormtrooper disguises and bump into their group. My immediate response: "I shoot at them but miss on purpose." Thus we were part of the reason why everyone thinks Stormtroopers can't hit the broadside of a barn. :)
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@marczellm said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
@Gurth said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
West End Games Star Wars RPG books
What's a RPG book?
RPG = Role-Playing Game. You know, the kind of game that computer gamers call a “tabletop RPG” when it’s their version that should have a separate name (preferably entirely different, since I’ve never seen one that was actually a proper role-playing game, largely due to the inherent limitations of a computer game).
From the mid-1980s through late 90s, a company called West End Games published Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game and released a large number of books for it that provided additional background on the setting beyond what you can get from the movies. This mostly because role-players need a world that’s bigger and more detailed than what you typically get in fiction, since they’re basically free to do what they please in the setting — meaning the gamemaster needs to know what’s out there so that “the world” seems realistic and complete, and he or she usually also wants lots of story hooks to hang adventures onto.
Much of this, as I recall, formed the basis for the Expanded Universe, but I have no idea how much of it still remains recognisable after tons of other writers did their own thing with everything that came before them.
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@Parody said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
Out of necessity, WEG's sourcebooks did a lot of world-building.
I remember, and probably still have somewhere, a fairly comprehensive set of those books. I loved them. At the time, we really thought what they contained was canon, because there simply were no other sources (and this was before the widely available web as well, so if you could not find it in your library/games' shop, it didn't exist).
In the mid 90s-early 2000s I played in a few Star Wars D6 campaigns and one-offs that were good.
I played it for years, and even after I stopped playing it regularly I still used it for one-offs with people new to RPG, because the setting takes half a second to explain (just say the name), and the rules are also very simple, much more than most other games (some have even less rules, but they sometimes nonetheless require experienced RPG players, the one that comes to mind and that I played a lot is Amber, one of the first (?) diceless-RPG). I could setup and run a small adventure for a group of new players in a couple of hours top, which makes for a nice introduction to RPGs.
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
and I'm not sure how playable the PC port is
As good as any. Not much fun by modern standards. But that's the constant problem with all retro gaming - except for select few titles, you need nostalgia or it's no fun at all. Games were terrible back then (for any value of "back then").
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@remi said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
I remember, and probably still have somewhere, a fairly comprehensive set of those books. I loved them.
I kind of wish I’d bought them back in the day. All I have is the second-edition and revised-second-edition (full-colour) main rules plus a couple of sourcebooks (including the prized Death Star Technical Companion, though).
At the time, we really thought what they contained was canon
Or to put that another way: at the time, nobody thought to differentiate between the movies and the game books, comics, toys, and whathaveyou. It was all simply Star Wars.
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@Gąska said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
As good as any. Not much fun by modern standards. But that's the constant problem with all retro gaming - except for select few titles, you need nostalgia or it's no fun at all.
Even with nostalgia, they can be no fun at all. I downloaded all of the software archive from World of Spectrum a few years ago (I bought an SD card reader for my Spectrum, and it’s amazing how many games you can fit on the smallest SD card you can find in the shops …) but playing several of the games I remember liking 30+ years ago, I found many of them distinctly lacking. And I’m not even up to speed on modern gaming at all, but I am rather big on nostalgia. Could be that last bit is exactly the problem, of course. (Try watching an old TV show you remember liking a lot. Chances are you’ll think it’s pretty lame now.)
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@Gurth said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
I kind of wish I’d bought them back in the day. All I have is the second-edition and revised-second-edition (full-colour) main rules plus a couple of sourcebooks (including the prized Death Star Technical Companion, though).
I had a look yesterday evening, and something that had entirely slipped out of my mind is that I have most of them... in French! At the time I wasn't fluent enough in English, plus anyway I got what I could find in the shops, so since they did not source the English ones, I probably never even thought about them. Some of the last ones I bought are in English, but very few. So while I know that I had "almost all the books", actually it's "almost all the French books", and I have no idea how the translation went (sometimes editors will merge several books into one, or just translate bits of one, for unclear reasons -- it's weird, but that happens).
I also find out how battered my copy of the core rulebook is. That thing definitely saw a lot of action!
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@remi said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
I had a look yesterday evening, and something that had entirely slipped out of my mind is that I have most of them... in French!
I didn’t know there was a French edition, but TBH it probably would have surprised me more to learn you had them all in English. You’re in much the same situation as German roleplayers, which I’ve had a fair amount of exposure to: popular games get translated, so there’s no need to buy the English-language originals.
I have no idea how the translation went (sometimes editors will merge several books into one, or just translate bits of one, for unclear reasons -- it's weird, but that happens).
Probably again, much the same as German. I have a bunch of German Shadowrun books (all the original German releases for < 4th edition, plus a couple of translated ones) and though I haven’t actually read the translations, I have leafed through them and they look OK. They also had a habit of expanding several books a little with new material aimed at the German market. I can’t really tell if this also happened in France, though, as I have exactly three French SR books (including the — to my knowledge — very rare first-edition rulebook by Hexagon). Oh, and my French isn’t good enough to really read them. But better than my Hungarian or Japanese, and I have SR books in both of those languages as well :)
I also find out how battered my copy of the core rulebook is. That thing definitely saw a lot of action!
You should see my first-edition (English) Shadowrun rulebook …
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@Gurth said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
I didn’t know there was a French edition, but TBH it probably would have surprised me more to learn you had them all in English. You’re in much the same situation as German roleplayers, which I’ve had a fair amount of exposure to: popular games get translated, so there’s no need to buy the English-language originals.
Exactly. Star Wars always was popular, so it definitely warranted a translation. Plus, at the time, the RPG offer was very small. AFAIR, if you wanted medfan you got AD&D, MERP and Warhammer, for a contemporary/horror setting you had Call of Cthulhu, later on came Vampire, and if you wanted something futuristic, that was Shadowrun or Star Wars, and that was about all. Well no, I think Paranoia got a good run as well here. There were other small ones, but on the top of my mind, those are the ones I remember, and they probably covered the large majority of the market.
They also had a habit of expanding several books a little with new material aimed at the German market. I can’t really tell if this also happened in France,
I can't tell for SR either, I never played it. I also never heard that this happened for SW, although of course since I've never compared editions in various languages I don't know how I would have spotted it. There was nothing that seemed obviously French-specific, but then again of course SW is happening "in a galaxy far away" while SR is set on Earth so you'd expect players to want more stuff they can relate to directly.
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@Gurth said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
They also had a habit of expanding several books a little with new material aimed at the German market. I can’t really tell if this also happened in France, though, as I have exactly three French SR books (including the — to my knowledge — very rare first-edition rulebook by Hexagon).
I suspect that is a German exclusive. Apparently Shadowrun and BattleTech (another game from the same publisher, FASA) were pretty big in Germany. When FASA went under, the company who had been doing the German translations set up a US subsidiary and acquired the rights to keep the games going in English, too, not just German. Pretty sure they ended up doing entire German-only sourcebooks for Shadowrun, not just additional material while translating.
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@remi said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
I was going to say 'or Cyberpunk' but after checking they're apparently originally the same game [as] Shadowrun
Blasphemy! The two are pretty much only related in both being near-future cyberpunk (as in the genre) games. Oh, and because it’s not that hard to translate stuff between one and the other. (I still occasionally¹ get emails from people who say they always liked my Chromebook Conversions.)
I can't tell for SR either, I never played it. I also never heard that this happened for SW, although of course since I've never compared editions in various languages I don't know how I would have spotted it. There was nothing that seemed obviously French-specific, but then again of course SW is happening "in a galaxy far away" while SR is set on Earth so you'd expect players to want more stuff they can relate to directly.
There’s a sourcebook titled Shadowrun France published by Jeux Descartes, which covers exactly what the title says :) I’ve got a copy, but for the reason I mentioned before, haven’t really read it as such. Oddly, though, when an English-language Shadows of Europe (sourcebook for most of the continent) was released, the authors took pretty much nothing from Shadowrun France for it, as far as I can tell.
@Unperverted-Vixen said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
I suspect that is a German exclusive. Apparently Shadowrun and BattleTech (another game from the same publisher, FASA) were pretty big in Germany.
That’s because the people behind FanPro, the German publisher, were FASA fanboys a bit. If you look at things like their catalogs and other promotional material, it was very clearly done in imitation of how FASA did these things. They also used to have some FASA people at the FanPro booth at Spiel pretty much every year, mainly because they published several of FASA’s games in translation of course. But relations between the two companies were quite good in any case.
When FASA went under, the company who had been doing the German translations set up a US subsidiary
FanPro LLC.
and acquired the rights to keep the games going in English, too, not just German.
They also did it the other way around, publishing Das Schwarze Auge in English as The Dark Eye. Having obtained² a shit-ton³ of books for DSA last year, though, I have to wonder why they bothered. The world seems very standard medieval fantasy to me and the game system is … let’s just keep it at “awkward”, shall we? Certainly not one I’d choose to use except if I really wanted to play in that game world.
Pretty sure they ended up doing entire German-only sourcebooks for Shadowrun, not just additional material while translating.
They already published their first original German-language book⁴ in 1993, and followed it up with several more over the next decade or so. I count eight on my shelf, five of them from before FASA threw in the towel. Quality of the material, though, is generally not that great, especially in the couple of books after the first one.
¹ Once every couple of years, perhaps.
² Free of charge.
³ SEVEN boxes for 2500 pages of A4 copier paper, full to the brim with DSA books …
⁴ Deutschland in den Schatten, which FASA had translated and published as Germany Sourcebook.
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
When FASA went under, the company who had been doing the German translations set up a US subsidiary and acquired the rights to keep the games going in English, too, not just German.
Now if only they would've kept it there and not transferred it out to Catalyst...
I liked Shadowrun 4th and 5th, but Catalyst mis-managed stuff for so long that it's surprising that they seem to be getting back into a groove (New Shadowrun edition, new Battletech edition...)
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@e4tmyl33t said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
Now if only they would've kept it there and not transferred it out to Catalyst...
Not FanPro's fault. Their distributor in the US (Fast Forward Entertainment) went under and took a lot of FanPro's money with it.
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
@e4tmyl33t said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
Now if only they would've kept it there and not transferred it out to Catalyst...
Not FanPro's fault. Their distributor in the US (Fast Forward Entertainment) went under and took a lot of FanPro's money with it.
Nah, I blame WizKids. They're the license owners, they're the ones responsible, the fuckers.
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@Gurth said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
@remi said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
I was going to say 'or Cyberpunk' but after checking they're apparently originally the same game [as] Shadowrun
Blasphemy! The two are pretty much only related in both being near-future cyberpunk (as in the genre) games.
Eh. I kind of remember that kind of reactions back then, when someone was giving a high-level overview of what games existed, there was always one SR or CP fan to howl that they were not at all the same thing
It also happened to some extent between RoleMaster and MERP, although in France I almost never saw RoleMaster, so most people ignored it (also, MERP only saving grace was its universe (Middle-Earth!), the system itself never was very appealing, so why would you want to play with that system without Middle-Earth?).Also, there were a few GURPS players, but they were the weirdos amongst the weirdos that were all RPG players...
There’s a sourcebook titled Shadowrun France published by Jeux Descartes,
That vaguely rings a bell, yes, I must have seen it in shops. Jeux Descartes was great, they published a lot of stuff, translated or created, and in many cities their shop was the only place you could find RPGs, card games (Magic etc.), wargames and any non-mainstream board game (i.e. other than Monopoly or Risk...). They're still around, but games shops have become more common nowadays, and it's been years since I've been in one, so I don't know what they do nowadays.
They also did it the other way around, publishing Das Schwarze Auge in English as The Dark Eye. Having obtained² a shit-ton³ of books for DSA last year, though, I have to wonder why they bothered. The world seems very standard medieval fantasy to me and the game system is … let’s just keep it at “awkward”, shall we? Certainly not one I’d choose to use except if I really wanted to play in that game world.
Oh yeah, I remember that one! Came out as "L'oeil Noir" in French, and I even played it a couple of times. Never was a hit, probably for the reasons you mention. They had something about runes that you positioned in a triangle to describe spells that sounded intriguing a the time (it was not just a straight pre-written list of spells), but I don't remember more, nor whether it worked well in a real game.
They did however do a good job of presenting the game, AFAIR, both in terms of physical aspect (it was a nice box with the books, dices and stuff), marketing (they managed to be sold in more mainstream shops at one point), and in terms of introducing new players to RPGs (many other games had a section about "what's an RPG" at the start, but were honestly kind of assuming that you knew what you were getting into). They probably were the gateway drug for many RPG players
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
Not FanPro's fault. Their distributor in the US (Fast Forward Entertainment) went under and took a lot of FanPro's money with it.
That in turn was because FFE had misunderstood WotC’s Open Gaming License, and so published stuff intended for D&D3 that WotC felt they weren’t allowed too.
@remi said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
Eh. I kind of remember that kind of reactions back then, when someone was giving a high-level overview of what games existed, there was always one SR or CP fan to howl that they were not at all the same thing
Because they’re not :) Really, the best description is probably “SR is like CP2020, but with magic; oh, and less deadly”.
It also happened to some extent between RoleMaster and MERP, although in France I almost never saw RoleMaster, so most people ignored it (also, MERP only saving grace was its universe (Middle-Earth!), the system itself never was very appealing, so why would you want to play with that system without Middle-Earth?).
About twenty years ago I used to know some people who began roleplaying with MERP (IIRC due to an interest in Middle Earth) and then switched to RoleMaster. I own the basic books for both, but have never seriously played it. Well, I did once, but that was when I was visiting acquaintances in the UK who played RM.
Jeux Descartes was great, they published a lot of stuff, translated or created, and in many cities their shop was the only place you could find RPGs
I didn’t know they had shops as well, I thought it was just a publisher.
Oh yeah, I remember that one! Came out as "L'oeil Noir" in French
Means the same thing as the German name, of course. It was even published in Dutch, as Oog des Meesters (“Eye of the Master”, with archaic second case des -s instead of van de) — very few RPGs got Dutch translations because the market fir these games would simply buy the English books as a matter of course. DSA was probably the main exception, and my guess is because it was German and the publisher must have felt that German-language books would sell even worse here.
I even played it a couple of times. Never was a hit, probably for the reasons you mention. They had something about runes that you positioned in a triangle to describe spells that sounded intriguing a the time (it was not just a straight pre-written list of spells), but I don't remember more, nor whether it worked well in a real game.
I read the main rules last year, and the thing I remember most is the odd way of rolling tests: every one of them is a roll against three stats, made with three D20s, and if even one fails, the whole test fails. I’ve not actually played it, but this just feels really awkward to me.
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@Gurth said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
Jeux Descartes was great, they published a lot of stuff, translated or created, and in many cities their shop was the only place you could find RPGs
I didn’t know they had shops as well, I thought it was just a publisher.
In addition to many translations, they edited some French-created (I think) board/war games that were hits, the one that comes to mind is Formule Dé (F1 racing game with a nice and easy-flowing rule system, still a good game decades later, and still published), although I also remember Junta that was a hugely fun (you played high-ranking officials in a banana republic trying to make money though various coup d'état -- that were in part resolved by physically shooting with a dart gun at figurines! --, winning the coup wasn't really the main point, it was just a way to change the status-quo).
But still, I think they were primarily games' shops, and branched out to publishing when they saw nobody else was doing it. To teenagers interested in unusual games (RPGs, wargames...) before the internet, their shops were Ali Baba's cavern.
I even played it a couple of times. Never was a hit, probably for the reasons you mention. They had something about runes that you positioned in a triangle to describe spells that sounded intriguing a the time (it was not just a straight pre-written list of spells), but I don't remember more, nor whether it worked well in a real game.
I read the main rules last year, and the thing I remember most is the odd way of rolling tests: every one of them is a roll against three stats, made with three D20s, and if even one fails, the whole test fails. I’ve not actually played it, but this just feels really awkward to me.
Weird, I thought their system was D6 based. I guess I must be confusing memories of different games, all that was more than 20 years ago...
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@Gąska said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
@remi said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
Jeux Descartes
How do you pronounce that?
Uh, I don't know how to write IPA (all I know it how to drink it
)..."jeux" is pronounced like "je" (the French first person pronoun i.e. "I"), the "eu" is supposed to make a longer "e" than "e" alone, but the difference is not huge, and the "x" is silent (it's the plural mark for nouns ending in "eu" or "au", instead of "s", and the plural mark is almost always silent in French).
"Descartes" (being obviously a reference to the philosopher/scientist, he was on their logo as well) would be a bit like "day-cart" in English. I'm sure you could find a rule as to why the middle "s" is silent (the end one is again likely a plural mark), my main guess in this case is that the name was originally "Des Cartes" (that would have been even before Descartes' time, his name always was written this way, but being from a small noble family, it's likely it was his first noble ancestor chosen name).
(although now that I think of it, I can't find a word with "esc" in the middle, where the "c" is not itself pronounced "ss" (because of -e or -i afterwards, like e.g. in "ascent" in English), and where the "s" is not silent. I think that "ess-k" is too hard to pronounce and the "s" always gets dropped. The only exception I can think of is "escalier" (stairs) and other words starting with esc- (escalade, escapade, Esculape...), where the "e" is the first letter so the stress of the whole word is a bit different)
There is a pun with "Descartes" being pronounced almost like "de cartes" ("des" is not the same as "de", but close enough to make the pun work), making the whole name sound like "jeu de carte" i.e. "card game".
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@remi I knew the answer would be multiple paragraphs. French is a funny language.
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@error_bot !xkcd nerd sniping
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And of course @error_bot is still locked into his owner's trunk...
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@Gąska said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
@remi said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
Jeux Descartes
How do you pronounce that?
Approximately as /ʒø(z) deˈkart/, I think.
@remi said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
Formule Dé
I’ve been wanting to play that for some years, but haven’t had the opportunity yet.
But still, I think they were primarily games' shops, and branched out to publishing when they saw nobody else was doing it.
Makes sense.
To teenagers interested in unusual games (RPGs, wargames...) before the internet, their shops were Ali Baba's cavern.
I bet. I know I greatly enjoyed spending ages in shops dedicated to my hobbies (not just gaming) when I came across one, as there were very few in my area.
I read the main rules last year, and the thing I remember most is the odd way of rolling tests: every one of them is a roll against three stats, made with three D20s, and if even one fails, the whole test fails. I’ve not actually played it, but this just feels really awkward to me.
Weird, I thought their system was D6 based. I guess I must be confusing memories of different games, all that was more than 20 years ago...
Maybe they changed the system, I just read the main rulebook of the previous edition to the current one, and the three D20s is the basic system — the gamemaster’s guide even has several pages devoted to the statistics of it, including graphs. Maybe I should find the oldest rulebooks in my huge collection and see if that’s different. TBH, my recollection of the one time I played Oog des Meesters is also that it had very different rules than what I described above.
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Is there something like a subscription reading service where SW books / comics are available?
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@marczellm said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
Is there something like a subscription reading service where SW books / comics are available?
For comics, Marvel Unlimited should have any comics that are more than 6 months old. No such service for books, but try your local library.
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@Gurth said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
@remi said in Any Star Wars EU fans here?:
Formule Dé
I’ve been wanting to play that for some years, but haven’t had the opportunity yet.
I think it's worth it, but don't take it as a serious racing car simulation game. The rules are simple enough to be explained in 5-10 min (I've played with children as young as 6-7, if they're familiar with board games: at the simplest, all they need to know is throw a dice and count boxes on the board), but sufficiently well-made that you'll still have some aha! moments when finding a nice combination that works, there is a bit of randomness that adds to the fun without being overwhelming (a good player will still beat a poor one most of the time), and the different circuits are varied enough that they really require different play styles and have their own challenges. Of course the main drawback of that last point is that you need to buy all those circuits separately (each one being a game board), but even with 1-2 circuits you can have fun for a few times. And games are short enough (I'd say 1-2 h max?) to fit into most social gathering.
Also, IME the game is funnier when you can have at least 6-8 players (or race cars -- a common setup is to use 2 cars per player, either playing as a team or just 2 independent cars), with less than that after a few turns everyone is effectively playing against themselves only (cars space out a bit and you get too far from others), whereas with enough players there is an added tactical element in blocking the others (or being blocked by them). Unless you have min-maxers who spend 10 min contemplating every possible move before playing, it can still be fast to play with many players.
At one point there was a computer version (Java-based, I think) that was made, probably an unofficial one by fans, but it was easily available (might still be?). It didn't contain the rules (so you had to know them beforehand, or try guessing), but they're easy enough, and AFAIR you couldn't only play solo (or maybe with other players on the same computer?), but still, it was nice. It did randomly crash from time to time, definitely not high quality software, I'd guess it was cobbled together by a couple of fans.
