Star Wars Roleplaying Game

Edge of the Empire is Fantasy Flight Games attempt at producing a Star Wars roleplaying game, it's actually pretty good.

A very unique form of roleplaying game though, in that it relies less on raw statistical power and more on speciality dice (sold by FFG obviously).

Setting

Edge of the Empire is set around the same time as Episode IV, approximately the same time that the Rebels blow up the Death Star.

However, the characters have very little to do with that, instead are more like Han Solo archetype characters, being freighter crews indebted to various underworld organisations, which the DM uses as a hook to pull the players into the storylines.

Gameplay

Anyone that has played any of the 40k roleplaying systems by FFG will get a familiar feeling when playing Edge of the Empire, it takes the "degrees of success" mechanic from the 40k rules, and strips away pretty much everything else.

Instead of simply taking a skill or combat check and comparing numbers, players roll a dice pool which just has a random number of success or advantage symbols on the dice itself. Comparing that to a similar dice pool rolled by the DM representing the difficulty of the test.

This actually has two major advantages over most other rulesets straight off the bat.

• 1) Less reliance on statistics means there are less pauses at the table while people count up what their rolls actually mean. Basically few rolls require counting higher than ten.
• 2) Cheating becomes much less of a problem as players cannot simply roll dice and declare that they have passed or failed a test, since they actually have to compare their successes to the DMs number of failures. Meaning the authority always remains with a DM.

Of course this means owning a set of Star Wars dice, though you can use traditional dice, and just use a conversion table found in the rulebook... though that defeats the point.

Dice pools are generated quite easily, when you take a test, each skill has a stat associated with it. Compare your ranks in the skill with the stat, and take the higher of the two numbers as your basic number of dice, and the lower of the two number determines how many of those dice are "upgraded" from D8s to D12s.

If you get situational bonuses due to talents or environmental effects, the DM can add or take away D6s to the pool.

Classes

Edge of the Empire is a strange hybrid of free-form vs structure when it comes to character creation.

PCs choose a career and a specialisation to spend their experience in. However, if they choose to, they can buy upgrades from other specialisations by paying into those specialisations. They may also buy into other entire careers if they feel inclined too, though that is essentially cross classing and therefore comes at an increased XP cost.

Careers are obviously fringer based, reflecting the nature of the setting.

• Bounty Hunter
• Colonist
• Explorer
• Hired Gun
• Smuggler
• Technician

Equipment

Like any good FFG system, it is heavily equipment based, meaning that any character with a decent set of gear can overcome nearly every problem, so differences between character levels means significantly less than it does in other systems. (like 3rd & 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons)

The game also does away with most of the minutia that bog down other systems; so no tracking extremely minor consumables, food & drink, denominations of currency, and the exact weight of each item of gear. Instead it has a system of "encumbrance" which is basically an abstract number of how heavy or bulky an item actually is, and a character has a small threshold before becoming encumbered, meaning that most PCs will not simply attempt to loot everything in sight

Weapon upgrades are also dealt with fairly, each weapon / armour / starship has a pre-determined number of hard points where things can be added to and each modification has a hardpoint value, though certain mods can be upgraded in and of themselves. So very few items can be pimped out to the max and become stupidly overpowered.

Lightsabers are in, and work exactly how they are expected to, so no underpowering them for the sake of game balance.

• They have a crit rating of 1, so if a player hits and rolls just one advantage on his dice, body parts get chopped off. Lightsabers also ignore all armour up to and including starship bulkheads.
• Thankfully the setting excludes Jedi characters, so no-one actually knows how to use them properly, meaning any character stupid enough to wield one will be rolling a number of D8s based on strength or agility without any skill points to upgrade them and therefore would have problems reliably hitting anything with a decent defense score.

The Force

Despite Jedi not being the focus of the setting, the Force is present if players want to use it. Thankfully it's not as OP as sometimes portrayed in other rules systems.

Access to force powers is granted by force sensitivity talent, which is only associated with the Force Sensitive Exile specialisation. Which is not connected to any career, meaning it costs the higher value to buy into.

Once the specialisation and therefore the talent is bought, upgrades can be taken for the class itself, but can also be bought for powers, which are relatively simple: Move / Sense / Influence. Which are initially very weak but can be upgraded much like any other career specialisation.

Even then though, force powers require a special dice to activate which has white and black spots on it, representing light or dark points respectively. (players are inherently "light-based"). The number of dice you get is represented by your force sensitivity factor and you invest these successes into your power upgrades to perform more impressive feats, like moving larger objects or mind-tricking more opponents. However the force sensitivity factor goes as high as 2 in the current ruleset, meaning that your powers are unlikely to be impressive as you cannot activate as many upgrades to a power as you can roll light-side successes.

Splatbooks

• Star Wars: Edge of the Empire Core Rulebook
• Suns of Fortune - basically a gazetteer for the Corellian sector, including a few cool items of gear, cool starships and some playable races.
• Enter the Unknown - additional rules / careers / starships for Explorers. Also includes Chiss & Toydarians as playable races.
• Dangerous Covenants - additional rules / careers / weapons for Hired Guns.
• Beyond the Rim - First adventure supplement, covering a treasure hunt for a lost clone wars starship.