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Yeah, no, this is a thing that exists. See? Stick around, though, it’s a completely different game wearing both its licenses as a hat. Star Wars… Life? LIFE is a member of that second tier of classic board game, not as famous as Monopoly or the like but a step above Catan or Carcassonne. Players compete to live the most picture-perfect suburban American life possible, passing through various life stages while trying to make as much money as they can; the richest person wins, because no matter how happy their life was, the most important thing to someone on their deathbed is the size of their bank account. It plays like most boardgames that send you along a winding track and grade you based on how much money you snap up, but its big mechanical distinction is the LIFE® tile: you draw these facedown every time you land on certain spaces and try to gather as many of them as possible, then flip them over once everyone’s done to discover what #lifegoals each player accomplished and how much money they earned off them because that’s why you do interesting things. Star Wars is a franchise involving stars and wars. A long time ago (2002), in a galaxy far, far away (Rhode Island, I think), Milton Bradley and Lucasfilm joined forces to create a bunch of tie-in knockoffs of famous boardgames about the hot new hit film Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. One of them was The Game of LIFE®: STAR WARS®: A Jedi’s Path, which wasn’t actually a LIFE ripoff; instead, it was a stat-building game where you and your kids could pretend to be Jedi-in-training for an hour and a half in a game. Unfortunately Episode II kind of sucked (though it was pretty funny in retrospect), the other tie-in boardgames they made also sucked, and novelty boardgames would still be kind of expensive even if four out of five weren’t worth buying. A Jedi’s Path sold modestly before fading out of memory. Hasbro later axed the Milton Bradley brand and Disney eventually bought out Lucasfilm. These events were only tangentially related. Milton Bradley? Lucasfilm? Attack of the Clones? I’m too young and cool and interesting to know these words. Let me take you back through the sands of time, a solid score of years ago, into the mind of a twinkle-eyed Falconier111 too young to realize using “ElfofSilver” as your standard username will get you horselaughed by strangers. My parents, themselves pedigreed nerds, started me young on Star Wars. Probably too young honestly, I saw Episode V before I understood division and they disembowel animals and cut off people’s hands in that movie, but in a way they timed it perfectly: I was both old enough to grasp the magic of the Original Trilogy and not old enough to realize the recently-released Episode I was hot garbage. I was hooked. And being a precocious reader, the moment I saw they were releasing Star Wars kids’ novels I practically snatched them off the shelves. Like, I have a terrible memory for specifics, I don’t remember events all that well, but I clearly remember the almost superstitious awe I felt at realizing I could read about JEDI APPRENTICES for hundreds of pages. After I finished those, I switched to other Star Wars media: trivia books, novels, games, even a few comics. I consumed a lot of nerd media back then, but Star Wars stuff, what was at that point called the Star Wars Expanded Universe, always had a special place in my heart. I don’t remember exactly when I found this board game or where I found it; I’m pretty sure it was at some kind of summer camp or something, definitely not something we had at home. But when I found it, I loved the loving poo poo out of it. I played it against myself obsessively for hours a day, days on end – maybe it was sad, but to me it wasn’t any different from playing a videogame and my caretakers usually figured out it was healthier for all of us to let me do my weird things in the corner if it wasn’t bothering anybody. I had to leave it behind when I left, though; such is life. I went back just as dedicated to the EU as I was when I found it. But over time I grew away from Star Wars a bit. I never stopped liking it, and I never stopped consuming it – to this day, I think of the reveal of Revan’s face and eyes as one of the standout visuals of videogame history. But I also realized a lot of it was god-awful trash, sometimes on multiple levels, so I cared less and less. It didn’t help that Star Wars fans are famous for being overwhelmingly awful people, so that was kind of a bonerkiller too. Then Disney bought Lucasfilm, shoved a knife in the base of the Expanded Universe’s neck, renamed it Star Wars Legends, and went off to produce a new expanded universe around films that had the consistency of year-old string cheese in the Jamaican sunshine. You hate the Disney movies too?! Hey, I put together this version of Episode VIII where I cut out all the – You misunderstand me. I don’t hate the new ones because the franchise that had women and black people in plot-driving roles now has women and black people in plot-driving roles or whatever the gently caress you people were mad about. I unironically liked VII and VIII. My issue is that, despite jettisoning the old Expanded Universe, Disney managed to keep on its greatest flaw: inconsistency. Had they made a trilogy where every film was thematically and structurally similar to either of those movies, then it would’ve been better than the Prequels, at least. Instead, they made three movies that had little in common structurally, inconsistent characterization, and lots and lots of stupid poo poo everywhere that wouldn’t have mattered if they’d made any effort to integrate it with anything else. But then, I kind of like the EU because it is inconsistent. You can get everything from classic shooters to lovely kids’ comics to tabletop RPGs to to zombie apocalypse novels to true Westerns if you know where to look. It contains NYT bestselling scifi and some of the finest video games ever made and also green space hares from the planet Coachella, Luke’s zombie ghost girlfriend, and that one droid that malfunctioned in Episode IV being a force-sensitive that committed suicide to save the galaxy. This is a franchise that had five different levels of canon and a sixth reserved for the comedy show Lucas tried to produce despite lacking a sense of humor. It’s bad and dumb and I love it. I love it, except the parts that I hate. That’s a lot of bullshit to wade through before you tell us what you’re doing. Each update of this LP will consist of two parts. In the first, I’ll play with myself and take pictures, playing the board game as if I was four human players with different strategies to show off all the game’s mechanics. On your end it’ll work the same as any screenshot LP; physical boardgames are a bit unorthodox here, I know, but they had a rock paper scissors LP that was well-received here once so who are you to judge? Each update will cover a few turns and both talk about what’s going on mechanically and show how whatever comes up in the turn ties into Legends. Like, it has dozens of action cards that reference things with Wookieepedia articles, there’ll be a lot of those. Keep an eye out for misplaced phrases or words that aren’t where they should be; I use dictation software and it isn’t always the smartest, so if you see something that doesn’t make sense, let me know and I’ll fix it. The second part will be me rambling about something from Legends, possibly something that came up earlier in the update but probably not; the game looks like it’ll focus on a bunch of different eras but it actually only covers a very specific part of Legends, so I won’t be limiting what I talk about. I’d like to make this as accessible to newcomers as possible, but I got into Star Wars too early to be normal so I’ll just assume everyone half-remembers most of the films and go from there. Expect topics that are bad, dumb, weird, obscure, and sometimes actually good. The EU is defined by all the good ideas embedded in the rest of the muck and fans were justified in fearing that Disney would throw out the baby with the baby-poop filled bathwater. Well, justified in it would’ve been a waste, not that they actually did it. They recycled the Corporate Sector, of all things. Dude, they brought back the loving space hare. Shitposting about Star Wars, got it. Can I shitpost about Star Wars too? Of course you can! In fact, I’m actively looking for it! If you post something interesting about Star Wars and don’t mind it, I plan on adding it to the OP so it can ride the rest of the LP to the Archive. I want this thread to be a celebration of Star Wars in all its patchy glory. Note that I said Star Wars, not Legends; I’m sticking to the old EU because that’s what I’m familiar with, but I encourage you to discuss the new EU here too. That said,  if you talk about anything that’s less than a year old, don’t spoil it . They’re doing that High Republic thing right now and I’m not interested in people spoiling it for each other. If it’s older than that, though, go hogwild. Other than that, standard subforum rules apply: don’t be a dick, don’t be a creep, and if you get too invested in the argument, remember that while Star Wars is great, it’s also not worth making GBS threads up the thread for. Speaking of which, we’re almost done: last thing we need to cover before we play is our players. We get three cardboard cutouts of different Prequel characters and one character from the original trilogy because I guess they couldn’t help themselves, and all but one are male because the Prequels were kind of a sausagefest. We’ll be using each of them to illustrate a different aspect of the rules:
Come up with a name and short character description for Suboptimal Jedi and/or Balls-Out Gray Jedi. I’ll choose whichever options I like, but you can vote for other people’s names and characters if you think they’re good enough and that might make a difference. Voting closes in 48 hours! TABLE OF CONTENTS Setup, Palpatine's Clones Skippy the Jedi Droid Turns 1-5, The Rakata Turns 6-9, Do Jedi gently caress? Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Mar 6, 2022 |
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Feb 26, 2022 16:40
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STAR WARS POSTING Aces High talks about young Han Solo, past and present. disposablewords discusses the fandom's reaction to the prequels and the collapse of the EU. disposablewords breaks down just how shady the EU's treatment of Luke's love interests was. MagusofStars examines Satine's death. ZCKaiser explains how Jedi in new Canon aren't actually as celibate as I said they were. Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Mar 16, 2022 |
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Feb 26, 2022 16:40
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Name one of them Obi-Jon. Also this isn't what I expected your next project to be but I'm here for it 
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Feb 26, 2022 23:13
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LIFE Star Wars. Sure, why not? (apart from LIFE being an awful tabletop game but w/e not my problem) I propose Gal'lant for the suboptimal Jedi's name. I'm also seconding Quackles' Obi-Jon.
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Feb 27, 2022 20:23
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Omobono posted:LIFE Star Wars. Sure, why not? It’s not actually Life  Well, it uses a similar set of equipment to different ends. They’re about as similar mechanically as poker and blackjack. Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Feb 27, 2022 |
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Feb 27, 2022 20:43
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For our grey jedi, I'm thinking Qui-Jim, or just Jim. Brilliant but when they play, they turn their brain off, which results in things like setting up a bounty on themselves, hiring people to mess with a racing they are betting on using the money from the bounty as the payment, and then going double or nothing with the bounties set up on the other party members.
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Feb 27, 2022 20:48
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Darth and Droids still going strong? How deep is the episode 50 alternate comic by now?Falconier111 posted:It’s not actually Life We had Risk LPs that worked (hi grandalt) so it was just a joke about the game sucking. That has no bearing on how LP-able it is.
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Feb 27, 2022 21:23
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Omobono posted:We had Risk LPs that worked (hi grandalt) so it was just a joke about the game sucking. That has no bearing on how LP-able it is. God those Risk Legacy LPs were among the best. The first one was actually what made me get an account just to bypass the paywall... shame it got dropped right after Constantes got loving nuked. (That's an actual spoiler for one of Risk Legacy's mods) As for this... I actually still have my copy of this sitting on the top shelf of my closet right now, so I'm interested in seeing how this pans out as an LP. I've got nothing to suggest for names, but I'm definitely following.
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Feb 27, 2022 23:28
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ah The Game of LIFE, that game you played when you wanted to have a family game night, but didn't want things to turn nasty or drag out for the entire evening (so no RISK, Monopoly or even Scrabble in my house). This will be fascinating to watch because even the current version of LIFE is way more complicated than the version I had growing up (starter homes and trading up for second homes? what the gently caress Bougie nightmare do we live in now?). I took a gander at a name generator and got these winners: Crix Vane or Val Inel poo poo Teckla Brandall is a good ridiculous sounding name too
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Feb 28, 2022 16:19
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I loving love Star Wars despite how bad Star Wars is, and will watch this with great interest. Played way too much Star Wars Saga Edition.
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Feb 28, 2022 17:29
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Setup A relatively short one to start us off. And I think it’s just the right time for some music! MUSIC: star Wars main theme Kazoo cover Before we start, worth noting; this is the only place I could set the board up in my house. The glare is, unfortunately, inevitable.  Let’s start out with the board, unadorned. I don’t know if this is still a thing, but back when this game was released, a lot of boardgames had little plastic decorations you were supposed to slot into the board to give it some pop. We called them feelies, I don’t know if there’s a technical term for them. Anyway, this game has a bunch, and they’re all fiddly little uncooperative cheap plastic fuckers that like to hide under furniture and try to choke my dog.   I braved the trial of assembling them all anyway, just for you. Notice that little starship there; that one’s particularly weird because what you’re looking at is a cover over an elongated base that ALSO looks like a starship (the bottom fell through the bars of the cage I put the board on, it should be elevated above the board itself). I have more than once set the game up, started playing, and realized I’d left that plastic top part around waiting to disappear into my puppy. The manual says this is a “Jedi Dart Ship”, which as far as I can tell isn’t a thing. I’m pretty sure it’s actually a Delta-7, the kind of ship Obi-Wan took to Geonosis in Episode II (tie-in!), but who knows?  Also notice this spinner, part of the game’s LIFE heritage. It may not be clear from this distance, but it’s terrible. It’s the worst spinner I’ve ever seen in a commercial product that still technically works. See, it has a nasty habit of sticking if you don’t spin it hard enough and going flying off into your tokens if you do; you can still use it if you have to, but I wouldn’t recommend it except for professionals or people looking to injure family members.  Like any good LIFE knockoff, A Jedi’s Path has a board with a confusing mess of lanes, each made of squares with various effects you travel down by spending the spinner with the occasional red square that stops you to go through some major life event. But you may have noticed the absence of any green salary squares that give you the money you’re supposed to use to win.  We don’t use cash and LIFE tiles that give you cash in this game because we’re Jedi, what the gently caress are we doing trying to earn money. Instead, we deal with “LIFE tiles” that are actually stats (the game calls them “Skills”): Fighting, Intuition, Logic, Energy, and Dark Side. The first four are the point of the game; almost all of the game’s mechanics boil down to adding to a pile, subtracting from a pile, or comparing two piles plus a spinner spin to see which is higher. Different stats never interact and are mechanically interchangeable until the end game, when they suddenly matter a whole lot in different ways depending on how your game went. The last token type, Dark Side tokens, determine which of two routes you travel at the end of the game and they have a bunch of mechanical effects I want to save for when we get to them. Suffice to say, they’re basically a morality system. Yeah, RPG stats and a morality system in a family board game. I didn’t just want to play this because the concept’s weird or because it lets me rant about Star Wars, there’s a few interesting things going on under the surface.  Second to last, we have the instruction manual. It’s an instruction manual  .  Something seems to accidentally blocked most of the rules, but at least you can see the board assembly instructions and the cover and the pictures I got. Fun note: those little blurbs on the back are fluff text you’re supposed to read at the end of the game. You find out your two highest stats, then consult the little chart to find out what kind of Jedi you are. Well, only if you choose the ForceTM and become a Jedi KnightTM, as the cover suggests; Sith get a consolation prize. As we go on, you will quickly notice the Sith need consolation prizes in this game.  And last to last – our four characters. Pardon the sewing machine; again, not a lot of room. I’ve marked off with the little cutouts, but those cutouts will soon enough be moving down the board and I’ll have to keep track of those piles by memory. Let’s take it left to right:
With that, we’re ready to take our first turn. Which we will do next time. Because it’s time to talk about the EU! Palpatine’s Clones I remember a lot of people getting up in arms when Episode IX started with “AND SOMEHOW PALPATINE RETURNED”; something something cheap asspull something when did they foreshadow this something Disney is Satan, you know. I remember being unfazed – mostly because people dropping huge plot developments into the opening crawl without context wasn’t exactly new to Star Wars but partly because I’d seen this before. This wasn’t the first time Star Wars brought the Emperor back from the dead. It wasn’t even the second. It was the fourth, and looking at why tells us a lot about the Expanded Universe.  It’s the end of 1991. Grunge is getting big, the Gulf War is at its height, and the Soviet Union just fell. More importantly, March saw the release of a little tie-in book called Heir to the Empire that still occasionally makes lists of the best science fiction novels of all time. Until that point, Star Wars fans had been making do with RPG supplements and awful old specials, so they fell on it like starving wolves. Smelling profit in the water, Lucasfilm quickly started lining up projects to try and cash in – one of the first of which to make it out was a very era-appropriate comic series called Star Wars: Dark Empire. I’ve never read it, but I know it by influence and reputation and also have access to Wookieepedia, the Star Wars Encyclopedia (as opposed to Wookieepedia, the Hirsute Encyclopedia), so let’s pull together a brief summary first. I’m sure some people reading this are huge fans and will very enthusiastically let me know how wrong I am, but this is Star Wars so that’s a constant threat anyway.  There’s a lot going on here and I don’t want to get into the weeds with this, so I’ll try to keep this as high-level as possible. So, in the EU, while the Empire didn’t actually collapse when the Emperor died in Episode VI, it did enter an unstable holding pattern with various admirals and politicos backstabbing each other or going off on their own that lasted over a decade until a few surviving leaders beat the stupid out of the rest and pulled the remnants into a rump state. Anyway, a few years into this process things are going good, the Rebellion is big and organized enough to start calling itself the New Republic in earnest, the Empire’s leaders are too busy killing each other to fight back effectively, you know, good stuff. Suddenly, a bunch of factions near the center of the galaxy vanish mysteriously. Then, new Imperial superweapons (this time gigantic, heavily armed “World Devastators” that rip up planets with tractor beams) show up and start basically eating planets. The New Republic, effectively the most powerful organization in the galaxy, is of course helpless to resist. Admiral Gial “It’s A Trap” Ackbar posted:This is the greatest scourge the galaxy has ever seen… Far more lethal than the Death Star! Thanks, Admiral. Meanwhile, after botching a raid on Coruscant, Luke gets sucked into a wormhole and ends up on Byss, a mysterious paradisical world suffused in the energies of the Dark Side (click here for some Luke Skywalker ASMR action on the subject; the comics were popular enough to get a full audiobook adaptation later on). Soon enough he encounters… A revived Emperor Palpatine?!   Turns out Papa Sheev got his hands on cloning technology (not the same kind as in the Prequels, this kind grows adult bodies that don’t have any consciousness) and set up a facility on his top-secret super awesome Dark Side planet, plus a whole authoritarian theocracy to support him because he’s that kind of guy. He wants Luke to be his apprentice! And he’s probably going to kill him if he says no! So, Luke knuckles under and vows to resist Palpatine’s baleful influence, which he mostly fails at. Meanwhile, Han, Chewbacca, and Leia have been going on adventures to stop the World Devastators and find wherever the hell Luke went; they meet Han’s resentful ex who demands to join up, find out Boba Fett’s still alive because you can’t keep a merchandisable fan favorite down, and generally putter around until they finally arrive at Byss and are promptly captured.  Han ends up having to put the Falcon in neutral nearby while Leia’s taken to Palpatine’s super cool flagship that’s totally bigger than any other spaceship we saw in the series that wasn’t a Death Star called the Eclipse. The emperor then tries to win Leia over by offering her lost Jedi knowledge, then reveals that A) he’s almost done Boganizing Luke and B) his cloning technology is kind of terrible and he wants a newer, better body – he tells Leia she’s now pregnant with Han’s child, and also that he wants to put his spirit in the baby like he put it in the clone. Leia, predictably, tells him to take his fetish content and gently caress off.  Cue Leia getting Luke (who apparently was just kind of hanging around) to shake off the Emperor’s control and have a lightsaber fight with the guy while Leia escapes. Luke wins and manages to make his way to the place where Sheev keeps his clones, smashing them up while Palpatine’s clone body gives up the ghost. It looks like we won! A couple pages later, the Eclipse jumps into the system where Leia is regrouping with the Rebels. The Emperor survived offscreen and, in a couple panels, the comic tells us Luke missed a clone and the ghost possessed that one before defeating Luke and corrupting him proper this time. After wrecking poo poo with the Force for a bit, Palpatine stops and invites Leia on board to “discuss a truce”. So Leia and the Emperor meet AGAIN, he fails to recruit her AGAIN, she redeems Luke AGAIN, and Luke kills Palpatine AGAIN, this time apparently for good. The Eclipse blows up in the aftermath of his death, Luke says something nice about the future of the Jedi, roll credits.  Except the series proved popular enough to get a continuation. Fittingly for a story that managed to recycle its own third act, the first sequel recreated the part where Han, Leia, Chewbacca, and company ducked Imperial bounty hunters and Boba Fett, and the second sequel redid the part on Byss and the Emperor’s defeat, right down to introducing another superweapon more powerful than the Death Star and another Eclipse. This time, though, instead of just the main cast and a couple hangers-on we also get a whole grip of disposable side characters for the plot to chew through as it raises the stakes, including a few of Luke’s new apprentice Jedi. After the series kills off everyone who doesn’t matter, Han shoots the Emperor in the back, then the ghost of one of Luke’s apprentices (who had previous Force training) grabs Palpatine’s soul and hauls him into the afterlife. That actually manages to kill him and the Emperor never shows up again; some dudes got away with pretending he came back to life for a while and people talked about him and his legacy a lot, but that was it for him, and the Dark Empire trilogy.  If I had to, I’d divide the EU’s history into three rough stages: the first stuttered into existence in 1987 when they started standardizing things for the RPG before actually beginning in earnest with Heir of the Empire, the second kicked off somewhere between Episodes I and II, and the third started sometime after III came out. There was plenty of Star Wars content release before then, but we don’t talk about it. If I had to capture the first phase at its best and worst, I’d probably finger the Dark Empire trilogy. That laser focus on the characters from the Original Trilogy and their kids? Side characters that die like flies? Important characters falling to the Dark Side and bouncing back like nothing happened? The hunt for a lost Jedi knowledge? Enough Imperial superweapons coming out of nowhere they later invented a special research base just to explain where they all came from? Luke gathering apprentices everywhere he goes? Imperial factions serving as villains despite losing every time? The plot constantly trying to top everything that came before it? A gritty 90s tone? Lots and lots of comics? Even if people rarely directly referenced its events, most big EU releases echoed its tone and style until Lucasfilm forced them to focus on the Prequels. You saw it everywhere from the kids’ books to the mass market paperbacks to the Legends equivalent of a comics crossover event that made national headlines when it killed off Chewbacca. But, look. I’ve been treating it flippantly and Dark Empire had more issues than it had issues but it wasn’t actually bad. By all accounts, it was certainly readable, though not exactly great literature. But despite its early popularity it didn’t make much of an impact on the Expanded Universe; as voracious as I was with Star Wars Media, I never realized the Emperor showed up after his death in the EU until after Episode VII came out. I didn’t even know the series’ name until I looked it up for this post. The funny thing is, despite not knowing it existed, I’d already developed an attachment to a lot of the stuff it came up with through OTHER Star Wars media. See, Star Wars fans have always tended towards the obsessive, a habit fueled by all those proper nouns they threw around in the Original Trilogy and the furor around collecting Star Wars toys. By the time the Expanded Universe was finally kicking into gear, those obsessive fans had grown into obsessive creators fond of picking out minor film details and turning them into whole projects. You remember all those weird aliens in the cantina? They wrote short stories about just about all of them. You know how there’s that one scene where Darth Vader tells a bunch of bounty hunters to go after the main characters and there’s a droid there? It took over the second Death Star and would have tried to kill all organic life if it hadn’t blown up minutes later. Do you remember that one dude in Episode V who was running around Cloud City with an ice cream machine?  This guy. I didn’t. Somebody did, though, and he became Willrow Hood, hero of the Rebellion, who people used to imitate by running around conventions with ice cream machines. This happens a LOT. So, remember the lost Jedi knowledge I mentioned, the thing so irrelevant to the plot I didn’t even clarify what it was? That was a holocron, a kind of information storage device that Force-users can store their memories in and leave a sort of Force chatbot to interpret for readers. The names this specific chatbot dropped later got their own series written about them, which in turn ended up heavily worked into the backstory of the Knights of the Old Republic games. I had no idea who Exar Kun was when I put his Light Battle suit on Carth, but it ultimately owes its existence to Dark Empire. This kind of fractal referencing is really common in the EU, and the dopamine bursts you get every time you see a thing or hear a name you recognize after you’ve spent enough time in the mines is a big part of the fun. I think that’s part of why Star Wars fans go so feral every time somebody changes something; once you’ve gotten invested, even a tiny change has a knockdown effect on so much of the stuff that you like. Well, that and the racism and sexism, but, you know. Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Feb 28, 2022 |
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Feb 28, 2022 22:37
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you have to assemble the plastic bits for that version? yeesh, we had plastic houses and poo poo in mine but they were glued in or something and the game box had been sized properly to accommodate that
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Mar 1, 2022 02:49
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Hurray, Jim made it in. Nice. Also yes, movie 9 did borrow a lot from that series. edit, hi Omobono grandalt fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Mar 1, 2022 |
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Mar 1, 2022 03:52
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I mostly experienced the Extended Universe through games, which never really got all that weird as far as the stories go. Luuke Skywalker, the evil clone grown from the hand Luke lost at Cloud City, always makes me think that I missed out on some choice insanity, though.
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Mar 1, 2022 04:44
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This looks interesting, in that I'm wondering how they managed to add game mechanics to LIFE and what effects that will end up having (as I recall it, the original was barely a game, just a series of RNG calls with only a handful of real decision points before you tallied up the final results). It's not a particularly pleasant game, considering all you get on top of those non-mechanics is incessant heteronormativity and capitalism. God, board game design has come a long way since things like this. I resent a lot of these 'classic' board games (Monopoly's another big offender, for instance), because they get normalised as 'what board games are', children grow up playing them and not much else, and then bounce off the hobby as adults without realising there are actually well-designed ones that are strategically deep and fun to play. I'm interested to see how this version improves on the original, since it'd be hard for it to not. On the other hand, I'm not super knowledgeable about Star Wars, so it's also going to be interesting on that level; let's see how much any of this makes sense to me.
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Mar 1, 2022 14:36
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Falconier111 posted:Anyway, I’m taking the thread-suggested name Gal’lant, because… I’m almost certain you didn’t do this on purpose, but having an apostrophe in the middle of your name is a Twi’lek cultural thing, so that suggestion was pretty strategically timed. But I did remember that the franchise is strong in the apostrophes. Apostrophorce? Falconier111 posted:Darth Furry.  (Although the furries are good now, as they hunt nazis)
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Mar 1, 2022 15:15
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I am disappointed that none of the tokens are an ewok or a gamorrean. I look forward to this thread, and talking about the insanity that often was the EU.
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Mar 1, 2022 15:40
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Capfalcon posted:I mostly experienced the Extended Universe through games, which never really got all that weird as far as the stories go. Ask me about Skippy. Go on, ask me, I loving dare you. Omobono posted:Well, I had no idea we had a Twi'lek cardboard character and I didn't know/realize the apostrophe was a Twi'lek thing. What are you talking about, Mitth'raw'nuruodo? Also, in fairness, the furries were always (mostly) good, they just had the temerity to be queer and neurodivergent in public and that made them cringe. I’ve written about my views on furries before.
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Mar 1, 2022 21:47
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Falconier111 posted:Ask me about Skippy. Go on, ask me, I loving dare you. "What about Skippy?"
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Mar 1, 2022 22:57
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Falconier111 posted:What are you talking about, Mitth'raw'nuruodo? You're having me on, let's see what google says. loving Admiral Thrawn 
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Mar 2, 2022 01:24
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ZCKaiser posted:I am disappointed that none of the tokens are an ewok or a gamorrean. Yub yub, Falconier.
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Mar 2, 2022 02:49
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Karia posted:Yub yub, Falconier. I don’t like eating people. The_Final_Stand posted:Well, if you insist. Skippy the Jedi Droid For years, one question has haunted the minds of Star Wars fans the world over. Well, actually a billion questions haunt the minds of Star Wars fans, but one of the oldest ones goes thus: can droids be Force-sensitive? The answer is no. Ish. Though every Legends author has their own interpretation of the Force, they mostly agree it’s the combined fundamental essence of all organic life in the galaxy. No room for robots there. But this is Legends, so it can’t help contradicting itself, and there is a whole race of Force-sensitive crystals that walk around in droid bodies. They aren’t really droids, though, are they? Yeah, they’re inorganic, but they’re also naturally-evolved sentient lifeforms that happen to ride around in robot bodies, so they get a pass. Droids are not organic or naturally anything. Therefore, they can’t use the Force. But this is Legends, so it can’t help contradicting itself. And there is, in fact, one exception.  The Star Wars Tales comics were supposed to be chances for various names in the comic book industry to take a crack at Star Wars for a few pages (each issue had a few short stories bundled together). Most have been forgotten, some are remembered for their impact on the franchise, and a few are remembered for other reasons - such as the last story of the very first issue. It goes like this: you remember how back in IV, when Luke bought R2-D2 and C-3P0, he was actually about to buy that other red droid when it busted? A week or so earlier, that droid was bussing tables in Jabba’s palace when one of the patrons bumped into him, knocking drinks off his head - and in that moment, he reached out with the Force to keep them from hitting the ground. Over the next few days, Skippy began experimenting, starting by telekinetically removing the restraining bolt that forced him to stay put (and I could use this opportunity to discuss how Star Wars presents keeping its droids in effectively chattel slavery enforced by mind control as a non-issue, but that’s an essay for another day). Then he force-persuaded the guards to let it out, went wandering in the desert, and stumbled into the jawa sandcrawler carrying R2-D2 and C-3P0. That night, Skippy had a vision. If things continued as they were, Luke would separate the droids, keeping the Death Star plans out of the Rebellion’s hands. The stormtroopers would kill Luke and destroy R2, the Rebellion would be crushed, and the galaxy would sink into darkness. So Skippy decided to make the ultimate sacrifice. When the day came and Luke looked them over, Skippy used the Force to break himself. Luke bought R2 instead, the jawas took Skippy back on board for repairs, and when the stormtroopers came for the them, he was destroyed by a stray blaster bolt. But he died happy, for he knew that, by his sacrifice, he had saved the galaxy.  The EU, especially the early EU, had a problem with writers taking the tiniest traits a character displayed in the movies and blowing them up into an entire personality. There’s an old joke in the fandom that if a character’s only line in the movies was “I like pie”, the EU would declare him a member of the Piekonian species from planet Pie V, make him the descendant of a long line of pie-makers, and eventually have the Empire’s skyrocketing pie taxes drive him to join the Rebellion. You can’t find a better example than Skippy’s sole contribution to the movies, the droid equivalent of letting your pants fall down in public, turning into a plot-vital act of heroic sacrifice. Doesn’t hurt that he’s directly connected to the fate of the Death Star plans, because the EU also had a problem with writers involving their characters in the theft of the plans to make them more important; just look at the Wookieepedia article, they went through so many hands I’m surprised they didn’t end up with herpes. Skippy embodies the worst excesses of the early EU, and everyone knew it. You know how I mentioned Legends has five levels of canon? Star Wars Tales is in the lowest level, the place where pop-up books and Kinect games go to die. He does get namedropped as an old Droid legend from time to time, but as far as anyone else is concerned in-universe he is at most a myth. The world at large is mostly content to forget Skippy. And I love him to bits. See, a lot of the stuff I talk about here I either ran into years after it came out or only know through the fandom. I bought Star Wars Tales #1 off the magazine rack in a gas station shortly after it came out. I don’t even remember the other stories in that comic, who loving cares? It’s Skippy! His concept is a basic betrayal of some of the setting’s fundamental elements, his comic is stupid and cheesy, and I think he’s the best thing ever. He’s the worst and best characters in Star Wars and I will never forget him .
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Mar 2, 2022 19:09
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is that stuff about Skippy not effectively what happened in Solo? Suddenly we have an answer to the dumb bullshit Han fed Luke and Obi-Wan about the Kessel Run, we now know why he has dice hanging in the cockpit, we know why the computer "has an interesting personality". Background flavour that doesn't need more depth but nope, we've gotta answer all those questions in a prequel. Then again, that reminds me of how back when Episode 1 was months away from release, there were all sorts of rumours floating around about how we were gonna see young Han Solo, there were talks about a potential side-movie just so we knew what he was up to before Episode 4. 10 year old me sure ate that poo poo up
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Mar 2, 2022 21:06
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Falconier111 posted:Skippy the Jedi Droid Well. I did ask. Thought for the day: "Does this unit have a soul?"
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Mar 3, 2022 13:40
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Turns 1-5 MUSIC: Star Wars: KOTOR Music- The Old Republic Theme  And so we begin. Standard LIFE starts out with college loan industry propaganda: either you take a small loan that doesn’t accrue interest in exchange for access to way higher-paying jobs, or you start your career and have to settle for jobs that pay peanuts. Here, though, the three paths available to you are based on youngling clans, basically little educational cohorts they used to raise the children they kidnapped through early childhood. We get three: the short Gundark Clan, the middling Kaadu Clan, and the Bantha Clan, long enough to get its own red space halfway through. Mechanically, while they look like they take different amounts of time to get through… Okay, look. There are two things to understand here. In normal people LIFE, when you hit red spaces, you just stop, do whatever it tells you to do, and move forward. That happens here to, but a couple of them make you test against either one or all of your stats. Getting sent back to the start isn’t a huge deal, though, because every time you get sent back, you pick up two new tokens of your choice and start again. In theory. This game’s rules have one big, glaring weakness: they never define what happens if a red space sends you backwards. They don’t even mention that’s a thing that can happen. Rules as written, you could argue – in bad faith, but you could argue – that space sends you back to the beginning without activating the space at the beginning. If so, well… You see that shortest route? You’re looking at four spaces there, and if you don’t get that bounty from going back to the start, you will on average LOSE tokens going down that route instead of gaining them over time. The rules also don’t clarify if you can switch which clan you go down if you end up back at the start, so you can end up completely screwed right off the bat by making a simple decision. Even if you don’t interpret the rules in the worst possible light, you STILL want to go down the longer paths. Being really into Star Wars and therefore an insufferable nerd, I actually crunched the numbers: statistically, you earn nearly twice as many tokens per spin on the longest path than the shortest path. And while it is possible to shoot ahead if you get lucky, you REALLY do not want to get ahead of other players in this game, and not because they’ll shoot you in the back. Somebody heard someone in one of the movies talking about the Dark Side and shortcuts and work it into their design philosophy; you really, really want to take as long to get to the end as possible. Naturally, Jim will take the shortest route. Teckla and Darth Furry, being optimizing types, will take the longest path, while Gal’lant will take the middle ground. She is, after all, a Jedi, so she does like getting people to compromise. Oh, before we get into the game proper, got to get this out there: I won’t be going down things turn by turn. Since each turn just moves tokens around, there’s no better way to lose you in a flood of basic arithmetic. I’ll just stop the narrative every time something interesting happens.  On her very first turn, Gal’lant spins an eight and hits the Jedi Trials space. In Legends, these were a bunch of tests and challenges little Jedi had to go through before qualifying to start on the road to being a proper Jedi Knight, and oh man do I have enough to talk about their that I think you’ll be the subject of the next update. But for now, that doesn’t matter. This is the first time we spin against anything – namely, we have to spin, add every skill we have, and see if the total works out to 8 or more. You actually have about an even chance of passing even on your first time, but Gal’ant here doesn’t. She just fails, goes back to the start, and snaps up a couple more stat tokens. Worth quickly noting: you know how people in the thread noted LIFE gives players basically no options as they move around the board? This game is a little more generous with detours and alternate paths, especially at the end, but not by much. The real player choice comes in with skill tile selection. Some spaces or actions just give or take away tokens arbitrarily. About as many, though, let you pick which tokens you take, give up, or spin against to decide what happens next. It’s a nice mix, actually; it balances enough random chance to create opportunities and force you to set priorities with enough player choice that you can execute plans. You only get so much choice, this is a LIFE variant after all, but it’s far, far more than the sort of board games your grandma breaks out.  One full round later, she (Gal’lant, not your grandma) gets our first Lesson card of the game. I forgot to move her cutout so you can see it, but that space reads LESSON. Trust me.  This game actually has four kinds of cards you can draw, two of which are specialized tests. Lesson cards have you spin against a stat, and if you succeed you get a token of your choice. Simple enough. Each also has a line of fluff presenting some scenario you’re going through or a bit of philosophy you’re supposed to be contemplating, anything from sparring with a Master to grilling C-3PO on things to each line of the Jedi Code independently to Yoda quotes. Actually, that’s a good segue: you know how Yoda and Luke are on the backs of these cards? You’ve probably noticed there are a few visual references scattered across the board to the Original Trilogy. The presentation kind of implies it’ll touch on classic Star Wars at some point. It doesn’t. Aside from a few visual references, throwaway names, and slight quotes in flavor text, this whole game is laser-focused on becoming a Jedi Knight. Many parents bought this hoping to share something with their children they treasured in their own childhoods and ended up staring at names they didn’t recognize. Anyway, she succeeds and gets an energy token. Life is eventful for Gal’lant: on her third turn, she actually passes her trial. Now she’s going to advance further down the track and leave those losers in the dust. As I said, this is actually a bad thing, she’s going to miss out on a lot of skill points, but, hey, she’s just here to play this game! Getting ahead is good, right?  On her fifth turn (everyone else has repeatedly failed their trials while she shot ahead), she triggers yet ANOTHER new mechanic – Jedi Challenges. Basically, the square tells you what skill to use, then you spin against somebody else. Whoever wins gets a skill. In this case, she goes up against Teckla in Fighting and wins handily, nabbing herself an Intuition.  As of the start of turn 6, everybody’s passed their Trials and they’re ready to start going down the game path proper. So why not stop here to take stock?  As of now, skilled totals sit at:
The Rakata The Old Republic MMO is the last remaining part of Legends that sees regular updates. In it, if you play a certain class and advance a certain distance in that class’s storyline, you eventually stumble across a buried monument to an ancient race. It activates and displays a hologram that greets you as a slave, inquiring what instructions your masters send along with you. When you tell it the state it served is a long gone, this is its response: Rakatam Monument posted:By definition, the Infinite Empire cannot "fall". The Infinite Empire was the first organization to establish a true interstellar empire. Its creators, the Rakata, were universally powerful in the Force, enough so they used it to travel between planets. They built great monuments, world-cities, and semi-autonomous spaceborne factories that could turn out entire fleets in days. They were also just the biggest assholes. The Rakata viewed themselves as biologically superior to all other species and enslaved every race they encountered, stripping them of their names and cultures, working them to death, branding their body parts to help identify them if they were dismembered in their duties, sacrificing them to fuel their special hyperdrives, and just eating them if they decided their slaves weren’t worth feeding anymore. They enslaved humans en masse in their homeworld and dragged most of its population off into slavery (even though somehow that planet was still populous enough to send so many colony ships out they lost track of which world they came from, Legends is not one for consistency), plus a bunch of races you probably hadn’t heard of. Except for the Hutts, though, they enslaved them too. Eventually… Well, they were an ancient evil empire in a (science) fantasy setting. Hubris got them: they built a weapon so powerful it corrupted them even more, turned on each other in a gigantic civil war, got hit by some mysterious disease that stripped away their ability to use the Force, were slaughtered when their slaves realized how helpless they were all of a sudden, and retreated to their home world after their Empire collapsed to devolve into lesser beings and gradually go extinct. So what did these Rakata, founders of the first interstellar nation-state, inventors of imperialism and purveyors of slavery on a grand scale, preachers so dedicated to the Dark Side that it destroyed them, actually look like?  Yeah, these mud-brown, hunched-over, slug-hammerhead-shark-hybrid-looking motherfuckers. Feast your eyes upon them and quaver in despair! You know how I said there were three phases of the Expanded Universe? The Rakata belong to the second one. See, the pre-Prequel EU was very chronologically focused. While you did get the rare foray into the distant past, almost everything revolved around the events and characters of the Original Trilogy. To a lot of people, the massive, convoluted narrative that emerged around Luke and Leia and Han WAS Star Wars. They cared about other characters and events, sometimes to the point of ignoring those three in favor of Boba Fett or a selection of EU-original characters or whatever, but the Original Trilogy was the axle around which the whole thing revolved.  And then George Lucas hosed it up. Episode I’s release in 1999 nuked a lot of EU content right out the gate, and the new media produced to support the franchise’s new direction pushed more and more well-loved older material by the wayside every year. For instance, turns out the Jedi specifically shun relationships and are heavily implied to have been celibate. Omnipresent fighter ace/new Jedi/roving novel protagonist Corran Horn was descended from a whole family of Jedi Knights. Does that mean his whole backstory is now non-canon? Does that mean HE isn’t canon? The well-loved X-Wing series he starred in, which released a new book like three times a year in the 90s, put out its last novel the same year Episode I came out and went silent; did that mean the series is gone for good? A lot of fans turned on Lucas because they felt he was gutting the franchise they’d spent years getting invested in itself something that was only barely related. And to them, “barely related” was about the nicest thing they could say about the Prequels. In retrospect, early Legends was extremely 90s in its “mature” tone, content, and aesthetic. Episode I, though, was unapologetically a kid’s movie, and the bulk of the tie in media for the Prequels – like this board game – targeted that demographic. Even among the stuff that targeted older audiences the bulk were either set during the Prequels or during some other time period, and the one big-ticket Original-era series still coming out, New Jedi Order, was a controversial buzzsaw that delighted in ruining iconic settings (it turned Coruscant into a jungle) and killing off popular characters to raise the stakes (remember the fetus Palpatine was so invested in taking over? His grown-up self gets killed off in a raid). It was a terrible time to be an older Star Wars fan: no one knew what would or wouldn’t be respected going forward, every new release seemed to replace something good with something much shittier, and Lucas could not have telegraphed harder that he didn’t care. The Star Wars fandom that drives people off social media with waves of death threats took shape here, coagulating among the kind of resentful fan that would proudly claim hell hath no fury like a nerd scorned.  A lot of these people would (without any sense of irony), later embrace a lot of the stuff that came out at this time, because while it was a terrible time to be an older Star Wars fan it was a great time to be a Star Wars fan in general. With the laser focus on that one milieu relaxed, writers could take Star Wars’s fundamental themes and aesthetics and start applying them in different ways in different settings. While the bulk of the Prequel promotional material was pap, lots of it wasn’t. Like, remember those Jedi Apprentice novels I mentioned in the OP? They were definitely kids’ books, but they also belonged to the dark YA tradition of the time that produced things people are still adapting to movies decades later; I remember reading tween-oriented books that dealt with political corruption, human trafficking, betrayal, murder, friendships and families being broken by ideological conflict, class warfare, and outright genocide. After II came out and introduced the Clone Wars, they started phasing in war stories; not like the war stories that characterized the last phase of the EU, but books, shows, and games that dwelt on what it meant to be a nearly interchangeable cog in a war machine destined to live half as long as a normal human even if you survived combat. As West End Games, creators of the original Star Wars RPG, started falling apart, Lucasfilm shuffled the rights to Dungeons & Dragons publishers Wizards of the Coast. At the time, Wizards had just set up a new license that let other companies make tabletop RPGs using parts of D&D for free with limited oversight, a policy that proved a massive success as people jumped on the bandwagon and started basically promoting their game for them. They worked the license into a brand new game that tapped into that world and formed a bridge between two groups of extremely dedicated nerds. TV saw the first Clone Wars cartoon, which pulled in an Emmy and still makes top 25 lists decades later. Star Wars gaming had never been better; Star Wars Republic Commando, Star Wars Bounty Hunter, and Lego Star Wars all have LPs in the archive. Every week saw new games, episodes, issues, and articles released somewhere as the fandom dragged itself online with increasing enthusiasm. And that was just media set at the same time as new movies. While the novels, before then the most respected part of the EU, had mostly moved elsewhere, the Original Trilogy era saw a lot of classic video games, everything from the much-maligned Star Wars Galaxies to the shockingly good Episode III tie-in. Stuff set after the original films, everything from the New Jedi Order series that killed off poor Chewie to, at the end of the period, some edgy comics set 100 years in the future where Luke and Leia’s descendents boned down to close that particular circle, continued to come out, while media that covered the whole series like Battlefront II (the good one, not the later one) hit record sales. And, of course, there was Knights of the Old Republic.  Bioware was riding high after the Baldur’s Gate series’s massive success, but they weren’t quite ready to move on from turning tabletop RPGs into video games, so they decided to just adapt another RPG – this time, that Star Wars one I mentioned last paragraph. Except instead of the standard setting, they chose to make a new one up. Yeah, it was Star Wars and you had the Force and Jedi and such, but the game was set thousands of years before even the Prequels, featuring entirely new characters, species, planets, and even philosophies. It was Bioware at its best, leveraging the writing and design skills it’d honed over years of working with RPG adaptations before the company hared off into Mass Effect for better or for worse, and it left a permanent mark on Star Wars – and gaming – as a whole. Its legacy is strong enough that as of writing, they’re putting together a remake and reassembling parts of the old Bioware team to do it. It has three separate LPs in the Archive, man. The sequel, produced by Obsidian, gets even higher praise in some circles, with two LPs of its own completed, with several more left unfinished scattered throughout the LP Subforum archives. The Rakata first showed up in KOTOR, and the various macguffins they left behind drove the plot as people fought over their legacy. As time went on, they kind of metastasized; they now get credited as inventors of the hyperdrive, play extremely closely into the creation of the Jedi, show up in the MMO, and even made it into new canon. If the first phase of the Expanded Universe was defined by its relationship to the original movies, the second phase was defined by its relationship to itself. That fractal referencing I mentioned grew so deep you could find media under the Star Wars brand that had nothing to do with any of the characters audiences grew invested in, just the generic inhabitants, technology, and metaphysics of the setting. And it was glorious. It freely mixed and matched things to create media that still grabs attention decades later. Like any good fan of any franchise, I believe it objectively peaked the moment I was most involved. Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t, but at least I have reason to think so. Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Mar 5, 2022 |
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Mar 4, 2022 21:14
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You know, in original Life, I never quite figured out if, after doing a red space, you're supposed to *immediately* spin again, or if that basically ends your turn so everyone else gets a spin and then you get to spin again.
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Mar 4, 2022 23:22
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Falconier111 posted:
I'm pretty sure the Rakata did show up in Kotor. There was the one in the mind prison that you reenact "Riddles in the Dark" with, and in the first part of the endgame you crash land on a planet where the last surviving ones have taken refuge.
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Mar 5, 2022 00:03
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Carbon dioxide posted:You know, in original Life, I never quite figured out if, after doing a red space, you're supposed to *immediately* spin again, or if that basically ends your turn so everyone else gets a spin and then you get to spin again. It ends your turn. I think. At least according to this game. amshaeg posted:I'm pretty sure the Rakata did show up in Kotor. There was the one in the mind prison that you reenact "Riddles in the Dark" with, and in the first part of the endgame you crash land on a planet where the last surviving ones have taken refuge. I checked the image file for the Rakata picture I posted and it's the KOTOR model  .
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Mar 5, 2022 19:39
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Carbon dioxide posted:You know, in original Life, I never quite figured out if, after doing a red space, you're supposed to *immediately* spin again, or if that basically ends your turn so everyone else gets a spin and then you get to spin again. In the version my family had you ended your turn unless explicitly told otherwise like on the marriage space. This was a pre-LIFE card version though. whitehelm fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Mar 5, 2022 |
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Mar 5, 2022 21:32
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grandalt posted:For our grey jedi, I'm thinking Qui-Jim, or just Jim.
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Mar 5, 2022 21:51
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Yyyyeah, I remember the nerd scrambling and outrage as prequel stuff started coming out and gradually invalidated more and more of the EU. Nobody cared that much as the Droids cartoon and comics fell by the wayside when C-3PO and R2-D2's histories got reestablished. Zahn's explanation for the Clone Wars (flash-grown clones employed extensively throughout galactic society suddenly going mad for complicated Force reasons) got completely dashed and people had to frantically try to salvage anything they could. The new inconsistencies around Jedi and family being "resolved" by claiming the Jedi are more internally fractured than we saw in the prequels and stuff like Corran Horn's family belonging to a different but related tradition. (I actually like this a lot, because it made the Jedi feel bigger to suit the literally galactic setting and also more like, well, people.) Then the axe came down completely on the EU, which caused nerds to lose their poo poo. Some are still upset and a lot more still grumble about it. Fortunately, by the time this happened I was already extremely tired of the frankly dire quality of most EU novels and stories, so I just didn't care. Hell, I've come to see it as a good and necessary thing irrespective of the quality of the new trilogy and the New EU material, because again... dire quality, and a mythos that had disappeared up its own rear end out of a desperate need to keep publishing. Like, seriously. Han Solo's evil identical cousin needed to go.
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Mar 5, 2022 23:33
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The discussions of the broader EU are really interesting since I only know the vague broad outlines that the EU had a couple ones that were well regarded but most seem to be basically fodder for discount book sellers.Carbon dioxide posted:You know, in original Life, I never quite figured out if, after doing a red space, you're supposed to *immediately* spin again, or if that basically ends your turn so everyone else gets a spin and then you get to spin again. Though in vanilla Life where you can’t “fail” a red square, I guess it doesn’t really matter as long as you do it the same way for all players. MagusofStars fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Mar 5, 2022 |
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Mar 5, 2022 23:55
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Turns 6-9 MUSIC: "SEAGULLS! (Stop It Now)" -- A Bad Lip Reading of The Empire Strikes Back Right, we just passed our Trials. Let’s pick up where we left off.  Turn six doesn’t see much interesting. Well, unless you count Jim landing on a space that takes away an Intuition he doesn’t have. Turn seven, though, starts off with Teckla landing on a Redemption space, which – well, it just gives him a free scale token of his choice. The jaws of this space will snap shut on someone else someday.  When Darth Furry’s turn swings around, he reaches a crossroads. At three points in the game (possibly four, I’ll get to why in next update), players pass a point in the board where you can choose whether to proceed along the normal gray path or detour into a shorter path with black squares that rejoins with the main path somewhere later after a red space. These paths are how you fall to the Dark Side. Each time you land on one of these spaces, you have to take a special token (the one that’s square and red) to signify your gradually building corruption. In return, you either get 2-3 tokens for free or steal 2-3 tokens from another player. If you’re really lucky and spin low, you can hit multiple black spaces in one detour and pull in more tokens than people going the long way. You won’t be, though, they’re too short to be reliable tokenmakers. At least they all have red spaces at the end to make sure you don’t just use them as literal instead of thematic shortcuts. Furry was lucky here; he did manage to land in the middle of this Dark Side track, so by the time he gets out of this first Dark Side detour, he’ll have lifted a couple skill tokens from Gal’lant (she was in the lead at the time) and gathered three more. Jim also goes down the route for giggles, but gets stopped at the red space and only picks up one Dark Side token.  Gal’lant, being an incurable trendchaser, sweeps into the Jedi Master red space first. At this point in standard LIFE the game forces you to conform to the amatonormative paradigm and pick up a spouse – most modern editions let you pick a spouse of the same-colored peg, that’s about as much flexibility as you’re gonna get. “No wonder that’s not a thing here,” I hear you saying, “Jedi are supposed to avoid attachments, of course they don’t gently caress.” Well… Do Jedi gently caress? Actually, yeah they do. Sometimes. That prohibition against relationships is relatively recent in Legends’s timeline; go back far enough in the setting’s history and you find plenty of people who married and had kids while in the Order. One woman named Nomi Sunrider became a Jedi when she watched some bandits kill her husband, picked up his lightsaber, and murdered them all; she ended up Grand Master of the Order and founded a whole line of famous female Jedi. But everything changed when the Sith Empire attacked.  (This mural’s from new Canon, but it represents a parallel event at a parallel time with parallel results that’s clearly its later version; new Canon borrows a lot from old Canon, so I borrowed this one back.) Remember that throwaway line in II where they mention the galaxy hadn’t seen full-scale war in like a thousand years? Because Legends is Legends, they turned that into a key feature of galactic history. So, you know how like half a dozen Sith maybe actually show up in the movies? Up until then, the Sith were as much a cultural and political unit as a philosophy, one that went through three whole empires before dissolving entirely. The last one was the most successful, basically defeating the Republic driving them back to a few core territories, but being Sith, they couldn’t help stabbing each other in the back and political organization broke down entirely. It got to the point that what was left of the Republic started delegating governance out to Jedi Knights, and when I say “Jedi Knights” I mean they were made into literal feudal nobility. After a while, a couple of warlords gathered the bulk of the remaining Jedi and Sith, literally all of them died, and the one remaining Sith put together the Rule of Two, the philosophy all the Sith in the movies operate under. The book they established all this in was actually really good; a friend sold it to me as watching a nice kid turn into a complete monster without noticing because the change was so gradual and smoothly executed, and once I hit about two thirds of the way through the book, I realized the same character who’d struggled to kill his abusive father who is coming at him with a knife was now casually slaughtering civilians and it didn’t feel dissonant with his character development and I was like “you’re right”. Anyway, after the dust settled, what remained of the central government and a faction of non-feudal Jedi put the Galactic Republic we see in the movies together. The celibacy thing wasn’t some philosophical point; it was a political and social policy, one designed to reject the past thousand or so years of brutal warfare by removing some of its chief engines from power. “So that’s when the Jedi stopped loving?” The Jedi never stopped loving, they just didn’t do it as often. A few groups of feudal Jedi stuck around in the background; remember Corran Horn’s Jedi dad? That’s how they explained it. You also had exceptions like Ki-Adi-Mundi having to gently caress (for his race) to survive and the occasional renegade who got disciplined or kicked out when the Council found them out, and some authors hinted Jedi were allowed friends with benefits as long as there were no strings attached (though nobody ever followed up on that). But yeah, as always, Legends never let a good inconsistency go to waste.  Okay, I’m going to break character for a second. I’m pretty callous about it in the following few paragraphs for comic effect, but Legends had a serious problem with how it treated female love interests. Now, I’d hesitate to call the Expanded Universe misogynistic or anything. As much of us a sausagefest as it was, you did have prominent female characters all over the place. But EU authors had a nasty habit of introducing love interests for various important male characters to kill them off for cheap dramatic effect. I hate that. I hate that writing technique no matter where it shows up, it’s such a blatantly manipulative writing technique it breaks my immersion like a good kick to the junk, and that’s on top of all the awful implications of people throwing away women’s lives so casually. We are firmly in Bad Star Wars territory here, so keep this in mind as we go forward. Anyway, Jedi loving. Just because emotions were prohibited doesn’t mean authors didn’t keep throwing love interests at protagonists. Qui-Gon had a Jedi he married in secret before she died, and despite a few hints otherwise in some early novels Anakin always had Padme, which wasn’t at all creepy despite their massive age gap. Obi-Wan, though, had four I can name off the top of my head. Cerasi was a guerrilla leader and social reformer trying to stop the civil war that was killing her home planet. She was shot by an assassin and died in Obi-Wan’s arms. Siri Tachi was a childhood friend of his, a Jedi general and war hero who specialized in infiltration missions and espionage. She was shot by an assassin and died in Obi-Wan’s arms. Satine Kryze was a principled noblewoman who founded and led a pacifist movement aiming to completely reform one of the most infamously violent cultures in the galaxy. She was stabbed by an assassin and died in Obi-Wan’s arms. Annileen Calwell was a single mother and owner of a Tatooine general store daring enough to stand up to Jabba’s thugs. Can you guess what happened to her? Wrong, he paid her way through college. But she did have to go offworld to do it, because by then he’d figured out any character a Jedi cared about in the Prequels either broke contact and went into hiding or died horribly. Usually both; the university he sent her off to was on Alderaan, after all.  Everything in the first phase of the EU predated the idea that Jedi can’t get married, and everything in later phases set in the same time period either had their characters explicitly reject the concept or just ignored it. Hell, Heir to the Empire help kick off the EU proper by introducing Mara Jade, a Dark Side-using former Imperial assassin and hot redhead who had to balance a deeply-held oath to personally kill Luke Skywalker with her growing desire to jump his bones. Despite her concept, Mara proved very much her own character and a consistent fan favorite; instead of being redeemed by Luke’s Light Side cock by the end of the book or something, she spent years in- and out-of-universe gradually coming to terms with her past, deciding what she wanted out of life, going on adventures of her own, and even casually dating Lando for a bit before finally settling down with Luke as an active leader in his new Jedi Order. She did get killed off later, but her death came as a result of her own character arc and decisions, and her influence, whether her personal legacy or her force ghost, showed up constantly until they discontinued the EU. Like, I want to emphasize that Mara Jade was an exception to the Bad Star Wars I’ve been talking about. Trouble is, EU writers quickly recognized two things. One: Mara was the fandom’s preferred love interest for Luke, so popular that a rumor her name showed up in a bathroom in Disney World convinced people she’d made it into new canon and that my dictation software recognizes her name. Two: their relationship took so long to develop writers could introduce love interests for Luke and kill them off for dramatic effect over and over again without anyone getting too mad. Luke’s romantic partners, like his students, showed up frequently and died almost as often; even the ones that survived, like rising border-planet politician Gaeriel Captison, often got killed off later in the New Jedi Order crossover. My personal favorite is Callista Ming, a Jedi during the Clone Wars who ended up haunting a warship’s computer. In her debut series, one of Luke’s students decides to commit suicide when her boyfriend dies by having Ming possess her body and overwrite her personality; she and Luke start dating, but they drift apart by the end (mostly because headquarters told the author to stop loving around and either kill off or write out this competing love interest). In her second appearance, she’d had her soul hollowed out and used as a honey trap by a transdimensional Dark Side entity until Luke killed it. They fridged another character to let her into the plot, fridged her offscreen, and tortured her soul in order to fridge her again. You can tell this started in the 90s.  In fairness, death tolls in the EU were skyhigh all around, Jedi or not, and it was possible for Jedi characters to enter relationships where, in fact, people didn’t die; by the time of the Legacy comics, there’d been enough generations successfully pass for Han and Leia’s great-granddaughter to rule a smaller and substantially saner Galactic Empire and for Luke’s great-grandson to smoke crack in an alleyway. But the point stands: if the question is “do Jedi gently caress?”, the answer is “yes, but God hates them.” Meanwhile, new Canon has this to say on the subject: The High Republic: Into the Dark posted:"So, the Jedi are Force users united in our quest to understand the mysteries of the Force and to serve as guardians of peace and justice throughout the galaxy. […] we ground ourselves in a spiritual existence and give up individual attachments in order to focus entirely on greater concerns."  I got distracted. Anyway, instead of getting married, Gal’lant drew a Jedi Master card to signify somebody important taking her on as a padawan so she doesn’t have to get bundled off somewhere to pick crops or stare at star charts for the rest of her life. She got none other than Liam Neeson in his least favorite role, which is kind of a shame; all the Masters are characters that show up in the movies and you get some weird overlaps here. I was hoping Obi-Wan’s cutout would get Qui-Gon and Ki-Adi-Mundi’s cutout would get Ki-Adi-Mundi, but we can’t have everything. Jedi Masters give players a raft of tokens, and Qui-Gon is one of the worst; most other cards give five total as compared to his two Logic and two Energy. Also odd that they have him giving you Logic tokens, since Legends tended to portray him as a maverick and theological dissident with a more mystical approach to the Force than the rest of the order, but again, we can’t have everything.  After a turn-long delay, Gal’lant shoots ahead again because she’s determined to steal the spotlight for every new mechanic. Halfway through her turn, she stops to make a decision: not every path split leads to Dark Side tokens, a couple just require you to have enough skill tokens to hop on. Gal’lant doesn’t have 4 Logic, though, even with Qui-Gon’s influence, so she just shrugs and heads for the rest of the way on the main path.  Now, we’re at the start of turn 10. We’re maybe, I dunno, two fifths of the way through the game? I’d say we’re roughly halfway through the LP, because while there’s plenty more board to cover, we’ve already hit most of the game’s mechanics. It’s about time we take stock again and go through everything that’s changed. Notably, everyone has their own Masters now; Teckla drew Adi Gallia, who was basically the Order’s go-to diplomat for a while. She’s special. Every other Master gives out a bunch of tokens, but she lets you draw two Mission cards and discard one. This is a HUGE benefit, but it’s one I can’t explain until we actually land on a MISSION space, so take my word on this. For reasons I ALSO won’t discuss for a little while, she’s the ideal Master for a Sith, but unfortunately Darth Furry is going to miss out. Instead, Furry drew Samuel L. Jackson himself. Mace Windu is easily the best Master in the game with six tiles; even Yoda only gives out five. For most players, drawing Mace is a serious stroke of luck. For Sith, it’s a decidedly mixed blessing, for reasons I’ll break down when we get to the endgame. At least for now it helps our Furry friend out. And last but not quite least, Jim drew Plo Koon, a commander and warrior borth important enough to play a major role in both Clone Wars cartoons and cool enough to get an on-screen death in III while being a fighter pilot. Jim gets a nice fat bounty of 5 Fighting, which makes his stats even more lopsided. His first turn after picking up his master, Jim drew a Fighting lesson he passed automatically because his Fighting was twice as high as the target number.  This is what our team looks like right now:
Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Mar 6, 2022 |
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Mar 6, 2022 17:57
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Falconier111 posted:My personal favorite is Callista Ming, a Jedi during the Clone Wars who ended up haunting a warship’s computer. In her debut series, one of Luke’s students decides to commit suicide when her boyfriend dies by having Ming possess her body and overwrite her personality; she and Luke start dating, but they drift apart by the end (mostly because headquarters told the author to stop loving around and either kill off or write out this competing love interest). In her second appearance, she’d had her soul hollowed out and used as a honey trap by a transdimensional Dark Side entity until Luke killed it. They fridged another character to let her into the plot, fridged her offscreen, and tortured her soul in order to fridge her again. You can tell this started in the 90s. Even as a fairly uncritical adolescent reading these books, everything around Callista felt at best deeply uncomfortable and weird. Being an older Jedi ghost who refused to give up on life? Kind of interesting! Hijacking someone else's body for it, even with that person's consent? Oh, ew! Functionally giving Luke a Jedi peer romantic interest? Hm, okay! Who is also a hot younger woman who until recently was Luke's student? Uhhhhh... I get that a lot of authors wanted to put their own mark on the setting, felt that the best way to do it was to create someone who could be elevated into the core cast, and that Luke's romantic status was a readily dangling thread to grab at. But that resulted in a bunch of questionable characters with frequently awful writing around them, especially as later authors decided to prune out "rivals," which... seriously? Gaerial Captison got doubly pruned when she finally reappeared after like 20 in-setting years: she'd gotten married because seriously it had been twenty years she's not going to sit pining for some guy she knew for about a week who then never thought about her again, and then still got killed off in her reappearance. My personal "favorite" is Akanah Pell, whose whole relationship with Luke was based on lies. It could've been interesting in showing how someone can prey upon even a powerful Jedi Master's insecurities and sense of loss, as she tricked Luke into helping her by claiming she knew who his mother was and that she might still be alive. (Yes, this was before the prequels.) She even challenged him with how he had never really reflected upon the sheer number of people he'd killed with aid of the Force. Yes, the Death Star and so many other things needed to be stopped, but Luke had never thought about the basic fact of his own personal bodycount. She was an interesting idea and a really dodgy relationship wrapped up in one of those dire EU novel trilogies... and then reappeared later when the setting mythos had gone completely off the rails with ancient Force gods, and got fridged as the "only way" to stop one of them.
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Mar 6, 2022 19:22
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My experience with the eu is very limited but ive always liked mara jade, she is refreshingly complex compared to the rest of the original series cast
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Mar 6, 2022 20:49
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All this talk about Jedi loving and you left us hanging on the biggest one. That log that had a child: Anakin is the father, isn't he?
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Mar 6, 2022 21:06
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yes, Satine was killed by an "assassin"
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Mar 6, 2022 21:22
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Aces High posted:yes, Satine was killed by an "assassin"  See the title of that random YouTube video? Check and mate  .
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Mar 6, 2022 23:22
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disposablewords posted:Even as a fairly uncritical adolescent reading these books, everything around Callista felt at best deeply uncomfortable and weird. Being an older Jedi ghost who refused to give up on life? Kind of interesting! Hijacking someone else's body for it, even with that person's consent? Oh, ew! Functionally giving Luke a Jedi peer romantic interest? Hm, okay! Who is also a hot younger woman who until recently was Luke's student? Uhhhhh... Callista is from the planet Chad, and well, the jokes write themselves
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Mar 7, 2022 02:40
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As someone whose only real exposure to Star Wars was the movies and Clone Wars, I never felt like Satine's death was cheap or manipulative. She was in the story for quite a while and spent that entire time fighting with forces way over her head (Deathwatch, crime lords, Sith) while trying to remain 'neutral' during a galaxy-shattering war. So to me, her death felt closer to the culmination of a hard-fought life rather than simply being a plot device thrown in to be a cheap emotional tug. But I bet I'd feel differently if I'd read more of the EU so it came across as Yet Another Murdered Jedi Lover.
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Mar 7, 2022 03:28
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