Customer Reviews

Starships of the Galaxy (Star Wars Roleplaying Game)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It is too bad there is a version of this book for the old StarWars roleplaying rule set that shares the same name and general content. I don't own that piece but have seen it and this new book is MUCH better.

SotG may have far fewer pages than the Core Rulebook for just a slightly smaller price but it is packed full of information that is useful for any RPG campain that values space combat or even travel. After a short introduction Champer 1 covers the basics of starships in adventuring; this includes answers to questions like "how much does it cost to opperate my ship?" and clarification on how various thing work in starship scale combat. In addition to clarifing how some corebook material works SotG also gives us some new talents and feats to use for our space going characters.

Chapter 2 covers Starship Combat. This includes a new maneuver system that is similiar to how the core book uses force powers. Additionally, this chapter gives advice on creating interesting space encounters and tips on how to keep players interested but not overwhelmed.

Chapter 3 is the section on modification. This chapter is a virtual shopping list of things that can be added to or changed on starships. The end of the chapter even gives a "stock ship" and cost for various ship types that would allow players to build their own ship.

Chapter 4 covers the last two-thirds of the book and contains an extensive Codex of ships found in the StarWars universe. These range from small light fighters up to the Eclipse Super Star Destroyer from the Dark Horse Comic Series. Each of these many ships is given RPG stats, a brief writeup about its history and abilities, and most also include a color illustration showing what the ship looks like. The list doesn't cover everything which is nearly impossible given the size of the SW Universe but does include ships from all eras of play.

Someone not into the roleplaying game may like the Starship Codex. For the roleplayer, I'd say this book is a must for any group that deals with space combat regularly.

This is easily the most complete starship compendium for a Star Wars RPG so far.

What I loved: Templates for starships. You can take an exisiting ship and make it an "advanced" version, an "archaic" version a "prototype", etc. This is a fantastic idea and saves the GM at lot of work.

The range of ships: All eras of play are covered nicely. There are omissions, probably because of space reasons. (I'd like to have seen Grevious's starfighter, for example. Also the capital ships from the KOTOR era, not just the Sith interceptor. The Sun Crusher is mercifully absent. Good call on that.)

The character options are well done and a lot of attention has been taken to give everyone something to do in a starship. In some games in D6 SW, oh so long ago, everyone except the pilot and the gunners used to sit back and wait for the starship combat to end. Now, nobles can demand surrender from enemy ships, scoundrels can disrupt the enemy, etc.

Building rules, custom rules. The rest of what you'd expect. I do wish they'd have added another 60 pages or so and made the book truly complete for the ages.

After picking up the Star Wars SAGA roleplaying game from Amazon, I went to the Wizards of the Coast website to look up any potential printing errors in the book. While I was looking around, I read about an up and coming supplement dealing with starship options. It piqued my interest, so I pre-ordered a copy of it on Amazon.

A month later, the book arrived and after spending about a week using it, I can say it was very much worth the money.

---

"Starships of the Galaxy" is at heart a gathering of ship statistics, paragraphs of ship descriptions within the Star Wars timeline and pieces of art sprinkled throughout.

There's good variety here: most if not all of the movie ships were covered, including the medical frigates (seen at the end of The Empire Strikes Back and during Return of the Jedi), Cloud Cars (seen in The Empire Strikes Back), Super Star Destroyers (around the middle to end of Return of the Jedi) and more. In addition to what was seen in the six films, there are also entries that come from the Expanded Universe novels, like Xizor's Virago (from Shadows of the Empire). These were a nice touch that managed to cater to both casual and hardcore fans.

In some cases, the descriptions were a little skimpy - you'd either read about who used the ship, or when and where it was conceived, but rarely both. Mostly though, they did get the basics of the vehicle across.

The art is a mixed bag in terms of style - some were very straight, bright and blocky, giving the ship a technical drawing feel (like the X-Wing, and it appears the artists did work for the d20 Modern supplement "d20 Future"). Others were a bit blurry, colorful and seemed to make the ship look like it was engaged that moment in the heat of battle (such as the Virago). Both were done well, however. So, consistency aside, I was very pleased.

Though smaller than the rest of the book, there is a section on starship maneuvers and tactics. While these are reserved for campaigns set primarily with vehicle combat as the main conflict, there are some good single options that work for a mixed theme campaign.

To top it off, the covering is solidly build and the pages aren't thin and easily bent. The low page count (160) might turn some away (and I was skeptical myself after Wizards lowered the average from 192 to 160) but as long as the content stays at this level of quality or rises, the cost will be justifiable.

The book should be required reading for any Star Wars GM. Besides the huge codex of stock starships, the rules for creating and modifying starships and all the new combat options for starship pilots, you gets tons of good GM information on making starship battles easier to run and more exciting. Also included is a good amount of basic information on owning and operating a starship.
And beyond the stat blocks (which by-and-large are rules-perfect, unlike Threats of the Galaxy), the fluff given for each starship is well-written and fairly evocative (like Threats of the Galaxy, which also contains great fluff).

The few criticisms I have are:
1) The choices for which starships would get deck plans: the Lambda Shuttle and the Sith Infiltrator did not need deck plans. Those could have been left for the YT-2000, YT-2400 or the Citadel Cruiser (in other words, ships that the heroes will likely use as a mobile base of operations).
2) While nearly every starship is either illustrated or a movie still is shown, some of the movie stills leave a lot to be desired. The art is mostly good however.
3) Actual length (in meters) is not given for any of the ships.

Overall, this is a 5-star book. If you are running Star Wars game which will feature starships at all, you practically need this book.

The first book to expand on the new Saga rules, and it's about as good as I expected. A good mix of starships that is perhaps a bit heavy on capitol ships and many fighters that are visually distinct but all have roughly the same rules. Likewise, there are few deckplans, pretty much limited to a underwhelming deckplan for a YT-1300. The customization rules work relatively well and are easy to use.

Overall, I'd suggest it to people that like the new Saga Edition. It might be good for people that like Star Wars starships in general too.

Good book if you or your role playing group are going to be participating in space battles. If the game will focus on individuals and less on space battles then this may or may not be a benefit. It has good information for players and GMs.

I have a player who is an aircraft design engineer in real life and is playing an engineer pilot. I bought this book to solve two related problems. First, I know he will want to do custom modifications, and probably want to design a ship from scratch. Second, I needed some guidance in designing a space encounter that includes a star destroyer, which would be scary but not overwhelming for a group of level 2 characters.

"Starships of the Galaxy" succeeds on both counts. An entire chapter is devoted to every possible custom modification you could hope for, along with considerations for cost, tradeoffs, roleplaying consequences, reliability, and every other facet I could think of related to modifying a ship.

A combination of custom modifications and maneuvers makes designing space encounters much more interesting. There are options available to make a bombing run, dogfight, interception/capture, smuggling, and escort mission all feel different from one another, instead of just shooting at each other until one of you is disabled. The book also introduces a "tactical fire" concept, which allows capital ships like star destroyers to take part in a scene without directly threatening lower-level characters.

Other parts of the book I wasn't specifically looking for, but which will definitely come in handy, include guidance on using character-scale feats and talents in starship-scale battles, lots of roleplaying ideas for obtaining and maintaining a ship, and of course the extensive codex containing stats and fluff for a large variety of ships.

My one complaint is I would like to have seen ground vehicles included. I know it doesn't fit with the starships theme, but there are enough similarities that it shouldn't have been difficult to accommodate them, and I don't know if they would merit their own separate book.

If you or one of your players is specifically playing a pilot, this book is definitely worth picking up.

This is a good,well made book it's descriptive and has over 100 ships.Any bad reviews,I think are because they thought it was the old book.THIS IS NOT THE OLD BOOK!

I think my biggest beef with this book is the way the ships are organized. Instead of alphabetically ordered (even the four new templates like junker and prototype are in with the ships in alphabetical order instead of a little section of their own)I think it would have made more sense to have the ships catagorized by size, function, or the best prolly would have been by who used or made them. Like... all the old republic ships in one section, then new empire, then the independants... I dunno, it just get's very dissorganized when they do it alphabetically. My other beef being I guess even though it is labeled "Starships" I was hoping to see some land speeders or bikes, a few walkers... land craft I guess, I wonder if that means they'll come out with a land craft book or just put them chunk by chunk in the other supplements which seems to be what they're doing. Seems the KotR book has speeders and bikes and the Unleashed book has some too so.... In order to play the game you have to buy all the books anyways right? One last beef... The templates in my opinion are pretty useless, nice attempt, but really... if a gm wants to make a ship a junker... you don't really need a template, just make some of the stats lower...
On to the pluss' of this book. There is enough selection of ships (barely) to put together a battle. There are maybe a couple of fighters, freighters, transports, capital ships, etc from each era of play from each faction. There are pictures for 99% of the ships which is allways good and the art is exceptional. I guess I do have another beef with this book which was actually the first thing that annoyed me, there are only about 4 schematic layouts for ships... so there are all these ships but only about four of them have blueprint layouts (dynamic a.k.a. ebon hawk, sith infiltrator a.k.a. Darth Maul's personal transport, and of course han solo's ride.. I'm pretty sure there's one more... oh yea, one other space transport) which bummed me out because I was looking to throw some space pirates into the campaign and would have liked to work with some actual ship layouts instead of making them myself and I guess it would have gotten pretty rediculous with the sheer size of some of these ships but they could have done a few more of them. The ships have brief descriptions of who made them and why which is good for tying them in to your campaign as well as a capabilities section which is good for basically letting you know how that ship was used. One of the best parts of this book was the modification part which was laid out and explained very well. There are new talents and feats which were interesting but seriously I think unless the GM let's it be known that it is going to be a campaign heavy in space most of them are pretty useless to a standard campaign, more for building specialized characters. There is one cool feat enabling someone to literally make a ship from the ground up and I think that's cool. I reccomend this book for two people and two people only... The GM who wants to throw an occasional small scale starship battle into the campaign (although get ready for a headache cuz the rules and specs on how to do this are complicated) and the player who wants to be a specialized character, the player who really wants to be an ace pilot and have a personalized ship that is capable of more than just getting the party from point a to point b. Hey, no group is complete without a han solo right? beats calling a taxi all the time and really helps flesh out a character. Sooo... I'd say this book is more for the player looking to flesh their character than for the GM

Unless you're a absolute completionist and MUST have every book in this series I would seriously recommend not getting this at the price this book is currently commanding. The book itself is very high quality, and an exceptional piece of kit for the aspiring star wars:rpg gamemaster. However I really cannot recommend this given how expansive it is. My suggestion is to use the starships in the RPG core rules book as templates and create your own starships from those. Really if this book was 25-35 dollars I would give it a glowing 5 star review and recommend it to everyone.... But as its going for anywhere from 80-170 dollars. avoid.