Lit We Hav to Go on an Adventure with Jello

I remember back when FMVs actually kind of were a selling point for me in games, especially the Westwood Dune and Command & Conquer games, because it seemed like the games were a step up other ones (to be fair, Westwood games pretty much were the top of the 90s RTS pyramid).

If I remember right, the Rebel Assault FMVs were actually the first Star Wars footage shot since the Ewok movies.

 

So, to be clear, since I don't know much about SW literature outside of the adult novels, these Adventure journals are not the same thing as this, right?



Because I have that sitting on my bookshelf back home somewhere. Don't know where or when I got it, and I've never read it. Haha.

 

Nep, they are mostly RPG Guide material collected in small articles, they just also happen to cover general SW news, had interviews, short stories etc. Image it more like Star Wars Insider, if Insider had mostly real expanding the Universe content.

 

If you think about it though, other than having his name in the title, the Indiana Jones franchise isn't much different from the Star Wars franchise: the latter is a movie series focused on a family whose members you can't really be. The trick is opening up the world and making space for stories for other heroes, and the world of 1930s pulp has plenty of room for that.

That's not too far off. Imagining a relatively dark Dungeons and Dragons setting advancing technologically to the early 20th Century might be a bit closer. The game was remade as a D6 system game when WEG was reconstituted in the mid-2000s, and after WEG died for the last time, Bloodshadows wound up in another company's hands; you can find a pdf version of it for sale here.

EDIT: Turns out the same company has the rights to the original Masterbook The World of Bloodshadows, as well. You can see it (and read it's back cover copy) here.

I kind of miss it. Even with today's technological advances, there's nothing quite like seeing real flesh-and-blood humans cheesily acting out a scene. No amount of careful modeling of Sam Witwer for The Force Unleashed gave quite the thrill of seeing Jason Court hamming his way through the cutscenes of Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight.

Right. Here's Wookieepedia's overview of the Adventure Journals.

 

The WEG Adventure Journals have some of my absolute favourite stories, even after all these years. I was actually just reading The Cure in SWAJ6 a couple of hours before I came on and saw this thread. It includes some pretty interesting characters who I wish showed up more, including Dr Andros Hareel, who's described as "the head of the Rebel Alliance's medical section," and Dr Fesjo Negleem, the head of the Empire's biowarfare division. It really was a rich and amazing story.

 

Oh you can try, it won't happen.

 

I suck so bad at Rebel Assault II on PlayStation without a light gun for the ground missions and the space missions are very hard now, but fortunately my brother and I beat it a long time ago.

 

Holy blast from the past, Batman! Yeah, I used to have some of the SWAJs; we played WEG SW a lot back in the day. Good times...

 

Sounds like a cool project. I was a huge fun of the Adventure Journals during the time of their original run, and I'll never forget beginning my collection with #7 (which had the amazing Zahn story of "Mist Encounter") in 1995 and then working my way backwards, collecting 99% of them by the end of '97. (I'm still missing #12, I believe.)

It just so happens that as of last year, I began my own read-through from issue #1, and I am currently on #5. The great portion of these articles and stories I have not read in a good 15-20 years, and it is incredibly nostalgic and fun to revisit these old literary treasures again.

 

I have the D6 version of that RPG and I would more describe it as Cast A Deadly Spell the RPG

 

Excuse the weird comment, and I hate to pollute poor Havac's thread with my heresy, but I can actually buy Leia as Adam Driver's mother in that pic.

 

I can buy Adam Driver as Leia in that pic.

 

That was the underlying implication of my comment, yes.

Well.

Maybe overlying.

 

I'd all but forgotten this movie existed. Yes, this, only I get the impression there are more nonhuman fantasy races in Bloodshadows than your horror/urban fantasy standards of vampires, werewolves, and demons. (Of course, it's been so long since I've seen Cast a Deadly Spell, that might be true of the film, as well, and I'm just misremembering.)

"The best issue of the SWAJ by far, and one of the best Expanded Universe sources ever published." --Dan Wallace

 

It's sad that the age of the gaming magazine/journal is past, while pen-and-paper RPGs still chug along... but the demise the heavy hitters (Dragon and Dungeon) probably puts on hold any other RPGs doing anything except the occasional blog or podcast. It's not the same, not by half. They were fun, sometimes silly, and a great way to handle miscellany that wouldn't necessarily fit into a sourcebook or rulebook.

But from the collector's side of things, they can be a pain. It took a while to get all the Adventure Journals, or - even worse - all of Challenge Magazine.

 

There's definitely a lot of room to tell stories of that type, but Indy doesn't lend itself to sharing that universe quite as well as Star Wars. Star Wars has a war with two big factions and a sense of a larger universe that can have more Jedi Knights, more Rebels, more smugglers. Whereas Indy movies are very specifically about this one guy having fairly unique adventures. There's not the same sense of infrastructure there -- that the world is full of college professors who moonlight as treasure hunters, that you can run into Belloq and Wu Han and Marcus and Marion and not have it be a bit contrived. It's the way that you can imagine Star Wars spinoffs not about the main characters (we've gotten plenty), things like X-wing, but you couldn't really imagine an Indiana Jones spinoff about Sallah (it would be awesome, but it would never be made, because all Indiana Jones stories are Indiana Jones stories).

Anyway, it's not that I wouldn't love the idea of being able to use the setting, it's just a passing remark that Indiana Jones, as a franchise, lends itself to being a setting a little awkwardly. It's just that the name lends itself well to being a brand name for the idea of pulpy thirties adventures, moreso than the idea that you're going to get a lot of mileage out of a Raiders sourcebook by taking a party to the Raven's Nest or the Well of Souls on the regular.

FMV is awesome. It made Jedi Knight feel like, if not quite another Star Wars movie, at least a Star Wars TV episode. There's just something about having real people, in real costumes, acting, that gives it a sort of gravitas. The fact that Christopher Neame and a bunch of other people are standing there in real robes, holding real lightsabers, having real lightsaber fights, just gives that opening cutscene such a charge. Would Jerec be nearly as memorable a villain if he'd just been a collection of pixels, rather than a real person inhabiting the screen?

 

And now we come to the first feature representing the real meat of the Adventure Journals: First Contact, by Timothy Zahn. Most of you will probably be familiar with it through its appearance in the Tales from the Empire short story collection. Some of you might not know that all the stories in Tales from the Empire were taken from the Adventure Journal, however. As the first story of the Adventure Journals, it sets a great precedent. Written by top-tier talent Timothy Zahn, it makes it plain that the Adventure Journal will be offering quality Star Wars stories, something that every fan should want to get in on. Zahn would continue a fruitful association with the magazine, writing several more stories throughout its run. The story was also illustrated by Mike Vilardi, one of WEG's top artistic talents.

The story opens with Talon Karrde and . . . Quelev Tapper (and yet another top-notch addition to Karrde's long list of punnily-named ships, the Uwana Buyer). This makes it immediately clear that the story is a prequel, tapping into Zahn's own rich mythology to give us some of Karrde's background from back when he was paired with Tapper. The fact that what we know of Tapper from his mention in The Thrawn Trilogy is that he was Karrde's former second-in-command, deceased at the time of the series, whose role is now being filled by Mara Jade, gives a strong hint of where this story is going before it even starts to those familiar with the material. That's not necessarily to its detriment, however; it's not an absolute given that the story will employ conservation of narrative, and even so it's pleasant to see mysterious backstory played out and filled in even if we know it's backstory.

Given that most people have already read this story, I won't dance around spoilers: the story is that Karrde and Tapper are on Varonat to investigate the operations of a criminal rival, Gamgalon the Krish. Gamgalon is running Morodin hunts, and Karrde wants to figure out what the angle is on an operation that seemingly isn't worth Gamgalon's time. They're in disguise to do so, and while investigating they run into another person operating under an assumed identity: Mara Jade, hiding out post-Endor as lowly mechanic Celina Marniss. They pose as travelers with engine trouble who let themselves get sold on a safari, and Karrde quickly figures out that Marniss shows a lot of intelligence and talent for a backwater mechanic. They set out on the safari, where Karrde is very suspicious, and they soon come face-to-face with a Morodin, which Karrde hesitates to shoot -- other hunters get it. Nothing is obviously wrong, but something definitely feels off. That evening at camp, Karrde and Tapper go out looking for more of the transponders they saw, and end up following the slime trails of the Morodins -- suspiciously regular -- until they come upon a whole herd of them. And looking, they realize the slime trails are the basis of a maze. The Morodins are sentient. They're immediately caught by Gamgalon and his subordinates, who reveal that yes, the Morodins are sentient -- and their hunting is covering for the harvesting of berries, altered by Morodin slime, that catalyze the creation of a new blaster gas -- a smuggler and arms dealer's dream. Tapper is unceremoniously killed when he tries to resist, while Karrde is taken back toward their airspeeders. Mara ambushes Gamgalon and frees Karrde, however. They escape, and aboard Karrde's yacht, she explains that she saw through his disguise and figured out he was the smuggler boss with a penchant for wordplay she'd heard of, so she decided to throw in with him. She asks for a job, he gives her one, and the story ends with her revealing her name: Mara Jade.

There are a few interesting points to make here. One is that Karrde is a big criminal kingpin, but can credibly go undercover, face-to-face with a rival, without fear of being caught. Karrde was mentioned as a quiet, behind-the-scenes player in TTT, but this makes it clear just how obscure he kept himself. Another is that Zahn really is great at creating that lived-in atmosphere for Star Wars stories. The way Karrde and Gamgalon's representative at the spaceport banter and barter, or the way a character casually drops "five-half" as a time -- immediately understandable, but just different enough to suggest a certain foreignness to the galaxy far, far away -- it suggests a full, living, strange-but-familiar setting. There's a delicate balance there, and Zahn tends to nail it. There's some stuff like "come-up flector" that's total nonsense but immediately intelligible nonetheless -- Zahn knows that you don't need a term explained, that it can be a little fanciful, if you're given context and if it sounds right. Or there's something like replacing Twenty Questions with Questions Three -- slightly archaic, it sounds like a well-established question game without simply being a find-and-replace. It avoids the lazy sci-fi-ification route of just tacking on "Rodian Questions" or "Pulsar Interrogation" to make it sound like a Space Thing, and avoids the arguably worse Reeves-Perry method of just turning it into completely unnatural-sounding thesaurus salad to make it sound "technical" and "spacey" -- "Twenty Interrogatives" or "Dozen Queries" or something.

By setting the story up as an investigation of a mystery -- what is Gamgalon doing? -- Zahn gets to play to another of his strengths, which is writing intelligently. I've often made a point of praising Zahn's ability to write intelligent characters convincingly. It takes a lot of talent to write a good mystery -- you not only have to come up with a convincing mystery -- you have to come up with a convincing solution, and a convincing method for your character to reach the solution. You have to make it hard to solve, but solvable. You need, critically, to make your reader believe in the character's intelligence by finding a way to demonstrate it on the page -- to walk through thought processes, to illustrate perceptiveness by knowing what details to pick up on. The author must himself be smart to write a smart character. It's a lot harder than just writing, "He went here, and immediately found a clue when someone told it to him, and then there was a big fight, and then he chased him." Action is easy; mystery is hard. This isn't the greatest mystery writing Zahn's done -- with this short space, the moment of revelation basically boils down to looking at suspicious regularity and making something that looks a little like a leap because Zahn hasn't had space to set it up extensively. But it does a nice job of misdirection -- of hiding mysteries in mysteries. The mystery of what Gamgalon is doing hides the fact that the real key puzzle is the nature of the Morodins, something you're not even thinking of at the outset. Zahn conditions you to think that the mystery is about what the safari is hiding, not about the subject of the safari itself. And that mystery hides the fact that the story really isn't about that at all -- it's distracting you from the mystery of Mara Jade's identity, and from the fact that the story is actually about Karrde meeting Mara. Zahn can't really hide that that much -- as soon as Marniss shows up anyone who's read TTT knows it's Mara -- but it throws a lot more variables into play to conceal just how Mara's going to play into the story. It also nicely makes the point that Zahn tends to write intelligent, perceptive characters in general. He's known for Thrawn, but both Karrde and Mara are very intelligent, insightful, cunning people too.

That's the biggest weakness of the story, though -- Mara's Maraness is immediately apparent. I mean, red-gold hair is basically the first thing Zahn mentions about her. Zahn tries to stage it as a big final reveal, but, really, did anyone not see this coming? In some ways, I think the story might have been stronger if it had included Mara's perspective to let the audience in on this major moment of Mara's story and make it clear that the real importance is Mara revealing her identity to Karrde, not to the reader. The short length of the story, though, maybe doesn't make that possible. That's really it; the story in general would have benefited from being expanded in length by about five or ten more pages. As is, it's all very compressed and there's not much room for anything to breathe. There's a mystery, but it's immediately resolved. Gamgalon just shows up because he kind of has to and the story is running out of time to get to him naturally. So what I guess I'm saying is that it's a fun story. It's nice to see backstory of characters we know and love, to get those tantalizing mentions fleshed out. It's nice seeing Karrde leading his own story, operating in full super-suave mode. But it's not Zahn's best work. In general I like his short stories but this is just a little too compressed.

That's not all, though! Once the story finishes, we get the roleplaying meat that justifies its inclusion in a roleplaying magazine. There are profiles, with RPG statistics, capsule bios, and portraits for Karrde, Tapper, Mara, and Gamgalon, plus mini-writeups on Gamgalon's henchmen, and profiles for the Morodin and Krish species and Varonat itself, plus two separate "Adventure Idea" sidebars. These writeups are focused on giving gamers what they need to know. Karrde doesn't get a life history; rather he gets a basic statement of his position in the galaxy -- smuggling kingpin -- the details of his personality -- enjoys quiet and security, prefers to stay in the shadows, very protective of his people, values information over brute force -- and the ways player characters might interact with him -- he likes to go out incognito to check out business opportunities himself, he runs smuggling operations, he has a secret base on Myrkr. With Mara a well-known quantity and the sourcebooks for TTT already covering her and Karrde, their writeups really focus on placing them in a context for this particular period of time around the story, giving some details on other identities Mara has inhabited and discussing her motivations at the time. These bios can be very valuable, however, for people like Tapper, who haven't been fully fleshed out as characters elsewhere. You get details like the fact that he's a bigger, more imposing guy than Karrde, that he's usually suspicious and highly security-oriented -- stuff that the story suggests but this solidifies -- and full backstory that the story itself didn't have cause to just divert into (He led his own smuggling group post-Endor, until an Imperial governor raided his hideout. Most of his people died, but Karrde was in the area and was able to rescue him and the rest, and agreed to merge their operations [It would have been neat to establish that someone we knew, like Chin or Dankin or somebody, was originally a member of Tapper's crew, but that opportunity is not taken]). Gamgalon, similarly, is someone who gets no real development in the story but becomes a character thanks to his writeup, which details his backstory as a gunrunner whose operation was absorbed by Jabba due to debt, went independent again after his death, and is now obsessed with maintaining his independence through secrecy and full control of his operations. In just two short paragraphs, you get everything you need to bring him to life as a full character in your game. You also get stuff like the henchman writeups giving a name and bit of personality to an otherwise unnamed background character in the story, Jombo the Rodian.

The Krish get a writeup that assigns the whole species characteristics, as always -- they treat everything as sports, games, or puzzles, and are good mechanics, but are unreliable businessmen because they mean well but are invariably sloppy and will leave people hanging. It's a strong concept for RPG characters, but kind of an odd way to characterize a whole race (the story itself contains the seeds of this, with Mara's hilariously, bluntly racist statement that she doesn't trust any Krish, even the honest ones. Literally, "I don't like Krish." It's a line). The Morodins' entry explains their slime, which they use in a calculated way by manipulating its chemical composition to affect plant life and mutate it to create more nutritious food for themselves. They, in fact, colonized Varonat themselves to do just that, and to send food back to their homeworld. It's just that they colonized it a thousand years before the Republic was even formed -- using organic starships -- but ecological crisis on their homeworld meant they couldn't grow ships anymore and the colony was cut off. Lacking the visible trappings of civilization like cities or farms, or recognizable language, they've always been assumed to be beasts. It raises an interesting question: how could you tell if a species was really sapient? We rely on our trappings of civilization -- cities, tools, organization -- but if a sapient species continued to live as herd animals, how would you ever tell the difference? Interestingly, the writeup focuses on the idea of biochemical agriculture that Schweighofer -- who spun this supplemental information out of Zahn's story -- has invented as his hook, and only makes passing mention of the data that Zahn's revelation hinges on -- that the fertilization routes double as mazes to provide Morodin youth with an intellectual challenge and teach them about fertilization.



Varonat's writeup reveals that it was settled 250 years ago as a utopian colony, with disaffected idealists trying to create a participatory democracy. It failed when agriculture proved unproductive. The Morodins were regarded merely as pests who trampled the crops and were driven off out of contact. Now it's basically a dead community, with only a few thousand people too poor to buy their way offworld. None of that is anywhere in the story -- but here, it gives you an interesting potential setting. There's a ton here that you would miss if you only ever read the story in TFTE.

The first adventure idea is all about Varonat -- send your players there to survey the jungles for natural resources, and let them struggle with the Imperial governor, isolationist colonists, and Morodins, whose sentience they could discover. The second is about the Morodins, with the New Republic asking your characters to make first contact with the Morodins and study their agriculture. For more peaceful players, there's the chance to study a culture, learn a language, and figure out a scientific puzzle. Of course, Schweighofer also suggests the possibility of conflict with the Imperial governor and with rogue Morodin poachers.

Overall, this is a pretty good example of the way the AJs were able to use stories to spin out extensive world-building that made the universe a more exciting and imagination-stimulating place. All, of course, in the particular service of stimulating gamers' minds to create stories using these pieces of the setting, but that doesn't mean that non-gamers won't be inspired too.

Next up, an interview with Zahn!

 

People mey be interested in knowing that Mike Vilardi have a deviantArt account - http://caesar120.deviantart.com/ - and have posted some of his SW art there.

 

So I just finished browsing through all this and I was going to go on some spiel about how much I loved the WEG art, how the artists really did a magnificent job of bringing the stories to life...but then I saw the dude's art of Tinian I'att and now all I can do is kick myself for forgetting to include her in my "favorite SWAJ-sourced" characters.

 

Indeed! And he, in the past, at least, has been quite willing to sell his original WEG artwork for very reasonable prices. You can see what made its way into my possession here.