Lit We Hav to Go on an Adventure with Jello

Looking at that linked thread, and the illustrations above, reminds me of what someone else said in it: Karrde looks much truer to what I expected as he's depicted by WEG's artists, when compared to the DH comic version that seems to have stuck.

 

Indeed. The comic book version looks like a garden variety thug.

I've gone on record before about how little I like those comics' artwork and its subsequent impact on the EU's depictions of Thrawn Trilogy characters and elements.

 

I love the comics' artwork. Each of the different art styles is gorgeous. It's just that the character designs from the HTTE artist aren't faithful to the books at all. And that's had a terrible follow-on effect.

 

It's always bugged me that the 'worst' designs - thug Karrde and catsuit Mara - stuck around forever, while the actually rather refreshing decision to make characters with no real description like Mazzic aliens instead of (white) humans was completely ignored.

 

My preferred version of Karrde is still the one from the Essential Guide to Characters.


But much as I love Vilardi, I'm not actually that fond of his Karrde.



His version, with his mullety hair and tendency toward tunics and capes, just hasn't aged that well and tends to look a little bit too self-consciously refined for a low-key smuggler boss. I like the EGTC version better not just for jiving with the text, but for suggesting a sort of rakish suavity within the context of being a rough-and-tumble smuggler who lives in the middle of the jungle. He looks intelligent, cunning, and cultured, but also tough and capable. Vilardi's Karrde is just a little too foppish for me to really buy as the Karrde of TTT (it does work for Karrde in disguise as a wealthy purchasing agent, however [except it doesn't work in the illustration for First Contact, because he's supposed to be wearing just-bought safari clothes at that point, not a freaking cape]).



The HTTE comics version, though inaccurate with the long hair and, IMO, not at all the best basis for Karrde's artistic representation, isn't actually quite as bad as all that. It's not so much that he looks like a thug -- I think Karrde's intelligence still shines through -- as that the combination of sleeveless sheepskin vest, long hair, and blocky horseshoe mustache makes him look like the leader of a biker gang. The total commitment to the rough-and-tumble outlaw look doesn't really work for the cultured Karrde. It's not the worst possible design for him -- you can see what the artist is going for -- but it's inapt. Subsequent artists seem to have recognized this and done some work to buff up that image without altering it entirely. Edvin Biukovic, with the TLC comic, turned the vest into a jacket, which alone did a huge amount to make him look more like an averagely fashionable smuggler who happens to have flowing locks. The NEGTC elaborated on the look by filling out the horseshoe-mustache-and-goatee look into a fully-connected goatee, which significantly normalized his look.



The end result isn't a terrible look for an intelligent crimelord at all. The Japanese TUF cover, for example, certainly isn't an objectionable representation. It's just not quite as on-point as the EGTC take of short hair and a more rakishly styled van dyke goatee.

 

There are also the bothans, who the game depicted as very human like, and the bims, who were just bearded hobbits, unlike the comics were they had a more unique design.

 

I always thought there was a deliberate connection between the names - IIRC Melina Carniss was the person who stopped Mara from going on Jabba's sail barge, thereby preventing her from killing Luke. So she's a significant source for an alias.

 

I always liked that this story was the only time Karrde and Mara actually flirt, as it just seems fitting for him to try to hit on her but drop it once he realizes more of her past, skills and that she would be much more useful as a long term member of his organization then just a quick fling.

 

Zahn's short story was followed by Timothy Zahn: From Heir to Last Command, an interview with the author. It starts with a nice, punchy lead-in from author Ilene Rosenberg, who points out that Zahn had hoped Heir to the Empire's first printing would sell out in six months. "It didn't. The first printing disappeared from the shelves within one week." There's a little biographical detail to give you context and then we're off to the interview.

The questions are mostly the predictable sort of stuff Zahn has to get in just about every interview, about writing the first Star Wars books in a long time. How did you get picked to write the books? When did you fall in love with Star Wars? Were there restrictions from Lucasfilm? Why is Star Wars so popular? There's some interesting meat in there, though. Zahn says that he knows a little bit about the process by which he was picked, but not all of it. Bantam made a list of names and sent it to Lucasfilm for approval. His name was at the top of the list, but he has no idea if that meant anything or was just coincidence, and he has no idea if Lucasfilm picked him just because he was the first name on the list. It's a pleasantly self-effacing anecdote. He also affirms that he has met George Lucas -- he was in San Francisco for a book signing and was invited to Skywalker Ranch to meet with Lucy Autrey Wilson, and it was set up for him to drop by George's office. George had time to see him and actually sat there for ten minutes talking with Zahn (doing most of the talking, Zahn says), talking about the state of film, complaining that movies weren't being made with as much care, that plot was being left out in favor of special effects and atmosphere. Zahn seems very impressed by the meeting and suggests that Lucas gave him a lot to think about. I can certainly understand that; say what you want about Lucas, but the guy knows film, knows storytelling, very deeply and has studied the heck out of it.

You also get the questions about working in an established universe, and working with WEG's material. Zahn is very complimentary about WEG, but honest about being dubious at first, when he was two months into writing and suddenly told to coordinate with the big mass of material WEG had already developed. He admits he didn't want to do that -- it sounds like kind of a pain in the ass, and no author is likely to want to be bound by a bunch of random other people's stuff -- until he actually started reading the material and realized how consistent it was with itself and the films, how good it was, and how it actually made his job easier by giving him a whole framework to work with. He makes special note of inventing very few new ship designs because, rather than having to, he found what he wanted ready-made by WEG and just used their designs instead. The interviewer also asks him if it was tough to work in a universe that had already been created by the films, WEG, Daley's books, the newspaper strips, and even more material. What's fascinating about the question is that, even at this early stage of the EU, Rosenberg is mentioning the Daley books and Goodwin/Williamson strips as part of the background of the universe -- they're assumed rather casually to be inherent to the canon. Zahn says that he didn't find it too hard, but is up front in saying that "I had some problems with the Dark Horse Comics series, and persuaded them to let me not have to reference anything there." It might seem a little arrogant, but I think it's interesting to look back in context. Zahn was brought aboard to write a book series following the films, and there doesn't seem to have been an up-front caveat that he was going to be coordinating with any other spin-off material. This was before the existence of an EU; it's not like Karen Traviss or Troy Denning being brought into an extant, well-established EU and then not wanting to play ball when other stories get in their way. It was just him doing his thing, and then the EU was sprung on him -- and I can't really blame the guy for looking at the ridiculous bull**** that is Dark Empire's narrative, in the days before the EU was a solidified thing, and saying, "Can I not? Please, can I not? Look at that, they've got a goddamn body-hopping Emperor clone and Luke turns evil? What is this ****? And Leia's already pregnant? I'm trying to do a whole thing with them having their first pregnancy. Do I really have to?" And they said, "I guess not, we'll move things around and make it work." It's not exactly like Zahn was being a huge diva -- the whole issue of what the boundaries were was in the middle of being negotiated, and was only sprung on him after he'd started writing. Anyway, Zahn says that overall it was very easy to work in the universe because so much of the universe is internally consistent -- he complains that one of his biggest problem with lower-quality sci-fi is when the pieces don't fit together, or things are introduced and then not used again when they'd make sense, or used inconsistently. Star Wars doesn't have that problem (or didn't have it at the time) so it was very easy to tie everything together tightly, and he felt it was easy to fit his new characters and planets into the setting seamlessly.

Zahn also mentions the sense of expectations created by writing in the Star Wars universe, of having to live up to the movies: "The simple fact that there was Star Wars printed in gold leaf on the cover means I'm promising something, and I knew I had to deliver." He seems to take that very seriously, and knew also that the audience for Star Wars is far bigger than his normal audience; most of the people buying these books will have no idea who he is. Fan reaction, he says, has been very positive (though there have been negative responses, some complaints being "really strange," but that diminished after HTTE), and he's most gratified by the responses from teenagers who say that they don't normally read books but liked these. In the pre-Harry Potter age, Zahn seems very pleased "to help remind people that it's not just Nintendo and MTV out there, that there's a lot of neat stuff in books." He also says that he was surprised at the time by the overwhelming response to the books almost a decade after the last movie had left theaters, but "In retrospect, I don't think there was ever any real loss of interest in Star Wars, it simply had nothing to focus on for many years." It's an interesting point, and likely true. The Star Wars brand continued to have power, but the companies behind it simply didn't recognize that because this was a whole brand-new business model. Nothing like this sort of blockbuster nerd-centric franchise had existed before, and executives couldn't know that a significant base of consumers would be willing to continue to consume material long after the films had left theaters. It suggests then that TTT had a much larger role within the entertainment industry as a whole in redefining the whole way the tie-in market works.

No interview with Zahn is going to forego questions about his characters. In a question about his villains, Zahn is fairly explicit about the contrast he sees between Vader and Thrawn, always a nice source of arguments here. Zahn says that Vader "dominates by fear," which he doesn't think is very effective; it inspires obedience but not loyalty. Even the Emperor "probably had a fair amount of charm he could use when he wanted to" and had individuals like Mara who were fanatically loyal, but by and large he doesn't seem to think that the image of the Emperor presented in ROTJ is one that inspired a lot of deep personal loyalty either. "But I wanted a leader who could inspire loyalty and trust and not just fear, and Thrawn is what came out." The main contrast thus seems to be that Thrawn was trusted by his men, was inspirational, and that would allow him to rally the Imperial remnants, whereas the usual sort of black-clad rule-by-terror wouldn't cut it in the context of a rump Empire. As for Mara, he mentions her being driven by a contradiction between her desire for connection, for trust, and a fear of connection as making her vulnerable, and points out that most of her actions throughout the series are driven by her loyalty to Karrde, trying to repay him for the trust he's put in her. On my part I think that's very interesting, because it suggests that Karrde is a huge part of the positive outcome of the series, and of Mara's redemption, just by giving her a positive role model and a positive focus for her loyalty. Luke's life is ultimately saved not just because he's such a swell guy that he wins her over, but because she ever gave him a chance to win her over by putting her loyalty to Karrde in the present above her loyalty to Palpatine in the past. The fact that Karrde replaces Palpatine as the focus of Mara's loyalty is crucial to the whole progression and resolution of the series. And speaking of Karrde, while it's often heard that he's the image of Han had he stayed in the fringe -- something Zahn repeats here -- he also points out that he was conceived as a contrast to another character. Zahn designed Karrde to be a mirror of Jabba the Hutt. Rather than the corruption and backstabbing of Jabba's court, Karrde has built his organization on mutual trust and loyalty -- his people have his back and he has theirs, and Zahn suggests that's the only way a criminal organization can really have a positive culture and have growth and stability. Karrde perhaps never intended to invest himself so deeply in others, Zahn says, but he's created a sort of surrogate family, contrasting Karrde's emotional investment in his organization with Han's more emotionally open, heroic investment in actual family and friends. Zahn's also asked about Jaina and Jacen's names, and says that Jacen was an easy appropriation of his son's friend's name, but it took him days of going over names to pick Jaina. He wanted the Luke-and-Leia effect of the same letter for the twins' names, but had a long back-and-forth with his editor before deciding on Jaina.

There are some more unique questions scattered throughout, too. One picks up on the pacing of the books: was there a deliberate effort to pace them like the movies? Zahn says yes, that he was trying to reproduce the entire feel of Star Wars. And he shares the interesting information that he had taped the audio from various movies his son liked in order to play it on road trips and keep him quiet. So in addition to seeing the films over and over, Zahn has heard them over and over, and thinks that being so familiar with the audio, without being distracted by the visuals, really helped his grasp of how the characters speak, helped him convey their voices. He also says that he didn't make a specific effort to develop the characters as they would be five years later; it just seemed to come naturally to him to nudge them forward to where they were; it just made sense. One interesting complaint, which I'd never heard before, that he brings up is from those who said Han was too "wimpy" because he's less cavalier and very protective of Leia. That's a super-silly complaint, but Zahn points out that he explicitly intended for Han to be very protective because with his new family, it's the first time he's really been responsible for someone else and he sees Han overreacting to that a little. There's also a question about the Noghri, in which Zahn repeats the well-known factoid about wanting them to be the Sith, but elaborates that he wanted Vader's armor to reflect his role as the leader of the Noghri -- that it looked sort of like a stylized Noghri (or Sith) face. That explicit backstory was of course axed, but Zahn points out that he snuck it in anyway by implication -- he described the Noghri's faces in a way that he intended to be similar to Vader's mask, and points out that by giving them gray skin that darkened with age, Vader's black armor would suggest status as an elder to Noghri.

The interview ends with the natural question: will he be back? At this stage, with the interview done probably in late 1993, Zahn already states that Bantam is doing twelve more books (obviously their contract got bigger) and he's agreed to do "the last of the 12" -- it's ambiguous whether that means the last book, the last three books, or what. But up next for him was a short story in Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina. Up next for us, however, is our first Adventure Journal adventure: The Spira Regatta.

 

It was meant to be the last of the twelve, titled The Hand of Thrawn. As we know, that eventually spiraled out into a duology, but it was initially intended as a one-off.

 

That's how it worked out, but the message Zahn is sending to fans is ambiguous. And to be fair, with as many evolutions as Bantam's contract went through, we can't be sure that the plan in 1993 was the same as the plan in 1996. But my main point is that it's a fantastic tease for fans all the way back then knowing that the run will start and end with Zahn, but it's not quite clear what they've been guaranteed.

 

Now we get the first adventure of the Adventure Journal, The Spira Regatta, by Paul Sudlow. For those unfamiliar with the concept, an adventure is a prepackaged outline for roleplaying, something that lays out a setting, characters, and a storyline in which to involve your players. Because the point of roleplaying is to make your own decisions that influence the stories, there's a bit of a choose-your-own adventure effect as the adventure will present opportunities for decisions and outcomes, though obviously there's an overall structure the players are kept inside. Let's see how it works.

WEG games generally assumed that the players would be playing as Rebels of one kind or another. This adventure therefore starts with the prompt that the characters' sector has seen increased Imperial activity, which captured a crucial supply shipment. A backup shipment was sent to Spira, "a pleasure world situated close to the Inner Core." Jello alert! The smuggler delivering this shipment, though, also got intercepted and had to dump his cargo into the ocean. The cargo was dropped in shallow water near a wrecked ancient spaceship with a lot of tourist traffic, but there was only enough Rebel manpower on the planet to move the crates into the wreck, not to get them out of the water and offworld. So your party is sent to get these supplies, posing as tourists. And that's just the backstory!

It's a pretty solid setup, though. Aside from Spira potentially being all the way across the galaxy from where your characters are operating and not really making any sense as a supply drop. This is followed up with an appeal directly to the gamemaster, suggesting that he fill the crates with specific supplies needed by the party, and a sidebar that offers a "script" to kick off the game, with set lines for the gamemaster to introduce the adventure and some banter between six characters. Players may resent being told what to say, so this isn't an absolutely required part of the adventure (everything in an adventure is, fundamentally, optional; it's up to the gamemaster to construct the game however he wants to); rather it's a nice tool to help get newer players started, or to kick off gameplay and get people into character if they're playing this as a one-off adventure and not part of a larger campaign. Mostly it serves the function of letting the players introduce the backstory of the adventure in a conversation among themselves rather than relying on a massive data dump from the gamemaster. In a set of details sure to please Jello, it starts the adventure off aboard a luxury starliner, and describes Spira as a "tropical pleasure world" with resorts that are "the classiest this side of Coruscant." One character also teases another about wearing "loud floral-patterned shirts," confirming that Star Wars tourists wear Hawaiian shirts too. Aaron Allston would have been so happy. Anyway, they don't have their own ship because travel to Spira is restricted and it would have been too much work to get a pass, and they only have low-power stun guns to get through customs. Their contact is Seth Cambriel, a "beach-bum playboy extraordinaire" who happens to also be a Rebel spy. They'll be meeting him at a casino.

Unlike the short stories, here the gaming material isn't saved for the end. It's simply inserted into the adventure wherever it's relevant. So we get a box with a writeup of Spira and a world map that seems ridiculously scaled (rather than zooming in, it just uses the whole damn planet up). You can learn some interesting things, such as that the planet imports everything because the entire planet doesn't have any economy other than tourism (all planets can only be one thing), and the entire world has a smaller population than Milwaukee. On days like these, you can't help but think that there's something to Saxtonism. The Imperial garrison is tiny and deferential, with a Core-like disinclination to impose itself on the locals. Many, many Imperial dignitaries are tourists and residents, however. It's a little bizarre to think of, like, Sate Pestage or Jerec or somebody on vacation, though.


DELIBERATELY AWFUL PHOTOSHOP

We then kick off "episode one" of the adventure with more admonitions to the gamemaster -- as an Imperial world, alien characters will be a little out of place, and may be snubbed or "frequently mistaken for waiters and janitors." They arrive at Ataria Island, the most exclusive resort, of which we also get a map (it has monorails!) and a general rundown of its layout. Even the spaceport is luxurious, paved in red marble and surrounded with trees and flowers. We get stats for Spira police officers and a layout of the Aspre Plunge, the ultra-exclusive resort on Ataria where the characters are going to meet their contact, a huge vertical tower that runs from above ground down well below sea level, all down a long cliffside. It's a pretty neat design.

We are then introduced to the best-named character since Empatojayos Brand, Regenald Hanniper Snopps III. The characters are meant to meet Snopps in the casino, and he get a lovely writeup as "a handsome and wealthy young dandy, and a crashing bore." The son of everyone's favorite WEG governor, Zafiel Snopps (here introduced!), he couldn't get into the Academy and now is just a stereotype of an obnoxious, spoiled rich kid who wastes all his daddy's money at resort casinos. He's got a temper, but his threats of using his Imperial connections are empty -- "he really does know all the right people, but they all think he's a fool." He has long blonde hair, a mustache, a predilection for pink-and-turquoise silk clothes, wears gloves, and according to his list of equipment, carries a cane. So like a particularly buffoonish pimp, basically.

We then get introduced to Rebel contact Seth Cambriel, a "ruggedly handsome . . . sportsman" who made a fortune trading on companies nationalized by the Empire and then retired to Spira, where he lives a life of leisure and is on good terms with the staff everywhere thanks to generous tipping. Secretly, he's a Rebel agent who rounds up tons of information by using his contacts on the staff everywhere and palling around with all the drunk Imperials. It's a very cool little character concept. Anyway, Cambriel explains that normally you could just take a yacht out to the wreck and get at the stuff easily, all under cover of tourism. Right now, however, the area is off-limits to divers because of the Spira Regatta, the course of which runs over this famous wreck. They have two days before the race begins, and Cambriel has entered the characters into the regatta to give them cover to sail right there and pick the stuff up. He's also got a way for them to smuggle the weapons offworld, since there's no private traffic allowed: put them in a container full of dead eels that smell too awful for inspectors to bother with them too long. This is hilarious.

But oh wait he doesn't have a dead eel so they need to kill the eel while they're at it and oh by the way it's a pretty badass eel. We also get a short description and stats of Harbold Taft, the only other Rebel on the planet, who is a clerk in the spaceport security office and is very good at running around and poking his nose in. The adventure specifies that he doesn't have a specific role in the story (and CANNOT sail a yacht better than the characters, you are not allowed to just use him for that!) but the gamemaster may find him useful in running errands or helping out, "especially if the characters wind up in jail somehow." Now that's roleplaying -- you've always got to keep in mind that everybody may just end up in jail.

Episode two is the regatta itself. The game mentions the necessary prep -- training on sailing the yacht (and it suggests using this time to combine that objective with getting an eel), getting supplies, etc. There's a discussion of what's generally available in shops and what Cambriel has in his stash. This is the sort of information that helps out gamemasters. There are also writeups of various pieces of equipment, like diving suits and a "blaster speargun," which is a speargun that also has a blaster so, like, make up your mind already why do you need both. Plus the sailing droid brought to teach the party how to sail and help out aboard ship and Cambriel's yacht itself.

Anyway, the eels live in this beautiful crystal-covered trench that the players have to dive into, and there's talk of how many search rolls characters get per day and such. If they go and go without successfully rolling up an eel, the gamemaster is suggested to have one of the predatory eels hunt them, stalking the group and striking. Also, in the event that "the players don't hate Snopps enough yet," have him and his boorish friends show up on a "party barge," shouting and throwing concussion grenades into the water to kill an eel the lazy way, which of course is ineffective and just scares them off.

There are no specific mechanics for the race itself, since the competition isn't the point; they're not going to stop to pick up a bunch of crates and somehow win it. There is a schedule, however, of several days, with a few days picked out to have special encounters. One involves realizing a sea slug has attached itself to the ship and the drag is slowing it down; they have to dive and shoot it off, without shooting holes in the yacht. There's also a sailing challenge, in which the players must weather The Point, a cape surrounded with bad weather and high seas.

Episode three has the characters raising the goods from the wreck. We get a writeup of the ancient and mysterious wreck (complete with one of those insultingly lowball timeframes where the Old Republic only scouted Spira a thousand years ago), which is described as metal but also as organic-looking, which would certainly tempt later retconners to link it to the Vong, had anyone ever cared about The Spira Regatta again. As is, there are plenty of other ancient aliens to play with, too. While the characters work to haul out the crates, Snopps shows up with a bunch of seatroopers to explore the wreck himself, because he don't care about no diving ban. He tells the characters to leave. The adventure says, basically, that the party can get into a firefight with Snopps but it would be really dumb, and also really hard to win. After a very structured adventure, it's largely left up to the gamemaster and players how this story will end. Sudlow suggests some kind of con, noting that Snopps is easy to fool and his seatroopers are so sick of him that they don't really care if he gets humiliated so long as nobody's obviously treasonous. However, there are a lot of variables in play, and Snopps could take off or he could insist on diving even more, and anything could happen if he runs into the players underwater or if people surface with a bunch of crates right in the middle of the conversation. This is the climax of the story, and the conclusion basically brushes off the challenge of smuggling everything out as easily met as long as you've got the eel.

Overall, it's a fairly simple, straightforward adventure without too many moving parts or even, for that matter, much action. What it does have, though, is a pretty great setting and some good ideas for characters. Spira, Cambriel, and Snopps are the kind of elements that lend themselves to appearing outside this scenario too. I really like Spira (and so does Kyle Katarn! It gets a mention in Jedi Outcast!) and I'd have loved to see more stories set there.

Coming up next, we have Charlene Newcomb's first Alex Winger story!

 

I couldn't work the Spira Regatta into my group's game when I was GMing, but I did send them there for a visit. It was a good setting, and I regret that we never went back.

 

Interesting EU Lore: Spira (and the surrounding sector) was represented by Finis Valorum, who did the traditional carpetbagging by moving there and then becoming its senator.

 

It still shows up occasionally - Quantum Break next month will have extensive FMV.

 

Charlene Newcomb, mother of three and graduate student in library science, began writing A Glimmer of Hope while eagerly awaiting the release of The Last Command. Now, what started as fanfiction is canon, published in The Adventure Journal. How often does that happen? Even better, this is only the first of many stories Newcomb would write over the course of her association with the Adventure Journal, most of them following the heroine introduced here, Alex Winger. One notable thing about the Adventure Journal is that it didn't just give amateurs a shot at writing Star Wars -- for many who were successful in creating engaging protagonists, it allowed them to continue writing for the Journal, developing their own small-scale worlds within the Star Wars setting, hooking readers with personally-scaled sagas.


(Mike Vilardi's original black and white art was colorized when the story was reprinted on Hyperspace)

The story begins mid-action on an underground mission, introducing us to Alex, an eighteen-year-old girl who's been involved in the resistance on Garos IV (created by Newcomb, and later selected as the homeworld of the illustrious General Brenn Tantor) for two years already. When the resistance, spying on activity at an Imperial mining site, are caught, we see her in action, quick-thinking and capable. She narrowly avoids capture by scout troopers and bolts along the famously forbidding Tahika Cliffs, a near-impossible-to-climb formation along the coastline with rugged terrain she knows well. We also get the detail that she's never climbed the fatal cliffs, but has a recurring dream of her doing so alongside a mystery man she's never seen before, which she believes will come true someday. The prose is nothing special, with the slightly amateurish but highly readable feel of smooth but sub-professional-level fanfic, but Newcomb has a good feel for introducing a character, throwing us into the action, peppering the prose with world-building details.

With her escape complete, the story is interrupted by a massive two-page character profile. Now, this is just awfully placed. The page-and-a-half bio is rich in detail that spoils pretty much any attempt to deliver a backstory surprise via the text -- such as the one the story's about to try to pull off on the very next page. This very clearly belongs at the end of the story, not the beginning. Just in her stats block, it lets us know that Alex is Force-sensitive, a detail I could already guess from the dream vision and Newcomb's admirably subtle use of bad feelings, but which I'd have liked to discover from the story, not a stat block. Her bio starts off with a standard fanfic description -- she's beautiful, poised, and graceful, but also a secret tomboy. Her beauty and intelligence intimidate men, but she's loyal and those who really know her count on her. Also she's a genius who entered university young and is a good pilot. Her backstory is sort of a good, small-scale Star Wars twist on a fantasy archetype: she was orphaned young, raised by grandparents who were killed by an Imperial invasion of her homeworld, which is apparently not Garos IV, at age six (so only about twelve years before ANH). She barely remembers her mother, and her father may have been involved with the Alliance (though Newcomb may not quite have known it at the time, this would have been long before Daddy could have been a proper, capital-R Rebel, but no doubt he could have been part of a precursor organization [now with 100% more Ahsoka . . . thank god they killed the EU before it came to that]). As an orphan, she was given to Tork and Sali Winger, a childless couple who wanted to adopt and loyal Imperial citizens in a position to get captured war orphans as a reward for loyalty -- Tork is the Imperial governor of Garos IV. There's a nice complexity here, with Tork portrayed as a caring, perfectly good father whom Alex loves, but also one she is quite literally rebelling against, joining the anti-Imperial underground out of resentment at her still-vivid memories of the Imperial occupation of her homeworld (she hopes to someday access Imperial records to find out what her homeworld is, and the fate and identity of her father) and anger at seeing a close friend executed by the Imperial regime on Garos. There's a lot going on there, a lot of story hooks, and Alex is in a great position for storytelling, as a privileged governor's daughter who can use her access to the top of Imperial society for the underground. She's a young, committed idealist who's Force-sensitive but doesn't know it, caught up in a rebellion. It's a great basis for a character. It's also an interesting, and very cool, choice to make the rebellion not the Rebellion. It's a local underground cell, of exactly the type that would have made up the Rebellion, but it's about 6 ABY (the story's been variously positioned in 7 and 8 ABY before it was officially put in 6 ABY). The Rebellion is gone; the New Republic is here. The Garos rebels would like New Republic aid, but they're behind Imperial lines. It's a neat choice to feature the struggles of people still caught behind Imperial lines in the age of the New Republic, telling the kind of stories you would normally see being set just after ANH in a later, even more complex period.

It also, to me, raises interesting questions about the Rebellion's transition to the New Republic. It's all well and good for the Rebel Alliance to become the New Republic in the territory it actually holds, but what of those worlds with a Rebel presence -- found throughout the galaxy -- that weren't yet ready to be liberated? The New Republic not only has its own territory to govern, but it has an extensive network of spies, saboteurs, and insurrectionists behind enemy lines. How does it manage them now that its priorities have suddenly changed? What happens when Rebel cells suddenly find themselves within the territory of warlords the New Republic isn't interested in antagonizing for the moment? Where does it prioritize its resources? It's an interesting question of transition that the EU never really dealt with that heavily. There's just massive story potential overall in that 4-9 ABY shift from Rebellion to established galactic power that has been very little developed.

Anyway, we're finally back into the story, which now underplays the revelation that Alex goes home to the governor's mansion anyway. There's also a sidebar writeup of Garos IV, which features the fact that for the past century, Garos was consumed by civil war between its natives and colonists from another inhabited planet within its system, Sundari (population of Garos IV: 20 million Garosians, 4 million Sundars -- in total, the entire planet has the population of Australia, which is not even in the top fifty most populous countries on this planet, having only one-third of a percent of Earth's population). The civil war was stopped by the Empire, which crushed it by executing all the troublemakers on both sides. I really hope that their slogan was "THE VIOLENCE WILL CONTINUE UNTIL THE VIOLENCE STOPS." Anyway, the Empire has mostly left the planet alone since then, but recently there's been an uptick in activity at the hibridium mines south of the capital, with the Empire obviously interested in the valuable cloaking ore.

Alex has a nice, domestic breakfast with Tork at which he mentions the impending arrival of Judicator and his old friend Captain Brandei, everyone's favorite minor TTT supporting character. Bantam-era EU loved to play with TTT, fanfic even moreso I'm sure, but Newcomb's tie-in is pretty classy, subtle but neat and expanding on a supporting character to tie the universe together rather than dragging major characters into everything. Tork wants Alex to help him host the reception that night. We then get a capsule on Tork Winger. Winger is apparently older than he looks, joining the Old Republic's army fifty years ago (coincidentally, this is exactly the year of the Stark Hyperspace War). He did five years and returned to Garos, which is actually his homeworld, where he became an accomplished diplomat and aide to the planetary leader by the time he was thirty, and was the leading mediator in the civil war. He thought he was close to peace when the Empire stepped in and ended the war; he didn't like their methods but was so grateful for the result that he went along. As the most respected man on the planet, the Emperor chose him to be the planet's Imperial governor, which tainted him for many Garosians who resented the Empire's heavy-handed intervention. But he's an honorable man who means well; Alex just can't convince him that the Empire isn't the solution to Garos's problems. Interestingly, it's mentioned that the anti-Imperial underground is formed of the most conservative elements from both sides of the civil war; the Empire has, in its own way, unified the factions on Garos after all.

This is followed by a scene in class at the University of Garos, where Alex muses on the galactic situation, and how she could be at Raithal but isn't. There are rumors that the New Republic is driving on Coruscant, and has nearly half the galaxy. I have to think that Jason and Dan dropped the ball a little in placing Garos way out in the Mid Rim, as the statements that Garos "wasn't that far off the beaten track" and a "mere four days from Coruscant" are clearly meant to imply that Garos is in the Core neighborhood, not way out next to Mandalore and already largely cut off from the Empire (and in Zsinj's area of influence) at the time. Anyway, we get a mention of the fact that her adoptive mother died last year, leading to an increase in diplomatic hostess duties, and mention of a couple fellow students. She heads off to meet with her rebel cell in tunnels under the city. The two main rebel leaders we're introduced to are Dr. Carl Barzon and Magir Paca. Both get writeups: Paca is a sort of parallel Alex, a family friend and protege of Tork's who was one of the original leaders of the Garosian underground (COSGU, the Committee of Seven for Garosian Unification, which makes it sound like the original underground was tightly tied into the whole civil war situation). For ten years he used his position in the Imperial administration to undermine it, until he was found out. A fifteen-year-old Alex Winger, slicing the Imperial system, accidentally found the file the Imperials were building on him and warned him, allowing him to disappear underground, where he became the main rebel leader. Barzon is a scientist and professor at the university who has spent a quarter-century researching hibridium and its cloaking properties, the rare ore being only found in one area of Garos. He's actually a Sundar who attended the university as a graduate student and stayed around to research and teach, and got involved with the underground. Anyway, at the meeting, Barzon mentions that the Empire has confiscated his research, and he's worried they'll weaponize it. Alex mentions Judicator's arrival, an insists on helping with the mission the next morning to free a rebel with the unfortunate name of Scat, captured in last night's fiasco. They also want to hit the convoy traveling from the mine to the spaceport, the spaceport being too secure to attack, to prevent the transfer of hibridium to Judicator and offworld to the Empire.

That afternoon, she takes off into the mountains south of town and sets up for the ambush of the hibridium convoy. The rebels blow up the skiffs, and she personally snipes a pair of scout troopers, before they melt away. On her way out, though, she gets tackled by Lej Carner, one of the students introduced earlier, an arrogant, idle son of the major general commanding the mining operation. He acts like a sneering villain, having followed her from school with a creepy crush and now excited to hold a real rebel at gunpoint. Another rebel walks up and shoots him, though, because he's not exactly a pro here and he didn't quite think this whole "stumbling into an underground ambush and then trying to capture one of them" thing through. Alex watches the classmate she didn't like but had cultivated as an information source die out in the woods with the sort of casualness you only find in pulp fiction where characters dying every other page is just assumed to be part of the background noise of genre adventures, and heads back home at 1310 because screw school, apparently.

The story actually skips over the party, moving to its end and just recounting the fact that Alex spent a lot of time with Captain Brandei, hoping to get some information out of him. She did learn that Palpatine had claimed to have a vision of Garos's importance to the war effort and left instructions having to do with it, which is both a nice dark detail, and a setup for Alex to muse about her interest in the Jedi Knights, who also had visions of the future, and wonder whether her tendency to have dreams that come true has anything to do with the Jedi -- something she's clearly excited by but can't quite bring herself to believe. In the middle of waving goodbye to the departing Imperials, she has another vision -- of herself sitting in the cockpit of an X-wing, something she's always wanted to fly, with the mystery man talking to her. Who could this blue-eyed, sandy-haired, X-wing-associated mystery man envisioned by a Force-sensitive be? Probably Cole Fardreamer.

She goes to bed, and early in the morning, it's time for another rebel mission! She and a couple other dudes sneak through the tunnels into the Imperial base, with a rather poorly-organized plan to free Scat in which Alexandra has involved herself at unnecessary risk because she's a fictional protagonist and no one in the underground leadership will tell this headstrong teenage girl who's an extremely valuable source of information no any time she wants to go off and raid Imperial forces. They basically stumble into a bunch of stormtroopers moving Scat around, but hey, it works out because the three rebels manage to stun them all anyway, and the guys in the room nearby who hear all the blasterfire. Rather than, you know, killing these people who've just seen a rebel who looks suspiciously like the governor's daughter (there's a Vilardi picture. She's not wearing a mask, because she's stupid and arrogant). They leave, mission accomplished, end of story.

There are two adventure ideas: one for a party involved in the underground who are assigned to place sensors precisely around the Imperial mine, avoiding Imperial patrols, and one in which Paca sends the characters to find New Republic forces in a nearby sector, where the NR is engaged with a Moff. You've got to convince the NR to get involved and help however it can, maybe get some supplies.

Overall, it's a fun, pulpy little story. It doesn't really have a tight, coherent plot, skipping from incident to incident, and god that character writeup is awfully placed, but Newcomb manages to pack a lot into a fairly tight word count. It's packed with all kinds of incident, and foremost it does a great job of setting up a can't-miss premise, rich with all kinds of storytelling opportunities, to which Newcomb can return, introducing a super-pulpy, engaging heroine and her almost superhero-esque scenario. I mean, she's an secret underground freedom fighter, she's the governor's daughter, she wants to find her real father and history, she has the Force, she has visions of a future meeting with Cole Fardreamer, she's a university student, the Empire wants the hibridium mines, her planet's got a whole backstory . . . it's about as nice a job as I've seen of, in one story, creating a whole world ready to unfold for serial storytelling. Newcomb also does a pretty good job of letting the sidebar writeups tell the story, too. Some of it, mostly out of Alex's misplaced bio, shorts the story of revelations that should have occurred, much more punchily, within it, but most of it does a great job of adding depth to the world she's created without slowing down the story itself with reams of exposition and backstory. The sidebar is a real underappreciated asset for the short story writer.

 

The Alex Winger stories showcased what I've always thought was WEG's strongest era setting - not the traditional OT gaming era (circa 2 years ABY), but the early NR days.

 

Now for something completely different: Glah Ubooki's Strange & Wondrous Imports. Not a story, and not an adventure, this is simply an article about stuff gamers might find useful. It introduces the concept of Glah Ubooki's stores. Glah Ubooki was a Bimm who came across a wrecked Imperial research vessel well back during the Galactic Civil War. He got his seven brothers, Bimms being born in near-identical single-sex litters, and they stripped the wreck and sold the rare Imperial technology off to a Rebel for a hefty profit. Glah and his brothers promptly got drunk and decided that since this had worked out so well, they'd use the profits to buy a ship and go around looking for more wrecks to scavenge. This actually worked out, due to the nature of the war in that sector, where both sides were undermanned and it was relatively easy to access wreckage or infiltrate facilities. They stole goods and sold them to the other side, or occasionally back to the original owner. To avoid the heat, they all dressed identically and claimed to be Glah Ubooki when making sales.

This became such a hilarious in-joke to them that, even after Endor when the salvage business died down and they went into rarities and exotic goods, they set up a shop on Bimmisaari as one person. This store did so well that the other brothers split off (at this point there are now somehow eighteen brothers, don't ask me how) and set up their own shops across the galaxy -- still dressing identically and calling themselves Glah Ubooki. Yet, as a surrealist twist on the whole thing, they all insist they're the only Glah Ubooki, and there are no other Glah Ubooki stores anywhere else. But if you've been in another store, they'll totally pretend to recognize you, while also insisting that the other store doesn't exist.

Apparently, Bimm humor is . . . weird.

Having introduced the concept of this weird little shop of curiosities for gamers to use, the article now settles down to describe three new items that can be bought at Glah Ubooki's. The Jubba bird is from Dagobah, and naturally uses the Force to project a calming sensation through its song. So you can buy a bird that soothes people, and also is fairly intelligent so if you treat it well it can find people and point out untrustworthy people and that kind of pet stuff. So, you know, if you really, really wanted to have to maintain a pet so that you could make people marginally less likely to attack you, there you go. There is also the Imperial Neural Interface Device, a scavenged Imperial technology designed to let people fly spaceships with their brains. Just plug yourself into the ship. As the blurb points out, this is overwhelmingly difficult because the technology hasn't really perfected getting people's brains to process the data, but the goal was faster reaction times. So if you want +2D to your rolls at the cost of constant perception checks and having to rest every fourth turn, boy, has Glah Ubooki got the tech for you. Finally, there is the Jodakan Needler Crab, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It's a crab that shoots darts. It shoots darts of paralyzing poison out of little tubes so that it can eat the seagulls trying to eat it, but an owner can push on its air sacs to get it to fire involuntarily. So if you want to feed, care for, and somehow carry around a crab, you can have the edge of firing off a paralyzing dart. Once every four hours. If the crab doesn't see something flying and shoot its dart at it itself first.

Look, I like you, AJs, but this article just seems kind of useless. Yet this isn't written by one of the amateurs -- this comes from Shane Hensley, a professional freelance gaming writer who's written for TSR and WEG, and actually wrote a novel for WEG's Shatterzone setting. Oh well. They can't all be hits. Next we'll be moving on to our second adventure, The Quality of Mercy.