Guides and Encyclopedias (non-RPG)

[Falconer]

Got any guides or anything that you like or reference from the 90s or earlier? I have a few.



What else is there? Blueprints??

[Falconer]

I don’t have this, but it looks like a pleasant coffee table book:

[Starbeard]

I had the second Guide and the Essential Vehicles. My friend had the Essential Characters and Planets, and between us that served as our campaign sourcebook material for Star Wars RPG games. It wasn’t until we were adults that I began collecting old SWRPG sourcebooks, so a lot of the stats I either made up or got off the internet.

[Starbeard]

The Art and Blueprint books are also useful to have from a historical perspective, because they add tidbits about how the designers conceptualized vehicle scale and performance at the time. For example, the rebel blockade runner not being much larger than the Falcon, X-wings, Y-wings and TIE Fighters having the same basic speed, etc.

I enjoy seeing how the ideas mutated here and there in the popular imagination into what we got in the 90s.

[Falconer]

I got this:



…with the idea of using it as a visual reference at the game table (“You run into one of…THESE…things…”), for referencing the movie script, and as an all-around coffee table book. Unfortunately, the binding fell apart almost immediately. I’ll have to look into getting it rebound (maybe just throw a spiral on it).

[Falconer]

This looks beautiful and eminently useful:

[Starbeard]

I've never seen that book before, it looks great.

As an aside, I was always taken aback at how the RotJ speeder bike never seemed to get any technical treatments, either in the WEG books or elsewhere (at least not that I ever saw). Just about every other vehicle got a model number, design background, company history, variations, complete weapon and engine readouts, etc.; but the speeder bike was always just "Speeder Bike."

[Starbeard]

Related but out of this scope, so I posted a new thread: beggarscanyon.proboards.com/thread/47/list-empire-star-wars-sources

I'm hoping we can band together to create some lists, era by era, of published sources for Star Wars that can be used as a guide for world building within specific (real world) periods of Star Wars history (so, before Return of the Jedi came out and changed things, as opposed to 'The Old Republic').