This past weekend, my wife and I played hooky and headed out to a local gaming store, the Compleat Strategist in King of Prussia, PA. And therein lies a story…

I went to college outside of Philadelphia. My friends were gamers and SF/F nerds and people who I found my tribe with. And one of the places we would go was that very store, where we could get a lot of things you couldn’t get at normal stores, even the comic book stores.

One of those trips, in the ancient years of 1987, brought something I didn’t know about: the original, D6-based, Star Wars Roleplaying Game. 

Wait, Original?

If you’re not familiar with it, the company that created it, West End Games, put out a LOT of supplements for it, and a lot of what they created for the game got used later in the books, to the point that when Timothy Zahn was contracted to write the original Thrawn Trilogy, Lucasfilm sent him pretty much one of everything they put out.  One could even argue that the game showed Lucasfilms there was still interest in the universe, and the wellspring of media for it (including, yes, the prequel and sequel trilogies) wouldn’t exist without the game.

Five years ago, the then-current license holders for the Star Wars RPG, Fantasy Flight Games, released a remake of the original two books, the Star Wars RPG and the Star Wars Sourcebook, as a thirtieth-anniversary edition.

And in that store, where I bought them when I first got them in 1987, there was just one of those thirtieth-anniversary editions. My wife found it and called me over, and showed it to me.

So what did you do?

It was fate. It was destiny. It was there. And I bought it.

What’s it like?

This is a really nice edition.  Under the plastic wrapping,  you first find this wraparound for the slipcase:

Then the slipcase itself looks nice.

The front:

The back:

(love that black on black logo!)

One side of it has the logo, and the other has the opening for the books:

And then we get to the books themselves.  They look and feel just like the originals. They look to be complete reprints of the originals, without any rules updates (there was a second edition, which cleared up some rules).

I’ve wanted them since I first heard of it, and now, I have them.

And if my wife hadn’t seen them I probably would have overlooked it.

I’m very happy right now.