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The 448-page Star Wars Edge of the Empire Core Rulebook is a roleplaying experience set in those thousands of places across the galaxy where morality is gray and nothing is certain. It contains everything that players and GMs need to conduct their adventures as smugglers in the Outer Rim, to collect bounties on the scum in the shadows of Coruscant, or to establish new colonies beneath the Empires notice.
Introduction
Star Wars! An entire universe of adventure, wonder, lore, history, mystery, blasters, cool starships and force-wielding masters all evoked from those two simple words. Whether you engage in Star Wars via the toys and memorabilia, miniatures games such as ShatterPoint, Legion, X-Wing and Armada, reading, video games, TV shows, or enjoy the universe via the medium that started it all, the movies, just about everyone will have, at some point, wondered what it would be like to be a character in Star Wars. Well, look no further than Star Wars Edge of the Empire.
First released in 2012 by Fantasy Flight Games, this marked the start of many sourcebooks, reference books, specialisation decks and supplements to immerse yourself as much or as little as you want. Now reprinted by Asmodee Edge Studio, a dedicated roleplaying game studio, players can access this gem of a game as large and involved as your gaming group wants it to be. From a single book and a set of the Edge of the Empire dice, it is possible to have an almost endless number of unique experiences and stories, develop your character, and build memorable relationships in your very own part of the galaxy far, far away.
The Build-Up
Before you roll your eyes and skip to another game, passing this game off as a Dungeons and Dragons clone, know what this entire game system (called Genesys) uses mechanics that encourage a collaborative storytelling experience, allowing everyone to help shape the ways actions are carried out.
While the Games Master will help to control the narrative and help provide structure to a story, help with rule smithing and describe the characters the players interact with, players are encouraged to help fill in the story by describing locations, environment and atmosphere and come up with solutions to any problems that fit in Star Wars. In a fascinating twist, this takes some of the burden off of the Games Master, reducing the amount of 'prep' work needed before a gaming session. As long as the Games Master has a view of the overall arc, if players want to take an unexpected way to get there, embrace it and adapt slightly. This is a collective storytelling experience, so focusing on characters you want to be present at some point in the story or specific scenes, let them occur wherever the players find themselves. This game encourages all participants to avoid applying the traditional Games Master role from other systems, where one person plans a gaming session to meticulous levels of detail, leaving the players as essentially passengers on a theme park ride who experience some events but have no real control of their destiny or direction of the story.
The Rulebook
This product is a solid 448 page hardback book covering everything you need to create your characters, equip them and have your first scripted adventure. The text is often broken up with beautiful artwork. Rules contain plenty of examples to help with understanding.
The book is laid out logically to reduce having to go from one end of the book to the other to resolve a rules query.
A solid third of the book is devoted to information about factions, planets and systems, law and society, and a scripted adventure to help new Game Masters.
Destiny Pool
The destiny pool is a mechanic that allows players and Games Master to influence the story, for better or worse. At the start of each session, everyone carries out a destiny roll by rolling the special 'Force' dice. The results will provide light and dark side points. These can be used at any point in the session by flipping the point (players use the light side, and the Games Master spends the dark side) to the alternate side, which can help or hinder the story. This provides everyone with the ability to influence the story, sometimes helping at a critical time or adding a wrinkle to be overcome.
Character Development
The game system provides stats and information for a variety of races to get you started. In the book, each race is well described with information and guides to build the core stats, build your starting skills, and select a career and specialisations to create everything from a highly specialised character in one trait to more general 'jack-of-all' characters.
Progression comes in the form of gaining experience, typically at the end of each session. The cost of improving existing stats or skills requires a bit of maths but scales well. Learning new skills or careers (yes you can have multiple career paths) will refer you to a wealth of progress trees present in the book. If you have enough experience to learn something, do it without waiting to 'level up'.
The Dice!
Unique dice in Star Wars Edge of the Empire are used in all rolls and are done out in the open for all to see. The greatness of this system is you don't need to roll above some number that the Games Master may or may not disclose to succeed. Once all the dice are rolled, everyone can see how well you did.
To build your dice pool, start by adding dice based on your natural ability, expertise, and incidental benefits. Then, finish off the pool by determining the difficulty of the roll with the Games Master, also adding in any hindrances. Dice rolls and difficulty are not tied to numeric values and are not black and white; pass/fail. Instead, you count up all of your successes, failures, triumphs, despairs, advantages, and disadvantages. This allows for fascinating results where you may succeed in your result, but have some disadvantages applied to the action. Maybe you succeeded in opening the locked door, but with two disadvantages you tripped an alarm, and it's only a matter of time before someone comes to investigate. Or maybe you fail the check but have an advantage. Perhaps you failed to hit a stormtrooper with your blaster shot, but you've hit a pipe behind him, and now the room is filling with some grey gas that will obscure everyone's vision for the rest of the combat.
Triumphs and despairs call for a truly epic moment, fitting right into the Star Wars universe, and that we've all seen from the movies. Think an 'advantage plus' and allow players and the Games Master to really get creative and provide 'that moment' that will be remembered fondly when recalling the adventure later on.
Equipment And Stats
The equipment for Star Wars Edge of the Empire Core Rulebook is often as memorable as the characters themselves. From the clothing and armour to the weapons to health restoration or scanning equipment, it all has a place. Plus, the chances are good they are covered in the core rulebook, at least enough to cover anything other than hardcore requests. The more impacting equipment is, the more rare (and often expensive) it will be. The stats can cover anything from boosts to your dice pools to providing additional skills that can trigger at certain points or even change the state of the environment.
Equipment can affect your encumbrance, so if you come armed like a one-person army, expect penalties to move, act or do just about anything.
Modifying your equipment is also covered to make it truly yours and provide benefits that won't exist anywhere else.
Lightsabers are, of course, represented, but depending on the time period you are playing in, these items should be scarce and, for the untrained, can be devastating to the wielder if you have a bad dice roll. Their rarity also provides massive opportunities to build stories, encounters and even complete character arcs around obtaining, hiding or dealing with one.
Overall, the system provides a level of detail that your party can dip into as much or as little as they want. If a party member knows the difference between an E-11 or an A280 blaster, they'll appreciate the detail in this book.
Ships, Space Travel And Combat
As is consistent with this book, a wealth of detail and pages are devoted to describing how everything works in this system (scale, distance, etc.). This includes details about a huge number of ships themselves. This includes the weaponry used by ships as well. Proton torpedoes anyone?
Ship combat rules are quite abstract and require a bit more descriptive, tracking and mental agility and are often considered the weakest part of this rulebook. While it improves greatly in the other core rulebooks (see the intro for links), this area is often the area where house rules are used to help smooth the rough edges. For ships of a similar size, the rules as written work, but when the scale differs in the same engagement, such as your Y-wing involved in a battle going on the ground while a star Destroyer is also bearing down on you, it can be more challenging.
Game Setup
Have the rulebook nearby for reference. Have characters create or bring their character sheets (having them on regular paper is fine, as is printing out character sheets from the resources online from the game). Have some of the roleplaying dice accessible to all players and some tokens or counters available to track the destiny pool. Ensure spare paper and writing implements are available to make notes or track things as the game progresses.
The Games Master should have some idea of how the story starts. If this is a continuation of a previous session, having a 'previously on…' recap to remind everyone what happened and get everyone back into mindset and mood helps massively. Don't be afraid to signal the start of the session with the classic phrase 'A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away'!
Your First Adventure
The scripted adventure in this book is called 'Trouble Brewing' and provides all of the information and tools for any Games Master to provide one or two game sessions to get the players introduced to the world and the rules and (hopefully) make them eager to play more.
Without spoiling the details of the adventure, it contains sufficient details on locations, general low-level and key characters, different encounter scenarios, ships, and how to proceed to a climatic finale with a satisfying ending, giving the players hope and options on what they may want to do next.
As a Games Master, a key part of this system is to get the players involved in describing the world, the environment, how characters look and what goes on in the world. The more engaged everyone is, the more invested and alive everything will be.
Final Verdict
Star Wars Edge of the Empire Core Rulebook as an entry into the Star Wars roleplaying system makes this an experience unlike any roleplaying game you will have come across.
The rules are flexible enough to allow you to play any character and do literally anything you want, telling your story in the Star Wars Universe, although Edge of the Empire places focus on the darker, more gritty side of the galaxy, where smugglers, bounty hunters, criminals and the morally ambiguous thrive. If you want the focus to be on the Galactic Civil War, then check out Star Wars: Age of Rebellion. Or if you want to play during the Clone Wars, Star Wars: Force and Destiny may be more to your liking. Or when you fall in love with this game, start at the Clone Wars and work through the years.
