2 minutes ago, Andreievitch said:

This image from Vanity Fair is interesting. It looks like it shows what we knew as a Bothan, but perhaps they will be designated as a new species?

Pablo Hidalgo has already confirmed them to not be Bothans. They look like the Thakwaash, but are probably a new species.

1 hour ago, Andreievitch said:

This image from Vanity Fair is interesting. It looks like it shows what we knew as a Bothan, but perhaps they will be designated as a new species?

I don't see anything in that image that looks like the 1.6 m tall Bothans as presented in FFG's products.

On 7/25/2017 at 12:07 PM, HappyDaze said:

I don't see anything in that image that looks like the 1.6 m tall Bothans as presented in FFG's products.

Well, it may be a lot taller than 1.6m, but no EVERY human is fits into the 1.6m average either.

The faces are very similar, hair not withstanding. But once again, not every human has the same amount of hair.

But thanks for your input

Course if any of us don't like whatever design Disney come up with, we can simply ignore the dammed thing, and carry on with the Bothans we have had presented by FFG so far.

3 hours ago, Ogrebear said:

Course if any of us don't like whatever design Disney come up with, we can simply ignore the dammed thing, and carry on with the Bothans we have had presented by FFG so far.

Unless you're one of those poor German players that only have the German book and are not given that option.

On 25/07/2017 at 1:56 AM, Andreievitch said:

This image from Vanity Fair is interesting. It looks like it shows what we knew as a Bothan, but perhaps they will be designated as a new species?

Is that Lady Gaga standing in front of... (Notices Pablo Hidalgo's reply) whoever that is?!

The one thing that annoy me most of that story is, how Disney deal with there own "promises". It was the same Pablo Hidalgo, who told us in 2014 officially on Star Wars Celebration Anaheim, that only Bioware with the Old Republic and FFG with there product lines is allowed to continue the old Canon under restriction from Lucasfilm. That was in April 2014. The AoR CRB was released in July 2014, three month later. So must have aproved that at this time or before by the story group. And now the Germans are the first, who got stolen that from Disney as they decided to hadle it like "What interests us our chatter from yesterday." even it is not canon but got aproved for printing.

Shame on them!

For those German Fans who want the cut Content (which was not only the Species infromation but also the Information about Bothawui at the "Galaxy" part and the Bothan Spy profile from the adversaries), I translated it from the original english CRB to German and made a short "Age of the Bothans" PDF file out of that. Can be found here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B64IYy1v12BdOXROVHRYVVk0RGM

On 7/12/2017 at 1:51 PM, HappyDaze said:

I have a strange feeling that Disney isn't going to have a Bothan species at all. Instead, they're humans, just like Alderaanians, Corellians, and Chandrillans.

Which, to me, always seemed like the more logical choice. I always did have this odd scratching in the back of my head trying to visualize a couple of bothans entering an Imperial base (notice how the Imperials always seemed to have been very, very humanocentric), and even making it deep into the base where the truly secret stuff was kept hidden (even if the info was planted there for the bothans to find, and it all could have been a great computer hack, but meh, Star Wars, to me, is about the adventure, so they enter the bases physically).

On the other hand, it also made for a stunning visual that I once told my players. I always reminded them about how Mon Mothma seemed to suppress a laugh when she delivered that "Many bothans died..." line. Imagine an Imperial base. Suddenly, the horizon grows dark, and a general alert sounds. While horns blaze, and stormtroopers man the battlements, hundreds, nay, thousands of bothans come running at the base. The first salvos kill the bothans in droves, but they keep coming on and on. Their bodies pile up against the wall, a grim stairway up to the battlements, where the bothans climb and clatter up and over. Overwhelming the defenses, dragging the stormtroopers and army troopers down. A great mass of fur forces its way into the base, all the way into the chambers where the Death Star II plans are hidden (quite accessible, on purpose, of course). The few surviving bothan run out again, while others are still clambering over the walls and crashing into the defenders lime lemmings. That last group of invaders is being slaughtered while the initial wave (with the plans) makes a run for it. Some distance out of the base, one random bothan takes the casette with the plans and the Emperor's schedule book (as they also knew he would be overseeing the final stages of the construction, so they must have had his agenda as well) and they all scatter. Behind them, a bunch of stormtroopers is actively wondering what in the name of the Emperor just happened. All those furry corpses about, up against the walls, on the battlements, on the inner terrain and within the base...

Many bothans died, to bring them that information.

15 hours ago, Xcapobl said:

On the other hand, it also made for a stunning visual that I once told my players. I always reminded them about how Mon Mothma seemed to suppress a laugh when she delivered that "Many bothans died..." line.

....you thought she was about to laugh? Odd. It always came across to me as someone who was upset by the loss of life required to obtain that information. It was a "crack in the armor" kind of moment, which is why she quickly let the other official take over the briefing, so she could regain her composure.

I don't picture it as being Bothans that performed the physical penetration. Instead some disloyal Imperial (later revealed to be a double agent doing Palpatine's bidding) released the plans to the Bothan Spynet. The Bothan Spynet then released the information to the Alliance. The Empire "discovered" the leak of information and traced it to the Bothans. The Empire then conducted atrocities against the Bothans to "punish" them for being the middle men for stolen Imperial secrets. End result: Alliance has the information and many Bothans died to make that happen. No hard to explain "Bothan infiltrations" and it makes Palpatine look even more evil and cunning, so double win.

The number of ways the information could have been obtained is so vast that it's pointless to speculate. And also without knowing what the intentional concept for Bothan might've been, it's equally unclear. They could've been a complete stealth/infiltration/slicing team, and totally bypassed all detection in the facility they infiltrated. Killing/subduing any they encountered, until they could slice the plans they needed.

They might've been able to attack a convoy that was carrying the plans to the production facility or something, and had to fight off several fighters, then board the ship and fight the crew.

They might've been human shaped enough to fit into storm trooper suits and pull a New Hope kind of trick.

There's no real way to know.

Does it matter how though? I mean, we really didn't need Rogue 1 at all. It was a fleshing out of a plot element that didn't really add anything to the narrative of Star Wars. Because I simply do not feel there was a need to "explain" the flaw in the planet sized construction project, that puts real life jobs to shame. Real life jobs that frequently have fatal flaws in their design, that are only learned of when the thing catastrophically fails.

So yeah, "the Bothans got the information" is really all we need. Expanding on it doesn't really serve any narrative purpose in my opinion.

27 minutes ago, KungFuFerret said:

Expanding on it doesn't really serve any narrative purpose in my opinion.

Unless you plan on focusing on it for your game. Much as Rogue One could easily have been the actions of a PC group, so too could the actions of the stealing the plans for the second Death Star or of trying to protect/evacuate Bothans from Imperial counteractions.

As for "not adding to the narrative of Star Wars" I find that these lines that lay along the plot without defining new directions are great ways for players to attach themselves to canon story lines without putting them in the same camera space as the people we see on screen.

1 hour ago, HappyDaze said:

Unless you plan on focusing on it for your game. Much as Rogue One could easily have been the actions of a PC group, so too could the actions of the stealing the plans for the second Death Star or of trying to protect/evacuate Bothans from Imperial counteractions.

But if you are going to make your campaign around it, do you really want it spelled out for you? Wouldn't you rather have it open to your own narrative needs? I mean, Rogue One basically just codified something that didn't really need to be codified, and has now, at least if you follow canon, limited the options for a gaming table trying to tell that story. And it wasn't even a very good story at that.

1 hour ago, HappyDaze said:

As for "not adding to the narrative of Star Wars" I find that these lines that lay along the plot without defining new directions are great ways for players to attach themselves to canon story lines without putting them in the same camera space as the people we see on screen.

Yeah but any table can easily do this without having to have the Disney stamp of "This is what officially happened."
I dunno, I just think it narrows options without really adding much of real worth to the Star Wars universe. Again, if you ignore canon, that's fine, none of it matters anyway.

I wasn't trying to Disney stamp it. I was trying to flesh it out so I could use it in game, and it's an example that I have used for that purpose in the past.

1 hour ago, HappyDaze said:

I wasn't trying to Disney stamp it. I was trying to flesh it out so I could use it in game, and it's an example that I have used for that purpose in the past.

I know, I'm just saying that there isn't any need for it. A GM can easily flesh out the Bothan Incident however they want, and will probably do a better job than what Disney comes up with.

Most of my opinion on this is colored by my complete dislike of Rogue One, and how I felt it to be a completely boring film, that didn't actually do anything constructive for the franchise. And all this talk about the "official" status of the Bothans just has me going "yeah? And? Who cares?' As whatever is published, will probably be underwhelming, compared to the open canvas that every GM has to play with, if it's left unknown.

On 7/9/2017 at 6:05 AM, TheMOELANDER said:

Well, if that means we will get different bothans, than those inane political schemers like Borrsk Fey'lya, who put personal gain above galactic safety...

I am actually game.

I was actually a big fan of the EU Bothans. They were a good example of the downsides to democracy, and of the not-quite-good types that the Alliance sometimes had to work with. And yet, despite the political maneuvering and tribalism that influenced their society so heavily, they produced a large number of war heroes and selfless freedom fighters, including a Rogue Squadron pilot.

The Bothans were pretty cool.

Perhaps that is the plan... Rogue 2: how the bothans stole the ds2 plans!

I sure hope not.

Unless the films are edited, Bothans will still exist.

They may, however, not be the Space Gnus that the EU / Legends / RPGs asserted them to be.

"Bothans" might be a reference to a cultural or organizational or territorial group.

Maybe they will be a terrorist group/revolutionary group

All hints point to the Bothans still being an alien species of some kind. It's just their appearance and culture have to be put through the story group's developmental process, whatever that means.

Considering Pablo Hidalgo's fondness for WEG, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if not much changes. The biggest shift will probably be designing them to look more like they did when WEG first illustrated them, more human in the face than animal.

Hm. I kind of liked the little I've seen of the current iteration of the Bothans. Mind you, that's not much more than the couple of Stackpole novels I read a few years ago (I will never get that time back...ever), but still.

Someone brought up the excellent point that it's sloppy worldbuilding and writing to extrapolate entire species' careers/cultural tendencies from one character in the films, or even lines about those characters, in the Bothans' case. I definitely concur with that. However, I do think it worked out okay in the end for the Hutts, at any rate.

5 hours ago, Blackbird888 said:

Considering Pablo Hidalgo's fondness for WEG, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if not much changes. The biggest shift will probably be designing them to look more like they did when WEG first illustrated them, more human in the face than animal.

If I cared about canon revisions, this is one change I would hope doesn't come to pass. I don't think that Star Wars needs "more human-like" aliens. We already have so many "near-human" aliens and more seem to pop out all the time.

20 hours ago, Blackbird888 said:

All hints point to the Bothans still being an alien species of some kind. It's just their appearance and culture have to be put through the story group's developmental process, whatever that means.

Considering Pablo Hidalgo's fondness for WEG, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if not much changes. The biggest shift will probably be designing them to look more like they did when WEG first illustrated them, more human in the face than animal.

FWIW, it wasn’t the story group the Bothans had to go through; Pablo Hidalgo said they had to be designed by the Art Department before making an appearance.