Somewhere in an alternate universe the classic adventures of Rey and Kylo Ren were deemed non-canon after Dreamworks purchased Lucasfilm.

thanks to u/megakyle

In this timeline Oprah became President and the whole World (and it’s Moonbase, Mars and asteroid colonies) were al at Peace.

Also, politicians were not allowed to get funding from lobbyists, you could eat all the ice cream you wanted and not put on weight, and drink all the tequila you wanted and not call ex girlfriends.

I feel like this is all a reference I'm just not getting.

11 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

I feel like this is all a reference I'm just not getting.

The covers are reworked versions of the Timothy Zahn 'Thrawn' trilogy - which is largely considered to be the kick-off point for the Star Wars Extended Universe - the stuff deemed non-canon by Disney after they bought the Star Wars IP.

(and then regularly plundered for ideas and source material, such as Dark Empire, the TIE defender, and Thrawn himself).

In fairness, in this timeline, people are psyched for new films....right up until the second film introduces the Yuuzhan Vong.

1 minute ago, Magnus Grendel said:

The covers are reworked versions of the Timothy Zahn 'Thrawn' trilogy - which is largely considered to be the kick-off point for the Star Wars Extended Universe - the stuff deemed non-canon by Disney after they bought the Star Wars IP.

(and then regularly plundered for ideas and source material, such as Dark Empire, the TIE defender, and Thrawn himself).

💔

To be fair we West End Games folks expanded Star Wars for four years before the release of the Heir to The Empire trilogy. And were walking on Cloud City to see material we created on those story pages.

Fair enough, and apologies.

I did come across Star Warriors as a board game once, but never really read much of the WEG RPG materials; and certainly not enough to know when (respectively) they were published.

38 minutes ago, Magnus Grendel said:

Fair enough, and apologies.

I did come across Star Warriors as a board game once, but never really read much of the WEG RPG materials; and certainly not enough to know when (respectively) they were published.

No apologies needed in the least @Magnus Grendel

If you ever used Z-95 Headhunter, unnamed Firespray, or the Grand Inquisitor’s TIE, if you have ever roleplayed a Twi’lek, Rodian or Bothan, if ever you used the Imperial Security Bureau in the plot background, if ever you took command of a Victory Class , an Interdictor , or a Star Galleon , or if ever wondered who gave Admiral Ackbar, Major General Veers or Major Derljn their backstories, then please know you are honoring West End Games every time you roll your dice.

So cheers to you and all Star Wars fans out there 🥂

57 minutes ago, Magnus Grendel said:

I did come across Star Warriors as a board game once

@Magnus Grendel

I got you covered sir.

7 hours ago, Imperial Advisor Arem Heshvaun said:

Somewhere in an alternate universe the classic adventures of Rey and Kylo Ren were deemed non-canon after Dreamworks purchased Lucasfilm.

thanks to u/megakyle

Honestly it'd be a bigger loss if these were made non canon, entirely because of the daring steps these stories have made by having an almost entirely new cast to focus on.

2 hours ago, KCDodger said:

Honestly it'd be a bigger loss if these were made non canon, entirely because of the daring steps these stories have made by having an almost entirely new cast to focus on.

On my word this is all in good fun and zero malice to any of the movies.

15 hours ago, Imperial Advisor Arem Heshvaun said:

@Magnus Grendel

I got you covered sir.

Thanks!

I did actually have a copy at one point. I knew it must have been pretty old - first 'Star Warriors' was the phrase Marvel used in the more-or-less-contemporary-to-the-original films comic run (with still-in-current-X-wing Zertik Strom, which was one of the first storylines I remember reading as a kid...I don't expect to see the Rabbit's Foot as a rebel ship, though), and if I remember right it referred to Vader's ship as a 'TIE interceptor prototype'. So it must have been after Return of the Jedi but before the TIE/x1 Advanced first got 'officially' named that (wherever and whenever that happened).

It reminded me quite a bit of the Battlestar Galactica dogfighting game, too, which I also liked and think was about contemporary. (Ironically there's a new Battlestar Galactica one contemporary with 2nd edition X-wing , too - I do need to give that one a try at some point, as people have spoken quite highly of it).

I think the latter's approach to big ships (you got two double-sided hex map-sheets, much like Star Warriors , but it had two empty of terrain, one with a battlestar on the back and one with a base star on the back, allowing you to do a dogfight in empty space, an attack on a colonial ship or a cylon ship or a dogfight between two brawling capital ships. The latter was awesome fun even if your ships tended to randomly die in the crossfire at the most inconvenient moments.....) was better than Star Warriors (where a star destroyer only took up about three or four hexes, as I recall, which made them feel weirdly small)

I didn't dislike it, but it did feel more fiddly than it needed to be - detail isn't a bad thing, and don't take that as a criticism - but one thing I will give FFG a lot of credit for is producing a dogfighting game that feels fast . (And, to be fair, also note that they've had twenty years of development in the wargames industry to pluck good ideas from as well as coming up with them themselves)

The main thing that slowed the game down to me (like a lot of games of that era) was detail in damage control.

It wasn't that bad - far worse offenders in this respect was Star Fleet Battles (about ten years earlier) - I have a copy of the 'doomsday' rulebook and have no desire to actually play the game given that you could club seals to death with it - and Babylon 5 wars , which committed the ultimate crime in that it had N th degree detailed damage resolution BUT two equal-sized ships could generally slag one another in a single exchange of fire, rendering all that detail irrelevant since you were dead.

A push for comparative simplicity and elegance in board games is a good thing - since (I've had arguments with 'proper wargaming' grognards about this*) removing unnecessary detail does not reduce the level of strategy possible in a game. One explanation I've heard from someone who writes a lot of RPG stuff is that games with excessive detail, these days, fall over because they're not on a computer - board games have additional tactile and social elements over computer games and they will (I hope!) always survive because of it, but the moment you're spending too long resolving the non-decision-making effects of a single attack, you should probably have been using a spreadsheet or app to manage the number-crunching.

The problem with a lot of games is that once you take the number-crunching detail out, you sometimes realise there's not a lot of game left**....

The damage-card-deck isn't original to FFG - I know, for example, that Dreadfleet used it the year before X-wing came out, and I'm not sure where in the industry it actually originated - but it's a very elegant way of having random damage effects without having to truffle-hunt through tables and a good example of the kind of simplification I mean. The 'movement templates' are a very simple way of unchaining a board game from a hex map, and dials are a neat alternative to bookkeeping in preplanning manoeuvres.

* My usual response is to such individuals is to suggest a game of 'Go' . Which is so ridiculously simple that obviously there can't be much strategy and therefore they'll pick it up very quickly....

** I'll give Star Warriors - in case you think I'm referring to it here - its due that that wasn't the case, since it also had a fair amount of detail in the movement planning, which is decision making time instead of resolve-the-effect time. It did have a simple I-go-you-go activation order but that wasn't as much of a problem as it is in some games because you're locked in to movement choices decided before seeing your opponents; it's a combination of simplistic initiative and decided-on-the-fly movement which lets you suck the decision-making out of the game, as in GW's dogfighting game Aeronautica Imperialis (the first edition of which had some really weird quirks in that you had to commit to - for example - a hard turn - but not which way . Meaning you could on the fly decide to go 180' in the other direction, but not to go from a turn to a slightly more gentle turn), and A Call To Arms , the successor to Babylon 5 Wars - a lesson, sadly, that whoever wrote the rules for FFG's Star Wars: Armada didn't learn.

8 hours ago, Imperial Advisor Arem Heshvaun said:

On my word this is all in good fun and zero malice to any of the movies.

Give us time.

@KCDodger is right that it's good to have a new cast, though. The Zahn trilogy and Dark Empire worked because they were set within - what? Five years or so of the originals. Any new film series after this long has to have new people at its core.

But the EU would have been equally poor if it kept the spotlight only on the original main cast without the spin-off 'main protagonist' threads, like Wedge and the X-wing novel series, or Kyle Katarn and the Jedi Knight series, even if kept using the 'original stars' in background cameos on and off. It's fleshing out the universe that makes it feel 'lived in' and which creates that nostalgic attachment.

One good example, and a thing I've really enjoyed, which belongs up there as an existing set of covers - is the Poe Dameron comics, which are very much the 'new-canon-equivalent' of Rogue Squadron .

They're very much a key part, to me, of fleshing out the 'immediately before episode VII starts' universe feel of 'cold war' and who and what the resistance is, and why they're not the same thing as the republic.

Being told, in this alternate timeline, that they were to be junked in favour of a new series about a fighter squadron would leave me a bit irked, especially if you subsequently told me it was Michael Stackpole writing them, since - as his superb X-wing novels obviously don't exist at this point (as they're the 'new replacement') - I can logically know him from his Battletech novels, which by comparison feel like he'd taken many blows to the head whilst writing them.

17 hours ago, Magnus Grendel said:

The Zahn trilogy and Dark Empire worked because they were set within - what? Five years or so of the originals. Any new film series after this long has to have new people at its core.

Eight years and week to the day of the release of Return of the Jedi for Heir to The Empire . Less than a year later for Dark Empire .

Longer than I though, actually.

On 1/29/2020 at 5:59 AM, Imperial Advisor Arem Heshvaun said:

In this timeline Oprah became President and the whole World (and it’s Moonbase, Mars and asteroid colonies) were al at Peace.

Also, politicians were not allowed to get funding from lobbyists, you could eat all the ice cream you wanted and not put on weight, and drink all the tequila you wanted and not call ex girlfriends.

I **KNEW** I was born in the wrong timeline.

edit: And why can I not give infinite positive reacts?!?!?!?!!?