Im kinda sad they didn't change it. But, I don't have the nostalgia for weg Star Wars, and think it should disappear along with the d20 version, erased from the collective consciousness.

Interesting! Considering WEG barely sketched the species, what would be gained by renaming them a 'Glaxnorz', or something? On that note, would you prefer that Greedo was actually a 'Shmerkalerk'?

That sounds snide, but I don't mean it that way. I'm honestly curious!

Actually, as I stated, I don't have any nostalgia for the WEG Star Wars RPG - never got to play it, I am just a little sick of seeing, all the "well, WEG did it this way.." posts, both here and on the d20 boards.

If changing the common things works better for this game, I'm all for it. I don't think we should be so beholden to the past. I would honestly like to see some NEW star wars content, rather than redoing the same stuff again and again.

I just don't give a zarking fardwark about WEG or WotC's Star Wars at this point. They are dead to me.

Im kinda sad they didn't change it. But, I don't have the nostalgia for weg Star Wars, and think it should disappear along with the d20 version, erased from the collective consciousness.

Interesting! Considering WEG barely sketched the species, what would be gained by renaming them a 'Glaxnorz', or something? On that note, would you prefer that Greedo was actually a 'Shmerkalerk'?

That sounds snide, but I don't mean it that way. I'm honestly curious!

Actually, as I stated, I don't have any nostalgia for the WEG Star Wars RPG - never got to play it, I am just a little sick of seeing, all the "well, WEG did it this way.." posts, both here and on the d20 boards.

If changing the common things works better for this game, I'm all for it. I don't think we should be so beholden to the past. I would honestly like to see some NEW star wars content, rather than redoing the same stuff again and again.

I just don't give a zarking fardwark about WEG or WotC's Star Wars at this point. They are dead to me.

Wow, I just... wow. I thought I was being nice.

Yes, WEG told us that that guy is a Lasat. But they also told us that Greedo is a Rodian. And that a Medical Frigate is a Nebulon-B. And that the Falcon is a YT-1300.

I'm not saying everyone needs to bow down and worship WEG, but why on earth would you want these names changed, just for the sake of changing them?

If I'm not getting what you're saying, I apologize - but I would need a little more detail.

[edited for clarity]

Never mind...

Im kinda sad they didn't change it. But, I don't have the nostalgia for weg Star Wars, and think it should disappear along with the d20 version, erased from the collective consciousness.

Interesting! Considering WEG barely sketched the species, what would be gained by renaming them a 'Glaxnorz', or something? On that note, would you prefer that Greedo was actually a 'Shmerkalerk'?

That sounds snide, but I don't mean it that way. I'm honestly curious!

Actually, as I stated, I don't have any nostalgia for the WEG Star Wars RPG - never got to play it, I am just a little sick of seeing, all the "well, WEG did it this way.." posts, both here and on the d20 boards.

If changing the common things works better for this game, I'm all for it. I don't think we should be so beholden to the past. I would honestly like to see some NEW star wars content, rather than redoing the same stuff again and again.

I just don't give a zarking fardwark about WEG or WotC's Star Wars at this point. They are dead to me.

Wow, I just... wow. I thought I was being nice.

Yes, WEG told us that that guy is a Lasat. But they also told us that Greedo is a Rodian. And that a Medical Frigate is a Nebulon-B. And that the Falcon is a YT-1300.

I'm not saying everyone needs to bow down and worship WEG, but why on earth would you want these names changed, just for the sake of changing them?

If I'm not getting what you're saying, I apologize - but I would need a little more detail.

[edited for clarity]

I never said I WANTED the names changed. All I am trying to say is that, I personally, am tired of seeing people compare everything to the WEG's RPG. I'm sorry if you think anything I said was rude, as that was not my intent.

While I acknowledge that WEG did a lot for the current EU and star wars lore, I don't think it should be necessarily held as gospel. If WEG still had the license, sure, but they don't. If Disney/Lucasfilm (or Fantasy Flight) want to change the name of something, or say that a YZ-775 has no room for passengers, then they should be allowed and not feel beholden to something like a defunct RPG, because some people hold it as gospel.

Just because something was done a particular way (or had stats written) doesn't mean that it has to be that way. Fantasy Flight is crafting a very good RPG currently. If they have a vision of how things should be, I say let them do it. Change is not necessarily bad. We may get something even better, but you may have to take off the rose coloured glasses to see that.

I write this from the standpoint that WEG's rpg legacy means bupkiss to me. Zeb's species could have been called anything. They kept Lasat because of an RPG book from the 80's that a minority of star wars fans will know of. In a time where much of the EU is in danger of being purged, keeping little things like this is insignificant. So, while the name of the species doesn't matter, and won't affect my enjoyment of the show - If a greater story can be accomplished by altering a detail from old sources, I think the powers that be should be willing to do that - especially if the detail is so very obscure like the name of Zeb's species which appeared in an RPG book from 1988.

I hope I cleared things up, but to sum up. I've written far more about my original comment than I figured I would. It was a flippant remark about not having any nostalgia towards WEG's product. Whether Zeb's species is lasat or glaxnorz doesn't matter in terms of the show - the name was left to cater to a small group of people who have Nostalgia towards the RPG. If they changed the name, most of the people who watch the show wouldn't have known what it was originally called.

Also, another fact, if Episode VII nullifies the existence of Thrawn, I personally don't care. I enjoyed those books, but if the new movies are good, I would gladly take the loss - but, I know people will scream murder over it. A certain writer is rumoured to have gotten death threats for killing Chewbacca..

I'm with Samophlange, in that while the old WEG Star Wars stuff was good, it shouldn't necessarily be held as inviolate simply out of sheer nostalgia.

As much as I enjoy Zahn's work in the post-RotJ era, I'm willing to accept that the new movies may very well invalidate some, if not all of what he's written in regards to that era. He'd already had some of the stuff in Thrawn Trilogy invalidated by the prequels, as have other authors; most folks figured it'd been more than 20 years between when the Clone Wars ended and the Original Trilogy began, or that Luke & Leia's mother had survived for at least a little while after the twins were born.

As was noted in a similar thread over in the AoR section, The Force Unleashed (aka the last big multi-media event that Lucasfilm tried to organize) has, per Pablo Hidalgo, already been moved to a non-canon status in regards to how the Rebel Alliance came to be.

There's also the simple matter that what WEG created is, in RPG terms, ancient history. It'd really cut down on the creativity of new material like Star Wars: Rebels if they had to remain slavishly devoted to huge swaths of stuff that a bunch of third-party writers created well over a decade ago.

Yeah, Zeb's been tagged as a Lasat, which was a label that WEG applied to an old concept drawing, something they did a lot of during their ownership of the license since it was probably cheaper just to slap a made-up name onto an early concept drawing (Z-95 Headhunters came about by way of early X-Wing concept drawings as another instance). But that doesn't mean the Lasat species in SW: Rebels has to follow the same template that WEG laid out. I glanced at the Wookieepedia article, and the Lasat as described there were indicated to prize cunning and sneakiness, where Zeb seems to be of a warrior-race type of background that's very direct in dealing with an enemy (he's pretty much a Hired Gun/Marauder in my eyes).

I'm not necessarily in disagreement with either of you; I was essentially replying to this, which struck me as odd:

Im kinda sad they didn't change it.

Why would anyone be kinda sad that they didn't arbitrarily rename an alien that was barely sketched out in the first place?

Anyway, as far as the novels and stuff go, they can toss all that and I wouldn't care - most of the ones I read were pretty bad, anyway. But to rename, say, a CR-90 corvette to a DL-81 or something just seems needlessly destructive to me.

Anyway, as far as the novels and stuff go, they can toss all that and I wouldn't care - most of the ones I read were pretty bad, anyway. But to rename, say, a CR-90 corvette to a DL-81 or something just seems needlessly destructive to me.

I'm in agreement here. Changing events or rewriting canon to make things more consistent makes sense to me and is usually easy enough to follow. Changing names of stuff would just be incredibly confusing (moreso than changing other stuff anyway) to me.

In the case of the Zeb and the Lasat, I don't really have an opinion either way. He's a "new" alien species so it works any way they want to do it. Making up a new one with a new name, or using the Lasat, which is based on the same concept art and has pretty sparse info so they can make up what they want.

I know this thread is about Rebels, but I am coming in to hijack it for a moment. No one shall dare speak ill of WEG !

No, that's not it...

I don't know how many watched the Clone Wars Lost Missions trailer, but according to dialog in there, they have changed the name of the Sith home world to "Moriband".

I have to admit, that I am not happy about. If they want to change it, fine, but then change it to something way different...

Korriban is now Moriband?? Not liking it.

Now back to Star Wars Rebels.

I'm not necessarily in disagreement with either of you; I was essentially replying to this, which struck me as odd:

Im kinda sad they didn't change it.

Why would anyone be kinda sad that they didn't arbitrarily rename an alien that was barely sketched out in the first place?

Anyway, as far as the novels and stuff go, they can toss all that and I wouldn't care - most of the ones I read were pretty bad, anyway. But to rename, say, a CR-90 corvette to a DL-81 or something just seems needlessly destructive to me.

Because I posted that in a very flippant mood. I will try again to spell this out. I don't have any desire to hold onto the "glory" days of WEG. I never played the game, and anything they have named that has become more common knowledge, such as rodians or yt-1300's or whatever, should keep the most well known name, but if some obscure elements such as the lasat name come to forefront of the fanbase, disney/ lucasfilm shouldn't necessarily be beholden to what was written as canon. That is all I'm trying to say...

If Zeb's species was called a Sunarg because the writers didn't know about the lasat thing, or didnt like how it sounded I would be fine if they changed it. Glad, even, that they aren't trying to shoehorn every piddly little detail from an obscure, outdated - obsolete even - source, because somebody wrote a five letter word as a name.

Disney/Lucasfilm and Fantasy Flight have the rights now, not WEG. They can change whatever they want. Yes I know, disney has a team of canoneers saying what is and what isn't canon and I hope they are as willing to dismiss the good (if it doesn't jive with the new movies), the bad (darksaber perhaps) and the indifferent (lasat species name) if it is better served changing it rather than keep it.

Jerrypocaslypse, you summed it up pretty well. The actual name doesn't matter. Most of the people who will watch probably don't even know about the current rpg, let alone the old outdated and as far as I'm personally concerned, should be recycled, old rpg. Unless you can sell them at an exorbitant price to some weg fanboy, so you can buy Fantasy Flights good RPG. (This is a joke troll comment by the way - you want to use WEG stuff in your game, awesome. To me though, it means two things: Jack and what's in my sons diaper... and Jack left town)

I agree that they shouldn't feel beholden to adhear to anything. With the way that Disney is analyzing the canon, I don't think they feel that they are either. I wouldn't be surprised if they wanted to use the concept art, found out it had been used in the past, liked the name, and just decided to go with it. They might have even had other names in mind but in the end went with lasat. I didn't know about them before the Zeb stuff either (I also never played the WEG game). I kind of like the name so I'm okay with it.

In the end, I think FFG and Disney will take what they like and change stuff that they don't. FFG has already shown that they are willing to alter some details to make the game fit their vision better and I am more than on board with this. I think they are walking a nice middleground: not changing things all willy nilly, but also not keeping things just for the sake of keeping them because they were in some other source of canon.

I don't really want the old Star Wars Universe to be basically discarded, especially since I kind of actually like parts of the EU much more than of the movies. I mean if they change it too much it's not the Star Wars universe I know and love and I really don't have any reason to care about that.