he latest supplement for the Wizards of the Coast version of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game is The Dark Side Sourcebook. It is the villain book for a Star Wars campaign, providing a wealth of background on the Dark Side and a lot of antagonists for a game master to pit against his players' characters.
The book contains a time line of the Dark Side's role in galactic history, eight new prestige classes for Dark Side characters, and Dark Side equipment from weapons to droids to poisons. There are 20 pages devoted to monsters, spirits and mutants created and nurtured by the Dark Side, plus 40 pages (a quarter of the book) of statistics and history for Dark Side non-player characters (NPCs) from Marka Ragnos, the first Sith Lord, to the emperor and Vader, and on to such post-rebellion characters as Mara Jade (eventually Luke's wife) and Kyp Durron.
The two most important parts of the book are the chapters on how to run a Dark Side campaign and the one on all the Dark Side NPCs. There are dozens of Star Wars novels, comic books and games, as well as the films themselves, to provide background material about the Dark Side, and the DSS tries to pull characters and history from most of them. It turns out that the Dark Side has a history 5,000 years old. If players have encountered it nowhere else, the DSS explains why Vader is called a Sith Lord and why it is said in Episode One that there are always two Dark Siders, a master and an apprentice.
A useful encyclopedia of evil
In its chapter on game-mastering a Dark Side campaign, The Dark Side Sourcebook warns that "just as in the Star Wars universe, the Dark Side can be extremely tempting and hard to control; be careful not to overdo it." This is good advice, and pages spent elaborating on it are well written and worth heeding.
There is a tendency among gamers to play their characters as if they were on the Dark Side to begin with. Violence is often the first resort, the bodies and homes of the campaign's "villains" are routinely looted, and politeness and charity are all but unknown. The Star Wars RPG is designed so that these behaviors cost characters experience and power. But Dark Side characters actually get rewarded for being brutal and selfish; using the force for evil gives them more force to wield.
So the DSS is probably best used as a sourcebook for a campaign's antagonists, and as such it is terrific resource. Not only are there all those NPCs to use, but there are lots of templates to allow game masters to create their own Dark Siders, particularly the lower-level ones. Plus, there are plenty of ideas in the NPC histories for quests and scenarios for the players characters. Sith artifacts make wonderful macguffins, the Dark Side spirits and mutants make wonderful obstacles, and both are things that players who mainly know the universe from the films may not be expecting. Using a Dark Side villain means that, at the end of the campaign, there is the thrill for the players of ending an honest-to-goodness evil.
The strangest thing about this book is that it is a very clinical, cut-and-dried look at what is meant to be a terrifying and seductive brand of evil. The Dark Side Sourcebook contains all the facts game masters will need, but they are going to need to bring their own atmosphere to the table.
— Eric
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