he Star Wars saga lives in lots of media besides the four (and counting) movies. It is most voluminously played out in the many novels that have been published since the first movie was released. One of the best-selling series of these novels is The New Jedi Order, which takes place in the time
after Return of the Jedi, when Han and Leia's children grow to be Jedi Knights themselves and must battle a brand-new threat to the galaxy, the fanatic Yuuzhan Vong.
The New Jedi Order Sourcebook for Wizards of the Coast's Star Wars Roleplaying Game gives game masters the information they need to run their players through the events chronicled in the novels Vector Prime, Onslaught, Ruin, Hero's Trial, Jedi Eclipse, Balance Point, Conquest, Rebirth and Star by Star. Each set of books gets its own chapter where the basic plot is laid out, interspersed with rules and statistics for each of the important characters, creatures, machines and places that figure in the books. At the end of each chapter are adventure seeds that describe how the player characters can be inserted beside, at the edges or right at the center of the chapter's events.
The very first chapter of the book contains background and statistics on the Yuuzhan Vong, a race that hates machines and uses bio-engineered creatures in place of technology. Overall, the sourcebook contains new prestige classes for heroes and villains, new feats, new aliens and lots of new spaceships.
A novel approach to gaming
For players and GMs who have not read The New Jedi Order books, this campaign may be a hard sell. One of the first things new players is going to do with the books is flip to page 21 to check the statistics for the Yuuzhan Vong's biotech weapons. On that page they will discover that the aliens' best personal weapon is a genetically modified snake that spits poison 20 meters. These are the warriors that have the Jedi on the run and are conquering all of the New Republic? In the context of the novels, with all the tricks of dialogue, pacing and limited point of view, the Yuuzhan Vong come across as a deadly, fearsome enemy. On the bare page, stripped their enhancing prose, Yuuzhan Vong don't seem nearly dangerous enough.
A similar problem shows up in the chapters that describe the events of the novels. Star Wars is a universe full of melodrama and larger-than-life characters, emotions and events. Dressed up on the movie screen or described in good fiction, the distance of the happenings from anything resembling real life is part of the fun. In simple summation, however, the events of the novels lack most of their emotional punch. It is the difference between reading "Luke saves his child using The Force" and reading a full chapter about how and why and with whom he does it.
Neither of these problems, luckily, will bother anyone who has read and enjoyed the novels. A game master who has read at least one or two of them will be able use the sourcebook to transform the events of those novels to a game. Those game masters will also be able to take their players through the events of the novels they haven't read. They will already have the "soul" of the characters from the books, and the sourcebook contains all the nuts and bolts they need to bring the adventures to life. If the players have read some of the books and come to love the characters in them as well, so much the better.
One thing to be careful of when reading The New Jedi Order Sourcebook is that it gives away everything that happens in the novels. Don't read farther in the Sourcebook than you are in the series, or you will learn every surprise.
— Eric
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