Star Wars RPG Resources: The Essential Atlas

The Star Wars: The Essential Atlas is a book I cannot recommend highly enough, especially if your group is serious about playing in Fantasy Flight's Star Wars RPG universe.

First off, there is a lot of Legacy/Expanded Universe universe content in this book, but you can look at this three ways:

1. The EU is cool and pull from it what you want.
2. We play in a specific EU period.
3. We play in the current Star Wars cannon and timeline and this book lets you identify cannon versus EU lore.

The third one I find interesting, because of the state of Star Wars, there are things in the RPG and also the general community that may have more of a place in EU than the current timeline. This book gives you enough timeline to decide if something fits, and gives it a place in the universe. Me? I am part of the crowd that enjoys some of the EU content, and I will pull from it freely to develop my own timeline for the universe going forward. I would like to start with the movies, but have familiar faces drop by and make the universe my own combination of the best of Star Wars - Legacy and current movie timeline.

Hey, it's the "my universe" (MU), and it's all Star Wars. It's cool.

What I love about this book is the sense of place and time. You get maps of the movies, where people were, how they got there, and a chronological order of what happened. Each movie and the flow of how things happened gives you a broad perspective on how to run the game, especially with planet hopping and action that can take place light years apart. The maps of the movies are perfect 'sample adventure models' for the game, and they provide a model for how your game should flow.

Of course, you get pictures and descriptions of the major planets, and detailed star maps for everything else, so you can use this as a master atlas to run your own campaign, and drop in iconic planets and places as you see fit. The roleplaying books give you a couple planets and a starmap, but this jut goes to town, gives you maps and history, and drills down on specific events and tears them apart in detail.

You could create a campaign that parallels the movies and play in that, like a squadron of X-Wings that is running a diversionary operation for the attack on the first Death Star, or rebels protecting supply lines for the battle of Endor. If you love one-off historical roleplaying adventures, this is a great source book to base your own creations from. Those sorts of 'what if' scenarios can also be inspiring for your own adventures should you stick with the official timeline, have your own battles of Endor, or kick off the threat of a third Death Star upon the galaxy.

It is the "your universe" (YU) after all, so do what you want.

This book is useful for all three game books, no matter if you play Jedi, smugglers, or rebels (or Imperials) - you will find something to pull inspiration from and use. It is also a great player's guide, especially for smugglers plotting routes and avoiding the long arm of the Empire, rebel plotting their next move, or Jedi seeking artifacts from long-lost civilizations. Give this to players and watch them dig in and create their own adventures, it is that cool and inspirational.

So a must-buy for this today, and a highly useful and cool book to flip through when developing your own Star Wars adventures. May the force be with you, and oh yeah, remember to bring a map.