That doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of scope for grand adventure in weird and wonderful locations, however. This includes a section setting out guidelines for creating antagonists that can act as a foil for the party without necessarily being outright evil, and for running a campaign with the party battling oppression as a cell of rebels. Indeed, the tone of the book is a little closer to the more realistic and morally grey galaxy presented in Rogue One than that starkly black and white one of the original trilogy. It’s probably safe to assume that anyone who’s playing an RPG set in the universe is already pretty invested in the franchise, of course, but this is a book that will reward GMs and players who want to dig deep into the lore and are looking for something a little more rooted in the galaxy than the usual lightsaber and blaster-fuelled heroics. If the deuterium-dense array of assumed knowledge in that sentence didn’t make it quite clear enough, Dawn of Rebellion is definitely a book that will appeal to the more hardcore end of the Star Wars fan spectrum. For example, the very first player specialisation in the book is the kind-of-a-Jedi-but-not-really ‘Force Adherent’, based on Rogue One’s blind, stick-wielding monk Chirrut Îmwe, while Darth Maul (the top half of him, anyway) is given stats for use as a villain. In many ways you can think of it as an accompaniment to Rogue One and the Star Wars Rebels series, with many of the new character options and enemies clearly inspired or even directly pulled from them.

It’s a time of stealth missions and sabotage rather than pitched battles, where the heroes are likely to be desperate renegades rather than superpowered warriors. It paints a picture of a time when the Galactic Empire was riding high, unrest was spreading across the stars and Luke Skywalker was still drinking blue milk on an isolated farmstead. Dawn of Rebellion bills itself as the first ‘era’ sourcebook for Fantasy Flight’s range of Star Wars RPGs, and few things demonstrate how closely it’s tied to a specific time frame than its sections for adventuring on Alderaan and the Death Star, neither of which are particularly viable options by the time the credits roll on A New Hope.ĭesigned to work with all three of the subtly different rulesets released by the studio, the book aims to set up adventures in the early days of the Rebellion.

Star wars dawn of rebellion