Sunday, September 19, 2010

Darths & Droids: RPG satire and movie mashup


It's fair to say the Star Wars saga has inspired entire generations of geeks and gamers.  Of course, after the movie first came out, the main science fiction role-playing game was Traveller, which took its influences from the literary end of the SF spectrum.  I've read about a few obscure games that might have been more directly influenced by the movie, but I didn't know of any at the time. 

About a decade later, the first roleplaying game for that setting came out from West End Games.  After another ten years, Wizards of the Coast took over the Star Wars gaming franchise with its d20 version of the setting (WotC recently lost that license). 

I myself never had a chance to play any games set in the Star Wars universe.  If I ever did, however, I imagine it might be something like the game portrayed in the webcomic Darths & Droids.  This webcomic (from the creator of Irregular Webcomic, another series I highly recommend), uses screen captures from the film to portray the adventures of a sci-fi roleplaying game.  It takes the premise that the players exist in a world where the movies had never been made and imagines how that setting might come about from the interaction of players and game master. 

Darths & Droids was directly inspired by DM of the Rings, another webcomic which (successfully and humorously) uses screen caps from the Lord of the Rings films to protray a cliched group of fantasy roleplaying gamers.   The latter series is complete, having covered all three LotR movies.  The creators of D&D (get it?) plan to go through all six films; they've already covered Episodes I and II, and are well into Episode III.  It's a fun read, and you might see some players you know reflected in the characters in this webcomic.

1 comment:

Jim said...

As much as I liked SW growing up, I just never got into it wargaming wise.