In the years since Lucasfilm overhauled Star Wars continuity—reclassifying years of Expanded Universe material as “Legends” before wiping a clean slate of continuity it has developed over the last decade-plus—much of what has been rebuilt has been done so off of the back of re-canonizing elements of that old material. In some ways re-imagined, in others just lifted wholesale, the journey of modern Star Wars is as much about adding new stories as it is weaving the old ones back into them.
There are perhaps two pillars that define the reconstructive effort above all. The story of Star Wars‘ future, as in that in the wake of the events of Return of the Jedi, has somehow inexplicably turned to 1994’s The Courtship of Princess Leia as its guiding light. But the story of Star Wars‘ recent past, the trajectory of the rise of the Imperial machine that has been a richly delved period of exploration in everything from Andor to Bad Batch, from games, comics, and books, to movies like Rogue One and Solo?
That’s been West End Games’ Star Wars RPG.
First published in 1987, Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game spent over a decade filling out the background of the world before and after the original Star Wars trilogy across multiple editions and a plethora of sourcebooks. Without much to go on beyond the material Marvel’s ongoing Star Wars comic series had developed at the time (itself coming to an end the year West End Games’ Star Wars story began), the RPG would become an early groundwork for what would become the beginning of the Star Wars Expanded Universe as we would come to know it in the early 1990s.
From species names to Rebel Alliance command structures, from events that still resonate now like the Ghorman Massacre depicted in Andor, Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game was the right combination of coming along at the perfect time and its creatives being given the exact level of free reign to create a perfect sandbox of Star Wars creation.
And create WEG did, with dozens of intricate sourcebooks that didn’t just cover the broad strokes of what it would mean to have a roleplaying game experience in Star Wars‘ galaxy, but the nittiest, grittiest details, many of which didn’t just go on to shape the Expanded Universe when it began in earnest, but expand even further with the addition of the material created there, delving further and further into Star Wars‘ past with supplements based on the Tales of the Jedi comics, or Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy (itself shaped by the early writings of the RPG, given to Zahn as a guideline).
It wasn’t just raw informational data that WEG’s books provided to shape the EU (and in turn modern continuity), but style and tone. This is most keenly felt in Greg Gorden’s Imperial Sourcebook, which does a deep dive into details about different facets of the Empire’s structure, from intelligence to military, and also explores things like COMPNOR—the Commission for the Preservation of the New Order, essentially the political superstructure of Imperial power—to elucidate the specific fascistic character of the Empire’s oppressive tactics.
But beyond the actual material itself, one major thing that still remains influential in visions of contemporary Star Wars, is how West End Games taught its writers to write Star Wars. West End Games’ Star Wars style guide had a bit of a viral moment a decade ago when it re-emerged on the internet (at places like this very website!), to compare and contrast how its dos and don’t matched up with what was then the nascent status of modern Star Wars in the wake of the reboot of canon and the release of The Force Awakens. But while the gift of hindsight can be enjoyable, WEG’s advise on what made good Star Wars can still be felt throughout the very best of the material that we’re getting today.
The style guide pushed writers to be expansive and additive to Star Wars‘ world, rather than to simply play in what was already in the toybox. Familiar characters were to be few and far between, moral storytelling to be less clear-cut, with villains (new villains!) that had motivation beyond evil for evil’s sake. Again, its approach to stories of the Empire were some of its most fascinating, pushing writers to remember that the Empire was made up of genuinely awful people, but also a galaxy of citizenry who had little choice than to conform to the grip of Empire, and who became its willing tool was different to just a regular person with their own wants and needs.
Star Wars is a broad sandbox, but West End Games pitched an enduring vision of it that strove for maturity and intelligence, that took the base framework and world of the original movies and genuinely pushed them into new and compelling territories in order to give players a rich and thriving universe to play in. There’s an argument to be made, of course, that not all Star Wars should adhere to this tone or particular frame of interest: WEG’s vision of Star Wars leaned more into the military sci-fi of its view of the Imperial/Rebel conflict, and not necessarily too far into Star Wars‘ space fantasy roots, an equally important aspect of the universe.
But it’s remarkable to see how what has become some of the very best of Star Wars in the modern day—across books, television, comics, games, and movies—carry so much of Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game‘s heritage, not just in reference to the worlds, names, places, and events it first explored, but in the tonal vision it had for the galaxy far, far away.
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