Endless Vigil: A Sourcebook for Sentinels (US$30 suggested retail) is one of the latest books in Fantasy Flight Games’ Force & Destiny line. It’s also my prize from the Gamer Nation Con IV auction, and a lovely prize indeed. Like all the career books, it adds three new specs, three species, new Moralities, Motivations, and background ideas. There’s also a new Force power! And that’s on top of the eagerly awaited new Lightsaber Construction rules. Since Lightsaber Construction has been covered so well online, I am focusing on other things in this review, starting with the new specs.
Investigator is, in many ways, a Force-sensitive counterpart to EotE’s Marshall (Far Horizons), focusing on detective work. It might make a possible, albeit relatively expensive, additional spec for a Marshall/Exile to consider. (If I wanted to go this route, I would ask my GM to just let me re-spec from Marshall/Exile to Marshall/Investigator or just Investigator.) It also reminds me of the Jedi Investigator prestige class from the WotC Star Wars line, which was intended for Jedi doing “Get to the bottom of this” assignments like Obi-Wan in Attack of the Clones.
Racer is similar to the Driver and Pilot trees from the EotE and AoR lines, but with less vehicle- or beast-specific talents replaced by talents more suitable for footracers. The new Freerunning and Improved Freerunning talents are situational–but if you ever need to get through difficult/impassible terrain, or somewhere in medium range, ASAP, you’ll be glad of them. Better Luck Next Time–forcing a competitor to have a mishap–sounds pretty good, if your GM is willing to stretch “competitor” to include “opponent” in combat. Then there’s Superhuman Reflexes–turn a Piloting Despair into Successes. Must. Have. Now!…Pretty please? (The writer practices imitating her dog’s Please Feed the Poor Puppy look before going to beg her GM to switch it into Starfighter Ace or Pilot.)
The trio of new specs ends with Sentry, which the writers describe as a lightsaber spec, and yes, it does gain you Lightsaber as a class skill. Sentry includes some familiar ‘saber talents–Reflect, Saber Throw, and their Improved versions–and a number of utility talents, including the Force talents Sleight of Mind and Uncanny Reactions. Among its new talents is the Force talent Fear the Shadows, allowing you to force some non-Nemesis opponents to flee. The bad news is that Fear the Shadows is one of the talents that nets you an auto-Conflict every session. (If you don’t want to deal with that, you can do an end run around it easily.)
The three species are solid. One is the Gand, from Edge of the Empire Core. The others are Pantoran and Muun. The new species look pretty balanced. Unlike some of the sourcebooks these 3 don’t seem too closely tied to any of the new specs, which is good. I find that over-connection makes it difficult to see using the species with other concepts and thus makes players less willing to try out a species. Nor are the species locked to how they are portrayed in canon. Muun, for example, don’t seem like just Greedy Bankers–especially combined with the exciting short story introduction. All fluff sections are quite detailed, and Gand makes a few changes to account for the canon changes since EotE was published, such as the society not being a monarchy and why outsiders may have thought it was.
The low point in the book for me was the Manipulation Force power. Don’t get me wrong, it is a good power. It hearkens back to the Anakin Solo of Legends, with his knack for using the Force on machines. I liked most of the upgrades, many of which are analogous to older powers’ bases and upgrades. The base power is similar to the base Heal aspect of Heal/Harm applied to system strain. There are other upgrades allowing the wielder to heal droid wounds, increase system strain/wounds healed, or deal system strain. So what’s my issue? The accompanying text was so messed up, with upgrades that aren’t on the tree. (It was confirmed on Order 66 that you should just stick with the tree.) It wouldn’t bother me so much, except that there seemed to be a lot more typos and other errors, especially in the first half of the book, than in previous books in the 3 SW lines.*
Okay, all the Force fangirls and -boys know what’s in Endless Vigil for them. But everyone else is clamoring, “What’s in it for me?” Actually, quite a lot besides species suitable for any of the lines and most any career. First, arguably one of the few cool (only cool?) things in The Phantom Menace was Podracing, and Endless Vigil has lots of it. (Now we know why there’s a Racer spec.) About eight pages to be exact–a veritable Watto’s Shop worth of podracers, mods, and parts. Yes, there are a few other ships, but most vehicles are podracers. Just right for an Edge game. Other goods ideal for Edge, or even AoR, are some new illicit drugs–bad news for any PC, regardless of Force-sensitivity. Worse news: some Inquisitors and other Imperials use these drugs during interrogations.
Chapter III, “Strike from the Shadows,” covers Sentinels operating in Urban areas, but much is applicable to any of the lines. Among other things, the very detailed section on Urban settings is useful for GMing any campaign or arc that is city-based. There are several tables on spending narrative dice results in cities. Some of them, such as Confined Spaces and Vertical Spaces, would work for other settings–cave systems, the bowels of ships. GM tips on handling investigations work no matter the the careers of the investigators.
Finally, there are the Contact Networks, a way of crowdsourcing your info gathering. Each Contact Network is connected to a relevant Knowledge skill and since it is made up of multiple beings and may span more than one locale, it can obtain more and possibly better information than one or two informants. Mostly these are gained through the story, although there is an option for buying/expanding a Contact Network with XP, subject, of course, to GM buy-in. I can see Contact Networks becoming popular with all types of AoR and EotE characters who need answers to the questions they, their superiors, or those they’re Obligated to are asking.
Endless Vigil ends with sections on Sentinel Adventures, Campaigns, and Encounters including both seeds and a brief outline of an entire Sentinel campaign. There’s also a few tips on integrating Sentinels into more general campaigns and AoR and/or EotE. Overall, this is a very good addition to Force & Destiny, indeed the entire Star Wars RPG line. Now that I’ve read it, I am just as happy as I was when I made the winning bid at GNC–which means I am a pretty happy gamer-gal.
*Contrary to popular belief, I actually obsess less about this than many gaming-forum users, because I know how hard it is to proofread.
Linda Whitson
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