For fans of the the FFG Star Wars RPG system, the supplement books that have been released have been incredibly well received and add an amazing amount of depth to the game. We got a chance to talk with Keith Ryan Kappel, one of the writers contributing to this content. Keith has written parts for Suns of Fortune, Far Horizons, the Age of Rebellion GM Kit, and Stay On Target. The piece below is an essay written by Keith that reflects on his time spent writing on this book. Tomorrow look for an interview, where we focus on Keith’s background, his journey towards becoming a professional writer, and his work in Suns of Fortune.
From Keith:
So it’s been well over a year since Star Wars: Edge of the Empire: Suns of Fortune was released, and even longer since I contributed my modest portion to the manuscript. Suns was my first professional writing assignment, and I thought it might be fun to explore some of the themes and ideas that went into my work on the book. As many of you know, I am a pretty hardcore Star Wars Legends fan, so a lot of that material inspires and informs my FFG work. What most of us think of as “Star Wars,” tonally is a mash-up of five primary influences: World War II, mythology as understood by Joseph Campbell, Kurosawa films, Flash Gordon serials, and the spaghetti western/wild west. As the EU, Clone Wars, and now Rebels have shown us, these five ingredients can be combined in any number of ways or proportions to make any number of Star Wars stories.
Now most of us think of Corellia as Space Texas, a place where wildly independent folks want to live their unique brand of life without any outside interference. Obviously this is going to take us into wild west territory very naturally, when it comes to what brand of Star Wars a book about Corellian space is going to be like. Of course, I was only dealing with Centerpoint Station, Soronia, Crollia, and some other miscellaneous space stations in the system, as well as two modular encounters, so my opportunities to “cowboy out” were going to be defined by those limitations.
Still, even Centerpoint Station itself was built as a microcosm of the wild west. Hollowtown provides the ranchers, open spaces, and never setting “sun,” mountain ranges, and a mind-bending view. I made sure to mention nerf and nauga as potential ranch animals, so GMs can include actual cowboys, or players can draw upon that as a background for their PC. The Shells and TechSec function as the “town,” where government and professionals work. Null Town is where the criminal element thrives. I really liked the imagery of a street beggar wearing a scrap metal anchor to keep them from floating away.
That is what Star Wars is all about, taking something familiar from a classic setting, like a street beggar, and adding a twist to it that seems unexpected. Even Baron Kaldo, the major crime lord on the station, harkens back to the city slicker/southern gentleman nobility that we’ve seen in countless westerns. But it wouldn’t be a western without some presence of natives. The Selonians, with their more primitive glaives and stoic natures stand in for the Indians here. There is also a modular encounter that includes rescuing a boy lost in the mountains. This felt like an adventure seed that could have been taken from an episode of the Rifleman or some other cowboy serial.
All the while working in this western theme, I wanted to make sure I did justice to the Legends lore that has used Centerpoint Station on several occasions. The Sacorrian Triad had a lot to do with the events that led to the discovery of what the station can actually do in Legends. To make sure Baron Kaldo’s syndicate didn’t bump too harshly against that, I made sure to say that Null Town was also known as Little Socorro, as a nod to the fact that Baron Kaldo might work for the Sacorrian Triad, or be one of their major leaders. I wanted to lay some kind of foundation for their eventual actions in the Corellian Trilogy series of novels. I also wanted to make sure I got all of the little things right. Roger MacBride Allen created his own terminology for what places and things were called on Centerpoint, and I wanted to stay true to that. Instead of a standard turbolift, Centerpoint has a turbovator. We learn about a Shell One, so I created an entire region known as the Shells to pay homage to that.
I also got to reference a bunch of other Legends content with small nods and references. I think the key to a good reference is to use them in such a way that those who aren’t picking up on the reference don’t realize you were making one, and aren’t taken out of the story or writing because you made it. Crollia is now where crodium comes from, which is a reference from a Legacy of the Force novel. Rorax Falken makes an appearance in a journal sidebar; he’s a mad scientist from the DHC Rogue Squadron comics who eventually creates a gravity-based superweapon. Perhaps Centerpoint Station’s glowpoint provided some research that helped him or even inspired his invention. Crollia and Soronia also provide two more traditional wild west story locations, the mines and a remote, desolate place for criminals to hide out.
The other major location I wrote about was Gus Treta, which is infamous in Legends for being the station where Wedge grew up, and his parents were killed. Studying what few images of the station existed, I noticed a similarly to Hoersch-Kessel designed starships, and so I created a backstory that included them as a major part of its manufacture. I also knew I needed a Hutt to lead the station, and used one of the lesser known clans, Vosadii, which had previously been created for Alan Dean Foster’s The Approaching Storm. Gus Treta also has one last major western location, the saloon.
The goal was to include all these western themes in the piece, but make sure I didn’t beat anyone over the head too firmly with them, and make sure they had that distinct Star Wars flavor. The western remained a key thematic element in the Colonist Career book Far Horizons, which I also worked on. There, I got to spend more time focusing on the people that make up the wild west, while Suns of Fortune was more about the places that make the Star Wars setting so strange and new and exciting, while also being so very familiar.
Steve "Jaspor" Orr
