Core Talk

By Ray and Val Vallese

Coruscant and the Core Worlds is such a comprehensive tour of important Star Wars planets that it took six designers -- Craig Carey, Chris Doyle, Jason Fry, Paul Sudlow, John Terra, and Daniel Wallace -- to write it. We gathered them all for an interview behind the scenes of the latest hardcover accessory for the Star Wars Roleplaying Game.

Jason Fry: We were assigned planets. I didn't do any horse-trading, because I was pretty excited about the mix of worlds I got. There was a strange alien world in the throes of a pretty wrenching cultural change (New Plympto), the least-explored of the Corellian planets (Talus and Tralus, with Centerpoint Station thrown in for good measure), and the chance to create my own planet (Anaxes). Later, I got to do an interesting, out-of-the-way world -- J't'p'tan -- as a web enhancement. [Look for it later this month on this website! - ed.] And to top it off, I got to do the rough draft of the map. That was a thrill, since I've always been a major geek about Star Wars geography.

John Terra: My only real request was that I be given a large chunk of work, and that's exactly what I got, so I was happy. I'm accustomed to doing "anthology" work, where you have anywhere from two to a dozen other people writing stuff for a book. I didn't lobby for any worlds, but I did trade a few of my planets away so I could do Corellia.

Paul Sudlow: That's right -- he traded them to me! Chris Perkins (Star Wars Roleplaying Game design leader) was pretty cool about divvying up the more well-known planets among the designers. I wound up with Corellia, which I traded to John in exchange for Esseles and Corulag. Doing Corellia would have been cool, but I created Esseles many moons ago as the setting for a long-gone Star Wars campaign and wrote it up for the old West End Games Star Wars Adventure Journal, and I was fired up to have another crack at it.

Dan Wallace: Speaking of which -- I'm thrilled to work with such a strong team. In a way, Paul got the whole ball rolling long ago with his article "Into the Core Worlds" from the Star Wars Adventure Journal. I had worked with Craig and Jason before on several Star Wars roleplaying planetary gazetteers, one of which (on Endor and the Moddell Sector) appeared in Star Wars Gamer. And Chris and John are roleplaying veterans who bring diverse writing and gaming experience to the table.

Scene on Fresia

Craig Carey: Also, each of us was assigned one undetermined world that we could completely make from scratch, though we could opt to detail another Core World that wasn't on the assigned list instead. I picked Fresia as my "free" world. The only previous mention of the world was in the original first-edition 1987 rulebook of West End Games' Star Wars game. It had a mock advertisement for Incom, the corporation that produced the X-wing before the Empire came in and took things over. The ad provided contact information for the "INCOM Corp. Customer Service Bureau, NW Coromon Island 102, Fresia LLK231." So I had a world name, an island name, and the company's presence. I gathered what was known about Incom's history and various products from a dozen sources, and ran with it from there. Many of the planets in Coruscant and the Core Worlds were designed with similar tactics: pulling in the most obscure and perhaps forgotten details, and forging it all into one cohesive world entry. Like Dan said, this was a really thorough and inventive team, and they pulled out all the stops.

Chris Doyle: I specifically requested the chance to write up the more obscure planets. I wanted the most creative freedom. By the way, I think having six authors is a huge advantage. You get six different perspectives, which leads to more interesting material.

Jason Fry: I agree with that. You said that six authors were "a lot of cooks," but the Core Worlds is a pretty big kitchen! From looking over the galleys (there's a kitchen pun to be made there, but I'll leave it for one of the other guys), we have different styles and different approaches to creating and fleshing out worlds, which I think makes for an even better book. Even in a region that's somewhat uniform culturally, like the Core Worlds, the differences between individual worlds are a lot bigger than any similarities they might have because they're part of the same region.

Paul Sudlow: If it's a Core World worth visiting, it's in here. The book is dual-use, with sections for both player and GM. That makes it handy, for example, if the GM wants to give a player a quick orientation on his character's homeworld -- a quick look at the suitable entry and suddenly the player's got the inside scoop on some of the interesting places to visit, just like his character would. The GM section, of course, is loaded with plot hooks, NPCs, new critters, and a host of crunchy bits.

Chris Doyle: "Crunchy bits" is right! Coruscant and the Core Worlds has characters, new ships, and equipment, in addition to the planet locations. The editors put a premium on these crunchy bits in an effort to make the book a useful source book, instead of a dry planet guide. You know, planet X is a desert world, planet Y is a water world, etc. GMs and players will crave these crunchy bits, but Star Wars fans will also find them interesting.

Jason Fry: That's right. I think this book will be a lot of fun for plain old Star Wars fans who just love new information about the galaxy and its people, culture, and history. For example, I never played West End Games' RPG, but I eagerly bought all the books just for the wealth of cool info they contained.

Coruscant and the Core Worlds has lots of that in its own right -- it covers 28 worlds, several of them new -- but I hope the book will also serve as a terrific idea generator for GMs. Take six guys in love with Star Wars and let them play in that universe a while, and they'll come up with a lot that GMs can play off in their own campaigns. The same goes for players. There are so many different characters from so many walks of life in the book. I hope it'll encourage players to branch out and try some unique things when they construct their own characters and put them through their paces.

Coruscant

Dan Wallace: Bigger and badder. I received the Coruscant assignment, and when I started work it was only going to be about three times as long as the other planets in the book. It soon became apparent that Coruscant should receive much more attention, and Chris Perkins enlisted me to nearly triple the amount of content we already had. The Coruscant section makes up almost one-fifth of the finished book. I had a bit of an advantage since I'd been planning to include a detailed look at Coruscant in a book for Del Rey called The Essential Guide to Episode I -- which was never published -- and consequently had done a lot of the research already.

I like Coruscant as a setting because you can do anything there, and it's the natural home for characters as diverse as the noble, the soldier, and the scoundrel. I also see a lot of tragedy in Coruscant, as the Republic crumbles and the Jedi Knights are driven away and killed. I snuck a lyrical tribute to the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot somewhere in the Coruscant entry.

Jason Fry: Anyone who knows Star Wars knows that Dan is just an amazing writer, and it's great that he was given a lot of room to work with for Coruscant. There are such a huge number of locations, adventures, and characters. I was pretty awestruck by it. Dan also has a gift for weaving bits of information from 10 billion sources in with his own creations and ideas and making the whole thing fit together beautifully. You read his description of Coruscant and it feels like a real place, like you could go there.

Jason Fry: A chance to play in George Lucas' galaxy? Where do I sign up?

John Terra: I'll second that. Star Wars is something I've always thought was exciting, special and cool, ever since I saw the first movie way back when. To be part of the Star Wars universe, even in this small way, to me is an honor. But I was attracted to the project for other reasons, too, I believe that the planets are a critical part of the story, and to be able to write the descriptions of them, especially important worlds like Alderaan and Corellia, was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. Furthermore, I wrote a lot of stuff for the old Star Wars game by West End Games, so naturally I had to jump at doing something for the new game, you know, to keep continuity going.

Dan Wallace: Well, I'm a longtime, hardcore Star Wars planet geek. I wrote The Essential Guide to Planets and Moons for Del Rey and helped create Lucasfilm's galactic maps, and before that I created an obsessive fan database of every planet in the films and Expanded Universe to date, circa 1995. Keeping me off this project would have been impossible.

Chris Doyle:Star Wars is high-profile writing. Even my family knows the Star Wars legacy, plus I get to be interviewed on a website regarding the book. That doesn't exactly happen for most RPG projects I work on.

Paul Sudlow: We never saw any Core planets in the original, pre-Special Edition trilogy, but many prominent characters -- Leia Organa, Han Solo, and Palpatine, among others -- were products of Core culture, so it's always interested me, the idea of exploring the places they came from. Of course, back when I first got interested in the Core, who knew that Emperor Palpatine could possibly have come from a planet that would elect Jar Jar Binks senator . . . poor guy, no wonder he ditched Naboo.

From an RPG perspective, the Core always struck me as a fascinating place to run a Rebel campaign. Agitating against the Empire in its stronghold would be a dangerous and exciting prospect, sort of like running a WWII resistance movement out of Berlin. And the goals for the Alliance are totally different. In the Colonies and Outer Rim, the Empire is brutal, and stirring the local populaces up isn't that hard. But in the Core, a lot of people think the Empire is all that protects them from the chaos threatening them from without. Out on the frontier, Rebels might blow up Imperial buildings and kill Moffs, but if they try that in the Core, they'll be labeled terrorists. It's more an espionage game in the Core, more skulking around like Zorro or the Scarlet Pimpernel, blackmailing Moffs, rescuing political prisoners, recruiting new high-level agents, that sort of thing.

A Coromon headhunter of Fresia

Jason Fry: Writing a world description is a combination of detective work, creative writing, and brainstorming. There are so many bits and scraps about that world from novels, comics, RPG books, video games and the like -- for each world I wrote, I wound up with a teetering pile of books at least as tall as my monitor. It's great fun to put all that together and then try to weave it into a whole with your own stuff. When it works, the whole thing just comes alive and the characters and adventures almost write themselves. For example, after I thought up the Sea of Jarad and styanax hunting on Tralus, the idea of a hunter like Van Jahan Surgoth and an adventure in which the characters would have to learn the ropes just materialized all at once.

John Terra: Given my choice, writing world descriptions are preferable to dreaming up new creatures and/or adventure hooks. Designing creatures is okay -- I'm not knocking it -- but it's not my first choice for creative exercise. I'm also not too crazy about adventure hooks because, quite frankly, I want to write the whole adventure, not just give someone else an idea or two! That leaves world descriptions, which falls under the category of world-building, and for a fully functioning and operational DM such as myself, that's second nature!

Chris Doyle: Actually, I prefer writing adventures, and I found it challenging to generate source material for a change. I attacked it from the perspective of creating interesting locales (and crunchy bits) that I would want featured in an adventure.

Craig Carey: I like designing worlds, because you have to include it all: flora, fauna, adventure hooks, interesting inhabitants, natural dangers -- the whole package. It's a lot of work, because (especially in the case of the Core Worlds) you need to account for anything that's previously been covered relevant to the world, and in the last 25 years there have been a lot of Star Wars materials published. Like Jason said, you need a huge pile of reference materials right next to your computer. To research a world and do it justice, you become something of a Star Wars archivist. We're not just talking the films and the core novels. To do it right, you pore over the comics, the various guides, both roleplaying libraries, even things -- in some cases -- as "obscure" as the Holiday Special or the Ewok/Droid cartoons.

Chris Doyle: Kamino, the ocean planet in Episode II. I enjoy anything aquatic-themed, and I'd love to see that world fleshed out in detail. I imagine the oceans teeming with a myriad of majestic beasts -- even entire civilizations.

Kamino

John Terra: I'll go with Naboo. I like the environment and the fact that there are not one but two main sentient races. In terms of straight adventure, though, I'd pick Tatooine, since it seems that a lot of things happen on that backwater planet. Thing is, I hate desert settings. Hmmm. Perhaps we could combine the adventure-laden setting of Tatooine with the lovely scenery and climate of Naboo, into one planet. We could call it Taboo! Never mind . . .

Jason Fry: Bespin. It looks great, what with all that art deco architecture. You can blast around in Cloud Cars. You can gamble and live the high life -- anywhere Lando's happy would probably be okay with me. And as we've seen from the evacuation scene, apparently they have ice cream.

Paul Sudlow: Another vote for Bespin -- or, actually, Cloud City, I guess. It's got a Fritz Lang "Metropolis" thing going -- all clean lines and spotless elegance on the surface where the beautiful people play, but beneath there's a grungy, industrial undercity teaming with Ugnauts. It's a great juxtaposition, both visually and conceptually, and good grist for story-telling.

Want even more Coruscant and the Core Worlds? Start with our latest sneak peek at the book!