Earlier this year, Lost in Translation reviewed Cyberpunk 2077: Trauma Team, which followed a MedTech working for the emergency medical provider, Trauma Team. The comic was based on Cyberpunk 2077, the video game successor to the tabletop RPG Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0., both created by Mike Pondsmith. The games, both video and RPG, are set in a near future where corporations control the country and people are left to eke out lives either in the gilded cage of a corporate office or on the sidelines. Cyberpunk, the genre, is not a happy place to live, yet the only difference between cyberpunk and today is the lack of implanted augmentations. Maybe by 2077.

The other theme in cyberpunk and in Cyberpunk is that while it may not be possible to change the world, it is possible to change the world around you. The change doesn’t have to be for the better. In Neuromancer, Case leaves the world in a new situation, one that it has to adjust to, while his own life has changed greatly despite his efforts.

As a genre, cyberpunk began as literary but relies heavily on imagery that it was a natural to be picked up in more visual mediums. While Blade Runner didn’t start as cyberpunk, its film adaptation provided the visual esthetic that it’s part of the genre’s DNA. Moody, neon, gritty, and focused on the outsiders.

That brings us to Cyberpunk 2077: Where’s Johnny from Dark Horse Comics, written by Bartosz Sztybor, with art by Giannis Milogiannis, colours by Roman Titov, and letters by Aditya Bidikar. The plot follows Wallace, a reporter who is working to bring down the corporations, who is brought into a complex plot. The hook, a lead into who planted a nuclear bomb in Arasaka’s Night City HQ, the missing Rockerboy, Johnny Silverhand. Get proof, and Wallace has it made at his employer.

Naturally, things are never as they appear. Wallace is being played. Everyone wants to know where Johnny is, but Wallace finds out something else. A body allegedly recovered from the former Arasaka Tower, died not of radiation or being crushed but by having her throat slit. Wallace might not be able to bring down a corporation, but he can bring the woman’s killer to justice of sorts.

The graphic novel is definitely using elements from Cyberpunk 2077. Johnny Silverhand is a legacy character, showing up first in the Cyberpunk 2013 Night City supplement then in the Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. core rules as an established character before being portrayed by Keanu Reeves in the video game. Johnny has gone through a lot, including a few deaths; thanks to technology, it is possible to back up memories to be implanted in a clone if you can afford the medical insurance. Johnny’s trademark is a chromed cybernetic arm and hand; in 2020, he often treats it as a separate entity, a reflection of a loss of humanity due to its implantation.

The arrival of the Silverhands poser gang brings in an element that doesn’t really appear in the videogame. Poser gangs get cosmetic surgery to look like a celebrity or a group of celebrities. In 2020, sample poser gangs include the Gilligans, who look like the characters from Gilligan’s Island and the Bradies, based off The Brady Bunch. WHile most poser gangs are considered annoyances, especially by other types of gangs, they can be a problem. Witnesses giving a description after an organized snatch-and-grab are going to all describe Gilligan in different ways. The videogame didn’t include because of issues with permissions, though if the Silverhands appear after an update, they would fit in well.

In the end, not much changes by the end of Where’s Johnny. Corporations are still warring. People are still oppressed. But Wallace does get in justice for the dead woman in a way that could not have happened through regular channels. And this is at the heart of the game. Wallace is still the same, but he can live with himself at the end. It’s not the large change, but the series of small changes along the way that will improve life for people. Cyberpunk 2077: Where’s Johnny mixes up elements from tabletop and video game, mixes them up, and provides a story that fits in both.

Over the next few weeks, Lost in Translation will be looking at how to adapt settings from tabletop RPGs. The benefit of these settings is that a lot of the hard work, the world building, is already done. The settings also have a built-in audience, though one that isn’t as large as fans of Marvel or DC comics. The games also provide for an idea for a plot.

The settings to be looked at will all be created for the game. Yes, there are licensed RPGs, but that makes the RPG the adaptation. In the next few weeks, the idea is to see how a setting or game can be adapted using case studies and what would be the best format. Some games publishers have seen the potential and have licensed tie-in novels, to varying degrees of success.

Please enjoy.

Fast food is highly competitive. So many options for the person who just wants to have a quick, inexpensive meal. Each fast food chain has its own way of getting attention, from mascots to sponsorships to tie-ins to other mainstream media. Burger King had three XBox/XBox 360 video games. Arby’s has its anime-aware Twitter account. KFC produced a dating sim featuring the Colonel. McDonald’s has its ubiquitous nature. So what is a chain like Wendy’s supposed to do?

Would you believe a tabletop role-playing game?

Wendy’s made available a free RPG called Feast of Legends, where players are called by Queen Wendy, first of her name, breaker of fast food chains, defender of all things fresh, never frozen, ruler of the realm of Freshtovia since 1969, to defend the realm against the evils of the dark art of frozen beef and their practitioners. The land of Beef’s Keep have fractured over how to treat beef, with some siding with Creepingvale and the United Clown Nations and going with freezing.

Yes, the goal is to sell Wendy’s hamburgers and other foods with subtle and, at times, not so subtle jabs at the competition. Lurking beneath the marketing is a solid game mechanic that takes inspiration and cues from the various editions of Dungeons & Dragons since the turn of the millennium. The question becomes, can a fast food restaurant be adapted as a tabletop RPG?

Back a bit, I went through what is key for adapting a work to a tabletop RPG. The five points to watch for are:
1. Is there something for the players to do?
2. Can the players have the same impact on the setting as the main characters?
3. Does the plot of the original work allow for expansion?
4. Will the adapted game bring in something that a more generic game can’t?
5. Is the license available?

The last one is easy to answer. Wendy’s is the publisher, bypassing the need to get a license. Skips the middleman and gets the game out. The third question is the big one, though. The original has no plot. The original is a fast food restaurant. There is no plot, just a daily war between the folks behind the counter and the ravening mass of humanity determined to leave nothing in its wake but destruction, or, as they mass calls itself, customers. While the idea of playing the last stand of the unfortunates standing against the horde may be appealing, that’s not what Feast of Legends is about. It’s an epic fantasy based on the menu at Wendy’s. There’s going to be a lot of stretching of points here.

The RPG does give something for the players to do and not only are their characters having the same impact as the main ones, they are the leads. Queen Wendy needs brave souls to fight for Freshtovia, and given the number of competitors for the fast food dollar, there is room for expansion.

Mechanically, Feast of Legends is what is called a “fantasy heartbreaker“, a fantasy RPG that tries to be different from D&D but still relies heavily on the older game. What would be a liability, though, works in the favour of Feast. Leaning on what D&D has done makes it easier to get buy-in from players and an easier learning curve, even for rookies. This leaves room for developing the world itself, which is where Feast starts to shine.

Feast is a marketing tool. The game doesn’t shy away from that fact. Instead, it revels in it. Not only are the players working on Queen Wendy’s behalf, their opponents are from the competing fast food restaurants. The classes are reskinned as Orders, each one named after different parts of the menu, such as Order of the Beef, Order of the Chicken, and Order of the Sides. Each Order has its own sub-Order, named after specific items on the menu. There are special abilities that each Order gets, but, broadly speaking, the Order of the Chicken is the magical class, Order of the Beef the fighter class, and Order of the Sides the roguish class with a touch of magic.

The mechanics take advantage of being menu items. To encourage the players to eat off the Wendy’s menu, there are mechanical advantages depending on what’s being consumed. An added benefit is if the item being eaten matches the name of the character’s order, the player gets advantage on every roll made that night, rolling two twenty-sided dice and taking the better result. If a player decides to eat from a competitor, then woe be on the character as penalties apply. The worst may be from eating gas station food, a -2 to Intelligence all night.

The world of Beef’s Keep includes a map. Keeping with the hamburger theme, there are two mountain ranges, Top Bun Mountains and Bottom Bun Mountains. Freshtovia, Creepingvale, and the United Clown Nations aren’t the only realms; there’s also The Box, the Twin Cities of Carl, and the Temple of Panda. Other named features include Lake John Silver and Roast Beach. The greatest threat comes from the Deep Freeze, home of the Ice Jester and his United Clown Nations. The adventure that comes with the game has the players take on the Jester and his minions, Grumble, the Beef Burgler, and the Fry Fiends, to protect Freshtovia from being flash frozen.

The setting is very tongue-in-cheek, poking fun at Wendy’s competition. The game is not meant to be taken seriously, though the work that went into it was serious. The goal of the game is fun. There’s room to explore beyond the adventure. After all, Creepingvale is nearby with its creepy king with the paper crown, waiting to sneak his minions up to the border of Freshtovia when no one is looking.

Feast of Legends is a very loose adaptation of the Wendy’s menu and chain. As a tabletop RPG, there’s a few gaps, but not many. The artwork is on par with the larger RPG publishers. As an adaptation, well, it exists for marketing purposes, but there is a sense of fun that went into the game. Mechanically, the game is sound, and emphasizes the message the publisher wants to get across, “Eat at Wendy’s”. For its price, the game is far better than it has a right to be, but Wendy’s wanted something memorable for its audacity, not its drawbacks. The creators hit the right balance between game and marketing, making something that can be played and that people will want to try out.

When adapting a tabletop RPG, the ideal original work is one that allows for more people in the setting than just the main characters. Star Trek, in its various incarnations, allows for other Starfleet officers, creating an instant hook for an RPG. Television, though, works best with a limited cast, mainly for budgetary reasons, with a broad hook. Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files was prime for a TV adaptation, with one central character, a small core of supporting characters, and numerous recurring guest characters. For an RPG, though, that isn’t the best set up.

Or is it? As the series of novels grew, Butcher expanded the setting. Harry Dresden isn’t the only wizard in the world, just the only one to open a detective agency. Over the course of the series, Harry picks up an apprentice, deals with the various threats both mundane and supernatural, has to work around the wizardly White Council, and keeps the peace among the supernatural factions and the Mob in Chicago. There is a world beyond just Harry Dresden. This is where Evil Hat Productions comes in.

Evil Hat developed the Fate RPG by building on the Fudge system with elements that went beyond just attributes and skills. Called Aspects, these elements allow players and GMs to use drama points, called Fate Points, to modify the narrative. Players can invoke the Aspects to gain an advantage for their characters; GMs can invoke the same Aspects to put the characters into a disadvantageous position. Fate doesn’t encourage the old “killer DM” play; the goal is for everyone to have fun and be challenged.

At this point, there’s two levels of adaptation going on. First, the adapting of The Dresden Files as a tabletop RPG. Second, the adapting of Fate to The Dresden Files. Fate is Evil Hat’s house system, a concept seen widely in the tabletop RPG industry. Game mechanics take time to develop and playtest. Many RPG publishers, once their mechanics are worked out, don’t want to reinvent the wheel every time a new game is released. When licensing a title, one of the issues faced by RPG publishers is making sure that the work can fit into their mechanics.

Evil Hat’s approach to Fate, especially for The Dresden Files and their previous game, the original work Spirit of the Century, was to emulate the writing process. While that approach may not work for some players, it does set the tone of the game, reflecting Dresden‘s literary background. The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game, released in 2010, comes in two volumes, Volume 1: Your Story and Volume Two: Our World. That’s not unusual for tabletop RPGs; while getting both mechanics and setting into one book is ideal, if there is too much information, printing over two thick volumes makes sense.

Our World details Harrry Dresden’s Chicago, as presented in the novels. The city isn’t just the landmarks that can be found in a Wikipedia entry. Our World adds the elements that have appeared in the novels – characters, themes, the vampiric Red and White Courts, the police, the Mob, the morgue, and even Sue, the Tyrannosaurus Rex from the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History that became a zombie. Anything and everything players could want if they want to play in Harry’s Chicago.

Your Story contains the mechanics of Fate, how to roll the dice and how to create a character. Being an urban fantasy RPG, the Dresden game has to include not just regular skills but also supernatural abilities, with some extrapolation from what’s seen in the books to provide players a range of options. To help players, the game includes templates based on characters who appeared. Included in the templates are Wizard, like Harry, Champion of God, like Michael, Were-Form, like Billy and the Alphas, and White Court Vampire, like Thomas. Most templates have a Fate Point refresh cost, so some may not be available depending on the initial amount of points available at start. However, Pure Mortals, like Karrin Murphy and Waldo Butters, gain two Fate Points for use to buy stunts, to offset not having access to supernatural abilities, reflecting how such characters in the books can survive being around Harry.

Fate was designed as a generic game system, one that can be modified as needed for different settings. The core easily takes additions, though some care is needed. Gameplay revolves around the Fate Point economy, encouraging players to let their Aspects restrict them so that they can use those very same Aspects to save the day. Characters, though, aren’t the only ones who get Aspects. Everything can, from the city the game takes place in to a specific location to the current scene. The approach at the time was new, but one that gained a following. The GM and players work together to create their own city, if they want one, allowing the campaign and its theme to be personalized for the group.

Presentation in RPGs often helps sets the tone, With the Dresden RPG, it’s not just adapting the mechanics for the settings, it’s also the maginalia commenting on the main text. Used often to help explain a concept, either by directly commenting or refering to an event in the books, the marginalia is written as Harry, Bob, and Billy, in different handwriting. At one point, when the main text is using Harry himself as an example for character creation, Harry corrects his player, Jim, and then tells him to roll better.

RPGs have a tough challenge when adapting a work. They have to take the work, extract information, and make the setting playable for others beyond the creators while still providing players options to go beyond what has been produced. Evil Hat managed to hit this mark with The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game, taking Jim Butcher’s creation and presenting it in a way that players can have their own adventures in Harry’s world, whether as Dresden and his companions in Chicago or as their own group elsewhere.

Lost in Translation has taken a look at a number of tabletop role-playing games, the most recent being Tails of Equestria. In those reviews, the goal was to see how well the source material was adapted as a game. Today, the goal is to determine what would adapt well as a game.

Tabletop RPGs bring together a group on a regular basis to play, to socialize, and to relax. Existing settings helps reduce set up time. Settings based on existing works allow the players to get a good idea of what sort of play is expected in a game. What makes for a good source to be adapted? The big thing is playability. There needs to be something for the players to do in the game. The goal doesn’t have to be all combat all the time. Investigations, intrigue, and exploration are all viable options. The implication here is that there is more to the setting than what is shown in the original work; that the main characters aren’t the only movers and shakers.

Related to the above, can the players have an effect on the setting of the same importance as the main characters? Sure, only Luke Skywalker can destroy the first Death Star, but can players in a Star Wars setting aid the Rebellion in a way that is just as meaningful? The effect doesn’t have to be achieved in the first session; the goal of an entire Star Wars RPG campaign could be to bring down the Empire in a sector, with the end taking place at the same time as the Battle of Endor. Star Wars: Rogue One could easily be a campaign, getting the plans for the Death Star into the hands of Princess Leia. Without that, the Rebellion would be destroyed.

Next, does the plot of the original work allow for expansion? Some works come down to the actions of one character. A hypothetical The Last Starfighter RPG* has the problem of every starfighter pilot except Alex being killed by a Ko-Dan sneak attack. The movie doesn’t show what happens afterwards, but there isn’t much detail to the setting beyond that needed to drive the plot. Few players want to play Dead Pilot #10. Likewise, a Rumble in the Bronx RPG, based on the Jackie Chan movie, doesn’t work; Jackie’s character is the critical one in the story, and there isn’t a way to expand the cast to allow for player characters. However, a tabletop RPG based on the entire Jackie Chan movie catelogue can and has been done.

The game publisher has another issue unique to the industry. Will the adapted game bring in something that a more generic game can’t? The generic game doesn’t have to be as broad as Steve Jackson Games’ GURPS; there are games that handle just one genre, such as D&D with fantasy. The goal, though, is to have the adaptation represent the original far better than the broader games in the genre. Take Victory Games’ James Bond 007 Role Playing Game as an example. At the time, its competition included TSR’s Top Secret, Flying Buffalo’s Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes, and Hero Games’ Danger International, but the game had the draw of 007 himself. The result was a game with mechanics that could be seen happening on screen without having to be excessively house ruled to be playable, a game that reflected the source well. That’s not to say that a broader game can’t be used to adapt a work. GURPS has had a number of licensed adaptations, including The Prisoner and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.

Of course, game publishers can’t just adapt a work at will. The owners of the originals want to be compensated. Thus, the big question, the one that can make or break an adaptation – is the license available and affordable. Game publishing is still a business. If a license costs more than the expected return on investment, then it’s not worth pursuing. Likewise, if a license just isn’t available, like with the Harry Potter series, then no amount of money is enough. The game just won’t exist legally, and few game publishers have the money to afford a lawyer to fend off the inevitable lawsuit that would occur by ignoring the licensing needs.

In short:

1. Is there something for the players to do?
2. Can the players have the same impact on the setting as the main characters?
3. Does the plot of the original work allow for expansion?
4. Will the adapted game bring in something that a more generic game can’t?
5. Is the license available?

How does this work? Let’s take Star Trek, which has had a number of RPGs based om it, the most recent being published by Modiphius. The players do have something to do – they can be officers on board a Starfleet vessel exploring new worlds and new civilizations, going boldly where no one has gone before. As Starfleet officers, the players can make discoveries similar to the ones Kirk, Picard, and Janeway have. Star Trek: Voyager showed that there are ships in Starfleet not named Enterprise that also explore the unknown. Each of the Trek RPGs was designed with the setting in mind; while Traveller could be adapted to the setting, the various publishers have made an effort to keep to the feel of the franchise. As for the license, Modiphius is the current holder for the purposes of publishing a tabletop RPG.

A potential licensed RPG shoould have these questions in mind. Let’s use a hypothetical Reboot RPG, since it’s fresh in memory. Players would have a wide variety of things to do, from fighting viruses to winning games to dealing with or even being software pirates. If in a different system other than Mainframe, the players can have a similar impact to the main cast, the exception being the events in Daemon Rising, where it took a small handful of Mainframers and a friendly virus to stop Daemon. The plot in Reboot, especially once the ongoing one begins in season 2, still allows for players to do their own thing, even during Daemon Rising. The key to the mechanics will be to allow for the range of characters seen in the show; binomes like the Crimson Binome, Binky, and Algernon, sprites like Dot, Bob, and big and little Enzo, and even benign viruses. Devices like the Guardians’ key tools, like Glitch, and the Code Masters’ staff will need to be worked out. As it stands now, a superhero game may be the best “generic” system to emulate the series, but a game that can reflect Reboot specifically would be ideal. The only question is, is the license available to a publisher? That can only be found out by a potential designer.

Licensed tabletop RPGs have a tightrope to walk, They have to be true to the source material while still being playable. If done well, though, the game can introduce a new pastime to fans of the original and introduce gamers to a new work that they might not have heard of before.

* Note that FASA released a wargame based on The Last Starfighter, where one player took the forces of the Ko-Dan Empire and a second played the Star League. One of the scenarios in the game was the final battle from the movie, complete with rules for the Death Blossom.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was originally meant to advertise a new line of My Little Pony toys. Instead, it became a massive hit, not just with the intended audience of pre-tween girls but with people of all ages. Toys and other merchandise sold well, enough that Hasbro showed gains while other toy companies were struggling, but audiences tuned in because of the characters. Within the Mane Six alone – Applejack, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, and Twilight Sparkle – there is a pony to appeal to everyone. Their core natures meant that any episode featuring two of them would have a conflict that the ponies would have to work out. No one pony is given preference, so resolving the conflict means finding a compromise that works for both. For the target audience, it’s a lesson in how to get along with friends who act differently.

The Mane Six aren’t the only characters in Equestria. Applejack and Rarity have younger siblings, Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle, who, along with Scootaloo, form the Cutie Mark Crusaders, a trio of young fillies who want to grow up. Parallels to younger siblings and to puberty may be intended with them. Other ponies have made appearances, as regulars, such as DJ Pon-3 and Big Mackintosh, or as visitors to Ponyville, such as Trixie and Cheese Sandwich, the latter based on and voiced by “Weird Al” Yankovic.

With a series that mixes fantasy adventure with slice of life, there is plenty of room for ponies other than the Mane Six to get together and save Equestria. Online roleplaying fora exist for just that. With people wanting to play in Equestria, an official licensed role-playing game should have been expected. In early 2017, River Horse released* Tails of Equestria, the official My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic RPG.

Tails of Equestria comes as a single hardback book. The cover features art by Amy Mebberson with three ponies on an adventure, none of whom are part of the Mane Six. The unicorn on the cover is the sample PC (Pony Character) in character creation. Inside, stills from the show are used to illustrate the rules being explained on the page. There’s even a full spread map of Equestria and surrounding lands. PCs aren’t stuck in Ponyville; they can travel to such places as Manehattan and Vanhoover.

The game’s mechanics are easy enough to learn. There are three attributes – Body, Mind, and Charm – rated at a die type, from the four-sided die to the best die, the twenty-sided die. Most rolls will involve one of the attributes, though talents may modify the die type rolled. The Gamesmaster (GM) sets the difficulty anywhere from 2, very easy, to 20, “has anybody ever done this?” A roll of 1 results in bad luck; something goes wrong and hinders the pony. If the pony’s player wishes, he or she can use one or more Tokens of Friendship, the game’s drama point mechanic, to reroll the die, roll the next larger die and take the better result, or even succeed without rolling, depending on how many Tokens are spent. Other ponies can help, reducing the number of Tokens of Friendship needed to get a result. Teamwork makes tasks easier.

Character creation is quick. There’s ten steps, but each step only requires a simple choice. Players just have to decided on type of pony, whether to be brainy or brawny, what their Cutie Mark talent is, a quirk, and a name. Pony portraits are encouraged, either drawn by hand or through an online pony creator, the latter with parents’ permission and supervision. The unicorn on the cover, Firebrand, has a hand-drawn pencil portrait as an example. River Horse also has character sheets with pony outlines to fill in available for sale. If players prefer, they can use MLP toys as miniatures.

The game is aimed at the younger audience of the TV series. The writing is simple and direct, well illustrated when needed. The game reinforces the main theme from the cartoon, friendship is magic. Even if a player doesn’t give another a Token of Friendship to help in a task, ponies are encouraged to work together and give a helping hoof. The quirks, minor drawbacks that limited what a pony can do, help show how two ponies are different but can still work together. The game gets a little heavy-hoofed with the message, but the target audience won’t notice. There are helpful hints for the GM through out the game, with more in the GM’s section on how to run the game. There’s even an option to run a Cutie Mark Crusader-style game, with players being young colts and fillies trying to discover what their cutie mark talent is.

Tails of Equestria also has an adventure for beginning players. The Mane Six need to find out what’s turning ponies into statuettes but they promised to give their pets a party. The players are recruited to watch over the pets while the Mane Six are gone. Given that Fluttershy’s rabbit, Angel, is the complete opposite of his name, things don’t go smooth for the PCs. And while it seems like the Mane Six are off having an epic adventure while the PCs are rounding up wayward pets, the end of the adventure leads into the first expansion set, The Curse of the Statuettes.

Mechanics alone do not determine the tone of a game, though matching them to the setting helps greatly. MLP:FIM has its own themes, the big one being the power of friendship. Violence doesn’t solve problems; friendship does. Tails of Equestria follows this theme. The combat section takes just two pages and is called “scuffling”. Ponies who lose all their stamina need to rest; they get to see stars around their head when stamina reaches zero. Ponies that help each other see the difficulty of their tasks get reduced. One pony might not be able to lift a heavy table; four ponies can easily move it to where they want it. The focus of the game is on friendship. Even the number of Tokens of Friendship depends on the number of friends, including the GM, who are playing. A new player means a new friend, so everyone else gets an extra Token while the new pony gets a number equal to everyone playing, even the people who couldn’t make it. After all, a friend is still a friend, even if they’re not at the table.

The only real problem with Tails of Equestria is how it handles the Elements of Harmony. Every Pony Character must choose one, but there isn’t much on how the Elements are used. The idea is that if a task fits one of the Elements well, a pony with that Element can succeed without having to roll. Fortunately, the adventure included in the book shows how it works, but there isn’t much else.

Tails also has a small bestiary, just containing the creatures needed for the introductory adventure. The same section also has the Mane Six fully statted out plus generic ponies of all three types. The expansions should have more details; The Bestiary of Equestria has far more if players are interested, including new character types like Griffons and Buffalo. River Horse is supporting the Tails of Equestria line with a wide range, including a sourcebook for the MLP:FIM theatrical movie.

Game designers have a difficult task when adapting a work to a game of any sort. With tabletop RPGs, the goal is to take what has been shown and expand it so that players can have fun in the setting. Tails of Equestria took My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and presented the setting as a place for players to play in and have fun, much like the cartoon invites audiences to do. With only small problems, Tails of Equestria gets to the heart of MLP:FIM and makes it possible for players to do the same thing the Mane Six do, have adventures with friends helping each other out.

* In North American, the game and its supplements is distributed by Ninja Division.

In previous examinations of works adapted to gaming, Lost in Translation focused on just one original work being turned into a game. This time around, multiple original works are being adapted into just one game system, the Cortex and its successor, Cortex Plus.

The ideal works to adapt as tabletop role-playing games provide a larger setting, one where the original provides for a larger setting than what the main characters there experience.  This is the case in three previous game adaptations examined, Star Trek, Star Wars, and 007, where players can take on similar roles as the main characters in both franchises.  Even the Buffy RPG could delve into both past and future, allowing players to take up the mantle of the Slayer in a different time.  At the same time, if players want, they can still take the roles of the existing characters.  RPGs need to keep that flexibility and allow for new characters with similar capabilities as existing ones.

The Cortex system debuted in its early form with the Sovereign Stone Game System, which was based on Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Sovereign Stone novels.  Since then, the Cortex system was refined and was used as the base for a number of licensed games published by Margaret Weis Productions – Serenity, based on the movie*; Battlestar Galactica, based on the rebooted series; Demon Hunters, based on videos by Dead Gentlemen Productions; and Supernatural, based on the CW TV series.  A stand-alone version of the Cortex rules, the Cortex System Role Playing Game, came out in 2008, after Serenity, Battlestar Galactica, and Demon Hunters had been released.

The works adapted share some common features.  Both Serenity and Battlestar Galactica are science fiction set far from Earth and have characters who spend much of their time in spaceships.  Demon Hunters and Supernatural both deal with supernatural threats.  All four original works have a devoted fan base, one that is likely to play RPGs.  At the same time, each of the original works has its own tone.  Serenity, the movie, was based around a government cover-up that affected one of the core characters.  Battlestar Galactica showed the last of humanity escaping a relentless enemy intent on exterminating every last human.  Demon Hunters is a comedy.  Supernatural is the story of the Winchester brothers fighting against destiny, Hell, and Heaven.

Fortunately, game mechanics don’t always set the tone.  While there are games where the mechanics were written to support the tone of the game, a more generic system can be adapted to the desired result.  The Serenity RPG presents the game in terms of the players being the crew of their own small ship trying to make a living while staying true to themselves.  Battlestar Galactica focused on survival in an environment that is inherently deadly, with the push to find the lost planet, Earth.  Demon Hunters focused on comedy, with additional writing from Dead Gentlemen contributors and bonus orientation DVD.  Supernatural placed the focus on the players being a small group of supernatural hunters that banded together.  Each release added rules needed for the setting.  Serenity and Battlestar Galactica had rules for starships, with Galactica having expanded rules for dogfighting in space.  Demon Hunters added rules for creating demons and spending plot points to summon the Purple Ninja.  Supernatural also had rules for creating the supernatural and exploiting their weaknesses.

What helped Cortex be flexible enough for the range of adapted works is its simplicity.  The core mechanic involves using dice – the full range of regular polyhedrons – for attributes, skills, traits, and complications.  Players roll the dice from appropriate attribute, skill, and, if any, trait against a difficulty number set by the GM, modified by dice from the character’s applicable complications, again, if any.  Skill lists can be modified by setting; where Pilot would be a given for a Colonial Warrior to have in Battlestar Galactica, a group of hunters in Supernatural might just have the one character who can fly a small plane.  Adding setting-specific rules, such as details about the Cylons, builds on top of the existing core rules, allowing for specialization.

Cortex worked well for settings that focused on action.  However, not all settings focus on action.  Gaming has seen a movement to expand towards a more narrative-driven focus, moving away from the hobby’s wargaming background.  The intent is to tell stories, not chop down opponents.  While Cortex might not have been able to take advantage, its successor, Cortex Plus, was developed to do just that.

Cortext Plus developed into three streams – Cortex Plus Drama, focusing on the relationships between characters; Cortext Plus Action, looked at what the characters did; and Cortex Plus Heroic, which combined the Drama and the Action.  The core die mechanic remained but was heavily modified as needed.  The game also added more details for characters, including character distinctions that could help or hinder depending on the circumstance.  Traditional hit points fell by the wayside.  Instead, characters could suffer from stress or complications imposed on them.  If either got too high, the character would be forced out of the scene, either because of injuries, exhaustion, or escaping.

The first Cortex Plus game released was the Smallville Roleplaying Game, licensed from the Smallville TV series.  The RPG used the Cortex Plus Drama system, reflecting how what the characters on the show were driven by their relationships with each other.  Instead of rolling attribute and skill, players rolled value and relationship, adding in relevant resources and assets, and keeping the best two dice rolled.  Players wouldn’t always be rolling against the GM; sometimes, two characters could work at cross purposes, coming into conflict.  Character creation was a group effort; relationships between player and non-player characters were set up in the first session.  The main drawback with the game was that a large number of players meant that the relationship map grew complex,  It also meant that all the players had to show up for the first session, something not all groups can handle.  That said, the system reflected the show; the values, replacing attributes, went to what motivated the characters.  Clark Kent’s highest rated value, Justice, and lowest, Power, were true to his appearance on the show.

The first Cortex Plus Action game released was based on the TV series, Leverage, which was about a group of five con artists and thieves using their skills to help the average person who is being run over roughshod by the powerful and corrupt.  Leverage used the same attributes that were in the Cortex games above, but instead of skills, characters had roles.  The roles came directly from the TV series – Mastermind, Grifter, Hitter, Hacker, and Thief.  Every character would have a key role, a minor role, and roles that would make things interesting for them.  Each attribute and role had a die type assigned, which would be added to the player’s dice pool when it came time to raise the stakes.  Characters also had distinction, which could work for or against them in the dice pool.  For example, if Parker, the thief of the Leverage crew, needed to break into an office on the 34th floor of an office tower, she could decide to repel down the side of the building from the roof.  To do this, Parker’s player would her Strength die, her Thief die, and could add her “Crazy” distinction and her “No – Really Crazy”, giving her four dice, though only the highest two would be added together.  Parker’s player could decide that “Crazy” merited the usual d8 for the distinction, but then say that, because she’s going down facing the ground, “No – Really Crazy” would add just a d4 and provide a plot point.

The Leverage RPG added rules to reflect the show’s episode structure, which included flashbacks to show the characters setting up twists to defeat the Mark.  The game allows for players to set up their own flashbacks, allowing them to get an advantage when needed.  This allows the crew’s thief to place a convenient smartphone in a drawer where the crew’s hacker can grab it later without the players spending two hours of gaming working out all the contingencies before committing their heist.  The Leverage RPG works to keep the story flowing; there’s no real need to spend hours on a plan when the players just need to work out a general idea of what they want to do.

The next Cortex Plus game out was also the first to use the Heroic approach.  The Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game featured the characters from Marvel Comics and was the fourth licensed game based on the Marvel Universe.  The game pulled in ideas from both Smallville and Leverage, adapted to reflect the needs of the new setting.  Instead of Smallville‘s values and Leverage‘s attributes, Marvel Heroic used affiliations, or how well a character worked with others.  There were three types of affiliation, each getting a different die type – Solo, for characters like Daredevil and Wolverine, who worked best on their own; Buddy, for characters like Spider-Man who often works with another hero; and Team, for the likes of Captain America and Cyclops, who work most often with a large group, such as the Avengers or the X-Men.

Marvel Heroic also uses the stress system from Smallville, again, modified.  Instead of taking six different types of stress, Marvel Heroic characters only have three sources – physical, mental, and emotional.  It is possible for Spider-Man to keep up his constant wisecracking to force an opponent to break down and give up, a result that the previous three Marvel-based games didn’t have a mechanic for.  Skills were replaced by specialties, though their use is similar.  The mechanics remain the same; a player builds a dice pool and takes the best two results and add them together.

The most recent game from Margaret Weis Productions was the Firefly RPG.  The license for the Serenity RPG had expired, but the company had worked with Fox to get the license for the TV series*.  The Firefly RPG uses Cortex Plus Action, modified from its first incarnation as the Leverage RPG and taking some ideas from Marvel Heroic.  Firefly has attributes, but only three; Mental, Physical, and Social.  The skill list is shorter than Serenity‘s, but are broader.  The game introduced rules for spaceships, since the TV series was set on one.  Players could not only create their characters but their own ship, turning the vessel from a stat block into something that the players and their characters could care about.  The game also modified the distinctions.  Instead of just giving a bonus die for the player’s dice pool, distinction had some extra mechanical bits that helped players distinguish their characters.  The rule book also uses scenes from the TV series to illustrate how the mechanics work, giving players a way to follow the action.

With four licensed games using Cortex and another four using Cortex Plus, how did the adapting fare?  At its core, Cortex is a simple, flexible system, in the same vein as the Cinematic Unisystem rules used by the Buffy RPG.  This allowed the developers to tailor the mechanics to the adapted setting by changing skill lists and adding and removing talents and complications.  It is possible for characters from one of the published games to be used in another; it would be odd to see a member of the Brotherhood of the Celestial Torch on board the Rising Star, but less so if that same member met the Winchesters.

With Cortex Plus and its different streams, adapting the mechanics to the setting was a design goal.  This means that characters from the different games wouldn’t interact as easily – Spider-Man has no relationship ties to anyone from Smallville, for example – but the games reflect the TV series they’re meant to portray.  Smallville is a super-powered soap opera while Leverage is a series of heist mini-movies, and their games reflect those realities.  The key is to choose the correct Cortex Plus stream to reflect the core of a work.  So far, the developers have been able to do just that.

Speaking of the developers, Cam Banks, has licensed Cortex and Cortex Plus from Margaret Weis Productions.  The end goal is to create a game, Cortex Prime, that takes in all the prior work mentioned above and produce not just the rules but settings that aren’t necessarily licensed works.  His studio, Magic Vacuum Design Studio is running a Kickstarter, with stretch goals that will include a number of pre-made settings with the new game.

* The Serenity and Firefly licenses had an inherent problem – different studios held the licensing rights.  Fox has the rights for Firefly, but Universal had the rights for Serenity.  This split meant that information in one work could not appear in the licensed game of the other.  Players, however, aren’t restricted and can pull in characters and ideas from both works, but any work needed to stat up something not covered by the game fell to the GM.

Like the previous two gaming adaptations looked at, Star Wars and Star Trek, today’s is also based on a franchise. Unlike the previous outings, though, Victory Games’ James Bond 007 Role Playing Game, released in 1983, is set in modern times.

007 is an older franchise than either Star Wars or Star Trek, beginning with the release of Casino Royale in 1954, followed by thirteen more books, including two collections of short stories.. After Fleming’s death, other authors continued writing about Bond, including Kingsley Amis, penning Colonel Sun as Robert Markham, and John Gardner. Naturally, Bond’s adventures became popular enough to become adaptation fodder. Casino Royale was the first adapted; the first adaptation of the book was an CBS TV movie featuring “Jimmy Bond” in 1954, followed later by the 1967 parody with Woody Allen, and then in 2006 starring Daniel Craig. The latter was a reboot of the film franchise started by Cubby Broccoli in 1962 with Dr. No. All told, the franchise has seen six actors portraying James Bond, each bringing a different interpretation of the character. 007 has had many imitators, from Matt Helm to Danger!! Death Ray, and has also been the basis of many parodies, including the 1967 Casino Royale, the Austin Powers movies, and the Reboot episode, “Firewall“. Bond is an influence.

A role-playing game based on a franchise featuring a sole main character may seem odd, but Bond is just one agent of several with a License to Kill. The franchise also has recurring characters, including CIA agent Felix Leiter and fellow MI6 agent, Mary Goodnight. The novel Moonraker mentions agents 008 and 0011, and the film franchise shows agents through to 009. Goodnight represents the lower ranked agents in MI6, allowing for players who want to work towards becoming a 00 agent.

Character creation in James Bond 007 is point-based, as opposed to random dice rolls as seen in Dungeons & Dragons*, allowing for players to create an agent to their taste. The points, the number of which depend on the experience of the character, can be used to buy attributes, skills, and appearance details. The attributes – Strength, Dexterity, Willpower, Perception, and Intelligence – are more or less standard across the majority of tabletop RPGs, and are the base for skills. The twenty-four skills are those seen in the 007 books and movies, from Boating to Gambling to Seduction. Need to outrun a number of SUVs filled with mooks working for the head of a Columbian drug cartel? Driving. Need to shoot at those same mooks? Fire Combat. Need to convince the cartel head that you wanted to get his attention to become one of his lieutenants? Charisma. If a skill doesn’t quite cover what a player wants to do, there’s also the optional Fields of Experience, which provide some flavour on what an agent knows, from being able to ski to understanding a toxicological report on a rare poison. The Primary Chance of a skill is based on one or two attributes plus the number of levels bought for the character.

With the appearance details, the game introduces an interesting concept that works in the context of an espionage RPG – the more average a character is, in height, weight, and looks, the more it costs to buy the appearance. An average looking character is harder to identify, which is handled in the game with Fame points. Fame is further increased depending on the initial experience level; Rookies, like Goodnight, aren’t known while a 00-level agent, like 007, has had missions that have become known. Agent-level, the middle tier covering people like Felix Leiter, may or may not be recognized, but word of their exploits have gotten out. Bond, who is known through out the espionage world, has a high number of Fame points that even dying, as seen in the film adaptation of You Only Live Twice, still doesn’t help avoid recognition. Also affecting Fame is gender; female agents get a reduction because women aren’t as represented as agents as men are; Holly Goodhead, the CIA agent from the Moonraker movie, isn’t recognized by Bond because of this factor.

The core mechanic of the 007 RPG is based on the roll of a percentile die, or d100. However, it’s not a simple pass/fail system. Instead, the game uses Ease Factors ranging from 10, the easiest, to 1/2, the hardest. The Ease Factor is multiplied by a skill’s Primary Chance to determine the Success Chance. When the percentile dice are rolled, the result is checked against the success table, not only to see if the character succeeded, but how well, through the determination of the Quality Rating. The QR ranges from 1, best, to 4, worst but still a success. If the roll was to see if a character hit using Fire Combat, for guns, or Hand-to-Hand Combat, for melee, the Quality determines how much damage is done.

Dice, though, can be fickle. Bond seldom fails when he knows he must succeed. The 007 RPG has one more mechanic that helps, the Hero Point. Today, most games have a hero point or drama point mechanism to help players when needed. Prior to the 007 game’s release, the only hero point mechanism seen was in TSR’s Top Secret, with optional Fame and Fortune points. With 007, the hero point mechanic was part of the core. Players had to declare the use of a Hero Point, though not how many, before rolling. Hero Points improved the Quality Rating by one per point spent. A QR of 1, though, was the best possible, with no further improvements possible**. However, that Hero Point isn’t lost; getting a QR1 gets the player a Hero Point, turning the expenditure into a wash. That does mean that more experienced agents, like 007, will be getting more Hero Points on average than a Rookie, but a 00 will also be facing more challenging opponents. A Rookie shouldn’t be going up against Scaramanga on his or her first mission.

All of the above may seem complex, and the game does front-load the complexity at character creation, but once an agent has been made, the mechanics are easy to use. The provided character sheet includes all the skills and and how to calculate their base chance and even has a multiplication table for Ease Factors. All rolls are based on Ease Factors, giving players an idea of their chance of success. The game includes examples of play that show how the mechanics work using scenes from the movies and books. While the core rulebook doesn’t have room to detail all of 007’s gadgets, the supplement, Q-Manual covers everything that has appeared in the books and movies.

With weapons, vehicles, and gadgets, the core philosophy of the designers was that the character still had to be the focus. Almost every item detailed in either the core rules or the Q Manual provides a Performance Modifier, a bonus or penalty to the the task’s Ease Factor. The only exception is the automatic safecracker from the movie version of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a suitcase-sized device that did the work while Bond read a magazine. The Performance Modifiers give the GM room to throw added challenges to players. A chase sequence that’d be too easy with the Q Branch provided Lotus becomes a tense scene when said Lotus explodes and the player needs to borrow a non-player character’s aged Peugeot, as seen in For Your Eyes Only.

All the above discussion about character creation and game mechanics, though, doesn’t answer the main thrust of Lost in Translation – is the game a good adaptation of the source works? The answer – yes. The game’s mechanics were pulled from the books and films. Reading the novels or watching the movies with an eye to seeing the mechanics in action reveals that the rules cover everything that happens. It is possible to see when Bond gets a QR1 result and when he spends a Hero Point. The robustness of the mechanic means that players and GMs can apply them to the 007 films released after the game went out of print. The game’s designers ensured that the rules reflected 007’s exploits.

The only lack that the game has is the hole caused by litigation over Thunderball. EON Productions, the licensors of James Bond, didn’t have the rights for SPECTRE, thus could not grant Victory Games permission to use the organization. Victory Games created a new villainous group to fill in the gap, TAROT, using the organization to fill in SPECTRE-sized hole, particularly in adventure modules based on the older movies. Characters with ties to SPECTRE were transferred to TAROT.

While the James Bond 007 RPG is out of print, and the Avalon Hill Game Company has folded the Victory Games imprint, the game itself is again available. A retro-clone, Classified published by Expeditious Retreat Press, was released in 2013. The game doesn’t have the /007/ license, but the core mechanics will allow for Bond and his contemporaries and successors.
* Point-buy in D&D has been around as an option since second edition AD&D, but was explicitly made so in the third edition.
** Except when using the Gambling skill, depending on the game of chance being played, allowing a player to beat an opponent’s 8 with a 9 in Chemin de Fer or Baccarat or an opponent’s straight flush with a royal flush in Poker.

Any work with a large geek following is fodder for being adapted as a tabletop role-playing game.  If that work has a setting that allows for other groups to live in without being affected by the events of the work, it becomes prime, whether fan-created or licensed.  Star Trek is such a work; popular with a setting that spans the galaxy.  It shouldn’t be a surprise that there have been three Trek RPGs published over the decades.

Star Trek introduced Star Fleet with its main mission being exploration.  Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise boldly went where no man had gone before, finding new life and new civilizations.  The series showed a number of first contacts, some more dangerous than others, and introduced Klingons and Romulans to the audience.  The original Trek lasted three seasons, but remained in syndicated reruns since leaving the air in 1969.  The popularity of the show in syndication led to two season of an animated adaptation in 1973, featuring most of the original cast*.  The animated series led to an aborted second TV series that turned into the 1979 movie, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and the film franchise that followed.

Trek returned to television in 1987 with Star Trek: The Next Generation.  The new series introduced a new crew and a new Enterprise, helmed by Captain Jean-Luc Picard.  The Next Generation ran seven seasons, then went into its own movie series.  Meanwhile, a third Trek TV series, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, began in 1993, showing a different aspect of the Federation.  Instead of exploration, Deep Space Nine focused on life on a space station as the Federation helped the Bajorans recover from being occupied by the Cardassians.  When The Next Generation wrapped up, a fourth TV series, Star Trek: Voyager, began.  Voyager chronicled the story of a lost Star Fleet vessel, the USS Voyager under the command of Captain Kathryn Janeway as the ship tried to return to the Federation.  When Voyager came to a close with the ship returning home, another series was ready to go.  Star Trek: Enterprise looked at the history of the setting, from Earth’s first steps into space to the birth of the Federation.  Fatigue and story quality, though, meant that Enterprise was the first Trek series since the original to not last seven seasons.  No new Trek production would be made until the 2009 film, Star Trek.

Even working from the original Trek, the germ of a roleplaying game already existed.  Players could be Star Fleet officers, commanding a starship and exploring the galaxy.  This was the basis of the first Trek RPG, FASA’s Star Trek: The Role Playing Game, released in 1983.  FASATrek had only the original series, the animated adaptation, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture to work from, with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan coming out during the game’s production.  Character creation in FASATrek assumes that players will be Star Fleet officers, though later supplements allowed players to play merchants, Star Fleet intelligence agents, Klingons, and Romulans.  The core rules, though, took characters through Star Fleet Academy, their cadet cruise, and their previous experience before embarking on their new mission.  The core mechanic was a percentile, or d100, roll, with players trying to roll underneath their skill rating used.  The skills reflected what was seen on the TV series.  Available races included Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellerites, all from the TV series, plus Caitians and Edoans, both from the animated series**.

While the original Trek emphasized a peaceful approach, there were starship battles, most notably in the episode, “The Balance of Terror”.  The developers of FASATrek wanted to keep to what was shown in the series, avoiding turning starship battles into a board- or wargame.  FASATrek broke down responsibilities by position.  The captain gave the orders, the helmsman piloted the ship and fired the weapons, the navigator managed the shields, the engineer tried to balance the power available to the needs of each station, the science officer ran sensors, and communications maintained damage control.  Security officers were the only ones without a duty during a starship battle, provided shields didn’t fail allowing boarding parties.  A second edition came out before Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, with an update after the movie was released to take into account the events shown.  The new edition cleared up problems found in the first and took into account the film franchise.  The core mechanic was kept, with some clarifications, and starship battles still used a console for each position on the bridge.  The end result was a game system that kept the flavour of both the TV series and existing movies.

FASATrek was published through to the first season of The Next Generation, with two supplements released for the new series.  Paramount, however, wasn’t pleased with what FASA was doing with the license and pulled it after the first season of The Next Generation was complete in 1989.  FASA, though, had other game lines to fall back on – BattleTech, the miniatures wargame involving giant mecha, and Shadowrun, a role-playing game crossing cyberpunk with Tolkein-esque fantasy.

FASATrek worked to maintain the Trek flavour as seen in the original series, then expanded the setting based on what was known.  As will be seen below, the game established a feel that would be repeated by later publishers.  FASATrek managed to replicate the feel of both the TV series and, with the second edition, the movies.

The Trek RPG license lay fallow for a decade, In 1999, Last Unicorn Games obtained the license and released Star Trek: The Next Generation Role-playing Game.  The Next Generation had wrapped up in 1994, with Deep Space Nine wrapping up its seventh season and Voyager still boldly going.  The new RPG used LUG’s Icon system, using six-sided dice and target numbers instead of FASA’s percentile system.  Character creation, though, still followed the same lifepath, going from youth to Star Fleet Academy to prior experience before the new mission.  Starship battles also ensured that all the characters on the bridge had something to do.  By focusing on The Next Generation at first, the game was able to feel current, especially with Trek available on TV and in theatres.  LUG released several supplements, covering the Andorians, the Vulcans, the Klingons, and the Romulans, as well as core books for the original Star Trek and Deep Space Nine.  A Voyager core book was planned but never released.  The license was transferred to Decipher before the book could be created.

LUGTrek had a different feel from FASATrek, thanks to the change in mechanics.  However, the change in mechanics helped reflect the change in tone from the original series to The Next Generation.  The tone of the each series was reflected in the writing; but each core book was still Star Trek.

Decipher wasn’t a new game company, but had focused on collectible card games, including one based on Star Trek.  However, when it received the license, the design team from LUG moved over to Decipher.  A new mechanic was devised, called CODA, which would also be used in Decipher’s Lord of the Rings  Roleplaying Game.  The Star Trek Roleplaying Game used the CODA mechanics, two six-sided dice instead of LUGTrek‘s dice based on the attribute.  Decipher also split the rules between the Player’s Guide and the Narrator’s Guide.  This did allow DECTrek to incorporate all the existing series, including Enterprise, into the core rules, instead of splitting them over several books as LUGTrek had.  DECTrek also used a lifepath for character creation, but characters weren’t restricted to being Star Fleet officers unlike both FASATrek and LUG’s Next Generation core rules,  The end result is a character with a backstory as detailed as the player wants.

Aside from some layout issues, DECTrek still aimed to achieve the feel of Star Trek, with the added difficulty of trying to be all eras of Trek.  For the most part, the game succeeded.  Decipher ended publication of RPGs by 2007, leaving material for both the Trek and the LotR games unpublished.

There is no licensed Trek RPG currently in production.  However, there is Prime Directive, a role-playing game derived from the universe created in Amarillo Design Bureau’s wargame Star Fleet Battles.  The wargame, originally published by Task Force Games, was licensed, not from Paramount but from Franz Joseph, who had created blueprints of various Trek ships and had written The Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual.  As such, the wargame, and thus Prime Directive, does diverge from canon.  There have been four verstions of the Prime Directive RPG. one from Amarillo using its own mechanics, one published by Amarillo that uses Steve Jackson Games’ GURPS rules, and two D20*** editions.  A Mongoose Traveller version was announced in 2011, but it appears that the development of the base game’s second edition has delayed production on Amarillo’s end.  Prime Directive is centered on “Prime Teams”, Star Fleet officers who are specifically trained for landing party duty so that senior officers would not be endangered by beaming down to new worlds.  The system allowed players to create connections to events as needed, reflecting how in the various Trek series that a character would know someone in an episode, from Kirk’s rivalry with Finnigan to Dax’s many lives.  Prime Directive, though, wasn’t as reflective of Star Trek as the other games, in part because of limitations in the licensing.

It is possible to adapt an existing role-playing game for Star Trek.  Licensed games remove the work of adapting from the GM, having already made the effort to get the details down.  Each of the games mentioned above has done the hard work, setting down in mechanics a work where writers will create new solutions without having to worry about the ramifications in a game.  With this work done, the GM just has to create situations to send players through, without worrying about what damage a phaser can do.

* Budget considerations meant that Walter Koenig didn’t return as Chekov, but he did write the episode, “The Infinite Vulcan”.
** The Paramount-mandated requirement that licensees not work together hadn’t come in yet.  This can be seen with the 1983 supplement, The Klingons, which was in part written by John M. Ford, who also wrote the tie-in novel, The Final Reflection, about the Klingons around the same time.  The two works build on each other.
*** The D20 system was Wizards of the Coast’s core mechanic for the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons.  Wizards released an Open Gaming License version of the rules to allow other companies to focus more on setting than on mechanics.

A few weeks back, Lost in Translation looked at adaptations of tabletop RPGs.  While there haven’t been many RPGs adapted to other media, the reverse is far more likely.  Many popular franchises have been adapted for gaming, from Star Trek to Supernatural.  The result is a licensed property created by game designers who are also fans.  With The Force Awakens turning into a powerhouse beyond expectations, now is as good a time as any to look at the Star Wars roleplaying games past and present.

Role-playing in an established universe is more than just letting the players take the roles of existing characters.  With a setting as vast as the Galaxy Far, Far Away, there’s room for any number of characters, from scruffy rogues to naive farmboys to dashing conmen to dangerous bounty hunters.  Adding to the complexity, Jedi and Sith lurk, depending on the era.  The goal of the games is to provide an experience that would fit in the Star Wars setting but still giving players the flexibility to play what they want.  There have been three published RPGs for /Star Wars/, detailed below.

Star Wars: The Role-Playing Game, West End Games
The first Star Wars RPG, released in 1987, used WEG’s Ghostbusters: The Role-Playing Game‘s core mechanic, modified for the new setting.  Determining success or failure was based on rolling a number of six-sided* dice based on the rating of a character’s skill, with a differently coloured die designated the wild die.  The wild die could allow for amazing successes or crushing failures, depending on its value.  Players could use character points to add dice to the roll.  To account for the Force in Star Wars, players also had Force points.  Spending a Force point allowed players to double the number of dice they could roll for a skill, allowing feats such as firing a proton torpedo into a two metre exhaust port without the aid of a targeting computer.

Because it was released three years after Return of the Jedi, there was little information about Jedi, beyond that they were rare after the Emperor destroyed the Order.  At the time, Star Wars wasn’t the big franchise that it is now.  The Expanded Universe consisted of the Han Solo and Lando Calrissian trilogies; Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire would be published in 1991, a year before the RPG’s second edition.  Jedi were limited to what was shown on screen and what the WEG writers could extrapolate and get approved by Lucasfilm.  However, the more earthier characters, like Han, were supported, with all starships, from starfighters to Star Destroyers, being written up.  The Revised and Expanded edition, released in 1996, became the definitive version of the RPG.

The game played fast; the mechanics loose enough to let players swoop through space in a transport modified for smuggling while out running a flight of TIE fighters and maintain the feel of the Galaxy Far, Far Away.  WEG’s RPG still has an impact even today; Dave Filoni, showrunner for both CGI-animated series, The Clone Wars and Rebels has stated in commentary that he and his crew have refered to WEG’s Imperial Sourcebook and Star Wars Sourcebook for details on vehicles and droids used in the series.

WEG lost the license in 1999 after having to declare bankruptcy when its parent company, West End Shoes, drained the game publisher to stay afloat.  Speculation on the Internet on who would get the license next grew as the prequel movies were announced.

Star Wars Roleplaying Game, Wizards of the Coast
Wizards of the Coast, who also owned Dungeons & Dragons, picked up the license in 2000, a year after The Phantom Menace was released.  Wizards used a modified version of the d20 System, as used in D&D 3rd edition.  The result was a class-based system that covered not just the original trilogy, like WEG’s game had, but also the prequels and the Expanded Universe.  A second edition was released in 2002, a year before D&D 3.5, cleaning up some problematic rules.  The Saga edition came out in 2007, streamlining the d20 system more to keep the gameplay flowing.

As mentioned, the d20 System is class-based, meaning that every character falls into one of a number of character classes that define their abilities.  Instead of using the D&D classes like Fighter and Wizard, the d20 Star Wars games used classes like Scoundrel, Fringer, and Jedi.  The result was playable, but the sweet spot was between levels 7 and 12, where characters had the skills needed to pull off difficult but in-setting plausible stunts without becoming impossible to challenge without throwing a Star Destroyer at them.  Thanks to the prequels and the Expanded Universe, Jedi had more options than in WEG’s RPG.  Sourcebooks detailed the different eras of the Galaxy Far, Far Away, giving gamemasters (GMs) and players flexibility in play styles.

Wizards let the license lapse in 2010, after not just a large number of detailed sourcebooks but also a miniatures game that could tie into the RPG or be played as a stand-alone.

Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion, and Force and Destiny, Fantasy Flight Games
Fantasy Flight Games picked up the Star Wars license with an eye to create both a miniatures and a role-playing game.  The first of the RPGs, Edge of the Empire, came out in 2013, followed by Age of Rebellion in 2014 and Force and Destiny in 2015.  Each of the games, while using the same mechanics, have a different focus.  Edge deals with characters on the edge of polite society; smugglers, bounty hunters, colonists.  Rebellion allows for characters in the Rebel Alliance, fighting against the Galactic Empire’s evil.  Force focuses on Jedi and other Force-sensitives.  The three games are set during the original trilogy, but can be adapted, with work, to other eras.

The FFG games need to use specialty dice marked for use in play.  It is possible to use regular dice** and convert the numbers to the special markings, but it is easier with the specialty dice.  The dice provide for more than just success and failure; they also add advantages and threats.  A failure could come with an advantage and success could come with complications.  Scenes from the movies, like Han stepping on a twig when right behind a stormtrooper in Return of the Jedi, can come from the mechanic, ensuring that the feel of the movies is kept.

Each game moves the timeline through the movies.  Edge is set shortly after the destruction of the Death Star in A New Hope.  Rebellion is set just after the events in The Empire Strikes Back.  Force is set after Return of the Jedi.  However, players and GMs aren’t limited to those eras.  /Force/ can easily be used for a group of Jedi padawans during the prequel era.  All three could be used for a campaign set during The Force Awakens.  Work would need to be done, such as re-skinning existing vehicles for the new ones seen in the new movie, but the amount of work needed is minimal.

Each of the above games had a different approach to the Galaxy Far, Far Away.  While each one had some areas that needed work, overall, the games remained faithful to the source.  Players could feel like they were part of Star Wars, which is the most important part of adapting to a game.

* Role-playing games use more regular polyhedrons than just the standard cube dice.
** Regular meaning six-, eight-, and twelve-sided, as used in other games such as D&D.