Category: Space Opera

  • We have an election on in Australia, the cradle of democracy, and as always in federal elections an enormous number of fringe political parties have crawled out from under their rocks. We have the Rotating Leadership Party, which is running on a platform of giving every person in Australia the chance to be prime minister…

  • Imagine our planet sends out a colony ship, to colonize some distant planet. It’s flying at near light speed, but the journey is still expected to take about 300 years; time dilation effects on the ship mean shipboard it’s only, say, 150 years – 5 or 6 generations. While the ship is speeding to its…

  • Iain M. Banks is dying: having seen off threats from militaristic empires and proto-gods, his galaxy-spanning, anarchist semi-utopian Culture has less than a year to live because of cancer. This marks the sad end of a great science fiction career, and a well-respected fiction writer. My first encounter with Banks was his first Culture novel,…

  • Today I received my copy of Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, along with some necessary WFRP3 materials. Edge of the Empire is described as a “beginner’s game,” which means that it essentially doesn’t have any character creation rules, has a very stripped down combat system, and contains a well laid out…

  • Yesterday’s role-playing was a session of Saga edition Star Wars, set in the era just after the clone wars, and my character was a Rodian scout – that is, one of Gredo’s race, pursuing essentially the same trade and with probably just as much aplomb and skill. My character, Seredo, was joining an established group,…

  • Six Against the Stars is a two volume space opera adventure by Stephen Hunt, whose work I have reviewed many times before. Six Against the Stars has an unlikely crew of adventurers thrown together against their will to try and prevent a rebellion in a far future stellar confederation. The main character is a useless…

  • I found this in the tumblr We are the 53%, your go-to page for people who vote against their own interests. Darth Vader and his stormtroopers are classic examples of people who voted against their own interests. You’re an exemplar for us all, Lord Vader!

  • The Australian census is due soon. In 2001, 0.37% of the population wrote “Jedi” as their religion. Will Yoda triumph this time around?

  • It’s not exactly unsung at the moment, but I thought I’d link to this excellent news article announcing the death of Obi-Wan Kenobi in a firefight with Imperial Storm Troopers on Alderaan. It’s a rare occasion that I enjoy humour based on morphing real life figures into fictional characters, but this is one of those…

  • Using the idea of random character generation for WFRP from the previous post, I came up with this idea for a character created randomly for the Star Wars universe, using the WFRP 3 template. This character is a Tusken Guide,  a specialist role for an elite minority of sand people. Every aspect of this character…