I got a request a couple of weeks ago from Osprey at the FFG forums for this vessel, and just recently completed it. The YT-2000, known best as the Otana from X-Wing: Alliance, isn’t new, as it’s already a part of the Fly Casual sourcebook, but the deckplan (obviously) is. You can find it up on the Deckplans>Medium Craft page.

If you head on over to the “Modules” page, you’ll see that I’ve added a new short module – “The Quarantine Quandary.” This is different from my norm – this actually isn’t a module I designed; it’s a module that was originally written by Tommy “VerdantSF” Roddy. He runs a campaign that focuses on one-shots and characters that drop in and out of playing – a really fun concept. I’ve played in it a little, and I had the opportunity to collaborate with him for a Halloween session, and this module was the result.

It’s a one-shot designed with a novel theme – two parties and two GMs playing two games simultaneously, with some basic interactivity between the parties – like a live version of a living campaign setting. It was, as we expected, a huge challenge in its implementation, but it’s a lot of fun to try out things that really shouldn’t work. It ended up being great fun, although it was a big time management game – consequently, the module has suggestions for both in-character and out-of-character time benchmarks.

All the art for the module was posted last month, and as mentioned on the modules entry, you can get them from the “Area Maps” page. Head on over and enjoy!

As promised back in this late August post, I’ve added my work done on the Fandom Comics module (“Escape From Smuggler’s Hold”) to the site. You can see it over in the maps section – there’s a Mon Gazza overview, the eponymous prison, and an asteroid base (which is the solitary set of maps done at personal scale). I don’t often work on larger, representative-scale maps like this, but I enjoyed this work and I’d like to do more like it in the future. So maybe my next module will use more maps like this – who knows?

I’ve also added a set of maps I recently did for another collaborative piece – “A Quarantine Quandary.” This is part of a series of one-shots designed to make it easy to drop in and drop out, and you can read about it here. I collaborated on both the art and the design of the session – the adventure was written by Tommy “VerdantSF” Roddy, but he graciously let me get my hands in his work to help adapt it further for our sessions. I’ll probably link out to the adventure module a little later on.

On a final note, about a month ago, I adapted a new comment filter on the site to help minimize my need to filter spam comments. If you ever find that your comment seems to be ignored after you’ve posted it, please shoot me an e-mail at “maveritchell at gmail dot com” and let me know – and apologies in advance if that does happen to you. Thanks!

This was a fun one to use to jump back on the horse.

Per a request (Osprey), I’ve made the Aurore-class freighter, known for its appearance in the Zygerrian arc in Clone Wars (among a couple of appearances in that show). I always enjoy adding the newer vessels, because there’s less reference material, and it makes me work a bit harder to come up with something decent. You can see the stab I’ve taken at this particular vessel on the “Medium Craft” Deckplans page.

Inspired by a post in the SWRPG subreddit, I took a hard look at the really “cheap” vessels I had available. I didn’t have many – there really aren’t many. This particular ship was a great one to turn into a real junker (and consequently a cheap purchase) – it’s a Clone-Wars-era ship (which means that it’s older), it’s not designed to support a whole lot of people or amenities (it’s basically a box with engines), and it’s used by criminal lowlifes. A lot of the ships in the book(s) are very off-the-assembly-line new and useful, so it’s nice to design around something that isn’t, inherently, all that great.

I always keep my eye open for neat ship designs to work with, and one of the ones I’ve got in my backlog should be another great one to adapt as a pretty inexpensive ship (canonically, it’s really cheap too, which is a bonus). Hopefully I’ll get that one done some time here soon, too.

I’ve also updated a few Silhouettes to some of the vessels.

To back up, one of the things that really bothers me design-wise about the game has been the incredibly imprecise application of numbers. I’m a big fan of accuracy. While there are several stats that are “in the ballpark” levels of accuracy, few have been as inconsistent as the Silhouette stat. That’s been a source of more frustration than it probably should be, and as a result, I’ve probably stuck my fingers in my ears a little.

The biggest area of flux in the Silhouette stat has been right at around the 4/5 line. For the most part, this separates the freighters from the small capital ships, and it’s particularly contentious, because it’s the point at which the handling (not Handling) of the ship starts to look like a capital vessel (i.e. inability to perform some maneuvers). Problematically, the books have had Silhouette 5 craft as small as 41m in length and Silhouette 4 craft as long as 50m in length (yes, Silhouette is volume and not one dimension, but these are similarly-proportioned ships). Consequently, I’ve done pretty much whatever I felt like around that area, because it would drive me crazy to try and figure out the non-logic driving those stats.

However, in discussing it recently, I was concerned that I was simply being obstinate, and I gave the books a quick review. While I’m still frustrated with the imprecision, there looks like there’s at least a plurality of ships that use the 40+m mark as Silhouette 5. Not wanting to be a complete child, I’ve updated some of the vessels in the deckplans section accordingly.

It’s been a busy past couple of months at work, and I haven’t had the time to make new stuff for EotE/SWRPG as often as I’d like. Sorry!

However, I have had the opportunity in the interim to work with the guys over at Fandom Comics on a module (“Escape From Smuggler’s Hold”) for the d20radio Kickstarter. I did all the map work for the module, and everyone involved did a great job in making something that looks polished.

Because this is a d20radio-backer-exclusive module, I can’t put the maps up right away (although they’ll end up here eventually, too). If you’re a backer at d20radio, though, I’d encourage you to check out the module when it goes up in the backer zone. There have already been a couple of parts and pieces I made specifically for this module go up on this site, and I’ll probably make a few extra things that go with the module and put them up here too. Keep your eyes peeled!