This is the first edition of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game Sourcebook from West End Games. Written by Bill Slavicsek (who would eventually become WEG’s creative director) and Curtis Smith in 1987, this was pretty much the motherlode of Star Wars material for the period, whether you were into RPGs or not. It marks the first serious attempt to codify the Star Wars universe and is arguably the foundation of the Expanded Universe (some may say that is really the Marvel comic series, but those never felt real to me, at least not in the same way this did – feel free to fight me on that).
What we have here are game stats for stuff you saw in the movies – ships, aliens, blasters, characters and more. This material isn’t just rattled off for readers. Rather, a great deal of work was done to make all of this stuff function as a whole, to make sense as parts of a greater world. If stuff wasn’t shown in the movies but it made sense for inclusion, the writers made it up (luxury space liners!).
The result formed the model for dozens of additional sourcebooks over the next decade, as the Star Wars RPG methodically converted and expanded other Star Wars media into RPG material.
It helps that Slaviscek had access to the Lucasfilm archives. As I tend to mention whenever I talk about the Star Wars RPG, a lot of the material this book contains was simply unavailable elsewhere. Aside of a few children’s books and a series of sketchbooks, stills and production art were hard to come by. Having all these concept illustrations, particularly the McQuarrie stuff, in one place was pure Star Wars fan catnip.