Star Wars Roleplaying Game (Fantasy Flight Games)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Star Wars Roleplaying Game from Fantasy Flight Games arrived in 2012 with a bold proposition: one galaxy, three completely separate games, all designed to work together. Before a single dice roll, players had to choose their corner of that universe. Would they run cargo on the fringes as smugglers and bounty hunters? Fight the Empire as rebel soldiers? Or explore the fading remnants of the Jedi Order as Force-sensitive fugitives? Each choice came packaged in its own standalone box, each with its own moral framework, its own measure of success and failure, and its own flavour of storytelling.

  At the heart of the system lay something genuinely unusual: custom dice covered in symbols rather than numbers, borrowed and reshaped from Fantasy Flight's earlier work on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Critics noticed. Fans debated. And the questions worth asking go beyond the dice themselves. How did three separate game lines become one of the most decorated tabletop roleplaying games of its era? What does it mean to design a game where you can succeed and fail at the same time? And how does a property as sprawling as Star Wars get divided into a rulebook?

• 2. From Wizards to Fantasy Flight

  ›

  Wizards of the Coast held the Star Wars roleplaying license for eleven years before declining to renew it in 2010. That decision opened a door. At Gen Con 2011, Fantasy Flight Games announced they had acquired the license directly from Lucasfilm Ltd. The following year's Gen Con laid out an ambitious roadmap: three distinct game lines, each announced for a different year, with Star Wars: Edge of the Empire targeting 2013, Star Wars: Age of Rebellion for 2014, and Star Wars: Force and Destiny for 2015.

  Fantasy Flight did not wait for launch to invite scrutiny. They released a paid beta version of Edge of the Empire alongside the Beginner Game in 2012, a move that drew early criticism. Paying to test an unfinished product struck some players as unusual. But that beta also revealed where the design was rooted: Jay Little's Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay third edition provided the structural DNA, with the dice pool system carried over and then rebuilt for the Star Wars setting. The twelve-sided dice replaced ten-sided ones, the exploding die mechanic was removed entirely, and the stance dice from Warhammer disappeared. What remained was something new enough to stand on its own.

• 3. The Narrative Dice System

  ›

  Seven different dice types sit at the centre of this game, and none of them show a single number. Green eight-sided ability dice represent a character's raw attribute level. Yellow twelve-sided proficiency dice represent trained skill. Light blue six-sided boost dice reward favourable circumstances. Purple eight-sided difficulty dice set the challenge level of a task. Red twelve-sided challenge dice appear when an opponent is skilled. Black six-sided setback dice punish bad conditions. And a white twelve-sided Force die, used to generate destiny points at the start of each session, handles the pull of the Force itself.

  The facets resolve on two separate axes simultaneously. One axis tracks success or failure. The other tracks advantage or threat, meaning positive or negative side-effects that exist independently of whether the main action worked. A character can fail a task but create a useful opening for an ally. They can succeed but trigger an alarm. Game Informer noted that this structure gives players a role in interpreting outcomes together rather than waiting for the game master alone to rule on a roll. A reviewer writing for Penny Arcade described the design as built to facilitate storytelling rather than act as a neutral arbitration tool.

  Two rare symbols sit at the extreme ends of each axis. Triumph appears only on proficiency dice and counts as a success while also unlocking special effects or dealing critical damage. Despair appears only on challenge dice and counts as a failure while also triggering a powerful negative consequence. The white Force die feeds a separate economy: destiny tokens, small black-and-white sided tokens distributed between the players and the game master at the start of each session. Each time a token is spent to shift the odds of an action, it flips to the opposing side's pool, creating a tide that was designed to flow back and forth throughout a session.

• 4. Three Games, One Galaxy

  ›

  Star Wars: Edge of the Empire is set shortly after the destruction of the first Death Star, and its characters occupy the fringes of galactic society: bounty hunters, colonists, explorers, hired guns, smugglers, and technicians. The defining disadvantage mechanic for this line is Obligation, something each character is compelled or forced to do. The game master rolls percentile dice at the start of each session to determine which player's Obligation will shape the evening's events. The number of players in the group sets the base level of that disadvantage, meaning smaller groups carry heavier individual burdens.

  Universal career specializations allow movement between the three lines. A veteran Edge of the Empire character can use the Force Sensitive Exile specialization to gain access to Force and Destiny rules. A Recruit specialization lets Edge of the Empire characters cross into Age of Rebellion campaigns. A 2019 review from Strange Assembly observed that Force and Destiny's Morality mechanic makes it uniquely portable, since a hidden Force user fits more naturally into any group than an entire cell of rebels or a crew of smugglers.

• 5. Eras and Sourcebooks

  ›

  The three core games cover the original trilogy era, but the sourcebook line extended the timeline in both directions. Star Wars: Dawn of Rebellion, published in 2018, is set during the ascendance of the Empire and draws on the animated series Star Wars Rebels and the film Rogue One from 2016. A review in the UK magazine Tabletop Gaming by Richard Jansen-Parkes described its setting as a time of stealth missions and sabotage rather than open conflict, populated by desperate renegades rather than powerful warriors. Jansen-Parkes also noted that Dawn of Rebellion includes material for running adventures inside the Death Star itself.

  Rise of the Separatists, announced in August 2018 and released on the 9th of May 2019, pushed the timeline back to the beginning of the Clone Wars and the opening of Palpatine's regime. Its companion volume, Collapse of the Republic, released on the 28th of June 2019, covers the later seasons of the Clone Wars and the destruction of the Republic. The ENNIE Award-nominated website Cannibal Halfling Gaming reviewed both volumes together and observed that Collapse of the Republic functions as a standalone entry for players focused on that era, though certain play styles benefit from having Rise of the Separatists as well. The Force Awakens Beginner Game, released in August 2016, moved the timeline forward into the sequel era, set just before the events of the 2015 film, though wider sequel-era support remained limited across the product line as a whole.

• 6. Character Building and Conflict

  ›

  Six core characteristics define every character: Brawn for physical power, Agility for physical precision, Intellect for book knowledge, Cunning for street wisdom, Willpower for endurance and focus, and Presence for charisma. Ratings range from one to six, though five is the ceiling during character creation. Each species template sets different starting minimums and maximums, and additional ratings can be purchased as the character develops.

  After attributes, players choose a career and then one or more specializations within it. Specialization trees unlock Talents, which divide into passive abilities that remain active throughout a session and active abilities that require a roll to trigger and may only work a limited number of times per session. A character who exhausts one specialization tree must purchase a new specialization to gain further Talents. Buying a specialization outside the character's own career costs more, while universal career specializations that bridge game lines cost the same as if they were native to the character's existing career.

  Motivation provides a different kind of engine. In Edge of the Empire, motivation is an ambition, cause, or relationship. In Age of Rebellion, it is a quest, belief, or personal connection. In Force and Destiny, it is an ambition, cause, or faith. A character who engages their motivation during play earns a bonus experience point. Skills divide into three groups: Knowledge skills for intellectual tasks, Combat skills for confrontational ones, and general skills for everything else. When a character buys a rank in a skill, regular rolls substitute a yellow twelve-sided proficiency die for a green eight-sided ability die. Combat itself opens with an Initiative roll using either the Cool or Vigilance skill, and then proceeds through a range band system for determining the modifiers on attacks.

• 7. Awards and Reception

  ›

  Edge of the Empire took multiple Golden Geek Awards in 2013, winning RPG Game of the Year and RPG Best Supplement for the Beginner Game, as well as the UK Games Expo Award for Best Role-Playing Game. The following year, Age of Rebellion's Core Rulebook won Golden Geek's RPG Best Artwork and Presentation. Force and Destiny appeared on Popular Mechanics' list of the ten best tabletop games of 2015; reviewer Giaco Furino wrote in a separate Popular Mechanics piece that the game is full of fanservice for die-hard fans while remaining accessible to newcomers, and that it prioritises story over number-crunching. Force and Destiny went on to win the Origins Award for Best Role-Playing Game in 2016 and Fan Favorite Role-Playing Game, with Edge of the Empire taking the Fan Favorite award again in 2017.

  Daniel Foster, reviewing the Edge of the Empire Beginner Game for FanSided in 2020, noted that his group completed the included adventure in approximately two hours without the game bogging down even while they were still learning the dice. Foster also observed that despite the game predating Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm, his group encountered no major conflicts with newer canon. In 2022, CBR cited the dice pool system as the best example of theme influencing mechanics in the game, highlighting how the requirement to interpret rolls as a group keeps players engaged in the storytelling rather than waiting passively for a ruling.

• 8. Edge Studio and the Road Ahead

  ›

  Fantasy Flight Games announced in 2020 that they were discontinuing their tabletop roleplaying game lines. Parent company Asmodee moved the Star Wars Roleplaying Game license to their subsidiary Edge Studio, which in October 2021 outlined two phases of continued support: reprints first, then new supplements. Sam Gregor-Stewart, Edge Studio's RPG manager and former lead developer of Edge of the Empire, hinted at the possibility of an entirely new Star Wars roleplaying game system. One month later, Edge Studio told the outlet Dicebreaker that no standalone Star Wars RPGs were in active development, pulling back from the earlier suggestion.

  Printed books had become scarce during the hiatus, and in October 2022 Asmodee announced a new print run of several sourcebooks. The titles released in November 2022 included Dawn of the Rebellion, Rise of the Separatists, and Starships and Speeders, along with game master's kits for Age of Rebellion and Edge of the Empire. In December 2022, Edge Studio announced reprints of eleven books including the Core Rulebooks for all three main game lines. The three entry-level boxed sets were scheduled for a return in December 2023. Also in 2018, Fantasy Flight had published a 30th anniversary edition of the original Star Wars roleplaying game from 1987, a reminder of how long players have been finding their place in that galaxy, and how persistently they return to it.