Battles with Integrity

So, I walked into my FLGS (Engdame, btw) with tasty birthday gift cards buring a hole in my pocket (thank you to jenderqueer and LA&B!), looking to see what I might find.

I was tempted to pick up The Great Pendragon Campaign, as I really want to run a King Arthur Pendragon game sometime in the nearish future (mebbe next spring, on Thursdays?), but name_redacted has admonished me not to read the book, since I am playing in a GPC game right now on Sundays. Despite a fair bit of logical gymnastics ¹, I asked the guys at Endgame to reassure me that the book would still be available in the spring and then looked around for other neat toys in the game store. I perused through the new RPG books (lots of stuff on the nice to have, but no time to read list). I skimmed across the used RPG books section (occassionally there's a nice find, like Forest Perilous for $2). Next to the used RPGs I saw something that looked familiar, and surprised me a little.

I had forgotten that it was coming out this fall, but there it was. A nice wide box with colorful artwork depicting a desperate battle against overwhelming odds, and a window on each end of the box showing the flashy part of the content. Beneath the window on the left side was a menacing multi-toned grey dagger shape. I examined the box further. Beneath the window on the right, there was a cream and dun colored loaf shape with nobblys on it, somewhat like a beignet, but also resembling the curves of a whale with the fins removed. The middle of the box proudly proclaimed:

"Contains 2 exclusive miniatures—-Super Star Destroyer Executor and Mon Calamari Star Defender Viscount."

Oh.

I took it to the counter and asked about the price. Chris named a number a little higher that I would have been willing to pay, but then he said, "I've got an open box, would you like to see what's inside?" Inside his box were not only the two behemoths visible under the plastic, but also 8 other ships of varying size, including a Llamda-class shuttle, and other spacecraft harking back from my impressionable youth. Damn.

I hope to use the stuff I picked up in a Star Wars RPG game sometime. As the minis are packed randomly, I am stuck with some prequel stuff I'd just as soon do without, but I'm definitely interested in getting my hands on some more of the original trilogy stuff. Now that I've got the Executor, I definitely need to fill out the set with a couple of Victory-class SDs, an Interdictor, at least one Imperial-class SD, and multifarious TIE fighters, just for the bad guys, and the gamut of Mon Calimari cruisers, Nebulon-B frigates, Correlian corvettes and gunships, and A-, B-, Y-, or X-Wing fighters for my Rebel/New Republic collection. I have always enjoyed the extra zing that a well-placed visual aid can give to an RPG, and suddenly I'm brimming with ideas for stories.

Of course that makes two campaigns I'm suddenly itching to run... d'oh! Maybe late spring or early summer² I can persuade the Sunday group to turn their eyes from the semi-historical Arthurian past to a game set a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away....

¹Mental gymnastics like:

1. Maybe I could buy the book, and lock it away somewhere until the campaign is over. Not really feasible.
2. Maybe if I only read up to the year before the year we're currently playing. NO! There's sure to be information in there I oughtn't know yet.
3. If I do buy the book, I could run the game for a long time in the Uther period, thereby avoiding the knowledge I shouldn't have, I could stay a generation or two behind name_redacted in the timeline, but still get my KAP GMing freak on.

² And finishing before fall semester starts, as (if I get in) I don't know that my Junior year at Cal will allow for me to expend a lot of energy on preparing for GMing.

N.B.: In the Star Wars Imperial Sourcebook, by West End Games, there is a neat diagram of ship silhouettes showing relative sizes of ships in the Imperial fleet. There are little 7 milimeter silhouettes showing the kind of craft that players might encounter on a personal level, and the Imperial-class Star Destoyer takes up a significant part of the diagram. In the background, in grey, is the diagram of the rearmost portion of the Super-class Star Destoyer. It's pretty impressive, as it dwarfs everything else in view. But when you turn the page, a faint grey mass is still visible behind the text, spearing its way across the two-page spread, and onto the next... and onto the next. In the sidebar of each page is the legend: Silhouette of Super Star Destroyer continued from previous page.