StarWarsderness of Mirrors

Last night I ran a one-shot of Wilderness of Mirrors, using the setting from Star Wars.

I replaced the 5 stats of Wilderness of Mirrors with five similar, but subtly different stats. The five attributes were:

• Droid - used for tech, repair, and computing
• Flyboy - used for piloting and acrobatics
• Jedi - used for The Force, Luke
• Princess - used to charm, inspire, and command
• Wookie - used to intimidate and battle

Effectively, I folded the "Saturn" and "Mercury" roles from the main game into each other, since my previous experience had told me that "Saturn" was too weak. I used Saturn's power, with general social-roll utility of Mercury. This left me with Mercury's special power sitting unused, and I realized that being able to tell a perfectly convincing lie was very much like "These aren't the droids you're looking for", so I added in the Jedi stat. The end result was that the five attributes felt much better balanced, instead of Saturn having the awkward "dump stat" status it has in the main rules. I was very pleased with that.

If you look at the attached character sheet I made, you'll notice I also tweaked the power of "Pluto". Stealth isn't really center-stage in the Star Wars films, it's got it's place, but it didn't seem it should be a central character focus. So, I made "Flyboy" cover acrobatics and piloting, with the modified special power to escape from any one tight situation. This is a slightly more frenetic and active version of Pluto's power, and it can be used in a ship. Again, I was pleased with the way it played out.

Overall, things went well. My only complaint involved my own memory issues re: the rules. The main rules are so simple, I didn't re-read them before play. I got about half way through the session, and then commented "I don't remember this being such a cake-walk for the players. I feel like the difficulties should be higher." That's when one my players (thanks, Erik!) stepped up and reminded me about the tokens/points the GM is supposed to get. Off the top of my head, I couldn't remember the rate the GM earns these Setback points, so we went with one every 30 minutes. Turns out that it's supposed to be one every 20 minutes, which would have been much more challenging, and probably far better to have the extra 3 or 4 Setbacks, but we had fun anyway.

As always with Wilderness of Mirrors, the GM just sets up a very brief mission proposal, and then lets the players roll with it. (The bulk of my game prep was making that character sheet.)

Players have a lot of narrative control, and you never really know where things are going to go. We started with the PCs having to steal the Death Star plans and convey them to Princess Leia. By the time all was said and done, the plot involved Wookie and Gamorrean porn stars, evil architects with brain-sucking Dark Side powers, lots of EVA (zero-G combat in space-suits), and an escape in a garbage scow. Very amusing... but trust me, the less you know about "the Wookie Wax", the better.