From Hocus Pocus to Homebrew: My Star Wars RPG Origin Story
I am a huge fan of Star Wars. I mean, who isn’t really? And, of course, I am an RPG mega-nerd. One of the first TTRPGs I ever got, in fact, the very first gaming book I ever bought, was the Darth Vader cover of the West End Games Star Wars: The Role-Playing Game Second Edition.
Let’s go back a little, though. It was the summer of 1992. My friend was diagnosed with a tumor in his leg, and our normal “endless summer” activities (swimming, running, jumping, climbing trees) were put on hold. In an effort to give our ADHD-rattled 12-year-old boy-brains something to do that wasn’t playing Nintendo or otherwise bothering his parents, they bought him the AD&D 2nd Edition Player's Handbook and DMG. We were hooked.
Over the next few months, we spent entire days sitting on his back porch in the sun, fighting hobgoblins, solving mysteries, and rewriting histories between episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, DuckTales, and wearing out my uncle’s VHS copies of the Star Wars Trilogy. Telling stories powered by plastic random number generators became an obsession.
While my friend was the DM for our earliest D&D games, I spent most of the summer, when I wasn’t over at his place playing, swimming, and fantasizing about telling my own stories. Then one day, my dad took me up to Ryder's Hobby Shop in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We were getting some model airplanes to build together when I saw it for the first time: Darth Vader’s head framed in the middle of a dark blue gradient cover with the words “STAR WARS” in dull silver, and right below that, the words that set my heart aflutter: “THE ROLEPLAYING GAME.”
But… I was a kid. I didn’t have the money to buy it, and my dad didn’t know what roleplaying was. This wasn’t that long after the Satanic Panic, and while I wasn’t raised in a particularly religious home, the “panics” of the 1980s were not exactly limited to churchgoers. So, I had to wait. I spent the next few weeks loafing around the pool, dreaming about how my players would escape the clutches of Stormtroopers, fly X-Wings in pitched space dogfights, and save whole worlds from the veil of an oppressive Galactic Empire. I mowed lawns, did the dishes, weeded the yard, and saved every single penny, even the ones found on the ground. I was going to get that book, come hell or high water.
As the summer turned to fall, we visited my mom’s family in Cadillac and took a trip to see my aunt at her house in Traverse City. I took my three 1-gallon Ziploc bags of change and marched right into Hocus Pocus, a little magic shop on the second floor of the Arcade Building. When I say "Magic Shop," I don’t mean Magic: The Gathering (although I had gotten into that around the same time); Hocus Pocus was a shop that sold magic tricks (I was also the kid who wanted to grow up to be a stage magician). I had PLANNED to spend some of my hard-earned coin on learning new tricks. I hadn’t exactly forgotten about the Star Wars RPG, far from it, but one thing about me has always been true: I am endlessly interested in learning new things.
Anyway, there I was, surrounded by literal magic, clutching a fascinating little spiral-bound book of tricks (The Klutz Book of Magic) I had found, the Schmendrick-looking cartoon wizard on the cover, and a little golden bag of REAL magic clutched in my grubby little hands, when destiny intervened.
Darth Vader was there, staring out from his deep blue “Phantom Zone.” And it wasn’t the only book they had, either. Oh no, they had a whole SLEW of eye-popping, imagination-swirling Star Wars RPG books. It was a veritable cornucopia of hardcover-bound childhood wonder. What I had was three gallons of coins. I was FLUSH with cash! It was MY money!! Nobody could stop me!!!
I grabbed everything, rushed to the counter, and started, literally, counting out my pennies onto the counter. The total was over $100. The poor clerk just stared at me, but I walked out of that shop utterly bewitched. I not only got my magic tricks, but I was also about to become George Lucas (with less money)!!!
Star Wars was the first TTRPG I ever ran. My friends and I fought the Evil Empire; mingled with Han, Leia, Luke, and Lando; smuggled goods all over the galaxy; and even flew the Death Star trench in our Y-Wings, only failing to take Luke's glory by a few pips.
Over the next six years, we spent THOUSANDS of hours immersed in the Star Wars universe. Sure, we still played D&D and MtG, and discovered other games like Vampire the Masquerade, Street Fighter, Robotech, and Rifts... Suffice it to say, we played a LOT of games in the Golden Age of TTRPGs.
When the 2000s rolled around, and WotC picked up the license, we moved on. Sure, we played it a bit, but let’s be honest: the d20 system is really only good at one thing, D&D (in my opinion, anyway). The prequel movies also spoiled a lot of the magic for us. Regardless of your thoughts on the prequels, the truth is, they just didn’t inspire us the way the older films did.
So, we moved on and expanded our storytelling into new realms.
We did revisit the setting when Fantasy Flight released their version. We even enjoyed it for a while… but the magic wasn’t there. At least not for me.
Then, about three years ago, I started getting the itch to go back to “Old School” Star Wars. But the old WEG system was created almost 39 years ago, and the reality is, it feels old. Rolling huge pools of dice, counting every single pip, rolling to defend, rolling for damage… it was a lot.
It got me thinking: way back in 1998, WEG modified the d6 system for Hercules & Xena (the Legend System). This was a much faster, success-based version of the system. The only trouble was that it wasn’t backwards compatible. I had always dreamed of a “Third Edition” of the Star Wars RPG, but it never came to be. While other designers embraced and modified the system after Purgatory Publishing released it under OGL, nothing ever really felt… right.
So, I said to myself, “Self, why not make an ‘overlay’ that converts the old WEG d6 system into a quick conversion so players can just use their old sheets, old books, and old dice? No need to rework stat blocks and add static TN’s. It won’t fix all the problems of a nearly 40-year-old game; don't even try. Keep the same number of rolls but speed it all up.”
Now, I'm sure I'm not the only person who has ever tried this. There are literally hundreds of variations of the d6 Star Wars game out there. But I've never come across one quite like this, and frankly, while a lot of the ones I've seen over the years are fine and dandy, they didn't feel like what I was looking for. So, after years of false starts and bad takes on the concept, I finally came up with what I think is a fine first draft of an overlay system modification, and I want to share it with you. This isn't a total rewrite; it’s an "active overlay" designed to let you play any version of WEG Star Wars with the velocity of a modern cinematic RPG.
The Highlights:
- Zero Conversion Necessary: Use your 30-year-old character sheets and NPC stat blocks as-is.
- Success-Based Resolution: We’re ditching the mental math of adding up 6D+2 for a streamlined success-counting mechanic.
- Keep the "Wild Die": The chaos and tension of the original game remain intact.
- Faster Combat: By simplifying the math behind opposing rolls like Dodge and Soak, combat rounds move at the speed of a TIE Fighter.
This overlay is my love letter to the OSR spirit and the bygone era of the classic Star Wars Expanded Universe. It’s for the GMs who want to grab a dusty copy of Tatooine Manhunt and run it tonight without a two-hour prep session. It’s the same galaxy, the same dice, and the same stories, just faster.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Dmc4kjl58Y4ABgGgPbFc0cB2jqPFijP4631fD4Ola5k/edit?usp=sharing
If you enjoyed this story or find the rules overlay interesting, I don't really reddit a ton, but I have other places I do frequent a bit more, and I'm trying to be more present here. You can read the original post here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/from-hocus-pocus-157532686
NOTE: I did use AI for SOME of the math because I never really understood the Wild Die math well enough to finish this system. A lot of this was written based on intuition until I ran the numbers past AI. I did make a few tweaks as a result (like altering the Damage Chart and moving the massive damage rule from every 5D giving +1 auto success to every 5D beyond 10D). I also used Grammarly for spelling and punctuation. Despite being an English major, I am a terrible speller.