Alison Taylor: Well, ever since you slammed an asteroid into Earth it just hasn't been the same. We're all doing what we can to score cameos on your other productions.

GM: Point taken. *ahem* Sorry about that whole rock thing.

AT: It's no problem, I was looking to expand my résumé a bit anyway.

GM: Well, in that case, welcome to the set of the Star Wars campaign!

AT: Glad to be here.

GM: So where would you like to begin?

AT: My first question should be fairly obvious, how in the name of Saburo Arasaka and the Corporate Board of Biotechnica did a GM end up running a fluffy-bunny Star Wars game?

GM: *laughs* That does seem like a stretch doesn't it? The short version is that our old GM was just getting burned out with the whole campaign. I had been a player in several Star Wars RPG games back in college and volunteered to take over once the Cybergame had run its course.

AT: Which gets us back to the rock.

GM: Exactly.

AT: Did the taking over of this game influence the outcome of the Cyberpunk campaign?

GM: Not directly, I had already planned on the general course of events in that campaign, what with the genespliced soldiers ala Dark Angel and the dénouement to the Chicken Little Saves The Day scenario that I had run with the Boulder group.

AT: So, basically, the plotlines for that game were already planned out for the foreseeable future.

GM: Their fate, and yours, were pretty much sealed yes. The rock (part two) was going to hit no matter what, it really wasn't just a convenient way to switch game systems. But, in the end, it worked out nicely that way.

AT: So then you took over with Star Wars. As you said, that's quite a jump. How did you deal with the less-than-realistic physics system?

GM: That one took me awhile to get used to, since in Cyberpunk I was famous for being a strict physics disciplinarian. Usually, in that game, I would let the more cutting edge or fantastic technologies slide if myself or another player could vaguely figure out how the technology could work.

AT: That sounds time consuming.

GM: But it was also very rewarding, it's amazing the things you can learn while gaming. For example, one of my players wanted to make a stun phaser. We ended up researching laser and taser designs until we finally hit upon an old Tesla trick. The player's techie ended up creating a device that would fire a high-power laser to ionize a column of air between the gun and the target. Then it was a simple case of running an electric jolt down that ionization path to stun the target.

AT: Would that work?

GM: Theoretically yes, it could work if you had the background tech level high enough to hammer out all the details. Which was really the point of the whole exercise. Sadly, that approach wouldn't work out so well with Star Wars.

AT: Aliens, hyperspace, blasters, the infamous "Lucasdrive" (tm).

GM: Yeah, and let's not forget the ability to survive inside a giant worm who still has its mouth open to space. I mean, that's still more or less a vacuum in there--breathmasks wouldn't help much. That's the sort of thing that just makes a CyberGM twitch.

AT: So what did you do?

GM: I sat down and watched all three of the classic trilogy movies in a row just to get a feel for the universe. It's long been called a space opera, and I wanted to wrap my mind around what that concept meant. I eventually got to the point where the physics of the world system were secondary to the flow of the story. Perhaps the technology was so high and so deeply imbedded in the background that we can simply assumed that it was all covered.

AT: So, to quote Douglas Adams, "how to breath in a vacuum was suddenly Somebody Else's Problem."

GM: Either that or space was simply less dangerous, which still makes me twitch a bit. I did manage to solve in my own mind at least a few of the more nagging aspects of the universe.

AT: Such as?

GM: The Lucasdrive, i.e. Hyperspace. It's a magic FTL drive that can zip you all over the galaxy--assuming that you don't get close to a gravity well and don't smack into something. This, to me, sounded awfully close to the Stutterwarp or "Jerome Drive" concept. Another intriguing idea is the Alcubierre Warp Drive, which very closely resembles the hyperdrive we've seen in the movies. As for the aliens all looking more or less like bipedal, two armed, two eyed, and tool using beasties I refer you to a fascinating book called Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe by Simon Conway Morris. It's sure to piss off a few of the Creationists out there.

AT: Interesting. Now that you had the story over technology aspect firmly settled, how did you get a grasp on the story?

GM: To get a real feel for the larger than life dramatic aspects, I stuck pretty closely to the Original Trilogy of movies--even going so far as to set the game just prior to the Battle of Hoth.

AT: You seem to include a number of different cultural aspects besides what is seen in the Holy Trinity of movies, so what else did you do to prepare for running this game?

GM: The best stories, in my opinion, are not about the events, they're about the people. Lucas lost that a bit in Phantom Menace, but has made a nice comeback with Eps II and hopefully III. I needed to get in touch with how to set a galaxy-spanning story around a select group of characters, so I went back to the source material.

AT: Source?

GM: The same guy that greatly inspired Lucas' style of A New Hope: Akira Kurosawa. Particularly the films The Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress. They are absolutely some of the best character-driven movies I've ever seen. Also, as a bonus, Kurosawa-san's filming style was also adopted for the Star Wars series: The frame compositions, subtle character introductions, long shots, scene-change wipes--they're all present in the older Samurai films.

AT: Any other major influences?

GM: I'm also taking a lot of hints from Joss Whedon, who is known for several successful character driven TV shows. Thanks to the smuggler aspects of this campaign, Firefly has taken center stage as a source of inspiration. I've also taken a few pages from Sophocles, some of the same ones that Lucas and Joss used in fact. The Greeks loved their melodramatic heroes fighting the good fight against impossible odds. Toss in some of his Sumerian-inspired tragic heroes with fatal flaws and serious family issues and you've got Star Wars.

AT: Gilgamesh, Beowulf, that sort of thing?

GM: Precisely. Oh, it looks like the director's commentaries track is all cued up and ready. Any closing questions?

AT: Yanna and Kaylee, both are amazingly similar characters--which one came first?

GM: Believe it or not, I was playing Yanna as a PC long before I was ever introduced to Kaylee Fry (Firefly). Both are the overworked, cute as a button, often in love, and generally witty engineers of their respective broken-down transports. The were so similar, in fact, that when I later played Yanna as an NPC her personality was highly influenced by Jewel Staite's performance of Kaylee.

AT: Although Yanna was supposed to be a Jedi.

GM: That was the plan originally, yes.

AT: And now?

GM: You'll see, you'll see... that's still a bit of a secret here on the set.

AT: Any hints?

GM: Think black synth-leather bodysuit.

AT: And just when I thought you'd given up Cyberpunk.

GM: Well, as they say, you can take the GM out of Night City...

AT: *laughs* I can't wait to see how this all turns out. Everyone make sure to tune in Sunday nights to find out how this story unfolds.

GM: Thank you again for coming Ali. *shakes hands*

AT: It was my pleasure.

GM: And now, on to the Director's Commentary track for Act I, scene ii: A wretched hive of scum and villainy.