T w e n t y S i d e d
– Shamus, Wednesday Dec 13, 2006
So, something great about this strip is it actually required a real, out-of-the-house quest. Most of these strips can be done from the comfort of a cave. Issac goes through and grabs every single screenshot from the movies, copies Dad’s original text, formats, and sends it to me. I, then, format everything site-side, write up my little quips and notes, and schedule it for Sunday, one second after midnight.
But this week, the strip contained a real life photo. The picture of the core rule book for the official Star Wars tabletop RPG. We talked about sizing up the original picture and doing some garbage sharpening on it and hoping it would look okay but…yeah, that looked…bad.
The next idea was just find the book and take a new picture. Easy, right?
Nope. Dad’s original copy, which I can only assume(?) he had, is lost to time. Maybe this was a picture of a book one of his players had? Maybe he asked one of his brothers for a shot of it?
I didn’t feel like contacting every single one of his old table, and some extended family, to see if they had this one book they might have had in 2006.
We could have looked up an eBay listing for one and snagged a screenshot, but…there’s an ick to just skimming someone’s photo without asking, and I’m personally against weird and confusing chats with eBay sellers when I have no intention of buying their product. They didn’t list it as some sort of strange modeling gig for a web-comic they may or may not have heard of.
So Issac and I jumped in the car and went to every comic book store within a thirty mile radius.
And then called every place within a two hundred mile radius.
Quickly the search turned into an awkward, stumbling interaction with confused comic-book store owners. I ask about the book I’m looking for, and they shake their heads. The book is out of print and most old copies have fallen apart, they are prized and hard to come by. The new edition is out, and new, like…new new. ‘You’ll be lucky to find a copy’ new.
They tell me to look on eBay and I (with an appropriate amount of shame) explain I don’t actually want to buy the book, but instead…take a picture of it? They tell me to just take a screenshot, like our original idea, and I just agree and leave, getting nowhere. I find a place that has it three hours away, and when I ask if they could just send me a picture of it, they laugh and hang up.
Shout out to ‘Your Parent’s Basement’ in Butler PA, for not only not laughing in my face, but also being super professional and helpful even though I wasn’t there to give them money. I don’t know what it’s like to be there as a customer, but they were excellent sports about the whole thing and let me peruse their library of rentals without paying the usual entry cost. They seem to be a place you rent tables for board and tabletop games? I think? Instructions unclear, but staff cool as hell about weirdos asking to take pictures with their products.
Anyway, we didn’t end up finding the book at all, we realized we could print a very ink-heavy and wasteful front page of a PDF and stick it on a blank stack of paper. Charlie surprised us all with pizza when we got home, and so the scene was set. We grabbed some of our own tabletop gear and made a whole set of it. Actually turned out to be a lot of fun. And loose printed PDF copies of handbooks are super common these days anyway, so really, it’s authentic.
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I appreciate the extra dedication that went into putting together that single panel of with the rule book. I’m fairly certain most people wouldn’t have blinked if you had just done as suggested and used a screenshot off Ebay.
I will say I’m not sure any of these guys is drinking Diet Pepsi. I think you need a sidequest for Mountain Dew Code Red.
Yeah, if I was a seller, as long as the person snagging the screenshot wasn’t intending to use it for nefarious purposes and just wanted to use it for entertainment/satire, I’d be 100% fine with it. I’d have no clue if thousands of people were taking screenshots of my page without my knowledge anyway.
I like that.
Ah, Dave’s bid for freedom! Good on him. A decent solution to a bad campaign.
Though the picture does fit: Dave seems like the kind of guy to download a bootleg copy of a rulebook rather than buy it…and then print it off as a massive sheaf of A4 paper.
Probably using his work printer and paper supplies.
I ran the numbers once back in the day, and the cost of printing out an entire book (with the ink printer most people would have) came close enough to the cost of just buying it that you’d have been better off paying the last couple dollars for the hardcover and nice glossy pages. Dunno how it stacks up nowadays but I’d bet it’s still pretty similar. Which is of course where the poaching of work supplies comes in for the joke/thing some people actually do and get away with apparently.
After failing to find a copy of warhammer quest at a sensible price, my brother and I once found a PDF of all the board pieces, cards and rulebooks, printed it off (using our parents’ printer so it wasn’t us paying for the ink), spent a full evening cutting everything out and sticking it to cereal boxes from the recycling, and then played one game before getting bored. It was fun for the nostalgia though
Someone who paid for their own ink and paper would never print this front page. It is either the office printer, or their parent’s.
Or these days, get the Kickstarter PDF version and print it out.
I may try that with The Secret World RPG, depending on whether my group can get together before or after the hard copy gets sent out.
Oh wow, that’s an impressive amount of effort to get this strip put together! I can’t help but respect the search for authenticity
And I’m only just realizing that this is probably the strip that got the Darths & Droids folks to use Star Wars as the setting for their… spin-off comic? That might be the best term for it? Which I should probably get back to reading one of these days
Darths and Droids is very much ongoing at the moment. They’re plowtering through The Last Jedi right now.
Awesome to hear! I last left off when I reached the end of their then-current content, which I think was around the end of Empire Strikes Back? I decided to let it rest for a little while to build up a bit of a backlog I could read through in a big sitting later.
It definitely sounds like they’ve made quite a bit of progress!
Don’t forget to check the sideways parallel universe progression via the author’s comment for episode 51 (‘The 21% Solution’ I think it’s called). They also sometimes update that without warning.
I’ve tried to get into Darths and Droids several times, but it’s just not as funny as DM of the Rings. Most of the jokes fall flat to me and I find the character development very tedious.
It also doesn’t help that I really like the prequels, so every time I get bored of the strips, I get reminded that I could be watching one of my favourite movies instead :D
My recollection is they asked Shamus if he was really going to do this for Star Wars and he said no. They asked if he would mind if they did and he said go ahead.
“this is probably the strip that got the Darths & Droids folks to use Star Wars”
Nope, it was a post by Adam Bloom responding to Shamus on this blog post, https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1226, right after this comic ended and Shamus was getting started on the Fear the Boot collab. Yes, Star Wars was mentioned in that discussion as well, but the guy who does Irregular Webcomic (which very regular) talked with his coworkers and they decided on Star Wars as (at the time) the Prequels were done and there were no other films on the horizon, so they figured they do all 6 movies.
Eight years later Kathleen Kennedy decided they needed to put out three more movies whose only saving grace would be that Darth and Droids would make them better, just as they’d done for the Prequels…
I’m pretty sure I have that book, and would have been happy to provide a photo like that. (And could still, if you ever need it.)
But this works great, too. Spending all the money on fancy dice and little on books, like Frodo here, is definitely a thing I’ve seen players do.
Salute to a fellow nerd with an aging tabletop collection :)
I am both mortified and amused by the game called Star Wars D&D.
I played quite a lot of it with my friends over the years (including from this book, but no, we don’t have a copy of that exact one still either), and the idea that it’s just “Star Wars D&D” is somehow offensive and reductive. Yet, at the same time, that’s exactly what it was, to a hilarious extent sometimes.
It’s really even less that it was Star Wars D&D than it was that it, D&D, and d20 Modern were all various evolutionary steps on the “d20 game system” WotC was continually working on at that time. New features would appear in one system, and then evolve into more finished versions in the next in the neighboring game line. I kinda miss those days, though it made it hard to remember which attack of opportunity or grapple rules went with which version of d20.
Your story of the search to find the book so you could photograph it was so impressive.What sort of obsessive dork would do all that? Must be in the genes!! You made me extra happy today.
Cool story
I bet it would be incredibly unlikely to find a d20 Star Wars book in any game shop, it’s been out of print for a lot of time and the IP for a star wars RPG changed hands many times.
It’s really nostalgic, I think Star Wars was one of my first long campaigns as a GM. We actually played the SAGA edition which was the next one that came before the one in the picture… it had it’s good sides and bad sides.
Now, to the comic… Man I fucking D R E A D that stuff, I’ve been there
Wait, which Star Wars tabletop do you want? Is it a specific edition? I don’t remember which game was in the original comic.
I ask because if Shamus made this in 2006 he was either using the Wizards of the Coast version or the West End Games version, and I think I have both. If this is specifically a d20 Star Wars it’s the WotC version and from the cover you’re using the WotC version in your printout. Do you want a picture of the book? Your side quest is very aesthetic but I wanted to offer in case a submission from a fan was also aesthetic.
For the record, the current Star Wars RPG, originally by Fantasy Flight Games and currently under Edge Studios, is fabulous and, in one rando internet nerd’s opinion, head and shoulders above 5e and d20 in general. Multi-axis degrees of success! The base system has also been spun off into a setting-agnostic system called Genesys which is also very, very good.
Eh, FFG’s system has some very intriguing bits, but having to purchase the base game rules three times really turned me off from ever collecting it and the rules some very clunky and hard to adjudicate bits. Also, it’s almost as restrictive a system as D&D, at which point, why aren’t you just playing a D20 version, which runs smoother?
Now, I have been toying with converting FFG’s L5R system (similar, but instead of critical fail states it has emotional/psychological stress) into Star Wars, i think it’d really do a good job finally allowing the Force to affect and be affected by the rules in a more “organic” manner.
The new photo looks so much more real than the original! Which is funny considering that it’s fake! But I could imagine that this is the table they’re playing at.
I forgot to comment when this was new, but I hope you still see this.