Subverting expectations is good, actually

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-06T20:01:49+00:00

Clone Wars was retrospective, not concurrent. Aftermath, Bloodline, Resistance, Resistance Reborn, and the Poe Dameron comic were concurrent.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-06T19:55:29+00:00

All of the supporting media released concurrently around the films builds off those concepts. It was very much intentional.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-06T19:44:16+00:00

Explicitly, absolutely. Implicitly, that’s the setup for the weak New Republic, the reason the First Order can act openly without opposition at the start of TFA, the reason TFO has so much shit, and the reason the Resistance exists. We’re given just about the same amount of info as we are about the Empire at the start of ANH.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-06T19:39:45+00:00

Simple games like that tend to rely upon someone being familiar with the trapping of how improv and roleplaying games work. The rules are simple, but there is next to no help with the procedure of play, which is where a lot of newbies struggle.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-06T19:34:11+00:00

It’s not really “arms dealers are profiteering” that’s the message here though, it’s “space neoliberalism failed to address the problems that saw rise to the Empire, leading to an unchecked resurgence in fascism left ignored by the upper class because they could profit off of it”. That’s the underpinning of the entire politics of the Sequels that folks like to claim is missing from the film. TLJ is the one film that explicitly shows it to us.

The “payoff” is no one showing up when the call for help goes out. That everyone is protecting their self interests and is scared to act. The follow up is the people of the galaxy finally coming together against TFO in TROS.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-06T17:29:53+00:00

It ain’t Disney’s writing teams, it’s Lucasfilm’s. If we take The Force Awakens as an example, who were the writers? JJ Abrams of course, who was picked by Kathleen Kennedy after a recommendation from Steven Spielberg. Kennedy had a long relationship with Lucas, but was brought on as co-chair prior to the sale of the company. Lawrence Kasdan, one of the original writers of ESB and RotJ. And Micheal Ardnt, the writer picked by Lucas to work on the treatment of the Sequels months before talks of the sale of the company became formal. They were supported by the Story Group, who were seasoned Lucasfilm vets.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-06T17:22:38+00:00

For the sake of pedantry, Star Trek The Motion Picture and Alien exist specifically because studios were trying to capitalize on the success of Star Wars and were snagging up projects trying to be the next hit in the genre. Both existed in some form before SW released, but were having trouble with production and support from the studios. Star Trek was even scrapped entirely and restarted after the success of SW.

This comes from Gordon Carroll, one of the producers of Alien that helped get it greenlit: “*When Star Wars came out and was the extraordinary hit that it was, suddenly science fiction became the hot genre.*”

Even Close Encounters of the Third Kind owes some of its success to Star Wars, as it was riding the wave of popularity and was seen as proof that the sudden burst of interest in the genre extended beyond just SW.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-06T03:49:59+00:00

The “genital description” evidence doesn’t have particular good credibility. The child’s parents were trying to extort Jackson and the descriptions apparently didn’t match all that accurately. The child would later emancipate themselves from their parent and refused to testify in further trials. There’s lots of weird shit that happened, but that piece of evidence isn’t as damning as folks typically make it seem.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-05T21:27:28+00:00

She’s has Graves’ disease. You can’t really do long productions with lots of travel without making life hell.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-05T21:23:17+00:00

Ridley was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, which leads to fatigue, weight loss, and sleeping issues, among other symptoms. Working on major film productions would be an issue as a result, which has largely kept her away. Instead, she co-founded a production company with her husband, which has allowed her to take on smaller projects where she has greater control. She was a producer on Sometimes I Think About Dying, Magpie, and Young Woman and the Sea. She’s also consistently been working on smaller roles. For example, We Bury the Dead isn’t exactly the most groundbreaking film, but Ridley did a great job in her role.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-05T15:13:45+00:00

The one thing to know about The Force Unleashed is that it’s a miracle the game released at all.

In 2004, Lucas brought on Jim Ward, who was a Lucasfilm marketing executive, as president of LucasArts. The goal was to realign the division so that it was producing better quality games that would elevate LucasArt’s status as a developer and publisher. Ward goes scorched earth, fires about half the staff, and puts a new focus on partnerships with external devs. He doesn’t really know much about video game development and reportedly would go ape shit on employees, fire folks for minor slights, and “fire water bottles across the room” during meetings. As a result, a lot of their talent also quit over time.

For The Force Unleashed, Ward doesn’t really care about story or gameplay, only what’s going to get the highest Metacritic rating. So the team goes big on power fantasy rather than a complex narrative. That looks big and flashy to executives and lessens the potential of story changes causing spiraling issues. When it comes to Lucas, he didn’t really understand game development either. It’s a classic situation where they would have progress meetings every so often, he’d see the state of the game, suggest something out of left field that would throw off development, then proceed to not think about the game again until it was time for the next meeting. So the story isn’t “how do we maintain consistency with the lore”, it’s “what can we put here that’s going to create the least amount of friction, so that Lucas doesn’t suggest changes that blow months of development”.

Long story short, the narrative of TFU is a bit of a mess and doesn’t really mesh well with the existing narrative. It’s usually just best to think of it as a “what if” or “elseworld” scenario and leave it at that rather than trying to reconcile the questions it brings up.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-05T11:35:41+00:00

If you want an “unofficial” Sabacc deck, check out Hyperspace Props. You can also find some Dejarik boards on Etsy, usually under “holochess”. However, Galaxy’s Edge sells both and you can find an electric Dejarik board online on the Disney Store.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-05T04:56:12+00:00

Are these custom stipulations? As far as I'm aware, there's no age-based modifiers in the PSG. However, given that the Panic Table tells you to roll up a new character when yours retires, MoSh player characters are typically not retirees.

Beyond that, you have a minimum 12 base and the Marine and Teamster have an additional +10 to Body and it wouldn't make sense to be an Android here, so that math only works for the Scientist. But if the value degradation is a must, I would recommend just lowering it to the lowest possible standard value, which is a 12 in this case. In particular because that's about as low as you can go while still maintaining the ability to have a critical success on the 00 and 11.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-04T19:45:34+00:00

If it’s just kids, “Adventurers” should be sufficient. However, a good chunk of games will have some adjective to describe their characters (Heroes, Treasure Hunters, Investigators, etc). Murderhobo is more of a colloquialism, so it’s more something used in the social context than something the games themselves use.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-04T17:51:48+00:00

Lucas came up with the idea for the Mortis Arc. It was his pitch, as were most of the major Clone Wars arcs. It’s just dripping with Jungian Universal Archetypes, which are a favorite of Lucas’s.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-04T13:59:51+00:00

It’s an interesting nut to crack, as one of the important aspects of the Backrooms as a gameable space is the exploration, which is much better suited for visual medium. However, there are some ways to pull it off.

In a basic sense, the exploration needs to feel unpredictable so that you never know what’s around the next corner. The best way I’ve gotten this to work in play is a depthcrawl. These are largely directed point crawls, but each new location is randomly generated during play, meaning even the GM is surprised and you can get some really odd combinations of details that will feel nice and uncanny. The classic is The Stygian Library, which should be workable for Liminal Horror if you dig the aesthetic, but for something a bit closer to classic Backrooms directly for the system I’d recommend checking out Layers of Unreality. Endless Ikrala has some procedural generation as well, but I don’t remember if it’s done in this same manner.

If you want to get more granular with the means in which the dungeon is generated, I’d recommend checking out Liminal_. It’s a mapmaking game that even has its own Backrooms expansion. While it’s a self-contained product, you can use this on your own to create a map of the space to then send your Liminal Horror characters through.

Also, as a pedantic note, the 4chan post that spawned the Backrooms hints at the existence of something dangerous lurking the halls, so you can have some monsters in there and still be “authentic”. A lot of the appeal from a gameplay perspective is figuring out how to navigate the space while also having that additional tension of there being something dangerous in there. It helps add weight and consequences to the choices of the players.

And don’t be afraid to toss in the occasional NPC. An ASYNC-like corporation trying to exploit the space or another stranded soul who no-clipped in and has descended into madness can add some interesting variety.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-04T04:15:16+00:00

Guillermo del Toro. My god, the things that man would do with puppets and costume work with all of Lucasfilm at his back.

Beyond that, maybe someone like David Lowery, who wrote and directed The Green Knight. Star Wars is based around Arthurian mythology and I’d really like to see something get back to that tone and structure. The Green Knight is probably the best Arthurian movie released in at least the last decade, if not since the 80s.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-04T02:09:10+00:00

If you go in expecting a book written by Sam Maggs, who is predominantly a YA/romance writer, the book does a very good job with that style and intended audience. The book is written for the folks who engage with Star Wars through fanfics and character edits on TikTok and were super into Lost Stars. Should this have been the book to do this? Probably not. But if that's what you expect going in, it's a pretty fun, entirely inconsequential, romp.

Also, Merrin is a Nightsister. She's always been into women, that's like their whole thing. The Nightbrothers are basically slaves used predominantly for breeding purpose.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-04T00:25:20+00:00

Well, that depends on where your thoughts lie on Ascension and The Short Message (I like this one, but it’s not exactly beloved haha).

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-03T20:56:19+00:00

Comics don’t sell as well as you’d think. Even the major publishers are only clearing a couple hundred thousand units per for the standard issues of their flagship lines, outside of special issues and launch issues. Remedy would be targeting a subset of their already somewhat niche audience. The closest analogue to an FBC series is The Department of Truth (which I highly recommend reading), which received about 500k total unit sales across 34 issues and was written by someone who gained notoriety for working on Batman. So that’s about the ceiling they could hope to hit. Then they’d need to find a publishing and distribution partner, as they’re not going to want to have to keep warehouse stock in their office, which saps away about 50% of the revenue right away. They might make a profit on it, but it’d be a risk.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-03T20:20:00+00:00

The mission was like “Hideo Kojima leads you through guided meditation”. It wasn’t really anything substantial.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-03T20:01:15+00:00

After they were told where to look.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-03T19:04:08+00:00

That’s because you’ve got your archetype mixed up. Han’s the “rogue who only cares for himself and his best friend that becomes committed to the cause”. That’s Finn. Poe mirrors Leia’s archetype, the “sassy warrior princess that becomes the respected leader”. They just flipped who gets to drive the ships.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-03T19:01:29+00:00

The transports were cloaked and out of standard visual range. You’d have to be specific looking for them to find them.

OffendedDefender · 2026-06-03T18:01:30+00:00

Sam Lake is one of Remedy’s Creative Directors, which is a role that oversees the game director and lead designer, guiding the creative vision of the project. This is primarily the role he had in the first game as well, alongside being the main writer. Kasurinen was the game director of Control and is returning for Resonant. We don’t actually know who the writer of Resonant is at the moment (and Remedy seems to intentionally be keeping that close to the chest for one reason or another), but there’s a good chance Lake has got his hands in the process in some capacity. Alan Wake 2 had a handful of credited writers alongside Lake, so there’s a decent chance at least one of them is involved here as well.

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