Star Wars “Tierfon Outpost”

Almost three decades ago, back in 1987, I bought West End Games’ Star Wars RPG and the Star Wars Sourcebook (find at Amazon.com*) and instantly launched into adventure. To this day, West End Games’ Star Wars roleplaying game stands out as the best translation of the films to an RPG, and in 1987 it was this game that shifted my attention from other properties back to Star Wars.

Much has been written about the West End Games Star Wars work, most recently in a Rolling Stone magazine post headlined “How a Tabletop RPG Brought ‘Star Wars’ Back From the Dead.”

Today, though, I’d like to zero in on one very tiny bit of West End Games’ Star Wars RPG and my joy in discovering that Fantasy Flight Games recognized the value in an older idea and modernized it, dropping the Tierfon Outpost into their Strongholds of Resistance* sourcebook. This one act perfectly demonstrates how FFG’s Star Wars team is honoring past efforts and keeping threads of the old works alive in today’s market.

West End Games’ Star Wars Sourcebook (1987)

Out of all of the books that West End Games published, the 1987 Star Wars Sourcebook* stands out in my mind as the most valuable tool after the core game book. No other book in the line — hell, maybe no other roleplaying game book ever — provided me with more inspiration and value than this 144-page hardcover. Every page included a character, vehicle, creature, weapon, or idea that inspired adventure and sparked my imagination.

What’s perhaps most remarkable, though, is that the West End Games team used only (at the time) existing Star Wars images to assemble the book. By tapping into concept art, the authors — Bill Slavicsek and Curtis Smith — gave unused Star Wars concepts a place in the universe and opened up a galaxy of resources beyond what would have been possible if they had stuck solely to the films.

As a roleplaying game product, the Star Wars Sourcebook* required some possibilities for adventure, and that’s where Tierfon Outpost came into existence in the book. Covering only five of the book’s 144-pages, the Tierfon Outpost description, while brief, left enough hooks for gamemasters to use the base as a home for the player characters.

And it is obvious that Tierfon Outpost had a far broader reach than we could have ever known when first encountering the base in 1987. As the Star Wars Wikia entry on Tierfon Outpost shows us, the base found its way into fiction, other West End Games products, and even magazines and the Star Wars CCG of the nineties. That’s a lot of traction for what could have easily been written off as a throwaway location.

Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars Strongholds of Resistance (2015)

I’ve not had the opportunity to fully explore Fantasy Flight Games’ different Star Wars roleplaying games (find at Amazon.com*), but each book that I have read has left me impressed with the work that is going into the product line. I get excited when I run across unexpected details from the past — The Wheel from Marvel’s comics of the seventies appearing in Beyond the Rim* still wins as the biggest surprise in the line — and when I was reading Strongholds of Resistance* that knowing smile hit me as I came across the section on Tierfon Outpost.

Six pages in length, the Tierfon Outpost description in Strongholds of Resistance* even reads like an updated take on the base’s appearance in the 1987 Star Wars Sourcebook*. The new book looks better, packs more info into a similar amount of space, and even gives us a more colorful map of the base. The one thing that I believe the 1987 map did better than the newer map is the base cross-section illustration — that 1987 diagram makes it easier to understand how the base is built into the cliff — and I have to say that having the two books together is the absolute best approach since you get everything at your fingertips.

I’m Ready for More

Running across Tierfon Outpost in Strongholds of Resistance* was a pleasant surprise and makes me respect FFG’s Star Wars team even more. I’ve no idea if I’ll ever get an opportunity to really use all of these bits of info and detail in a game, but just knowing that fragments of the past are being snatched and brought into the future is enough to make me happy. I can’t wait to see what they bring us next.