Gaming: Savaging Star Wars, Part III: Species, Sith, and Stalinism

Star Wars has a lot of aliens.  A ton of aliens.  There are so many species that there are serious issues trying to include them all.  The obvious problem for a role-playing game is that every species that gets included needs to be statted out.  The first filter therefore is which species get included.

There are certain species which, regardless of era, are so iconic they must be included.  These include humans, for obvious reasons (and their statistical duplicate, near-humans, a WEGism that I really liked and therefore keep), Wookiees, Twi'leks (the "tail-head people," as my daughter calls them), Rodians (think Greedo, who accosted Han in the cantina), and Gamorreans ("pig-men," according to her).  That's not even an exhaustive list of the "iconics," but they all get enough screen time in the films that they need to be included.

Then there are the species which make a specific era stand out - Gungans for the Clone Wars, for instance.  For our prospective Old Republic-era game, that includes Miralukans, "Red" Sith, and Cathars, all of which feature prominently in works set in the era.

The next category could be called "background noise," "Star Wars-isms," or even "looks cool."  These include things like Herglics (gambling-addicted space whales), Massassi (the warrior caste of the old Sith, descended into atavism), or the Chiss (Grand Admiral Thrawn).  The inclusion of the Chiss in SWTOR falls into this category, and it isn't a choice I'd have made but, having seen it in action, I fully support it.

The final category is exclusions.  The truth is, some species just do not fit the tone of a game, the era of a game, or simply playability.  For instance, Hutts are more or less plot devices.  They are barely mobile and cannot reasonably be adventurers in a conventional game.  Other exclusions include Gungans, through no fault of their own - we simply are not given a single example of a Gungan who is not intrusively jarring comic relief - Ewoks, and Noghri (small, reptilian ninja-aliens that served Thrawn in the books).  Ewoks and Gungans are tone-deaf, and Ewoks and Noghri live on worlds that haven't been found yet.

This does not mean that they couldn't be written up, just that, because I only have so many hours to invest in this project, I will not be doing so.  Even Hutts are pretty straightforward to stat up, there's just little purpose in doing so.  You will also note that none of the above options were droids, which are a special case and will be covered later.

Because it's a very simple case but also suited for demonstration here, I'll discuss converting the Chiss.  Savage Worlds species design assumes a certain amount of "free" play - for humans, you start with a free Edge of your choice, for instance.  Anything beyond this in species design must be offset for balance reasons, such as by racial Hindrances, or by restricting some skills or attributes.

First, a disclaimer and basic philosophical guide - not everything needs to be reflected in stats.  The fact that the Chiss have a cultural taboo on aggressive violence but a bunch of cultural work-arounds that basically add up to the Code Duello doesn't really need to be reflected here.  What makes Chiss different from baseline humans does.

There are a handful of things we know about the Chiss.  They are blue-skinned, can see in the near-infra-red range, pay close attention to detail, and are cultural perfectionists.  They are also rare in the Galaxy as a whole, preferring to stay close to their homeworld of Csilla.  The near-IR sight is not a sufficiently differentiating feature the way that, say, dwarven darkvision is in D&D.  How do we reflect these points in Savage Worlds?

Their attributes are human or human-like, so require no adjustments.  There are two ways that the attention to detail can be reflected, either by a bump to the Notice skill, or by an Edge such as Alertness.  Notice is broadly applicable, but Savage Worlds has a specific problem with statistical deviation - a bump to a skill from 1d4 to 1d6 means that the odds for a non-Wild Card (PC or PC-equivalent) of rolling over a 4 (the default target in Savage Worlds) goes from 25% to 50-50.  Giving the character the Alertness Edge, which gives a +2 to Notice rolls, changes those same odds from 1d4 to 1d4+2, meaning that the character rolls a 4 75% of the time.  This more-consistent result feels more appropriate for a cultural emphasis on attention to detail than a die bump, so this is the route I have chosen to go.  This consumes the "free play" I mentioned earlier - simply replacing "pick an Edge" with "Alertness is picked for you."

The cultural perfectionist issue is difficult to reflect properly.  Chiss society places a premium on being good at your job - sort of like Victorian England, but a fictionalized, idealized meritocracy without the problematic class distinctions, and with fewer human foibles included.  In terms of "build points," two skill points is a single build point, and is a simple way of saying "you are driven from a young age to excel."  It will however require an offset later.

That offset, since we are running at +1 build points, and it should be running at net zero, is simple: Chiss are uncommon.  Wherever they go, in dealing with people who are not Chiss, they are going to attract attention.  People will gawk, they will have a very hard time blending in, what with being cobalt-blue with glowing red eyes, and in overtly racist societies like the Galactic Empire of the Rebellion era, or the Sith Empire of this period, they are going to deal with extreme prejudice.  This manifests as the Minor version of the Outsider Hindrance.

So - the final statblock:

Species Homeworld - Csilla

Medium - Chiss are almost exactly the same size and build as the human standard.

Attentive - Chiss gain the Alertness Edge for free.

Skilled - Chiss society places a premium on skill and perfection; Chiss gain two extra Skill points at character creation.

Outsider - Chiss are an exceptionally rare species within the galaxy as a whole, and receive the Outsider Minor Hindrance regardless of where they are.  This cannot be bought off.

I have mentioned the overt racism of the Sith Empire, and that brings me to the setting and philosophy details of this period.

I'll get it out of the way up front: the Sith Empire is bad.

The Glorious Sith Emperor plots a course to Dromund Kaas (colorized)

It is bad in the exact same ways that Stalin's USSR is bad; weirdly it is not bad in the exact same ways that the Third Reich was bad (that's far more Palpatine's game).  In fact, it has redeeming qualities even as it is a violently oppressive surveillance state run by an elite who can be anything but better than their subjects.

Like Stalin's Soviet Union, it has an entrenched government that has educated its subjects that they owe everything to the state, or the Emperor, as the case may be, which means that unlike the precariously-positioned Nazis or Palpatine's New Order, the Soviet Union or the Sith Empire were united in opposition to large, vague, and theoretically external enemies even as they rooted out the supposed agents of those enemies within.  In Stalin's Russia, it was the dangers of Trotskyism.  In the Sith Empire, they have been reminded for the past thousand years of the attempted genocide of the Sith by the Republic, and how the Emperor saved them from extinction.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, it was common for people to believe that if they could just appeal to Stalin, then they would be safe from the injustice happening in his name; the truth was that Stalin was directing much, perhaps all of it, and was saved from bad publicity because when things reached a certain state, he would always cannibalize whoever had been doing his dirty work, such as Nikolai Yezhov, who ran the security apparatus up until the Purges of the '30s.  This is substantially different from Nazi Germany, where the odds of being hauled up in front of a firing squad for being excessively Nazi were pretty slim.  Nevertheless, it meant that, at least at the base of society, Stalin was broadly popular in ways that Hitler wasn't, even as every person in Russia knew someone who had been snatched away to a labor camp.  There is a character in SWTOR who references "the democratization of fear;" that is one of the pillars of both Stalin's Soviet Union and the Sith Empire.  Fear is a constant presence, even for the supposed elite, whether that's the Sith or the Party.  Because it's a constant presence, at some point it becomes background noise, until it spikes again.  It is worth noting that in both cases, the intelligence and security services, while highly respected, are never trusted either by those in power, or their neighbors, and are frequently the scapegoat for when things go too far.

Of course, the fact that they are the Evil Empire does not mean that even the average person in the Empire is bad.  For the most part, they're just people, albeit people who have been told from birth that down is up and black is white.

After the Iron Curtain came down, one of the most common complaints in the former Soviet bloc was that Westerners had no sense of community, and were just out for themselves.  This was especially prevalent in Germany; I have known a handful of East Germans, and every single Ossi I know, even the ones who had twenty years to get past it, still felt this way at least a little bit even as they talked about the climate of paranoia in East Germany.  So, too, the Sith Empire - even among its leaders there are those who are at worst pragmatic villains who want the Empire to be a better place and resist the "democratization of fear" while simultaneously being utterly ruthless in their service to the Empire.  The average Imperial citizen wants, at most, to improve their station within the hierarchy, often by abusing the very tools of the hierarchy - reporting suspicious behavior, for instance.  The average Imperial citizen is well aware of sayings like "even a slave can be a Sith," and most parents are proud of their Force-sensitive children who can join the Sith Order.

All of the above is drawn from published material; here's where the interpolation starts.  The Sith Empire practices slavery.  This is considered routine, and slaves are slaves because of defects in their, or their forebears', character that allowed them to become victims.  Slavery is stated to be hereditary in perpetuity and manumission illegal.  However, we also see easily removed slave collars, and the slaves that we see are not branded or marked in any fashion other than literal fashion - their clothes are (often only slightly) worse off than those of their masters.  Theoretically, those who cannot interbreed with the Sith species are treated worse, but we do not see a great deal of evidence that they are treated worse by the Sith than by anyone else, or that a non-human is treated worse than a human of low social standing, and the Empire allies with at least two non-human meritocracies, the Mandalorians and the Chiss.  All of this says to me that the Sith version of slavery is not supportable for a thousand-year period; it'd collapse under its own weight.

My proposed solution to this problem goes back to Stalinism - there's Stalin, and there's everyone else.  Everyone else owes everything to Stalin, and knows that there is no coalition they could build against him that would not be betrayed.  Combine this with the fact that the Sith Emperor is a 1500-year-old physical god and a withdrawn presence, that the Emperor has repeatedly shown he is stronger than any combination of rebels, and the knowledge that the same attitude that the Emperor's subjects literally belonged to the Emperor has happened before (even in the west, it was common in the Holy Roman Empire for high-ranking members of the court to be ministerialis, essentially specially appointed Imperial serfs), and slavery in the Sith Empire quits being a special punishment, and in fact becomes universal - every single subject of the Emperor is a slave, just with different levels of privilege.  What we see as slaves are not slaves in the sense that Africans were enslaved in the Americas, where their mere skin is enough to convict them, but are merely the lowest rung of imperial society and, just like everyone else, can theoretically move socially, albeit with exceptional difficulty.

Now, I don't think this version is any more sustainable either - and in fact in-universe plot developments say it's not sustainable either, but I believe that in a closed-loop society like the Sith Empire between 5000 BBY and 3700-ish BBY, it could be sustained, or at least better-sustained than what we see.