The book contains several new species: Bith, Defel, Fosh, Givin, Gotal, Herglic, Mrlssi, Neimoidian, and Umbaran. "But wait," you say, "Bith already appear in Threats, Neimoidians are in the core book, and Umbarans are in Clone Wars." Well, yes, that's true, but these versions are a little more balanced for play. I suspect WotC had second thoughts about species that got both Skill Focus *and* rerolls in the same skill (Deception for Neimoidians and Persuasion for Umbarans), as well as the Bith's ability to get an automatic natural 20 on an Intelligence check once per encounter.
The Bith are similar to the Threats version, except +2 Charisma, no Perception reroll, and the Evolved Intellect ability: every time they spend a Force Point for any reason, they also gain a temporary Force Point which must be used for an Intelligence-based skill check. Neimoidians can potentially get both Skill Focus (Deception) and Skill Focus (Persuasion), which is pretty nice, though I do notice their stats are lower than the core book version, and again, no Deception reroll. Umbarans are the most different from their original version; they get +2 Dex, +2 Wis, -2 Con, darkvision (not light sensitivity), a Stealth reroll, and they get Skill Focus (Gather Information). I will be allowing Jake to continue to play his character "as is," however, because to make him change to the new stats would require him to completely rethink his character concept.
The other species are quite nice too. Defel can gain total concealment very easily (no more of this "invisible" stuff like in the old Revised rules, which was pretty broken). Fosh are great medics because of their healing glands, and they're always considered to have a medpac or medical kit (no need to carry medpacs around, although they're still limited to the "one first aid per day" restriction on Treat Injury), plus they get a Deception reroll. Givin have damage reduction, can survive in vacuum, and can reroll all of their Knowledge checks. Gotals can read a target's emotions by making a Perception vs. Will roll, and they can also use Use the Force untrained to Sense Force and Sense Surroundings. Herglics are very strong (+4 Str) but take a -4 Dex penalty, plus they're Large size, they get a bonus to their second winds, and they get Skill Focus (Gather Information). Mrlssi get Mechanics as a bonus class skill, they get any one Knowledge as a free skill at first level, and they get Skill Focus (Persuasion).
On to classes. Every class but Jedi gets some new talents, and nobles make out the best. Nobles get three, count 'em three, new talent trees. The Master of Intrigue tree is all about manipulating your allies, in a good way: You can trade Initiative rolls, let them move as a free action, and force them to stand back up when they're unconscious. The Skill Challenge talent tree gives some new options in skill challenges; the book emphasizes that if your DM isn't running skill challenges, don't take any of the clearly labeled Skill Challenge talents or feats.
Then comes the Superior Skills tree, which is my favorite of the trees. Do you love skills? Do you have a particular skill you really want to pimp out? Then this is your tree. Assured Skill lets you pick a skill; you can lose any competence bonuses on it (i.e. Skill Focus) to be able to roll twice and keep the best die. Exceptional Skill lets you pick a skill; whenever you roll a 2-7 on it, it's treated as an 8. Reliable Boon lets you reroll 1s on Force Points. Skill Boon adds one die step to your Force Points when used with a particular skill. Skillful Recovery lets you pick a skill; whenever you fail a skill check with that skill, you gain a temporary Force Point which can only be used to add to a later skill check with that same skill. There's also Critical Skill Success, which adds to your other skill checks whenever you roll a natural 20 on a skill, and Skill Confidence, which boosts off of that and makes it 19-20, and gives you bonus hit points equal to your Charisma modifier whenever you get it.
Scoundrels get the Revolutionary talent tree, which is all about being a rebel. Bomb Thrower lets you make frag grenades from scratch as a full-round action. Make an Example hurts the attack rolls of any target whose damage threshold you beat; conversely, For the Cause gives you and all of your allies bonuses to attack and damage rolls whenever one of you takes damage beating your threshold. Revolutionary Rhetoric lets you use Persuasion to keep an opponent from making standard actions.
Scouts get the Espionage talent tree, which is focused on stealth and making a quick getaway. Fade Out lets you use Stealth, not Deception, to create a diversion to hide in combat. Keep Together lets you move as a reaction whenever you are hit or missed in melee, as long as you end next to an ally. Prudent Escape lets you move yourself and two allies immediately after knocking a target to 0 hit points or unconscious. Reactive Stealth lets you try to move and stay concealed if you're attacked while you have concealment. Sizing Up gives you a bonus to attack and skill rolls against a target of your choice.
Soldiers get some new Brawling and Commando talents, all of which have a "bodyguard" feel. The Brawling talents are primarily focused on grabbing and grappling, with one, Disarm and Engage, giving you more incentive to disarm. The Commando talents all require Harm's Way, from the core book, as a prerequisite, and they all go a long way to keeping a target protected. Between these and the Elite Trooper talents in the Legacy book, you could build a Soldier/Elite Trooper whose sole function is to protect other people from damage.
Prestige classes get a few talents, as well. Ace Pilot gets a few talents, most of which work to defend the ship you're piloting. Bounty Hunter gets some "detective"-type talents that make it easier to track targets with Gather Information; in particular, the Electronic Trail talent lets you follow a target's "electronic trail," which consists of the amount and location of any credits spent, the routes of any public transportation taken, and the sites viewed on the HoloNet while the target was logged in using its primary identity. Players beware! Crime Lord gets two new talents, including Attract Superior Minion, which is a nonheroic minion whose level equals yours. Gunslinger gets two new talents, including the awesome Pistol Duelist, which, among other things, lets you once per encounter aim and shoot as a single action.
The book does not include any new prestige classes, and it took a little flak on the Star Wars RPG forums for not having a "Senator" prestige class or anything like that. To which one of the designers got on and said that really, they couldn't think of anything new for a Senator to do that existing prestige classes can't do (nor did they want to add a new prestige class just for the sake of doing so), and players should feel free to file the serial numbers off Crime Lord or Corporate Agent and call it a "Senator" class or whatever Noble-based prestige class they feel is lacking. Which I happen to agree with, not that we have players in the campaign lining up to be senators or anything.
Next come feats, which are across the board pretty good, and I'll touch on the highlights here. Adaptable Talent lets you sub out one talent for another; although it sounds broken, you can only do it at the start of the day, it has to be a talent from a class you possess (and that you meet the prereq's for), and this feat is not a bonus feat for any class, so you're spending one of your good feats to get a talent you will only use half the time at most anyway. Cut the Red Tape lets you sub Knowledge (bureaucracy) for Gather Information. Fléche lets you, once per encounter, when you charge, turn a natural roll of 17+ into a critical hit. Grazing Shot lets you shoot two targets at once, for reduced damage. Master of Disguise gives you bonuses to make disguises or forge documents, and lets you do it quickly, too. Recurring Success lets you pick any talent or feat you can use once per encounter; you can now use it twice per encounter. Stand Tall lets you, once per encounter, let all allies make an attack out of turn. Wookiee Grip is just like the old D&D Monkey Grip; you can grip a two-handed weapon in one hand, at an attack penalty.
Chapter 2 is Skill Challenges. Now I know D&D 4th Ed. has skill challenges, and our success with those has been mixed. But this chapter is pretty good — it talks about how to run them, how they can be broken up, how they're not a substitute for actual roleplaying, and provides a lengthy example with commentary. It also talks about what is and isn't a skill challenge, how to build them, and has a handy table of DCs. They also have Challenge Effects. Challenge Effects differentiate Star Wars skill challenges from D&D skill challenges; they're different things you can apply to skill challenges; for example, the Recovery effect makes it so a player who succeeds on a roll by 5 or more can remove a failure instead of accruing a success. Not only is it very nice to codify and write all this stuff out, but there are also feats and Noble talents that can interact with skill challenges by adding or removing these challenge effects.
The chapter then includes various skill challenges, a lot of them directly based on the movies: Breaching the Bunker, The Podrace, Asteroid Field Escape, Covert Infiltration, Interrogation, Investigation, Negotiation, Overland Travel, Searching the Debris Field, Slicing the HoloNet, Smuggling Contraband, Speeder Bike Chase, Tactical Leadership, Traversing the Minefield, and Sabotage Mission. These incorporate a wide variety of skills (Negotiation lists as primary skills Deception, Knowledge (galactic lore), Knowledge (social sciences), Persuasion, and Use the Force) and also use the different Challenge Effects to different degrees. For example, the Podcasting challenge changes from lap to lap, requiring some different skills on the part of both the racers and the "pit team," while the Overland Travel challenge requires every hero to get 3 successes to pull their weight, lest they drag their party down.
I'm sufficiently impressed with skill challenges and I plan to run them in the future; my goal is about one per game from here on out. However, I do need to emphasize that this will require some participation from you guys. I plan to have every individual player act in skill challenges in some meaningful way; for example, a negotiation challenge will not involve the entire party watching Jake roll Persuasion over and over again (not putting down Jake, but I don't want him inadvertently monopolizing the action). I will be looking at character sheets to see how I can use at least one skill every player has in each challenge. (For example, when I wrote up the skill challenge for convincing Keane to provide information, I wasn't sure if Devo would be in the party yet or not, so I included Knowledge (tactics) as an option, as Keane had made pretty clear that he cared a lot about maintaining his secrecy and keeping his operation running smoothly.)
Chapter 3 is Equipment. There are a few weapons: the wrist blaster (disguised as a bracelet, and fires only one shot), the darter, the snare pistol, and the Xerrol Nightstinger (which fires invisible shots, but is very rare and very expensive). There are also a few poisons, which range form the annoying to the deadly. The book also features a lot of equipment: the antitoxin patch, the earbud comlink (which I quite like), the flash suppressor/silencer (for your slugthrowers), the holo converter (for disguising yourself over holo transmissions), panic ring, redirection crystal (which redirects a blaster shot that hits it, for use with the Xerrol Nightstinger), a shield cage, surveillance detector, surveillance tagger (for following somebody), toxin detector, veridicator (basically a bracelet-like device that can determine if someone is lying), and a vid-vox scrambler (which scrambles nearby active recording devices). There is also a new Scum and Villainy-type upgrade, compartmentalization, which lets you break down an item into smaller components, which makes them easier to hide.
There are also quite a few ships, which I won't get into, but which are mostly either stealth recon ships or ships for the nobility. The book also includes a few vehicles, as well as a few droids: the 5-BT Threat Analysis, the NR-1100 Slicer, 3D-4 Administrative, M4-Series Messenger, FIII Footman, BL-Series Battle Legionnaire, and B4J4 Security droid.
Chapter 4 is Campaigns, which talks quite about how to make a campaign that focuses on intrigue and secrets. It discusses how heroes might join together and the common elements to these sorts of campaigns (and emphasizes that these don't have any less action than other campaigns). It provides a few campaign models, then discusses how to write compelling bad guys and encounters (even including a sidebar about having a Jedi be the villain; not even a Dark Jedi, but just one who's meddling where he doesn't belong). All in all this was a pretty good chapter, discussing misdirection, plot twists, trust, and so on.
Chapter 5 is Factions and Organizations. This just discusses some of the intrigue-based groups out there and how they interact with heroes and the rest of the galaxy: Core World Nobles, Droid Equality Foundation, the Firebird Society, the Galactic Alliance Guard, the Hapans, House Korden, Imperial Intelligence, Kashyyyk Resistance, Naboo Resistance Movement, New Republic Intelligence, the Praetorite Vong, the Tagge Company, and Tapani Nobles.
Chapter 6 is an original planet, Nyriaan, which makes use of a lot of the intrigue ideas in the book. It's got a rare material useful in hyperdrives, which has attracted all sorts of corporations to it and created a large miner slave operation. It gives plenty of adventure ideas, details major locations, gives a timeline dating back to the KotOR era, and stats out a lot of NPCs. Chapter 7 is Intrigue Encounters, which are a bunch of mini-adventures that include maps and NPCs, and which can be dropped into any campaign (similar scenes appear in Scum and Villainy and Galaxy at War). Chapter 8 is a small campaign, The Perfect Storm, which is based on Nyriaan and makes use of the intrigue ideas in the book. My only complaint about The Perfect Storm is it doesn't seem to say what level it's designed for, and it looks like somewhere between 2 and 4.
All in all, I think this is a great book, and I plan to make use of a lot of this material — like I said, I plan to make skill challenges a regular thing, and intrigue has been a big part of my campaign from the beginning. I think it's pretty solid if you're playing a noble and I highly recommend it.
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