“…I need something more real.” One of my favorite scenes from Star Wars Episode I is the first meeting with Watto at his shop. Bartering for a used hyperdrive component, the heroes run into an age old problem: currency exchange.
Most often in my RPG games, money has been either the generic Gold, Silver, Copper coinage; or for the sci-fi theme, Credits, all tracked on a sheet of paper. Nothing actually changed hands. There were no “Watto moments” where an issue with payment lead to an adventure or series of encounters. I’ve always wanted to get some tangible, tactile money exchange into my game. Something the players could hold onto, something as Watto would say, is “real”. However, such currency available to gamers in the past was either too expensive or of such low quality to be a vehicle for in-game jokes.
As in many things in today’s gaming world: Enter Kickstarter.
Recently, we have seen some quality hobby gaming coin sets come up on Kickstarter. Myself being a long time a-wishin-and-hopin for such reasonably priced options have jumped at the opportunity and backed two such projects. The fruits of the first have recently arrived.
Future coins is designed to supply in-game currency for Minion Games 4x title Hegemonic. However, they can very much be used for any purpose. My primary use for these will be in my sci-fi RPG’s, specifically Traveller and Star Wars: Edge of the Empire.
I was very pleased with the quality of the credit coins. The coloring, shading, and trim, is very well done. My only nitpick is the color for the highest denomination coin, 100,000, which looks black. The other denominations more than make up for this however, the shading between the raised text and the primary coin color give them a good depth and actually enhances the feeling of being a solid coin. There are both straight colors and metallics. For those of you who lust Ferengi-like after cold-pressed latinum, the 1,000 coin will more than satisfy.
If you are interested in picking up some of these for yourself and missed the Kickstarter campaign, not to worry, Minion has you covered and you can get your hands on some right here.
The other collection of coins I have jumped into is Conquistador Games Best Damn Metal Gaming Coins. This collection offers quite a bit of diversity in choice of era including Roman (my favorite), Spanish, Celtic and others, as well as fantasy and pirate themes. This particular kickstarter has not yet shipped, so if you are interested in picking some up it is possible that Conquistador or their partners in this project, Game Salute, will be selling additional coin sets later this year.
I’ve been playing a fair bit of the Star Wars Edge of the Empire (EotE) RPG lately. No serious campaign this time, but an easy going romp with pre-generated characters and new players, a far cry from the experienced players I ran with in my previous Saga edition campaign. This has been filled with light hearted gamorrean stomping and stormtrooper blasting.
I have been a long time player of pen and paper role playing games. Abbreviated as “RPG”, the number of unique games and systems have grown over the years since the original 
I was pretty pleased with what I read on the new game. I loved the new dice and the challenge resolution system with the building of a dice pool. The addition of positive and negative dice depending on the conditions of the challenge and the circumstances prevailing is a great way to simulate events in the Star Wars universe. The Force dice with light and dark side symmetry really had me hoping that one of the weaknesses I felt about the Saga system would be resolved in EoE, the unbalanced Force system. Another area that looked good was the talent tree diagrams.The old Saga talent system which governed the special abilities and powers for the various character classes, started off fine when the game was simple and only the core book was in print, but as the supplements began to flow the talent trees became unwieldy and difficult to play. The manner in which the rule books were laid out made it difficult to get an idea of what talent depended on what force power or other talent as a pre-requisite. I always wanted an online reference to the complete talent tree for every class but online support for the game was severely lacking. I ended up making my own excel spreadsheet to help arbitrate the progression of talents and figure out the interconnectivity of powers and skills.