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I had been running a STAR WARS campaign for nearly a year when I decided to try out "Secrets Of The Sisar Run", a nice book full of adventure and "fact". I had only a few problems : "Secrets" is set between 'The Empire Strikes Back' and 'Return Of The Jedi', and is clearly meant for newly rolled-up characters - while my campaign is set between 20 and 25 years AFTER the original Star Wars trilogy, and includes two pretty good Jedi apprentices as well as several other characters growing increasingly powerfull.

To make these characters actually work for Black Sun, the crime empire the adventures in the book are tied to, was a delight. Two Jedi sweating for Black Sun!

"Secrets Of The Sisar Run" is clearly a book one must be carefull with; be sure to have a group of players consisting of smugglers and pirates rather than Jedi and Old Senatorials, if you want to avoid a lot of trouble in your sessions.

The stories which get the characters to work with Black Sun are fair enough ; seemingly made for new players. When they first have begun working for that organization, the book describes a few optional stories before the characters begin with the book's included (small) campaign, "The Baroni Conspiracy". The adventure is essentially a chase-story, which is very Star Wars-like (the speeder bike chase, the chase through the Death Star corridors, the Death Star trench chase etc). It was an amusing afair to capture the campaign's main adversary Limna Yith, and I'm sure she'll be a guest star in a future session. "The Baroni Conspiracy" is a fair story, with good additional artwork showing various sites the characters will visit, but is too straight-forward to really grab attention.

"Secrets Of The Sisar Run" is a difficult item to review, mainly because I find everything about it so average. There are no really wondrous ideas here, no spectacular plot twists, no really interesting NPC's (with the possible exception of Sprax, just because he is a mysterious character the PC's know nothing about) and no breath-taking story hooks. I think the book will be perfect for a group of new players, who have yet to discover the wonders of the galaxy, and that it will be less suitable for those who played the game a while.

Of course, there are a few things in the book that are really great, but then again there are parts that really suck ... which pretty much makes it average, doesn't it?

It is nice of West End Games to drop some lesser known movie characters on the players, like Nabrun Leids!

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 3 (Average)