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Wizards of the Coast delivers with its new accessory book to the Star Wars role-playing game. This title, Geonosis and the Outer Rim Worlds, features those worlds out yonder, those places not often frequented by those happily ensconced in Coruscant and the Core Worlds, which is this accessory's big sister.

Importantly, this book and its authors note that each of the 28 planets are relatively foreign. That is, by providing such rich detail per world, a player of this game has little choice but to treat each world as an individual setting with its own quirks and special spots. Indeed, the book's exhaustive informational nature encourages players to branch out with their characters and eschew cookie-cutter human prototypes. Such is the province of role-playing games, which give that opportunity to leave familiar bodies behind and to try and to experience existence from another perspective.

In this light, Geonosis and the Outer Rim Worlds does its job. The stats, the artwork, the characters and the places, they are all top-notch and professionally done. Readers will obtain details about each world's denizens, technology, ecology, and even the various sundries that add flavor to role-playing campaigns such as the length of days on that particular planet, as well as the type of gravity that planet features. This detail, of course, also plays to the hard-core gamer, who interests in the role of the dice is dependent on the charts and their details.

Another welcomed feature is the inclusion of images from Episodes I & II movies. One must applaud Wizard for obtaining the creative licensing rights to include those images in the book. They add an authenticity that is critical to accessories and draw the player into the game, helping her/him remember that this stuff is real, at least in a gaming sense.

A second plus to the movie pictures is that they come from action angles not featured in the usual propaganda a movie creates. Instead, they come from an "insider's" view, that of someone who had been inside of these adventures and who has seen the happenings of the Star Wars universe from this unique angle.

My only complaint is that this book offers no pre-made adventures that a game master might tailor to her/his players. Really, the point of this sort of accessory is to provide raw materials for such stories. However, that requires a human to construct stories from this raw material. Ideally, this accessory encourages such creation (and that's a good thing). In reality, making role-playing stories is hard. Wizards of the Coast could have thrown a bone and included a pre-made campaign or two.

Chris learned to read from books of fantasy and science fiction, in that order. And any time he can find a graphic novel that inspires, that's good too.