Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game

The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, a pioneering venture, holds the distinction of being the initial licensed roleplaying game grounded within the expansive Star Wars fictional world. West End Games initially published it, maintaining the license from 1987 until 1998, when their rights expired. Subsequently, a German translation was produced by Welt der Spiele.

The game structure involves one player assuming the role of gamemaster, responsible for managing and overseeing the gameworld akin to a director and referee. Conversely, a group of four to eight players each embody a unique character or role. Random dice rolls determine various occurrences, such as combat damage. Game sessions can vary from brief, self-contained adventures to more complex and prolonged campaigns. Player characters possess diverse skills and equipment, with some even capable of wielding the Force. However, improper behavior carries the risk of succumbing to the Dark Side, resulting in the player losing control of their character.

Greg Costikyan was the mind behind the game's rule system. Throughout its run, three distinct editions of the core rulebook were released: first edition, second edition, and the "Revised and Expanded" second edition. These editions all leveraged West End Games' D6 System as their underlying framework.

The West End Games collection of supplementary materials comprises nearly 100 individual sourcebooks—excluding revised editions and compilations—in addition to 15 quarterly magazine publications under the title Star Wars Adventure Journal. Furthermore, they curated several related titles that, while connected, were not strictly part of the Roleplaying Game product line. These included Star Warriors, the board games Escape from the Death Star and Assault on Hoth, the two-player game Lightsaber Dueling, the Introductory Adventure Game, Star Wars Miniatures Battles, the Live-Action Adventures and solo adventure books.

These books expanded upon and detailed familiar elements from the original trilogy, such as locations, items, species, creatures, and characters, while also introducing entirely new concepts. Lucasfilm restricted the publisher from exploring certain themes, notably the Clone Wars. Consequently, the lore developed for the RPG served as a significant foundation for the Expanded Universe prior to the resurgence of interest in Star Wars publications sparked by Heir to the Empire in 1991, and it remained a crucial resource thereafter. As one of the earliest sources to assign quantifiable data and statistics to elements of the Star Wars universe, some details presented in the sourcebooks have undergone retconning or revisions to align more closely with the films and Expanded Universe narratives. Notable examples of these corrections include inconsistencies surrounding the Super Star Destroyers and the Galactic Empire's "discovery" of the Mon Calamari.

When Timothy Zahn was commissioned to author what would become The Thrawn Trilogy, he received a collection of West End Games Star Wars books and was instructed to ensure his writing harmonized with the established background information from the roleplaying game. Following the success of the novel trilogy, West End Games developed a series of sourcebooks drawing inspiration from Zahn's work. In 1999, West End Games' license for the Star Wars RPG concluded. Wizards of the Coast, the new license holder, initiated the creation of a new roleplaying game utilizing their d20 System. Subsequently, in 2004, West End Games launched D6 Space, a generic space opera game system derived from the earlier Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, but devoid of specific Star Wars content. In 2012, Fantasy Flight Games introduced their own Star Wars RPG titled Edge of the Empire.

During the early 1990s, predating the widespread adoption of the modern Internet, the FidoNet Star Wars Echo hosted a message board dedicated to playing the West End Games Star Wars Roleplaying Game online via BBS.

In 2017, Fantasy Flight Games revealed plans for a 30th Anniversary Edition's reprint of the first edition's rule- and sourcebook. Originally slated for release in Q4 2017, the launch was repeatedly delayed until its eventual debut on July 5, 2018.