Rebel Bass
Author: Kathy Tyers
Medium: Short story
Publication date: September 2001 in Star Wars Gamer #6
Timeline placement: 2 BBY
"Rebel Bass" tells the story of 16-year-old Ryley Ancum and his garage band Far Cry, which uses their music to send coded messages to undercover Rebel Alliance operatives, or something. Like most stories written in publications for the Star Wars Roleplaying Game, it's a "slice of life" narrative about random nobodies in the Star Wars galaxy who have no relevance to the core saga and will never appear in another story. And to be clear, there's nothing wrong with that. In fact it makes perfect sense for the RPG, where you yourself take on the role of a random nobody in the Star Wars galaxy who has no relevance to the core saga. The sourcebooks and other publications released for the Star Wars Roleplaying Game, especially when West End Games held the license, were responsible for most of the nitty-gritty worldbuilding that transformed the loose fantasy rules of George Lucas's movies into a grounded, verisimilar sci-fi universe.
But as much as I appreciate the detail and thoroughness of that level of setting construction, by and large the "man on the street" viewpoint isn't the appeal of Star Wars for me. Star Wars is big, bombastic, epic in its literal definition. There are intimate personal stories that can be told, but those moments of emotional poignancy are usually expressed between flashes of a lightsaber blade or the scream of a starfighter's laser cannons. I'd rather read this story than most of the ones published in the Adventure Journal, because 1) it's much shorter, and 2) it's written by an actual published novelist rather than an amateur cutting their teeth and therefore isn't completely painful to read, but it's still so fucking boring. I understand why it was written but reading it as a standalone story divorced from the broader context and culture of the Star Wars RPG, it has nothing of value or interest to offer me. 2 out of 5 Death Stars.
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