1987 was the 10th anniversary of “Star Wars,” and West End Games had picked up the license to make a roleplaying game set in a galaxy far, far away. Bill Slavicsek was then an editor for West End Games and was very upfront with Lucasfilm. He said, “We told them that to do a role-playing game, we are going to have to expand your world, and are you okay with that? They said, yes, so long as they got to approve it.”
Slavicsek (as well as a few other writers) went to work on the “Star Wars Sourcebook”, never realizing how important this single tome would be to the future of “Star Wars” and have ramifications that would continue to stretch into the present.
“Well, a lot of that is thanks to me,” Slavicsek explained to me in my interview with him for Star Wars Insider. “When I wrote the ‘Star Wars Sourcebook,’ I gave the Hammerhead the name Ithorian because it was insulting to call the whole race Hammerheads. So I put all the names together, Lucasfilm approved them and started putting them on action figures.”
It makes sense, too, when you think about it. It’s hard to play a pen-and-paper roleplaying game if you don’t have the proper vocabulary for the world around you. Imagine trying to play “Dungeons & Dragons” and having to refer to Beholders as “those round things with lots of eye stalks” or Baldur’s Gate as “that place over there.” In order to create the immersion to tell stories at a table, you need to have a sense of things.