The New Jedi Order Sourcebook (Star Wars) [Hardcover]

Like all of Wizard's Star Wars products, the book itself is full color throughout. The artwork is high-quality and has a dark and stylistic touch. Some people won't like that, claiming that it isn't "Star Wars," but I say that it is appropriate for the NJO universe.

I stopped reading the Star Wars novels a long time ago because there are too darn many to keep track of. As a GM myself, and as a NJO newbie, the main thing I liked about the NJO sourcebook is that it neatly compressed all the major events from these six novels into one book. The writing is clear, concise, and most importantly I found it fun to read. I immediately felt that I had enough information to begin building a NJO campaign. The book has a lot of adventure ideas and even a few rough adventure outlines which any GM worth his salt can integrate into his campaign.

Is the book perfect? Certainly not. My biggest gripe is the lack of an alphabetical index. This would nearly cripple the book if its other qualities hadn't been so good. Fortunately, there is a chapter summary at the beginning of the book, which partially alleviates the lack of an index. Chances are you're still going to have to go searching for those obscure entries though. The other issue is that since this book was released just prior to the release of the Revised Core Rulebook, you may need to do some tinkering to integrate the two. However, that is ultimately a minor issue in my opinion.

Overall, I give this book a very strong 4 out of 5 because of the lack of an index.

As a side note, the prior claim that a GM would be better served by spending 10 minutes reading the backs of the novels seems to be quite ill-advised, if not impossible. If you are a GM wanting to run a NJO campaign, GET THIS BOOK. And may it help you as much as it helped me.

EDIT: My gaming group, which meets twice a month, is now 8 sessions into our NJO campaign. As GM, I can honestly say that in that time, the NJO sourcebook has continued to be an invaluable resource. After much consideration, I have decided to raise the book's rating to a 5. This is both for the book's continuing usefulness and because I feel that the previous poster's rating of 1 flies in the face of reason.

If you like the NJO series, and/or playing an adventure in this era, get this book. But it's not a must

Each chapter is devoted to one of the novels and outlines the important people, places, things and events of that book as well as adventure hooks for getting your own characters into the action. Great for a quick refresher of everything that's happened upto Star by Star.

My only major complaint with this book is the lack of artwork. There's tons of new places, characters and things mentioned but very few pictures of them. There are several small diagrams of ships/places but they're more on the technical side than artistic.

Basically, if you enjoy NJO story you'll want this book. Hopefully, WotC will continue to turn out books like this instead of planet guides.