#RPGaDay2021 - Day 15 - Supplement

Day 15 of #RPGaDay2021 is a only a single word: "Supplement"

You would think this would be a no-brainer: Favorite Supplement, Best Supplement I'm Using Right Now, Latest Supplement I've purchased, but truth be told, I'm not using anything for my games outside of the core rulebooks and some online inspriation.   Even with all the stuff I picked up through #zinequest on Kickstarter, very little, if any could be considered a supplement.  All of the books are stand-along games, although I do plan on using A Complicated Profession as a sub-game around Christmas time for my Star Wars d6 campaign.

Now that I brought up the Star Wars game, the supplement question brings up a bigger question.

How much flippin' easier was it to run West End d6 Star Wars when it first came out?  

Yes, yes, we clamored for any detail, any stat we could get our hands on, but we really only had three movies, some novels, if you could get your hands on them, and the mythical holiday special.  We weren't coo-coo for Driods or all the Ewok stuff.  Even by the time the special editions were coming out, and the Expanded Universe was in all its glory, and West End had printed a library of books, there was still a lot of freedom to work within and around the hardline established canon. 

Nowadays, I don't need to hunt down an out-of-print sourcebook.  No, I don't mean downloads of a dubious nature, I mean Wookieepedia.

The internet is a blessing and a curse now with eleven (?) live-action movies, cartoons, and now shows on Disney+.  I can go to a random NPC generator for an character on the fly (and use another one to name them).  I can reference any point on the massive map of the galaxy and within seconds pull up minutiae that will overwhelm the players with trivia boredom.  I can take a "bathroom break" to figure out where they're wild decision has led them, and in five minutes I can re-calibrate the plot.  It's great. 

Except when it's not.  The information overload has been crippling at times.  The wiki structure promotes a LOT of references in each example, but it creates a rabbit hole of data that some people may need help getting pulled out of. 

I need to remember that not every corner of every planet, every race, or every star system is covered in excruciating detail.    If I need a Devaronian Snow Cat to make the game make sense, darnit, the planet Devaron will have small ice caps at the poles, no matter how much forest and jungle there is. It's my setting, and I've already made some significant changes that could affect the "sacred timeline."  I assume that by some point in the future, I might be working with variant NPCs, and if that happens, it's okay.