In 1989, West End started publishing the Star Wars Galaxy Guides. Initially, they were deep dive splatbooks, digging into the movies from the perspective of a Rebel Alliance historian. The idea was to take the work done in the Sourcebook and give even more detail and background material. Like the Sourcebook, the first six hew very closely to events and locales portrayed in the movie, so I will come back to them in the future.

This is the seventh Galaxy Guide and the first entry in the series written specifically for the second edition rules revision. It tackles Mos Eisley, but the focus is on what we didn’t see in the movies (that is covered in Galaxy Guide 1). Rather, this book attempts to flesh out the city as it exists after the events of A New Hope.

It is a little boring. West End did great stuff when working from source material from others, but was hit-or-miss in developing original stuff. A lot of stuff detailed here feels not unlike what you’d find in any given D&D city guide and lacks that special Star Wars vibe. For instance: the entries for various local businesses, including a bank. Remember, this is 1993, six years off from the tedium of trade alliances being introduced into the film canon.

Other stuff, like Jabba’s town house and Dr. Evazan’s “clinic,” fairs better (though the latter has the groan-worthy name Cutting Edge Clinic, which sounds about as exciting as a chiropractor’s office), but you can already see the limits of the Expanded Universe’s usefulness. The maps are nice though.

Fun fact: there’s a humanoid squirrel alien in the book named Mace Windu.