A good-looking small vessel in the ever-useful adventuring party size, with some very nice technical and historical notes to hook in to a campaign.

I have mentioned before how much I love the Blue Max Studios ship plans. The D6 stats for them are incredibly welcome, given that West End Games Star Wars RPG has been out of print for so long. New ships are always a welcome addition in my campaign, and they are able to inject new items to the Star Wars universe - but still remain in theme.

The ship plans come with a full set of deck plans that can be printed and are the right size for miniatures, should you need a room-to-room combat. There are additional notes regarding the history of the vehicle and also how it might fit into a campaign.

The Monarch Courier does fill a nice niche given its size and armaments, but also the fact that it is almost at the luxury end of starships for its size. As such, it would make a good ship for an enterprising smuggler (a more respectable one at least) or as a utility craft for a group of PCs.

Well worth the asking price.

The Monarch courier is a well-conceived and nicely-drawn little starship, perfect for spacefaring (N)PCs who want to travel in style and don’t need to depend too much on passengers or cargo hauling—and who don’t mind plying the spacelanes without weapons. The backstory is interesting enough, and explains that the ship is intended for business travelers (you could easily extend this to galactic politicians as well). A group of spacefaring PCs would probably want to add some weaponry to the ship, if using it as their primary form of transportation, but it would make a fine set-piece as is for one-time or occasional use. The product includes statistics for both d6- and d20-based games, and it wouldn’t be difficult to relocate the backstory to a galaxy far, far away rather than one close to Earth. The pages could stand nicer formatting (typefaces with more character and shorter paragraph indentations, for example), but that doesn’t detract from the gameplay value. Speaking of value, $5 seems a bit steep to me in absolute terms, but it’s not far from the prices of comparable products.