Latest news with #ExpandedUniverse
Gizmodo
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
The Original History Behind the Mandalorians' Wars Against the Jedi
The world of Mandalore has a long and complicated history in Star Wars, and perhaps even more complicated than the story of its peoples' wars among themselves are their wars united against a common foe: the Galactic Republic, and the Jedi Order that served it. But outside of allusions and artwork, the story of what defined these conflicts has gone largely untouched in contemporary Star Wars continuity, as the focus returned to Mandalore's restoration in the post-Imperial era. In the former canon of the Expanded Universe, however, the Mandalorians carved a defining path across the galaxy—in a series of wars that would reshape the Jedi and the Old Republic forever. The story of the Mandalorian Crusades is defined, in part, by the creation of the Mandalorian people. In the EU, the Mandalorians' roots lay with a species called the Taung: humanoid simians originally indigenous to Coruscant, they were routed from their homeworld after conflict with the planet's other native civilization, the Zhell. The Taung eventually relocated to the world that would become christened as Mandalore for their leader, Mandalore the First, adopting their new name as the Mandalorians, the sons and daughters of Mandalore in the Taung tongue. Almost immediately after the establishment of Mandalore, the Mandalorians dispatched warriors on nomadic crusades to subjugate nearby worlds and expand Mandalorian influence. Over three thousand years, generations of Mandalorian crusades pushed from the Outer Rim into the fringes of the Republic, establishing a growing pocket of Mandalorian space. But things would change under the leadership of Mandalore the Indomitable. Driven by a religious experience on the world of Shogun, Mandalore the Indomitable elevated conflict itself as a divine pillar of Mandalorian society. Under the Indomitable's rule, Mandalorian aggression became a serious galactic threat as the crusades thrust deeper and deeper into the galactic Core, with Mandalorian space eventually encompassing worlds practically on the doorstep of the Taung's ancestral home of Coruscant by 4000 BBY, 3 millennia after Mandalore's establishment. Hoping to exploit a fragile political situation in the Empress Teta system, which itself had been locked into civil wars and interventionist conflicts with Republic-backed forces amid the rise of a Dark Side cult known as the Krath, Mandalore the Indomitable led a new crusade into Tetan space. The crusaders' raiding drew the attention of Ulic Qel-Droma, a fallen Jedi who had been coaxed to the Dark Side while trying to infiltrate the Krath, who challenged Mandalore the Indomitable to a duel in 3996 BBY, with the seven worlds of the Empress Teta system, and the military might of the Krath and Mandalorian forces, at stake. Mandalore the Indomitable lost. Spared by Qel-Droma to deny him an honorable death, Qel-Droma leveraged victory to bring the Mandalorians into his service through Mandalore the Indomitable's sway. With the Mandalorians on their side, Qel-Droma and his fellow warlord, the Sith Lord Exar Kun, were prepared to launch a new Sith Empire—and with it, plunge the galaxy into total war. The Great Sith War would last just a single year, even with the powerful aid of the Mandalorians. The Indomitable and his Crusaders were largely absent from the turning point in the conflict at Ossus, where a defeated Qel-Droma was severed from the Force after slaying his own brother and surrendered to the Jedi and Republic—instead, Qel-Droma had tasked the Mandalorians with an invasion of Onderon. Locked into a slow stalemate with the locals, the arrival of Republic reinforcements over the world eventually pushed Mandalore into calling for a retreat to one of the Onderonian moons, Dxun. But the Indomitable was shot down en route and forced to land in the moon's jungles, where he was devoured by beasts. The Mandalorian people found themselves on a precipice. The Great Sith War had greatly diminished the Mandalorian population, still then descended from the Taung that had founded their world three thousand years prior. The Mandalorian who found the Indomitable's mask and rose to prominence as the next Mandalore—eventually to be known as Mandalore the Ultimate. Not only reuniting the remnant clans after establishing his forward base on Dxun as a training ground for Mandalorian warriors, Mandalore the Ultimate, himself a Taung, began the process of opening up Mandalorian society, recruiting members from a swathe of other species who submitted to their code of honor. He also instituted a policy of the Mandalorians occupying and adding worlds to Mandalore's growing rule, rather than just simply pillaging them, creating a backbone of worlds that could support a war industry. Over 20 years, Mandalore the Ultimate bided time restrengthening his people, just as the Jedi and Republic restored the damage wrought during the Great Sith War. Ultimately influenced in part into open conflict with the Republic by an emissary operating on behalf of Vitiate's hidden Sith Empire, but equally driven by his own desire to test both the Republic's and the renewed Mandalorians' strengths, Mandalore called his Neo-Crusaders into a new crusade in 3976 BBY. But Mandalore's forces did not immediately leap into battle within the galactic Core: the Mandalorians spent years picking at territories in the Outer Rim on the fringes of the Republic, taking worlds and exterminating millions, but just far enough away from the Republic to not provoke a response from the Senate. It took Mandalorian encroachment near the world of Taris, an Outer Rim world that had become a crucial hub of trade in the Republic's re-expansion after the Great Sith War, for the Republic to take notice. Shoring up defenses and engaging in skirmishes with Neo-Crusader forces around Taris and its local systems, the Republic and the Mandalorians spent a year engaging in a false war before Mandalore the Ultimate began the conflict in earnest in 3964 BBY. In what became known as 'The Onslaught,' Mandalorian forces broke through Republic defense lines, besieging the mining world of Vanquo as well as Taris itself, as the Mandalorians launched devastating and brutal attacks on worlds like Onderon and Serroco. But throughout the false war, another important conflict had been within the Republic itself. A young Jedi began making waves in the order, advocating for Jedi intervention on a galactic scale to stop the conflict with the Mandalorians from breaking out into a full-on war. Adopting revanchism—retaking territory taken by the Mandalorians—the young Jedi eventually established their own movement within the Order, swaying more and more Jedi to their beliefs at the behest of the Grand Council, which continued to rule that the Jedi had no place in the Republic's military plans. Although the council would dispatch the Revanchists on missions during the early phases of the war, and the Republic itself increasingly wrapped itself up in interest over the rise of a Jedi crusader who was willing to fight the Mandalorians, eventually the Revanchists and their leader would break entirely from the Jedi Council on the planet Cathar. An Outer Rim world outside of Republic space, Cathar had been one of the earliest worlds in the region invaded by Mandalore the Ultimate's forces, leading to the near-extinction of the Cathar people. Prompted to investigate the devastation of the world, the Revanchists discovered through the Force the truth of the Mandalorian's extermination of the Cathar—with their leader, now taking the mantle of Revan, swearing to fight until the Mandalorians were defeated. The discovery of the Cathar genocide begrudgingly prompted the Jedi Council to approve Revan and their followers' formal support of the Republic Military. First acting as Mercy Corps, an ostensible division of support crew and healers, the Revanchists quickly became key generals and frontline warriors in the war. Even as the Mandalorians began to push deeper and deeper coreward, the Revanchist Jedi's intervention would help turn the tide in the Republic's favor, with Revan ultimately being named Supreme Commander of the Republic Military by 3962. After years of pushing the Mandalorians further back into their own space, Revan drew the Mandalorians into a major conflict over the world of Malachor V. While Revan duelled and slew Malachore the Ultimate aboard the Mandalorian flagship, Revanchist forces activated an experimental superweapon known as the Mass Shadow Generator, a gravitational vortex generator. Trapping Republic and Mandalorian vessels alike and slamming them into the surface of the world below them, the Mass Shadow Generator brought Malachor V to a horrific cataclysm, sundering the planet and killing tens of thousands. With the death of Mandalore the Ultimate—and Revan's hiding of the mask of Mandalore, denying the Mandalorian people the traditional path to a new unifying leader—and the sheer loss of life at Malachor V, the last of the great Mandalorian Crusades came to an end with the surviving Mandalorians offering unconditional surrender to the Republic. Revan ordered that the Mandalorians be stripped of their weapons, armor, and military hardware, a tactic, combined with the disappearance of Mandalore's mask, that fractured the Mandalorian clans into fringe groups fighting among themselves for power, scattering across the galaxy. It would take years for Mandalore's mask to be found, leading to the age of a new Mandalore, the Preserver, who would in time work with Jedi and Republic forces alike to battle the threat of the Sith in the decade after the end of the Mandalorian Wars. But Revan's victory at Malachor V set the stage for an equally devastating conflict to come: defying the rules of the Jedi Council to return to Coruscant for their role in the horrific loss of life at Malachor, Revan and his close ally Malak took the bulk of the Revanchist Jedi into the Unknown Regions, following clues given to Revan by Mandalore the Ultimate in his dying breaths. Finding there the hidden Sith Empire that had likewise helped push the Mandalorians to attack the Republic in the first place, Revan and Malak were corrupted and broken into submitting to the Dark Side themselves… setting the stage for their command of an invasion of the galaxy by the Sith once more. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Gizmodo
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
West End Games' Classic ‘Star Wars' RPG Is Still Setting the Blueprint for Its Universe
In the years since Lucasfilm overhauled Star Wars continuity—reclassifying years of Expanded Universe material as 'Legends' before wiping a clean slate of continuity it has developed over the last decade-plus—much of what has been rebuilt has been done so off of the back of re-canonizing elements of that old material. In some ways re-imagined, in others just lifted wholesale, the journey of modern Star Wars is as much about adding new stories as it is weaving the old ones back into them. There are perhaps two pillars that define the reconstructive effort above all. The story of Star Wars' future, as in that in the wake of the events of Return of the Jedi, has somehow inexplicably turned to 1994's The Courtship of Princess Leia as its guiding light. But the story of Star Wars' recent past, the trajectory of the rise of the Imperial machine that has been a richly delved period of exploration in everything from Andor to Bad Batch, from games, comics, and books, to movies like Rogue One and Solo? That's been West End Games' Star Wars RPG. First published in 1987, Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game spent over a decade filling out the background of the world before and after the original Star Wars trilogy across multiple editions and a plethora of sourcebooks. Without much to go on beyond the material Marvel's ongoing Star Wars comic series had developed at the time (itself coming to an end the year West End Games' Star Wars story began), the RPG would become an early groundwork for what would become the beginning of the Star Wars Expanded Universe as we would come to know it in the early 1990s. From species names to Rebel Alliance command structures, from events that still resonate now like the Ghorman Massacre depicted in Andor, Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game was the right combination of coming along at the perfect time and its creatives being given the exact level of free reign to create a perfect sandbox of Star Wars creation. And create WEG did, with dozens of intricate sourcebooks that didn't just cover the broad strokes of what it would mean to have a roleplaying game experience in Star Wars' galaxy, but the nittiest, grittiest details, many of which didn't just go on to shape the Expanded Universe when it began in earnest, but expand even further with the addition of the material created there, delving further and further into Star Wars' past with supplements based on the Tales of the Jedi comics, or Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy (itself shaped by the early writings of the RPG, given to Zahn as a guideline). It wasn't just raw informational data that WEG's books provided to shape the EU (and in turn modern continuity), but style and tone. This is most keenly felt in Greg Gorden's Imperial Sourcebook, which does a deep dive into details about different facets of the Empire's structure, from intelligence to military, and also explores things like COMPNOR—the Commission for the Preservation of the New Order, essentially the political superstructure of Imperial power—to elucidate the specific fascistic character of the Empire's oppressive tactics. But beyond the actual material itself, one major thing that still remains influential in visions of contemporary Star Wars, is how West End Games taught its writers to write Star Wars. West End Games' Star Wars style guide had a bit of a viral moment a decade ago when it re-emerged on the internet (at places like this very website!), to compare and contrast how its dos and don't matched up with what was then the nascent status of modern Star Wars in the wake of the reboot of canon and the release of The Force Awakens. But while the gift of hindsight can be enjoyable, WEG's advise on what made good Star Wars can still be felt throughout the very best of the material that we're getting today. The style guide pushed writers to be expansive and additive to Star Wars' world, rather than to simply play in what was already in the toybox. Familiar characters were to be few and far between, moral storytelling to be less clear-cut, with villains (new villains!) that had motivation beyond evil for evil's sake. Again, its approach to stories of the Empire were some of its most fascinating, pushing writers to remember that the Empire was made up of genuinely awful people, but also a galaxy of citizenry who had little choice than to conform to the grip of Empire, and who became its willing tool was different to just a regular person with their own wants and needs. Star Wars is a broad sandbox, but West End Games pitched an enduring vision of it that strove for maturity and intelligence, that took the base framework and world of the original movies and genuinely pushed them into new and compelling territories in order to give players a rich and thriving universe to play in. There's an argument to be made, of course, that not all Star Wars should adhere to this tone or particular frame of interest: WEG's vision of Star Wars leaned more into the military sci-fi of its view of the Imperial/Rebel conflict, and not necessarily too far into Star Wars' space fantasy roots, an equally important aspect of the universe. But it's remarkable to see how what has become some of the very best of Star Wars in the modern day—across books, television, comics, games, and movies—carry so much of Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game's heritage, not just in reference to the worlds, names, places, and events it first explored, but in the tonal vision it had for the galaxy far, far away. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Express Tribune
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
William Shatner accuses Mark Hamill of ruining Star Wars
William Shatner, best known for his iconic portrayal of Captain Kirk in Star Trek, sparked controversy on Thursday with a post on X (formerly Twitter), accusing Mark Hamill of ruining Star Wars. Shatner responded to fans who believe Disney has altered the Star Wars universe, specifically referencing Mara Jade, a character central to the franchise's expanded lore. In his post, Shatner wrote, "I assume you are referring to Mara Jade? Hamill actually ruined it for you when he revealed Luke was gay," and included a 2016 Vanity Fair article titled ''Of Course' Luke Skywalker Is Gay, Confirms Mark Hamill, Echoing Thousands of Fan-Fiction Prayers.' Shatner's post sparked a wave of support from many Star Wars fans, who argued that he had a better understanding of Star Wars canon than Hamill or modern Star Wars enthusiasts. Some fans, however, mistakenly believed the article to be recent and criticized Hamill for being political. In response, some fans clarified the context of Hamill's original statement from the Vanity Fair interview. Hamill explained that he never definitively confirmed Luke's sexuality, saying, 'If you think Luke is gay, of course he is. Judge Luke by his character, not by who he loves.' He emphasized that his comments were meant to support fans who felt marginalized, allowing them to interpret Luke's story as they saw fit. Shatner's mention of Mara Jade refers to the character's role in Star Wars expanded lore. Mara Jade, originally an Emperor's Hand, was a powerful Force user who later married Luke Skywalker. After their marriage, she took the surname Skywalker and devoted her life to the New Jedi Order, ultimately becoming a Jedi Master. However, in 2008, when Star Wars creator George Lucas declared there would be no sequel trilogy, he stated that elements from the Expanded Universe were not part of his official Star Wars narrative. Lucas famously explained, 'Luke doesn't get married,' effectively removing Mara Jade from the canon of the main Star Wars story. The ongoing debate highlights the contrasting perspectives of the two legendary actors, with Shatner, at 93, and Hamill, at 73, continuing to ignite discussions about their respective franchises.
