And yet....in the novel Darth Plagueis, there are technically three in existence right up until the end of Episode I in the timeline...Darth Plagueis, Darth Sidious (his apprentice), and Darth Maul (Sidious' apprentice, which Darth Plagueis knew about) The novel was a good read and full of interesting little tidbits... I'd recommend it. Great info in this thread as well regarding the "Rule of Two". Thanks.

In that novel Sidious and Plagueis plan on using Maul just as an assassin and tease Maul with Sith lore to protect their identities and did not consider Maul not a true Sith apprentice. However when Maul "dies" at the end of Ep 1 Sidious is upset of the death of "his apprentice" implying that he was searching, and accomplished, Plagueis' end and Sid was planning on making Maul a more official Sith apprentice.

And yet....in the novel Darth Plagueis, there are technically three in existence right up until the end of Episode I in the timeline...Darth Plagueis, Darth Sidious (his apprentice), and Darth Maul (Sidious' apprentice, which Darth Plagueis knew about) The novel was a good read and full of interesting little tidbits... I'd recommend it. Great info in this thread as well regarding the "Rule of Two". Thanks.

Here's the thing, Sidious planned to supplant his master, so ofcourse he took an "apprentice". That way he doesn't have to go looking for one right off the bat after he off his master.

Smart thinking if you are planning to sack your boss, better have an underling.

Read the Bane books where Bane and his apprentice have it out. Guess who's waiting, the next apprentice.

Also something else many don't think and or know about. Sideous did infact abide by the rule of two during his Empire. There were two sith. Himself and Vader. But it doesn't mean Sideous didn't have a bunch of force users under his command. Read some of the EU stuff. He had inquisitors where were equal to say jedi knights and many times were dark jedi. Kyle Katarn killed an inquisitor infact at Ruusan, Jerec, fulfilling the prophesy that had been laid down about the planet.

Sideous also had dark side devotees, who practiced sith sorcery, but were not true sith. I mean all the rule ever said there can only be 2 sith. Didn't say there can't be more force users.

Lucas himself has been frequently ambiguous on the matter of canonicity. He has described the EU as being a parallel universe, i.e. entirely separate from the world of the films. He's described it as all being stories told about the same thing, i.e. all the same continuity. And so on. Expecting a concrete answer from him on a subject like that is not worth it. Besides, it's not even clear that Lucas himself "can" determine canonicity anymore, given the events of the last several months.

 

It is noteworthy that Lucas has adopted many canonical elements from the EU wholesale (the most obvious of which is, of course, Coruscant itself) and has exercised varying levels of control over the stories published under the aegis of Lucas Licensing (most famously, having Anakin Solo killed off in the New Jedi Order instead of Jacen Solo). These are not the sorts of things done by somebody who has not read the EU, has no interest in the EU, and who considers the EU to be entirely superfluous to the story of Star Wars.

 

It simply won't do to have such a simplistic interpretation of canon as you seem to think. You're talking as though people like Leland Chee and Sue Rostoni don't even exist. Please, educate yourself.

It's funny you link that because it's exactly that area, if you actually read it, where Lucas himself puts it down in black and white that the EU canon he considers separate from the movie canon as a parallel universe. This is on that page you linked that I will be quoting;

2001;

"There are two worlds here," explained Lucas. "There's my world, which is the movies, and there's this other world that has been created, which I say is the parallel universe—the licensing world of the books, games and comic books. They don't intrude on my world, which is a select period of time, [but] they do intrude in between the movies. I don't get too involved in the parallel universe."

This next line completely contradicts everything you said about him getting involved and reading the EU;

2005:

 

STARLOG: "The Star Wars Universe is so large and diverse. Do you ever find yourself confused by the subsidiary material that's in the novels, comics, and other offshoots?"

 

LUCAS: "I don't read that stuff. I haven't read any of the novels. I don't know anything about that world. That's a different world than my world. But I do try to keep it consistent. The way I do it now is they have a Star Wars Encyclopedia. So if I come up with a name or something else, I look it up and see if it has already been used. When I said [other people] could make their own Star Wars stories, we decided that, like Star Trek, we would have two universes: My universe and then this other one. They try to make their universe as consistent with mine as possible, but obviously they get enthusiastic and want to go off in other directions."

His interview concerning story past Episode 6

2008;

Interviewer: "Do you think you'd have other people continue the Star Wars saga past Episode VI or turn some of the other material into films?"

 

Lucas: "But there's no story past Episode VI, there's just no story. It's a certain story about Anakin Skywalker and once Anakin Skywalker dies, that's kind of the end of the story. There is no story about Luke Skywalker, I mean apart from the books. But there's three worlds: There's my world that I made up, there's the licensing world that's the books, the comics, all that kind of stuff, the games, which is their world, and then there's the fans' world, which is also very rich in imagination, but they don't always mesh. All I'm in charge of is my world. I can't be in charge of those other people's world, because I can't keep up with it."

And this one is just a noteworthy exchange;

2008;

TOTAL FILM: "The Star Wars universe has expanded far beyond the movies. How much leeway do the game makers and novel writers have?"

 

LUCAS: "They have their own kind of world. There's three pillars of Star Wars. I'll probably get in trouble for this but it's OK! There's three pillars: the father, the son and the holy ghost. I'm the father, Howard Roffman [president of Lucas Licensing] is the son and the holy ghost is the fans, this kind of ethereal world of people coming up with all kinds of different ideas and histories. Now these three different pillars don't always match, but the movies and TV shows are all under my control and they are consistent within themselves. Howard tries to be consistent but sometimes he goes off on tangents and it's hard to hold him back. He once said to me that there are two Star Trek universes: there's the TV show and then there's all the spin-offs. He said that these were completely different and didn't have anything to do with each other. So I said, "OK, go ahead." In the early days I told them that they couldn't do anything about how Darth Vader was born, for obvious reasons, but otherwise I pretty much let them do whatever they wanted. They created this whole amazing universe that goes on for millions of years!"

TOTAL FILM: "Are you happy for new Star Wars tales to be told after you're gone?"

LUCAS: "I've left pretty explicit instructions for there not to be any more features. There will definitely be no Episodes VII-IX. That's because there isn't any story. I mean, I never thought of anything. And now there have been novels about the events after Episode VI, which isn't at all what I would have done with it. The Star Wars story is really the tragedy of Darth Vader. That is the story. Once Vader dies, he doesn't come back to life, the Emperor doesn't get cloned and Luke doesn't get married..."

This is not made up, this is ALL from that wiki you just linked and told me to educate myself on, but I find it funny you seem to have completely skipped the relevant parts, that Lucas, himself, says point blankly that he doesn't do.

It's funny you link that because it's exactly that area, if you actually read it, where Lucas himself puts it down in black and white that the EU canon he considers separate from the movie canon as a parallel universe. This is on that page you linked that I will be quoting;

 

This next line completely contradicts everything you said about him getting involved and reading the EU;

 

His interview concerning story past Episode 6

 

And this one is just a noteworthy exchange;

 

This is not made up, this is ALL from that wiki you just linked and told me to educate myself on, but I find it funny you seem to have completely skipped the relevant parts, that Lucas, himself, says point blankly that he doesn't do.

It's not me that's cherry-picking, it's you.

I described Lucas' personal position on the universe as inconsistent. I acknowledged that he has referred to it as a parallel universe - the exact quote that you used was the one I had in mind. But he's also said things that directly contradict that, also on the same page of the wiki. For instance, he said this, which basically admits that it's all the same universe:

After Star Wars was released, it became apparent that my story—however many films it took to tell—was only one of thousands that could be told about the characters who inhabit its galaxy. But these were not stories I was destined to tell. Instead they would spring from the imagination of other writers, inspired by the glimpse of a galaxy that Star Wars provided.

My point is that Lucas has expressed contradictory points of view on the issue of canon and as such his status as an authority on canonicity is dubious. He's not a reliable source. So, giving some of the things he has said about the relationship of the EU to the movies weight over the statements of people whose whole job is the maintenance of Star Wars canon is ridiculous. Chee, Shapiro, Rostoni, the entire concept of the Holocron...you're ignoring this very salient stuff in favor of cherry-picked Lucas quotes from magazine interviews and conventions.

As for whether Lucas knows about/cares about the EU, he very clearly does, and any statements of his to the contrary are out and out lies. Although he rarely exercised it, Lucas had an effective veto over any and all story elements in all EU properties up to the acquisition of Lucasfilm by Disney. Most infamously to Star Wars fans, he interfered in the plotline of the New Jedi Order books by having Anakin Solo killed off instead of Jacen, provoking major changes to already in-progress stories. This has been well attested pretty much everywhere, including in interviews with Troy Denning (author of Star By Star, in which Anakin died) and Michael A. Stackpole (author of the Dark Tide duology, which among other things helped flesh out Anakin as a character early in the series). Lucas has also contributed directly to EU works (such as Shatterpoint, for which he wrote the introduction). And then, at its most basic, a man who knows about plot points from things like the Dark Empire comics and who took Coruscant's name from the Thrawn trilogy can't plausibly claim to not be aware of any of the EU.

Ok so this seemed to be the best place to put this without starting a new thread. Has there been an attempt by Lucasfilm, or Bioware to put the game and the books about it in a timeline....the republic in the bane books act like they think the sith are extinct which given what happened in this game I don't understand (makes sense here for them to think they are extinct if this is before those books as said here).

As well the Bane series was awesome (I recommend children of fire by the same author as well) the other old republic books though seem a little to closely connected to the game...would reading them spoil things in the game I may not have seen? Thanks!

Ok so this seemed to be the best place to put this without starting a new thread. Has there been an attempt by Lucasfilm, or Bioware to put the game and the books about it in a timeline....the republic in the bane books act like they think the sith are extinct which given what happened in this game I don't understand (makes sense here for them to think they are extinct if this is before those books as said here).

 

As well the Bane series was awesome (I recommend children of fire by the same author as well) the other old republic books though seem a little to closely connected to the game...would reading them spoil things in the game I may not have seen? Thanks!

The Battle of Yavin (so, Episode 4) is year 0. Bane's time is more than a thousand years before that. SWTOR takes place over 3600 years before the Battle of Yavin. And the books are in around that timeline, with Revan being 300 years before SWTOR.

So, yeah, they have been pretty clear about it. Ever since the game was announced, they advertised it as taking place 300 years after the events of KOTOR and more than 3000 years before the movies.

Edit:

Fatal Alliance and Deceived don't really spoil anything, Revan contains spoilers for 4 Flashpoints and parts of the Jedi Knight story, and Annihilation might also contain spoilers.

The Battle of Yavin (so, Episode 4) is year 0. Bane's time is more than a thousand years before that. SWTOR takes place over 3600 years before the Battle of Yavin. And the books are in around that timeline, with Revan being 300 years before SWTOR.

So, yeah, they have been pretty clear about it. Ever since the game was announced, they advertised it as taking place 300 years after the events of KOTOR and more than 3000 years before the movies.

 

Edit:

Fatal Alliance and Deceived don't really spoil anything, Revan contains spoilers for 4 Flashpoints and parts of the Jedi Knight story, and Annihilation might also contain spoilers.

Not to mention every official Star Wars book has a Timeline in the first few pages?

Yea got all of this from the thread but in the beginning of Bane the republic thought the sith had been completely destroyed (and then during the course of bane they thought they did it again...the republic seems pretty clueless on that score) given what I know about how the stories here end (admittedly I haven't ended all of the class stories though) I don't see how they could believe that. I guess something could have happened after the stuff here that might have given them that idea but in none of the ending stories here are the sith destroyed completely.

The timeline in the beginning of the books as it doesn't include the game wasn't much help and it wasn't until reading this thread that I made the 3k before Yavin and bane significantly closer to battle of Yavin.

Here's the thing, Sidious planned to supplant his master, so ofcourse he took an "apprentice". That way he doesn't have to go looking for one right off the bat after he off his master.

Smart thinking if you are planning to sack your boss, better have an underling.

Read the Bane books where Bane and his apprentice have it out. Guess who's waiting, the next apprentice.

 

Also something else many don't think and or know about. Sideous did infact abide by the rule of two during his Empire. There were two sith. Himself and Vader. But it doesn't mean Sideous didn't have a bunch of force users under his command. Read some of the EU stuff. He had inquisitors where were equal to say jedi knights and many times were dark jedi. Kyle Katarn killed an inquisitor infact at Ruusan, Jerec, fulfilling the prophesy that had been laid down about the planet.

 

Sideous also had dark side devotees, who practiced sith sorcery, but were not true sith. I mean all the rule ever said there can only be 2 sith. Didn't say there can't be more force users.

All that really does is highlight the silliness of the EU, and the fact that nobody really liked there only being able to be 2 Dark Side users around. Because that renders the entire 'Rule of Two' absurd, "There can totes be thousands of Sith trained Dark Side Force Users running around, but only two of them can actually be called Sith! Everyone else must be called....Bob!"

Yea got all of this from the thread but in the beginning of Bane the republic thought the sith had been completely destroyed (and then during the course of bane they thought they did it again...the republic seems pretty clueless on that score) given what I know about how the stories here end (admittedly I haven't ended all of the class stories though) I don't see how they could believe that. I guess something could have happened after the stuff here that might have given them that idea but in none of the ending stories here are the sith destroyed completely.

 

The timeline in the beginning of the books as it doesn't include the game wasn't much help and it wasn't until reading this thread that I made the 3k before Yavin and bane significantly closer to battle of Yavin.

Thing 1: We don't know exactly how SWTOR ends. In all probability, the Sith Empire will be destroyed or absorbed by the Galactic Republic, but since it hasn't actually happened yet, we can't say for sure. There is still, presumably, story content left for the game; the end of the class stories didn't mean that the war ended. We still got Dread Master stuff, then Makeb, then more Dread Master stuff, then whatever the hell comes after the Dread Masters, on and on until the end of the war.

Thing 2: What we do know is that a few hundred years from the end of SWTOR's story, whenever that is, the Sith Empire does not exist anymore, and the Republic does. The Republic wins the war. It might win in a fairly bizarre fashion (there are some crackpot fan theories about the Sith winning and then transforming into a Republic somehow that aren't that crackpot purely because the writers for this game are just bad enough to maybe want to try something like that), but it eventually wins.

Thing 3: Since the Sith are in many ways like cockroaches (ugly, gross, annoying, and indestructible), somebody keeps the Sith idea of using evil space magic to kill a bunch of people and rule the universe alive. About 1,500 years after SWTOR ends, a new group of Sith is created by a fallen Jedi Master, who takes advantage of turmoil and disintegration in the Republic itself to create an Empire ruled by him and referred to as "Sith". Apart from the whole "we all love the dark side" thing, there is not a whole lot of connection between the Sith of SWTOR and the Sith of these New Sith Wars.

Thing 4: These New Sith Wars drag on in a desultory fashion for about a millennium, with various dark-side regimes achieving regional power, fighting the Republic, splitting apart in bouts of warlordism, and eventually dying out, by which time their epigones emerge and start the process over again.

Thing 5: Darth Bane assumed power due to the rise of the most successful of these regimes, Lord Kaan's Brotherhood of Darkness, which was created about a thousand years after the New Sith Wars started and 2,600 years after SWTOR ended. Although Kaan achieved temporary military success, the Republic and Jedi managed to keep him at bay long enough for Bane to stab Kaan in the back and destroy his empire. The way in which Bane killed Kaan and the other Brotherhood Sith made the Jedi believe that most, if not all, of the Sith were wiped out. Jedi investigators encountered Bane afterward, but the outcome of that confrontation again made it appear as though Bane was dead, when he was in fact grievously injured and in hiding.

Thing 6: Although the Jedi believed that the Sith Order had gone more or less extinct with Bane, the millennium after his death spawned several brief episodes of terror sparked by dark-side users. These dark siders' insane rantings and patterns of action led the Jedi to believe that Sith remnants caused them to embark on their bizarre terrorism and that such remnants may have been in hiding for some time, or that Sith artifacts were manipulating people into becoming servants of the presumably long-dead order. This is how the Jedi knew about the Rule of Two, for instance. They still did not believe - or did not choose to believe - that the Sith Order had survived, intact, for a millennium until Darth Maul was killed on Naboo.

Here, then, is your timeline, if you still want it:

Effectively, then, there were several Sith organizations.

1. The original Red Sith Empire from before the Hundred-Year Darkness

2. The Sith Empire built by the refugee Dark Jedi that lost the Great Hyperspace War

3. The SWTOR Sith Empire

4. Exar Kun and Ulic Qel-Droma's Sith Empire

5. Revan and Malak's Sith Empire

6. The Triumvirate's Sith Empire

7. Phanius' Sith Empire and its successors, including the Brotherhood of Darkness

8. Darth Bane's hidden Sith Order, which eventually took over the Republic under Palpatine and turned it into a Sith Empire

9. And then a few others later in the EU that aren't worth getting into right now.

What you were doing was confusing Bane's Sith with the SWTOR Sith Empire, when in fact they shared little but a name.

All that really does is highlight the silliness of the EU, and the fact that nobody really liked there only being able to be 2 Dark Side users around. Because that renders the entire 'Rule of Two' absurd, "There can totes be thousands of Sith trained Dark Side Force Users running around, but only two of them can actually be called Sith! Everyone else must be called....Bob!"

Eh.

What actually happened is that there was a huge explosion of EU material after the original trilogy. Back then, "Sith" was just part of one of Darth Vader's many titles. It wasn't until Tales of the Jedi that "Sith" became first a race of red-skinned dark-side users. And it wasn't until The Phantom Menace that "Sith" became a specific group of darksiders with rules (like the Rule of Two) and whatnot.

Before 1999, most darksiders were called Dark Jedi by authors, because that was what they were. The only word to describe a Force user was "Jedi", so an evil Jedi would be a "Dark Jedi". This was backed up by the fact that the most prominent evil Force user in Star Wars, Darth Vader, was formerly a Jedi.

So the humongous number of evil Force users that served Palpatine and his Empire were never designated as "Sith" in the first place. The Inquisitorius, the Hands, the Adepts, the weird-looking goons that worked for his Dark Empire, all that stuff was written without any idea of what Lucas would eventually make the Sith into.

After The Phantom Menace, the whole notion of "Sith" was redefined and the people who manage the EU had to start trying to fit everything that had already been written into Lucas' new big idea. The easiest way to get around the Rule of Two with Palpatine was to simply say that Palpatine and Vader had never considered the other Force users serving the Empire to be "Sith"; they were just pawns, albeit slightly more powerful pawns. That does look silly if you approach it from the position of somebody who doesn't know why that name happened and who thinks all darksiders are Sith, but if you know the context it makes sense.

Side note: it's not an EU-specific problem, either. Lucas himself endorsed the idea of darksiders serving Sith who were not actually Sith, therefore not violating the Rule of Two. Hence Asajj Ventress, for instance, who played such a big role in the Clone Wars multimedia projects that Lucas headed. People sometimes dispute Lucas' control over the EU, claiming that he didn't really care about it (which is demonstrably false) and saying that the EU contained all sorts of things that conflicted with the movies because Lucas considered the EU irrelevant noncanon fanfiction (for which you can find quotes on both sides, although IMO Lucas' actions speak louder than words).

But you can't dispute Lucas' control over the two Clone Wars series and the movie. He created the broad sweep of the storyline, intervened on plot points and characterization, and had veto power over anything and everything. If Ventress' portrayal had been contrary to the way he wanted to depict Sith and dark side users, he would have changed it (and did change it, on several occasions). What we have is what he wanted to show us, and what we have is that not every evil Force user was Sith.

So it doesn't really "say" anything about the EU. If you have a problem with the consistency of how the word "Sith" is deployed in Star Wars media, you have that problem with all of Star Wars media, not just the EU.

I hereby dub the sir head loremaster of the old republic. Man - are you in a RP guild anywhere because if so I want to be tutored at your feet...

So where can I find more information about the original red sith the great hyperspace war and the things between aka which books/sites that give information before SWTOR and between SWTOR and the Bane series are worth checking out?