/sw/ - Star Wars

>>34674

Dustil Onasi, who Carth referred to as his bodyguard when Sirun asked why some dude in his bathrobe was hiding in the corner, joins in with his father in interrogating Sirun, they both want to know if he's seen Revan where Revan went how Revan's doing blah Revan blah REVAN

Your talk with Carth in KOTOR 2 (which happens WAAAY later in the game) goes very similarly, its all about where Revan is blah blah where mask man, part of Carth wants to know where he is but ultimately just asks you to send a message, but here Carth very much wants to know where Revan went because everything is falling a fucking part and he's afraid that he's failing Revan when he promised to keep the homefront secure, and Dustil who's had a lot of feeling of betrayal throughout his life is sorta pissed that the man who helped save his life (from becoming a slave to the organization that ruined his life) just up and fucking left right when everything went bad, so both Onasis are over here grilling the Exile about something he has no fucking clue about.

Carth has accepted that the Exile may've destroyed Peragus justifiably, but Dustil over here is much less understanding.

This is the same guy who absolutely hated his father for being busy fighting a war when his home and mother got incinerated so badly that he joined the fucks that committed the act just to get back at his old man, and now he's across the table from some fucking traitor who FOLLOWED the man who destroyed his home and just a few days ago put his home that's getting rebuilt in jeopardy by blowing up an essential part of it and running off.

Dustil is pissed. And also, Dustil is a jedi.

KOTOR 2 was supposed to have Dustil in it, he was gonna be on Korriban in Ludo Kressh's tomb, a part of some Jedi group that went there to investigate some blah blah. He's crazy and you kill him, that's what happens

It's bullshit, he deserved better, I'm trying to give him better. Sirun vehemently convinces them that he's a dumbass who knows fuckall, and while Carth can understand that maybe the death of Peragus is understandable to a point, he demands that Sirun fix the problem he created and help scrub Citadel Station clean of all its murky bits that ail it.

Which is funny, since that's what Dustil came there to do. And he's not alone.

>>34679

Blah blah Dustil notices that Sirun's got no Jedi robes he's been running around in one of those basic bitch combat suits you get from KOTOR and pleb robes up to this point Dustil acts like a cunt and gives him the vestments he whore at the Sith academy, that's where the 3rd image comes from. The second image is what Dustil's wearing, and if you look at it long enough, you'll notice that him and Mical have the exact same color palette.

I didn't take the colors from that picture of Mical, I got them from a higher quality render of his actual model, but I wanted them to be connected both in the story as buddies but also thematically, looking similar and all that. There's some irony in that Mical's dressed less like a Jedi than Dustil but actually follows the code much better, as you have to remember Dustil is a reformed Sith and one of the more Gray Jedi characters in this whole thing. He's pretty emotional and really relies on Mical being a personality foil for him to keep him in line. later when they split on separate missions you get to see just how important Mical is to Dustil not going apeshit

Mical is sort of giddy to be back in the presence of someone who was a proper Jedi, as neither of them really are no matter the fact that both of them have lightsabers and Sirun has an old blaster pistol. Blah blah its basically the Lt. Grenn missions where you find the Batono guy, eliminate Czerka's attempts at nurturing the remnants of the Exchange's black market, and slowly but surely through good works does the Exile prove to Dustil that he's not really a piece of shit. Dustil still is pissy about the predicament Sirun put Citadel Station in, but he at least believes Sirun when he says he'll try to fix it.

Through Slusk (I spelt it wrong the first few times, sorry) they realize that the Exchange has a huge bounty on Jedi, Dustil and Mical were vaguely aware of this but always in the presence of a metric fuckton of Republic fleet personnel, and while there are a bunch of HK-50s in the Republic military subverting shit left and right, none of their attempts to fuck with the Onasi fleet's gone anywhere so Dustil and Mical have been mostly safe from fuckery. While the Exile's had to deal with them around 3 fucking times so far

The HKs aren't about to call the hammer of a Republic hammerhead fleet down on them yet so while Sirun and the Onasi fleet's at Citadel station they leave him alone, despite him being in literal fucking orbit of their factory. After the Exchange's remnant is obliterated Slusk tried fleeing the station, gets apprehended by Sirun, Dustil, Mical, and a whole fucking army of TSF, the Exchange give one final stand in one of the restoration zones Czerka ""accidentally"" let them access for spice and other illegal good trafficking, but after a Republic force including the Jedi and actual Republic infantry wave their dicks at them the Exchange just gives up and leaves, leaving Czerka with its pants down. Secrets exposed, connections laid bare, it doesn't take much to uproot the shady corporation's entire efforts on Citadel Station. Sirun also looked into the fake Batu Rem shit while investigating the GenoHara-I mean, Exchange wanted bounty hunters and found out they were from Nar Shaddaa**

After some congratulations on helping take the yoke of niggotry and defilement off Citadel Station, from Carth, in the middle of the TSF's celebrations about not having to worry about Czerka or the Exchange doing fucked up things to their home anymore, Sirun gets a little message from T3 that he's got something to show him.

>>34680

T3's decoded an australian pedophile's porn stash worth of bullshit from Atris' archives, and after reviewing it multiple times with his not-so-faulty droid brain he thinks that one of the Jedi from Sirun's trial is there.

Luckily for Sirun, he already planned on heading to Nar Shaddaa just to investigate the fake Batu Rem business, but right when he's tell his crew about this wild shit that's unfolding guess who waddles her way out of the cargo hold.

The last of the Handmaidens aint too thrilled that Atris got her shit stolen, but she's still got her mission to do and poor argumentative skills on her part allow Atton and Sirun to change the subject and outshout her, exiling her to the cargo hold that she crawled out of.

Sirun goes to inform Carth, since he feels a little obligated to since he y'know fucked over the guys' home in a way, that he's got to go to Nar Shaddaa to deal with some business. Carth's not too happy to say this but, right before Sirun leaves Citadel Station he tells him in private that there's an extremely powerful being on Nar Shaddaa that could help him figure out both mysteries at once.

Vogga Besadii Dazion, head of the hutt Besadii kajidic after his father Novaba Besadii Dazion of Sleheyron mysteriously died and the immense wealth of Vogga's uncle Bochaba Besadii Tiure was passed onto the ambitious fat snail that lost his shell, and that Vogga could help Sirun deal with both his Jedi problem and cleanse him of his sins to Telos.

bleh Jesus, had to cut this one into 3 posts

Holy moly roly poly trolly frijoles, so many of the postings. I reread the other thread again as well, and there's a lot of stuff to cover, so I'll post about what I think of the most recent material first and then some more general thoughts.

>>34591

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

You should read the literature about this if you need something to base your ideas for the Zabraks' history on.

I realized that there might have been some confusion with the Basilisks partaking in boarding operations against Republic ships. I was thinking of the Star Viper-esque version instead of the horses with shooty faces. I guess either way can work given that these are the Mandalorians we're talking about. The StarViper probably has more mounts for hull breaching equipment though. I was also looking at refitting existing ships with disruptors and mass drivers instead of creating new ships, because the Mandos lack the cash to splurge on many different ship hulls. Your big ships have to stay in the fight as long as possible, meaning they shouldn't have nonstandard weapons. Missiles also help make up for poor firing arcs on some ships like the Kyramud.

Mass drivers arguably have the most use as supplemental weapons on missile-heavy ships like the Jehav to boost their power while lessening the resource burden of building lots of missiles. Missiles themselves are the most useful as supplemental weapons in settings where strong point defenses exist. These considerations only leave the Nynir as a potential base for a dedicated ballistics cruiser, especially since almost nothing has been specified for it yet. The only thing the Nynir has that makes it distinctive right now is that it's slower and better-armored than its Republic counterpart, which makes it the best candidate for ballistics. The heightened shielding afforded by not having to power mass drivers from the core will let it destroy any comparable Republic ship. The Mandos don't have any point defense ships right now either. Disruptors by contrast consume so much power that only big ships can mount them. I have to say these threads have helped my knowledge of naval tactics, but I still have a preference for ground battles.

Here's my opinion of your overall writing plan. I don't think any alternative takes on either of the main games are needed except maybe as a flashback or supplemental material if you decide to rewrite TOR. My thought is just to focus on the Mandalorian Wars and possibly separatist-TOR. You've been saying that you don't have the time to write this all into a book and would rather do a series of short stories. This is understandable given the gargantuan task of writing several hundred pages, but releasing all of it at once as a novel will probably gain more interest. There are ways of making this happen without having to do it all yourself. You could get other posters to write some of the chapters to take some of the workload off. You also have the knack for writing both /tg/ guidebook-style fluff as well as in novel format. So why not adopt a format that lets you combine both types of writing into a novel?

Use literary devices that allow fluff to partially stand in for traditional text and form part of a coherent narrative instead of just being flavoring, like a framing story set later on featuring historians poring over sometimes conflicting records of the war trying to get the truth or just push their agenda, or filmmakers in the process of making a documentary. Everything from footage of battles to journal entries and after-battle reports to interviews with the participants to news coverage and opinion pieces in galactic news media to arguments on HoloNet boards and space Discords of varying levels of controlled discussion and more is admissible. Those who aren't the best at traditional novel writing can contribute this way. You can include the various ship specs and battle maps as appendices written by those historians or as visual aids for some sections. The material you have so far will still need editing, but less so than if you attempted to transfer it into ordinary novel form.

This was used for the X-Wing and TIE Fighter strategy guides' continuations of The Farlander Papers and The Stele Chronicles, albeit without the media-related bits because it didn't fit the scenario. This is also somewhat similar to sourcebooks like The Jedi Path, but those didn't have any new content or attempt to tell a story, instead acting as mere aggregators. Approaching Revan this way allows the preservation of his larger-than-life persona at the same time as it gives us a more personal look at him and his allies. The audience can treat elements that conflict with their playthroughs or ideas as unreliable narration. You can incorporate the version of psychometry you thought up into this too. I like seeing the more supportive powers like that at work. It also offers the otherwise mostly unavailable opportunity to connect this era to the future eras. It also brings the ongoing fuckery of Disney to mind in a meta sense due to the historical revisionism aspect.

>>34682

And he's gone again. Gone with the wind… The mysterious and detailed writer who we shall never know.

>>34769

At least we know he'll be back.

Though some means of contacting him would be fucking swell.

OP/Recanon whatever you want to call me phone posting from a quality inn.

I'm sorry I'm not home yet, my last day went from Sunday to Wednesday to Friday and hopefully its gonna stay that way, but since one of us is injured I cant promise anything

Sorry for the long wait, if everything goes well my next post will be late Friday, I'll attach an email since somebody asked about it. Thanks guys

>>35074

Last line got fucked up for some reason. Probably technical retard issues on my part, sorry guys

So the First Watch Circle was made up of a blind hoe, Cthulhu, a NOT-Nautolan, Shaak Ti on ketamine, and Lucien Draay. Lucien's job here was probably to work as a guardian/protector of the Seers, as they're dumb retards with everybody but the big blue guy and coked up Ahsoka being more or less shit with a lightsaber and Lucien afterall wasn't exactly all that good at looking into the future stuff, something his mom more or less constantly shit on him for all his life like a gigantic cunt, but hey that's what happens when you have a psychotic gypsy who spends all her time either staring into a crystal ball looking for your Dad's murderers or hitting you over the head with a ouija board for not being able to see Grandma and Grandpa floating around in the corner.

Anyways, the entire point of bringing up the Jedi Covenant was to establish a few things about them that changed with the creation of the True Covenant. Things I will not go into too much detail right now, as I am currently doing my best not to fall asleep while typing this

In the morning I'll write more about,

>True Covenant's beliefs

>True Covenant VS Jedi Covenant comparison

>True Covenant actions

>Why the fuck I'm even bringing them up

Thank you guys for sticking with me, and I'm sorry my work trip took longer than expected. As promised here's that email I talked about

helpinghelper77@gmail.com

Not sure what you guys want to send me, but somebody asked for it so here you go

Thank you anons, good night

>>35075

For some reason I can't post a picture of the First Watch Circle. In the morning when I'm less retarded I'll change a pixel or something and post the same file

>>35073

>>35074

>>35075

>FUCKING MORON WRITERS

This is among the many things I was going to ask about. You should make sort of a non-spoiler brief guide to what's getting changed from the comics and why for those of us who haven't read them. I'm sure there were many terrible decisions made there going by what I've heard about the terrible decisions made for the novels. You'll always piss somebody off trying to translate something to another format. But it seems that they pissed off more people than usual here. Another thing is that we still have to see how the Eshan side of Albino Hook goes in more detail. Hopefully it turns out as badass as the Nouane part did so the Mandalorians know the absolute wreckage that happened to them on Nouane wasn't an isolated occurrence.

I have lots of other stuff that I've been thinking about here and I want to get everything I've thought about so far out of the way since I've got some big work projects coming up soon, so I may not get to post for weeks at a time for a couple months once they start. A lot of it depends on what you think of my ideas from >>34722 and >>34723. I won't just abandon the thread or the board entirely, but I probably won't get to participate as much for a while. This doesn't happen for about another month, though. I won't post the rest of it tonight because it's late and I'm going to bed soon, and it'll take the better part of a planetful of posts to describe it all. All the stuff from this post deals with already established material, so I don't have to strain too much on low sleep, but the rest of it is about things that have yet to be written.

>>35080

Thanks for sticking around anon, I enjoy your posts. I like the idea of Mandalorians incorporating older technologies in their ships and including mass drivers and other more ballistic weapons in their arsenal, it helps them stand out more and fits well with the motif already established in the KOTOR comic where they use a fuckton of missiles to assrape Republic vessels.

Regarding the writing thing let me try to explain it one more time, since I've done a shit job so far

They're going to be separated into what I expect to be novellas, i.e. essentially novels but smaller, as they revolve around a specific event or set of events happening in the overall story, together they tell the overall story of Revan, Malak, and the Exile in the Mandalorian Wars, but not necessarily back-to-back. Think of them as Episodes opposed to parts.

I was inspired to do this during the Onderon part of KOTOR 2, where I was already thinking about how I'd split things up before I realized that there were tons of plot threads just left untied at the end of it and I feel that if I wanted to incorporate a few or any, if I'm being honest then I'd have to find a way to tie them together into a nice, comfy, cohesive story.

For example,

>Gormo the freighter captain needs a visa to get him and his crew off planet

>That one widow who's trying to save her family from Vaklu's agents

You ultimately only have the ability to help two people, but in this instance I think that its a bit of an oversight on the writer's part to not have a clause in your agreement with Gormo or something to transport the family off planet as passengers.

Also Gormo does something else remotely important but I won't spoil it

Then there's things like,

>beast rider pimping out Onderonian fauna to Telos merchants

>Beasts go wild

>If you beast confusion them nothing happens, you're forced to kill them to continue the encounter

That's stupid. My immediate reaction when dealing with animals in KOTOR 2 post-beat trick was to use the Force to influence them, and its a shame that the game devs never accounted for this option.

But there's also,

>beast rider dickheads in the cantina you kill to get Dhagon's shit back

Honestly not sure if there's a way to NOT job them, but my idea was that the Exile helps out the beast rider who's profits literally go wild by Force-taming the creatures subtly of course and that said beast rider has some sort of affiliation with the gang of them you meet, leading to them having a few moments in the subsequent story.

Little moments like that may not seem like much but to someone like me who likes smooth and seamless narratives opposed to ones that fucking fray at the edges, tying things together helps me sleep at night.

>>35088 (chek'd)

But at the end of the day I don't really want to rewrite the comics that much, I'd rather let them breath and exist because my job isn't necessarily to retcon everything I disliked but instead to shove that square peg into an appropriately sized round hole and just pray that I did enough work to make it fit somewhat, afterall that's what Legends was built on and I think that keeping that spirit alive is more important than having things my way 100%.

That being said though, I will very happily cut and add things whenever I feel like it if it either makes me happy or adds to the overall narrative, which usually makes me happy so it all works out in the end.

Regarding doing a sort of Essential Guide-esque thing where I lay out events and ideas and summarize them, I like that idea. I think that is a great idea, but if I'm being honest I sort of already did a lot of that and just never showed it because I thought it was dumb and boring, I do it because I enjoy it I have specs on the DLA-7's length, weight, and power capabilities for each of the 3 models of it but I quit doing it quite as much because it really started to detract from me actually working on the story, since I was too busy measuring the angle on a 92.5 degree armor plating on the Centurion-class.

>>35089

>comic changes

The goal of just about any project that covers previously covered material is to change things more to your liking, but if you get to changing things just for the sake of changing things, you get Greedo shooting first.

>Essential Guide

This is less of an Essential Guide than a dissident history of the Mandalorian Wars, although it still has some things in common with an Essential Guide like ship specs and battle maps but also has sections of prose. The audience could even read it alongside the official version of the comics and consider both to be canon on some level, just telling different versions of history. We all loved the narrative you wrote for the Nouane stuff, and we'd rather not lose that entirely.

>I quit doing it quite as much because it really started to detract from me actually working on the story

It really depends how many people you could get onboard to serve as writers. Effectively focusing on the story becomes easier if you have more people helping. I should talk about some of the ideas I have that may not be usable without the documentary approach, or that may not go over as well. We can compare the ideas stemming from that with what could be done with a conventional approach and evaluate whether it's worth the effort. Not to rain on your parade with the Covenant or Eshan stuff. Text block incoming.

>Characterizations

This is really the meat and potatoes of the whole thing. I had to take a while to think about this, and I don't know that it did any good, but here goes. Sirun will probably end up being the major viewpoint character. From what you're saying about Kavar, it sounds like the loss of his father figure would drive Sirun to find something else to be a part of since the Jedi are doing a poor job of acting as a surrogate family. Maybe him joining the war is just as much about that as it is about fighting the Mandalorians. Becoming part of the Revanchists offers him not only purpose and a place to belong but somebody to look up to who shares his negative opinion of the Jedi, albeit somebody who's not old enough to be a proper father figure and therefore serves as more of an older brother. Given the Jedi's policy of no contact with family, this is probably none too rare among them.

We should see the difference between Tau's tactics and Sirun's as part of their differing characterizations too. I don't know how much stuff you have planned for Tau character-wise, but in terms of his battle strategies and tactics he should be pretty much Light Yagami in space, especially given his Machiavellian manipulation skills which he would both be a natural at and have developed under the tutelage of the best manipulation expert in this time period. I said earlier that Revan would use troll tactics a lot and that Thrawn could take inspiration after having read history books about him, and with the documentary approach it could even be this book specifically, but I guess that depends on how you define trolling. Thrawn, Light Yagami and other chessmaster characters tend to use psychological tactics, but Nouane was trolly as fuck too. Sirun can take some of Tau's tactics for himself, but he still has his own way of doing things which is more about being resourceful and making use of the environment than appealing to some psychological weakness of the enemy.

What we really have to address here is the fundamental question of why people go to war, which invites questioning of the entire setting much like Avellone. His deconstructionist style served well for a story about rebuilding after the war, since you can't rebuild something unless you know how it works. Unfortunately, this is why the prequel hate was so far out of proportion to their actual flaws. Normalfags never really cared about understanding why any of these events happen as they do. They want to watch shit blow up and not have to think too hard about it. Any normalfag who's finally caught onto how bad the sequels are doesn't understand that they're part of the reason the sequels are bad. I want to have a moment fairly late in the story with some Sirun dialogue that makes sense within the story but also basically calls normalfag moviegoers out for being worthless fucking retards. He isn't wrong about the past being better, though. Just look how the future turned out. The past had the old Battlefront, while the future has given us EA's abomination.

>Side plots

This part is just a grab bag of ideas meant to flesh out the story more, which can be taken or left. You no doubt have things planned at a basic level for the side characters already, so you should have some more material to speed up the process and maybe feed back into the main story. First up is the economic situation of the Republic. G0-T0 tells us during his in-game dialogue that the Republic is a month away from collapse. You can attribute some of this to Malak destroying the Republic's infrastructure after he took over, since unlike Tau or Sirun the only tactic he knows is MALAK SMASH, but the Cressa administration's mismanagement and that of the previous several administrations probably had something to do with it too. The Republic's economy has never been detailed. You now have the opportunity to correct this.

We should ask how long a chancellor's term in the Republic is versus how long the war lasts. There are also senatorial terms as well as term limits to consider. What I'm getting at here is that Tol Cressa and many of those who support his policies may have to run for re-election while the war is going on if this isn't his last term. He'll still have the desire to make things easier for his successor even if it is his last term. I imagine the electoral system in use here would have some differences from how elections are done in real countries today. Maybe the elections have multiple sets of voting machines to attempt to reduce election fraud, or they base the elections on protocol droids instead of today's voting machines. Maybe they'd have implemented proportional representation in their voting, so tactical voting no longer happens since everybody can always put their preferred candidate first. Many have also had the desire to get rid of the Electoral College, but it would no longer be a Republic at that point since a republic is representative democracy and this would now be direct democracy. Whatever happens, an election could have major effects on the war even if any potential chancellor would be the same greedy, warmongering bastard.

This could impact the Eres III campaign in particular. The way you have it set up right now makes it seem like that defeat was because Sirun just plain fucked up. Maybe he made mistakes and maybe he didn't, but I think the best way to approach this without diminishing his character is to use the Republic's political maneuvering against him. Have some absolute dumbshit of an admiral appointed to command the fleet he's with for political reasons which may or may not be related to the election, an admiral so retarded he pulls everybody around him down to defeat in spite of their best efforts. This would allow the Revanchists to lose some battles without undermining the trust they've built up from the Republic troops, because this way the loss isn't the Jedi's fault, or at least not entirely his fault. That would make the troops distrust the Republic and be more likely to go along with turning around and conquering it. But this could bog the story down in politics, so it really should be used with care.

>Side plots cont.

If you use the documentary style, you could also make Meetra Surik canon again as a historical inconsistency, or even actually having her be a character who gets variously conflated with the real main protagonists. She could be the stand-in for the Revanchists' top leaders when an assassination attempt against them is suspected, even putting on the mask herself, and generally be the sneaky kunoichi who does this sort of thing the rest of the time. Her role in the war effort, though significant, would be overblown by feminist historical revisionists in academia to the point of literally replacing an important male leader. Maybe she writes the real account of the war years later, thereby succeeding Kreia and Atris as a Jedi historian, and the framing story is either about her or about some historian even further along rediscovering her suppressed writings and fighting to get them heard by the public.

This would mean that she'd be picking a different choice out of the 3 that Kreia offers after the player beats her, being a teacher rather than going on to fight the True Sith. The main purpose of including her would be to highlight how rare fighting women like her actually are. Even when you disregard the differences in strength between men and women, the fact remains that women get everything handed to them just for being women, and therefore tend not to develop the perseverance of a true soldier or anything else that requires skill and dedication. And if that sounds misogynist, I don't really care because it's the fucking truth. And the really shitty women even try to downplay male accomplishments and sacrifices on top of that.

Or you could go really out there and have multiple versions of history be canon because somebody from the future was fucking around with time in an attempt to actually revise this very important era's history instead of just revising the history books, but most people from the Separatist Canon general seem to want to put a moratorium on any Marty McFly antics. You could also have it be just some /fringe/-tier theory talked about on some conspiracy board on the HoloNet, perhaps to make the real grievances with the Cressa administration and the Republic in general which are also talked about on this board seem loony, but you could leave enough room for the reader to decide the theory is true if they want.

>Late story/ending/True Sith

We haven't gotten this far yet, but we still have some things to discuss before getting there. Many people were upset by TOR's rendering of the True Sith Empire because it lacked originality, being just another empire copied nearly verbatim from Palpy instead of the almost purely spiritual edifice Kreia described. If they were going to copy from Sheev, they should have at least used the vision he describes in the Dark Empire liner notes about his titular Dark Empire, a magocracy ruled by the Dark Side without the need for conventional weapons or ships. Kreia said the Ebon Hawk was left behind in known space because it wasn't needed to fight the True Sith, and also that the threat from them was such that Jedi and Sith would have to ally to defeat them. This ended up happening on some level with Abeloth, but Abeloth was sort of a Cthulhu-like creature and not an empire or even a small group. A group like that would represent a threat comparable to the ancient empires like the Rakata or the even scarier enemies that have what it takes to give an empire like the Rakata pause.

Vitiate's empire doesn't convey that level of threat. It just comes off as an offbrand ramshackle operation that makes Sheev look worse because he apparently just copied off of Vitiate instead of doing his own thing. Not that Sheev was ever perfect because his love of costly superweapons proved to be his empire's undoing, but he shouldn't just be a LARPer, and that's what TOR's version of Vitiate makes him. The True Sith shouldn't follow the Dark Empire concept to the letter either because that would just mean Sheev was copying off of that instead, but it should still be something more eerie and surreal than a government, maybe something that some dark side cult hundreds or thousands of years later could use as a basis for its doctrine.

The only thing even close to that is probably the Dromund Kaas levels of Mysteries of the Sith. I was very disappointed when I heard about TOR's version of Dromund Kaas because they made it just another megacity with nothing that would lead a player who'd never heard of it before to believe it would become what it is in MotS. The Dromund Kaas levels also had something that when scaled up could make the idea of the Ebon Hawk not being needed plausible. That would be its dark side field which disables all your normal weapons. I'm surprised the ships worked well enough to get Mara and Kyle off the planet in the end. Whatever form this threat takes, it has to have enough impact on whatever portion of the Revanchists' leadership knows about it that they decide the only way to combat this threat is to take over the Republic themselves and put it on a total war footing. You could use some weird dark side beliefs like the Way of the Dark as a model for their belief system, and it should have a similar effect on whoever hears about it because Kreia said the Sith is a belief at its core.

>Miscellaneous

Minor note about the ballistics cruiser concept: Particle shielding is said to require much lower fuel consumption than ray shielding for the same effect, but that may not apply in this era. It's debatable whether it applies in any era considering the Death Star apparently had many railguns on it. Another minor note: The Jedi Path and the other books in its series have notes made in the margins by various characters who read the book, and you could use that with the documentary style too.

I don't know how much of this works with what you already have planned, but I doubt that I'll have many more ideas because this goes clear to the end of the story and I wanted to get everything on the table because I may not have many more opportunities to contribute before it's done. Then again I never thought I'd have even this much.

>>35124

I admit that I did hyperbolize a bit there, Sirun probably only feels pings when he's awake, a defense mechanism made to shield his mind from the agonized currents of the Living Force, it takes some real dedication and effort from the Mandalorians to make him feel what he does halfway across the fucking Galaxy.

When he's asleep though, those conscious walls fall under the Jericho trumpet of horror that literally comes screaming from the Crusader's endless march, and on top of all his other problems this one does nothing but exhaust and fuck with his already fragile mind

There's another element too though, and its directly linked to Kavar. When Sirun already makes the choice to

Spoilers incoming

join the Revanchists with Tau, Alek, and y'boy Talvon Esan, the first Jedi world they visit to garner more support is H'ratth, a world with a tiny Jedi temple on it maintained by Master Chamma, a badass Devaronian with his own story to tell, but the important think about H'ratth is that its got a special little spot on it that triggers prophetic visions in those that meditate at it. Chamma uses it to increase his already impressive understanding of the Force as he strolls towards enlightenment, and while he ultimately refuses to join the Revanchists, he does allow Tau and a few others to visit the spot for some vision gibs. Tau's vision is neat, he sees a blade cut through a dozen armored plates yet come out the same, Alek sees a man follow another through a trap-laden path that ends up with the first man coming out unharmed, unbent, and mostly the same, but the other man lies in a pool of his own blood. He doesn't mind too much though, since prophecies are bullshit and he's just thankful that he had a good enough sleep to achieve Rem.

Sirun's though is different. Pain. Just pain. Pain in the form of waves slamming against his eardrums, threatening to pulverize them, pain as his mind is torn in half, pain as his chest is crushed under some immense weight, pain as every limb he has is crunched, not severed, but crushed to a bloody pulp. Pain as his eyelids are vaporized, scorching his actual eyes with invisible fire as he looks on to see a tidal wave of bodies being crushed, their mouths opened in an endless but disjointed scream, each malformed echo ricocheting through his skull and pulsing through his entire body

That's Sirun's vision. You can probably figure out what its referencing

>>35123

You said some of the stuff about Tau before, but having it put in contrast to Sirun and Malak is nice. It goes toward the end of deconstructing people's reasons for going to war. I wondered specifically how Tau would change through the course of the story because his motivation seems to be the farthest outside of himself personally. Most soldiers have arguably lacked understanding of the underlying political reasons for why they fight. It may be that Revan and Light Yagami have more in common besides their combat tactics. Light was depicted as an idealistic high school student who wanted to make the world better, and viewed getting the Death Note as his opportunity to make a difference. Of course, as the Mandalorians go on their campaign of atrocities, Revan would start listening to Malak more and increasingly veer away from subtlety and chessmaster maneuvers in favor of just fucking nuking the bastards. But you should avoid making Revan a direct copy of Light by making it so he really does try to play by the rule book at the start instead of by the book that kills people. The personal motivations driving Revan would be hotly debated by political commentators and forumgoers and there would be several camps that would never completely agree about why he was doing this. But we can't have a deconstruction of the reasons for going to war without having the main character be heroic enough to be compelling.

I hoped to get some feedback on the side plots and True Sith stuff, especially the potential election campaign, the Eres III debacle and the possibility of using Meetra alongside Sirun. However, it was fairly late when I got all that posted and I went to bed soon after, so you probably went to bed before getting that far. But I only got a few hours of sleep, so I might just go research that divegrass strategy sheet.

>>35074

>how space Hitler was gonna shove the Jedi into his own personal Jekk'Jekk Tar chamber and laugh at them from the Dark Side while he did it.

>implying space Hitler did anything wrong

>>35137

This turns Sirun into an absolutely devastating force on a battlefield since if you can give him a quality fucking unit that he's spent some time with, he'll drill straight through the opposition or hold a position until the very ground beneath them crumbles.

However this definitely has some very apparent downsides, for starters Sirun's basically just inadvertently min-maxed his small-unit tactics abilities to an absurd degree, making him the best pick for a very certain job but ultimately a one-trick pony who can do that trick really fucking well, but as a strategist or battlefield tactician he's sorely lacking.

Plus there's two sides to that Force Influence coin, yes the bonds created allow his unconscious mind to turn those around him into fully functioning flesh puppets, but when those puppets break he feels it, badly.

If anything goes wrong its very likely that Sirun may get overwhelmed by whatever strong emotions those around him are exerting, or that if he gets hurt they themselves might even feel it, and when you throw that negative feedback loop aspect into the mix it becomes very apparent that things can spiral out of control.

That being said though, whenever Sirun takes to the field either way shit's either going down or about to fly into an industrial fan.

>>35137

Holy fuck I'm retarded. Second image is supposed to have the bottom half on top, look at it from the bottom up to understand it right.

Sorry

>Sirun senses mando

>That info gets fed to the others

>One of them, since he now knows exactly where the Mando is, pops him

>>35117

>True Sith

If I might make a suggestion, other parts of this board seem to like the "smug red aryan" parts of the Sith Empire I'll admit to being one of them. Perhaps the Sith Empire that sacked Coruscant and wrecked so much shit was an increasing spiral of systems and sectors which at first unwittingly then gleefully infected themselves with Vitty's spiritual and ideological contagion. Kinda like how Protestantism made an unholy mess of Western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Thus, with this new faith and way of life sweeping through the Galaxy, the Republic suddenly finds what were once sure and steady territories fielding vast armies against her. It's like the Pius Dea Crusades again, only the Republic is now on the receiving end, a receiving end strengthened with the most cutting edge technology available at the time. And of course, the original Sith are seen as the holiest speakers of that fanatical wave, such that men will prostrate themselves before them out of religious awe as much as fear. Why use slave labor and worry about riots, when devout and willing corveé labor is so much easier to come by? Why not indulge your footmen's zeal to increase their moral tenfold, such that they will stop the enemy's meatgrinder through force and bodies? All these things I can see the True Sith letting loose: a horrific yet compelling storm of focused and doctrinate madness.

>>35115

>side plot republic economy

One of the contributing factors to Revan becoming disillusioned with the Republic is the stagnancy of its economy, which has become so over saturated with corporate rivalries and tensions that greed and a lust for shekels has caused a massive disparity between the core and just about everywhere else. The Republic itself has the potential to become an economic juggernaut and despite things being so fucked up it still is the MOST POWERFUL economy in the Galaxy at the time, shitting all over even the Hutts in terms of production and quality. It's just not being harnessed because the corporations took the bit out of their mouths and have firmly planted it in the Senate's gums.

Tol Cressa's administration is moderately effective, its mismanagement doesn't necessarily lead to much as the only things they remotely fail on are changing the status quo of the Republic's economical and industrial situation, in terms of actual fuck ups there isn't a whole lot, Tol may be a corrupt bureaucrat but he is an effective one.

Emergency extensions due to the Repubic actively being at war and the fact that nobody's stupid enough to try to swap administrations in the middle of a war if the current one's doing okay, plus the fact that nobody wants to have any wartime failures pinned on them doing to them becoming chancellor right before them, has lead to nobody really challenging Tol for his spot, in fact Tol's none too happy to be chancellor during the war because he has to be twice as fucking careful as he would be otherwise because if he fucks up once, once, his career will be absolutely over and his moderately good name will get dragged through Coruscant's lowest levels' shit sewer streets.

>Eres III Sirun fuckup

The thing about my telling of Eres III is that Sirun honestly didn't make that many mistakes, but the situation before him and some newly developed autism on his part leads to him blaming himself for the shitshow that was what happened.

Brief summary of Eres III and subsequent events

>Republic has outpost near Tion space on the tiny world of Space Crimea AKA Eres III

>The purpose of the outpost is to act as an alarm for the Republic fleet in case the Mandalorians try blitzing down the Perelemian/that spot of space

>It's an outpost manned by joint forces of Tionese, Eres colonial forces, basically Tionese and the local Nikto natives that got marooned way back during the Tion-Hutt war

>Mandalorians led by Cassus Fett himself have gigantic fucking fleet and are planning on punching through the Core

>Eres III and subsequently Eres Prime is a fucking speedbump to them

>Sirun has to do a fighting retreat while holding together the motley crew of retarded Tionese who hate the Nikto because they're hutt fuckpuppets, Nikto who hate the Eres colonists for invading their home, and Eres colonists who hate all of them for fucking them over in one way or the other, plus all the Republic and Zabrak units attached to Sirun's force.

>Republic fleet hears how gigantic the fleet is an coordinates with Sirun to lead the Mandalorian fleet into them and an allied hutt fleet

>Mandalorians BTFO them by going after the hutts, annihilating them, then shredding the command element of the Republic reinforcement fleet

>Sirun's forced to try to manage a fleet 3x larger than he actually can while fighting an enemy that's twice the size of even that

>Put up a fight, manage to bleed the Mandos a little more than they got bled and run

>Repeat until Duro where there's no more retreating

>Mandos about to steal a fuckton of weapons, ship material, and ship weapons

>Revan shows up with the Interdictor and Centurions he's been working on with Rendili star drives

>Mandos have a hard time

Sirun blames himself for not managing to take out the Mandalorians before they got so close to the Republic's heart, this is due to a negative development on his part where he's stopped blaming others for his fuckups and instead unhealthily internalizes every fuck up from everyone around him, trying to improve himself so he can bear everyone else's weight too, where he can barely hold himself up.

Sirun doesn't necessarily fuck up, he did his best and managed to blunt the fuck out of an absolutely massive Mandalorian fleet, but he still ultimately failed at his objective of stopping them so he loses a bit of confidence in his abilities as a leader and this leads to him leaning more on Revan Who rarely fucks up because he rarely puts himself in situations where he could fuck up and this ultimately leads to him following Revan's orders to the letter at Dxun and Sirun ACTUALLY fucking up.

>>35140

I love red space aryans but I also much prefer this idea of zealotry over slavery.

I like it

I haven't put a whole lot of work or thought into the Eres section, I'll get around to that when I've actually gotten around to the things before it. Currently focusing on Zabrak recruitment stuff, post-Serroco Mandalore's march to Arkania, D'Asta affair, blah blah

Thanks for reading anons

>>35116

Let me get something out of the way.

>feminist revisionism

No. We're doing this nice little thing to escape bullshit like this. Approaching it from the other direction is no fucking better. Besides, Star Wars as we know it already has fighting women be thin on the ground. The most dangerous of them are either inhumanly strong aliens, Force Users, or both. Though it is a funny idea for the later Empire to try and stress the superiority of human women purely for human supremacist reasons.

>>35123

>Hutts

Wait, wouldn't they try to play both sides like they do later? And which finally blows up in their faces big time with the Vong.

>>35124

>Atris

Do I sense a schoolyard crush here? Are you going in that direction?

>>35143

>>35145

Weren't you going to talk about what goes on with poor esser Esan?

Also, fanks. Sith soldiers should be the kind of crazy only the bloodthirstiest of the Mandos understand, and even then the smarter ones would hold them at arm's length. They aren't miserable like in TOR, just paranoid and wired on adrenaline plus ambition to prove themselves. In terms of appearance, while the vanguard could look like they did in the Bioware games, Dromund Kaas should look more corrupted Ptolemaic Super-Egypt with lingering Pharaonic elements than Film Noir Coruscant. Sith Reds' formal wear should make them look like demonic Egyptian gods and goddesses Owing to Dromund Kaas being a damned swamp on top of their culture. Also, reminded of the Dread Masters here. Could be that they delight in fusing Sith magic into their formal masks to cow everyone save Vitty into bowing. Could be that it is customary for Sith to "wire" similar effects into their outfits. Could be that the Dreads are the only ones who dare use such powers on fellow Lords.

As an aside, I would avoid going into Way of the Dark style stuff. Vastly different powerset from the Sith. And a different deity to boot. Implied that their "Dark" is actually the Father of Shadows. Typhojem is a-okay, though.

>>35137

>Sirun, small-unit tactics and Eres III

This works better than the approach I thought up for Eres III. It sort of gives the sense that nobody could really have done that much better there. They had very poor unit cohesion and were severely overmatched anyway. Maybe the goal of that campaign was mostly just to be a distraction while something more important happens elsewhere. Maybe Admiral Dumbshit still gets assigned there but was placed there on purpose with the understanding that they were just fodder to keep the Mandalorians occupied until the real heavy equipment can be readied. You can still have the basic intent of what I posted about Admiral Dumbshit getting his job because of politics, or maybe something about him having dirt on a major Republic official and being sent there to die before he can reveal it. Either or both of those things would produce distrust of the Republic among the troops. It works on another level as well. Sirun's failings with the fine art of commanding large battle groups don't matter as much if he was never meant to win. The playable Exile has the option to use Battle Meditation aboard the Ravager to defeat the Sith, so we can surmise from this that no real command skills are required to use it. Nobody else who has Battle Meditation has ever displayed any command skill either. Bastila didn't have any or the Endar Spire would never have been attacked.

Sirun's portrayal here makes him something of an allegory for broken millennial men, which is probably the reason he's the viewpoint character. His status as the result of an upbringing with no real father figure, his social isolation and his impeccable facility with small unit tactics are all signs of this. If you went and got some pro gaming team and told them to fight a real war (and they could stop eating Dewritos long enough to pass the fitness tests), they'd probably have no trouble working in a small unit together but would be hopeless at strategic-level decisions since most games where you're not completely alone against the Evil Overlord have you working with a small team of very powerful characters. Sirun's other status as a follower of Revan is significant here too because Revan is a gaming hero just as much as he is anything else. Dreams of saving the world are bound to be used by ideologues for their own ends, which may be well-intentioned but misguided or just coldly self-serving.

>>35143

>Tol Cressa gets immediately emergency powers to keep his chancellorship until the war is over

Gee, I sure hope nobody takes advantage of this precedent to declare himself Emperor or something. But it also gets around having to have a substantial political side plot that may bore people.

>>35140

>True Sith

I'm fine with them being somewhat religion-based. But we already have the Pius Dea era and the New Jedi Order series for that. They need to have something to set them apart from the other religious fanatics and dark side cultists. Otherwise they're just boring and tired. But this is derailing the development of the preceding material, so we should go back to that for now and keep this stuff in the queue for later.

>>35147

>No. We're doing this nice little thing to escape bullshit like this. Approaching it from the other direction is no fucking better.

You know what, you're probably right about this. I hate feminism, and I'm not shy about it, but it could get in the way of the story to invite that much political content into it. We should still consider using Meetra though.

>>35149

>Nobody else who has Battle Meditation has ever displayed any command skill either.

I should amend this by saying that the otherwise fairly unremarkable Imperial Grand Admiral Nial Declann was trained in it by Emperor Palpatine, but just having rank doesn't mean you're a skilled commander. Declann hasn't had very much character development, so we can't say whether he was any good or not. There are still very few characters who have command training and battle meditation though. This is very strange and should be talked about with some detail. I'm interested by the concept of small-scale battle meditation as well. Is it better than the normal version for small units?

On the issue of how much political stuff to include in this, we need to find a balance. We can't just ignore it entirely given what Disney has done and the political subplot of the prequels, and some of the stuff discussed so far like the Republic military being a bloated money sink has ample support from previously released material, but the biggest drawback of the documentary approach I suggested is that it opens the way for political interference. All those editorials from galactic media pundits would take up room that should be going to the story. Finding some way of including some Essential Guide-like features while remaining predominantly a narrative would be good. But that can wait until near the end of the project to be fully thought out. We should probably get back to the present now.

>>35153

>Grand Admiral Nial Declann was trained in it by Emperor Palpatine, but just having rank doesn't mean you're a skilled commander.

Is there any particular reason the writers went this direction? Thrawn originally speculated that it was Palpy who engaged in Battle Meditation, since Imperial forces broke almost the instant he died. Why eschew that in favor of a random Grand Admiral being trained in Battle Meditation and not much else?

>>35156

They might have had the idea that battle meditation is more effective when used by somebody with command training, but who knows?

>>35147

Regarding the feminist revision thing, no, I'm keeping this strictly apolitical in terms of me pushing my own personal politics, individual characters have their own views and agendas and advocate for them of course, but that's because I prefer living breathing characters more similar to people as viewpoint characters dynamic characters are interesting, static ones can work but in specific situations for example, I am fairly NatSoc and think that a certain group of Poles and Germans need to be removed from the planet and whatever subterranean holes their reptilian noses hide their kosher coins under, but a major viewpoint character Tau/Revan who himself grows to view a dictatorship as necessary doesn't go spouting off about the Muun Financial Trust houses controlling the Senate, but Sirun might, and the reason Sirun does is because he's aware of the stigma around anti-Muunitic statements and makes them as shock and awe jokes to annoy people so they can argue with him and he can feel whole because he's a sort of petty person, I say kike because I legitimately believe it.

The only politics in this are the politics I've assigned to certain characters, that's it.

>hutts

The hutts tried playing both sides, and while certain kajidics are on the Mandalorians' good side since they handed over ships, weapons, and toys, a large number of them are fucking pissed because their smuggling economy is getting used as target practice by the Mandalorians. Remember when Canderous was talking about how they bullied smugglers? It's a part of the Vong story he has.

I'm aware that that story's smugglers could be any smugglers, freelance ones trying to run a blockade on a world they had, random smugglers in their territory on a run, anything.

The Mandalorians view the Hutt Cartel as a bloated slug that leaves nothing but a colossal slime trail of worthlessness like sloth, excess luxury, and nasty hedonism. They are without honor, without merit, and therefore without deserving existence.

>Atris n Sirun sittin in a

It's practically confirmed in KOTOR 2 that the male Exile and Atris had something, its never expressly stated that they fucked but Atris admits that you were close and the Exile can admit that they had something too.

Atris is a super duper vanilla Jedi though, and things only really develop a little bit, so sorry no fucking

>>35169

>Esan

Talvon sticks with Sirun throughout the Mando Wars. Except when they get split up at Nouane when Sirun gets his ass kicked by a basilisk He's more a character foil for Sirun as he's calm, collected, and internally confident while Sirun's for the beginning of the story the opposite. Talvon is like a wall that Sirun bounces off of, and a good deal of his work is keeping Sirun alive since he's sort of a retard every now and again

>Sith

I won't be touching them for a bit, but I frankly dislike the idea of Sith worshiping a proper God. The Dark Side isn't one side of a coin, its just overusing the Force for your own ends and trying to split its flow in the direction you want it to go rather than the one it wants, that is why it seems to hate Darksiders so much, where Lightsiders sorta chill out and ride the waves, Darksiders go off to divert rivers into their own personal reservoirs, pissing off the Force.

At least that's my guess, I don't know, I just know it isn't ying yang

>>35149

I like the Admiral fuckup idea, I was thinking about something similar anyways and its a good way of tying gay Republic political fuckups into the conflict.

>Battle meditation

I never used battle meditation in KOTOR and think that its best reserved as a cool ability few can do, and Sirun was never meant to be one of them. His connections are passive and unconscious, while Battle Meditation is an active coordination of people through the Force, Sirun's sort of pseudo-battle med is a side effect of pre-existing bonds if that makes sense. He isn't actively using the Force to order them around, he has quick impulses in his brain for actions and emotions which goes down the pipe line into those with him.

>Broken millenial

I never thought about it that way, just wanted there to be a plausible reason why he'd grow more attached to his master Kavar, but I definitely see the connection

>Immediate emergency powers

I was summarizing, Tol Cressa's side of things is a fucking slog. The Senate doesn't take the Mandalorians as that big of a deal, Tol himself didn't give a shit about them until Lhosan Industries and other Outer Rim companies started crying about their shit getting fucked with. After that, Tol realized his mistake and began trying to push back against the Mandos, but due to them not actually being a gigantic threat quite yet most Core senators didn't give a fuck and told him to go fuck themselves when he tried diverting budgetary funds towards the military, something he'd already done a while ago to re-outfit the military and barely got it passed.

I'm not really afraid of adding politics because they help the world out and are a good way of showing how the Republic as a whole goes from ignoring the small sting of the Mandos to reeling back after getting hit in the head by a fucking hammer, said hammer is Serroco. After Serroco, the Senate throws their hands up and starts letting Cressa do what he wants, since now they actually views the Mandos as a significant threat to their livelihoods.

I'll have to do a post on Cressa, I've had some new ideas on him that I want to talk about.

Also, I like the whole Meetra Surik idea you talked about, but I think that adding it to an already sort of complicated story will convolute and take away from the focus of the narrative, plus using Karpyshyn's rape baby abortion exile character and basically calling it a sham while taking focus away from the story sounds needlessly assholic, after all the fat fucker has to go to sleep at night knowing at the lore he wrote for TORtanic was shit enough

Tol Cressa is ultimately a background character who we follow as a vessel for displaying how the Senate (an allegory for the Republic as a whole) reacts to the Mandalorian Wars. When he's not doing that, he's either walking in on the Jedi Council to piss them off because they're prissy faggots who're sitting back while his and their Republic dies, or him reeling as he scrambles to undo the fucked up edicts and amendments of his immediate predecessor.

>>35221

That reminds me, and its something that bugs me. In KOTOR 2 Kreia can show up in front of every single Jedi master you meet and none of them bat a fucking eye, despite the fact that at the Dantooine enclave they all know IMMEDIATELY who she is. You could say that its not fair for the writers to be prepared for this, since due to the companion system Kreia could technically never pop up in front of Zez-Kai or Vrook's face due to said companion system, but she literally is FORCED upon you on Onderon and literally fucking talks in front of Kavar and he doesn't bat a fucking eye, despite being shocked later on that she isn't dead yet

The obvious answer is that she hid herself using the Force, speaking to you through the link and that that's the reason why nobody cares she's there, sort of like how she hid herself from Atris.

Problem is, she hid herself from Atris, but definitely not the fucking handmaidens, who literally tell Atris that she was there leading to Atris getting a few types of fucked up.

I have a solution for this in my telling of things, but I won't quite spoil it here

Another reason why I'm bringing the True Covenant up is because they're a loose end, not just a single thread or strand though, a gigantic fucking loose end. An entire GROUP of fucking Jedi that apparently did absolutely NOTHING throughout the Dark Wars and just sat back and watched as the Order got torn apart.

I don't blame KOTOR 2's devs for not, well, including them, since development for that game was a shitshow anyways, but I do blame authors and world builders for forgetting that they even existed. That shit annoys me They're also included because the authors baited Lucien becoming a certain somebody and I'm frankly disappointed that the two of them never met