THE EXPLOITS OF LANDO CALRISSIAN
DAN: It just kills me that the only solo Lando adventures to speak of were written more than 25 years ago. Look at that picture of young Lando by Chris Trevas and tell me a new series of young Lando conning his way out of trouble (a mix of James Bond and Face from the A-Team) wouldn't be infinitely fun.
THE CENTRALITY
DAN: This map is based on the article "A Campaign Guide to the Centrality" by Michael Kogge, which appeared in issue #5 of Star Wars Gamer.
THE ADVENTURES OF HAN SOLO
JASON: Saberhing and Coonee are mentioned by Lucas in a discussion of Han Solo's background dictated to Carol Titelman in the summer of 1977, and preserved (with a lot of other fascinating lore) in the beyond-awesome book The Making of Star Wars. That lore isn't part of official continuity, but I couldn't resist tossing Saberhing and Coonee into Han's biography, along with a nod to the early draft of Revenge of the Sith in which Han is an urchin living on Kashyyyk. In doing so, I was careful not to describe either planet, or to make any statements about what part of Han's backstory is true.
The roster of Han's early smuggling contacts is drawn from the Brian Daley and A.C. Crispin novels, Marvel comics, Dark Horse, The New Rebellion and the Russ Manning strips. The story of Han and Chewie's smuggler initiation is a retcon for the fungi-forested Kessel we see in the Russ Manning strips - I'd never been convinced by various attempts to square the thin-atmosphered, lumpy Kessel with the one covered with forests in the Manning strips. (To say nothing of what we see in The Glove of Darth Vader and its sequels. We kind of ignored those.) So I tried another tack. From this point of view, in the Manning strips Han is giving Luke his own initiation by trying to fool him into believing Little Kessel is Kessel. (Perhaps he's still hoping Luke might give up idealistic crusades and help out aboard the Falcon.)
The idea was inspired by a Wizards of the Coast feature that made Marvel's "Hoth Stuff" - the infamous comic in which Marvel mixed up the backstories of Wedge and Biggs and killed Janson - into a tall tale told to new fighter pilots. I'll grant it's not an airtight retcon and know some readers won't like it at all. But I think it works better than various strained alternatives.
MAP: THE ADVENTURES OF HAN SOLO
JASON: Coming up with the labels for this one was fun.
It's not specified on the map, but Sarlucif is the planet where the Authority attacks Doc's outlaw techs. The name is courtesy of my then-five-year-old son, who asked one day if he could name a planet. Sure, I said, and then wondered what I would do when Joshua wanted to call his planet Gwrlrtz or Elmo or some name I'd have to hide somewhere. "Sarlucif," he said after a moment's reflection. Startled, I asked him to repeat that. I wish any of the names I made up for the Atlas were as good as Sarlucif.
THE CORPORATE SECTOR
JASON: A couple of strands of EU lore get braided together here. 30,000 star systems total for the Corporate Sector is too small for a region of any importance, so the Atlas made it 30,000 star systems of potential value. Given the stellar population of various star types, that means the Sector probably included about 125,000 stars in all. Sounds big, but still an infinitesimal number compared with the overall galaxy.
The story of the corporate experiment in the Expansion Region is from Han Solo and the Corporate Sector Sourcebook, but was moved to the spinward reaches of that region, instead of taking place in the Slice as the sourcebook says. It was very hard to make that account work within the Slice, given the larger sweep of galactic history as told by numerous sources. Moving it to the New Territories, on the other hand, fit very nicely with our efforts to explain why colonization moved with such fits and starts in that part of the galaxy. You run into little continuity goofs like this a lot - a source establishes a fact with very large ramifications, but that fact is forgotten or ignored by so many other sources that it has to be discarded, or (better yet) modified. In the Atlas we tried to discard very few things and modify only a few more. If we did modify something, we tried whereever possible to preserve the spirit of it, and I hope we did that here.
TaggeCo. is said to have stayed neutral in the Clone Wars (see The Essential Guide to Weapons and Technology), but it's clearly favored in the early days of the Empire. Our interpretation: TaggeCo. helped the Republic, but refused to subordinate that to its interests as a galaxy-spanning megacorp.
The bit about the strange solar anomalies is mentioned in Han Solo at Stars' End.
The discussion of Mytus owes something to the controversy over the rendition of alleged terrorists captured by American forces to so-called black sites in other countries. Any accompanying political commentary is a product of the reader's imagination, though.
MAP: THE CORPORATE SECTOR
JASON: This map is adapted from a sketch drawn by Craig Carey for an unreleased West End Games box set about the CSA. I have a treasure trove of unreleased WEG stuff from the company's final days, and it was great to be able to bring at least that little bit of it out into the world.
THE ULTIMATE POWER IN THE UNIVERSE
JASON: Oh, the Death Star. Nothing about it is easy, whether it's discussing its origins or how the plans got to the Alliance.
This chapter starts off with a discussion of the Death Star from the perspective of military strategy: It's an answer to the problem of how you protect an entire galaxy of worlds against a mobile force - the "stateless strategy" explored a number of places in the Atlas. Bevel Lemelisk's work with the Geonosians is new material intended to bridge the various accounts of the Death Star's origin, with a bit to explain how a Republic/Empire loyalist like Lemelisk would have reacted to working with a Separatist power.
The Death Star novel (which also gave us the term "mundicide") notes that the project moved several times, and it seemed logical that Tarkin would at first try to keep the Death Star near his own base of power. (This also connects nicely with the construction of the Tarkin battle station at Patriim in the Marvel comics.) The various other locations and projects are all a part of the vast, confusing body of Death Star lore. The reference to captured Rebel leaders seeing the terrible truth firsthand is a nod to The Force Unleashed. The account of Tagge and Motti is a retcon for why the two seem to be playing roles opposite to their military ranks during the argument aboard the Death Star in Episode IV. I was very excited when I figured out an answer for that and spent 15 minutes explaining it to my wife. She asked to be left out of such future discussions.
MAP: THE ULTIMATE POWER IN THE UNIVERSE
JASON: I think this is one of the Atlas's more successful "thematic" maps. Note that the world where Tay Vanis was found is noted for the first time, and the quiet (or perhaps I should say "grudging") acknowledgment of the "third" Death Star from Star Tours.
MOVIE MAP: A NEW HOPE
JASON: Dark Horse's The Making of Baron Fel says Ord Biniir was recaptured on the same day as the Battle of Yavin. The Death Star's stopoff at Carida is from Children of the Jedi.
MAP: YAVIN AND THE GORDIAN REACH
JASON: This map elicited a complaint from Modi about my insistence on putting nebulae everywhere. Sorry man.
THE ERA OF REBELLION
JASON: The dating convention of Palpatine's speech will be familiar to readers of the Adventure Journal. Mon Mothma urging the Mon Cals to stay neutral is a retcon for various contradictions about when the Mon Cals joined the Rebellion and how openly they supported it.
Project Sarlacc is from Wizards' Dawn of Defiance campaign; the reference to Scarl is an effort to untangle the two birthplaces of the Executor, as seen first in Classic Star Wars and then in The Force Unleashed. The tale of the Yavin blockade is from Geonosis and the Outer Rim Worlds. Jarnollan is the jungle world seen in the first issue of Classic Star Wars; Pablo Hidalgo named it in his WEG days for an Adventure Journal article that never saw the light of day. Drexel is from Marvel; the Sil'Lume Belt is from the Jedi's Honor solo adventure.
The Battle of Skorrupon is seen (but not named) in Classic Star Wars, while the disaster at Deepspace Besh is seen in Rebellion: My Brother, My Enemy.
THE SPICE TRADE
JASON: The idea that spice would be useful in treating hibernation sickness, and the use of it and carbonite for pre-hyperdrive colonization, are concepts dreamed up by Pablo Hidalgo for a WEG boxed set that never came to pass. The Galactic Spice Mining Guild is mentioned in Episode I: Racer.
MOVIE MAP: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
JASON: Narra's first name is new. (And yet familiar!) The Adventure Journal tells how the Executor began blasting shadowports and Rebel ports of call in the Outer Rim, with Syvris one target. Assume the Executor has been working west from there. Fett's departure to fetch the Executor at Kinyen is new.
A CLOSER LOOK: HOTH AND THE GREATER JAVIN
JASON: Most of this section is a rewrite of the Wizards of the Coast online feature written by myself, Dan and Craig Carey.
MAP: HOTH AND THE GREATER JAVIN
JASON: Some new worlds (particularly from X-Wing Alliance) were added to this map. We debated dropping the unnamed systems, since no other "Closer Look" map includes them, but left them in as an appreciative nod to the very nice map Wizards did for the original article.
A CLOSER LOOK: ENDOR AND THE MODDELL SECTOR
JASON: Most of this section is a rewrite of the Star Wars Gamer feature written by myself, Dan and Craig Carey. Note that Qina was misidentified as Mina in the original article.
DAN: I know I breathed a sigh of relief when we got to the Hoth and Endor parts of the Atlas, knowing that we'd done the heavy geographic lifting years ago.
MAP: ENDOR AND THE MODDELL SECTOR
JASON: Another idea we dropped as too complicated was reflecting that up and down are also significant in determining systems, sector boundaries and the course of trade routes. We agreed that was a necessary simplification, but regretted it nonetheless - and so gave Modi an enthusiastic thumbs-up when he said he wanted to include a side view of the Moddell sector.
DAN: If we had unlimited time and resources, I'd love for every map in the Atlas to have a side view just like this one. But we had to pick our battles or else we would have been trampled by data.
MOVIE MAP: RETURN OF THE JEDI
JASON: The fight between Boba Fett and the other bounty hunters in the asteroid field is seen in the Shadows of the Empire comic; its identification as Vergesso is new, as is Our Heroes' starting point at Kothlis. Jerjerrod's first name is new.
AN EMPIRE FRAGMENTED
JASON: Note the slight retcon/explanation that Lumiya's stormtroopers weren't Imperial soldiers but loyal (at least for a while) to her.
MAP: THE SSI-RUUK AND NAGAI INVASIONS
JASON: Just as the maps of the early Republic also show the extent of civilized space at certain times, the New Republic maps show the boundaries of the oversectors and satrapies of the major post-Imperial warlords. We were able to eliminate a map that showed the warlords' territories after realizing we'd covered them all on the various historical maps.
ADVANCE OF THE NEW REPUBLIC
JASON: This section was written fairly late - somehow our initial outline included a map for the period, but not a narrative. D'oh. We also wanted to wait for Matt Stover's Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - but when the book appeared, there wasn't a lot to do, as the action in Mindor turned out to be essentially limited to a single system. (Shadowspawn did get a great Chris Trevas painting.)
The fun of this section was connecting the dots between far-flung references to Rebel victories and defeats and using that to create a narrative that worked with the fall of various warlords.
MAP: THE ROAD TO CORUSCANT
JASON: This was the first historical detail map completed, and served as a proof of concept for the look and feel of the overall maps and for the idea of putting time references on some maps to make them easier to follow and give them more interest. A tip of the cap, then, not just to Modi but to our timeline gurus Nathan Butler and Eddie van der Heijden.
AN IMPERIAL RESTORATION
JASON: The material about Thrawn's relationship with the post-Imperial warlords is new, as is the role of the D'Asta family as power brokers.
MAP: THRAWN'S CAMPAIGNS
JASON: The Thrawn campaigns were a particular challenge to map; Zahn is great at describing military strategy and mentions star systems as if he's looking at a map, but no map existed at the time, and the narrative of the trilogy can't be made to fit perfectly on one. (Berchest and Orus and Poderis, oh my!)
Dedicated Zahn fans will notice some minor, hopefully logical additions to the campaign on this map. Not to mention the location of the Katana fleet, of course.
Some readers will be disappointed that this is one of the only mentions of the Empire of the Hand in the Atlas. We decided to stay away from that region for two reasons. First, we were wary of leaving some readers feeling that the Atlas had stripped all the mystery from the Star Wars galaxy, and leaving the Empire of the Hand out preserved that. Second, we have a hunch (and it's only a hunch - no inside information here) that Timothy Zahn will want to explore the area he created one day, and we wanted to leave him as free a hand as possible.
THE DARK EMPIRE
DAN: Large parts of Part 3 of the Atlas felt similar to the writing process for the New Essential Chronology. Essentially we were summarizing historical events, but wherever possible we emphasized geography so that the text would tie in smoothly to the accompanying maps.
DECLINE AND FALL
DAN: This section is mostly an excuse for us to detail the Pentastar Alignment. Both Jason and I are big fans of Anthony P. Russo's article "The Pentastar Alignment" published in issue #3 of the Star Wars Adventure Journal in 1994. The article was the first attempt to explain how warlordism would cripple the post-Jedi Empire, and provided a detailed look at the Pentastar Alignment in particular. It also introduced such bits of coolness as Grand Moff Ardus Kaine (Grand Moff Tarkin's replacement) and the Super Star Destroyer Reaper.
This section also covers the comic series Crimson Empire, and I made it explicit here that the term Crimson Empire was used in-universe as well (something I also did with Dark Empire). If you think about it, this particular Imperial phase really needs its own name. So why not the Crimson Empire?
MAP: PENTASTAR ALIGNMENT AND THE IMPERIAL REMNANT
JASON: One of my favorite maps, from my sketch and brought beautifully to life by Chris Reiff. Lots of references to the old West End Games module Riders of the Maelstrom here.
A CLOSER LOOK: MON CALAMARI SPACE
DAN: The history of Mon Calamari space has been retconned several times over the years. In West End Games' 1989 roleplaying sourcebook Galaxy Guide 4: Alien Races (written by Troy Denning), it's stated that the Mon Cals were unknown to the greater galaxy until discovered by the Empire. But the Mon Cals and the Quarren were just too cool-looking to not get picked up by other writers and artists in stories set earlier in the timeline. There are Quarren senators in The Phantom Menace, for one. The Atlas puts a date of 4166 BBY on first contact between the Mon Cals and the Republic, which will probably come back to bite us in the butt at some point in the future.
A CLOSER LOOK: THE SENEX AND JUVEX WORLDS
JASON: This may seem like an odd choice for a "Closer Look" section, but we wanted to take a look at a part of the galaxy that was insular and isolated and deeply strange. Note that Gyla Petro from the Russ Manning comic "The Kashyyyk Depths" is now revealed as gentry - and gets an explanation for why she's so out of it about galactic politics.
The link between the Ninth Quadrant and Bozhnee sector (from the Darkstryder boxed set) is new. The Senex and Juvex worlds are drawn from many sources. ("Lords of Atron!" is an oath from Tales of the Empire, for instance.) The tale of the Crimson Days ties together the planet Picutorion in Kwymar Sector with the Senex house introduced in Children of the Jedi.
MAP: THE SENEX/JUVEX
JASON: Note that the Noopiths are mapped but not described. I'd always wondered what they were since encountering them in Children of the Jedi - but decided the Atlas shouldn't reveal every mystery!
MAP: VECTOR PRIME AND THE VONG ADVANCE
JASON: The New Jedi Order maps would seem straightforward, since we could follow the "battle" maps in the books. But mapping the exact paths of various fleets and keeping track of occupied worlds proved exhausting. On the other hand, it was nice to add the Chiss Ascendancy to the third map, marking its Atlas debut.
THE CHISS ASCENDANCY
DAN: There has been a lot of contradictory information published about the Chiss over the years, so I pray that this section is relatively error-free. There's also an Easter Egg in here, but I'm not saying what it is.
MAP: THE NEW GALACTIC CIVIL WAR
JASON: Note that the Empire has expanded again, reflecting its advances in the final days of the Vong war.
EPILOGUE: THE EMPIRE REBORN
DAN: We were glad to include the Star Wars Legacy time period (137 ABY) in the Atlas, but early in the process its future setting had a ripple effect that threatened to wreck the rest of the Atlas. For example: If we're including Legacy, does that mean that the POV of the Atlas writers is set in 137 ABY or later? If so, shouldn't we be providing Legacy updates for every planet in the planets section? And if we do that (e.g. "In 137 ABY, Kalee is now a cotton candy factory") aren't we just closing down story opportunities for writers who might want to tell tales set during the intervening century? The solution was to make this last section an epilogue that can stand entirely on its own.
MAP: THE NEW EMPIRE
DAN: We ran this map by John Ostrander and Jan Duursema, creators of the Legacy comics and time period, who suggested several changes. It's not specified on the map itself, but the highlighted worlds are specific points of interest related to the comics, such as Caamas (site of the defeat of the Galactic Alliance fleet) and Vendaxa (where Cade Skywalker fights an acklay).
APPENDIX
JASON: The appendix is a logical place to discuss the big question of how we placed things in the Atlas.
The answer is it depended on the starting point.
Sometimes we had a cool-sounding system and we wanted it to go THERE. So we'd cruise around the Excel database of all known star systems invented for Star Wars searching for any connections that aren't directly referenced, then go to the primary sources to read more. Generally it would be pretty quickly apparent whether or not the system could go THERE. Though not always -- I originally placed Halmad at the junction of the Hydian Way and the Salin Corridor, only to realize while taking notes for the Hunt for Zsinj map that Halmad needed to be closer to later areas of Imperial power. So Halmad had to move and I had to find a new system for the junction. (It turned out to be Botajef.) To me Halmad still looks like it's in the wrong place, since I got so used to it being somewhere else.
Sometimes we had a dot on a sector/region map that could use a certain characteristic -- busy port, mineral wealth, has a history of gladiator fights, oppressed slave species, subject of brutal Imperial repression, etc. In that case, we might cycle through the systems database, looking for systems that meet those criteria but didn't have coordinates, were in the right region, etc. I'd generally write down all the candidates that fit the bill and go to the original sources to check for other information about the system. That usually knocked the list down to a couple of candidates, or just one, or sometimes none.
And sometimes we had a bunch of dots and needed to fill them out with names. Then it would be a case of going to the systems database, finding systems that weren't described, and checking the primary sources. (Always, always, always check the primary sources.)
Repeat that thousands and thousands of times, with occasional reversals and lots of new material, and you've got an Atlas....
Of the 4,387 systems in the appendix, perhaps 3,000 had already been placed before the book began, or got placed during the researching and writing of the text. But that still left a ton for Dan and me to go through, defining a grid location and region for each.
At this point we re-sorted the database by source and started taking chunks of a couple of hundred each. Why re-sort by source? Because - particularly with West End Games books - you could often infer loose connections between star systems mentioned in the same section of a sourcebook or the same sourcebook. Plus, at the risk of sounding mystical, individual books have a "feel" that it's useful to get a handle on when making placements. Anyway, Dan and I blitzed through the rest of the appendix that way in a week or so.
Our original plan was to assign every star system to a sector, and my hope was that we'd be able to illustrate the sector boundaries somewhere - either on the regional maps or in an online extra. But that proved much more daunting than we'd thought. We figured out a number of sectors per region, using the original 1,024 and then adding some others to reflect Imperial-era exploration, which gave us a framework for what had to be illustrated. But that framework showed we were up against some big challenges. There were definitely too many sectors to include on the region maps of the Core and Colonies, and probably the Inner Rim as well. As a test case, I mapped the sectors of the Outer Rim. It took an enormous amount of work - hours and hours of checking and cross-checking sources. And I was keenly aware that it was far and away the easiest of the regions to so map.
So the sector plan went by the boards both for the maps and for the appendix. My hope is that we'll be able to revisit it somehow, perhaps as an ongoing online effort. But I've learned the hard way that it's an enormous job, and so am not making promises.
As a last note, we worked very hard to track down every star system we could, no matter how obscure the source. We tracked down Official Poster Monthlies, RPGA adventures, first editions of WEG material, video-game manuals - you name it. After consultation with Lucasfilm, we agreed to include planets introduced in unofficial RPG articles in magazines such as Polyhedron and Dragon, so long as they'd been written by authors who at some point received an author credit for licensed Star Wars material. (Note that this says nothing about such articles' canon status beyond the fact that the star systems exist.) I'm sure we missed some things - in a project this big, that's inevitable. But I hope it isn't very many - and I hope Atlas readers enjoy finding some of the tremendously obscure mentions (and an Easter egg or two) in the appendix.
Subscribe by RSS