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 Posted: Tue Jan 15, 2008 3:10 pm
 Knowledge is power.
This forum is dedicated to spreading the knowledge of our Empire and our legacy, as well as any other information that may be of use to us...
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Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 2:13 pm
Sith History
The Great Schism
The Sith Order was first established when dissident Jedi discovered that "true" power was achieved not through pensive meditation, as taught by their Jedi Masters, but through emotion. The tension between the Jedi and these dissident Dark Jedi, led by Xendor, the first Dark Jedi, grew until conflict erupted, thousands of years before the Battle of Yavin. This conflict, called the Great Schism, led to the Dark Jedi being banished by the Old Republic. These outcasts found a new home on the distant planet of Korriban, a desolate world inhabited by the relatively primitive Sith people. However, the Force flowed strongly with these Sith, allowing them to create their own brand of black magic. The Dark Jedi saw this as an opportunity to gain additional power. Using their training in the Force, the Dark Jedi amazed the Sith and elevated themselves to god-like status on Korriban, becoming the rulers of the Sith people. As years passed, and interbreeding occurred between the Dark Jedi and the Sith, the term "Sith" came to mean not the original insect-like inhabitants of Korriban, but their Dark Jedi masters as well. It is from this rise to power and integration into Sith culture that the term Dark Lord of the Sith was first conceived as a title bestowed upon the leader of the Sith Empire by a council of lesser Sith Lords. Sometime during the early history of the First Sith Empire, the coming of the Sith'ari, the prophesied savior of the Sith Order, was foretold. The Sith'ari was a perfect being who would rise to power and bring balance to the Force. According to prophecy, the Sith'ari would rise up and destroy the Sith, but in the process would return to lead the Sith and make them stronger than ever before, a striking parallel to the Chosen One of Jedi legend, though it is most likely that the Sith'ari and Chosen One are one and the same.
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Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 2:14 pm
The Fall of the Sith Empire and the Freedon Nadd Uprising
In 5,000 BBY, the Republic rediscovered the Sith and the Great Hyperspace War began. Though it ended with Dark Lord of the Sith Naga Sadow in suspended animation on Yavin 4 and his great war fleets destroyed, the Sith Empire survived. It was believed to have collapsed shortly afterward due to infighting and attacks by the Old Republic, but it was later discovered that the Sith Empire had retreated into the Unknown Regions, where the Lords of the Sith waited patiently for over a millennium for the right moment to return.
Centuries later, a Jedi Knight named Freedon Nadd fell to the dark side. On Yavin 4, he awakened former Dark Lord Naga Sadow, who trained him in the ways of the Sith. Though Sadow's definite fate is not known, it is believed he perished and his spirit was destroyed at his pupil's hand. Freedon Nadd used his newfound powers to conquer the Onderon system. But Freedon Nadd's extraordinary reign of power eventually came to a close. His death echoed a great power vacuum all throughout the galaxy. His dark gloomy tomb, constructed on Dxun and greatly tainted by the darkside would remain an outpost for Sith knights many years to come.
Sith teachings would bring constant civil war throughout their civilization, however, as the primal instinct of their teachings was based upon the principle that they must continually prove their strength against each other. Rumors have it that the true Sith Empire still watched and waited on the outer rim of the galaxy.
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Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 2:15 pm
The Great Sith War
Four hundred years after Nadd's death, the Jedi Exar Kun sought out his tomb, a place strong in the dark side. Nadd's spirit materialized and corrupted Kun, but was eventually destroyed by his student. Exar Kun was pronounced the new Dark Lord of the Sith by the ghost of the ancient Dark Lord Marka Ragnos. As his first apprentice he took another fallen Jedi, Ulic Qel-Droma, and the Great Sith War began. Although several more Jedi turned to the dark side and many more were killed, Exar Kun was finally defeated when Ulic realized the error of his ways and led the Old Republic's forces to Kun's stronghold on Yavin 4. Using the drained life energies of his Massassi warriors, Kun shed his physical body and imprisoned his spirit within the walls of Yavin 4's Massassi temples. His ghost, driven half-mad by millennia of isolation, was destroyed by a group of Luke Skywalker's students thousands of years later. Most of what remained of his Sith Brotherhood by the end of the Great Sith War was hunted down by the Old Republic in a purge known as "the Cleansing of the Nine Houses".
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Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 2:16 pm
The War of the Star Forge
Less than four decades later, the Jedi Revan and Malak, heroes of the Mandalorian Wars (a bloody conflict allegedly instigated by the remnants of the ancient Sith Empire in the Unknown Regions), fell to the dark side and founded the Second Sith Empire. Using the ancient Rakatan Star Forge factory, they built a massive war fleet and began attacking the Old Republic. Thus began the second Sith War, later called the Jedi Civil War (and, still later, the War of the Star Forge), a conflict that proved even more devastating than Kun's war as more Jedi fell to the dark side, were killed in battle, or were murdered by Sith assassins. Revan was the greatest military genius the Jedi had ever seen. It was through his cunning alone that the Mandalorian Wars had been won, as the Old Republic soon discovered. During the Mandalorian Wars, Revan and Malak had rediscovered the long-lost ancient Sith Empire in the Unknown Regions, and were therefore careful to preserve the Republic's shipyards to use against this forgotten threat once they had conquered the galaxy. Due to an attempted coup by Malak, however, Revan's mind was destroyed and Revan, captured by the Jedi, was re-trained in their ways. Taking up the mantle of Dark Lord, Malak redoubled his empire's offenses against the Old Republic, no longer caring about preserving his enemy's resources. Following a long and arduous quest for the five Star Maps that would lead him to the Sith's stronghold, the new Revan led a frontal assault on the Star Forge. He battled his way through the Forge's droid army and legions of Sith and Dark Jedi. After redeeming Malak's apprentice, Bastila Shan, he slew Malak himself in a final confrontation between the old friends, allowing the Old Republic to destroy the Star Forge and win the day.
Despite this great victory won for the Old Republic by Revan, the galaxy soon grew even darker. Barely a hundred Jedi remained after the Jedi Civil War, and those who did soon found their ranks thinning at an alarming rate. Everywhere Jedi congregated, they were murdered, struck down by an invisible enemy who, incredibly enough, was somehow attacking them through the Force itself. Darth Nihilus, the Lord of Hunger, and Darth Sion, Lord of Pain, were students of Revan's former Jedi Master, Kreia (now a Sith called Darth Traya, Lady of Betrayal), had begun a shadow war against the surviving Jedi. Despite their incredible powers, they did not believe themselves strong enough to defeat the Jedi in the same kind of open warfare employed by Revan and Malak. (Revan himself had disappeared into the Unknown Regions a year after the destruction of the Star Forge, hoping to put an end to the ever-present threat posed by the ancient Sith, and had not been heard from since.)
Five years after Malak's defeat on the Star Forge, a Jedi exile who had served Revan as a general during the Mandalorian Wars returned from the Outer Rim to find the Jedi Order virtually extinct. Thought to be the last of the Jedi by Nihilus and Sion, the exile was hunted mercilessly by Sith Assassins from planet to planet as the "last of the Jedi" tracked down the surviving members of the Jedi Council. In the end, several of these Jedi were killed, but the exile managed to turn the tide against the insidious "shadow Sith," slaying Nihilus, Sion, and Traya in battle, thereby ending their Jedi purge and giving the Jedi Order a chance to rebuild.
In modern history texts, the Great Sith War, the Cleansing of the Nine Houses, the Mandalorian Wars, and the War of the Star Forge are often grouped together under the collective appellation of "the Old Sith Wars."
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Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 2:17 pm
The New Sith Wars
Slowly, over the next thousand years, the Jedi Order rebuilt itself back to its former strength. Then, some 2,000 years before the Battle of Yavin, yet another Jedi, chafing under the restrictions of the Jedi Council, fell to the dark side, stole a Sith Holocron, renamed himself "Darth Ruin," formed a new Sith Order, and began recruiting others to his cause. This spawned a new series of conflicts, called the New Sith Wars, which lasted for a millennium.
However, the Sith very nearly proved to be their own undoing. Hungry for power, they turned on each other, all but destroying their order. The survivors reformed under the leadership of Lord Kaan, calling themselves "the Brotherhood of Darkness". To appease his disheartened minions, Kaan abandoned the millennia-old tradition of one ruling Dark Lord and granted the title to a good number of his followers, though very few of them were deserving of it.
The final conflict of the New Sith Wars, the War of Light and Dark or the Light and Darkness War (sometimes also referred to, as Exar Kun's war had been, as the Great Sith War), came to a head in the titanic seventh Battle of Ruusan, in which the Jedi Lord Hoth and the Army of Light clashed with Lord Kaan and the Brotherhood of Darkness for the last time. In the end, a deranged Kaan activated a thought bomb, an ancient Sith technique that sapped the life energy of all Force-sensitives in the vicinity. Both armies were all but destroyed, and only one Sith Lord survived: Darth Bane.
To guard against the Sith self-destructing or losing sight of their "ideals" again, Bane took only one apprentice, starting a one-master-one-apprentice tradition to prevent the Sith from destroying themselves again. He also restarted the tradition of passing the name "Darth" to each of his successors, a trend which appears to have originated with Darth Revan millennia before. In a nod to Kaan's earlier pronouncement, both master and apprentice in Bane's Sith Order held the title "Dark Lord of the Sith," making them, nominally at least, equals. The new tenets of this sinister order would be cunning, stealth, and subterfuge.
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Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 9:52 pm
Went through and spaced it out a little. Good work, keep it up.
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