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		<title>Star Wars</title>
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		<updated>2021-02-08T10:25:13Z</updated>

		<summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;2406:3400:20F:FFC0:8D7C:860E:AC00:5981: /* The original EU/Star Wars &amp;quot;Legends&amp;quot; */&lt;/p&gt;
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[[File:Star-Wars-Logo (1).jpg|center|500px|]]&lt;br /&gt;
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{{Topquote|A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....|Star Wars opening text}}&lt;br /&gt;
&#039;&#039;&#039;[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D0ZQPqeJkk/ Star Wars]&#039;&#039;&#039; is one of, if not &#039;&#039;the&#039;&#039;, most influential media franchises of modern times, let alone its effect on science-fiction and fantasy. Indeed, among [[/tg/|nerddom]], it is challenged by only a few others, like [[Star Trek]] and [[The Lord of the Rings]].&lt;br /&gt;
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The incredibly ardent fandom is spread worldwide and has a strong presence in popular culture. Many of the characters, like Darth Vader and Yoda, are iconic even to the general public. John Williams&#039; score for the original trilogy is one of the best-known film scores of all time, right up there with greats like Jaws, Jurassic Park (also composed by John Williams), Indiana Jones (John Williams again!), Shrek, Harry Potter (there&#039;s a reason Hollywood often relies on John Williams for their soundtracks)  and the Avengers. The universe has spawned numerous video games, hundreds of novels, multiple TV shows, one of the largest merchandising franchises ever, and, relevant to /tg/, a whole bunch of board, card, and roleplaying games.&lt;br /&gt;
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It is also the current leading world source of [[Skub]].&lt;br /&gt;
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==The Basic Concept==&lt;br /&gt;
Star Wars was originally a series of epic science-fantasy &amp;quot;space operas&amp;quot; that roughly followed the mythic cycle that&#039;s been around since Homer. They&#039;re set &amp;quot;a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,&amp;quot; [Note: this makes the entire series a fairy tale] where a mysterious life force called (reasonably enough) the Force permeates everything. This, in turn, can be wielded by certain people, giving them pseudo-magical abilities; thank the Emperor ([[Emperor|no, the other one]]) there were no Commissars in that universe. Those who use it for good become mystical, selfless warrior monks called Jedi, whereas those who use it for evil are ruthless, self-serving bastards called Sith. However, the Force must always be in balance, so any time the Sith arise to cause imbalance, the Jedi have to pull together and take them out to restore the natural order.&lt;br /&gt;
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The so-called Original Trilogy (made up of films IV through VI, released from 1977 to 1983) followed a young man named Luke Skywalker who becomes a Jedi and re-balances the Force. Meanwhile, the Rebel Alliance is fighting to end the oppressive Galactic Empire, which is secretly led by the Sith. Luke and his Rebel companions eventually defeat the evil Emperor Palpatine, but along the way they discover that his lieutenant, Darth Vader, is actually Luke&#039;s father. A financial, critical, popular and cultural H-bomb, these movies are basically the filter through which Generation X perceives the world... for better or worse.&lt;br /&gt;
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The so-called Prequel Trilogy (made up of films I through III, released from 1999 to 2005) explained how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader and how the Galactic Empire was established. This involves a lot of convoluted politicking in the Republic, which is then torn apart in the Clone Wars, where the Republic (with an army of clones led by the Jedi) fights against the Confederacy (with an army of robots led by [[Necrons|General Grievous]] and secretly controlled by the Sith). It was not as well received as the first trilogy, for reasons we&#039;ll talk about below.&lt;br /&gt;
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There&#039;s also a so-called Sequel Trilogy (made up of films VII, VIII, and IX), which started in 2015 and picked up the story some three decades after the Emperor&#039;s defeat with a new generation of heroes taking on the remains of the evil Empire, which is a group of extremist former Imperials calling themselves the First Order. However, Episode VII aka &#039;&#039;The Force Awakens&#039;&#039;, was directed by J.J. Abrams, who&#039;s mostly known for the [[skub|skubtastic]] [[Star Trek]] reboot and was widely criticized for ripping off Episode IV (the whole trilogy apes the original trilogy a lot but none as much as VII) and a [[Mary Sue]] protagonist. Meanwhile Episode VIII was written and directed by Rian Johnson who was a young director known for plot twists and genre experimentation on a handful of movies and television episodes that openly said he wanted to &amp;quot;subvert expectations&amp;quot; and make half of viewers dislike his work, then got pissed when half of them disliked his work. The result managed to fracture the Star Wars fanbase over issues of dull rehashing for VII and a whole laundry list of reasons for VIII (ranging from small ones such as it being too different, to major issues like half the movie being filler), as well as those who still enjoyed them and very little common ground between the three groups. Abrams returned for Episode IX which got a mixed reception from both those who liked VIII and those who didn&#039;t. &lt;br /&gt;
General issue with the sequels is that there was no plan on what to do in each part of the trilogy and they came up with everything as they went along and it really shows. Thus it really feels like the whole trilogy lacks direction, as it was directed by two guys with conflicting visions, yet almost complete freedom to do what they wanted, including [[derp|undoing stuff done in the other guys movie]].&lt;br /&gt;
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Finally, there are the so-called Anthology movies, standalone one-shots involving characters and plotlines that aren&#039;t a part of the main &amp;quot;Saga&amp;quot; films, except they kind of are.  The first, Rogue One (2016), is an immediate prequel to Episode IV that follows those Rebel spies who stole the Death Star plans.  The second film follows a young Han Solo and pals Chewie and Lando.  &amp;lt;s&amp;gt;A third rumored one follows Boba Fett&amp;lt;/s&amp;gt; Became a series.&lt;br /&gt;
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There are also four separate TV series. The first one, &#039;&#039;Clone Wars&#039;&#039;, was based on traditional animation, whereas the later one, &#039;&#039;&#039;&#039;&#039;The&#039;&#039;&#039; Clone Wars&#039;&#039;, was a weird 3D animation. They&#039;re both pretty good. There was also a terrible theatrical release that was basically just an advertisement for &#039;&#039;The Clone Wars&#039;&#039;, but, since it&#039;s quite bad(hint: babysitting Jabba the Hutt&#039;s kid), nobody talks about it much. The third series is Disney&#039;s &#039;&#039;&amp;quot;Rebels&amp;quot;&#039;&#039; which is set between Episodes III-IV and it takes itself far less seriously than Clone Wars did, and is more of a homage to the original trilogy since not every character in the series is the owner of a lightsaber nor are they constantly talking about grown-up politics, senators and trade embargoes, which played a large role in the prequel trilogy and found their way to The Clone Wars as well. Finally there is Resistance, which only lasted two seasons (for comparison, Clone Wars lasted 7 and Rebels lasted 4) and wasn&#039;t particularly well received by the fans, largely due to general lack of interest in the [[fluff]] of the sequel trilogy.&lt;br /&gt;
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And so, after voicing a Mandalorian character one time in an episode of Clone Wars, Jon Favreau’s ego boner couldn’t contain itself any longer and gave birth to the first live action Star Wars TV series, The Mandalorian - building on the Disney version of Mandalorians as a sort of [[Eldar Corsairs|weedy, neo space Viking]], which seems feeble when compared to the old EU version of Mandalorians, who were more like space [[Orks|Maoris]]. Still, it ended up being pretty good; good enough for Disney to  go ahead with another &amp;lt;s&amp;gt;two&amp;lt;/s&amp;gt; four live action series (because if there is anyone who loves to rub skub into their pores, they are Star Wars fans). The first is a prequel to the Rogue One film, y’know, to build on the backstories of people you never needed to know about in the first place. The second series will focus on Obi Wan Kenobi’s time in exile after the saddling Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru with a kid they never asked for, nor wanted. This is what passes for entertainment in this day and age. A one season serieson Ahsoka (from 3d Clone Wars) and one on Boba Fett.&lt;br /&gt;
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And then there&#039;s the whole Expanded Universe, which covers pretty much everything not covered by the films, like the Old Republic (set thousands of years before the prequel trilogy, when there were a hell of a lot more Sith and Jedi around) and the New Republic (set immediately after the original trilogy, explaining what became of all the characters.  It could also reach 40k levels of grimdark with races like the [[Dark Eldar|Yuuzhan]] [[Tyranids|Vong]] characters like [[Vampire|Darth Nihilus]] and beings like [[Old Ones|Abeloth]]...and of course Ewoks. &lt;br /&gt;
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The EU is no longer considered in the main canon of the films and TV series, due to the new sequel trilogy which does not follow EU, the reason for this being, according to Disney, that following EU would restrict their creative freedom.  The reaction to this was, well, [[skub|mixed, for lack of a better word, especially considering how a lot of the so-called creative freedom in the sequels consists of aping the Original Trilogy.]]  They&#039;ve since noted that they&#039;ll slot &#039;&#039;some&#039;&#039; of it in on a case-by-case basis, but the canon is in a highly fluid state at the moment. EU is now officially called Star Wars Legends, though most fans still refer to it as EU.&lt;br /&gt;
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==Why is it so popular?==&lt;br /&gt;
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Star Wars is as accessible as science fiction gets. It doesn&#039;t require extensive knowledge of a fictional world (a la &#039;&#039;[[The Lord of the Rings]]&#039;&#039; or &#039;&#039;[[Warhammer 40,000]]&#039;&#039;) or cultural background (as &#039;&#039;[[Star Trek]]&#039;&#039; sometimes does) to make sense.  Those elements are present for those who want them, but they largely stay in the (very rich and vibrant) background. It has well-shot action and good &#039;&#039;enough&#039;&#039; dialogue to make it interesting for both kids and adults (as well as allowing parents who grew up with it to watch it with their children, thereby hooking the next generation of viewers). It has simple, good-vs.-evil themes that resonate with almost anyone, anywhere, at any time. The science fiction elements are generally handled well if you don&#039;t obsess over making science fiction realistic and hard (or at least they WERE handled well until Episode VII). It&#039;s a prime gateway drug for sci-fi which still holds up to the experienced eye, [[Isaac Asimov]] saw and rather enjoyed the films. All in Fourteen hours of cinema, plus optional sides for those who want it.&lt;br /&gt;
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There&#039;s a ton of merchandise that is, of course, really cool. Also, given it&#039;s crossed over into the mainstream, many people feel comfortable being part of the community without feeling judged as &amp;quot;nerds&amp;quot; (as they might with &#039;&#039;Lord of the Rings&#039;&#039;, &#039;&#039;D&amp;amp;D&#039;&#039;, &#039;&#039;Star Trek&#039;&#039;, &#039;&#039;Warhammer&#039;&#039;, etc.). &lt;br /&gt;
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Again, they roughly follow the mythic cycle that&#039;s been around since Homer. If you think about it, 6 of the 9 films can be summarized as: hero begins his journey under the tutelage of a wise (more or less) man, they encounter a threat which has captured/enslaved a princess/girl, who was in one way or another connected to an important secret (usually a superweapon but could be the identity of a political figure or the location of someone); the heroes save the princess/girl but someone dies tragically in a battle against the villain while someone else is blowing up a space station or a spaceship afterwards they are happy, they celebrate and mourn the loss of the poor bloke who died.&lt;br /&gt;
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Additionally, the first film can be summarized as a samurai and a gunslinger team up to save a princess from Nazis in space. That is multiple cinematic genres at once, following the style of the epic myth.&lt;br /&gt;
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==Setting==&lt;br /&gt;
Due to article bloat, [[Star Wars Setting]] is now its own page.&lt;br /&gt;
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==Movies==&lt;br /&gt;
Also due to article bloat, [[Star Wars Movies]] are also their own page.&lt;br /&gt;
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==Expanded Universe==&lt;br /&gt;
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It can be said what makes a franchise into a long term lasting thing is when a wealth of extra story and background is created that expands on the original story far beyond what there was. It could be argued Star Wars leads the race in this, as the sheer amount of extra novels, graphic novels and games based on Star Wars can and does overwhelm the ordinary fan.&lt;br /&gt;
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===The original EU/Star Wars &amp;quot;Legends&amp;quot;===&lt;br /&gt;
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[[Image: Choices_of_One_PB_art.jpg|right|200px|thumb|The waifu was so strong with Mara Jade, Luke Skywalker himself decided to wife her up]]&lt;br /&gt;
The background has expanded into the distant past before the founding of the current Jedi and Sith orders and into the (not-quite-so) far future looking at the descendants of Luke Skywalker and other popular characters. Uniquely, especially considering [[Warhammer 40K|other]] [[Star Trek|franchises&#039;]] track records, the Star Wars Expanded Universe is &amp;lt;strike&amp;gt;remarkably&amp;lt;/strike&amp;gt; &amp;lt;strike&amp;gt;sorta&amp;lt;/strike&amp;gt; sometimes internally consistent, both with other sources within the universe and with the films themselves, at least in comparison to other comparable settings. Of course, it&#039;s got plenty of its own [[C. S. Goto|problem children]] that slipped through, and the [[skub]] mine of it all isn&#039;t much shallower than that of 40K. Good portions of it do hold up well, largely due to the efforts of Lucas&#039; company&#039;s continuity department leaning on everyone to hold it together. One thing that greatly helps is continuity books and articles aren&#039;t afraid to make small retcons to make even the most obscure and shitty sources (like that terrible PS1 fighting game) seem like part of an organized plot. Particularly well-loved parts include characters like Grand Admiral Thrawn (a rare alien officer in the Empire and popular enough that Disney brought him back to the canon from the EU) and Mara Jade (pictured right, a Force-using former agent of Emperor Palpatine who later turned good, became a Jedi Master, married Luke and had a son with him) - interestingly both were created by the same author [[Timothy Zahn]].  &lt;br /&gt;
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Upon their acquisition, Disney said &amp;quot;fuck it&amp;quot; and threw out everything but the films and the Clone Wars cartoons. Some popular old stuff got mentions or appearances (and Thrawn got to be a major character), but the overall quality is even lower than the old EU. What was set up as a major book contains phrases like &amp;quot;The TIE wibbles and wobbles through the air&amp;quot; and random virtue signalling. As though to top the previous, Disney literally published a book with an entire chapter about mass wedding farts (Yes. Really.). The only good stuff is from established EU authors writing stuff far away from era of the Disney films.&lt;br /&gt;
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The [[rage]] over the EU&#039;s scrapping was major among many fans of it, but for all Disney&#039;s shortcomings, they were in a tight spot. Towards the end all that continuity and consistency got thrown out the airlock for increasingly dumb and disjointed narratives and garbled plot threads to the point that the Star Wars logo was just about as much a sign of quality as the Nintendo approval stamp on shitty SNES games.  &lt;br /&gt;
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Another problem was that Disney is mostly family-friendly, and some of the Star Wars EU could get really dark.  As in Warhammer 40k levels of grimdark.  Examples of this are the invasion of the Yuuzhan Vong - forcenull space-Druchii (no no, not Comorrites though they have the pain and body modification fetishes for it, space-&#039;&#039;&#039;Druchii&#039;&#039;&#039;, riding enslaved tyranid bioships) from another galaxy, Mnggal-Mnggal - mindraping gelatin lost on its way to Star Trek, and Abeloth - an ancient (she predates the Jedi and the Sith) yandere Force entity more like something from the Cthulhu Mythos and is so dangerous the Jedi and the Sith &#039;&#039;&#039;joined forces&#039;&#039;&#039; to fight her.  It&#039;s difficult to envision how Disney could have kept the EU when even before all that it was struggling to find a market beyond the most [[neckbeards|dedicated fans]].&lt;br /&gt;
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===The Books===&lt;br /&gt;
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&#039;&#039;&#039;The Good EU&#039;&#039;&#039;  &lt;br /&gt;
[[Image: Heir-to-the-empire-cover.jpg|right|200px|thumb|Heir to the Empire (1991): The book that started it all]]&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;The Thrawn Trilogy&#039;&#039;&#039;: The origination point for the EU despite not being the first Star Wars books published, and focuses on the conflict with the Imperial remnants left over after RotJ.  Named for the main villain, Grand Admiral Thrawn, who went on to become one of Star Wars most well-loved characters.  Basically the story &amp;quot;The Force Awakens&amp;quot; wishes it was (also introduced the character Mara Jade, a sexy redhead that&#039;s everything Disney wishes Rey was and more). Oh, and also gave us the Republic capital planet Coruscant.&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;The Han Solo Adventures&#039;&#039;&#039;: Star&#039;s End was the second spinoff book written and the first good one.  Hit store shelves before Empire Strikes Back was even in theaters.  Han and Chewie are trying to get some work done on the Falcon and get volun-told to bust out some political prisoners to pay for it.  The Z-95 Headhunter fighter comes from this one.  Would have made for a better film than &#039;&#039;Solo&#039;&#039; did. &lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Shadows of the Empire&#039;&#039;&#039;: Shadows is set between ESB and RotJ and fills in the details of getting the Death Star II&#039;s plans, finding out where Han was taken, Luke building his own saber, etc by the introduction of another bounty hunter by the name of Dash Rendar.  The Special Edition rerelease of &#039;&#039;A New Hope&#039;&#039; added the Outrider to the background of one scene. Most notable for the fact that it was also adapted into a video game for the N64 and PC.&lt;br /&gt;
*&#039;&#039;&#039;The Darth Bane Trilogy&#039;&#039;&#039;: The origin of the Rule of Two for the Sith, along with a compelling protagonist and his apprentice.&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Revenge of the Sith&#039;&#039;&#039;: The novelization is actually considered a serious improvement over the movie itself.&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Darth Plagueis&#039;&#039;&#039;: Shows how Palpatine becomes a Sith Lord under his mentor. Less Star Wars than Star Politics, which is a good thing for this praticular story.&lt;br /&gt;
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&#039;&#039;&#039;The Bad EU&#039;&#039;&#039;&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Jedi Academy Trilogy&#039;&#039;&#039;: Luke sets up his academy on Yavin IV and tries to teach [[Rage|Kyp Durron]].  Imperial remnant superweapons hit ludicrous territory with the sun crusher.  This was the beginning of Kevin J Anderson hammering out a couple dozen Star Wars books over about four years.&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Young Jedi Knights Series&#039;&#039;&#039;: Set between Jedi Academy and New Jedi Order, mostly follows Han &amp;amp; Leia&#039;s kids.  &lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;I, Jedi&#039;&#039;&#039;: A retelling of the Jedi Academy Trilogy (see above) with more of Corran Horn from the first set of X-Wing books. Less derp in general but significantly more [[Mary Sue]]age of Horn.&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Legacy of the Force&#039;&#039;&#039;: The survivors of the Yuuzhan Vong War are trying to rebuild the galaxy, but Jacen Solo turns Sith and becomes the main villain.  The book series is infamous for nearly killing the Star Wars brand and issues between various writers years before Disney went down the same road (Jacen Solo was also a major influence for Kylo Ren).  The biggest complaints were Jacen killing off Mara Jade, the villains having plot armor through bouts of incompetence from the heroes, poor dialogue, long-winded writing and the story being overstuffed with allusions to post 9/11 US culture and politics.&lt;br /&gt;
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&#039;&#039;&#039;The [[Skub]] EU&#039;&#039;&#039;&lt;br /&gt;
[[Image: Yuuzhan-vong-eu2_bg.jpg|right|200px|thumb|The Yuuzhan Vong, [[Skub|either badass and interesting or grimderp canon-defiling villains]]]]&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;New Jedi Order&#039;&#039;&#039;: The longest-running Star Wars book series (19 books long) being about an extragalactic invasion and the Jedi&#039;s role in fighting it.  Luke and his wife Mara are training new Jedi including Han and Leia&#039;s kids while Han and Leia build bridges between the New Republic and Imperial Remnants.  Until the extragalactic invaders arrive; the Yuuzhan Vong - [[Culexus|Force-null]] [[Imperium of Man|religious fanatics]] with [[Tyranids|organic technology]] and a fixation on [[Dark Eldar|pain and body modification]].  The resulting war sees a body count that rivals anything in  Warhammer 40k, including Chewie&#039;s death Majora&#039;s Mask style plus the deaths of Han and Leia&#039;s youngest son and Admiral Ackbar.  Mara gives birth to Ben Skywalker and overcomes a terminal illness.  The Vong take over and [[Tyranids|terraform]] part of the galaxy, including Coruscant, and lots is learned about the Force.  A real love-it-or-hate-it series, some parts are good, some are bad and some are weird. &lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Dark Empire&#039;&#039;&#039;: Palpatine&#039;s back to save a dying franchise decades before Disney tried it.  He even uses clone bodies to do so (but unlike Disney, Dark Horse didn&#039;t flip-flop on the lore), wrecks a fleet of enemy ships using the Force and at some point has his power reflected back at him.  Starts off good, falls apart fast.  Known for its love-it-or-hate-it artstyle and dialogue. Original version of Episode 9. &lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Courtship of Princess Leia&#039;&#039;&#039;: Deals with another Imperial remnant, where a Queen who could be potential ally against the Imperials offers a deal which hinges on Leia marrying her prince son.  In response, Han sorta-kinda (totally) kidnaps Leia.  Luke teams up with the prince in question (who&#039;s a bit of a Jedi fanboy but basically a competent officer) to find them.  This one introduced the planet Dathomir and the force witches the Nightsisters, which were ultimately adapted to be Maul&#039;s homeworld.  &lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;X-Wing&#039;&#039;&#039;: A long running series that passed between several authors that followed Wedge and his squad post RotJ.  Initially focused on the liberation of Coruscant and was solid if formulaic, but eventually spiraled off into skub territory.  cv &lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Fate of the Jedi&#039;&#039;&#039;: Want some Cthulhu with your Star Wars?  Luke, his son Ben and the remaining Jedi work to counter anti-Jedi backlash following the events of LotF while Han and Leia work to stop another war.  Things go from bad to worse when several Jedi suffer mysterious shared bouts of psychosis and an ancient Sith tribe emerges from hiding.  Things then go from worse to cosmic horror when both sides encounter Abeloth, a yandere, Lovecraftian Force entity so dangerous the Jedi and the Sith have to &#039;&#039;team up&#039;&#039; to fight her (yes really!).  But Abeloth escapes her prison, and both sides have to stop her before she plunges the Force and the galaxy into chaos.  During these events, Ben Skywalker finds himself in a Batman/Catwoman situation with the Sith apprentice Vestara Khai.  While being an OoM better than the preceding book series, FotJ has a very divided opinion among SW fans.&lt;br /&gt;
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== Disney Canon ==&lt;br /&gt;
[[Image:Star_Wars_Disney_Princesses.jpg|right|400px|thumb|Love it or hate it, they are now official &#039;&#039;Disney Princesses&#039;&#039;.]]&lt;br /&gt;
It&#039;s still [[skub|debatable]] whether or not the new Canon holds up to the old EU, or learns to fix the problems that plagued it. We probably won&#039;t see what comes of it for decades to come. Disney Canon, as of 2020, seems to largely be built around the nine main movies though there have been growing rumors of a shakeup that may render the Disney triology non-canon due to severe backlash and financial losses.  There&#039;s also shows like Rebels and Clone Wars alongside anthology movies fleshing out stories that had been told in comics and books back before the Disney buy-up, but can now be seen on film.&lt;br /&gt;
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A curious thing that has begun happening: Certain elements of the old EU are slipping into the Disney Canon. Plotlines like the Emperor returning, the Death Star plans heist and Han&#039;s path to become the smuggler we know him as all have bits and pieces from EU canon in them. In some cases, whole characters are ported in; the best example is Admiral Thrawn, who appears in Rebels. Other times, popular characters has their traits or stories ported into new ones (Finn and Cassian are both expies of Kyle Katarn, for example). This gives some credence to the argument that Lucasfilms and Disney wanted to wipe the slate with all the stories that had been told in the EU, so they could create their own, fully realized canon Star Wars setting that one could make movies - &#039;&#039;many&#039;&#039; movies - from. Considering the amount of shitty fan-fiction-esque stories the EU had, this may be for the best, but of course, storylines that people have loved for ages are also thrown out with the bathwater.&lt;br /&gt;
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Detractors of Disney-era Star Wars often talk loads about how the sequel trilogy invalidates the original trilogy.  Other complaints raised are how Disney screwed over Luke and how many cool characters are either cannibalized for story elements (like Kyle Katarn) or completely removed from canon (like Mara Jade).  These are semi-valid arguments of course, but they ignore some of the biggest issues with the EU originally - it wasn&#039;t sponsored by George Lucas and Lucasfilms.  They were sponsored fan-fiction in a sense, semi-canon from the outset and not really something that could be considered a part of the Star Wars setting, though George Lucas did work with the writers to a point, such as with the New Jedi Order book series (he gave them permission to kill off Chewbacca in the story).  In fact, George never really considered them real stories; more like a parallel universe of his own Star Wars works. He accepted it because they bring in the big bucks when people would beg to have the official Star Wars logo on anything they produced.&lt;br /&gt;
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That, and the sequel trilogy, underwhelming as it may be, was George&#039;s idea in broad strokes. The series was always going to have a sequel trilogy, and while the outcome isn&#039;t exactly what he (or we) wanted, quite a lot of it is. Luke being an exile on a far-away planet, who has to be roused to fight by a new, female Jedi? George&#039;s idea, not Disney&#039;s.  A son of Han and Leia struggling with the Dark Side?  Also George&#039;s idea (though Disney lifted a lot form the original version - Jacen Solo - for Kylo Ren).  If anything, much of the direction comes from Lucasfilms; Disney just wants the movie to sell well. It&#039;s similar with Marvel nowadays.&lt;br /&gt;
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So for better or worse, the Disney Canon is the first time the wider setting of Star Wars beyond the series and movies have become irrevocably canon, rather than &amp;quot;kinda-sorta-canon&amp;quot;. Much of what we&#039;ve gotten that is new is based roughly on George&#039;s own work as well. Remember this when discussing EU vs Disney in Star Wars - Either setting is cool for their own reasons, but the Mouse got little to do with it - and if you don&#039;t like it, bring it up with big man Lucas.  Whatever the case, CEO Big Iger briefly resigned in 2019... before being brought back in 2020 following severe financial and PR losses for Disney due to comparatively poor reception of the Disney canon, controversial statements from Disney staff against fans and shutdowns related to the global coronavirus pandemic.  There have been large rumblings of change in Disney Star Wars, for better or worse.&lt;br /&gt;
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It should be noted that the TV shows below are either now part of the Disney canon (such as the 2008 Clone Wars series), or made by Disney.  There is also a major Star Wars project in the works called Star Wars: The High Republic.  It&#039;s an upcoming multimedia project spanning books and comics worked on by various writers including Claudia Gray and Cavan Scott ([[Warhammer Adventures|yes, &#039;&#039;that&#039;&#039; Cavan Scott]]).  The stated goal is to tell one cohesive story set in the High Republic Era, two centuries prior to Phantom Menace.  It was slated for a 2020 release but was pushed back to 2021, purportedly due to the COVID-19 pandemic (purportedly because they could still work on the story from home in this day and age but have chosen to extend the deadline).&lt;br /&gt;
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December 2020 gave us a major announcement of several new films and TV series, as well as further information about already announced things. These include:&lt;br /&gt;
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* &#039;&#039;&#039;[[Star Wars:The Mandalorian|The Mandalorian]]&#039;&#039;&#039;: Live-action series that started in 2019. Unsurprisingly, Season 3 is on it&#039;s way and will release in 2022.&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Ahsoka&#039;&#039;&#039;: Live-action series by Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni (the chads responsible for The Mandalorian, the latter also responsible for  [[Star Wars:The Clone Wars|The Clone Wars]], [[Star Wars:Rebels|Rebels]] and the character of Ahsoka (and [[Star Wars:Resistance|Resistance]] but [[heresy|let&#039;s not talk about that]])) featuring the titular fan favorite character who made her live-action debut in The Mandalorian Season 2, starring Rosario Dawson and is a spin-off of The Mandalorian and will have cross-overs with it. Though not officially confirmed, is highly likely to feature the live-action debut of [[tactical genius|Thrawn]], who was name-dropped by Ahsoka in The Mandalorian as her quarry. Release date unknown but is confirmed to run only for one season.&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Rangers of the New Republic&#039;&#039;&#039;: Live-action series and another spin-off of The Mandalorian, again by Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni and is said to have cross-overs with The Mandalorian and Ahsoka. Not much is known at the moment but the name tells us at that it would focus on the titular galactic government, something we still don&#039;t know much about due to the world-building fuck-up of the sequel trilogy. Release date unknown.&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;The Bad Batch&#039;&#039;&#039;: Animated series and a spin-off of The Clone Wars. Focuses on the titular clone commando unit that was introduced in the last season of The Clone Wars, seemingly set during Republics transition into the Empire. [[Awesome|Dee Bradley Baker is back playing all the main characters]]. Release in 2021.&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Andor&#039;&#039;&#039;: Live-action series and a spy-thriller focusing on the titular character who was introduced in Rogue One. Release in 2022.&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;The Acolyte&#039;&#039;&#039;: Live-action series set during the High Republic-era, a thus-far unexplored era 100-300 years before the original movie during which the Republic was at it&#039;s peak. Release date unknown.&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Obi-Wan Kenobi&#039;&#039;&#039;: Live-action series featuring the return of Ewan McGregor as the titular character set 10 years after Revenge of the Sith. Hayden Christensen is also confirmed to be returning, though how it will work is unknown as Anakin was Vader at this time and thus he would be in his armor and have his voiced dubbed over by someone, likely/hopefully James Earl Jones. Release in 2022 and is confirmed to only run for one season.&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;A Droid Story&#039;&#039;&#039;: Animated series featuring R2-D2 and C-3PO and a new character, possibly a droid as well. That is all we know for now but will likely be targeted towards kids, just like the animated series Droids from the 80s. Release date unknown.&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Lando&#039;&#039;&#039;: Live-action series focusing on the titular character. Not much known aside from that at the moment, not even will it feature Billy-Dee Williams or Donald Glover. Release date unknown.&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Visions&#039;&#039;&#039;: [[Anime]] anthology-series made by different anime studios across Japan. Will run for 10 episodes, with each episode likely produced by a different studio. It&#039;s unknown which studios are involved but considering their track record, Production IG, Sunrise and Trigger are likely involved. Release date unknown.&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Rogue Squadron&#039;&#039;&#039;: Live-action film, the first one after the sequels. Will feature the titular elite starfighter squadron and is directed by Patty Jenkins, the director of Wonder Woman (but also [[RAGE|writer and director of Wonder Woman 1984]]). Will it focus on the Rogue Squadron from EU led by Wedge Antilles or will it be completely different remains to seen. Release in 2023.&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Film by Taika Waititi&#039;&#039;&#039;: Nothing about it is known at the moment except that it is happening, it is live-action and will be directed by Taika Waititi of Thor: Ragnarök-fame who also played IG-11 in The Mandalorian and directed the last episode of the first season. Release likely in either 2024 or 2025.&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;The Book of Boba Fett&#039;&#039;&#039;: Live-action series, revealed post-credits in the last episode of The Mandalorian Season 2, which had Boba Fett returning to Jabba&#039;s palace, kill everyone inside and then sit on his old bosses throne. Release in 2021.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
==Wookieepedia==&lt;br /&gt;
One of the largest fan wikis ever created, this bad boy is extensively cited, has enormous variety, and has page upon page of talk. It was if Lexicanum, the 40k fan wiki, and our own glorious site were fused into a terrible beast.&lt;br /&gt;
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==Impact on 1d4chan and associated games etc==&lt;br /&gt;
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Star Wars has had subtle and clear impacts on a number of other franchises and genres and it can be &#039;&#039;incredibly&#039;&#039; hard to gauge the extent of it all. Certainly it didn&#039;t create the concepts of sci-fi, space battles, sweeping storylines, and a blending of mystical and scientific ideas, but it certainly popularized them during the years of the original trilogy and influenced many people that would go on to have interests in sci-fi, fantasy and epic adventure today.&lt;br /&gt;
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Hell, look me in the eye and tell me that the lightsaber didn&#039;t give us the [[power weapon]]. But then again, magic weapons.&lt;br /&gt;
==Sabacc and Pazaak==&lt;br /&gt;
A rather unusual entry here but it&#039;s well in line, Sabacc is an actual tabletop card game from the Star Wars universe which is basically a hybrid of Poker and Blackjack. A Sabacc Deck has 80 cards, most of which in four suits of 16 cards numbered one to 16 (two suits positive, two suits negative), plus 16 wildcards that could be positive/negative or (in the case of the Idiot) Zero. The goal of the game is to have a set of three cards who&#039;s total as close as possible to, but not over, 23 or -23. If you got 23/-23 (Pure Sabacc) which could only be beaten by an Idiot&#039;s Array (the Idiot, a Two and a Three, thus 23). The stakes are raised every cycle until the cards go down or one player is left standing who gets the pot.  Like most card games there are variations, such as a single suit hand beating a mixed hand of equal value, light beating dark, dark beating light, instant tiebreaker with new hands in the case of a tie; one variation even uses dice (presumably to set a handicap the hand has to overcome).&lt;br /&gt;
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The notable thing about Sabacc that sets it apart from real world card games is that the Cards can change value every turn. A Pure Sabacc can easily become an instant lose 25 and an absolutely lousy hand can become an Idiot&#039;s Array. They can be stabilized to fix their value, but everyone knows when you do so. This feature has so far prevented Sabacc from being released in tabletop form as of yet.  &#039;&#039;(Of course, there are ways to deal with this, such as simply re-dealing unfixed cards, but never let it be said that nerds will choose practicality over purity.)&#039;&#039; &lt;br /&gt;
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In universe, Han Solo won the Millenium Falcon off Lando in a game of Sabacc.&lt;br /&gt;
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Pazaak is an older game from an in-universe perspective, similar to Blackjack but its player versus player rather than player versus dealer and also has some aspects of a collectible card game. Goal of the game is to raise cards from the main deck until their total value is 20 or they can also choose to stand if they get close but don&#039;t want to risk it. Best out of five wins.&lt;br /&gt;
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CCG-aspect of Pazaak comes from the sidedeck: both players collect ten cards for their side deck and then randomly take four cards from their side deck to their hand in the beginning of the game. Hand cards are used to either lower or raise the total value: so if the player raises cards from the main deck to the total value of 25, they can prevent dropping out if they have a -5 card or higher in their hand. &lt;br /&gt;
Cards which only either raise or lower the value are the most common of the side cards. &lt;br /&gt;
More rarer are cards which can be used to both raise and lower the value. &lt;br /&gt;
Then there are flip cards, which change certain main deck cards on the table to negative ones. So if the player plays a 2&amp;amp;4 flip card, all 2:s and 4:s on the table become -2:s and -4:s. Flip cards exist in 2&amp;amp;4:s and 3&amp;amp;6:s.&lt;br /&gt;
Then there is the double card, which doubles the value of the last played card. So if the player raises a 5 from the main deck, playing the double card would turn it into a 10.&lt;br /&gt;
Finally, the rarest side deck card is the tiebreaker, which grants the player a win if the game would otherwise end in a tie.&lt;br /&gt;
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==Tabletop games for Star Wars==&lt;br /&gt;
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=== Role-playing Games ===&lt;br /&gt;
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[[West End Games]] made a Star Wars [[role-playing game]] called [[Star Wars RPG|Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game]] AKA &#039;&#039;&#039;Star Wars D6&#039;&#039;&#039;.  Like many West End products, it&#039;s a good game with the great misfortune of being published by West End Games.&lt;br /&gt;
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[[Wizards of the Coast]] picked up the license later and made two distinct RPGs based on their [[d20 System]], called [[Star Wars D20]] (imaginatively).  Could be fun, but generally broken as hell, much like [[Dungeons &amp;amp; Dragons 3rd Edition|its parent game]]. It was then utterly revised that into what they called the &#039;&#039;&#039;Saga Edition&#039;&#039;&#039;, which is relatively balanced and pretty good.&lt;br /&gt;
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[[Fantasy Flight Games]] is presently selling [[Star Wars Roleplaying Game|a whole line of Star Wars-themed RPGs]], each one focusing on a specific style of play. You want to play a bunch of scruffy space outlaws (Edge of the Empire), members of the nascent Rebellion (Age of Rebellion), or exiled Jedi Knights (Force and Destiny), then they got you covered. Unlike their [[Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay]] games, which are all &#039;&#039;juuuuust&#039;&#039; different enough from one another to completely buttfuck any attempts at blending, all three gamelines use identical mechanics and are fully cross-compatible. Uses symbol-counting [[dice pool]]s with ludicrously overpriced custom dice.&lt;br /&gt;
Like the other RPGs they decided with the retardedly similar name, and thus this one is sometimes called &#039;&#039;&#039;Star Wars FFG&#039;&#039;&#039; to avoid confusion.&lt;br /&gt;
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FFG have kept milking the franchise and in summer 2017, decided to [[Necromancer | reanimate]] the [[Star Wars RPG|Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game]] with a &amp;quot;30th Year Anniversary Edition&amp;quot; print of the original game. It &#039;&#039;&#039;&#039;&#039;finally&#039;&#039;&#039;&#039;&#039; shipped in July 2018 after spending a year in limbo.&lt;br /&gt;
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=== Card Games ===&lt;br /&gt;
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The big [[card game]] set in the Star Wars universe is the [[Star Wars Customizable Card Game]].  It&#039;s no longer produced by Decipher, but there is still a sufficiently large player community to organize annual tournaments, rule on cards, and so on.  SWCCG was radically different from the norm of card games, being divided into light and dark side cards with different backings, with light and dark always playing against each other.  For tournament play a player would need both a light and dark deck.  The gameplay was also radically different from most CCGs; in Magic terms the closest analog would be that every SWCCG deck was fundamentally a mill deck, with some hard to assemble insta-win combos themed to the plots of the movies.&lt;br /&gt;
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[[Wizards of the Coast]] made the [[Star Wars Trading Card Game]].  It is now dead.&lt;br /&gt;
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[[Fantasy Flight Games]] made [[Star Wars: Destiny CCG]].  It is also now dead.&lt;br /&gt;
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Obviously, nobody is capable of creating a Star Wars card game with an interesting name.&lt;br /&gt;
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Aside from the real, physical, games there was also &#039;&#039;Star Wars Galaxies Trading Card Game&#039;&#039;. It was a real, functioning, card game within the MMO that used all virtual cards. Unfortunately no server emulators have implemented it yet.&lt;br /&gt;
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=== Miniature Games ===&lt;br /&gt;
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The first Star Wars miniatures game was &#039;&#039;Star Wars Miniature Battles&#039;&#039; released by West End Games in 1989.  It and the minis were readily available through the early half of the 1990&#039;s, although the line was never particularly diverse.  Even accounting for vehicles the whole line was only a couple dozen products and you could get all the rebel heroes in a single box if you just wanted them for the RPG, plus a another box for Vader and a mix of imperials.&lt;br /&gt;
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Concurrent to this, Galoob managed to get their hands on Star Wars for their Micro Machines toy line, and released an &#039;&#039;&#039;enormous&#039;&#039;&#039; line of minis which conformed to no consistent scale but were at least cheap, durable, and prepainted.  Homebrew adaptations of other systems to use them were a thing in the 90&#039;s but vanished as they became scarce.&lt;br /&gt;
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[[Wizards of the Coast]] did a tabletop battles game imaginatively called Star Wars: Miniatures, based on an extremely dumbed down version of the D&amp;amp;D ruleset. The figures were meant to tie in with the Saga edition RPG, it wasn&#039;t terrible on its own, just impossible to collect for competitive play since figures came in random booster packs so you never know what you were getting for what faction. Who could possibly stand for that?&lt;br /&gt;
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[[Fantasy Flight Games]] is producing the [[X-Wing]] miniatures game based on individual starfighter combat (because, let&#039;s be honest, that&#039;s what &#039;&#039;Star&#039;&#039; Wars is all about). They have also released [[Star Wars: Armada]] which is a larger scale &amp;quot;fleet&amp;quot; combat simulator, using capital ships and squadrons of starfighters.&lt;br /&gt;
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&#039;&#039;&#039;Star Wars: Imperial Assault&#039;&#039;&#039;&lt;br /&gt;
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The latest [[Fantasy Flight Games]] addition to its Star Wars related games is a mix between a miniature board game and a skirmish wargame. It has two play modes: &lt;br /&gt;
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One for campaign play where 1-4 players control a team of Rebel heroes and another player has the role of the DM, who controls the Imperial forces. The campaign, as the name suggests, focuses on character personalization, xp gain and the like, which you can find in any light RPG-esque (board)game. The main goal is to get a few friends together and casually play through the missions. Think of it as a Star Wars version of the original [[Hero Quest]].&lt;br /&gt;
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The other play mode is skirmish play, where two players each get to assemble a team of miniatures plus a command deck (cards that have specific effects when played) and play against each other in an open-play scenario. The play area is still very limited to a few game tiles (as in a campaign mission) but players are free to bring whatever they want (with a few limitations of course). The skirmish part of Imperial assault is as close as you can get to an actual Star Wars skirmish wargame, but it is a missed opportunity from Fantasy Flight to create a true skirmish wargame (ala [[Infinity (wargame)|Infinity]]), not based on tiles and so confined spaces. Who knows what they have plans for though...&lt;br /&gt;
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&#039;&#039;&#039;Star Wars Legion&#039;&#039;&#039;&lt;br /&gt;
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And Fantasy Flight have now given us a fully fledged wargame, complete with AT-ST in the first wave. (They&#039;re 32mm scale, which means [[Games Workshop|no reusing your Imperial Assault miniatures]].) Legion has an integrated turn system, and the usual FF custom dice and forest worth of dead trees in cards and tokens that will be familiar to X-Wing and Armada players.  The miniatures are PVC, reasonably detailed, easy to assemble pieces.  A standard battle is 800 points, which could be anywhere from half a dozen to 16 units on the field, with an average army fielding 8-12 units comprising 30-ish models.&lt;br /&gt;
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=== Board Games ===&lt;br /&gt;
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The most famous and arguably best one is [[Star Wars: Rebellion]], an asymmetric two-player game that plays through the Original Trilogy in a wargame/worker placement-esque game. The Empire player must expand their already huge military base over the galaxy to build more ships and huge superweapons while searching for the Rebel Base, while the Rebels do their best to bite them in their heel, obscuring their movements and annoying the Empire until they have enough support to overthrow the Empire. As a [[Fantasy Flight Games|FFG]] boardgame, it&#039;s filled with a ludicrous amount of bits and pieces (including sweet models of Star Destroyers, Death Stars and Calamari Cruisers), as well as the trademark filled-with-small-exceptions ruleset. It&#039;s pretty sweet and still considered one of the best board games of its kind.&lt;br /&gt;
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=== Card Miniature Games ===&lt;br /&gt;
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In the late 00&#039;s, WizKids produced a short lived construct-able miniatures Star Wars game based on their styrene card system for Pirates of the Spanish Main.  Although the game sold well, when NECA bought WizKids from Topps the rights did not transfer and it went out of print.&lt;br /&gt;
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==Video Games for Star Wars==&lt;br /&gt;
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To put it bluntly, every game which could possibly have &#039;&#039;Star Wars&#039;&#039; slapped onto it, exists.  Flight simulators.  Racers.  Rail shooters.  Doom clones.  MMOs.  Age of Empires reskins.  An official expansion for &#039;&#039;The Sims 4&#039;&#039;.  Hell, there&#039;s even a Kinect variety game.  Here&#039;s a few standouts...&lt;br /&gt;
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* &#039;&#039;&#039;Knights of the Old Republic&#039;&#039;&#039;: A pair of single player RPGs depicting a Sith war several thousand years before &#039;&#039;A New Hope&#039;&#039;. KotOR is widely regarded as the best Star Wars video game ever, and was the framework for BioWare&#039;s &#039;&#039;Mass Effect&#039;&#039; series.  Of all the Legends stuff, KotOR appears to still be in good standing with Disney since they continue to borrow from it. The sequel by Obsidian was the original skubtastic take on the franchise TLJ wanted to be but failed miserably. Got a skubtastic MMO simply called &amp;quot;Old Republic&amp;quot; (since you can play as things other than Jedi and Sith) that is the sequel, which had a very rough start but stabilized enough to still survive to this day somehow. Though the gameplay is pretty meh due to being an MMO, the storylines are mostly good, with the best of them being some of the best Star Wars stories out there. Possibly still canon in the Disney continuity since a lot of things get borrowed or referenced from it. Also the only thing in the EU to still receive new content. Fans often treat these games as canon even if they are technically not, due to being set so long before the films that there aren&#039;t many contradictions between canon and legends.&lt;br /&gt;
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* &#039;&#039;&#039;Jedi Knight:&#039;&#039;&#039; A series that started of as an early FPS named Dark Forces (so early that it was the time when FPS games were still known as [[Doom]]-clones) but Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight had the protagonist become a Jedi. The Dark Forces name was dropped in favor of Jedi Knight after this. The series combines surprisingly deep lightsaber combat with standard shooting, though the levels can get very mazy at times. Introduced Kyle Katarn, one of the most popular characters from EU. Unfortunately, there has not been a new game since 2003&#039;s &#039;&#039;Jedi Academy&#039;&#039; and likely will never be thanks to Disney. At least they were recently re-released on modern consoles so at least their existence is acknowledged and gives more people a chance to play them. Also the full name for Jedi Academy would be Dark Forces 4 : Jedi Knight 3 : Jedi Academy.&lt;br /&gt;
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* &#039;&#039;&#039;Republic Commando&#039;&#039;&#039;: An FPS that has the player command a squad of commandos. Its a great shooter but unfortunately, it never received a sequel and to make things worse, ended on a cliffhanger. The second act of the game, set entirely on a drifting Acclamator-class assault ship is particularly memorable and highly atmospheric. If one can look past outdated graphics, it is one of the best Star Wars games ever made and holds it&#039;s own in the FPS-genre as a whole. It is also notably more violent and [[grimdark]] than Star Wars usually is. The soundtrack is also quite noteworthy, while it does make great use of John Williams music as most Star Wars games do, it also has it&#039;s own original and rather unique soundtrack consisting of Mandalorian warchants which you should seriously go and listen to.&lt;br /&gt;
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* &#039;&#039;&#039;Empire at War&#039;&#039;&#039;: Made by the original developers of [[Command and Conquer]], it is the most notable strategy game to have come out of Star Wars. Notable for featuring three different modes of play: ground battles, space battles and galactic conquest map. Though ground battles are a bit meh, the space battles are great and the galactic conquest is certainly more interesting than only playing random skirmish matches. Even though its over 10 years old, it has a very active modding community. Republic at War, which changes the games Galactic Civil War setting to Clone Wars and Thrawns Revenge, set much further into the Galactic Civil War than portrayed in the films, are particularly great. There is also a remake mod in the works, aiming to bring the game up to modern standards in terms of visuals, sound and UI and the results do look good. Unfortunately, no great 40k mod.&lt;br /&gt;
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* &#039;&#039;&#039;Bounty Hunter&#039;&#039;&#039;: Featuring Jango Fett as the protagonist and tells the story of he ended up being the clone template. A third person action adventure game that makes the player [[meme|FEEL like a Mandalorian]]. Particular highlight is the first level of the second chapter set on Coruscant as no other game before or since has allowed the player to explore Coruscant to this extent. 1313 was meant to do that even better but fuck Disney.&lt;br /&gt;
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* &#039;&#039;&#039;Star Wars Galaxies&#039;&#039;&#039;: An early MMO, launched after &#039;&#039;Everquest&#039;&#039; but before &#039;&#039;WoW&#039;&#039;.  Galaxies is noteworthy for making force powers a prestige achievement requiring enormous in-game effort to unlock. The first expansion pack added a subgame that&#039;s a pretty solid flight game in its own right and the game eventually added an original, fully playable, trading card game that sadly has not yet been implemented in any simulator. Then &#039;&#039;World of Warcraft&#039;&#039; hit, Sony panicked and made Jedi a starting class and replaced the skill system with massive level grind, and offered refunds to the raging army of neckbeards.  Subscription numbers tanked and never recovered. It would effectively be replaced by &#039;&#039;The Old Republic&#039;&#039;, an MMO using the acclaimed KotOR setting. Like most &amp;quot;dead&amp;quot; MMOs that people loved it still lives on through illegal private servers (don&#039;t worry, the guys providing it would get busted, not people playing on it). &lt;br /&gt;
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* &#039;&#039;&#039;X-Wing (and TIE Fighter)&#039;&#039;&#039;: A series of &#039;&#039;Wing Commander&#039;&#039; clones released in the 90&#039;s.  While badly dated today, they were the best fighter sims of their time, and if you can get past the highly primitive graphics some people still consider them to be the best to this day.  Why?  The mission scripting and AI are top notch for the genre and absolutely brutal to fight against; on all but the simplest missions you&#039;re almost guaranteed to fail the first time and eventually develop a sixth sense about the fighters threatening your objective vs the fighters just there to kill you (ignore those, learn to be hard to hit).  Interestingly, TIE Fighter is largely seen as the best of the series while the N64 era Rogue Squadron and Shadows Of The Empire games are seen as being far more visually modern but largely inferior sequels. Did we mention you had to use a flight stick controller basically made for these games to really do well at these? &lt;br /&gt;
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* &#039;&#039;&#039; The Force Unleashed&#039;&#039;&#039;: A hack n slash game featuring Starkiller, Darth Vaders secret apprentice. While the protagonist is very [[skub]], overpowered (he literally pulls down a Star Destroyer from orbit with the Force) and has been called a [[Mary Sue|Gary Stu]], all that just makes it a complete power fantasy that is hard not to enjoy. Physics are pretty good for its time and enemies can have particularly realistic moments, such as briefly grabbing onto whatever&#039;s at hand, including each other, when lifted with the Force. Disregard the wii version which is hilariously inferior in level design and gameplay&lt;br /&gt;
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* &#039;&#039;&#039;Revenge of the Sith&#039;&#039;&#039;: One of the best movie license games of all time, though does that say more about the game or movie license games, I&#039;ll let you decide. The storymode is basically a hack n slash but the real star is the versus mode (and boss fights in the story mode) as this is basically the best Star Wars fighting game there is (not that there&#039;s much competition).&lt;br /&gt;
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* &#039;&#039;&#039;Star Wars Battlefront II (2005)&#039;&#039;&#039;: Not to be confused with the one released by EA in 2017. Solid game from the new-defunct Pandemic studio (fuck you, EA) in 2005 told from the perspective of a clone trooper that survived all the way up to the battle of Hoth, with a very down to earth boots on the ground approach. Also, just being thrown into random matches as a soldier because fun. Despite some issues, it remains the high point of the Battlefront series as well as the entire PS2 era, and on PC still has fans via an active modding community to this day. There is of course also the original one but the second one pretty much completely overshadowed it.&lt;br /&gt;
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* &#039;&#039;&#039;Star Wars Battlefront II (2017)&#039;&#039;&#039;: The one by EA. You&#039;ve probably heard everything important. An absolute mess at launch due to its lootbox-heavy progression system, so much so that it started discussion even on government level about lootboxes that continues to this day. A comment by EA that became the most downvoted comment in Reddit history. Yet despite all this, two years later, the game is arguably one of the best Star Wars experiences one can have and an Anakin-level redemption story. Like the previous Battlefront II, it completely overshadowed its predecessor.&lt;br /&gt;
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* &#039;&#039;&#039;Jedi: Fallen Order&#039;&#039;&#039;: It took them years but finally, EA managed to deliver a Star Wars game that is great on launch without cramming it with e-transactions. Its plot focuses on an unfortunate Jedi renegade between &#039;&#039;Revenge&#039;&#039; and &#039;&#039;A New Hope&#039;&#039; who&#039;s on the hunt for a hidden database that might document all the Force-sensitive individuals in the galaxy. A game inspired primarily by games such as Dark Souls and Uncharted, its a great action-adventure game in its own right and a must-play for any Star Wars fan.  Also notable for making Darth Vader &#039;&#039;&#039;&#039;&#039;really FUCKING SCARY&#039;&#039;&#039;&#039;&#039;.  As he should be.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Monopoly Star Wars&#039;&#039;&#039;: Its Star Wars Monopoly. With 90&#039;s FMV that plays for every square you land on. On floppy disks. Considered fucking amazing at the time, its too strange and tabletop to not mention. Also one of the last pre-Prequel things released.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Super Star Wars&#039;&#039;&#039;: A heavily modified retelling of the original trilogy (what, you don&#039;t remember how Luke chased down the Sandcrawler and murdered all the Jawas as well as their giant rat god in order to rescue R2-D2?) that was one of the ways to say &amp;quot;hard as fuck&amp;quot; by namedropping a game prior to Dark Souls existing. Amusing for the insanity of the added content in order to make a platformer sidescrolling beat&#039;em&#039;up as well as how neckbeardy you have to be to punish yourself trying to beat it without cheating.  Sequels were made for Empire and Jedi, which slightly dialed back the difficulty.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;&#039;Star Wars: Yoda Stories&#039;&#039;&#039;: A game geared for kids, released the same year as Monopoly above. Players play as Luke sometime after Empire Strikes Back, although an odd alternate version where Han sometimes is free from carbonite and Boba Fett and sometimes is not. They are assigned a quest by Yoda which requires them to traverse one or more procedurally generated planets doing whatever odd crap Yoda felt was necessary, including sometimes fighting Vader. Recieved middling scores as a PC release, with some individuals HATING the game and using it as a benchmark for how much they hate something when comparing the two, although to be fair that is because distributors tried to sell it like a full game when in reality its supposed to just be freebie software that came with other purchases and was meant to go with Solitaire and space pinball as default games on a computer to waste time with. It has lapsed into obscurity thanks to even those reviewers largely being forgotten on the modern internet. Noteworthy for being played on a grid with simultaneous turn-based movement with all enemies and NPCs on a screen, feeling very much like a desktop game at times, since it uses the Win32 API (like Minesweeper and Solitare) and was almost certainly written in visual basic. A simple puzzle game, where getting blocked in a corner without enough space to pass the time by an idiot NPC is more dangerous than any foe.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
*&#039;&#039;&#039;Shadows of the Empire&#039;&#039;&#039;: Made on the Nintendo 64 and Windows PC, you play as Dash Rendar, a scoundrel in a ship like Han Solo working for the Rebellion. Takes place during Episode V as a side story. Despite being much beloved by fans for years and years, it has sadly not aged well at all thanks to the rather peculiar control scheme of the N64 and the graphics having aged like cheap cheese in the sun. Main enemy of the game is a xeno named Xisor who is just a real uppity crime boss (and apparently a prince). The game has an absolute great opening (at least for it&#039;s time) where you&#039;re flying in a Snowspeeder on Hoth killing Imperials left and right while trying to use the cables to crash the AT-ATs like in the movie. After that the game begins to kinda just carry on with awkward controls.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
*&#039;&#039;&#039;Star Wars : Racers&#039;&#039;&#039; : The defining podracing game and the only thing done on Episode I that no one can complain about.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
==Assorted list of Awesome From Star Wars==&lt;br /&gt;
* X-Wing starfighters = spaceborne sex&lt;br /&gt;
* Fucking &#039;&#039;[[Lightsaber|Lightsabers!]]&#039;&#039;&lt;br /&gt;
* The fucking [[Approved music|OST]]&lt;br /&gt;
* What is likely the greatest duel in cinematic history, that takes place on a [[Death World|lava planet.]]&lt;br /&gt;
* Deathly Stormtroopers, heroic Clonetroopers or sinister First Order troopers; whatever they&#039;re called, stormtroopers are awesome! Contrary to popular belief, shot counts have proven they have ridiculously good aim.&lt;br /&gt;
* Darth Vader whenever he gets a speaking line or to murder rebel scum - that is to say, all the time.&lt;br /&gt;
* Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace, TCW and Rebels.&lt;br /&gt;
* Lightsaber Rifles&lt;br /&gt;
* The entirety of the Umbara campaign, where &amp;lt;s&amp;gt;Imperial Guardsmen&amp;lt;/s&amp;gt; Clone Troopers die in the dozens attempting to win some godforsaken planet, earning them balls of titanium that make the guard look ba- {{BLAM| &#039;&#039;&#039;*BLAM*&#039;&#039;&#039; Heresy!}}, all while serving under a &amp;lt;s&amp;gt;Commissar&amp;lt;/s&amp;gt; different Jedi, one who sees the Clone Troopers as cannon fodder.&lt;br /&gt;
* 97% of the Creatures.&lt;br /&gt;
* 98% of the Starfighter designs.&lt;br /&gt;
* Costumes that mix about every possible inspiration, Chinese, Mongolian, Japanese, Ancient Greece and Rome, Elizabethan, Moebius or Pulp Sci-Fi from the 60&#039;s, giving the whole series a distinctive style and gives Padme Amidala an excuse to show off with all her dresses.&lt;br /&gt;
* Boba and Jango Fett and the rest of the Mandalorians.&lt;br /&gt;
* KOTOR (both games) plot making you think this shit is actually logical and has so much philosophical background. One of the creepiest depictions of the Universe. Everything is brutal, with big vibrating knives, blood, those machines for Sith snuff movies, more blood, bastards, badass bastards and so on. Everything while somebody is talking with you about existence.&lt;br /&gt;
* Our saviour Lord Revan. He&#039;s like if [[Horus|fucking Horus]] just became [[Big Bad Evil Guy|fucking bad]] (but not that [[Erebus|bad]]) to fucking destroy the [[Chaos Gods|Dark Gods]] so he can solve his daddy issues.&lt;br /&gt;
**but he&#039;s more virile, deadly, powerful, charismatic and cool.&lt;br /&gt;
* Double-bladed Lightsabers.&lt;br /&gt;
* Lando Calrissian.&lt;br /&gt;
* [https://youtu.be/YJEUAe-dcGo Obi-Wan Kenobi.]&lt;br /&gt;
* The High Ground.&lt;br /&gt;
* TIE fighters. They have the most distinctive scream of any fighter in cinematic history that just yells &amp;quot;I&#039;m evil!&amp;quot;. Tell me I&#039;m wrong. I&#039;ll wait.&lt;br /&gt;
** The fact that they managed to do that using what is essentially a shitty visual pun.&lt;br /&gt;
* Most of Episode 3.&lt;br /&gt;
* The entirety of Anakin&#039;s story, especially when you add the Clone Wars and prequels. While you&#039;re at it, watch CinemaWins&#039; perspective on it the series.&lt;br /&gt;
* Admiral Ackbar the Memeable!&lt;br /&gt;
* Palpatine getting into some Tzeentchian-level scheming and backstabbing in order to overthrow the Jedi and the Republic.&lt;br /&gt;
* Battle of Yavin.&lt;br /&gt;
* Battle of Hoth.&lt;br /&gt;
* Battle of Endor.&lt;br /&gt;
* Battle of Scariff.&lt;br /&gt;
* Grand Admiral Thrawn: So awesome that he rose to a high rank in the anthropocentric Empire despite being an alien and was one of the first things to be imported straight from Legends to Disney.&lt;br /&gt;
* Imperial Pilots get a mention, seeing as they fly literal garbage fighters against superior rebel fighters. Yes, we are talking about the the same TIE Fighters we mentioned before.  By garbage, we mean despite how cool looking and sounding TIE Fighters are, they are actually a ridiculously impractical design and the standard TIE Fighters are mass produced extremely cheaply even if they don&#039;t look like it (except Darth Vader&#039;s, which is custom made and modified by Vader himself).  Even 40k&#039;s Imperium has better fighter designs. At least the Imperium&#039;s fighters conserve the life of the fucking pilot.  Also, clearly super skilled since they have roughly an equal kill-death ratio with the Rebels in the movie battles.&lt;br /&gt;
* [https://youtu.be/T9j7kLG7VK8 Obi-Wan Kenobi. Again.]&lt;br /&gt;
* The Millennium Falcon has a 3D chess board, secret compartments for smuggling space cocaine and a walk in closet specifically for capes.&lt;br /&gt;
* Princess, later Senator Leia Organa; the original badass-yet-hot boss lady in space. Ends up leading two separate, successful underground freedom movements against impossible odds. Did we mention she&#039;s a Jedi in both canons?&lt;br /&gt;
*The trench run.&lt;br /&gt;
* Han Solo, who is so badass that hot Leia falls in love. He has the smuggler&#039;s best friend, a Wookie, who is also the worst opponent you can face in a [[Chess|Dejarik match]].&lt;br /&gt;
* Just... Star Destroyers. When you see a huge, imposing warship from an evil Empire, this is the granddaddy they all look up to.&lt;br /&gt;
* The moon sized space stations that zap other planets to bits? They’re pretty neat.&lt;br /&gt;
* Werner Herzog, asking if he can look at your baby and assuring you that he will be quiet.&lt;br /&gt;
* Oh, did we mention the lightsabers?&lt;br /&gt;
* Tyber Zann&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
== See Also: ==&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
* &#039;&#039;[http://www.darthsanddroids.net/ Darths &amp;amp; Droids]&#039;&#039;: A webcomic, made using photo-stills of the &#039;&#039;Star Wars&#039;&#039; movies to tell a story about gamers blundering through each of the six movies in sequence... though not quite exactly how you might expect.  Think &#039;&#039;DM of the Rings&#039;&#039; in overall visual style, though unlike &#039;&#039;DM of the Rings&#039;&#039;, &#039;&#039;Darths &amp;amp; Droids&#039;&#039; features several heavy twists on the actual events of the films, subplots about the players and their lives outside the game alongside the campaign, and a better overall quality of gamer.  Whereas &#039;&#039;DM of the Rings&#039;&#039; features a railroading DM and players who are therefore somewhat antagonistic to him, &#039;&#039;Darths &amp;amp; Droids&#039;&#039; has a GM who adjusts his game to his players&#039; actions and players who generally get along with both him and each other.  The plot of &#039;&#039;DMotR&#039;&#039; is very similar to that of the movies (but avoids a few plot elements), but the plot (and, indeed, the universe) of &#039;&#039;Darths &amp;amp; Droids&#039;&#039; is only very loosely based on the &#039;&#039;Star Wars&#039;&#039; films.  (For a somewhat spoilery example:  &amp;quot;Darth&amp;quot; is a courtesy title for retired Jedi, such as Chancellor Palpatine.)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
* &amp;quot;[http://www.theforce.net/swtc/holocaust.html/ Endor Holocaust]&amp;quot;: An excellent example of the [[skub]] Star Wars can create. Rebuttal: &amp;quot; [http://www.darthsanddroids.net/fanart/endortruth20040810.pdf Endor Rebuttal]&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
* [[Timothy Zahn]]&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
{{Star Wars}}&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
[[Category: Television]]&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
[[Category: Star Wars]]&lt;/div&gt;</summary>
		<author><name>2406:3400:20F:FFC0:8D7C:860E:AC00:5981</name></author>
	</entry>
	<entry>
		<id>http://2d4chan.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=The_Silmarillion&amp;diff=493054</id>
		<title>The Silmarillion</title>
		<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://2d4chan.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=The_Silmarillion&amp;diff=493054"/>
		<updated>2021-02-08T10:08:06Z</updated>

		<summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;2406:3400:20F:FFC0:8D7C:860E:AC00:5981: /* The Creation Myth */&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;hr /&gt;
&lt;div&gt;[[File:Valinor.jpg|right|400px|thumb|♫ (Melody: the Great Chicago Fire) ♫&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&lt;br /&gt;
Three ages ago,&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&lt;br /&gt;
When the Valar ruled the stead,&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&lt;br /&gt;
Varda Elentári left a lantern overhead.&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&lt;br /&gt;
And when Melkor kicked it over,&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&lt;br /&gt;
He winked his eye and said:&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&lt;br /&gt;
It&#039;ll be a hot time, in Almaren, tonight!&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&lt;br /&gt;
FIRE, FIRE, FIRE!]]&lt;br /&gt;
The Silmarillion was a collection of world-generation notes by [[JRR Tolkien]]. Just like a modern passionate DM would do, he wrote many short stories about his own personal world inside of a journal. Most of it was incoherent and disorganized, as he wrote to it whenever whim took him in a writing mood. Of course, Tolkien died before he could ever put any of this to a book, so his journal was stuffed into a box and forgotten.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
... but, like the Ring of Sauron, the journal was not &#039;&#039;lost&#039;&#039;. Many years later, his son found it and decided to create a compilation of all the short stories. While there were many errors with timelines and such (Tolkien did not actually write it in any semblance of chronological order), his son made a great effort to organize it into a coherent work. Thus: the &#039;&#039;Silmarillion&#039;&#039;.  It is widely considered a...difficult read to say the least and is very often considered very boring (because, as mentioned before, he died before he could assemble it into a coherent narrative).  It&#039;s definitely written more like a collection of mythological tales like you might find for, say, Greek myths in a school library (only less accessible) than it is like a novel.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Or, more to the point, like the Bible. Tollers was a Catholic. Many lines could be drawn between his own creation myth with that of Christianity&#039;s. You could easily say that Eru Ilúvatar was equivalent to God, and Melkor would be Satan (He&#039;s even described as being the most beautiful of the Valar!).&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
= In A Nutshell =&lt;br /&gt;
==The Creation Myth==&lt;br /&gt;
In the beginning, there was absolutely nothing. Then the god Eru Ilúvatar began singing. Of course this wasn&#039;t just any sort of singing, because to gods like him, [[Bonesinger|singing was a means of weaving raw magic into a pure and physical form]]. He began his singing by creating his children, the Ainur, who in turn joined him in a new heavenly chorus. There were many Ainur, who were divided into the older and more powerful Valar, and the younger and less powerful Maiar. (Many better-known LOTR characters that are Maiar include Gandalf, Saruman, the Balrogs, and Sauron.) The Ainur each sang a different part of the world into existence, such as Ulmo who created the seas and oceans, the only thing Ilúvatar added was the Secret Fire, the source of life that only he possessed.  The Ainur continued singing various into existence, including Aule who created the Dwarves.  &lt;br /&gt;
[[File:Hades_Angry.jpg|right|300px|thumb|When your soulless song minions start creating their own songs.]]&lt;br /&gt;
Long dramatic pause.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Ilúvatar found out about the dorfs and was [[butthurt|displeased]], as only he had the ability to genuinely sapient creatures.  He had a vision of the world he was trying to create and his vision didn&#039;t include stumpy, uncouth beard people running around with picks and axes grunting &amp;quot;Genocide! Mining!&amp;quot;.  Aule was ashamed, explaining he&#039;d made them due to love for Ilúvatar, but resolved to destroy them.  Ilúvatar saw Aule&#039;s creations plead for mercy and stayed Aule&#039;s hammer, allowing the dorfs to stay and refining Aule&#039;s work by infusing the dorfs with the Secret Fire to give them true life.  Then Aule&#039;s wife Yavanna found out the dorfs would have axes and that [https://1d4chan.org/images/2/2f/DF_Elf_Diplomat_1.png the elves would be no good in keeping them from her trees] so she made some [[Treeman|angry sentient trees]] of her own to fight her hubby&#039;s dorfs.  How Ilúvatar handled hearing about THAT is not explored, but can&#039;t have been too bad since the Ents were allowed to stay.  &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
But their antics were nothing compared to the troublemaker of the group. An Ainur by the name of Melkor; described as the most beautiful and gifted singer of all the Ainur, decided that he wanted to create his own song. At first he was simply an arrogant prick, as he hated collaboration and wanted something that was wholly his own creation. Twice in a row he tried this, and each time Ilúvatar showed him a new, more beautiful song to both amaze the other Ainur, and show up Melkor [[fail|(because attempting to humble selfish people by upstaging them never, ever backfires)]].  Melkor first created Fire, hot and cold. As a consequence of the creation of Fire, evil was introduced into the world, but also beauty was created as hot and cold made Weather. The second of his singing served to seat evil in the world by warping many creations, such as granting scorpions their tails. For this, Melkor was cast out of the Ainur&#039;s Chorus. Embittered and emboldened by his failure, he continued to desire the Secret Fire for himself; lacking the ability to create life on his own, he instead chose to infuse his own power into Arda, attempting to corrupt all of creation toward his will.  At this, he was largely successful, even though the very act drained him of power until he feared even the power of mortals. As a result of this his influence lingers on in the world even long after his defeat; his dark power now so dispersed that nothing in Arda is truly free of its corruption.  It&#039;s particularly concentrated in Gold, which is why dragons love the stuff so much.  Then Ilúvatar stepped back and appointed the Valar - sans Melkor - to run Middle-Earth, only personally getting involved when the Valar asked for help, things went really pear-shaped or something really beautiful happened.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
==Bejewelled==&lt;br /&gt;
The Valar that still wanted to control everything got sick of Melkor&#039;s shit after he destroyed the two lights they were using to keep Arda (the Earth) from being nothing but shades of grey with chest-high walls. These lamps blew up when Melkor knocked them over, and split the formerly continuous landmass into three separate continents. So they decided that if Melkor was going to be a little bitch and destroy shit, they might as well turtle up in their own corner of the world. And so they went to the western continent (called Aman), and resolved to &#039;&#039;&#039;Make Aman Great Again&#039;&#039;&#039; by building a giant fuckoff wall of mountains to keep out all the &amp;lt;s&amp;gt;Mexicans&amp;lt;/s&amp;gt; &#039;&#039;middle earthers&#039;&#039;, and growing a couple glowing trees for mood lighting. Eventually they got around to making stars, and managed to locate the Elves.  Although not before Melkor found them first and took a few.  The Valar beat his pussy ass up and brought him back as a captive (but not before he had a chance to corrupt some Elves, essentially turning them into Orcs. Maybe.). Elves had spawned in Middle Earth (the central continent), but the Valar invited them to Aman in what was later to be dubbed &amp;quot;worst idea ever&amp;quot;.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Most of the Elves took the offer and for a while things were working out really well as they applied their creativity to all the crafting skills the Valar taught them. Feanor, an elf king, made three awesome jewels called the Silmarils that glowed just like the two trees used to light up the place. However, fucking Melkor decided to be a sneaky prick.  He pretended to apologize to the Valar, and asked if he could see what they were working on.  Caught off-guard by his apology, they accepted.  He immediately smote the two trees, killing them, stole the Silmarils and fucked off to Middle-Earth to raid the elves there.  He got his ass handed to him again, and holed up in the roguelike dungeon expansion pack Angband, due to his old Utumno version being too resource-intensive.  Then Melkor went on a crafting spree, creating beings such as werewolves and vampires for any Maia who helped him and started making dragons for himself who, who for some reason, took longer to make.  He then spammed the Maia with messages and gave some of the ones who joined him the gift of being &amp;quot;balrogs&amp;quot;, while the first dragon - code-named &amp;quot;Glaurung&amp;quot; - was successful enough to start testing on his enemies.  But Glaurung attacked Ard-galen too early, due to Melkor being a fail, which alerted the Valar to Melkor&#039;s plans.  Annoyed, Melkor managed to retrieve and perfect Glaurung, and used him as the prototype to create more dragons, the largest by far being Ancalagon.  Once finished, he [[Powergamer|spawned an army of them]] to rampage across Middle-Earth before multiple factions joined forces and thwarted Melkor&#039;s army, in an event later known as the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, though Ancalagon wasn&#039;t slain until the War of Wrath. &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Feanor was fukkin pissed, so much that it would make Angry Marines look like pussies, and kept calling Melkor &amp;quot;Morgoth.&amp;quot;  He was so pissed he picked a fight with another elf kingdom when they said &amp;quot;Dude, just chill&amp;quot;.  His sons would later pick up his [[Kharn|teamkilling]] habits, the greedy little psychos.  He traveled to Middle-Earth, raiding Angband over and over again to try and get his light-jewels back, and got himself killed. His elf kingdom stayed there, split between his sons, his half-brother, his half-brother&#039;s sons, his &#039;&#039;other&#039;&#039; half-brother&#039;s sons, and a king named Thingol who wasn&#039;t related to him, and who was understandably [[Butthurt|salty as fuck]] when he found out about the whole teamkilling thing.  They kept attacking Angband for 400 years until Morgoth said &amp;quot;enough already!&amp;quot; and got those damn kids off his front lawn.&lt;br /&gt;
[[File:TolkienElves_at_Night.jpg|right|400px|thumb|I have seen the light!  AND IT BURNS!!!]]&lt;br /&gt;
Meanwhile, back in Aman, the Valar hastily tried to replace the lost light tree thingies with a star. This new &#039;sun&#039; only works half the time, but it&#039;s better than nothing. (If you say &amp;quot;they could&#039;ve used the Silmaril&amp;quot;, those got stolen so what&#039;re you gonna do?)  Besides, the bloody elves really liked the stars and would&#039;ve bitched for eons if they got completely replaced. It was also around this time that Ilúvatar&#039;s second batch of creations woke up, a watered down version of Elves called Men, and probably the Dorfs too.  At some point Men got their first experience with encountering Angband and Morgoth.  Some worshipped Morgoth (the Original Sin for humanity in Middle-Earth), but others saw how much of [[That Guy]] he was and got away ASAP.  &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Then [[Tolkien|the DM]] made a character for himself, named Beren, and started a romance with an elf king&#039;s daughter Luthien (the Dungeon-master&#039;s-girlfriend&#039;s character).  Elf-dad Thingol was [[H.P. Lovecraft|a cultural elitist and a racist shit]], but that would look bad, so he said &amp;quot;sure you can date my daughter, IF you can finish a run of Angband by bringing a Silmaril jewel back to me.&amp;quot;  Beren and Luthien did the quest together, almost got wrecked by a Maiar named Sauron (more on him later), but managed to pull it off.  On the way back they encountered Carcharoth, the world&#039;s mightiest werewolf, so Luthien hit him with a sleep spell... but he woke up before the spell ended so Beren tried to fend him off with the Simaril&#039;s light.  Instead, Carcharoth bit off Beren&#039;s hand and swallowed it along with the Simaril, but touching Simarils is agonizing for anything evil (they scarred Melkor&#039;s hands) so Carcharoth was wracked with so much pain that he fled. The wedding was on a Tuesday, and afterwards Beren led a raid to kill Carcharoth and get the god damned Simaril back, which they accomplished. But Beren and a heroic Valar-blessed dog got killed by Carcharoth&#039;s poison bite.  Luthien later became an hero... but she sang some Goth poetry to the Grim Reaper-equivalent who, with Ilúvatar&#039;s permission, gives them an extra life for finding the Simiaril, and they both live as mortals until they died a second time. &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
The rest of the elves were pretty sure that a Man and an Elf playing together was some kind of exploit, so they stopped being racist and actually treated each other well, even getting Dwarves in on the action. Unfortunately, Melkor was able to appeal to the inherent evil and greed of Men and got them to do all kinds of stupid shit.  Still, not every Man was an idiot, some had great skill or wisdom, so the elves didn&#039;t go back to being totally racist. Some men picked up Morgoth&#039;s trollish habits and became his underlings, but there were also three bro-tier clans of men closely allied to the elves and fought on the front lines of the siege, who were collectively known as the Edain.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Blah blah a Man named Turin leaves home, blah blah blah loses his memory and hooks up with his mind-wiped sister, blah blah defeats the dragon Summer Glaurung, totally not his fault he killed his best friend, totally not his fault he knocks up his own sister, when they both find out they become [[meme|an heroic]] pair. This was expanded on in the book The Children of Hurin, published well after Tolkien himself died.  It started with Turin&#039;s dad Hurin, who was captured by Morgoth after a battle but had the massive steel balls to tell Morgoth to piss off &#039;&#039;to his face&#039;&#039; when the latter tried to get Hurin to sell out a hidden elf city so Morgoth could purge them.  Morgoth, like a GM angry no one wanted to play by his rules, cursed his whole family resulting in a story bleaker, but better than Game of Thrones.  That&#039;s not a lie either, Turin goes through some hard shit in his life before he dies, including his mother losing her home and her mind and Hurin is restrained &amp;quot;And I Must Scream&amp;quot; style and forced to see only the worst moments of his children lives.  You thought the Starks had it tough? Think again!&lt;br /&gt;
[[File:Gondolin.jpg|right|400px|thumb|First stop, Starbucks.]]&lt;br /&gt;
Bro-tier Man named Tuor weds a hot elf shortie named Idril, after a Vala tells him how to get to the Elven version of Seattle, which is where the elves move to after the Angband MMO servers shut down and they lost all their kingdoms. They have a son they name Eärendil. Naturally, since this is a tragedy, Elf Seattle also falls when Eärendil&#039;s a kid, all because Idril&#039;s creepy cousin wanted to bone her.  Again, [[FATAL|incest is most definitely not wincest]]. Together with many other fleeing elves Eärendil ends up south in what was essentially a giant Elf refugee camp, since at this point Morgoth had ruined nearly every other Elf realm further north. Tuor and Idril&#039;s kid Eärendil ends up dating Beren &amp;amp; Luthien&#039;s grandkid Elwing, who has a Silmaril from her grandparents&#039; adventures. Eärendil and Elwing end up with two kids, Elrond and Elros, but due to the way Eru wrote the code for souls and metaphysics the kids had to choose to be either elven or human.  Later, some of Fëanor&#039;s sons, still wanting to reclaim their family bling, attack the Elf refugee camp, because they know Elwing has it. Eärendil was out at sea while this happened, but Elwing threw herself into the ocean with the Silmaril and transformed into a bird to escape, leaving her kids behind. It worked out though, because one of Fëanor&#039;s sons suddenly grew a conscience and decided to take care of them.&lt;br /&gt;
[[File:Tirion.jpg|right|400px|thumb|Yelp Review: This place is like heaven.]]&lt;br /&gt;
Eärendil, sick of how everything was getting steadily more [[grimdark|grimdark]], sails to the western continent with his wife to petition the Valar for aid. Moved, they break forth their wrath and smite down Morgoth. They smite him so hard that the continent they were playing on, Beleriand, broke and sank into the ocean. The remaining two Silmarils were also brought out, and Feanor&#039;s two remaining sons saw their chance for an easy attack on Angband. They&#039;re told it&#039;s a bad idea, they have a quick discussion about whether they&#039;ll get banned for this, then raid the camp and pull off the quest, but when they try to use the silmarils they find they&#039;ve become evil, so trying to hold the gems hurts them. The older brother Maedhros kills himself, while Maglor goes off to an unknown fate, finally bringing Feanor&#039;s kind to an end.  Eventually one of the Silmarils maybe gets dug up by [[The Hobbit|the Dorfs in the Lonely Mountain]]... the continuity is kinda unclear cuz this book was mostly notes and half-formed ideas.&lt;br /&gt;
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Morgoth is currently removed out of, and forbidden from entering, Middle Earth, though there&#039;s rumors that he&#039;ll eventually come back.  There&#039;s also talk that this will happen when Ilúvatar decide to rebuild the world and fix Morgoth&#039;s damage to the world, and then Morgoth will be defeated once and for all.&lt;br /&gt;
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=Civilization=&lt;br /&gt;
The last stories concern the rings of power and the fall of Númenor and (most of) its Dúnedain. Technically we&#039;re on to the Second Age so no longer in Silmaril scope.&lt;br /&gt;
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On the way back home from wrecking Melkor&#039;s shit, the Ainur were impressed with three kingdoms of Western Man (&amp;quot;Dúnedain&amp;quot;) who&#039;d joined the elvish bro-quest (skipping the late-coming fourth loyalists, the sons of Bor, because Tollers forgot Matthew 20:1–16). The Valar gave these Men and Women an island Númenor to mutually sex each other in, with plenty of tech and weapons they could need when they ever crawled out of bed. Over long generations the now-mixed Númenoreans got all [[/pol/|human nationalist]], at least the Kings and the Kings&#039; Men; as Pratchett observes, &amp;quot;black and white live in harmony to gang up against green&amp;quot;. Other Númenoreans stayed Faithful to the ways of elves and Valar.&lt;br /&gt;
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Meanwhile, not all Melkor&#039;s lieutenant Maiar had been snapped up in the Valars&#039; dragnet after the Big Guy got his sorry ass imprisoned. The balrogs, being ugly, had no choice but to flee into the deep places of the earth. But Sauron had maintained his own prettiness. He fooled men and, apparently, angels into thinking he was going to turn a new leaf. To prove it, he [[pretend|re-branded himself]] &#039;Annatar&#039; (Gift-bearer) and made powerful magical objects for all his friends called &amp;quot;rings of power&amp;quot;. Each ring was actually a disguised way to control the kings of men, dwarves and elves. He had a master Ring that could control all the others, hopefully to turn all the people of Middle-Earth into his personal slaves. The elven lords manage to isolate their rings, realizing their intent. The dwarf kings were partially immune, so while they didn&#039;t become Sauron&#039;s servants, the dwarves did get an extreme lust for gold and extra greediness, which made the dwarves go into sort-of isolation while they tried to fix the messes this caused. Nine kings and sorcerers of men (including one woman, if you believe [[MERP|Iron Crown) were ensnared. They [[edgy|became Sauron&#039;s dark servants]], [[Nazgûl|the Ring Wraiths]]. Sauron meanwhile had got himself a rectangular Roman-style fort in Mordor, a valley almost subcontinental in scale.&lt;br /&gt;
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On occasion the Númenoreans would hoist sail and head east to beat Sauron back. The Númenoreans were still mainly Loyal, in earlier outings. But on Sauron&#039;s final Second-Age incursion, the Númenoreans were led by Ar-Pharazon, &amp;quot;The Golden&amp;quot;. Yes this is a Semitic Phira&#039;ûn reference, just like Quran. Tolkien was nothing if not a linguist. We are not told outright if Sauron&#039;s Nine were fighting alongside him yet; the two stories here, which we&#039;ve conflated, don&#039;t inline with each other so well in Christopher Tolkien&#039;s edition.&lt;br /&gt;
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By now both Númenorean factions owned colonies on Middle Earth. These clustered around the Bay of Belfalas on account of Mordor being the main threat: we know them as Gondor and Umbar. Also the Númenoreans had been enjoying a decent climate for the whole of the Second Age, and it was just &#039;&#039;nicer&#039;&#039; down there. Arnor, whence the Dúnedain originated, was neglected as too cold and unstrategic anymore. Ar-Pharazon persecuted the Faithful at home but we&#039;re not told how far his writ ran in the Middle-Earth colonies; we assume that the Faithful drifted more toward Arnor, their ancestral home and with more Elves in it, because Third Age Umbar will end up a nest of Sauronism.&lt;br /&gt;
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The Western fleet easily defeated Sauron&#039;s army. The Númenoreans all patted themselves on the back because capturing Sauron was [[just_as_planned|totally their idea]]. Sauron&#039;s a Maia, so killing him is impossible, he just chilled in the dungeons, and told the Men how awesome they were even though they aren&#039;t elves... cause elves are immortal, hoping to give the Dúnedain lifespan envy so he could manipulate them with it.  The Dúnedain started getting into fad diets and buying life-extension supplements on home-shopping channels, which in a sick twist of irony, made their lifespans shorter.  &amp;quot;Well, if I was a Valar, I could make men essentially immortal,&amp;quot; said Sauron, and the Dúnedain totally [[Just_as_planned|came up with the idea on their own]] to attack the Valar to demand immortality.  &amp;quot;My old boss Melkor is a Vala, maybe he could help if he was free,&amp;quot; and the Dúnedain fell for that bullshit too. Except for the Faithful but they couldn&#039;t talk sense into these idiots so they all took that western distraxion to sneak off east for Gondor/Arnor.&lt;br /&gt;
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So the Dúnedain prepared their armies, and sailed west. The Valar and Elves knew they were getting a full-on invasion, and appealed to Ilúvatar all-father to save their butts. Ilúvatar agreed and got his smiting on to decimate the invasion fleet, made Middle-Earth round instead of flat, and sank the island of Númenor like Thera for good measure. Sauron was still in jail when the place was rekt. Some Men of Númenor managed to survive, mostly those who&#039;d already colonized Middle-Earth.  Those in Arnor were overwhelmingly Faithful; Gondor might have been a mix, but we can assume that the King&#039;s Men were predominant along the coast and what do you &#039;&#039;think&#039;&#039; happens to coasts when a continent is suddenly submerged offshore? (hint: it rhymes with &amp;quot;salami&amp;quot;).  The survivors still had their abilities, and without the metropole they easily became KANGS in their own right, forming the majority in Gondor and an aristocratic minority in Arnor.  Umbar, we dunno; they&#039;re not much of a factor in what follows, understandably, since their golden boy had died of extreme stupidity with his vizier to blame. They&#039;re more important in the Third Age.&lt;br /&gt;
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Turns out Sauron too survived this &amp;quot;atalante&amp;quot; (get it??) because he still had his [[lich]] phylactery, the Ring; we don&#039;t know if he was wearing it when Shit Went Down or if he&#039;d stashed it in the Barad Dûr. Either way, he came back, not as pretty as he once was, nor quite at his full power, but certainly in position to hit back at the Númenorean remnants in Middle Earth and at their allies starting with some border skirmishes.&lt;br /&gt;
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The Elves (lead by their High King Gil-Gilad and the aforementioned Elrond) and the survivors of Númenor (lead by the new High King of Gondor and Arnor King Elendil) teamed up for a Pre Emptive Strike - and won!  Although Elendil and his younger son Anarion bought the farm, his oldest son Isildur cut the Ring from Sauron and won the war. Just as the elves started thinking maybe not all Dúnedain were greedy shits like the ones that tried to attack Aman, Isildur decided the One Ring was too awesome to destroy and kept it for himself.  Elves gave up on Men totally.  Isildur himself was later shot to death in an Orc ambush, losing the One Ring in a river. This also left Gondor and Arnor with two separate monarchies, not to be united until 3000 years later.&lt;br /&gt;
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At some point five Maiar were sent as the Istari (Wizards) to try and stop even more stupid shit happening and make absolutely definitely certain that Sauron was absolutely definitely really dead this time.  Two went to the Eastern Kingdoms while three (Gandalf, Radagsat and Saruman) headed west.  &lt;br /&gt;
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Also Arnor managed to get themselves split into three kingdoms and then destroyed by the evil kingdom of Angmar that was lead by the most powerful ringwraith. The Breelanders are the distant descendants of the last survivors.&lt;br /&gt;
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The last king of Gondor decided to [[meme|simply walk into Mordor]] and disappeared, with the direct line from Elendil ended, Gondor would be subsequently ruled by a line of Stewards.&lt;br /&gt;
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At one point Gondor looked like they were getting buttfucked from all sides until a badass Northerner named Eorl the Young rode down and destroyed an army of Dunlenders, so the Steward of Gondor gave him a great wack of land to rule as King, founding the Kingdom of Rohan.&lt;br /&gt;
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[[The Lord of the Rings|And &#039;&#039;that&#039;s&#039;&#039; when the hobbits came in.]]&lt;br /&gt;
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=Novels=&lt;br /&gt;
Three stories in particular were considered by [[Matt Ward|Christopher Tolkien]] to be so important that [[Profit|they deserved their own books]]. Which we finally got, in the 2010s (take THAT, [[George Martin]]!). They are:&lt;br /&gt;
:*The Tale of Beren and Luthien - If you thought Aragorn and Arwen had a whirlwind romance, you ain&#039;t seen nothing yet. Luthien&#039;s father King Thingol wouldn&#039;t allow her to marry Beren unless he captured one of the Silmarils from Morgoth&#039;s crown. Seemingly impossible demands aside, &#039;&#039;both&#039;&#039; of them go on an epic journey deep behind enemy lines to complete the quest. And though it costs them both their lives, they ultimately begat the line of the Half-elves after returning to Middle-Earth. Quite easily the most action-packed love story in high fantasy.&lt;br /&gt;
:* The Children of Hurin - Hurin was among the mightiest of mortal men, and he alone defied Morgoth during the seige of Angband. When he was captured, Hurin refused to give up the location of Gondolin. As punishment, Morgoth imprisoned Hurin and laid a curse upon his children. Hurin&#039;s emo son Turin is forced to live on the run, and many times those close to him end up getting killed, mostly due to his overwhelming ego. He swings a big black sword that talks. When he meets an amnesic girl alone and naked in the woods, he does the most logical thing and marries her. Except, uh oh, he was tricked by a dragon into [[Incest Smith|fucking and knocking up his sister]] so, of course, both an hero. If too much of this sounds like [[Elric]] that&#039;s &#039;cause both Tolkiens and Moorcock independently lifted from the same source, Kullervo (which Tolkien translated/retold alongside Beowulf). Welcome to Finland!&lt;br /&gt;
:* The Fall of Gondolin - this story has yet to be published in its own book, but the basic gist is that Gondolin is the last stronghold of the Noldor elves, hidden deep within the mountains, guided there by the Poseiden expy. Same expy sends the human warrior Tuor to warn Gondolin that it&#039;s about to fall. The elves don&#039;t pay much attention to his warning, but they let him marry the king&#039;s hot daughter. This pisses off her cousin, who&#039;s been wanting to get in on that incest action, and so he betrays the city and shows Morgoth&#039;s army how to sneak in. In the final battle, the city falls, but Tuor and his family escape, but not before shanking her cousin&#039;s treasonous ass.&lt;br /&gt;
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Before they each got their Christopher treatment, an early version of &#039;&#039;Beren&#039;&#039; was had in &amp;quot;The Lay of Luthien&amp;quot; (phnarr, phnarr) in an &#039;&#039;History of Middle Earth&#039;&#039; volume. The other two were had as &#039;&#039;[[derp|Unfinished Tales]]&#039;&#039;.&lt;br /&gt;
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=The Rock Band=&lt;br /&gt;
There&#039;s a bunch of Brits with guitars who formed a band called &amp;quot;Silmarillion&amp;quot; but the lawyers wouldn&#039;t let &#039;em, so they rebranded as &amp;quot;Marillion&amp;quot;. Later they fired their lead singer.&lt;br /&gt;
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[[Category:Literature]][[Category:The Lord of the Rings]]&lt;/div&gt;</summary>
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