Fascinating differences in the way the ancient Sith Empire was depicted, before the prequels

Looking back at GAOTS for example, it seems like some of the rulers of the Sith Empire weren't totally evil and egocentric with some of them just clinging to what they have and even having a bit of sentiment (at least for their own kin). For example with keeping defeated rivals alive (e.g. Simus) and having friends among each other.

When Simus was killed by Naga Sadow's people for example, the council members were shocked and one of them even uttered "Poor Simus" and some of them apparently wondered what kind of barbarian would be capable of such a act, which kinda proves a certain amount of empathy and compassion (at least for their own).

And Naga Sadow even thrived on the loyalty of his slaves and subjects, instead of totally subjugating and punishing them for mistakes like most of the other Sith Lords were prone to.

These aspects are really fascinating to see if one looks at how the Sith Empire and the ancient Lords were depicted in later sources.

Think it's a really interesting part of the lore to discuss.

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Thinking about alternate possibilities for the Old Republic era:

If the Great Hyperspace War never happened and Ludo Kressh became the Jen'Jidai, and a Sith Empire under him and his successors was continued to be depicted this way, there would have eventually been trade between it and the Republic and probably even an uneasy kind of alliance or symbiosis.

Like with Hutt Space for example.

Maybe the Sith Empire eventually being part of the Republic or at least playing a big part in galactic politics like the Trade Federation could even have become a factor in Palpatine's rise to power.

Or what about Sheev not being the senator for Naboo but for Sith Space?

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The thing that I enjoyed about the whole jedi/sith back story from Tales of the Jedi all the way to the Darth Bane novels and Darth Pleguis book was that the sith and the sith empire always sought ways to expand their power whether through technology or magic/sorcery. That combination of novel, comic book, and video games to include the MMO The Old Republic is so rich and expansive that no other era covered at least to me appears that interesting in scale and scope. One can argue that the clone wars are bigger because they were in two movies, slightly covered in snippets on two live action streaming series, one 2-d animated series, an animated movie, with 7 seasons worth of stuff and the additional Bad Bath series, along with the plethora of comic books, novels, video games, roleplaying game books, etc. Maybe that era might be bigger, but in terms of mystery, grandeur, and scope hands down has to be The Tales of the Jedi era, heck in back history was covered in Dark Empire comic series and Kevin J. Anderson books.

 

You are right OP the Sith Lords do act more like actual Lords and not warmongering psychopaths.

That said the main ones like Sadow, Ragnos and Kun were always potrayed as pure evil, like in the Jedi Academy game for Ragnos, also in spite of them being potrayed as actually concerned with keeping their Empire stable, they were always meant to go to war with the Republic, they were always antagonistic towards them, it just depended on "when", i don't see the Golden Age Empire before the PT was released becoming a member of the Republic, except for a short time and as a ploy to overthrow it.

Nowdays whenever a Sith Empire like the one from SWTOR is potrayed as having some good rulers they are usually the non-Sith.

 

The idea of the Sith Empire went through a lot of changes in the EU.

I want to briefly summarize how different their first appearance was in the Tales of the Jedi comics, because it was very different from what we saw later on in Golden Age and in following works. Originally, it was a lot closer to what George Lucas had imagined as the backstory for the Sith. That's not surprising, because Tom Veitch and Kevin J. Anderson wrote that story, Dark Lords of the Sith, based on information they got directly from Lucas.

In that comic, the Sith are not exactly an Empire. Rather, they are a people who were conquered by Jedi Knights who fell to the dark side. The Jedi named themselves the Dark Lords of the Sith, and there could only be two at a time, a master and an apprentice. So far, this sounds a lot like the Sith we met in the prequels.

The Sith were the first people conquered by the fallen Jedi. But the Dark Lords' knowledge of the dark side and their power were feared by the Republic, and so they were marked for extermination. The Sith Lords then wandered from system to system for quite some time. They would act in secrecy, seducing the leaders of societies and bringing down civilizations. The comic implied that this happened many times. It named various conflicts from the past in which dark siders brought down whole civilizations: the Vultar Cataclysm, the Gank Massacres, the Hundred-Year Darkness, the Great Hyperspace War. But eventually the Republic caught up with the Sith and destroyed them in the world that would become their final resting place: Korriban.

Another Sith menace, Freedon Nadd, is implied to have risen in a time when the Sith Lords were still active. He sought out the Dark Lord but was not chosen to be his apprentice. So Nadd fled to another world to call his own, Onderon, where he started his own dark dynasty. Naga Sadow was another dark menace, though he was not actually a Jedi but rather a magician from the elite Sith priesthood who rebelled against the reigning Dark Lord and was forced to flee to another world, Yavin, before the Sith found and executed him. It is implied that the Dark Lords may have allowed these two offshoots to escape in order to ensure the eventual resurgence of the Sith from these isolated remnants.

In the present day of the comic, it is the Krath Conspiracy that is the current manifestation of the Sith menace. The Dark Lords wreaked havoc as they fled across the galaxy, and their offshoots were also similarly destructive. The Sith teachings that were scattered across the ruins of their old domains continued to threaten to seduce living Jedi to the dark side, which is what eventually happens in the comics. The new Dark Lords of the Sith, Exar Kun and Ulic Qel-Droma, rise to threaten the galaxy again with the revenge of the Sith.

So there technically was no Sith Empire before the prequels because the comics were already informed by what Lucas had developed for the prequels. Of course, the stories evolved into something completely different as time went on. But I think it's fascinating to see what this idea looked like in its first appearance, with many of the details being retconned over time into what became the more familiar Sith Empire of the post-prequels EU.

 

This is interesting. The Sith operating as a secret cult, bringing down planets from the shadows and launching wars through their puppets. Would be very interesting to see.

 

@Sauron_18 In an example of “early installment wierdness”, the endnotes included with Dark Empire #5 refer to the Krath War as "the first war in which dark side powers were used on a massive scale”. That makes it sound like the Sith didn’t exist yet.

 

I only now found out that "Krath" is sanskrit and means to "injure, hurt, kill"... interesting. More ancient names to analyse?

https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/krath

 

Why was the birth of the Sith split off from the First Great Schism and moved forward to 6900 BBY? I've never understood the logic behind that retcon.

 

But there was also the Hundred-Year Darkness and the Rakata.

Leland Chee said that the birth of the Sith was “always” supposed to be in ~7000 BBY, but Pablo Hidalgo said that he doesn’t know where Chee got that from.

 

Huh. That's an unsatisfying reason to change such a basic fact, I wonder if it was just a mistake, or maybe an attempt to compromise with TPM's 2000 years of Sith.

 

The 7000 date is due to inuniverse dates/history matching real world ones.

5000bby sith is egypt, antique world
2000bby is christian mythology and times
1000bby is middle ages

Etc.

7000bby kinda is biblical as 6000-7000 years is bible age of the world at creation and sinfall happening in Eden mirrors Dark Lords of the Sith/shism.

Pablo loved real world paralells. So either him or likeminded. Lucas might too love it due to his PT changes to sith history.

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I need to reread those notes. They offer a great glimpse at Veitch’s mind in the early ‘90s.

As far as him not mentioning the Sith, I suspect he did not originally intend to feature the Sith at all in his backstory for Dark Empire. I don’t think it was until he collaborated with Kevin J. Anderson on Dark Lords of the Sith two years later that they got that Sith questionnaire from Lucas. That’s the same year that Anderson introduced Exar Kun and made him a Sith Lord based on feedback from Lucas. When Anderson and Veitch worked together on the comic, they then fused their backstories and modified them to fit each other’s and Lucas’s Sith backstory.

But prior to that, I think Veitch had created the Krath to fulfill a similar role as the Sith, that of the ancient group of dark siders who seduced Jedi to the dark side. He also described them operating under Ulic as pirates, raiding system after system until they were stopped by the Jedi.

And you know, something I realized a couple of weeks ago is how strong the pirate imagery is in Dark Lords. There’s the design of the ships, of course, but also the structure of the story, with Exar Kun searching for what is essentially the Sith’s hidden treasure from planet to planet. And even from the start, Naga Sadow’s escape through the Denarii stars reminds me of a pirate sheep fleeing through a narrow strait or some other natural hazard to escape the authorities at his tail. Maybe it’s simply that all Star Wars is strongly inspired by pirate stories.

And on the subject of the Denarii stars, I also just now realized how that introduction to the story is a direct reference to the opening of A New Hope, with a rebel ship being pursued by the authorities, and with the opening panel even mimicking the movie’s first shot. Then you also have the double stars, which are reminiscent of the Tatooine sunset. Of course, in this case it’s the rebels who are evil, and right off the bat we get the payoff for Vader’s line the power to destroy a planet is insignificant compared to the power of the Force.

There’s more there on both the pirate and ANH references fronts, I’m sure. But I think this is a long enough post for now.

 

In the second issue of TOTJ, Arca Jeth mentions that Freedon Nadd was an Apprentice of a Dark Lord of the Sith and The Freedon Nadd Uprising talks about the rise and fall of the Sith Lords and “Sith people” and makes it clear that Sith artifacts are corrupting the Ketos. Unless KJA influenced the parts of TOTJ that Veitch wrote without him behind the scenes, this suggests that Veitch was told that the Sith are ancient and that he was free to incorporate them into TOTJ before KJA came along.

 

You are correct! Although, looking at the timeline, those comics came out around the same time (1993). I’m not sure how / when Veitch and Anderson got their Sith info, but somehow I doubt there was more than one “interaction” with Lucas. I suspect the Publishing group, knowing both were touching on that ancient period, prompted the questionnaire that was sent to Lucas, prior to their actual collaboration in Dark Lords of the Sith.

 

I was wondering if there were plans for anyone to go to Korriban in DOTJ. Of particular interest to me is that we see Terentas in DOTJ but in Book of Sith Sorzus Syn says that the Sith (species) already have Terentateks.

 

@Sauron_18 @Sinrebirth In contrast to the line in the Dark Empire endnotes about the Krath being the first to use the Dark Side “on a massive scale”, a holocron in the 5th issue of TOTJ says, “Evil began in a time before recorded history, when magicians made themselves into kings… and gods…using the powers of the Dark Side of The Force. The weak-minded have ever been ready to obey one who wields great power. Those who learned the powers of the Dark Side were quick to exploit this weakness - - to make war. Again and again The Dark Side has surged forth, like a storm… devouring whole worlds and entire star systems. Those who mastered dark power became dark power. They unleashed destruction, for no other reason than selfish gain. They despoiled nations… destroyed whole civilizations. Some of them, I am ashamed to say, were Jedi.”

 

Interesting, so from the looks of it it's referring to mages even older than the Rakata, apparently much more powerful than Sith and other dark siders from the past, the way the prose is laid out it seems they were able to destroy Star Systems, perhaps with similar techniques to that of Naga Sadow, albeit probably without much aid of Sith Amulets and devices, i wonder if these could be from the time of the Celestials.

It's interesting how EU sources kept pushing the first Dark Siders (as well as the first Dark Side using Sith) further back into the timeline.

 

What do you mean? The conquest of the Sith species was moved from ~25,000 BBY to ~7000 BBY.

 

I mean that back in the Dark Empire endnotes it was the Krath, in the JAT Kun was the first Sith, then it got pushed back to the Sith being Dark Siders way before the Krath and existing before Kun, the Tales details about the first Dark Siders may originally refer to the schisms in the Jedi that caused the origin of the Sith Lords, but the presence of the Rakatan Infinite Empire as Dark Siders thousands of years before the Jedi and Sith split negates this being the case, so this was a fight between the precursors of the Jedi and Dark Jedi way before then, pushing the most ancient Dark Siders further back.

With "dark side using Sith" i don't mean just the Sith Lords, we got King Adas during the Infinite Empire reign, and the followers of Soa, Dawn of the Jedi material also implies the Sith species was always prone to the Dark Side before everyone migrated to Tython, so before 36.453 BBY, on top of that we know that in the earliest stages of Sith civilization they were multiple nations in war across Korriban, which used the Dark Side of the Force, and culminated in the Sith Kings, circa 100.000 BBY, so the first Dark Siders went from the Krath and the first Sith Lord to be Exar Kun, to the first Dark Siders being potentially in the Celestial times (over the hundred thousands BBY), the first Dark Side using Sith being from 100.000 BBY and the first Sith Lords as we know them from 7.000 BBY, before Kun's time.

The conquest may have been moved closer to the "present day", but the Sith were Dark Siders before the conquest, maybe not immediately before, but they definetly had periods where the Sith People were governed by Dark Side users.

 

Wasn’t Ajunta Pall The first dark lord of the Sith? It says he went to Korriban during The Hundred Year Darkness. But then I have heard The Legions of Lettow were the first darksiders and the conquered the Sith Spawns (Species).

Can anyone help me with the sequence of how Dark Lords came to be?