Factions & Powers
Factions & Powers
Embedded Files
Governments, alliances, territorial powers, and other large-scale political forces shape the circumstances in which characters live. They influence borders, law, warfare, diplomacy, trade, security, citizenship, military service, and the relationships between worlds and communities.
Factions & Powers is StarForgeRP’s roleplay-focused guide to those forces. Use these pages to understand how a major power is organized, where its influence comes from, what relationships surround it, and what citizenship, service, opposition, cooperation, or neutrality may mean for a character.
Not every influential group belongs here. Orders, military branches, intelligence services, corporations, criminal networks, clans, guilds, and similar institutions generally belong under Organizations. Factions & Powers is reserved for governments, broad political alliances, territorial powers, and other forces operating on a comparable scale.
For changing galactic conditions—including the present war, leadership changes, recent political developments, and unresolved consequences of the latest incorporated SWTOR story—use Current Setting. These faction pages focus primarily on the more durable context that remains useful as StarForgeRP continuity advances.
Using Factions & Powers in Roleplay
Using Factions & Powers in Roleplay
Faction lore creates circumstances rather than personalities. Republic citizens do not need to approve of every Republic institution. Imperial subjects may be loyal, ambitious, critical, frightened, privileged, resentful, pragmatic, or largely occupied with ordinary life. Chiss cooperation with the Sith Empire does not erase Chiss interests, and Mandalorian clans need not agree simply because they share a broader cultural identity.
When connecting a character to a faction, consider the practical relationship rather than choosing allegiance as a personality trait.
Who claims authority where the character lives, works, or travels?
What does that authority expect from them, and what can it realistically provide in return?
How have war, occupation, prosperity, isolation, displacement, or political change affected their family or community?
Where do citizenship, profession, family, culture, organization, and political allegiance reinforce—or contradict—one another?
What might loyalty, neutrality, cooperation, desertion, or changing allegiance cost them?
Which relationships could connect them to people living on another side of a political boundary?
Browse Factions & Powers
Browse Factions & Powers
Choose the power most relevant to the character, location, organization, or story you are exploring. Detailed pages carry the history, institutions, relationships, and roleplay context; this index is intended to help readers find the right destination without reproducing those pages here.
Major Galactic Powers
Major Galactic Powers
The Galactic Republic and Sith Empire are the two principal rival powers around which much of SWTOR’s galactic conflict is organized. Their competition affects worlds far beyond active battlefields through diplomacy, military deployments, intelligence activity, reconstruction, trade, resource pressure, and political alignment.
The Galactic Republic is an ancient representative government centered on the Galactic Senate and encompassing hundreds of worlds and star systems. Its political tradition emphasizes democracy, freedom, and individual rights, while SWTOR also depicts corruption, institutional conflict, economic pressure, local political differences, and difficult compromises made during war.
For roleplay, the Republic can surround senators, diplomats, military personnel, Jedi, intelligence officers, civil servants, merchants, contractors, colonists, refugees, activists, criminals, and civilians whose relationship with the Republic may range from deeply ideological to almost entirely practical.
The Sith Empire is the Republic’s principal political and military rival: an authoritarian state rebuilt by survivors of the ancient Sith civilization and ultimately governed through Sith authority. Its power depends not only upon Sith Lords but upon professional armed forces, administrators, intelligence institutions, scientists, engineers, industry, infrastructure, and a large civilian population.
An Imperial character’s relationship with that society may arise from patriotism, ambition, family, profession, coercion, privilege, fear, political conviction, personal loyalty, or simply the reality of having been born and raised within Imperial territory.
Independent & Regional Powers
Independent & Regional Powers
Republic–Imperial rivalry does not erase the interests of other governments, civilizations, commercial powers, and clan-based political communities. Some control their own territory and armed forces; others gain influence through trade, diplomacy, wealth, patronage, strategic location, or the ability to cooperate with larger powers without surrendering their own identity.
The Hutt Cartel combines commercial wealth, political influence, territorial authority, patronage, private force, and organized crime on a scale much larger than an ordinary criminal syndicate. Hutt power is especially important within Hutt Space and on Nar Shaddaa, while individual Hutts and clans can cooperate, compete, or pursue interests of their own.
Characters can become entangled with Hutt interests through legitimate business, shipping, entertainment, debt, diplomacy, mercenary work, bounty hunting, smuggling, organized crime, employment, slavery or its aftermath, local government, or everyday life in territory where Hutt authority is simply part of the political environment.
The Chiss Ascendancy is a self-governing civilization of the Unknown Regions with its own territory, political institutions, ruling houses, and armed forces. Its longstanding alliance with the Sith Empire makes Chiss interests important to Imperial affairs without turning the Ascendancy into an ordinary Imperial province or erasing its separate priorities.
That distinction creates useful questions of jurisdiction and loyalty. A Chiss character may cooperate closely with Imperial institutions while remaining responsible to the Ascendancy, a ruling house, military service, family obligations, or other Chiss interests.
The Mandalorians occupy an unusual position between culture and galactic power. They are a clan-based people rather than a permanently centralized state organized like the Republic or Sith Empire. Individual clans can retain substantial independence, while a Mandalore capable of winning broad recognition can bring many of them together as a formidable military and political force.
Clan loyalties, rivalries, contracts, family ties, leadership disputes, cultural obligations, and competing interpretations of Mandalorian identity can all matter more to an individual character than a simple faction label. For changing Mandalorian leadership and the consequences of recent SWTOR events, use the dedicated Mandalorians page together with Current Setting.
Historical & Transitional Powers
Historical & Transitional Powers
Some powers no longer hold the position they once did, while others changed dramatically after the conflicts that created them. They remain important because characters can have lived under their rule, fought for or against them, served within their institutions, formed relationships across old faction lines, or inherited consequences that survived their period of greatest influence.
The Zakuul-based Eternal Empire overturned the older galactic balance under Valkorion and his successors. Its Eternal Fleet allowed it to defeat the Republic and Sith Empire, impose political supremacy across much of the galaxy, and establish an occupation whose effects reached worlds and populations far beyond Zakuul itself.
The Eternal Empire no longer occupies that position, but its history remains immediately relevant to characters who were Zakuulan citizens, Knights, soldiers, occupation personnel, collaborators, resistance members, refugees, prisoners, veterans, or people whose communities were transformed by conquest and its aftermath.
The Eternal Alliance formed on Odessen to oppose Zakuulan domination, bringing together former Republic, Imperial, Mandalorian, Zakuulan, and independent personnel who might previously have regarded one another as enemies. That cooperation created careers, friendships, rivalries, obligations, and loyalties that could survive long after the crisis that first brought them together.
The Alliance’s extraordinary period of galactic supremacy was temporary, and later SWTOR outcomes allow its political alignment to vary according to player choices. For StarForgeRP, its history is therefore most useful as an established source of shared experience and lasting relationships unless a more specific community-continuity outcome has been established.
Related Lore
Related Lore
Political power is only one part of the setting. Use Organizations for military branches, intelligence services, orders, corporations, criminal networks, clans, guilds, and similar institutions. Use Culture & Society for identities, customs, traditions, and social life, and Force Traditions for beliefs and institutions centered upon the Force.
A subject may connect to several parts of StarForgeRP without requiring the same information to be repeated. Follow the page that best answers the question at hand, then use its links to move between political power, institutions, culture, geography, history, characters, and roleplay.
This page is under active development.
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