Wars & Conflicts

Wars end. Their consequences rarely do.

The history surrounding Star Wars: The Old Republic is shaped by invasions, occupations, rebellions, civil struggles, uneasy ceasefires, and wars that changed entire generations.

Wars & Conflicts collects major sustained struggles whose consequences remain useful to StarForgeRP characters and stories. The focus is not every battle or military operation, but the larger conflict: why it happened, who became involved, how it changed the balance of power, and what remained afterward through damaged worlds, displaced communities, altered borders, military traditions, political grievances, ruins, inherited loyalties, and relationships between former enemies.

When exact chronology matters, use Galactic Timeline. For the broader circumstances surrounding a historical period, use Era Overview. Individual turning points that need more detailed treatment belong in the Event Directory.

The conflicts closest to StarForgeRP's shared present can remain part of living memory. Older or long-lived characters may remember portions of the Great Galactic War, while later conflicts can remain personal history for much larger parts of the population.

Personal memory still depends upon age, location, profession, affiliation, and access to information. Living during a war does not mean someone witnessed its famous battles, understood its hidden causes, or experienced it in the same way as people elsewhere in the galaxy.

The Great Galactic War

The Great Galactic War began when the restored Sith Empire emerged from centuries of concealment and launched a massive offensive against the Galactic Republic. Nearly three decades of campaigning transformed borders, military institutions, trade, politics, and entire communities across the galaxy.

The war ended after Imperial forces attacked Coruscant while Republic and Imperial representatives were negotiating peace. With its capital devastated and the Republic under overwhelming pressure, its negotiators accepted the Treaty of Coruscant. Open warfare stopped, but territorial concessions and unresolved hostility produced a settlement defined more by exhaustion and strategic necessity than reconciliation.

For character histories, the war can survive through veterans, military families, refugees, occupied communities, transferred territory, damaged infrastructure, inherited political bitterness, bereavement, collaboration, resistance, or family stories about decisions made during decades of fighting.

The Cold War

The Treaty of Coruscant produced formal peace without resolving the rivalry between Republic and Empire. Both governments rebuilt while intelligence operations, political interference, territorial pressure, proxy struggles, military deployments, and localized violence continued beneath an increasingly fragile settlement.

SWTOR's later official retrospective describes roughly twelve years of tenuous peace before all-out Republic–Imperial warfare resumed. For people living through those years, however, “peace” could mean very different things. A disputed world might still experience soldiers, insurgency, annexation, or covert operations, while communities elsewhere encountered military preparation, propaganda, shortages, political suspicion, or the expectation of another major war.

The period is particularly useful for characters connected to intelligence work, diplomacy, border regions, military service, resistance movements, smuggling, divided political loyalties, or communities attempting to rebuild while preparing for another crisis.

The Renewed Galactic War

The Cold War eventually gave way to direct Republic–Imperial warfare. The struggle quickly became more complicated than a conventional two-sided conflict.

Darth Malgus launched his first rebellion against the existing Sith leadership. The Hutt Cartel's campaign on Makeb made access to strategic resources a galactic concern. The Order of Revan infiltrated both great powers and eventually forced Republic and Imperial personnel into temporary cooperation, while the return of the Sith Emperor culminated in the devastation of Ziost.

For characters living through this period, loyalties and assumptions could change repeatedly. Soldiers might cooperate with yesterday's enemy against a new threat. Intelligence personnel could discover enemies inside their own institutions. Mercenaries, diplomats, criminals, researchers, civilians, and relief workers could encounter conflicts whose participants and priorities shifted faster than the wider war itself.

The Zakuulan Conquest & War Against the Eternal Empire

The arrival of the Eternal Empire overturned the political order created by generations of Republic–Imperial rivalry. Zakuul's military power overwhelmed both governments. The Republic and Sith Empire survived, but in weakened form beneath a new galactic order that demanded submission and tribute.

Resistance later consolidated around the Alliance on Odessen. Republic personnel, Imperials, Jedi, Sith, Mandalorians, Zakuulan dissidents, mercenaries, scientists, criminals, and independents could find themselves serving beside people who had once been political or military enemies. The resulting struggle ended the ruling Eternal Empire regime and briefly established a powerful galactic center outside the traditional Republic–Imperial divide.

The consequences are especially useful for relationships and personal histories. Careers may have been interrupted, institutions destroyed or reorganized, families scattered, governments discredited, and communities displaced. Characters who once fought together against Zakuul may later find themselves divided again without losing the friendships, debts, grudges, loyalties, or professional respect created during that struggle.

The Renewed Republic–Imperial War

The fall of the Eternal Empire did not produce a stable galactic settlement. Republic and Imperial forces confronted one another directly on Iokath while competing for resources and ancient superweapons, demonstrating that their old rivalry had already begun to reassert itself. The later destruction of most of the Alliance fleet further reduced the power of the major force that had temporarily stood outside the traditional Republic–Imperial divide.

The Imperial attack on Ossus was subsequently described by SWTOR as the first blow in a renewed war against the Republic. Onslaught expanded the struggle through Onderon, Mek-Sha, and Corellia, while later fighting on Manaan demonstrated how medicine and other strategic resources could become military objectives alongside territory, fleets, and industry.

The wider war should not make the galaxy one uninterrupted battlefield. Characters can experience it through recruitment, casualties, disrupted shipping, intelligence work, scarce resources, refugee movement, contracting, reconstruction, organized crime, political pressure, or uncertainty far from active combat.

For its present military and political circumstances in StarForgeRP continuity, use Current Setting.

The Hidden Chain Conflict

The later SWTOR period also saw a major Mandalorian struggle led by Heta Kol and the Hidden Chain. Heta challenged Shae Vizla's leadership as Mandalore the Avenger and appealed to warriors who believed Mandalorian strength had been spent too freely in service to outside powers.

The conflict spread from the assault on the Spirit of Vengeance II through divided clans, Hidden Chain operations, fighting on Ruhnuk, and increasingly close connections to the lost work of Darth Nul. Those threads eventually converged at Khar Shian during the concluding conflict of Legacy of the Sith.

Within StarForgeRP's adopted continuity, the confrontation ended the rivalry between Heta Kol and Shae Vizla with the deaths of both leaders. The conflict's consequences nevertheless survived them. Families and clans may have chosen opposite sides. Former rebels may face suspicion, punishment, reconciliation, exile, or uncertain loyalties, while warriors who opposed Heta can still disagree about Shae's legacy or what Mandalorian unity should mean afterward.

The following wars took place centuries or millennia before StarForgeRP's shared present. They matter less as personal memory than as inherited history.

Characters may encounter them through Jedi or Sith teaching, Mandalorian tradition, government histories, archaeology, ruined sites, relics, ancient technology, family or cultural narratives, historical scholarship, propaganda, or later movements that deliberately reinterpret the past.

The Great Hyperspace War

The Great Hyperspace War brought the ancient Sith Empire under Naga Sadow into direct conflict with the Republic. The Sith offensive initially threatened an unprepared Republic but ultimately collapsed, and Republic forces drove the invaders back into Sith territory.

The destruction that followed drove surviving Sith into exile. Those survivors eventually rebuilt under the ruler who became Emperor of the restored Sith Empire and preserved the memory of their defeat across generations.

SWTOR's Galactic History therefore treats the later Republic–Imperial struggle as part of a chain of consequences reaching back to this ancient war. For roleplay, its strongest connections are Sith historical identity, archaeology, ancient ruins, relics, Jedi scholarship, Imperial narratives of exile and vengeance, and disagreements about how later societies remember catastrophic events.

The Exar Kun War

The conflict led by Exar Kun and Ulic Qel-Droma threatened the Republic and Jedi centuries before the restored Sith Empire returned from exile. Broader Legends material commonly refers to the conflict as the Great Sith War, while SWTOR's own Galactic History uses “The Exar Kun War.”

Exar Kun and Ulic Qel-Droma's forces waged war against the Republic and Jedi, and the struggle devastated important sites including Ossus. Kun was ultimately driven back to Yavin 4, where his physical defeat did not completely end his influence.

For SWTOR-era roleplay, the conflict matters primarily through Jedi and Sith history, ancient temples, artifacts, archaeological research, Force traditions, and the ways later scholars, cults, or extremists interpret the failures and ambitions of an earlier generation.

The Mandalorian Wars

The Mandalorian Wars grew from Mandalorian expansion in the Outer Rim into a devastating conflict with the Republic. Mandalore the Ultimate rallied the clans and recruited Neo-Crusaders, while the Jedi Council initially resisted direct intervention.

Revan, Malak, and other Jedi eventually defied that position and entered the Republic war effort. Their intervention helped reverse Mandalorian advances and ultimately broke the crusade, but the victory came at enormous cost and deeply changed many of the Jedi who had taken part.

The war remained central to Mandalorian historical memory and to the later histories of Revan, Malak, the Jedi, and the Republic. Its aftermath also led directly toward the Jedi Civil War.

For SWTOR-era characters, the conflict belongs to history rather than ordinary living memory. It may survive through clan traditions, inherited equipment or stories, old battlegrounds, political mythology, Jedi teaching, military scholarship, archaeology, or disagreements over what the ancient Mandalorian defeat should mean to later generations.

The Jedi Civil War

After the Mandalorian Wars, Revan and Malak returned from the Unknown Regions as Sith Lords and turned their forces against the Republic. Their military expansion drew enormous strength from the Star Forge, an ancient Rakatan installation capable of supplying the forces needed to sustain their war.

Malak eventually betrayed Revan. The wounded Revan was recovered by the Jedi and later defeated Malak, while Republic forces destroyed the Star Forge and brought the immediate conflict to an end.

SWTOR places this history within a larger chain of events by connecting Revan and Malak's fall to their encounter with the hidden Sith Empire and its Emperor. The Jedi Civil War therefore became another link between the Mandalorian Wars and the eventual return of the restored Sith Empire centuries later.

A major war becomes most useful when it explains circumstances surrounding a character rather than making that character important merely because they were present for famous events.

• Ask whether the character experienced the conflict personally, inherited memories of it from another generation, or knows it only through education, propaganda, tradition, records, or rumor.

• Consider location as carefully as date. The same war may mean invasion on one world, occupation on another, interrupted trade somewhere else, and little more than distant news in another region.

• Look beyond battlefield service. Refugees, medics, engineers, families, merchants, government workers, criminals, contractors, teachers, researchers, diplomats, aid workers, and displaced civilians can all carry lasting consequences of war.

• Decide whose version of history the character learned. Governments, military units, families, religious traditions, clans, universities, survivors, and former enemies may preserve very different accounts of the same conflict.

• Give the past something that still matters: a damaged home, inherited grievance, missing relative, military reputation, disputed property, old debt, abandoned site, surviving relationship, political loyalty, artifact, professional connection, or unresolved question.

Use Galactic Timeline when the main question is when something happened, what came before or after it, or whether several developments overlapped.

Use Event Directory when a particular turning point—such as a treaty, battle, invasion, political crisis, or disaster—needs more explanation than the larger conflict summary provides.

Use Era Overview when building a character background around the political, military, and social circumstances of a period rather than one specific war.

Use Current Setting for the Republic–Imperial war, the Mandalorian aftermath, and other circumstances that define StarForgeRP's shared present.