It's taken me a bit longer that I expected to get through these notes for my first official Star Wars project, but good things are worth waiting for. On with the show!

At the time The Emperor's Pawns was published, it was pretty rare for video game elements to receive any kind of formal recognition as part of the larger Star Wars mythology outside of the video game themselves. That's changed somewhat with video game blowouts like the Dark Forces Saga and tie-ins like the recently announced The Force Unleashed multimedia project.

So some fans might be able to appreciate what a small coup it was for me to be able to focus on two cool characters created for the video game genre in The Emperor's Pawns. We'll start with the star of the lesser-known game.


Arden Lyn

The character Arden Lyn was introduced in the Sony Playstation game Masters of Teräs Käsi (1997, LucasArts). The game was something of a latecomer to the tournament fighter genre, which had been ruled by the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat series for most of the 1990s, both of which I'd been an avid player. (I came in second place at my local arcade in their Mortal Kombat 3 tournament).

Arden Lyn's status as an Emperor's Hand wasn't actually established in the video game, but instead in the first edition of the Essential Chronology (2000, Del Rey). The martial art called teräs käsi (and its practitioners, the Followers of Palawa) received its first and briefest of mentions in the Shadows of the Empire Sourcebook (1996, West End Games), originally spelled with lower case letters. Sources since have largely capitalized the name, as well as linked it very strongly to Force-users. However, it should be noted that the first individuals referred to as adepts in teräs käsi, the self-serving criminals the Pike Sisters, were not Force-sensitive, and Han Solo apparently picked up a couple of teräs käsi moves because his "time in cantinas gave him a glimpse of teräs käsi fighting styles" according to Masters of Teras Kasi: Prima's Official Hints & Tips (1998, Prima Publishing). Meanwhile, the descriptions of Followers of Palawa as philosophers and intense meditators capable of great feats of longevity is new information created to explain Arden Lyn's youthful appearance, as explained below.

Most of Lyn's radical backstory as one of the most ancient enemies of the Jedi Order is new, but derived from references in the Masters of Teräs Käsi game manual stating that Lyn is "a Palawan warrior from the time of the Jedi" and that "her youthfulness belies her age" (1997, LucasArts). Masters of Teräs Käsi: Prima's Official Hints & Tips is even less ambiguous, explaining: "Arden Lyn is a Palawan warrior who's much older than her youthful appearance would suggest. In fact, her origins date to the early years of the Jedi, when she was schooled in the mysterious rival art of teräs käsi" (1998, Prima Publishing). With those sources backing me up, I opted to make Lyn almost as old as the Galactic Republic itself. The fun part would now become how to make that possible, given that she's in fighting trim despite being 25,000 years old!

Readers of The Story of General Grievous project and my Darth By Any Other Name series will be familiar with my desire to often have characters "earn" their names. Arden Lyn is a case in point. Besides the obvious similarity to Masters of the Universe villainess Evil-Lyn, Arden's name resembles both "ardor" and "harden." Dog-pile the ideas, and you've got a passionate woman with a hard heart, which becomes quite literally true at one point in Lyn's biography.

Mention of Lyn's lover "Xendor and his minions" was a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun. Prior to this, Xendor was little more than an unspecified noun making up part of one of Lando's preferred exclamations, "Minions of Xendor!" in The Adventures of Lando Calrissian (1983, Del Rey). I made Xendor an exile of Kashi Mer, which is a system that went supernova around the time of the formation of the Republic according to "Relic" in Adventure Journal #6 (1995, West End Games). The placement of both characters as major agitators in the First Great Schism is new, though the conflict itself was first mentioned in the comic Tales of the Jedi: The Golden Age of the Sith #0 (1996, Dark Horse Comics).

Likewise, Jedi Master Awdrysta Pina, who induces Lyn into her millennia-long coma, is a new character, but the literally heart-stopping Force technique he uses on Lyn is only sort of new. This power, referred to as mortichro in the article, was originally created by Daniel Wallace for the Essential Guide to Episode I. However, when that book was cancelled, The Emperor's Pawns ended up appearing to "originate" the concept. If I remember correctly, Dan made up the word from a Latin prefix and suffix, though unfortunately a misspelling of the word in future, more widely available Star Wars products as morichro (no "t") would obscure its linguistic roots. The "Kashi Mer talisman" Lyn uses to destroy the Jedi Master before falling into a coma is the title artifact of the aforementioned roleplaying adventure "Relic" in Adventure Journal #6 (1995, West End Games).

Like most of Lyn's backstory, her unfriendly encounter with Imperial Inquisitors upon reemerging during the Jedi Purge is new information. Inquisitor Tremayne is from Galaxy Guide 9: Fragments From the Rim (1993, West End Games), Grand Inquisitor Torbin is from the Star Wars Sourcebook (1987, West End Games), and Inquisitor Ameesa Darys is new. The deal Lyn strikes with Palpatine to work for the Emperor in exchange for his resurrecting her dead lover is new, though was meant to foreshadow the Emperor's experiments in eternal life as seen in Dark Empire (1992, Dark Horse Comics). Quite accidentally, this now seems to dovetail nicely with Palpatine's depiction in Revenge of the Sith, though the desire to cheat death is a common enough ambition among bad guys.

Lyn's training of Palpatine's "Byss Mages" and "Sovereign Protectors" is new, though these stooges of the Emperor were first depicted in Dark Empire (1992, Dark Horse Comics), while their formal titles come down from the Dark Empire Sourcebook (1993, West End Games). With reference to Arden Lyn's entrustment with "eliminating key Rebels" and "finding and training students," we at last touch on the zany plot of Masters of Teräs Käsi itself (1997, LucasArts), which suggests that Lyn somehow forced Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewbacca into entering a tournament to fight for their lives. (It should be noted, nonetheless, that most sources, including the video game itself, go out of their way not to frame the story as a tournament, per se.) However, given The Wheel storyarc in Star Wars #18-#22 (1978-79, Marvel Comics), in which Han and Chewie enter a to-the-death gladiatorial competition, and the Geonosis arena sequence of Attack of the Clones, the video game's story is perhaps not so gimmicky as seems at first glance. Furthermore, given the chronological placement of the Teräs Käsi storyline, the events of the video game and those of the The Wheel storyarc may very well be one and the same.

Lyn's betrayal of Palpatine is another new wrinkle, and an example of how Star Wars continuity works best, in my opinion. I'll talk about this more when I get to the notes on the other video game villain The Emperor's Pawns covers, Maarek Stele, but suffice to say Arden Lyn's kidnapping of the Emperor for the rogue Grand Admiral Zaarin is a reference to events in the PC game TIE Fighter (1994, LucasArts), though the revelation of Lyn's involvement is new.

The adventure seed crafted for Lyn, "Life After Death," is entirely new information, explaining how the Force-user was brought back from the dead (a process which I liken to death-like cryptobiosis). Meanwhile, Lyn's roleplaying stats offer a few more insights. Lyn speaks "Old Galactic Standard," which is a hybrid reference to the language Galactic Standard, most likely just another name for Star Wars' ubiquitous English-like language, in Star Wars #50 (1981, Marvel Comics) and an attempt to name the ancient precursor to Basic said to be spoken by the Jedi Knight Halbret in the last book of the impressive DarkStryder roleplaying campaign Endgame (1996, West End Games).

The description of Lyn's droid arm as that of a Juggernaut was originally meant to be a reference to the Juggernaut JU-9 warbot in Challenge #58's "Battle for Mandalore" (1992, West End Games). Though written by official Star Wars writer Chris Hind (No Disintegrations, "Elusive") and published by West End Games at a time when the company had the Star Wars roleplaying license, that article remains quasi-canonical. Note, however, that Lyn's arm is described in The Emperor's Pawns as an "ancient" droid arm, precipitating my creation of an even more antique version of the Juggernaut war droid in Droids, Technology and the Force: A Clash of Phenomena (2005, StarWars.com), just in case. However, the recent illustration of these Juggernaut models in the New Essential Guide to Droids (2006, Del Rey) does not seem to quite match Lyn's mechanical arm. So it goes.

Like Arden Lyn, her lover Xendor is never specified in The Emperor's Pawns to have been a Jedi Knight, though sources since such as Star Wars Insider #88's "Heritage of the Sith" (2006, IDG Entertainment) have established that Xendor did at least lead the Jedi turncoats. However, if rumors of Xendor's resurrection as the Sith Dark Underlord as told in Evil Never Dies: The Sith Dynasties (2006, StarWars.com) are to be believed--and Lyn's obsession with bringing Xendor back from the dead would make such a storytelling irony reasonable, if not certain--then some possible additional facts about the Kashi Mer renegade may be inferred. The Dark Forces Saga, Part 4 (2005, Wizards of the Coast) not only states that a trademark of the Royale Macheteros, the royal guard of the Kashi Mer monarchy, was their implementation of a two-bladed dueling technique, but the Dark Underlord is also said to favor such a fighting style. Again, dog pile those facts and it isn't unlikely that Xendor was once one of the Kashi Mer Dynasty's elite protectors before his banishment and war against the Jedi. ~ Abel G. Peña

Coming soon ... The Emperor's Pawns Endnotes, Part 5: Nerves of Stele!

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