Continuing our series of endnotes for Star Wars: The Essential Atlas, this installment talks about the individual planet entries, including Iego, Ryloth, Tatooine, and the Triton moon. Click here to go back to part 2!

PART II: PLANETS OF THE GALAXY

JASON: A rule we followed for this section was that if a planet appeared or was mentioned in one of the movies, we included it here. That did limit how many EU planets we could address, but I think it was a good trade-off.

The original outline for the Atlas didn't have a section dedicated to planets, but placed each significant planet near some point of historical context. But the feeling was that a dedicated section connected the book to The Essential Guide to Planets and Moons and gave more casual fans a way into the book, preventing them from drowning in the complexity of the EU.
I like that we got to use the old West End Games stat blocks.

ANAXES
JASON: I invented Anaxes for Coruscant and the Core Worlds, thinking it would be interesting to create a military world that was held in esteem by typical citizens of the Republic, Empire and New Republic. (I also love the Imperial Navy and thought it would be cool to have a place where you could set a space version of An Officer and a Gentleman.) For this write-up I tried to finesse the question of what role Anaxes played in the galaxy when there was no Republic Navy. (Answer: It trained officers who served in sector navies.) The name Whelm is a tip of the cap to Jack Vance, my favorite science-fantasy writer. What? You haven't read the Alastor books? Put that right, posthaste!

ANSION
JASON: Note that Ansion's web of treaties - described in brief in The Approaching Storm - is explained here.

BESTINE
DAN: Bestine first appeared in Biggs Darklighter's dialogue from the novelization of the original Star Wars movie. Since then it's been established as a waterworld, and also the home of an Imperial naval yard. The Atlas gives the Imperial facility a name, Juggerhead, and also throws in a reference to a new type of TIE - the "TIE torpedo," which is described as a streamlined one-person attack submersible. This is a fix for the puzzle of why a naval yard for a spacegoing navy would exist on the surface of a planet instead of in orbit, but it's also my excuse to create a new TIE. I admit I never really get tired of seeing new TIE designs. Once I saw that octagonal windshield and ball cockpit attached to crawler treads in Cam Kennedy's artwork for Dark Empire (known as a "century tank"), I was hooked.

BOZ PITY
DAN: This entry is almost entirely made up of new material. Boz Pity is an Episode II planet but has only previously appeared in the comic Star Wars: Obsession where its giant graves were mentioned in passing. The sad story of the planet's natives, the Gargantelles (the name is a nod to Gargantua and Pantagruel) was invented for the Atlas, but the involvement of the electric caliphs of Mourn in the destruction of the Gargantelles is a reference to the New Essential Guide to Droids, in which I created the electric caliphs for a simple throwaway line.

CHRISTOPHSIS
JASON: We added Christophsis and Teth to the Atlas after our revised pub date let us include material from the Clone Wars movie and first season. (And a bit of Season 2; more on that in a while.) I liked the idea of giving the Christophsians a reputation for treating non-human servants and hirelings badly - it makes you briefly share Whorm Loathsom's satisfaction at rampaging across the planet.

FELUCIA
DAN: The fact that the Gossams were able to colonize Felucia prior to the establishment of the Republic is unusual, but not unheard of. There are several pre-Republic colonization missions that are mentioned throughout the Atlas. However, because we wanted to minimize any appearances of the hyperdrive prior to its established development in 25,000 BBY, this passage references the Gossam Courivers who reached faster-than-light speeds by using the "tumbledrive." I'm not exactly sure how the tumbledrive works, but it doesn't sound particularly safe.

FONDOR
JASON: The Empire's plan to turn the Freeworlds into the Shapani sector (here more-completely identified as a subsector) is detailed in Lords of the Expanse.

GAMORR
JASON: It was fun to sprinkle the Atlas with galactic sayings, such as the Gamorreans' apparently unlikely colonization of another star system being cited in exasperation when apparently easy things can't get done.

HAPES
JASON: Galactic sayings, once again.

IEGO
DAN: In Episode I, Anakin tells Padmé about the angels that live on the moons of Iego. When contributing to the roleplaying sourcebook Geonosis and the Outer Rim Worlds in 2004, I was given the opportunity to flesh out Iego in all its glory. Because the "angel" seed had already been planted I tried to create a setting that seemed inexplicable and bizarre, with elements that reeked of the supernatural including singing demons, blind dragons, and castaways who never age. This was partly a reaction to working on a lot of roleplaying sourcebooks, in which I had created plenty of one-size-fits-all planets by plopping down a starport, a cantina, and a mining facility. After a while these start to blur together. Contributing to this is the fact that Star Wars has a "lived in" environment in which strange things are routinely accepted as no big deal.

This is a great strength of the setting, but it makes it hard to include something truly weird that doesn't feel like it's visiting from another franchise. Every once in a while somebody creates floating space skeletons and names them "Starweirds" and I'm surprised in a good way. It's a balancing act and I tried not to tip the balance too far in one direction with Iego. However, since the publication of Geonosis and the Outer Rim Worlds, Iego has been shifted back toward the other side of the seesaw through its more conventional appearances in Star Wars Legacy and the Clone Wars cartoon. It's a shared universe, and we did our best to address all facets of Iego in this entry.

ILUM
DAN: Ilum's location within what is essentially the Unknown Regions is a tricky bit. The rationalization here is that it takes a Force jump to get there, or as the text puts it, "one uninterrupted hop directly from Metellos."

KALEE
DAN: Some details of this, including the fact that nearly all sea life on Kalee is poisonous, came from unpublished backstory material created by Abel Peña for his online article series "Unknown Soldier: The Story of General Grievous."

KAMINO
DAN: To establish that the Kaminoans have been in the cloning business for a long time, I referenced the fact that they had a hand in shaping the "blind berserkers of the Unknown Regions' Leech Legions." Look for this to be expanded next year in Wizards of the Coast's Unknown Regions sourcebook (despite my editor's distaste for the name Leech Legions).

MYGEETO
DAN: The "brief, doomed seizure by the Rebel Alliance in 3 ABY" mentioned here is a reference to the game Star Wars: Imperial Ace, released for mobile phones in Europe.

NAGI
JASON: The backstory of the Nagai and details of their life among the stars of Companion Besh are new material.

NAL HUTTA
JASON: To my surprise, I noticed during final page proofs that we'd forgotten to include a rundown of the planets of the Y'Toub system. To my greater surprise, I couldn't find any place that those planets had been named.

The Vippits seemed to be crying out for a greater role in Hutt Space, so I gave them a backstory that would make them feared and somewhat despised as lawyers. (I know, that's another species generalization similar to Rodians being bounty hunters and Gamorreans being bouncers. Guilty as charged.) Regardless, I think it makes Doolb Snoil a more interesting and sympathetic character.

NEIMOIDIA
DAN: This planet is mostly white, which would seem to indicate arctic conditions - yet Neimoidia is a hothouse world of giant fungus! Nevertheless, the white hue had previously been depicted and we had to match it. While discussing this with editor Erich Schoeneweiss I helpfully pointed out that some types of fungus are white. He replied, "that's an awful lot of fungus."

RAXUS PRIME
DAN: To heighten the squalor of the "junkyard planet," I tried to illustrate its fall from grace. The fact that it was located inside territory once controlled by the Tionese Empire provided the context for its former splendor, and allowed me to make references to all-new oddities like "Nikato's bootheel" and the "Duros Red Credit Brigade."

RISHI
DAN: The first thing I wanted to do here was to explicitly connect the planet Rishi (introduced in 1992's Dark Force Rising) to the Rishi Maze from Attack of the Clones. The explanation is that Rishi is frequently used as a navigational calibration point for ships making a hyperspace transit to the satellite galaxy. The route stretching between Rishi and Rishi - the Zareca String - would offer a traveler such benefits as a pre-blazed hyperspace path and a number of stopovers for fuel, supplies, and repairs.

RODIA
DAN: The Vagh Rodiek are awful, crab-like monstrosities created by Yuuzhan Vong shapers through the mutation of Rodian slaves. I created these things for the article "Being Yuuzhan Vong" (illustrated by Anthony Waters) in an issue of Star Wars Gamer, and I love referencing them when I can.

RYLOTH
JASON: One of the surprises when I read the scripts for the first season of The Clone Wars was that Ryloth was portrayed as a normal, terrestrial world, and not the tide-locked planet beset by heat storms that we'd seen numerous times in the EU.

We looked at ways to preserve the EU vision of Ryloth - the most imaginative explanation I heard was that perhaps the Clone Wars shows took place entirely within the twilight band - but in the end it felt like a really convoluted attempt to deny the obvious. So we let it go and rewrote Ryloth's description to acknowledge that it was a relatively terrestrial, rotating world. But we didn't want to discard everything that had come before, so we took care to include mention of scorching deserts, mountain strongholds and heat storms.

SHADDA-BI-BORAN
JASON: The fate of Shadda-Bi-Boran was discussed in scenes cut from Attack of the Clones; I fleshed them out here in an effort to make the world a galactic cause célèbre and tragedy, which I hope adds a bit more depth to Padme's backstory.

TATOOINE
JASON: Ha ha, Luke. In your face.

TRITON
JASON: "Deader than a Triton moon" is a throwaway line in the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back, and years ago I saw a chance to surprise Star Wars fans who assumed that was a reference to an interplanetary war or some kind of cosmic cataclysm. Says who? Couldn't there be a backstory that was unexpected and more interesting? That led to the Hyperspace story "Deader Than a Triton Moon." Alas, that story will be spoiled for readers who come to the Atlas first, but that's showbiz.

I wrote the parenthetical that scholars disagree on who or what Gactimus was as a bit of color, not as cover for the Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia's reference (mistaken, in my book) to Gactimus as a moon of Triton. But I suppose it works as cover anyway.

(click here to go back to part 2)
(click here to go on to part 4)

Dan
(writing projects and current releases)