As a follow-up to my entry on the Essential Guide to Episode I, here's the scoop on another book that was written but ultimately cancelled: The Clone Wars Sourcebook.

The CWSB was written in 2003 for Wizards of the Coast, and would have been a roleplaying sourcebook with lots of encyclopedic information along the lines of WOTC's New Jedi Order Sourcebook. I wrote the encyclopedic info, and JD Wiker would have contributed the stat-heavy "crunchy bits" for gamers. A couple things happened along the way to complicate things, among them WOTC's shift from traditional RPG gaming to Miniatures gaming.

Ultimately there wasn't really a place for a traditional sourcebook like the CWSB. That's not entirely a bad thing, since the CWSB would have been published before the Clone Wars had actually wrapped up in real-time, and would therefore have been missing key storylines like Obsession, Labryinth of Evil, and the second season of the Clone Wars cartoon.

So what happened to all the material written for the Clone Wars Sourcebook? The short answer is that much of it reappeared in the New Essential Chronology. So if you thought the Clone Wars were covered in disproportionate detail in that book, now you know why -- I was honestly trying to cram in as much as possible.

But there's lots of stuff that didn't make the cut. Like the Essential Guide to Episode I, the manuscript for the CWSB was reviewed and approved by LFL, making it sort of weirdly quasi-official -- that is, it's not official until it appears in print, but since it might already be incorporated into meta-references like LFL's Holocron, it's possible that elements could still leak out sometime down the road.

Here's a few things I enjoyed from the Clone Wars Sourcebook:

Roadblocks at Mirgoshir: This was a Clone Wars battle that touched on hyperspace physics. The Separatists deployed a "hyperspace mine" at the crossroads planet of Mirgoshir, essentially throwing up a roadblock that snarled traffic throughout the quadrant, and Saesee Tiin and other Jedi try to smooth out the fabric of hyperspace by using the Force (a concept that reappears in the New Essential Chronlogy when discussing the Outbound Flight Project).

Wreck of the Dungeon Ships: Now presumably out-of-continuity, this was an attempt to reference the "Mandalorian dungeon ships" from Dark Empire that supposedly dated back to the time of the Clone Wars. The section described Plo Koon leading an attack on the dungeon ships at the shipyards of Cato Neimoidia. A different take on the dungeon ships later appeared in the "Dreadnaughts of Rendili" storyarc from the comic Star Wars Rebellion, where it's implied that the Rendili dreadnaughts were retrofitted into the Dark Empire dungeon ships.

Defeat at Mendig: Here we see Dark Forces baddie Rom Mohc square off against General Grievous on the "spike-stone plains" of Mendig. Grievous refuses to kill his opponent, instead sending him back to Coruscant in shame and defeat. This is something that I thought could tie in to Mohc's subsequent obsession with personal combat (leading to Mohc's creation of the Dark Troopers).

Planetary Annihilation: This section described how a Duinuogwuin Jedi Master (a member of the species known as "Star Dragons") released so much Force energy in response to a Separatist orbital bombardment that she inadvertently destroyed "the garden planet of Tan Concalay."

Sageon and Bridger: Back in the Essential Guide to Episode I, I created a pair of Jedi "equipment masters" whom I envisioned as the guys that equipped Jedi going out into the field. Before Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan departed on the mission to Naboo, for example, they would have got their underwater breathers and stuff from Sageon and Bridger. As befits their cancelled origins, both were killed off in the cancelled Clone Wars Sourcebook. I later snuck Bridger's death into the New Essential Chronology (he's killed on Togoria by Grievous), and Abel Pena included both their names in his listing of Grievous' "trophy kills" in "The Story of General Grievous" from Star Wars Insider #86 (and he gave them first names to boot!)

Sageon and Bridger essentially filled the role of "Q" from the James Bond movies. I envisioned Bridger as a muscular, shaved-head bruiser. Sageon was an elderly, white-haired scholar.

Umm... kind of like Q as played by Desmond Llewelyn.

The "joke," I guess, was that tough-guy Bridger was the one concerned with issuing warm clothes and food capsules and antibiotics, while grandfatherly Sageon took a perverse and un-Jedi like pleasure in showing off weapons and explosives.

Errr... in other words, exactly like Q as played by Desmond Llewelyn.

Come to think of it, some characters are better off cancelled.

Dan
(writing projects and current releases)