Like Michael Allen Horne, Paul Sudlow wrote extensively for West End Games while that company held the Star Wars RPG license. But he's responsible for two of the cooler developments in non-fiction SW writing:

Geography:
"Into the Core Worlds" is a Sudlow article from issue #7 of the Star Wars Adventure Journal (August 1995). It does several things well -- spotlights an interesting pocket of the galaxy, fleshes out planet profiles with generous dollops of history and culture, emphasizes the importance of hyperlanes to SW travel, and lays it all out on a simple map. Other WEG products had done similar things before, but "Into the Core Worlds" was the first to do it with established planets (as opposed to a one-off map that sprang fully-formed from a gamemaster's imagination).

Hey, I know those! Chandrila, Mon Mothma's homeworld, first appeared in the Star Wars Sourcebook; Ralltiir came from the National Public Radio dramas of Star Wars: A New Hope; the arrow to the Corporate Sector referenced the Brian Daley novels. (That hyperspace intersection of the Hydian Way and the Perlemian Trade Route became a cornerstone of the mapmaking process for the New Jedi Order novels.)

What Sudlow pioneered here was the visual organization of existing data, i.e. placing familiar planets in their larger spatial context. That's a fancy name for a simple but cool concept, and it's the approach that Jason Fry, Craig Carey, and I kept in mind for things like Galactic Gazeteer: Hoth and the Greater Javin, and it's something that I hope will come across in next year's Star Wars Atlas.

The News:
A series of articles entitled "Galaxywide NewsNets" ran in issues #3-14 of the Star Wars Adventure Journal. The series was somewhat unique in that it contained no RPG stats or other crunchy bits; its only purpose was scene-setting. But what a way to do it! Galaxywide NewsNets was presented in the form of a news feed listing the day's top stories from across the galaxy. Lots of opportunities for fun arose, including:

- Stories came from different networks. Gossipy TriNebulon News would spin a story differently than the stuffy Galaxy News Service, or the regime-boosters of Imperial HoloVision.

- Each story had a date attached to it, allowing it to be fixed on a timeline. Dates were subtle -- and have since been largely supplanted by the BBY/ABY system -- but they continue to be used as a kind of 1337 fannish code.

- All kinds of stories could appear in the news feed, from high-stakes crime capers to reviews of new operas to events from the SW movies. Sudlow had fun showing how the death of Alderaan and the destruction of the Death Star were revealed to the public, as claims and counterclaims zoomed back and forth between competing news outlets. Sudlow was also the first writer to describe Lando Calrissian's "little maneuver at the Battle of Taanab."

If NewsNets sounds familar, it might be because Pablo Hidalgo and Paul Ens expanded the concept for the outstanding online feature HoloNet News, which chronicled the media chatter in the months leading up to Attack of the Clones. HoloNet News then became a series of print articles in Star Wars Insider magazine covering the Clone Wars. (I co-wrote its final installment, which was a tie-in to Revenge of the Sith.) But without Sudlow's work, that particular ball might never have started rolling.

One final thing -- I flipped through Star Wars Adventure Journal #7 in order to scan images for this blog post, and this issue is freaking amazing. The best issue of the SWAJ by far, and one of the best Expanded Universe sources ever published. Here's a list of its feature articles:

1) "Mist Encounter" by Timothy Zahn: The Empire discovers Grand Admiral Thrawn, in a short story set shortly after Revenge of the Sith

2) "Missed Chance" by Michael A. Stackpole: Short story featuring Stackpole's mainstay character Corran Horn

3) "A Taste of Adventure" by Tony Russo: Cool collection of short adventure seeds

4) "The History of R-Series Astromech Droids" by Pablo Hidalgo: Amazing article that fits R2-D2 into a spectrum of droid models from R1 to R7. It's another great example of putting familiar facts into a unifying context (and I gladly appropriated almost all of it for The Essential Guide to Droids and its sequel.)

5) "Retreat from Coruscant" by Laurie Burns: The only story in existence that shows how the New Republic evacuated Coruscant prior to Dark Empire

6) "The Kaal Connection" by Peter Schweighofer: Cool first appearance of Jeng Droga, later retconned by Abel Pena as an Emperor's Hand

7) "Into the Core Worlds" by Paul Sudlow

8) "Old Corellian: A Guide for the Curious Scholar" by Patricia A. Jackson: Nice piece on fictional linguistics

9) "Passages" by Charlene Newcomb: Another great story by Char. She and Patty Jackson wrote a majority of the short stories in the early issues of the SWAJ.

10) "Galaxywide NewsNets" by Paul Sudlow

Dan
(writing projects and current releases)