Tuesday the 5th of February 2011 saw BioWare host their first UK The Old Republic event, inviting members of the community to come and have the opportunity to test the game and meet some of the key people responsible for its development. The event was held at the Trocodero in London, and would allow those in attendance to play as any of the classes or factions that they wished. Thankfully, I was one of the lucky few to receive an invite for the 7 p.m. session, having a chance to play a class I’ve been waiting to play since its announcement -- the Sith Inquisitor.

When a person typically thinks of Star Wars, horror is rarely their first thought. However Star Wars is filled with elements taken straight from the horror genre, with force drinking vampires, fear inducing demons, terrifying wolf-men, and even space faring ghosts all appearing within the Star Wars universe. So it may come as no surprise that everyone's favourite shambling corpses also make an appearance. Zombies themselves are nothing new to Star Wars, the walking dead first appearing as guardians of Sith knowledge in Dark Horse comics Tales of the Jedi: Dark Lords of the Sith, way back in 1994. It was in 2009 that zombies once more returned to the Star Wars universe in a big way, thanks to Joe Schrieber's Deathtroopers.

Deathtroopers was Del Rey's first foray into a pure Star Wars horror story and became a Star Wars mini-event in itself. Soon there were zombie Stormtrooper costumes being made, zombie themed Star Wars movie posters appearing all over the internet -- even the MMO Star Wars: Galaxies was getting involved, having a zombie outbreak as an in-game event. The novel itself was received well with many Star Wars fans and told the story of a zombie outbreak aboard an Imperial prison barge, which just so happens to be holding two very special prisoners. 

Fast-forward to 2011 and  once more the zombie plague has returned, this time in the form of the Deathtroopers prequel novel, Red Harvest. Once again written by Joe Schrieber, Red Harvest is a very different beast. Where Deathtroopers was set during the early days of the Galactic Civil War, Red Harvest takes us thousands of years into the past, a mere 8 years after the Treaty of Coruscant in the same era as Star Wars: The Old Republic is set to take place -- an era where the Sith are numerous. Taking advantage of this fact, the majority of Red Harvest takes place within the chilling confines of a Sith Academy where a Dark lord named Darth Scabrous is conducting horrific experiments in his attempts to bring the dead back to life. 

The Sith fully embrace the idea of the perfect being -- one who has overcome conflict and strife, cast off his chains for true freedom, conquered with merciless victory, and obtained unlimited power. It is no wonder that Sith society is one that is built on this same ideal. If it is not to stagnate but continue to grow stronger, it must follow a cruel and twisted version of Darwinism where ‘Survival of the Fittest’ is a phrase that could easily be prescribed with conflict and rivalry openly encouraged amongst its members. Nowhere is this harsh ideology more apparent than in the Sith Academies, the starting place for many who would seek to become a dark lord of the Sith.

During this era the Sith have spread out across various worlds, setting up academies in which those few who can sense the force being their journey to the Dark Side. These academies at the time of Star Wars: The Old Republic are located on prominent core Sith worlds like Korriban, as well as those planets less traveled such as Odacer-Faustin which is introduced during the events of Star Wars: Red Harvest. Life within them is a brutal regime of study and meditation, socialising with other students is heavily frowned upon as time-wasted. Not that one would particularly want to associate with those who find themselves drawn to these particular places of learning.

The Sacking of Coruscant wasn't the first time the Sith managed to bring war to the heart of the Republic. Almost a thousand years before the Treaty of Coruscant would be put in place, the Sith Empire under the command of Naga Sadow would accomplish this feat in a brutal and destructive campaign that would become to be known as the great Hyperspace War. It's this war that is the subject of Master Gnost-Dural latest time-line entry and this Fridays Update.

The Great Hyperspace War is one of the most important moments in galactic history, setting up events that would be felt for generations to come, and it's all down to a pair of force sensitive twins known as Gav and Jori Daragon. During a time of great expansion for the Republic, the blazing of new hyperspace lanes was a lucrative business for those who could survive the perils it entailed. Finding themselves in dire straits the Daragon twins turned to this life, hoping to make their riches and turn their life around. This left eventually only got them more in trouble, and soon found themselves with a price on their heads from a merchant lord who after using one of their trails found himself less one drone ship. With a price on their head, the siblings stole back their impounded ship and attempted to flee into space. Entering a random set of co-ordinates into the navicomp the pair made a leap into the unknown, whether it was luck or their undeveloped force sensitivity guiding the the pair survived, but what they found would lead to a galactic war that'll lay the foundation for the Star Wars: The Old Republic story.

This leads us to the story told in the Timeline update, which is now available to watch over on the the official site for Star Wars: The Old Republic!

Fatal Alliance is the first novel to be set within the new Star Wars: The Old Republic era, and a return to the Star Wars galaxy by author Sean Williams who has previously worked on the tie-in novels for the Force Unleashed games. Though unlike the Force Unleashed novels where Williams was largely restricted to the plot of the games, Fatal Alliance is more akin to another (in)famous tie-in series of Karen Travis’s Republic Commando, taking the general setting and character ideas and creating a story around them.

The plot takes the classes we’ll be able to select in-game, using them to create a diverse cast of both Republic and Imperial heroes who, without revealing any spoilers, journey to Hutta to participate in an auction being held by a local Hutt crime cartel matriarch -- Tassaa Bareesh. The winner will be led to a planet rich in resources that will benefit their own faction, or so they think. What they actually find leads to something none of them could have ever anticipated, something so terrible that old rivalries are cast aside as both Republic and Imperials join forces to combat a new and deadly threat to the galaxy.