Hello my fellow GMs, I’m having an issue and I was hoping I could pick your brains and get an idea of your experiences.

In the game I’m running the characters are going to be going to mandalore in the not too distant future which is going to be great because mandalore is one of my favorite scenes in the Star Wars universe.

The issue is that two player characters are mandalorian, one of them a clone trooper who has adopted the new mandalorian ideaology based on the new canon revealed in the clone wars and rebels and the other is a true mandalorian based on the canon established in legends. Personally I love the clone wars and rebels series but I prefer the canon established by Karen Traviss but I want to ensure that the setting can be fun for both of my players rather than just pick the one that I find more to my liking, so I’m going to try to combine the old and the new canons the Wookipedia seems to have done in the legends section.

To this end I was hoping that y’all would share with me your own experiences running games on mandalore in order to help me flesh out how I will run in. My players are currently preoccupied on corusant for the moment so I foresee having a few months to set this up.

Just establish that there was an ideological split at some point; maybe some kind of 'reformation' movement or something. Religions do it all the time.

I'm not familiar with Karen's work in Star Wars, is it anything like KOTOR where Mandalorians just want to fight to test themselves? If so you have a nice Mainstream Mando/Death Watch thing happening here.

Headcanon here, so bear with me:

First off, the legends stuff is literally legends. These stories actually do exist in the canon universe, but they exist as legends and stories. Just like New England has 'George Washington slept here' plaques all over the place, the galaxy is filled with planets where Vader and Luke first met and fought (Cloud city? Cymoon 1? Circarpous IV?), Revan was an actual historical figure who fell to the dark side, but untangling the stories from the history are nearly impossible (he's basically Cyrus the Great, or maybe Atilla the Hun).

Mandalorians are the same way - they had an ancient war with the Jedi, their society is partially built around clans, and they have a rich warrior tradition. But they also have so much more - stereotypes so spread and accepted that they are practically truth without any actual history backing them up.

So why not imagine them in a situation somewhat analogous to American Indians? They have a surprising amount of local autonomy, but still work with and are sorta-subordinate too the central government. They are aligned into tribes clans that associate with each other (and most outsiders consider them all the same thing) despite having different traditions, rules, jurisdictions, locations, etc. Depending on the clan and other factors, Mandalorians can have huge amounts of wealth and local power, or may be desperately poor and voiceless. Some have cheerfully joined galactic mainstream until you can't hardly tell their heritage, others cling to tradition so hard that it breaks. Outsiders often want to be a part of the heritage, but struggle to ever successfully join.

So, to push the analogy, your canon-Mando is an actual tribesman, using his traditions to make his way through the galaxy. Your legends-Mando is probably going to be recognized, and maybe even a bit respected for his attempts, but is gonna be kinda like a new-age type hippie trying hard to make the stereotypes into something real for himself. Reciting the Mando laws and talking about beskar'gam is going to be a bit like saying 'How' in a deep voice with upraised hand and discussing warpaint.

3 hours ago, Vorzakk said:

Just establish that there was an ideological split at some point; maybe some kind of 'reformation' movement or something. Religions do it all the time.

That is pretty much what I’m planning to do, just want to figure out how to frame the world under that setting.

2 hours ago, ASCI Blue said:

I'm not familiar with Karen's work in Star Wars, is it anything like KOTOR where Mandalorians just want to fight to test themselves? If so you have a nice Mainstream Mando/Death Watch thing happening here.

Somewhat, that is the mandalorians ancient history, because the motor games were thousands of years in the past after all.

In karen’s works there has not been a galaxy wide campaign in ages which is part of why the mandalorians have become bounty hunters or guns for hire.

this resulted from two things mostly, the first being that one of the central tenets of mandalorian culture is based on being warriors, the second is because other than fighters mandalorians are primarily a family based agrigarian society and fighting is something that agrigarian societies have often done during the off season when your not growing things.

more than that though Karen’s novels delve deeper into the mandalorian culture than just the fighting stereotypes and we see what it means to be part of a mandalorian family and society, we see the people who never become fighters, we see the diversity in species, background, and also orientation as one of her core canon mandalorians and boba fetts second in command is a gay mandalorian named Goran Bevin who was happily married to the man who made the mandalores armor, had a daughter, and had grandchildren.

Idk sorry I got carried away, but due in part to the ability of the writer as well as her preference for writing about them and the fans adoration of her that ensured she was the one most often to write about the mandalorians, they are one of the most developed cultural groups in the game along with corellians, and actually have something other than a 2 dimensional society, which I feel has been sorely lost with the new canon.

50 minutes ago, Genuine said:

Headcanon here, so bear with me:

First off, the legends stuff is literally legends. These stories actually do exist in the canon universe, but they exist as legends and stories. Just like New England has 'George Washington slept here' plaques all over the place, the galaxy is filled with planets where Vader and Luke first met and fought (Cloud city? Cymoon 1? Circarpous IV?), Revan was an actual historical figure who fell to the dark side, but untangling the stories from the history are nearly impossible (he's basically Cyrus the Great, or maybe Atilla the Hun).

Mandalorians are the same way - they had an ancient war with the Jedi, their society is partially built around clans, and they have a rich warrior tradition. But they also have so much more - stereotypes so spread and accepted that they are practically truth without any actual history backing them up.

So why not imagine them in a situation somewhat analogous to American Indians? They have a surprising amount of local autonomy, but still work with and are sorta-subordinate too the central government. They are aligned into tribes clans that associate with each other (and most outsiders consider them all the same thing) despite having different traditions, rules, jurisdictions, locations, etc. Depending on the clan and other factors, Mandalorians can have huge amounts of wealth and local power, or may be desperately poor and voiceless. Some have cheerfully joined galactic mainstream until you can't hardly tell their heritage, others cling to tradition so hard that it breaks. Outsiders often want to be a part of the heritage, but struggle to ever successfully join.

So, to push the analogy, your canon-Mando is an actual tribesman, using his traditions to make his way through the galaxy. Your legends-Mando is probably going to be recognized, and maybe even a bit respected for his attempts, but is gonna be kinda like a new-age type hippie trying hard to make the stereotypes into something real for himself. Reciting the Mando laws and talking about beskar'gam is going to be a bit like saying 'How' in a deep voice with upraised hand and discussing warpaint.

I kind of like this, it doesn’t fit in entirely with what I want to do because I consider mandalorians to be a semi-closed ethnoreligious group, so not impossible to join but yes difficult, however I definitely love a lot of the stuff you have here and I’m definitely going to use it to place some faux-mandalorian hippies in my game as well as to explore the varying levels of connection that some mandalorians might have to the cultural and or religious aspects of being mandalorian.

The thing is that the Traviss nonsense stuff was that it was so far removed from what Lucas intended that they needed to curbstomp it with the Clone Wars. That was an intentional realignment, because it was so contrary to Star Wars lore to date. So, if you're concerned about canon, Legends isn't it and there are one group of Mandalorians only - those seen in TCW and Rebels. Anything aligned to the Traviss works (so called "Travissty") should be assigned to a new racial or cultural group, not called Mandalorians.

57 minutes ago, Endersai said:

The thing is that the Traviss nonsense stuff was that it was so far removed from what Lucas intended that they needed to curbstomp it with the Clone Wars. That was an intentional realignment, because it was so contrary to Star Wars lore to date. So, if you're concerned about canon, Legends isn't it and there are one group of Mandalorians only - those seen in TCW and Rebels. Anything aligned to the Traviss works (so called "Travissty") should be assigned to a new racial or cultural group, not called Mandalorians.

Yeah. I'll admit that the thing that made me love Mandos wasn't the Traviss novels - it was the KOTOR games and comics. Those dudes were cool in a way that Boba never achieved.

1 hour ago, Endersai said:

The thing is that the Traviss nonsense stuff was that it was so far removed from what Lucas intended that they needed to curbstomp it with the Clone Wars. That was an intentional realignment, because it was so contrary to Star Wars lore to date. So, if you're concerned about canon, Legends isn't it and there are one group of Mandalorians only - those seen in TCW and Rebels. Anything aligned to the Traviss works (so called "Travissty") should be assigned to a new racial or cultural group, not called Mandalorians.

this is a very nice opinion for you to have personally and you should keep doing that in your own interpretation of the series, but this is not a thread about why people dislike the mandalorians from legends, this is one about how to merge together the two continuities in a way that will appeal to my players. if you are only interested in saying how you think the new mandalorian canon is better then this is not the place as that will simply be a distraction from the main topic and i would kindly request that you refrain from doing so here.

13 minutes ago, Genuine said:

Yeah. I'll admit that the thing that made me love Mandos wasn't the Traviss novels - it was the KOTOR games and comics. Those dudes were cool in a way that Boba never achieved.

fair point, the mandos from kotor were pretty cool, they weren't my first introduction to them and i already loved them by the time the kotor games came out, but i can definitely see someone wanting something based more off of them.
And yea i can definitely agree with that on boba, dude was a seriously flawed individual with the largest case of daddy issues this side of the galaxy and it really limited him in his life ultimately.

Have you seen much of the newer Rebels stuff set on/around Mandalore? Seems like it's swung back around to being a warrior culture of tight knit clans, just one that is firmly under the boot of the Empire. The pacifist era of Mandalore seems like it was fairly short-lived in Disney canon, effectively starting to peter out as soon as Maul took power, and being squashed completely after the Siege of Mandalore.

8 hours ago, Tom Cruise said:

Have you seen much of the newer Rebels stuff set on/around Mandalore? Seems like it's swung back around to being a warrior culture of tight knit clans, just one that is firmly under the boot of the Empire. The pacifist era of Mandalore seems like it was fairly short-lived in Disney canon, effectively starting to peter out as soon as Maul took power, and being squashed completely after the Siege of Mandalore.

Yeah, seems like they’ve managed to allow room for both the “canon” and “Traviss super-duper, storyline-derailing, only competent race in the galaxy, and if they scowl at you, you’ll vaporize” Mandalorians.

Wasn't the Obi Wan romance with Satine of Mandalore? She was having problems in those episodes of clone wars, bit her legacy of more peaceful Mandalorians can still be around. Both approaches are squashed under the Empire, so no problem having both around, a more militaristic and a more negotiation/lore approach to Mandalore and its culture.

I'd just go with whatever you think feels better. Honestly, if you like the Karen Traviss version, go with that and just ignore 'canon'. The old EU is still there if you want to use it, or you can always do what George Lucas did and make stuff up.

As some posters above note (not very politely!) the Traviss books are hugely polarising, as some fans feel she made them overly-perfect, a kind of 'Mary Sue' race that was always more awesome and badass than everyone else, and she painted the Jedi/Republic in a bad light.

We introduced the Mandalorians to our campaign after the AOR group played 'Friends Like These'. The player who wanted to play a Mando character got the job of defining them, with my approval as GM. I don't think he strayed too far from the Karen Traviss vision. I made them a bit more like the protagonists of a Robert Heinlein novel, a society with unity and individual contribution to the whole, a bit like the Turians in Mass Effect. We reimagined them as a genetically-engineered near-human race, created by the Taung in millennia past, so they're a relatively young race (who outlived their creators). Their stats offer one rank in a combat skill or two Knowledge skills, so we figured that different Houses were engineered to be good at certain things, rather than have 'peaceful' and 'warlike' ones. We kept a lot of their old lore, only stressed that their planet was a small and insignificant backwater. The fact they almost conquered the galaxy twice was meant to feel like our two world wars, if Lichtenstein or Monaco initiated them, rather than the military and economic might of Germany.

In any case, the players brought the Mandalorians on board to the Systems Alliance faction, which was a really good fit, seeing as how they are both military elites who punch well above their weight and have a deep rivalry with the Jedi and the Republic. The Mandalorian PC has actually bonded well with our protocol droid, on account of both being an engineered species:

"Other races ask the important questions: 'Why are we here? Who made us what we are? What is our purpose?' You and I already know the answers to these questions."

16 minutes ago, Maelora said:

I'd just go with whatever you think feels better. Honestly, if you like the Karen Traviss version, go with that and just ignore 'canon'. The old EU is still there if you want to use it, or you can always do what George Lucas did and make stuff up.

As some posters above note (not very politely!) the Traviss stuff is hugely polarising, as some fans feel she made them overly-perfect, a kind of 'Mary Sue' race that was always more awesome and badass than everyone else, and she painted the Jedi/Republic in a bad light.

We introduced the Mandalorians to our campaign after the AOR group played 'Friends Like These'. The player who wanted to play a Mando character got the job of defining them, with my approval as GM. I don't think he strayed too far from the Karen Traviss vision. I made them a bit more like the protagonists of a Robert Heinlein novel, a society with unity and individual contribution to the whole, a bit like the Turians in Mass Effect. We reimagined them as a genetically-engineered near-human race, created by the Taung in millennia past, so they're a relatively young race (who outlived their creators). Their stats offer one rank in a combat skill or two Knowledge skills, so we figured that different Houses were engineered to be good at certain things, rather than have 'peaceful' and 'warlike' ones. We kept a lot of their old lore, only stressed that their planet was a small and insignificant backwater. The fact they almost conquered the galaxy twice was meant to feel like our two world wars, if Lichtenstein or Monaco initiated them, rather than the military and economic might of Germany.

In any case, the players brought the Mandalorians on board to the Systems Alliance faction, which was a really good fit, seeing as how they are both military elites who punch well above their weight and have a deep rivalry with the Jedi and the Republic. The Mandalorian PC has actually bonded well with our protocol droid, on account of both being an engineered species:

"Other races ask the important questions: 'Why are we here? Who made us what we are? What is our purpose?' You and I already know the answers to these questions."

This is also very helpful, and I’m likely going to use some of this in my own presentation to my players. I would love to give them the option of fleshing it out themselves but one of them is very passive and I worry that they might get run over in the process of being overly acomadating so I’ll do my best to mold it for them.

ive honestly gotten a lot of great advice on this post and more than I expected, I would love to discuss the polarization and why a lot of fans view them as Mary Sues when to me they just seem like a well fleshed out culture, but that would likely be better placed in its own thread in the general section, I don’t want to derail my own thread after asking someone else not to after all lol.

20 hours ago, Endersai said:

The thing is that the Traviss nonsense stuff was that it was so far removed from what Lucas intended that they needed to curbstomp it with the Clone Wars. That was an intentional realignment, because it was so contrary to Star Wars lore to date. So, if you're concerned about canon, Legends isn't it and there are one group of Mandalorians only - those seen in TCW and Rebels. Anything aligned to the Traviss works (so called "Travissty") should be assigned to a new racial or cultural group, not called Mandalorians.

16 hours ago, Tom Cruise said:

Have you seen much of the newer Rebels stuff set on/around Mandalore? Seems like it's swung back around to being a warrior culture of tight knit clans, just one that is firmly under the boot of the Empire. The pacifist era of Mandalore seems like it was fairly short-lived in Disney canon, effectively starting to peter out as soon as Maul took power, and being squashed completely after the Siege of Mandalore.

Tom is correct here. Rebels has got me to great lengths to reincorporate much of the Mandalorian culture that Karen Traviss created. Also, the FFG adventure module also helps reinforce this by specifically mentioning the divisions in the culture between the pacifist New Mandalorians, Death Watch, and Old Mandalorians. Rebels clearly seems to be establishing that the ways of the Old Mandalorians are returning to prominence on Mandalore.

30 minutes ago, Tramp Graphics said:

Tom is correct here. Rebels has got me to great lengths to reincorporate much of the Mandalorian culture that Karen Traviss created. Also, the FFG adventure module also helps reinforce this by specifically mentioning the divisions in the culture between the pacifist New Mandalorians, Death Watch, and Old Mandalorians. Rebels clearly seems to be establishing that the ways of the Old Mandalorians are returning to prominence on Mandalore.

This is honestly what I had been hoping for on a personal level for the serrries outside of what I’m going to do with the mandalorians in the game to acomadate my players.

i know that we will not see much of what was written in legends because the new movies have made that unlikely if not impossible but I would like the feel to be preserved and I’ve been hoping that we would see something where Fenn shysha still plays a role.

Also would I be able to get a location for that adventure your talking about?

28 minutes ago, Norr-Saba said:

This is honestly what I had been hoping for on a personal level for the serrries outside of what I’m going to do with the mandalorians in the game to acomadate my players.

i know that we will not see much of what was written in legends because the new movies have made that unlikely if not impossible but I would like the feel to be preserved and I’ve been hoping that we would see something where Fenn shysha still plays a role.

Also would I be able to get a location for that adventure your talking about?

It's Friends Like These.

25 minutes ago, Tramp Graphics said:

It's Friends Like These.

Oh that is perfect, even th description of the mandalorian humans goes a long way to helping me out in managing this, thanks a lot

1 minute ago, Norr-Saba said:

Oh that is perfect, even th description of the mandalorian humans goes a long way to helping me out in managing this, thanks a lot

You're welcome ?

I have been through the adventure. Though I found the alliance aspect of it rather uninspiring, I fould the material surrounding it pretty rich. Actually ended up spawning a seperate adventure that ended with the assassination of the Zygerian king himself on a promise I made to the Prince's Sword, it ended up in a epic 3 way battle between 40 people a side, it was bloody, brutal and bloody good fun. It's been the only time in this campaign that I felt the mando's started to gel with me.

Never been to Mandolore personally, we have had two characters that have been Mandolorian inclined throughout our campaign and we had assisted one Mandolorian clan liberate their leader from slavery. In exchange we can call on their services once for any job, a favour for a favour as the currency on the rim were.

well the thread i made in the general forum turned out way better than i thought it would be, and aside from it helping me understand people's opposition to mandalorians, primarily as a reaction to disliking their primary author, it has given me a lot of ideas for how to proceed with introducing this to my group. I'll need to write it up, but ill share it in this thread after i do.

I’d say “primarily a reaction to disliking their primary author” is a bit of an oversimplification (likely put that way for brevity’s sake?). There’s also a reaction to specifically how she handled them.

27 minutes ago, Nytwyng said:

I’d say “primarily a reaction to disliking their primary author” is a bit of an oversimplification (likely put that way for brevity’s sake?). There’s also a reaction to specifically how she handled them.

Yea I just thought that would be implied with what I said as well, like I said in the other post, the fact that the EU is no longer cannon means that we can use travis’s World building without being saddled with her characterization of the culture she helped build.

so i decided how i am going to arrange this for my group, and i am going to be borrowing much of what everyone has said from both the posts.

to start, i'm doing away with the fact that the entire planet is a desert, in part because i find it hard to believe that the republic would have been willing to commit that level of genocide under any circumstances, but also because it would complicate the narrative too much.

Instead i am going to have the differences between the factions be one of a cultural and religious split that took place amongst the mandalorians as @Vorzakk suggested, but i am not going to have it be a recent one, but rather one that has been brewing ever since the time of the old republic.

I am going to also take some from @Maelora's suggestion of the mandalorians being an engineered people, although not so much to the point that the Taung were also engineered. This is going to take the form of the taung being the indigenous peoples of coruscant that were forced off by the human settlers as is still canon, however i'm adding that what forced them off the planet was the use of a device engineered by the humans that gave them no choice, and also what decimated much of the terrain of the planet resulting in its eventual hyper development to make up for the lack of land that could support agricultural projects. this will have lasting effects on them by causing a genetic degenerations that would take generations to take effect.
In travis's blurb article about the mandalorians back in the official star wars magazine she noted that the humans of mandalore bear a striking genetic similarity to the non-mandalorians of concord dawn. I am going to have it that the Taung's genetic degeneration only started to be noticeable after thier colonization of Mandalore. The taung would have taken humans from concord dawn as captives and forced laborers along the way to the planet and they would have been living with them for more than a few generations when the genetic disorder became apparent.
Wanting to preserve his people's legacy the current Mandalore will have made a move to make sure it lasted in perpetuity, by changing their culture from a closed ethno-religious group to a semi-closed ethno-religious group, with the Mandalore being the first to adopt one of his human slaves into his family and teaching them their culture. This makes the most sense to me as one of the users in the other post pointed out that the mandalorians only respected strength, and humans being the only ones to have ever defeated them, and defeated them entirely as the case would seem, humans seemed like the most appropriate and pragmatic choice for the continuation of the Taung culture.
From this point on the humans of Mandalore would have started to undergo a selective breeding and genetic enhancement program organized by the Taung, and any human laborer on the planet would have known that they could gain their freedom by demonstrating the ability to become a part of the Mandalorian society, and over the course of centuries humans would have steadily replaced the Taung as the dominant species among the Mandalorian people, and things began to change. The Taung never intended for the inclusion to become pan species, or to allow humans outside of their chosen few into the fold, but they were no longer the ones deciding the direction that the Mandalorian peoples were heading.
After the events in the Knights of The Old Republic games, most of the Taung had died off, and the wheels of change that had been so completely slowed to a halt by the Taung insistence on rigid cultural conformity began to turn, resulting in the start of the Mandalorian bedouins who roamed through the galaxy, and caused changes on the home world that set in motion the events that are transpiring today.

Much happened in the time between, but the change of greatest significance during this time would have been the fragmentation of the clans, with some roaming the galaxy, creating new mandalorian settlements (Not to be confused with the new mandalorians) or as bedouins, while others on the home world separated into those who lived in villages and those who resided in cities that were modest at first, but then grew to grandeur. All three groups of mandalorians developed along different lines culturally, the bedouin nomads focusing on survival, the villagers focussing on developing agrarian knowledge, and the city dwelling Mandalorians developing their advancements in technology, but amongst all three groups the ideals of ingenuity, family, and warrior culture persisted.

around 1000 bby the city dwelling mandalorians discovered new deposits of the Mandalorian metal Beskar close to the southern regions of the the planet and moved their cities there in order to make the best use of it. In the coming centuries the city dwelling mandalorians began a process of remilitarization, and in 738 bby fear caused the republic to forget the aid that they had once been given by the once conquerors, leading them to launch a preemptive strike against them, resulting in the ecological devastation of a large portion of the southern hemisphere, rendering it a large desert expanse.
Not to be deterred the city dwelling mandalorians adapted, constructing large cube cities in defiance of the republic in order to continue to live upon the location of their former capital. This is when the New mandalorians, those people who decided that a new way of life was their only hope for survival emerged.

and the rest follows the legends wiki, with one exception, the television show maintains that the clan vizla comes from the cities, and according to legends deathwatch formed from the old mandalorians, which is problematic. for that reason, i'm going to change that tor vizla and his clan was originally from the cities and the new mandalorians but became enamored with the idea of the old mandalorian ways, causing them to leave the cities and attempt to integrate with the village mandalorians and bedouin mandalorians. his desires towards identifying with the mandalorian ancient culture will have placed him at direct odds with Jaster merrell's attempts to reform the villager and bedouin mandalorians in light of the ilthulian genocide. This would make it possible to maintain the connection between vizla and satine while also maintaining the origins of deathwatch.
This also plays nicely into @Genuine's headcanon of the mandalorian who tries to maintain those old legends to the point of them breaking (with there of course being those non-mandalorian posers out there as well)

after the mandalorian civil war when satine came to power, death watch would have been exiled as well as all mandalorians who lived off the planet, to prevent their corrupting influence, with the villager mandalorians, ( one half of the old mandalorians) would be under planetary arrest knowing that leaving would render them exiled.
for both the exiled bedouin mandalorians and the confined villager mandalorians the rise of death watch and the rule of the empire would be a bittersweet situation, as it would ease the restrictions placed on them by satines government, allowing them to once again move freely back and forth, but it would also come at a very dear price.

im planning on calling the sporadic campaign that my group will run under this canon the tale of two mandalore's, with the primary npc being phen sysha, otherwise known as the mandalore in secret in the campaign, which will hopefully end in the assistance of phen in the liberation of mandalore from the imperial remnant, although given player choices who can say what will happen
Also for the sake of our personal canon, jango will still be the adopted son of the former mandalore jaster mereel, meaning that he and the clone solider are technically mandalorians. (one of our players is a former clone who identifies with the new mandalorian ethos) Satin's comment in the series will be explained away by the fact that the new mandalorians no longer being a warrior culture ceased to practice cultural adoption centuries ago and now no longer recognize it as a way of becoming mandalorian, and also do not consider anyone subject to the exile to be actual mandalorians for that matter.

i think that about covers it thanks so much for all your help on this, i think my players will enjoy the canon i've worked up for them, oh and one last thing, i saw this video in the ship mega thread and i'm going to use it as inspiration for the possible side campaign that might take place on mandalore,

On 5/14/2017 at 8:04 PM, 2P51 said:

For the Homeworld fans

if i do this then the weapon used over 700 years ago by the republic against the mandalorians that reduced a portion of their planet to desert will be an ancient sith artifact given to them by the jedi, which would in turn be the dark side infused weapon originally used against the Taung by the humans of Coruscant millennia ago. It would have been in a state of dormancy and found equilibrium with the surrounding environment during the past 700 years, but Maul's and other dark side force users presence on the planet during the rule of the empire would have started to wake it up.

@Norr-Saba, one thing that needs to be clarified. It wasn't the Republic that devistated Mandalore. It was the Mandalorian people themselves through repeated clan warfare.