Thanks to the miracle technology of Handwavium, we've just kicked off an all new game where some KotOR-era characters got bounced to right at the start of the Clone Wars. Once they've gotten their feet under them and extracted themselves from the kick off game, odds are they they will probably go "Geeze, what has happened in the last 3K years?" and go find a terminal and login to Space Google. So my question is - how complete do you guys think the historical records have been over the last thee millennium?

Obviously there will be gaps in the knowledge - there's probably been a couple burnings of the Library at Alexandria here and there over the years - so while a great many details have been lost, I imagine that most of the historical records survived - at least a high level.

Oooh, here's a thought: I wonder how much data on the Sith remain intact? The Empire was a large, powerful political and military entity, and that's something that's not going to vanish without a trace. . .. but, wouldn't modern Sith (or post-Rule of Two, operating from the shadows Sith) do their level best to scrub their existence from the record? You're not really operating in the shadows if anyone can edit your Wiki entry, are you? The Jedi would probably have pretty good records about their mortal enemy, but the man on the street? Probably not so much.

I wonder if Sith agents might have caused an 'accident' in certain wings of the Library of Obroa-Skai and then maybe dropped a virus into the systems that flags research queries?

Really, this thread is me just thinking out loud, sorting out ideas in my head. But I'd love to get your guy's two cents worth. How would you handle out-of time characters playing catch up?

Im gonna go with the Jedi have a vested interest in A. keeping that knowledge away from people and B. having that knowledge. SO I thinke like today many people who no real knowledge of history. I have a reasonably solid understanding of history and i have large gaps that are smaller than most people who dont even know current events.

There is no internet in Star Wars. You can find archives and libraries all over the galaxy, all trying to keep information relevant to him. You may even set up a campaign for that, collecting the required knowledge from all over the galaxy. Social encounters, military base raids, all can be done

4 hours ago, Rimsen said:

There is no internet in Star Wars. You can find archives and libraries all over the galaxy, all trying to keep information relevant to him. You may even set up a campaign for that, collecting the required knowledge from all over the galaxy. Social encounters, military base raids, all can be done

The HoloNet (at least in Legends) functions like the Internet.

As to the main question, I will again be giving Legends answers since the new canon isn't particularly interesting thus far so I'm not exactly up-to-date. History (even in the sourcebooks) prior to 5000 BBY is documented but it's a blur, but fortunately that isn't the part in question. If they're interested in what has happened since the KotOR era, you get a mix of high and low quality records with plenty of conflicting records and reports. The stuff between around 4k BBY and 2k BBY is quite well documented in universe - you have the Great Galactic Wars (SWtoR) and the 17th (presumably also the 16th) Alsakan Conflict.

The time between 2k BBY and 1k BBY is far murkier; the New Sith Wars period saw devastation and plague on a scale that wouldn't be seen in Legends canon at all again (with perhaps the Vong War coming close) with the Galactic Population at the end being around 1/3 what it was at the beginning. Part of this is because of the sheer devastation (entire planets were depopulated by war or Candorian Plague, part of this is the battle tactics of the New Sith Wars which involved both the Sith and Republic targetting hyperspace beacons and HoloNet transceivers to different effects: the Republic did so to slow the Sith advance in some regions, while the Sith did it to cut off areas from the wider galaxy and spread terror) and part of this is that much of the Sith movement happened in what was (at the time) the Unknown Regions and Wild Space, beyond the purview of people interested in keeping records.

1k BBY to Original Trilogy era is well documented too, the Golden Age of the Republic being a period of relative stability. One important feature is that with history is that history is that records are written by people with biases. There is obviously an objective truth to events (this happened, this did not happen) but that isn't always reflective of what records, books and especially the internet have. The further back you go the more events, names, motivations, etc become jumbled, blurred and lost and just having access to highly-advanced technology won't change that and in Star Wars we have a shadowy cabal called the Sith that has been operating for a thousand years in secret to twist events to their benefit. The surviving records probably are only reflective of the surface events of what happened (for example, Palpatine shifts the Great Galactic War, from a first-strike Sith attack against an unsuspecting Republic into a War of Republican aggression, so the overarching event (the war) still happens, but the context is very different).

As for the Sith, they are in the popular history of the setting an extinct religious cult that had a bunch of wars with the Jedi (and the Republic that supported them) centuries before anyone who is alive today was even born (caring about it would be like a modern Italian having a problem with a modern Iranian because the Roman Empire had a war with the Parthian Empire in 225 AD). They've been rehabilitated a little since the Rise of the Empire though, mostly because you know... the Emperor is one of them (in secret though). But people are the same everywhere and theres probably some HoloNet conspiracy forums where people are making wild claims like the Clone Wars were engineered and the Sith are controlling the whole galaxy Illuminati-style).

One final point: the galaxy of the movies is far larger than the galaxy of the KotOR games: many of the worlds which appear in the movies and we are intimately familiar with as such were not even explored in the KotOR-era let alone settled.

The last thousand years of peace for sure have great documentation for the large scale galactic events of the senate and such.

Before that? It really really depends on which subset of lore you subscribe to. If you still use some big picture EU elements, then the KOTOR era stuff has been wiped from teh galaxy (not unlike how the Emperor himself reduced the Jedi and their abilities to legend throughout much of the galaxy in under 20 years. Sith have taken over the galaxy a few times, and they tend to rewrite history as they see fit. So really, anything before the 1,000 years of peace is somewhat suspect and open to debate.

When I worked on Nexus of Power, I had the task of discussing some planets made famous by things that were no longer canon, largely because of their ties to the three KOTOR games and associated comics. My solution in universe was to present a lot of that history as unreliable. The specific vehicle I used was to say that much of that history is from an ancient epic poem (Qel Droma) and an ancient mythology (Revan). Because it's a single source, much of the galaxy doesn't take it as true history, even if some parts are verifiable (think of how many different opinions there are about say, the Bible, and how much is historical fact, embellished fact, or fiction). So this suggests that the major events of stuff over 3,000 years old at least is all really shoddy, record-keeping wise.

But really, I guess my answer is the galaxy knows as much about history as the story you're telling needs it to know. If you want the lives of the characters in the past to be well known historical fact, make it so! If you want them to be legends that have had video games, comics, and TV shows made about their lives (to hilarious degrees of false embellishment, perhaps), feel free to do that. If you want the galaxy to take what the PCs know as historical fact for "fanciful fairy tales", because that works best for your story, do that! It's really up to you.

On 7/25/2019 at 9:47 AM, BipolarJuice said:

The HoloNet (at least in Legends) functions like the Internet.

I have almost 80% of the novels and no, it's not the internet, it's more close to a global communication system. Data is always sent through short distance, direct connections or physical datacards. The computer systems are not digital.

Only global datastream is the holocalls, which seems to be like old phones, where the center connects you to your address, but it's done through holorelays

6 minutes ago, Rimsen said:

I have almost 80% of the novels and no, it's not the internet, it's more close to a global communication system. Data is always sent through, short distance, direct connections, datacards. The computer systems are not digital.

Only global datastream is the holocalls.

Correct. It isn't an internet, it's closer to a peer-to-peer system, but it definitely has internet like functions. The old HoloNetNews on StarWars.com mentioned forums such as what we are using right now.

If you can make a holonet call from a backwater like Florum to a seedy bar in Coruscant, it's effectively the internet. It can be open, monitored, restricted, or service denied, but it performs the same function. I don't see the point in belabouring how it's different.

Well, how they get their historical summation isn't really all that important. I'll just plunk them down at one of the Great Libraries of the Galaxy and call it good.

I hadn't considered that the Jedi would probably have a vested interest in keeping data on the sith suppressed. That makes pretty solid sense - even if we know that prohibiting knowledge makes people want that knowledge even more (That whole "Lets all Zerg Rush Area 51" thing anyone?) That'll make things fun when they're reading along, getting the good juicy stuff, and they run headlong into "[REDACTED BY REQUEST OF THE JEDI ORDER]"

And I do love the idea of chunks of history coming from your Beowulf-like epic poems and the writings of the Ancient Republic version of Homer. I'm so using that!

In our games we do use the Holonet as some sort of (early, sometimes unreliable) Internet. Of course, then the Holonet became the Imperial Holonet, and cencorship and data control and restricted access and the likes suffered. Like the Internet in some real world countries.

And as @KRKappel said, sort of, sometimes we change in-universe facts because of that unreliability. Stories told (and exaggerated over time), before they were actually recorded (which can also be changed over time, and during translations).

I have never seen the Holonet used for transmission of anything that wasn't a holographic video message of some kind. Well, other than the old EU, where it was just the Internet.

Star Wars doesn't even have seem to have proper modems, nevermind wi-fi. If R2-D2 wants to hack a computer, he needs physical access to the computer, or at least a computer in the same building/starbase connected to it.

18 minutes ago, micheldebruyn said:

I have never seen the Holonet used for transmission of anything that wasn't a holographic video message of some kind. Well, other than the old EU, where it was just the Internet.

Star Wars doesn't even have seem to have proper modems, nevermind wi-fi. If R2-D2 wants to hack a computer, he needs physical access to the computer, or at least a computer in the same building/starbase connected to it.

Rogue one does show wireless transmission of data. But not through the Holonet.

Lobot is connected to Besbin network from what i can tell.

Rogue One and Rebels show that off-world communication requires collosal transmitters.

Lobot just seems to have a phone (regular, 80's era phone) worked into his cyber brain.

On 7/24/2019 at 8:15 PM, Desslok said:

Oooh, here's a thought: I wonder how much data on the Sith remain intact? The Empire was a large, powerful political and military entity, and that's something that's not going to vanish without a trace. . .. but, wouldn't modern Sith (or post-Rule of Two, operating from the shadows Sith) do their level best to scrub their existence from the record? You're not really operating in the shadows if anyone can edit your Wiki entry, are you? The Jedi would probably have pretty good records about their mortal enemy, but the man on the street? Probably not so much.

Alternatively, knowledge of the Sith and that they are long-extinct could work in their favor. Even Council members were skeptical of the continued existence of the Sith, and I think that's exactly what they'd want.

"Could he be a Sith?" "Hah, what? Everyone knows they're extinct." That sort of reaction seems like it would work in favor of the Sith - where the only people who believe that the Sith might still be around are those who also believe that Coruscant is flat.

2 hours ago, micheldebruyn said:

Star Wars doesn't even have seem to have proper modems, nevermind wi-fi. If R2-D2 wants to hack a computer, he needs physical access to the computer, or at least a computer in the same building/starbase connected to it.

It could just be a case where the Wi-Fi is password protected, but the physical line is not.

Of course Star Wars, and thus the basis for all its technological level, was rooted in out 1977 and a couple of years following that, when 5 and 6 came out. Part of the technology is pure sci-fi (man-portable energy weapons, FTL starships of which most seem to be able to enter and leave atmosphere under their own power, etc.) and some Star Wars tech nog seems outdated to us (such as the computers) because we have evolved that tech beyond what Lucas and friends came up with then.

On 7/25/2019 at 6:54 AM, whafrog said:

If you can make a holonet call from a backwater like Florum to a seedy bar in Coruscant, it's effectively the internet. It can be open, monitored, restricted, or service denied, but it performs the same function. I don't see the point in belabouring how it's different.

The holonet seems even more restricted and less available under the empire. Still it seems like you could slice something remotely, there are plenty of canon examples: finding where the bounty placed on Darth Vader originated, or when the Imperials highjacked Chopper. You can also transmit data over vast distances like from Scarif to an orbiting ship.

1 hour ago, Eoen said:

The holonet seems even more restricted and less available under the empire.

Like China...the economy still requires the increased efficiency in communication, but they're watching everything and restricting much. Interruptions in data flow, especially to international partners, kill business and the economy, so it's a balancing act.

1 hour ago, Eoen said:

Still it seems like you could slice something remotely, there are plenty of canon examples

People confuse "remote access" with "the internet", but they aren't the same thing at all. I think most of the people claiming "Star Wars doesn't have the internet" have no idea how the actual internet works. The "R2D2 had to be on-site" argument doesn't prove anything, because the same is true today: most "hacking" is social engineering combined with insider information and/or coordination, so most hacking is effectively on-site IRL. The days of just logging into NORAD with your dial-up modem are long gone.

1 hour ago, whafrog said:

Like China...the economy still requires the increased efficiency in communication, but they're watching everything and restricting much. Interruptions in data flow, especially to international partners, kill business and the economy, so it's a balancing act.

People confuse "remote access" with "the internet", but they aren't the same thing at all. I think most of the people claiming "Star Wars doesn't have the internet" have no idea how the actual internet works. The "R2D2 had to be on-site" argument doesn't prove anything, because the same is true today: most "hacking" is social engineering combined with insider information and/or coordination, so most hacking is effectively on-site IRL. The days of just logging into NORAD with your dial-up modem are long gone.

Not just like China, the great firewall of China was built by Google and other US defense contractors, that technology was R&D'd in China but it's somewhat everywhere now.

The internet is just a network connecting local networks together, organized in a domain hierarchy, and it accommodates world wide communications traffic. The Holonet isn't the internet, it's a hyperspatial FTL communications network which allows for real time (or close to) transmission galaxy wide, it probably does bridge millions of planetwide (internets) or semi-planetwide communications networks to other ones. Just as in real life there are many other computer networks not hooked up to external communications networks, such as power grid controllers, government networks, military networks, black sites, criminal enterprises, etc.

There has to be a deliberate policy of isolating networks on purpose for security reasons; it would be bummer to loose your entire library due to slicing. Also since AI is real in the Star Wars galaxy there are a lot of potential firewalls and monitors on the networks.

2 hours ago, Eoen said:

The internet is just a network connecting local networks together, organized in a domain hierarchy, and it accommodates world wide communications traffic. The Holonet isn't the internet, it's a hyperspatial FTL communications network which allows for real time (or close to) transmission galaxy wide

I don't see a practical difference in game terms. Replace "local networks" with "planetary networks", and "world wide communications traffic" with "galactic communications traffic" and you end up with the same thing. "FTL" doesn't have anything to do with it.* It doesn't really feel like we're arguing, so ...

There are a few reasons I react to "Star Wars doesn't have the internet". First is that nothing that happens in Star Wars invalidates having an "internet"...all that "on site access" stuff is perfectly reasonable and happens in our world. Second is more a question of how much time you want to spend at your table policing this "flavour". If you want to do it, go for it; but other people seeking advice might want to focus more on story rather than policing flavour, and shouldn't feel like they have to toe some imaginary line.

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* Your definition of what the internet is isn't really accurate anyway. It's not "connecting local networks", it's really just a set of communication protocols between servers, regardless of whether those servers are connected to a physical wire, or broadcast and read the electromagnetic spectrum, or some FTL broadcast technology. Communications protocols includes some form of addressing so that packets can get to their intended recipient, and so that traffic in a local network can be kept discrete from public networks.

11 minutes ago, whafrog said:

* Your definition of what the internet is isn't really accurate anyway. It's not "connecting local networks", it's really just a set of communication protocols between servers, regardless of whether those servers are connected to a physical wire, or broadcast and read the electromagnetic spectrum, or some FTL broadcast technology. Communications protocols includes some form of addressing so that packets can get to their intended recipient, and so that traffic in a local network can be kept discrete from public networks.

I wasn't here to argue, or explain the internet. "organized in a domain hierarchy" is basically what you just said without bothering with the technical details of our internet. The Holonet is capable of doing everything the internet does, it's just that the star wars civilization purposely moved away from having everything networked for a variety of reasons like sophisticated computer viruses, and security. There's also the real world reason; that the model for in universe computing is 1970's computing practices.

20 minutes ago, whafrog said:

There are a few reasons I react to "Star Wars doesn't have the internet". First is that nothing that happens in Star Wars invalidates having an "internet"...all that "on site access" stuff is perfectly reasonable and happens in our world. Second is more a question of how much time you want to spend at your table policing this "flavour". If you want to do it, go for it; but other people seeking advice might want to focus more on story rather than policing flavour, and shouldn't feel like they have to toe some imaginary line.

I don't believe I ever said star wars didn't have the internet, they just have an FTL communications system on top of it (meaning the holonet isn't the internet analogue it's above it or bridges multiple networks). The Holonet is probably a common term for the whole apparatus, but it's properly the Holonet transceiver network itself. There's even large distributed databases like the galaxy wide BOSS ship registry.

2 minutes ago, Eoen said:

I don't believe I ever said star wars didn't have the internet

I don't get why you're responding then. We aren't arguing. However, "There is no internet in Star Wars" appears above. That's what I'm responding to.

1 minute ago, whafrog said:

I don't get why you're responding then. We aren't arguing. However, "There is no internet in Star Wars" appears above. That's what I'm responding to.

So your responding to @Rimsen but in a response to me?

Generally yes, but also to some statements you made.

On 7/25/2019 at 9:02 PM, micheldebruyn said:

I have never seen the Holonet used for transmission of anything that wasn't a holographic video message of some kind. Well, other than the old EU, where it was just the Internet.

Star Wars doesn't even have seem to have proper modems, nevermind wi-fi. If R2-D2 wants to hack a computer, he needs physical access to the computer, or at least a computer in the same building/starbase connected to it.

Rogue one does show wireless transmission of data. But not through the Holonet.

Lobot is connected to Besbin network from what i can tell.

But i dont think they have internet the way wr think. I suspect their AI controlled firewalls and strong encryption likely is why you need to be on site. The networks are probably like castles really hard to get in. But if you are inside easy to move around. As all the security is strongly border oriented. Wireless is likely strongly protected