Tund/Legends

Tund was a verdant terrestrial planet and potent Force nexus situated upon the north-eastern borders of the Open Sea in the Centrality sector. A remote colony world of the Sith species first settled around 27,700 BBY, Tund saw use as a prison for heretics and exiles prior to the collapse of the old Sith Empire, and subsequently came to serve as both the headquarters of the Sith-blooded Sorcerers of Tund and the adopted homeworld of the Toong species. The planet was destroyed in 5 BBY by a biological warhead released by the Croke Sorcerer of Tund Rokur Gepta.
Tund was first discovered and colonized around 27,700 BBY by a group of exiled Sith belonging to the Kissai priest caste. These outcasts were banished from the Sith homeworld of Korriban for interpreting the death of Sith King Adas during the Infinite Empire's failed invasion as a sign from the Force to reject the dark side. Fleeing Sith space aboard a Rakatan ship equipped with a Force-powered hyperdrive, these Kissai followed the Force to the hidden world of Tund in the Centrality sector, remaining in seclusion for millennia.
Later generations of Sith belonging to both the ancient Sith Empire and old Sith Empire used Tund as a penal colony for the imprisonment of their own heretics and exiles. Following the 6900 BBY conquest of Sith space by the Human-blooded Dark Jedi Exiles, Tund's pureblooded Sith were joined on-world by disparate groups of half-breed Sith-Human colonists. While many of these half-breeds were outcasts banished from the Sith Worlds, a number of Sith refugees fleeing the Republic counterinvasion that followed the Great Hyperspace War likewise settled Tund in the aftermath of the Sith Empire's collapse.
These disparate traditions eventually coalesced to form the Sorcerers of Tund, a sect of Sith-blooded Force users who denied the existence of the light and dark sides of the Force. Though these Sith remained isolated on their remote world for millennia, they were joined in 45 BBY by Toong refugees fleeing the devastation of Toong'L. The Sorcerers persecuted their new neighbors, but were themselves rendered extinct by the actions of one of their own. Rokur Gepta, a Croke who had infiltrated the group to learn its secrets, killed the Sorcerers and destroyed Tund with a biological weapon in 5 BBY to ensure their knowledge remained exclusively his, bringing an end to the Sith colony that had persisted for over two dozen millennia.
==Description==
Tund was the sole planet of the Tund system, a remote star system situated upon the north-eastern borders of the Open Sea in the Centrality sector of the Outer Rim. Tund rotated on its axis every forty-eight standard hours and orbited its sun, a star likewise called Tund, every one thousand, seven hundred and seventy local days on average. A relatively standard-sized terrestrial world, Tund possessed a planetary diameter of twelve thousand, one hundred and ninety kilometers.
For much of its history, Tund was a verdant Force nexus possessed of a potent connection to the Living Force generated by its rich ecosphere and diverse assortment of biomes. The planet's shadowy jungles and dark forests teemed with a disparate multiplicity of lifeforms, ranging in form and variety from thick-leafed vines to hard-shelled arthropods. Tund's planetary topography was characterized by expansive prairies and flatlands punctuated at length by plunging cliffs and escarpments, some of which played host to waterfalls marking the termini of Tund's rivers.
However, following Rokur Gepta's destruction of the planet in 5 BBY by means of an electromagnetic torpedo and biological weapon, Tund was reduced to a barren, radioactive wasteland devoid of all life. Apart from a small section of the planet protected by Gepta's system of force fields,The New Essential Guide to Characters Tund's atmosphere was highly poisonous and contaminated with deadly radiation from the fallout.
==History==
===Pre-Republic era===
During the pre-Republic era prior to the rise of the Rakata Infinite Empire, the Sharu, a humanoid species hailing from Rafa V, dominated the region of space that in subsequent millennia would be known as the Centrality, circumscribing the remote world of Tund within the bounds of their ancient civilization. Though the Sharu were believed to have voluntarily abandoned their holdings and withdrawn to their ancestral homeworld in fear of the Celestials, the legacy of the Sharu endured on Tund, where Old High Trammic—a trade language descended from the original tongue of the Sharu—continued to see regular usage in subsequent millennia.
Sometime prior to 27,700 BBY, the Rakata discovered Korriban, the ancestral homeworld of the Force-sensitive Sith species. In an effort to secure the allegiance of the Sith, the Rakata plied and seduced the Sith King Adas with gifts of dark-sided knowledge and technology, teaching the Sith King to create his own holocron for the storage of his teachings. Though the Sith had long engaged in sortilege, civil war, and sentient sacrifice, they led spiritually serene lives, never once doubting or questioning the critical role conflict played in their kratocratic society. It was only with the introduction of the Rakatans' methodic malice that the Sith first fell to the dark side.
In 27,700 BBY, the Rakata attempted an invasion of Korriban after their concerted attempts to seduce Adas failed. Though repulsed by the dark side-fueled fury of Adas and his Sith,Book of Sith: Secrets from the Dark Side the Rakata successfully killed the Sith King during the conflict's final days, sending the Sith into disarray as Sith Overlords made war upon each other in their attempts to capitalize upon the power vacuum left in Adas's absence. During this period of strife and turmoil, a group of Sith of the Kissai priest caste began to publicly interpret the dark side's failure to save Adas from death as a sign from the Force to renounce the dark side and reject the teachings of the Rakata. Branded heretics and banished from Korriban,The Jedi Path: A Manual for Students of the Force these exiles repurposed a captured Rakatan ship equipped with a Force-powered hyperdrive and set out from their homeworld into the unknown, trusting in the Force to guide them to a suitable refuge. They also carried their writing scripts, known as High Sith and Common Sith, with them.
Their protracted perambulations eventually brought them to Tund, a verdant Force nexus lost upon the north-east borders of the Open Sea in the Centrality sector. These Kissai and their descendants remained in isolation on the remote world for millennia thereafter, establishing a unique pureblooded Sith society and identity distinct from those of the mainline Sith. Convinced by their interactions with the Forceful Rakata that all sentients were Force-sensitive, the Tundan Sith espoused a monist Unifying Force philosophy that rejected the traditional light side/dark side dualism of conventional philosophy and instead declared the Force to be a single, indivisible cosmic entity without sides or aspects, a conception they called "the Unity."
===Manderon Period===
In 6900 BBY, a group of mostly Human-blooded Dark Jedi known as the Exiles arrived on Korriban, having fled from their defeat in the Battle of Corbos at the end of the Hundred-Year Darkness. In the remote backwater of the Outer Rim, they discovered the Sith species, who in the intervening millennia since their legendary Sith King Adas's death had expanded the borders of their ancient Sith Empire outward from their homeworld to the surrounding Sith Worlds of the Stygian Caldera. The Exiles ascended to the rulership of the primitive Sith, employing Sith alchemy to merge their blood with that of their subjects. The resultant hybrid race of Sith-Humans subsequently came to constitute the majority of the reorganized Sith Empire's population in the centuries that followed.
Though most of the Sith Empire's holdings were concentrated in the Stygian Caldera, the Sith species had previously colonized a handful of outlying worlds prior to the Exiles' arrival, and had at some point rediscovered the pureblooded Sith enclave on Tund. In her 6900 BBY chronicle, the Jen'jidai Sorzus Syn noted that the Sith employed Tund as a penal colony and de facto prison to which outcasts, exiles, and heretics were banished. The Exiles' reorganized incarnation of the Sith Empire continued this practice in the years that followed, and Tund's population of pureblooded Tundan Sith was eventually joined on-world by disparate groups of half-breed Sith-Human outcasts banished from the Sith Worlds.
The Sith Empire met its end during the Great Hyperspace War of 5000 BBY, a failed invasion of the Galactic Republic by the forces of the Jen'ari Naga Sadow. A joint Republic-Jedi counterinvasion of the Sith Empire followed,Star Wars: The Old Republic Encyclopedia ultimately leading to the near-eradication of the Sith species as civil conflict, famine, and disease wracked the Stygian Caldera. Though some Sith continued to oppose the Republic occupation in the Sith Worlds on the battlefield, many Sith-blooded refugees fled to outlying worlds as diverse as Dromund Kaas, Thule,Geonosis and the Outer Rim Worlds Ambria, Vjun, and Tund, persisting in isolation in remote corners far from the Republic.
===Post-Manderon period===
During the post-Manderon period, the disparate groups of Sith present on Tund coalesced into a single cultural entity, eventually giving birth to a unique sect of Force users known as the Sorcerers of Tund around the time of the Third Great Schism.The Essential Atlas maintains the Sorcerers arose after 5000 BBY, with The New Essential Guide to Characters additionally clarifying that the group's inception occurred around the time of one of the Great Schisms. The only Great Schism that occurred between 5000 BBY and the rise of Karnak Tetsu, the earliest Sorcerer of Tund named in Legends canon who lived around the time of the Dark Wars of 3955 BBY, was the Third Great Schism of 4250 BBY. In keeping with the traditional kratocracy that characterized the prevailing cultural mores of the Sith species, this order of Force-sensitives eventually came to rule Tund as a magocratic cabal in the centuries that followed its founding.
The unique society of the Sorcerers of Tund combined the disciplines of science, ontology, and magic, leading both outsiders and the Sorcerers themselves to view their refined power in the Force as something akin to arcane wizardry.The Dark Side Sourcebook Like their pureblooded progenitors of old, the Sorcerers of Tund likewise rejected the light side/dark side duality of the Force and proclaimed that the omnipresence of "the Unity" as evidenced in all sentient lifeforms illuminated the deceptions of duality and multiplicity as espoused by more conventional Forceful schools of thought. The Sorcerers' cosmology portrayed life—and by extension, the Force—as perfectly balanced and harmonious and considered the existence of true opposites as little more than an illusion.
Though Tund's population of Sith had managed to avoid detection by the Jedi during post–Great Hyperspace War counterinvasion, the Order eventually took note of the Sorcerers of Tund during the post-Manderon period, recognizing their refined magical powers as a form of Force-sensitivity. The Jedi occasionally sent emissaries and Jedi recruiters to Tund in the hopes of persuading the Sorcerers to eschew their trappings of magic and mysticism, embrace a more conventional understanding of the Force, and join the Jedi Order. Such conversion attempts were repeatedly rebuffed by the Sorcerers, who believed that only those of Sith blood could grasp the Force's true nature.
===Inter-Sith Wars period===
Unable to successfully convert the Sorcerers, the Jedi High Council eventually opted to simply leave the Tundan Sith in peace to continue studying the Force in their own fashion. The Order as a whole subsequently came to view the Sorcerers of Tund as just another Force sect akin to the Jal Shey and Zeison Sha, and were content to send occasional observers to Tund to ensure that the Sorcerers did not delve too deeply into the concerted study of the dark side. Despite their differences of belief, the Jedi Order and the Sorcerers of Tund managed to peacefully coexist without tension for some time.
Around the time of the Great Sith War, a Sith Offshoot named Karnak Tetsu, to whom was applied the epithet "the Maleficent" in subsequent years, ascended to the rulership of the Sorcerers of Tund. An enigmatic figure possessed of great power in the Force, Tetsu's tenure as leader of the Sorcerers was a reign of terror characterized by the study and practice of a malevolent style of Force manipulation. The Force sect as a whole gradually shifted towards the dark side under Tetsu's rule. In response, the restored Jedi Order, having rebounded from near-extinction in the aftermath of the First Jedi Purge and Dark Wars, condemned the Sorcerers and recategorized the group's hermetica and associated doctrine as unqualified heresy.
===Great Peace of the Republic===
Over time, as wars with the mainline Sith factions continued to dominate the Jedi Order's attentions, fewer and fewer Jedi observers were sent to Tund to monitor the Sorcerers. The last recorded visit to Tund by emissaries of the Order occurred more than a thousand years before the Battle of Yavin, sometime prior to the defeat of Skere Kaan and the end of the Ruusan campaign. Tionne Solusar, in her 40 ABY compendium titled Jedi vs. Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force, posited that the Jedi may have sought to enlist the Sorcerers in their fight against the Sith, though the nature of their final visit to Tund remained a subject of speculation alone.
The Jedi Order eventually forgot about the existence of the Sorcerers altogether by the time of the Great Peace of the Republic, leaving the Sith-blooded Force users in isolation on their backwater world. However, the Order of the Sith Lords, a vestigial remnant of the mainline Sith that persisted in secret through the Golden Age of the Old Republic, were aware of the existence of the Sorcerers and familiar with the history of prominent members like Tetsu.Darth Plagueis Though Darth Plagueis, the presiding Dark Lord of the Banite Sith, dismissed the Sorcerers as a "cult," his apprentice, Darth Sidious, recognized the Sorcerers' religious teachings as archaic interpretations of ancient Sith doctrineThe New Essential Chronology and harbored a desire to possess the Sorcerers' secrets for himself.
In 45 BBY, a pair of comets struck the planet Toong'L, poisoning the world and forcing its native population of Toongs to relocate offworld. Many refugees of this species ended up colonizing nearby Tund, grateful for its small population and jungle biomes. Culturally reticent towards outsiders by nature, the Sorcerers of Tund did not take kindly to the presence of non-Sith on their ancestral homeworld, and spent the next several decades persecuting the Toongs. The Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, secretly Darth Sidious, readily capitalized upon the outrage their actions generated in the Galactic Senate. Encouraging the public perception of the Sorcerers as self-important charlatans, Palpatine used the persecution of the Toongs as a pretext to intervene on Tund, though the agents he sent to the planet instead secretly scoured the world for hidden Sith knowledge.
===Imperial Period===
Despite his awareness of the fact that the doctrine of the Sorcerers of Tund was based on ancient Sith teachings, the newly crowned Emperor Palpatine dismissed the possibility of recruiting the Sorcerers to serve as Dark Side Adepts of the Galactic Empire, considering instead deploying the Imperial Navy to blockade Tund and confine the Sorcerers to their homeworld. Nonetheless, the Emperor retained a strong interest the Sorcerers and the acquisition of their hoarded dark-sided lore during the Imperial Period.
Sometime prior to 5 BBY, Rokur Gepta, a snail-like Croke hailing from the Unknown Regions, managed to apply his species's natural powers of illusion and shapeshifting to a successful infiltration of the Sorcerers. The Croke studied the group's Sith teachings and co-opted its secrets for his own purposes during his tenure on Tund. Once he had learned all he could from his teachers, Gepta unleashed a biological weapon and an electromagnetic torpedo upon Tund. The resultant green fire generated by the weapons eradicated all life on the planet and poisoned its atmosphere, rendering the irradiated husk of Tund uninhabitable.
Either in exchange for Tundan secrets or out of respect for the Croke's abilities, Emperor Palpatine eventually named Gepta the presiding Scrivinir of the Centrality and provided him a decommissioned Imperial cruiser named the Wennis with which to consolidate his control over the remote region of space. The Croke often returned Tund in the days that followed, meditating in a small enclave protected from the radioactive atmosphere by a system of force fields. Though the Croke harbored ambitions of overthrowing Palpatine and ruling the galaxy in his stead, Gepta was eventually killed in single combat with Lando Calrissian less than a year after Tund's destruction, bringing an end to the ancient order of Force users to which he had belonged.
===Post-Imperial era===
In 38 ABY, the world was mentioned in the xenolinguist Doctor Milanda Vorgan's article "The Written Word: A Brief Introduction to the Writing Systems of Galactic Basic."
==Inhabitants==
Immediately prior to its destruction at the hands of Rokur Gepta in 5 BBY, the planet Tund boasted a total population of eighteen million sentients. The species mix primarily consisted of approximately thirteen million, one hundred and forty thousand Toong (seventy-three percent of the population); one million, two hundred and sixty thousand pureblooded Sith (seven percent); and a diverse assortment of other species numbering approximately three million, six hundred thousand beings (twenty percent).
The pureblooded Sith residents of Tund were the descendants of several disparate groups; namely, the original Kissai heretics banished from Korriban after the death of Sith King Adas, the outcasts exiled from the ancient Sith Empire prior to the arrival of the Dark Jedi Exiles, the half-breed Sith-Human exiles who settled Tund during the era of the old Sith Empire, and the various Sith-blooded refugees who flocked to the planet in the years following the Great Hyperspace War. Of these Sith, the Force-using Sorcerers of Tund constituted the magocratic cabal that ruled the planet for much of its modern history. The Sorcerers presented themselves as magic-wielding wizards to the outside galaxy, and spent much of their time at their monastic enclaves in concerted study of the Force and in the perfecting of dark-sided rituals.
Towards the end of its recorded history, the planet hosted a sizable population of Toong who settled Tund in the aftermath of their homeworld's destruction. Drawn to the planet for its small population and jungle environment, the Toong found themselves in conflict with the native Sith-blooded Tundan natives, but persisted on the planet despite their persecution at the hands of the Sorcerers of Tund. Among the more notable members of this Toong diaspora was Ben Quadinaros, a male Toong who participated in the 32 BBY Boonta Eve Classic podracing championship on Tatooine.
Though Old High Trammic—a language derived from the ancient tongue of the Sharu—saw regular use as the common trade language of the Centrality sector, a number of other diverse languages were likewise spoken with some degree of regularity on Tund prior to its destruction. While the Sith-blooded population of Tund primarily spoke the ancient Sith language, the Sorcerers of Tund likewise employed Tundan, a language that also saw usage by certain offworld Force usersKnights of the Old Republic Campaign Guide and poets. The Toong population primarily spoke their native language Toongese.
==Locations==
An isolated planet far from the major population centers of the Centrality, Tund was a shadowy world largely unprobed by the greater galactic community. During its protracted tenure as the headquarters and homeworld of the Sorcerers of Tund, the planet's surface played host to a number of isolated monastic enclaves in which the Sith-blooded Sorcerers studied the mystical arts and searched for a better understanding of the galaxy and the powers that held it together. These structures, similar in purpose to the ancient Sith library-temples that once dotted the Sith Worlds,Tales of the Jedi Companion often took the form of inverted conical towers overlooking the planet's varied forests and escarpments.
With the planet's subsequent colonization by Toong refugees fleeing the destruction of their homeworld Toong'L in 45 BBY, the planet likewise came to a host a number of Toong settlements scattered throughout the planet's jungle biospheres. Toong structures on Tund generally took the form of multi-level circular buildings crowned with green domes, adorned with copious arches and a multiplicity of windows, and surrounded by decorative fences and gates.
==Behind the scenes==
The PC game Star Wars: Rebellion mistakenly places Tund in the Xappyh sector. In early scripts of Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace, the podracer pilot Slide Paramita was said to have originated from Tund. However, Paramita was ultimately cut from the script and Tund was repurposed to serve as the homeworld of the Toong podracer pilot Ben Quadinaros.
The question of Tund's status as a formal member world of the Sith Empire has never been directly addressed by any Legends source, despite a multiplicity of reference materials both confirming some degree of affiliation between the two groups and corroborating the Empire's usage of the world as a penal colony for Sith-blooded outcasts and heretics. However, Daniel Wallace, co-author of The Essential Atlas, indicated in private correspondence that though he was unsure whether he personally drafted the lore behind the Atlas entry on Tund, it is his unofficial opinion that Tund was likely a formal member world of the Sith Empire. His personal take on the subject of Tund's status seems to be tacitly corroborated by the various other references to Tund and the Sith Empire scattered throughout the Atlas contents.
==Appearances==
*Star Wars: The Old Republic 
*Star Wars: The Old Republic Cartel Market
*Darth Plagueis 
*Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace junior novelization 
*Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon 
*Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka 
*Star Wars: Rebellion
==Sources==
==Notes and references==
Category:Centrality planets
Category:Devastated planets
Category:Sith planets
Category:Terrestrial planets
Category:Tund system