New Sith Brotherhood

"Nothing good ever happens in a Brotherhood."

- Jon Stewart

Star Wars-based roleplaying site focused on, as you might have guessed from the title, the wielders of the Dark Side and their doings. After numerous name changes, incarnations and server moves, the site currently resides here. The timeline of the site takes place seperate from canon, after a divergence point shortly after the end of the Yuuzhang Vong war.

Fanon and canon first diverged with the existence of a Coruscanti noble named Andor Vaklas, one of the Dark Side Adepts Emperor Palpatine used to manage the Galactic Empire. Following Palpatine's true death, Vaklas lead his followers to an Imperial stronghold in the Deep Core rather than join with the Imperial Remnant, where he discovered a cache of Sith Holocrons and taught himself the ways of the Sith, naming himself Darth Groznii, Dark Lord of the Sith. Multiple schisms and alliances followed in his wake as his followers grew and consolidated their strength, Groznii himself perishing early on and the position of Dark Lord being taken by Darth Xaos.

The true divergence from canon began with the foundation of the Obsidian Union, initially a secret alliance between a small number of planetary Governments dissatisfied with the Galactic Alliance. The New Sith Order joining their ranks, they the Union built up strength in secret and formally announced their existence following the end of the Third Schism. Branded an illegal insurrection by the Galactic Alliance and numbering considerably smaller their enemies, the Union nonetheless began its campaign against the Galactic Alliance, with the objective of the complete destruction of the Galactic Alliance and the Jedi Order and the liberation of the planets they occupied. Following the death of the (previously immortal) Darth Xaos and the betrayal and subsequent execution of member of the Dark Council Lady Vidia, the Sith Brotherhood reorganised itself again, establishing a new Code as the Union began working towards recovering planets that seceded during Lady Vidia's insurrection.

The site currently has a fairly small but slowly growing user-base, headed-up by the Leadership Discussion of Darth Xaos, the House Lords and two specially appointed members. It also boasts a fairly extensive fanon and an unfortunate history of being stabbed in the back by important members.

This website includes examples of:

 * Above Good and Evil: Most members of the Brotherhood consider themselves to be this. Those few that do believe in good and evil think that they’re the ones who decide what qualifies as which.
 * Ace Pilot: Reaver, Exolus and Ares are currently the Union's top guns, along with the elite NPC pilots of Razor and Wraith Squadron. There's a couple of pilots who also think they're this, but fail to grasp that a good fighter doesn't equal a good pilot.
 * Always Chaotic Evil: Soundly averted. Whilst there are certainly some despicable individuals around (mostly NPCs), the Sith in their current incarnation are considerably nicer than most of the Sith that have come before, and a lot more complex than the "power for power's sake" view of many prior generations.
 * Alternative Character Interpretation: In-universe, are these heroic crusaders fighting the tyrannic of the Galactic Alliance (usually claimed by people brainwashed by propaganda or brought over to the Union's side by GA action) or ruthless killers just trying to slaughter control of the Galaxy as most Sith do (most not in the former camp)?
 * Anti Hero: Varies from individual to individual, but definitely present.
 * Anti Villain: Again, varies.
 * Awesome By Analysis: Everyone of Knight level and above. Once you reach level 7 and are Knighted, you can't receive training anymore. Whilst you can (and often will) receive points in certain skills or powers as mission rewards, the vast majority of your skills from that point on are going to be learned and upgraded using skill points, perks, force power points etc. Everyone is effectively teaching themselves (to potentially enormous levels of skill in certain areas) from level 7 on.
 * Badass Army: Every Warlord gets one, if they want one. Darth Reaver has his Jaig Legion, Darth Exolus has his Imperial Self-Defence Force, and Darth Ares is currently creating his Unified Terrestrial and Stellar Defence Force.
 * Badass Normal: A lot of NPCs, especially personal lieutenants and minions. One of the main rules is that none of them can be force-sensitive, yet it's possible (though difficult) for them to go toe-to-toe with a player-character and then win.
 * Bad Future: Reflections in a Shadowed Mirror, an unofficial examining what would have happened if the Brotherhood had lost the Second Union Civil War.
 * Bigger Bad/Orcus On His Throne: The Force Ghosts of the dead Dark Lords. As of Darth Xaos’ funeral it’s official Brotherhood doctrine that one needs their blessing to be Dark Lord. Some are actively involved in furthering the Sith cause in the world of the living but most prefer to lounge about in Chaos waiting for sacrifice and worship.
 * Bad Guy Bar: The Condor Club. Leave your sanity at the door and take nothing inside as canon unless explicitly stated to do so.
 * Black and Gray Morality: Though they haven’t made too many appearances thus far, the One Sith make the New Sith Brotherhood seem a lot nicer by comparison. This also applies to any group of Sith who aren’t part of the Brotherhood.
 * Boring Yet Practical: The Tartan-class patrol cruiser is the workhorse of the Union, produced in huge numbers by the shipyards of Dac and not particularly good (or particularly bad) at anything other than shooting down fighters (which it does exceedingly well).
 * Brotherhood of Evil
 * Chekhov's Armoury: Dol Gorath, a hidden world containing an arsenal of weapons and war machines left over from a bunch of Sith smashed by the Union's (at the time) Chiss Allies during the First Schism. Darth Ares and Lady Hecate uncovered it and the large quantities of vehicles and weapons it housed in its cache, a major boon to the severely under-equipped Federal Military.
 * Church Militant: The New Sith Brotherhood itself. Pretty much any Order of Sith, actually.
 * Command Roster: Ignoring individual ships, Union Military Hierarchy goes thusly.
 * Political hierachy, meanwhile, goes like this.
 * Conservation of Ninjitsu: An actual mechanic with the minions that the Lords gain; the smaller the amount of minions you have compared to how many you can have, the better the minions. If you have, say, 6 minions out of a possible 55, those 6 are going to be extremely skilled individuals, whereas if you have all 55 most of them will simply be cannon fodder.
 * It's also generally safe to assume that if you're going up a large amount of enemies you're going to be okay, whereas if you're fighting just one or two, you're in for a tough one.
 * Contractual Boss Immunity: Flips around a bit, but usually if a character has some sort of extremely powerful attack, be it a high-level Force Power or a Combination Power, it's safe to assume it won't work. At least, not straight away.
 * Cool Ship: Being that this is Star Wars, there's a lot of these; however, special mention needs to go to the Ascendancy-class Destroyers. Based off of an entry to Eve Online's design-a-ship contest, they're basically flying railguns designed solely to tackle larger targets (up to Cruiser classification, with escort).
 * Crapsack World: Debatable at this point, but if things keep going the way they are people will either have a choice between the Galactic Alliance, which is slowly but surely turning tyrannical due to the war with the Union, or the Union itself, which is run by Sith and has legalised areas such as drug, arms and narcotics trades, and member planets are run as the planets see fit, meaning they can freely turn into dictatorships and no-one will do a thing.
 * Darker and Edgier: NSB has some peers in the Star Wars Extended Universe in terms of darkness and edginess, but not many.
 * Face Heel Turn: These are Sith. Regardless of their current incarnation, it comes with the territory. One of the worst, in-character and out, was Lady Vidia's, and all of the schisms in the site's history, both IC and OOC, have been caused by a backstab of some kind.
 * From a Certain Point of View
 * GM Post Incompetence
 * Evil Is One Big Happy Family: Though the Brotherhood would likely take issue with this phrasing, this is the goal of the New Sith Brotherhood’s founding document: the Code of Brotherhood.
 * Evil Versus Evil: There have been five Civil Wars so far, spurred on by real life events. See below.
 * Enemy Civil War: Or, more accurately, Protagonist Civil War; lots of those. The New Sith Order went through four different Sith Schisms before being reformed into the New Sith Brotherhood. There was nearly a fifth when Darth Byss planned to seize power in the aftermath of the Fourth Schism but, in the fashion of a true Starscream, the plan fell flat on its ass. And nearly *again* when Lady Vidia tried to replace Xaos (whose death she had helped arrange) but failed to gain sufficient support amongst the Sith to truly cause a Schism. There have also been two Obsidian Union Civil Wars, the first of which was the same conflict as the Fourth Sith Schism while the second was the same as the second almost-Schism.
 * Enemy Mine: The roots of the Obsidian Union came from Xaos convincing several planets that the Galactic Alliance wasn't all that great. Things snowballed from there.
 * Equal Opportunity Evil: Humans aren’t the majority in the Brotherhood, just the largest minority. In the Union as a whole it’s doubtful that they’re even that. The current Dark Lord not only isn’t human but is a member of a species that only recently returned from the brink of extinction. This is a big change from how things were under Palpatine.
 * Evil Is Not Well Lit: Both averted and played straight. New Bethrezen has lights which imitate natural sunlight…yet its Sith Temple never seems to get any of it.
 * Evil Overlord: The Sith in general, from almost all viewpoints.
 * The Lords in particular. Whereas most classes get physical (combat, force etc) skills at higher levels, Lords tend more towards influence and command, gaining minions to control and developing influence over planets of their choosing. Warlords can probably be considered the epitome of the examples on the site, commanding armies of their own as well as holding high positions within the Union Hierarchy.
 * He Who Fights Monsters: The Galactic Alliance. The emergence of the Obsidian Union meant that the Second Galactic Civil War never happened, and whilst this accelerated the happening of several events (such as Natasi Daala's appointment to Chief of State), the War with the Union is slowly causing the Alliance to turn into the tyrants the Union claim them to be.
 * Grey and Gray Morality: The Union-Alliance conflict.
 * Knight Templar: The Inquisitorius is an organization of Jedi hunters given carte blanche to slay or convert their foes by any means necessary. The highest members can even call down an Exterminatus, the mass execution without trial of a particular group of a planet's inhabitants the inquisitor suspects have fallen under the sway of the Jedi.
 * Peoples Republic of Tyranny: The Obsidian Union’s idea of freedom basically boils down to the Sith being free to dominate the Galaxy.
 * The Galactic Alliance is slowly but surely turning into this as well (and actually fits the trope better as its full title is the ‘Galactic Federation of Free Alliances’).
 * Plot Armor: The basic rule for killing Canon characters is that their killability is directly inversely proportional to how many people have heard of them. Big name characters like Luke, Han, Leia, C-3PO and R2-D2 are unkillable (they can be beaten in combat though), whereas most other canon characters, whilst much tougher than the average opponent depending on their rough popularity, are mortal.
 * Ringworld Planet: New Bethrezen, an enormous torus located in the orbit of a remote gas giant in a, strategically and resource-wise, worthless solar system that serves as the headquarters of the Obsidian Union.
 * Retcon: A couple of minor ones here and there to make things more sensible, such as retconning the flagship of a former Sith Lord (Darth Nefarious) from an Imperium-class Ultra Star Destroyer (ridiculously implausible fanon ship) to a much more reasonable Sovereign-class Super Star Destroyer.
 * The Heretic: The Brotherhood applies this to anyone who claims to be a Sith but doesn’t agree with its principles. These individuals in turn apply it to the Brotherhood.
 * The Man Behind the Man: Sith Architects are the epitome of this trope: as opposed to Warlords (who focus on leading armies) and Priest-Kings (who take a religious angle), Architects have huge webs of contacts, influences and resources across the Galaxy, running their operations from the shadows and controlling their puppets using whatever proxy method they need.
 * Then there is, of course, the Dark Lord himself, and arguably the Dark Side Spirits in this Fanon as well (Xaos certainly could be argued to still be running the Union from beyond the grave).
 * The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: The Obsidian Union; what else would you expect from revolutionaries led by Sith?
 * The Starscream: A whole truck load. Most recently there was Lady Vidia; the wife of Dark Lord Xaos who ensured that Luke Skywalker got the information he needed to slay the immortal Xaos. She assumed she could then seize control of the New Sith Brotherhood and Obsidian Union but failed due to being unable to attract any allies amongst the Brotherhood.
 * Darth Nefarious only slightly fits this trope since he declared himself Dark Lord in defiance of the Sith Council rather than betraying a single Big Bad. The treachery and eventual failure of his power grab means he does fit it somewhat, however.
 * Darth Raziel and Darth Unrivaled could be seen as Well Intentioned Extremist variations of this trope. Convinced he had achieved an understanding of the Force beyond that of other Sith, Raziel declared himself the leader of a new group called the Sith’ar and sought to wipe out “unenlightened” Sith. His followers consisted of his apprentices, Darth Unrivaled, Unrivaled’s apprentices and much of the Union’s military (up until then commanded by Unrivaled). The conflict initiated by this is variously called the Sith’ar Heresy, the Fourth Sith Schism and the First Union Civil War and lead to the reformation of the New Sith Order as the New Sith Brotherhood.
 * However, the character from NSB’s metaplot that fits this trope so well as to make its namesake seem trustworthy is Darth Byss. A Yuuzhan Vong with an absurdly low Presence Stat of three, Byss never made any secret of his desire for absolute power. When the Code of Brotherhood was issued after the Fourth Schism in order to turn the Sith into one, big, happy evil family it rubbed Byss’ (type four) Social Darwinism the wrong way. He immediately set about planning a take over. Said plan was immediately uncovered and he was forced to flee with his followers in tow. They then founded their own Sith group which very quickly fell apart due to infighting.
 * The members of the first Sith Council averted this trope by being successful in their overthrow of Darth Groznii (except for those who would go on to have it applied to them later).
 * Villain Protagonist: They're Sith. They might debate the villain part, but Word of God says the dark side is evil.