What the fuck is a KotOR?

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is an RPG developed by Bioware that was originally released as an Xbox exclusive game in 2003. You get to play your choice of scoundrel, scout, or soldier as you immediately find yourself aboard a failing ship having to escape to the Sith occupied planet below.

You and your haphazardly put together team of a career miliary man, a fourteen year old twilek and her wookiee BFF, my very favourite mandalorian, and the best mech droid get to save the Jedi who was in charge of your ship's mission before it was wrecked and narrowly escape the planet before you (SPOILERS!) get to become a Jedi yourself and go on a quest to follow in the footsteps of a dead Jedi-turned-Sith in order to figure out how to stop their apprentice who is terrorizing the galaxy.

There are a couple of other companions who join you (including a disgruntled grey Jedi and a very snarky assassin droid) as you save (or conquer?) the galaxy and maybe find love through the twists and turns of the story. =)

For better or worse, Knights of the Old Republic changed my relationship with the internet and fandom

Maybe a loaded statement, but I was a wee bab of 13 the first time I played KotOR (which was still six years after the game was released mind you!), and as an impressionable teen just discovering that their parents were not in fact omnipotent and that it was only their word preventing me from discovering new websites, I'd like to think that it turned out okay.

I was having a good time with the dialogue and getting to know all of the characters, but I was hooked as soon as I got to [MASSIVE SPOILER I WILL NOT INCLUDE], and I wanted more! And so in looking for that sweet, sweet content, I found fandom and shipping and cosplay and fanfiction and eventually dragon age and mass effect (which several of my friends have been less than thrilled about over the years, whoops).

but what about KotOR II, dryad?

A little different of a beast, but still no less loved in this house! in fact, mayhaps more loved than the first game at this stage of my life.

Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords was developed by Obsidian after Bioware offered them their Star Wars license and was released in 2004. Five years after the events of the previous game, you wake on a mining facility on Telos as the Jedi Exile, a force-sensitive who had served under Revan during the Mandalorian Wars but been wandering the galaxy since their conclusion. While there's no import system, through dialogue choices with other characters you're able to establish what your canon looks like in terms of who Revan was.

You narrowly escape the destruction as well as assassins of the Sith and droid variety (both hunting you independenly mind you!) with a droid, a scoundrel pilot, and a supposed Jedi to embark on a journey to track down the few remaining Jedi Masters in the galaxy in order to rally against the Sith who seem to have gained a lot of ground in the last few years. Other friends you (might) make along the way include a zabrak engineer who served with you during the war and has a rad cybernetic arm; a Sith apprentice serving the Sith Lord who is literally hunting you; a handmaiden who serves the Jedi Master who kind of hates your guts; and a sympathetic, no-nonsense bounty hunter. Some familiar faces from the previous game also show up to help the Exile, including the literal game mechanics, the droids, our career military man, and eventually even my favourite Mandalorian.

Everything kind of goes wrong for the Exile, and maybe that's why I love the game so much.

You end up stuck in a forcebond with a morally dubious, possibly-Jedi possibly-Sith before you make it out of the mining facility. You're constantly being hunted. Some of your companions also seem to have questionable intentions. Some of their intentions are not questionable at all even if they might be unwanted. You're confronted with the consequences of your actions. A LOT. Wait, how many factions are hunting you? And sometimes, you're gonna cause problems on purpose because regardless of your alignment, that's just who the Exile is.

blessed relics of kotor's past

  • GameBanshee's walkthroughs for Knights of the Old Republic and Knights of the Old Republic: The Sith Lords because even though I've played these games a lot, I forget things like puzzle solutions a lot.
  • The Old Republic which I didn't realize was still up! Don't think the main site has been updated in some years, but there's still a little life on the forums.
  • Archived pages of KotOR Fan Media for old fan community stuff. A lot of this community cross-posted to deviantART, LiveJournal, and/or FF.net back in the day before it went offline. There was a time when the mods were supposedly going to bring it back online to include SWTOR content, but that never happened. =(
  • For fanworks new and old, head over here