Civil War and Death Watch
The Crusades broke Mandalore. The planet itself transformed into a barren, barely hospitable wasteland, while Mandalorian and Jedi alike perished in climactic battles of the conflict on worlds like Malachor. But even then, conflict was never far from the Mandalorian people—and thousands of years after Mandalore’s great crusades, in the waning decades of the Republic, the planet was once again torn apart by war. This time, however, it was an internal conflict rather than external. Factions divided between martial traditionalists, who sought to preserve Mandalore’s warrior culture, and Neo-Mandalorians, who rejected military conflict in the name of neutrality and interstellar independence. The sides engaged in bloody conflict for years to decide the fate of their people, with the Jedi directly intervening on behalf of the Neo-Mandalorians to safeguard their leader, the young duchess Satine of House Kryze, from repeated assassination attempts.
Satine’s Neo-Mandalorians emerged victorious in the civil war, and while Kryze became the leader of Mandalore’s new ruling council, the remaining martial traditionalists were exiled to Mandalorian colony worlds—including the scion of House Viszla, Pre, who reclaimed his family’s ancestral weapon and used it to forge the remnants of the traditionalists into a new guerilla faction: Death Watch.
