Dark Force Rising is my favorite of West End Games’ Star Wars RPG sourcebooks for Timothy Zahn’s trilogy of novels. There was a lot going on in the book, and that means a ton of interesting material to be converted into game terms.

Which is swell and all, but let’s talk about Grand Admiral Thrawn, the more than memorable villain of the trilogy.

To my eye, Thrawn represents the very best of what an expanded universe could offer Star Wars. Here was a complicated villain unlike any we had encountered in the films, most of whom are broadly drawn and a bit silly (save Grand Moff Tarkin, whose technocratic fascism is perhaps even more frightening forty years later). Thrawn is an intellectual of staggering ability, an enthusiastic student of both art and war who thinks in the mode of Sherlock Holmes. A blue-skinned, red-eyed alien, it is testament to his singular abilities that he defied the institutional racism of the Empire’s military apparatus and rose to one of its highest ranks. And, as the custodian of the Noghri assassins, he inherited some of Darth Vader’s legacy.

Something that is often misunderstood about the Expanded Universe, even by folks who worked on it: the good stuff developed naturally in order to tell stories that were different from those of the films. Thrawn exemplifies this. He’d be a strange inclusion in any of the movie trilogies, and yet still feels indelibly at home in that far, far away galaxy.

It’s no wonder he immediately became the subject of fascination for legions of fans, overshadowing the Zahn novels to the degree that they are referred to as the Thrawn trilogy now – an odd development for books meant to be a triumphant return for beloved characters from the films. I suspect that when Disney jettisoned the Expanded Universe out of its canon, fans were most upset at the loss of Thrawn, though it was no real surprise that he eventually resurfaced, in a reimagined form, in the Rebels cartoon.