“Amazing,” Paul Murphy says, as soon as he picks up the phone. “Holy shit. You can quote me on that.”
Murphy had just watched two scenes from the second season of Andor, in which two people from the planet Ghorman explain what one character calls “the Tarkin massacre.” In Episode 4, “Ever Been to Ghorman?,” local resistance leader Carro Rylanz tells Syril Karn, “16 years ago, Grand Moff Tarkin killed 500 peaceful, unarmed Ghormans in the middle of that plaza.” And in Episode 5, “I Have Friends Everywhere,” hotel bellhop Thela confirms to Cassian, “It was Moff Tarkin. People wouldn’t clear and he wanted to land, and more of us kept coming. We thought there was safety in numbers. Who would land a cruiser on a crowd full of unarmed citizens? I was with my father. He was killed saving me.”
Bad guys have been blowing up planets, if not entire star systems, since the start of Star Wars, which one would expect to desensitize fans of the franchise to mass murder: What’s 500 deaths compared to millions, billions, or trillions? But there’s something antiseptic about a superlaser striking from afar. Violence on a sub-planetary scale is less abstract and more visceral. Thus, the mental image of a cruiser crushing peaceful protesters is, perhaps, “holy shit” worthy for any Star Wars watcher. But Murphy is uniquely entitled to be floored by this lore: He created that bit of backstory, 35 years before these episodes aired.
Murphy wrote 1990’s The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook, a companion to West End Games’ Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game that fleshed out the origins of the Rebel Alliance featured in the original trilogy (and now, Andor). The sourcebook included recollections from Alliance (and, later, New Republic) leader Mon Mothma about how she got Alderaan senator Bail Organa on board with the rebellion. At first, Mothma remembers, Princess Leia’s adoptive dad “was aghast at the very idea of attempting to overthrow the government he had given his whole life to. … It wasn’t until the Ghorman Massacre that he turned around.”
Murphy sketched out the massacre in a single passage:
Ghorman is a small planet located in Sern Sector, just outside the Core Worlds. The citizens of Ghorman were staging a peaceful demonstration against new taxes; they staged a sit-in at the spaceport, blocking all of the port’s landing pads. A Republic warship, arriving at the planet to collect the taxes, landed in spite of the citizens, killing dozens and wounding hundreds more. The commander in charge of the warship, one Captain Tarkin, was not prosecuted for the murders; in fact, he was promoted.
“After Ghorman,” the text concludes, “Bail realized that the Republic was dead.” Some of the details differ from the description of the incident on Andor—we’ll get to that—but the broad strokes are the same. “Remarkable,” Murphy says now, sounding a little choked up as he describes his “deeply moving” spectator experience. “Hearing my thoughts just get put out on a $300 million TV series … wow.”
More on ‘Andor’
Andor is a strikingly original piece of storytelling. Creator Tony Gilroy has been blunt about his lack of interest in (let alone love or reverence for) Star Wars, which has helped him make a show that feels fresher than the rest of the franchise’s recent output. Yet as a Star Wars project and a prequel to a prequel, it’s still set in an established universe and must abide by and incorporate certain rules and features of its fictional sandbox. Thus, it frequently refers to Star Wars people, places, and things—not for fan service’s sake, but because they’re preexisting parts of the scenery.
The presence of those Star Wars signifiers, despite Gilroy’s reluctance to rely on nostalgia, paradoxically makes Andor the strongest illustration of the fact that Star Wars storytelling takes a village, or a galaxy. Star Wars is a patchwork quilt made by a multitude of people who’ve picked up the baton, with varying levels of eagerness and knowledge, from George Lucas—and then from the generations of writers and other artists who followed him, filling in new patches of that quilt he created as they went. That some Star Wars ideas, Ghorman Massacre included, have endured for decades despite the obstacles placed in their past does, indeed, merit Murphy’s “holy shit”—or possibly a “poodoo.”
On April 25, 2014, a year and a half after Disney purchased the Star Wars franchise, Lucasfilm announced the formation of a “story group”—a Jedi Council for continuity that would “oversee and coordinate all Star Wars creative development.” As part of that new initiative, and to clear space for the sequel trilogy, the existing Star Wars “Expanded Universe”—which the announcement acknowledged had long “enriched the Star Wars experience for fans seeking to continue the adventure beyond what is seen on the screen”—would be banished from the canon and rebranded as “Legends.”
Of the thousands of works that then composed the corpus of Star Wars movies, TV shows, video games, books, comics, and more, only Lucas’s two trilogies, plus The Clone Wars, would be “immovable objects … to which all other tales must align.” With that, the Ghorman Massacre was wiped out, amid the dissolution of more than 35 years’ worth of world-building. Unless specified by Disney, it didn’t exist in the newly decluttered canon.
As Luke tells Leia in The Last Jedi, though, “No one’s ever really gone.” Even that 2014 notice assured readers that “while the universe that readers knew is changing, it is not being discarded.” The announcement noted that Rebels—an animated series created by obsessive Star Wars fans who were familiar with the off-screen lore—had already dipped into the Legends catalog on occasion. Subsequent scribes have followed in Rebels cocreator Dave Filoni’s footsteps, effectively forming an informal Alliance to Restore the Old EU. Not in its entirety, with all its attendant temporal contradictions and ’90s nonsense, but whenever salvaging something seems to make sense.
There’s a “Simpsons did it” aspect to Disney’s Star Wars, with the old EU playing the part of the prolific, influential sitcom. Han Solo’s origin story, explored on-screen in Solo? Expanded Universe did it. Emperor Palpatine’s return, which somehow happened in The Rise of Skywalker? Expanded Universe did it. Grand Admiral Thrawn, big bad of the TV and movie Mandoverse? Expanded Universe did it. (And, in fact, flourished because of it.) Countless characters, concepts, creatures, and crafts have made the leap from Legends to the current canon, whether through intentional homage or convenience and coincidence (because there’s nothing new under the twin suns). Just as Lucas pulled from Westerns, sci-fi serials, and jidaigeki when he wove the first strands of the Star Wars tapestry, today’s Star Wars storytellers often draw from the EU—even if, like Gilroy, they’re hardly trying to.
Lucasfilm’s 2014 post mentioned that Rebels had drawn ideas from “roleplaying game material published in the 1980s,” an allusion to the urtext of the old EU, which also gave us the Ghorman Massacre. Lucas set the tone for the franchise in his first films and dropped in tantalizing tidbits. West End’s Star Wars RPG, released in 1987 for the 10th anniversary of the first movie, picked up where Lucas left off and in some respects went way deeper.
I spoke to Murphy’s former boss, Bill Slavicsek—who edited and oversaw West End’s SWRPG and signed off on Murphy’s Ghorman Massacre idea—for a 2017 podcast about the “lean years” of Star Wars that followed Return of the Jedi. By the mid- to late ’80s, Slavicsek said, “Star Wars is kind of a fond memory. The toys have wound down, the comic books are just about to stop being produced, there's really nothing on the horizon.”
Enter West End, which snagged the mostly moribund Star Wars license and set out to make an RPG: Think Dungeons & Dragons, except with Star Wars and only six-sided dice. “When you make a movie—and at the time, there had only been the three movies made—you only have to build as much of the set as you're going to film,” Slavicsek said. By contrast, in a roleplaying game, “You can do anything you can imagine. And for that to work, I have to tell you not only what's beyond the farm, but what's beyond the rest of the planet. And for Star Wars, what’s in the rest of the universe. And very little of that material existed.”
West End convinced the Lucasfilm licensing group of the need to create it, and with the exception of some narrative third rails—Yoda’s species, the Clone Wars, stormtrooper identities, the finer points of the Force—the company had fairly free rein to do so. “Once they understood what we were doing, we were given a lot of leeway,” Slavicsek said. “They approved everything, so everything we did went through them. They would ask questions, we would make some tweaks, but with very few exceptions, they liked what we were doing, they let us do it. … We were allowed to ask George questions, if we had any, but they had to be on an index card and they had to be a yes or no question, because he was very busy.”
Many of the details that today’s fans take for granted were supplied by West End, which Slavicsek said produced about 1.5 million words’ worth of Star Wars lore in his roughly five years on the project. “I had to convince [Lucasfilm] that ‘Hammerhead,’ for example, was not a name for a species. That was an insult,” Slavicsek said. “So they let me create the name Ithorian, and Twi’lek, and Rodian, and on and on. Those are the kinds of things that you had to put in to build a world so that people could play in it. … We basically laid the foundation for what the world felt like, beyond just the names and the technology that we were naming. We were giving a structure to the place.”
In 1991, Timothy Zahn’s novel Heir to the Empire became a no. 1 bestseller, which sparked an explosion of Star Wars content that helped fan the flames for the prequels. “But when we were doing it, none of this had been done before,” Slavicsek said. “We were fans of the property, we were trying to do justice to the property, and I think it came through that way. … I think our success led them to realize they had more that they could do even without a movie coming out. … And I think that set the tone for what they did then starting in 1991, and they’re even still using it today.”
Slavicsek noted that a few fans of West End’s work, including Pablo Hidalgo and Leland Chee, are members of the Lucasfilm story group and “constantly refer back to the products we did for inspiration and ideas.” When those ideas make it to TV, Slavicsek sees them: “I watch all the new episodes … as soon as they come out, and I’m constantly seeing things that I created or helped create rise to the forefront of an episode. Whether it’s a name that I never thought would get said out loud or even so much as taking the plot from an adventure.”
Lately, he’s been seeing such things often on Andor. “A lot of the tone and intention in the Imperial Sourcebook permeates the series,” Slavicsek says now. “Same with The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook. The Ghorman incident is pulled whole cloth from the book, as well as the general tone and structure of the rebellion. And of course we laid down a lot of the first background details about Mon Mothma, including the name of her homeworld, Chandrila. It’s really gratifying to see our ideas continue to play a significant role in the Star Wars universe.”
Rebels borrowed one Slavicsek creation—the Imperial Security Bureau—that Andor has heavily featured. “I figured the Empire had to have something like the KGB or secret police, and that would make a good opponent for a group of recruits attempting to join the rebellion,” Slavicsek says. “I called them the Imperial Security Bureau, or the ISB for short.” The RPG’s first adventure scenario, “Rebel Breakout,” featured Mar Barezz, whom Slavicsek calls “the first ISB agent ever introduced. I wanted someone to taunt the players, to put a name and face to the otherwise faceless stormtroopers.”
Dedra Meero and her ilk are descended from Barezz, but Andor’s debts run deeper. Ghorman has become the second season’s central setting, and the Empire’s actions there are its inciting event.
Murphy, the (Ghor)man of the hour, first saw Star Wars days after it opened in the spring of 1977, when he was 17. Less than 10 years later, in 1985, he went to work at West End and soon found himself shaping the universe that had captivated him in the movies. “I didn't think we were going to get that license,” he says. “I thought it was so unlikely. But when we did, it was like a big party at the company. Everybody was really happy about it.”
When he was working on the sourcebook, Murphy knew he needed an event that would wake up the Senate to the Empire’s evil and spur a real rebellion. He considered some sort of “large-scale butchery” targeting nonhuman victims, which would highlight the “inherent humanness” and “obvious bigotry” of the Empire, but he worried that Lucasfilm wouldn’t approve it. So he settled on the Tarkin idea, which was “disturbing” enough. “I probably started therapy shortly after that,” he says. “It's such an amazingly evil idea. But it’s Moff Tarkin; of course he’s evil.”
Murphy explains the previously unreported origin story of Ghorman and its massacre. First, the name. “When coming up with names for fictional people or locations, I often corrupt names of existing people or items,” Murphy says. “‘Ghorman’ comes from the director Roger Corman, who made one of my favorite cult sci-fi films, Attack of the Crab Monsters.”
The real-life basis of the Ghorman Massacre, of course, is much more serious: the 1919 atrocity known as the Jallianwala Bagh, or Amritsar, massacre, perpetrated by British occupiers of colonial India. As Murphy recounts, “A large group of people gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh square in Amritsar, Punjab, to protest various British actions, violating a British curfew. Brigadier General R.E.H. Dyer surrounded the enclosed square with Gurkha and Sikh infantry, blocking off all exits, and then ordered the troops to open fire, killing hundreds. This appalling image stuck with me for a very long time.”
Like Gilroy, Murphy based the rise of the rebellion on extensive historical research. He read about Jallianwala Bagh in Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica trilogy of books about the British Empire, published in 1968, 1973, and 1978. The trilogy, Murphy says, “had a profound effect on my understanding of history and the damage caused by empire.”
After its appearance in the SWRPG sourcebook, the massacre was mentioned sporadically in subsequent Legends stories. It crossed into the Disney Star Wars canon in 2016’s Forged in Battle (a sourcebook for Fantasy Flight Games’ 2014 Age of Rebellion RPG), courtesy of writer Keith Kappel. “It was just an element on a list of potential ‘tragic backstory’ elements that I drew from the WEG game,” Kappel says. “I have copies of all those old books, and I'm a huge fan of the lore building they did. So when references make sense, I try to make them in sections I work on. The Ghorman Massacre felt like a major atrocity, something that gained galactic attention, so it made sense to include.”
When I suggested that this stray reference had changed on-screen Star Wars history, Kappel laughed and said, “More likely, the Disney+ Star Wars team just treats a lot of the WEG content like they treat Ralph McQuarrie paintings. … I think there’s just a lot of love for that original lore that maybe never had its day in the sun in a major piece of media. But if I somehow had some small role in reminding them of it, I'll take it!”
One way or another, Ghorman made its on-screen debut the year after Forged in Battle was published, in the Rebels Season 3 episode “Secret Cargo,” which was written by Matt Michnovetz. Secret Cargo’s events overlap with those of Andor’s latest mini-trilogy: The episode depicts Mon Mothma’s flight from Coruscant and her first public address as an open member of the Rebel Alliance. It also shows a snippet of her previous speech to the Senate, in which she says, “I name the Emperor himself for ordering the brutal attacks on the people of Ghorman.”
“Secret Cargo” dated those attacks to two years before the Battle of Yavin, which created some confusion because Legends sources published long after The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook had placed Murphy’s Ghorman Massacre much earlier in the Imperial era. Gilroy inherited and had to plan around this somewhat nebulous lore, though the canon left him leeway. He acknowledged Ghorman’s significance to Mothma and the rebellion in an interview in 2022 and also in Andor’s first season, as the series laid the groundwork for Ghorman to take center stage in Season 2. Mothma first invokes Ghorman in Episode 4, “Aldhani,” when she takes her husband, Perrin, to task for inviting his “fun” fascist friends to dinner: “Oh, are they? Are they fun? We should find some Ghorman guests for tonight and see how amused they are. Your fun friends just cut off their shipping lanes yesterday. Do you know how many will starve? Oh, perhaps we can laugh about it over the third course.”
In Season 1, Episode 6, “The Eye,” Mon Mothma: “There will be a fact-finding commission put in place this session, and it will prove that this is a boot to the throats of all Ghormans, who've done nothing more than request their basic rights. My bill assails the coarse and blatant domination of a peaceful and faithful ally.” And in Episode 8, “Narkina 5,” Saw Gerrera dismissed the Ghorman Front as “sectorists.”
In an interview with IGN this spring, Gilroy said:
In the five-year period that I have to curate … there's a few canonical incidents that I have to pay attention to, and one of them was always, there's a Ghorman Massacre. There's some confusion about different Ghorman Massacres. There's a Ghorman Massacre that leads Mon Mothma to give a speech in the Senate where she breaks away and she goes to Yavin. So that's on the menu. I have to deal with that. It's not identified in any canon what it is. We can make it up from scratch. We start to build it. We're going to build another really super-complicated, ornate planet with a language and an economy and all these things, and it's expensive to do that. It has to be over five episodes at least to make that worthwhile. It's a really significant part of our show. That's the construction of it. We want to make it as heartbreaking and dramatic and as essential and important as it can possibly be.
He succeeded—and, in the process, corroborated the Legends circumstances and timing of the Murphy massacre (which Wookieepedia now terms the “Tarkin Massacre”)—while fleshing out a new massacre on the same site, motivated by the Empire’s desire to extract raw materials for the construction of the Death Star. Before this week’s episodes, Murphy told me, “I'm now very concerned about [the Ghormans] because they're my creation. I think bad things may happen.” He wasn’t wrong.
Murphy left West End not long after writing The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook, and he hasn’t thought about Ghorman much during his decades-long career as a writer and designer of games of all kinds (including computer games such as Sid Meier’s Civilization). He wasn’t watching Andor and hadn’t heard about Ghorman’s role in the show until I tipped him off, which prompted him to binge the series. When he heard the first Ghorman mention, he says, “I had a big thrill of fame there, in my own head, anyway.” Since then, he adds, “Every time I see something about Ghorman, I shout to my dogs about it. … I just say, ‘That’s me, I did that!’”
Murphy says self-deprecatingly that he just “made some fictional people dead,” and he jokes that his epitaph could read, “Created the Ghorman Massacre for Star Wars.” He expresses his surprise about “such a peripheral and small, unknown thing” becoming “the biggest reference to my work” and likens this becoming his breakthrough to Boris Karloff becoming famous for playing monsters. Yet, he adds, “It clearly has gained a life of its own. I’m quite proud to see that it’s here, and it was shocking to hear them say those words”—especially because Andor presents Ghorman’s suffering at Tarkin’s hands as “a deeply moving and appalling story.”
Murphy’s first response to me, via email, began, “I am quite flabbergasted to learn that my offhand mention of a made-up massacre in The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook has made it into TV.” Of course, everything in Star Wars was made up by someone, at some point. Yet nearly half a century of collective creativity and passion has enhanced the outline on Lucas’s canvas, resulting in a setting and a saga that are vibrant and meaningful for many millions of fans. “I think it says something about the original creation that it can accept all of this and maintain its integrity,” Murphy says. “And I think it’s done that remarkably.”
