Hugo Bartyn

Hugo Bartyn, a Human male born circa 583 BBY, was an employee of Outer Rim Oreworks, a great corporation that intended to exploit the gases and minerals of several planets. Bartyn worked as a scout for the exploratory branch of ORO, discovering uninhabited worlds that ORO could settle and develop, and from which ORO would gain a significant profit while doing so.

A big-game hunt aficionado, Bartyn secretly tracked and killed several sentient species of locals, both to satisfy his desire for difficult sport and to clear areas that ORO would otherwise be unable to strip-mine appropriately. Several high-ranking officers at ORO knew of this unpublished fact but, as Bartyn was a useful employee, ORO simply turned a blind eye.

After working for ORO for decades, Bartyn began to feel the ill effects of time in his health. Around five hundred years before the Battle of Naboo, Bartyn and his team discovered, scouted, and mapped the Lamaro system, in the Outer Rim Territories. The third planet, the 85%-aquatic Lamaredd, was rich in minerals, metals, and life—including seafood and a native sentient species, the primitive Menahuun.

Bartyn developed a scheme. He wanted ORO to claim Lamaredd so that they could mine the planet, and at the same time he wanted to stay there and export seafood, living the best years of his life as an entrepreneur. As such, he contacted the Senate Mining Bureau to claim Lamaredd even before reporting his discovery to ORO. He then sent a report to ORO, giving optimistic perspectives to the mining company—but omitting any reference to the seafood as a possible source of income. Bartyn also used all of the resources he could wager to be named Administrator of the planet and to obtain some terrain for himself in a bay near the mines, instead of being assigned a new scouting mission. Lastly, Bartyn noticed that while Lamaro was little-known, its coordinates were present in the star charts used for cartography. The crafty Bartyn managed to delete the coordinates of Lamaro from most of those maps.

ORO sent droids and engineers to build the main mine, ORO Mining Station LM0228, along with the needed infrastructures. Meanwhile, Bartyn and his personal circle of associates hunted the locals along the coasts. To do so, Bartyn built a command center in the mine, intending to use it as his headquarters.

After a time, the settlers believed that they had annihilated the coastal-dwelling Menahuun— in reality, the coastal tribes of Menahuun had joined other tribes in the forest and retreated toward the north. Bartyn suspected the truth, although most of his friends and bosses believed otherwise. Once the construction had been finished, Bartyn bribed several people so that the droids would stay there. ORO provided Bartyn with several hundred mining droids and left Bartyn alone for several years, waiting for him to turn a profit from their investment. As the mines were completely automated, Bartyn gave little attention to the individual droids, mere machines that continued performing their tasks.

Bartyn had complex plans. He contacted some Neimoidian traders who wanted to dismantle an old, three-kilometer-long Hoersch-Kessel LH-3010 capital freighter, and bought the ship with all of his personal savings. Using his droids, he placed the ship in the bay, blew up several parts of it with mining gear, and performed many customizations to create spaceports, piers, and habitats. After several months, the freighter became Bartyn's personal dock town, from where he intended to fish all of the seafood. Eventually, it would become known as Bartyn's Landing—the first person to use this name was never recorded, but the team's MD medical droid MD-0C6 maintained that it had been his idea.

In less time than expected, Bartyn mined enough for ORO to profit from his activities. ORO suspected that Bartyn was performing immoral or illegal activities, but they refused to ask any unwanted questions, fearing that it could affect the proceeds. At the same time, Bartyn was keeping for himself part of the money he was supposed to give to ORO.

Although Bartyn bought 209 old Ubrikkian 222 heavy fishing trawlers from the Hutts, and had already provided his droids with expensive software about seafood processing, he still needed sentient fishermen to provide him with the catch. He sent "recruiters" to the planets Champala, Dac, Iskalon, and Naboo to attract settlers from the local amphibious species with empty words of new lives. Once the Chagrians, Gungans, Iskalonians, Mon Calamari, and Quarrens were in Lamaredd, Bartyn destroyed their documents and tried to turn them into indentured servants or slaves. Most of the Iskalonians refused, and they were sent to their deaths in wooden boats. The survivors, later known as the First-Wavers, were kept in the outer area of Bartyn's Landing, which eventually became known as The Ring. Many of these First-Wavers squabbled with each other, sometimes reaching violence, and Bartyn also restricted the assignments of food and living space, awarding his best sailors with inexpensive prizes.

Bartyn's side company, Bartyn Gourmet Delicacies, became his greatest source of income, selling seafood that was in great demand particularly among Alderaan nobility, Hutts, and dilettantes. Bartyn, satisfied, saw his town becoming an important trading center. He became fabulously rich, and in a few years he had free time to personally explore the local wild areas, hunting any remaining beasts. He tried to wipe out the water-dwelling Gulletbeasts, a threat to his sailors, but he visibly failed at this.

Bartyn then secretly obtained claims to most of the key planetary locations, taking them from ORO, and established outposts on many of the greatest islands. When a number of Quarren wanted to settle in a different fishing town, Bartyn was in position to lease them some land in the other side of the bay so they could form The Shoals. Bartyn also manipulated paperwork so that he would control the budget of ORO's Security and Law Enforcement, meaning that ORO would pay the salaries of the Security Chief or constable, and the Security Chief's Second, which in turn allowed him to provide a number of liberties to his servants and established "dens of vice."

Only too late did ORO discover that Bartyn had turned Lamaredd into his own fief. ORO sent a security force to take control of the spaceport, and Bartyn allowed them to do their work. He nonetheless took measures so that these ORO employees would answer to the local Administrator, meaning himself, which allowed him to hide his seafood exports from ORO. As Bartyn continued to provide ORO with earnings, the company took no other punitive measures against him.

Circa 517 BBY, Bartyn considered his sailors to be his most important assets. As several non-Humans had proved themselves in the craft, Bartyn had promoted seventeen of them, including the Chagrian female Sirrik Olyeg, as unofficial skippers of trawlers. These individuals created an unofficial information network among boats for security reasons. Then, Olyeg began to use it subversively, convincing the other captains, including some Humans, to take active measures against Bartyn's oppressive government—even if the captains themselves were less oppressed than the workers at the Landing. Olyeg's revolutionary words used fishing metaphors as a cryptography system, to avoid being detected by any of Bartyn's supporters or monitors.

Olyeg planned an unexpected work stoppage, when the ships were on the high seas. Bartyn could not use his remaining sailors to track the missing ones, as he needed at least some of them fishing and the terrain was too big. Rumors extended about the Gulletbeasts, the Menahuun, and even the Sith being behind this, but eventually the truth became known in the Landing, much to Bartyn's chagrin. The workers felt that Bartyn was to blame, and they stopped attacking each other to join the strike. Having pending orders from some customers, including some Hutts, Bartyn resorted to threats and violence, but despite his workers' opposition, he could not kill them. As such, Bartyn was defenseless.

Then, Bartyn was offered a meeting with Olyeg, first chair of the Sailor's Union. Olyeg convinced Bartyn to increase the space provided to non-Human citizens, and even to lease them acres of terrain outside the spaceport—although Bartyn specified that the leasor was responsible for cleaning the property of any natural threat, including predators, a measure that would improve the security at the Landing. Bartyn was forced to cede Jotsen's Island, the second greatest continent of the planet, as an "alien homeland"—which was renamed "Little Mon Cal."

After this meeting, the Union had become a force to be considered, but Bartyn himself had solved many mid-term and long-term problems, so he was nevertheless satisfied about the results. He also ordered his people to murder Olyeg.

By circa 499 BBY, Bartyn, now eighty-four years old, had married and formed a family, including his oldest son Traggat and oldest daughter Tria Bartyn. He also moved his operations to his old command center in the mine, and eventually sealed it up. At that point, several trawlers were lost in the sea, several babies were kidnapped reportedly by "beasts," and strange artifacts appeared in the jungles around the Landing, prompting several ghost stories to circulate.

Bartyn decided to unravel this mystery and track those responsible. He formed a thirteen-person team, including Traggat and the survivors of his original ORO team; took many weapons; and ventured in the jungle. He was never seen again, although further investigations found proof of the team's violent and gruesome death at the hands of primitives or animals that had broken down their tissues, partly eaten their food and their livestock, and taken away their electronic gear.

Tria inherited Hugo Bartyn's rank as Administrator, although she discontinued her father's oppressive policies, thereby gaining the respect of the non-Humans. After her death, the ORO Administratorship was successively inherited by other descendants of Bartyn, at least until 29 BBY. Bartyn's original trawlers were still active for five centuries after his death, although the personal conditions of the non-Humans changed, with achievements that would have been unimaginable in his days—including a great number of fishermen that were not affiliated with the Bartyns.

Bartyn's name was still remembered in many senses, and the highest mountain near the Landing was named Mt. Hugo after him. Having annihilated the native Menahuuns, Bartyn was a well-known name on Lamaredd in the remaining centuries, both among the non-Human inhabitants of Bartyn's Landing and among the surviving Menahuun, who had nicknamed Bartyn "the Slayer."

In 29 BBY, the tale of Bartyn was discovered by a team sent by the Jedi Council. These people also found an anti-Human terrorist group that desired revenge for Bartyn's perceived crimes.

Hugo Bartyn had a great skill in his areas of expertise. As an officer of ORO's exploratory branch, he could value a planet in terms of useful resources for mining companies, or for other kinds of companies, in little time. He was also an excellent manager and a cunning negotiator, and was familiar with bribery, blackmail, and the use of favors.

Bartyn was a speciesist, believing that many non-Human species were "little more than animals," particularly if a species had no space travel technology. In the case of primitive species, Bartyn was known to enjoy hunting them, one of his favorite activities. He was not beyond ordering the cold-blooded murder of a person he had talked to, as exemplified in Sirrik Olyeg. He also enslaved numerous non-Humans. Nonetheless, when his non-Human "employees" proved their worth, Bartyn was not beyond rewarding them.

Bartyn was ambitious when talking about money, and was courageous, sometimes beyond his skills. Even at a venerable age, Bartyn decided to go in a dangerous hunt, putting his own life and that of his son in risk when he considered that he should do so.

Hugo Bartyn was created by writer Cory J. Herndon and was featured in the article Bartyn's Landing, with special prominence in the section "The Tale of Hugo Bartyn." The character was also mentioned in the role-playing adventure Reckonings. Both Bartyn's Landing and Reckonings were published in the magazine Star Wars Gamer #7 (2001). The roleplaying guide Ultimate Alien Anthology (2003) included a text on the Menahuun species that indirectly mentions Bartyn by re-telling some of his actions. All of these sources were supplements to the Star Wars Roleplaying Game published by Wizards of the Coast. Bartyn was later mentioned in The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia (2008).

• "Bartyn's Landing" — Star Wars Gamer 7
• Ultimate Alien Anthology
• The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia