A female Human Force-sensitive, Tyrnia Masak grew up in the slums of Nar Shaddaa, the moon of the planet Nal Hutta. With her mother working as a servant for a minor crime boss, Tyrnia used her strength and large size to her advantage and fought in the streets in order to provide additional money for her family. However, her mother still fell into a large debt to a Quarren crime lord named Durrsk, who noticed Tyrnia Masak's fighting prowess and took her as payment for her mother's debt. Believing that Masak could become an excellent fighter, Durrsk gave her to his fighting master for combat training so that she could fight in illegal gladiatorial matches. A Force Adept, the fighting master noticed Masak's Force potential and trained her in both unarmed combat and in using the Force.
Seeing potential in the "muscular, ferocious Human girl," Durrsk placed Tyrnia under the tutelage of an unknown fighting master. The trainer, a Force Adept, trained Tyrnia in a variety of combat and Force techniques. This training paid off in the arenas and gladiator pits, where Tyrnia used her physical strength, stubbornness, and "seeming indestructibility" to wear down and defeat all comers. And unlike some unwilling gladiators, Tyrnia actually enjoyed her life as a fighting slave, relishing in the frenzy of combat and the cheers of crowds. However, Tyrnia's successful career in arena soon ended.
After Durrsk murdered Tyrnia's now-aged mother in a fit of rage, Tyrnia vowed revenge, eventually killing the Quarren and a Hutt bystander as the two watched the conclusion of one of her fights. With a bounty placed on her head by the Hutt's and Durrsk's relatives, Tyrnia was forced to flee.
With few marketable skills, Tyrnia was soon forced to return to the arena, taking part in matches in various bouts on backwater planets across the galaxy. Her need to avoid bounty hunters has lead her to keep a low profile, but even these efforts have not been enough to keep another group off her track. Tyrnia's latent Force abilities have lead several "unsavory" Dark Side users to pursue her, most hoping to sway the fighter to the Dark Side and/or recruit her as a follower.
Growing up in the slums of Nar Shaddaa, Tyrnia Masak was an aggressive child and frequently fought to make money for her family. Soon after Durrsk took her from her family to be a pit fighter, Masak began to enjoy and be excited by causing bloodshed and hearing the sound of the crowd when she fought in a match. A stubborn fighter, she came to the point where she enjoyed both taking blows and giving them in order to demonstrate her toughness. After Durrsk killed her mother, Masak was enraged and took the quickest opportunity to revenge when she killed both the crime lord and a Hutt that was nearby. Because of her lack of skills besides fighting, she found it difficult to stay out of sight and was well known to individuals who followed gladiatorial combat. Her tendency to assert her strength also caused her problems and drew more attention. With her Force-sensitivity and violent nature, Masak was a person of interest for many Force-users who wanted to turn her further to the dark side of the Force. Secretly, Masak strongly disliked the person she had become.
Due to her Force potential as well as her bitterness and anger, Masak was approached by an individual who used the dark side of the Force. While she did not turn fully to the dark side, after learning from the individual, she was much more inclined to use the dark side.
She had blue eyes, brown hair, and fair skin. Standing over 1.6 meters tall, Masak was a muscular and durable individual with large hands, but she was not particularly quick or intelligent. At the time of her picture that was used by the Imperial Security Bureau, her hair's length was about halfway down her neck, her face was bruised, and she had a bandage over her nose. She viewed herself as physically unattractive and did her best to offset that by possessing greater strength and durability than everyone else around her.
During her youth, Tyrnia Masak used her size and strength to her advantage to make money from fights for her family. Upon the beginning of her training with Durrsk's fighting master, she learned of her Force-sensitivity and began to improve both her unarmed fighting skills and her Force abilities. After a short time, Masak had improved her skills greatly and increased her chances of victory as a pit fighter. However, her fighting style still relied heavily on her durability, which allowed her to outlast her opponents and overwhelm them when they were exhausted. She was also able to jump a considerable amount, as she did when she leapt out of the fighting pit to kill Durrsk. By the time that occurred, she had barely scratched the surface of her force potential. While her strongest skill was her unarmed fighting, she was also marginally skilled with the blaster pistols and blaster rifles. Masak lacked any significant skills besides her fighting abilities. She was able to use the force to allow her to endure more damage as well as to cause greater harm to her opponents. She was also skilled in tapping the dark side of the Force to go into a rage.
After killing Durrsk and escaping, Tyrnia Masak possessed a pair of combat gloves and a blaster pistol.
Tyrnia Masak was first featured in Tyrnia Masak: Pit Fighter, an article written by Eric Cagle for Wizards of the Coast's Saga Edition of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game. The article, which was posted on Wizards.com on June 11, 2008, was the third entry in the Bounty Postings series, which provided gamemasters with bounties for use in adventures with bounty hunter player characters. In the article, she received an image, which was created by Talon Dunning. While the article showed an Imperial Security Bureau picture of Masak, it did not specify the era when the events featured in the article occurred. However, she must have lived at some point when the Imperial Security Bureau was active, which places her mature life during the Rise of the Empire era or later.
The article also provided three example situations where the players could encounter Masak without having the heroes be bounty hunters. They could encounter her at an illegal fighting match, being a bodyguard for a Rodian crime lord and being chased by bounty hunters, or she could be under the influence of a dark side force-user. This article has presented the events mentioned in these adventure seeds as if they occurred in the order listed after the events described in the article's history section. However, the seeds could occur in any order and may not necessarily happen at all.