Hugo Bartyn

"Initial scans of system designated LM0228 show heavy ore deposits infusing the crust of the third planet. Claim registered with Senate Mining Bureau; further exploration recommended. Additional: Displacement of native sentients (species designated Menahuun) required."

- Hugo Bartyn's initial field report from Lamaro system

Hugo Bartyn, known as The Slayer among the Menahuun sentient species, was a male Human field agent of the exploratory branch of the Outer Rim Oreworks corporation during the time of the Galactic Republic. He was also a big-game hunter and a speciesist prone to chase and kill sentient beings till their extinction. While ORO was aware of this extra-curricular activity, they turned a deaf ear to it because Bartyn's working performance was way too lucrative for ORO.

Circa 583 BBY, Bartyn found the planet Lamaredd, rich in mineral veins, edible seafood and sentient locals&mdash;the Menahuuns. He manipulated events so that ORO would name him Administrator of the planet in exchange for mining rights and then, while still profiting ORO, turned to exploit the sealife as a personal venture. He built a coastal town, Bartyn's Landing, and populated it with poor, uneducated amphibious aliens that worked for him as indentured servants, while at the same time hunted the Menahuuns until their near-extinction. The Menahuuns moved to far-off areas, but the settlers believed them extinct.

ORO eventually discovered Bartyn's personal fiefdom in Lamaredd, but they had no legal claim to complain and decided to ignore his activities because the investment was still lucrative. Bartyn abused his fishermen in the company Bartyn Gourmet Delicacies for years, until they challenged him through a Sailor's Union. In 499 BBY, the octogenarian Bartyn and some trusted partners, including his oldest son Traggat, investigated strange happenings in the outskirts of his town. They all mysteriously disappeared, and their corpses were later found. Bartyn was succeeded as Administrator by his daughter Tria, and his family kept control over Lamaredd for five centuries. While Hugo Bartyn was locally remembered as a tyrant, his deeds were almost unknown off-planet.

Biography
"The Slayer drove the Menahuun into the deep northern woods ages ago."

- Eeytch

Hugo Bartyn, a Human male born c. 583 BBY, was an employee of Outer Rim Oreworks, a great corporation that intended to exploit gas and minerals in 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 get an important profit while doing so.

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

Having worked for ORO for decades, Bartyn was beginning to feel the ill effects of time in his health. Circa 529 BBY, 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&mdash;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 &mdash; but omitting any reference to the seafood as a possible source of incomes. Bartyn also used all the resources he could wager to be named Administrator of the planet and obtaining a terrain for himself in a bay near the mines, instead of being assigned a new scouting mission. Lastly, the crafty Bartyn managed to delete the coordinates of Lamaro from most of the star charts.

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 through the coasts. To do so, Bartyn built a command center in the mine, wanting to use it as his headquarters.

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

Bartyn's Landing


Bartyn had complex plans. He contacted some Neimoidian traders who wanted to dismantle an old, three-kilometer long Hoersch-Kessel LH-3010 cargo freighter, and bought the ship using all of his personal savings. Using the droids, he placed the ship in the bay, blew up several parts of it with mining gear and performed a lot of customizations to create spaceports, piers and habitats. In months time, the freighter became Bartyn's personal dock town, from where he intended to fish all the seafood. Eventually, it would became known as Bartyn's Landing&mdash;the first person to use this name was unknown, 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 Calamaris 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 rustled boats. The survivors, later known as the First-Wavers, were kept in the outer area of Bartyn's Landing, later known as The Ring. Many of these First-Waver squabbled with each other, sometimes reaching violence; and Bartyn also restricted the food and space assignations, awarding his best sailors with inexpensive prizes.

Bartyn's side company, Bartyn Gourmet Delicacies, became his greatest source of incomes, as the product 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 explore personally the local wild areas, hunting any remaining beast. He did try 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 in 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 the administrator 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 mount "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 measure against him.

Sailor's Union
C. 517 BBY, Bartyn considered his sailors to be his more important asset. As several aliens had proved themselves in the craft, Bartyn had promoted seventeen of them, including 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&mdash;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 partidaries 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 was known in the Landing, which was the worst that could happen to Bartyn. 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 he could not kill his workers and they knew that. 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 alien citizens, and even to lease them acres of terrain outside the spaceport &mdash; although Bartyn specified that the leaser was responsible of 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"&mdash;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.

Later years
C. 499 BBY, 84-year-old Bartyn 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 appear.

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 agian, although further teams found proofs of the team's violent and gruesome death at the hands of primitives or animals that broke down their tissues, partly ate their food and their livestock, and took away their electronic gear.

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

Hugo'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, Hugo was a well-known fact in Lamaredd in the remaining centuries, both among the aliens and among the surviving Menahuun, who had nicknamed Bartyn "the Slayer".

In 29 BBY, the tale of Hugo Bartyn was discovered by a team sent by the Jedi Council. These people also found an anti-human terrorist group that wanting to take revenge because of Hugo's perceived crimes.

Personality and traits
"Kill all the little buggers. Have yourselves some fun. And if any of 'em are still around when corporate gets here, you're joinin' 'em."

- Hugo Bartyn

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, being familiar with bribery, blackmail and the use of favors.

Hugo Bartyn was a speciesist, believing that many non-Human species were "little more than animals", particularly if that 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 great amounts of aliens. Nonetheless, when his alien "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 his son's in risk, when he considered that he should do so.

Behind the scenes
"This settlement, called Bartyn's Landing, grew and prospered, but it came into conflict with the Menahuun due to the colony's brutal suppression of natives. Menahuun who were not hunted and killed for sport retreated into the wilderness."

- Ultimate Alien Anthology indirectly mentioning Hugo Bartyn

Hugo Bartyn was created by writer Cory J. Herndon and 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 RPG guide Ultimate Alien Anthology (2003) included a text on the Menahuun species that does not name Hugo Bartyn, but indirectly mentions him by re-telling some of his actions. All those sources were supplements to the Star Wars Roleplaying Game published by Wizards of the Coast.

On Earth, "Hugo" is a real given name, a latinized form of the Teutonic name Hugh. This name had been previously used for other characters in the Star Wars canon, including Hugo Cutter, Naboo Hugo Eckener and Corellian Hugo Treece.