The opening crawl for The High Republic phase two has been revealed

The second phase of the High Republic publishing story begins later this year!

This next phase, “Quest of the Jedi,” serves as a prequel to the highly-acclaimed phase one (“Light of the Jedi”) that released last year. In phase two, we are taken 150 years into the past (therefore around 350 years prior to The Phantom Menace) to a time of great exploration in the Galactic Republic.

A few months before phase one released, we got an opening crawl for the era that set the stage for the stories that would follow, and another crawl has now been released in anticipation of phase two. At the San Diego Comic Con recently, amidst other Star Wars publishing details, a crawl was shown on the screen. Someone at the panel took a picture and posted it on twitter, giving us a glimpse of the opening crawl. It reads:

It is a time of great exploration. In an effort to unite the galaxy, the Chancellors of the Republic, working alongside the courageous and wise Jedi Knights, have dispatched dozens of PATHFINDER TEAMS into the farthest reaches of the Outer Rim.

But it is also a time of great uncertainty. Communication is unreliable, and tall tales of mysterious planets and monstrous creatures abound. Prospectors and pirates roam the frontier, and the worlds of Eiram and E’ronoh are locked in a FOREVER WAR.

And on the far-off planet of DALNA, a new threat to the galaxy is beginning to emerge….

This crawl doesn’t tell us a ton we didn’t know, besides name-dropping a few planets that figure to be key players in some of the stories of this phase, at least early on. But it does highlight just how much this is an era of expansion and exploration, into reaches of space that we might be familiar with but at this point in the timeline are relatively unexplored. I like the idea of the Jedi sort of operating on the frontier of the galaxy and helping to chart a course, bring peace, and aid the Republic.

It will be interesting to see how this sets up not only the stories to come in this phase, but also the stories that we’ve already been told in phase one. It’s a pretty bold strategy to jump back far enough in the timeline to a point where many of the characters we’ve grown to love in the High Republic aren’t around, but it is certainly for a good reason that we will find out soon enough.