I'm not as informed on all Star Wars lore, but I still find it odd that Sith or "bad guy Force users" suddenly pop out of the woodwork to hunt Jedi characters in the time between PT and OT. Maybe these were Sith in hiding before the Empire or maybe traitor Jedi, but to me it just feels "convenient" to give Jedi in hiding some competitive threat.
In my opinion, the Rule of Two was one of the most foolish lore contributions from the PT.
Now between the ages 13 and 16, my social life was based around playing the Star Wars RPG from West End games. The prequels had not come out yet but there was a lot of EU novels.
Anyway, we didn't know about Order 66 but we knew that "Darth Vader helped the emperor destroy the Jedi," but they didn't say "Palpatine and Darth Vader were the only two Sith destroying Jedi."
We had a lot of people wanting to play Jedi that escaped the Empire's purge. We needed these rogue Jedi to constantly be in danger but it would be blatantly unfair to send Darth Vader at them so we made up a bunch of lesser Force wielding servants of the Emperor. This let players play Jedi PCs who could fight challenging opponents and not be curb stomped by Vader.
In fact, I ran a very long personal game for a Defel Jedi who was apprenticing to one of the last surviving Jedi Masters, and I decided "better kill off his mentor" I gave Darth Vader an apprentice for him to fight.
The Defel Jedi, fled instead of even making a token effort to help his master so he didn't get to fight him. But Vader's apprentice was pissed that he lost his opportunity to take a Jedi out one-on-one and pursued him relentlessly and eventually caught up with them and a grand climatic fight was had.
West End's d6 RPG system is a little weird, especially with ship-to-ship combat where dice shenanigans can let David beat Goliath on a regular basis. In another game, a friend want to play an ex-servant of Palpatine who joined the Rebels BUT kept the Dark Side.
To make a long story short....he shot down Darth Vader's starfighter with a lucky torpedo (there was an ejection system so Vader himself was unscathed). He didn't know he was fighting Vader, he thought he was fighting some Force using servant of the emperor that was a good pilot. Also he was a Mandalorian because we power gamed like that.
Scheduling conflicts ended that game early. But said PC would have probably have to keep a lower profile because Vader was not likely to let that go.
We had a running gag that he was going to pick the best hiding place...right behind the Palpatine. Not saying or doing anything, just shadowing his movements. No one having an audience with the emperor would dare to ask "My emperor, why is there a Mandalorian silently behind you?" because they would assume he is supposed to be there and people who asked the emperor dumb questions were likely to be killed.
