The character of Darth Bane, and his Rule of Two, were created by George Lucas as part of his backstory of the Sith he developed for the prequel trilogy.
Bane was first mentioned in a deleted scene from Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and its novelization as the creator of the Rule of Two.
In 2000, The Essential Chronology collated these events with the Battle of Ruusan mentioned in the 1998 novel Dark Forces: Jedi Knight.
An abusive alcoholic, Hurst blames the boy for the death of his wife in childbirth, and often calls him the "Bane" of his existence.
With his latent affinity in the dark side of the Force, Bane subconsciously uses this power to kill his father in his sleep.
After he kills a Republic Navy ensign in self-defense, Bane flees Apatros to evade arrest, and joins the armies of the Brotherhood of Darkness, an amassing of Sith Lords and acolytes.
After Bane realizes that he had indeed killed his father with the dark side, he subconsciously retreats from the Force, losing his power.
Months later, in a vain attempt to reestablish himself, Bane challenges Sirak to a fight and is seriously injured in the ensuing duel.
Bane leaves the academy, hoping to find the secrets of ancient Sith Masters in the Valley of the Dark Lords on Korriban.
Bane completes his training, learning numerous Sith techniques, including the "thought bomb" designed to kill all Force-sensitive beings in reach.
Bane then devises the "Rule of Two": only two Sith Lords, a master and an apprentice, are allowed to exist at one time ("One to embody power and one to crave it.")
Barely alive, Bane eventually finds a healer named Caleb and extorts his help by threatening his daughter.
During meditation, Bane uses his own body and power as a focusing agent to unleash a wave of destruction upon the forests of Ruusan, where the Jedi's Army of Light is hiding.
Laa is shot dead by two Jedi troops, because every other Bouncer they had encountered after the destruction caused by Bane and the other Sith had been driven mad.
After a botched assassination attempt against the Chancellor, Zannah discovers a dark side user, Hetton, who has uncovered the location of a tomb of an ancient Sith on the Deep Core planet of Tython.
After killing the pseudo Sith, Bane and Zannah set off on their respective missions: to recover the ancient Holocron, and infiltrate the Jedi Archives for information on removing the orbalisks.
Upon arrival on Tython and entering the tomb, Bane is attacked by scores of technobeasts, creations of the ancient Sith to guard her crypt.
Once there, Tomcat (aka Darovit) creates an agreement between Zannah and Caleb (the healer who helped Bane in the previous novel) designed to ensure their survival.
Fearing that she is too weak to pursue his legacy, he starts to search for the lost knowledge of Darth Andeddu, a Dark Lord of the Sith who harbored the secret of eternal life.
When Bane discovers that a clue to the secret can be found on the planet Prakith, he distracts Zannah by sending her to Doan to investigate the death of a Jedi Knight.
Zannah knows that, despite his frail appearance, Bane is tremendously powerful and that his frailty might be a trap to lure her into attacking him.
He storms Andeddu's temple, which is inhabited by a cult called the Malevolence, and easily recovers the Dark Lord's holocron.
On Ciutric IV, the Huntress and a group of mercenaries ambushes Bane, and manages to incapacitate him by a potent nerve poison supplied by Serra's healer knowledge.
However, Serra's bodyguard and best friend, Lucia, recognizes Bane as Des, commander of the Gloom Walkers who saved her squad multiple times during the Sith Wars.
Prior to this, Set, who accompanied Zannah, tracks down the aura of Darth Andeddu's holocron among Bane's confiscated possessions.
The Huntress then encounters Bane, and pledges to become his next apprentice, offering him back his lightsaber and holocron which she stole from his estate.
Bane and the Huntress, now renamed Darth Cognus, follows Serra back to Ambria near Caleb's cottage.
Bane powers through her illusions, but Zannah reveals her trump card and summons sentient tentacles of pure dark side energy.
Bane evades them and rushes Zannah, but his final blow is cut short by a tentacle severing the arm holding his lightsaber.
Bane was to originally appear, alongside Darth Revan, in the third-season episode "Ghosts of Mortis" as an influence to The Son, an embodiment of the dark side of the Force.