LBAW Charybdis 5: History Lesson

So, we have our questions, lets offer some serious answers in the form of writing some history for the setting. We don’t need any particular “hard dates” (they’re rather arbitrary anyway, given how utterly fictional the rest of the setting’s history is), but we can at least align it with other historical events.

Lets do a quick historical summary of what the rest of this post will explore:

• Initial Colonization: 2750 BDC (~3550 BD)
• The Blood War and decline: 2650 BDC (3450 BD)
• Third Tyranny Momentary Return to Relevance: 300-500 DC (700-500 BD)
• First Redjack Outposts: 2800 DC (1800 AE)
• Vechkian Conquest and Slave Colony 3260 DC (~2160 AE)
• The Slaver War: ~3310-3315 DC (2211-2219 AE)
• The Revolt: ~3379 DC (2280 AE)
• Aftermath: to the present (3399 DC, 2297 AE)

LBAW Wilwatikta 14: The (Oc)Cult of Wilwatikta

If the history of Wilwatikta is going to matter, it must be player and GM facing. It cannot be irrelevant background info (I don’t mind that, but then we should summarize it, and those really interested in the specifics can dig up design notes to find out how we came up with it). Gamers don’t actually care about the history of the dungeon they’re in unless it provides context for their loot, or helps them solve puzzles, or helps them navigate it.

Fortunately, lots of neat ideas popped up from my notes, so I have plenty of things to play with. I wanted to settle down and discuss some of history’s mysteries, and also discuss some of the evolutions of the planet and nail down some mechanical traits, such as some of the cults I’ve spoken of and some of these “variant racial templates” I’ve discussed.

LBAW Wilwatikta 13: History

In many cases, I feel like history doesn’t matter that much. I tend to sketch it out in some detail anyway, so I have at least a rough idea of what’s going on and how it shaped the world, but generally the players don’t need to know the history of a world. With Wilwatikta, though, I’m not sure that’s true. Piecing together what happened during their galactic downtime might be a major plot point. They’re also more shaped by their history than most worlds would be, as in, their history was much more eventful.

More Kronos Musings: History

 So, quite some time ago, I announced a playtest, a heist; we did a poll, and Kronos won out.  I expect it did so because it’s an interesting, alien world set in the midst of an otherwise human dominated part of space, and that’s pretty much all we knew about it at the time.  I believe I’ve made some musings on it before, but let’s do another iterative cycle on it, where I simply walk through some basic logic, and what I need to make it an interesting heist location.

I was originally going to post the whole thing at once, but it turned out to be way too big for me to handle, so here it is in the first chunk.

What is Kronos? Why is Kronos?

So, let’s start with why Kronos even ended up in the Psi-Wars atlas.  One of the things that irritates me about a lot of space history is the timelessness of it.  Star Wars is the worst, of course, with Coruscant being a big, urban capital world for basically all of galactic history, at least as far back as the Old Republic.  This would be like deciding that Rome was the capital of the world for all time, when it wasn’t even the capital of Rome for the entire history of the Roman empire! Things move, they change, and they get left behind.  I wanted to express that, and to acknowledge the slow shift in power from the alien empires that made up the early history of the Psi-Wars galaxy.  Once upon a time, the power of the galaxy lay centered more towards the “eastern” half of the galactic core, around Kronos, between the Umbral Rim of the Ranathim, and the Arkhaian Spiral of the Eldoth.  Then came the Alexian Crusades and the conquest of the galaxy by humanity, and the center of power shifted to the “West” of the galactic core, closer to the Glorian Rim of humanity, and Sovereign.  This makes Kronos “the old capital.”

So, in a sense, Kronos has always been a historical world.  It’s had a few name changes, from Chronos (time) to Cronus (the titan, the king of the bygone age) to Kronos (an aptly confusing blend of the two), all meant to represent this notion of Kronos as a world deeply embedded in the history of the setting.  Thus, it’s most distinguishing feature is that it featured strongly in, and retains features of, previous eras, making it something of a time capsule world.

But I don’t want to go too far in that direction.  We often freeze locations in history based on a preferred narrative perspective.  I think Egypt suffers the most from it: when we discuss Egypt, most people immediately think of the pyramids, mummies, great monuments to bygone eras, the nile, palm trees, etc.  But this was _but one moment in time_ and from a very long time ago, once that was trumpeted wildly in the early 20th century, a moment in time that has set a lot of the tone of pop culture. But Egypt has been many, many things since, from a seat of Greek power to the breadbasket of the Roman empire, to one of the most important regions for Christianity to a seat of power of the Muslim world, home to Saladin and the Ismaili sect that later spawned the Hashashin, to the home of the Mamluks, and I could go on and on. I wanted Kronos to feel like that: it was not some world frozen in a single era, but one that had accumulated history, like layers of dust, over the eons, and you could see all of them every day, such as being in Egypt, with the pyramids at your back, a coptic church before you, and hearing the Islamic call to prayer.

The History of Kronos

The polls quickly established the idea of an alien race defeated (mostly) exterminated by the Eldoth.  The community came up with the Menhiri, a race of stony giants with fantastic memory that used to keep the histories of the galaxy before their destruction.  With their death, much of the history of the so-called primordial era, the era that pre-dates the Eldoth, was lost.

When did the Eldoth take over? Well, we know the Menhiri were lost pretty early on, and the Eldoth were looking for a base of operation: they had fought a war against some great galactic menace, and were seeking to prevent its resurgence.  Controlling a world near the Galactic Heart would keep them near Azrael, and it would act as a staging ground for the rest of their wars on the galaxy.  We also know the Keleni interacted with the Menhiri, which suggests there was some overlap between the two races.

If we look at our Galactic History,  this took place sometime between 4400 and 3200 “BD.” The Keleni colonizations took place between 3600 BD and 3200 BD.  This suggests that the earliest the Eldoth could have conquered Kronos, assuming the Keleni contacted the Menhiri on their homeworld, was 3600.  The Monolith War that kicked the Eldoth off of Kronos took place between 3100 and 3000 BD, which suggests the Eldoth had about 500 to 600 years at most, to perform their genocide and their transformation of the planet into a massive urbanscape.  A most likely scenario would be that the Eldoth and the Menhiri co-existed for quite some time, and the massive presence and threat was already building around Kronos when the first Keleni stepped foot on it, likely early scouts and explorers, before the Keleni colonizations took off in earnest.  We might give the Keleni a hundred years of contact before the conquest (setting the conquest at 3500), then less than 50 years to complete the extermination process (3450). Is 100 years enough time finish paving a world and building a Deep Engine on it? Well, it hardly matters, we could easily give them 200 years of construction on the planet to complete their fortification of the world (so, 3250, or just before they began to conquer the Keleni worlds).  That suggests the Keleni would have known their own destruction could have been imminent, so perhaps all of this took place slightly later than I’m speculating, but that means Eldothic control of the world wasn’t that long.

The Eldoth fougth the Ranathim between 3100 BD and 3000 BD. My guess is Kronos would have held out for a good long time, but its fall would have precipitated the disintegration of Eldothic defenses.  So, Kronos probably fell by 3050 BD.

With the Eldoth gone, we shift to a new era for Kronos.  Now firmly in the hands of the Ranathim Tyranny, it becomes a place of prestige. The Sumerians had a title, the King of Kish, often used by Kings who ruled from someplace other than Kish; it spoke to the central importance of Kish. The Ranathim Tyrants might have seen Kronos as similarly prestigious: “the Ranathim Mystical Tyrant, Master of the Nine Races of the Umbral Rim and King of Kronos.”

 

It certainly is not the capital of the Tyranny; that would remain on Styx, the Ranathim homeworld.  However, this newly conquered world is very central to the trade of the galactic center and sits adjacent to the Trader Band; the very reasons the Eldoth chose it remain valid, and thus it remains important. Plus it is a “conquered capital” and thus a prestigious location.  The Ranathim Tyranny would want to remind every ship passing through the region of the greatness of the Tyranny. This implies great, monumental architecture, magnificent temples and glory to the Ranathim Empire, all funded by the wealth of taxes and tolls from the flood of trade flowing through its ports.

But Kronos offers the Ranathim something else intriguing.  It is the largest infrastructural contribution to the Eldothic Deep Engine this close to the Ranathim strongholds of the Umbral Rim.  This makes it an ideal location to study the technology of the Eldoth and to learn their “occult practices.” If the “magpie tradition” of Zathare sorcery began anywhere, it would be on Kronos.

The Ranathim Tyranny would have held Kronos for about 2000 years. The first Tyranny likely would have taken it as a place of prestige, and then suspicion as the first heretical scholars of the Deep Engine began to explore the technologies of the Eldoth, which likely would have led to inquistorial purges, but the collapse of the first Tyranny would have led to greater acceptance and experimentation with the technology.  Zathare would almost certainly have its origins here, as would the psuedo-House of Mithna Zatharos.

Then the second Tyranny fell, and we move into a murky epoch, the so-called Third Tyranny.  This was a splintered era, with rival warlords vying for control and legitimacy.  With its central location, extensive infrastructure and occult potency, Kronos would have been the capital of one of these mini-Tyrannies.  I mentioned “the Witch-King of Kronos” before.  That was certainly a thing, and these Witch Kings would have belonged to Mithna Zatharos.

This era also sees the first furtive steps of humanity into the stars.  The Westerly would have made their way here, but I think the Shinjurai played a greater role on Kronos (they do have more of an affinity for urban worlds, after all).  The Traders and the Shinjurai merchant princes would have controlled trade along the Trader Band, which would have been the lifeblood of Kronos, and thus this little stellar empire.  This suggests a delicate arrangement of power, with the occult power balanced against the technological prowess and trading acumen of the Shinjurai and the Traders to create a potent central state.

Then came the Alexian Crusades.  I imagine Kronos would have put up a hell of a fight.  It was likely one of the strongest Ranathim enclaves outside of the Umbral Rim, thanks to their occult power and considerable wealth.I tend to see its conquest as the last major conquest that sealed the fate of the galactic core.  After its defeat, only then would Alexus Rex be crowned by the Akashic Order to be Emperor of the Galaxy on Sovereign.

During the Dynasty, Kronos and its alien heritage would need to be kept under tight control.  It’s also a very central world, so it would need to be held by a great house, a Ducal house.  Also, given the fact that it’s so deep in the Galactic Core, whatever house that ruled there would have certainly been destroyed today by the Emperor.  I have a name for that House, as I’ve been using it to reference “some extinct ducal house” for awhile: House Mistral.  What are they like? I dunno, it’s not important.  I have some musings on them being very fit, athletic, attractive and with a focus on TK (Aerokinesis, Tactile TK, Super Jump and PK Shield, perhaps), but nothing that’s important; I often see Mistral as one of those names I sling around with no real details so someone else can fit in the details themselves, if they want.

I suspect over the course of the Dynasty, it would have remained low key.  The Dynasty would not want it overshadow the new galactic capital of Sovereign, so its impact on the galaxy would be intentionally diminished, with policies meant to impoverish or weaken it. This would also serve to “time capsule” it somewhat: if you’re already on the world, you’ll be hard pressed to scrape together the money to meaningfully move offworld, and if you’re not on Kronos, you wouldn’t want to go.  So it would languish, its culture more-or-less developing in isolation based on what had already come before, with little cultural input from the Dynasty, other than what it gained from the osmosis of cultural bombardment.  It’s still well-placed for trade, so we likely see a flourishing black market at this time.

Once the Dynasty fell, however, house Mistral would have been well-placed to seize control, making it one of the major contenders of the interregnum.  This would certainly launch Kronos back into interstellar prominence, and free trade along the Trader Band, unbridled by antagonistic policies, would restore its reputation for wealth and prestige.  This would almost certainly have remained during the Federation, where liberal and open-handed policies would see more and more aliens return and its unique version of a Shinjurai culture flourishing. It would return to one of the gems of the Crown constellation. It would likely see a flood of immigration too, and gentrification. Given its central location and its reputation for alien communities, aliens likely would rush in.  I suspect this is the era that we start to see a lot of Asrathi communities forming on Kronos.

 

Then, finally, the Empire.  Kronos poses problems to the Empire: it generates a lot of money, but it has a strong alien tradition and has picked up some occult and criminal traditions. This puts the Empire in a bind: on the one hand, left to its own devices, Kronos generates huge revenue, but is also a source of chaotic, criminal alien ideas that threaten to destabilize imperial ideology.  The Empire wants to control that trade while also taming its alien population, pushing them underground (perhaps literally).  It also faces a world likely unpersuaded by its ideology.  The aliens of Kronos see no appeal in an empire biased towards humanity and away from them, and they’ve been doing things their own way for literally thousands of years.  Their baked in criminality and diverse ways makes a total crackdown difficult, so the Empire would likely seek to control traffic to and from the world, and then otherwise interface with local power structures to see that the Emperor’s edicts are enforced on the population.

So, based on history, what is Kronos?

• A once mighty library of galactic history, destroyed
• A planetary fortress from which a dark and foreboding empire once exerted control over the galactic core.
• A once prestigious location filled with the monuments of an ancient, alien empire
• A center for a growing academic tradition of psychic sorcery and the mastery of ancient alien technology
• A center for commerce and trade in the “eastern” half of the galaxy.
• A cultural isolate in a sea of human culture.
• A festering pool of crime and poverty thanks to literal centuries of neglect by elites.

A Psi-Wars Historical Timeline V: The Eldothic Era

This is the final post of the history series: these are the earliest events of “Recorded history” in Psi-Wars.

The Primordial Era (100,000+ years BD)

The official history of the Psi-Wars Galaxy begins with the Eldoth and their first Galactic Empire, but civilization in the Galaxy did not begin with them. Somethingbuilt the Hammer of Caliban and hollowed out the Labyrinthine worlds. Something built Azrael and the Adversary that the Eldoth would later fight are, themselves, ancient beyond even Eldothic description. Little is known about the Primordial Era, and it is left to GMs who wish to tackle the era to fill in the blanks. Possibilities include:

• A civilization of the Skairos that spanned Sylvan Spiral, the Glorian Rim and the galactic core that meddled with human evolution and mostly perished in some great war against some terrible enemy (perhaps the Adversary or the Anacridian Scourge), but not before arranging to bequeath their civilization to humanity as a successor species and warning them of a coming calamity.
• An elder cybernetic civilization that came from beyond the Galaxy and created Azrael (or was a civilization of enormous, world-sized “robots”) that once held all the galaxy in sway, or threatened to destroy it, before first being defeated by some civilization and then, later (in a much weaker state) by the Eldoth. They may have some connection with the Anacridian Scourge.
• The Shapeshifter race has forgotten its origins or its purpose, but most evidence points to their being an artificial race created for some purpose by some impossibly ancient race. They may date from this era.
• Communion is probably a completely natural phenomenon, but some fringe Communion theories speculate that Communion might be an artificial construct, a sacred psyshic engine similar in function to its more diabolical twin, the Deep Engine. If so, its lynchpins were created in this era, likely in the Sylvan Spiral or the Umbral Rim.
• The Morass and its Leviathans are probably natural evolutions, but the Sylvan Spiral was not always infested with both. In the Primordial Era, the Sylvan Spiral was clear of both, and in this era, something may have made them or some events may have transpired that allowed for their rapid infestation of this galactic arm.
   

The Eldothic Union

~6000 BD The Eldoth Awaken(The Arkhaian Spiral)
(~5150BDC Lithian; ~-25gc U Eldothic)

The Eldoth begin to explore the space of the Arkhaian Spiral. They have very primitive forms of FLT travel, so this takes a very long time by modern standards. During this phase, they mostly set up colonies

~5500 BD The First Age of Chaos (The Arkhaian Spiral)
(~4650BDC Lithian; ~–10gc U Eldothic)

Once Eldothic colonies have been established and they begin to more regularly interact with one another thanks to slowly improving FTL travel, they find their civilizations have sufficiently diverged that they no longer have any sense of unity. The small “star states” begin to raid one another for technology and resources. They also regularly come across other aliens that they can experiment on and incorporate into their small empires. Their movements into the core and fringes begin to give them their first encounters with what their archives will later describe as “the Adversary.”

~5300 BD The Deadzone and the Corruption (The Arkhaian Spiral)
(~4450BDC Lithian; ~–2gc U Eldothic)

The first experiments with the Deep Engine go horribly awry, creating an monstrous, planetary-scale Broken Communion zone and an entity within it referred to as the “Deep Corruption.” The Eldoth are able to contain the planet as the core of the Deep Engine and contain the entity within the Deep Engine itself, locked away behind layers of security, but it still moves within the pan-galactic network, lurking behind safeguards, seeking a way to get out and express itself.

This naturally results in the total extinction of a species.

5251 BD Eldothic Universal Time (The Arkhaian Spiral)
(4384BDC Lithian; 0gc U Eldothic)

The Deep Engine experiments conclude with the successful creation of the Deep Engine and its initiation on multiple worlds, thus networking them together. This moment is chosen as the arbitrary “cycle zero” of “universal time”

~5200 BD The First Eldothic Union (The Arkhaian Spiral)
(~4300BDC Lithian; 1gc U Eldothic)

Increasingly concerned by alien threats and united by the Deep Engine, the Eldoth set aside their differences and form a “Union,” governed by “the Convocation of Exarchs” representing each major state and faction within the Union, and administrating their own local portion of the Deep Engine. This council is physically located on their homeworld of Sepulcher.

~4700 to ~4500 BD The Great War with the Adversary (The Arkhaian Spiral)
(~3800to ~3600BDC Lithian; 17gc to 23gcU Eldothic)

The coordination afforded by the Convocation of Exarchs allows for a deep push into the troubled Galactic Core and into the Fringe (the Anaciridian Cloud), where they definitively encounter and catalog what their archives refer to as “the Adversary.” The Adversary is associated with Azrael, locked away in the Core in the present day, and its dangerous minions located in the Anacridician Cloud on the Fringe of the Arkahaian Spiral trying to reconnect with it.

The Adversary initiates a war with the Eldothic Union, who are forced to defend themselves. This Adversary Warlasts two hundred years, during which Deep Engine cores are broken, leading to more Broken Communion “Dead Gods” and more Deep Engine corruption. Entire Eldoth worlds are shattered during the war The Eldoth create their servitor race and their engines of war, such as the Titans, to defeat the Adversary, and even then, they are only able to force Azrael into a “slumber” state.

~4400 BD Eldothic Empire (The Arkhaian Spiral)
(~3500BDC Lithian; ~25gcU Eldothic)

Once the Adversary War completes, all of Eldothic culture is rocked by the aftermath. They pick up the pieces, repair what they can, seal away Broken Communion corruption and rebuild their society. Their culture has been deeply affected by the war and their near extinction, and slowly becomes deeply militaristic and paranoid. While still called the “Union,” the culture changes enough to mark a new epoch in the government and most human and Ranathim histories of the Eldothic Union begin to refer to it as the Eldothic Empire around this point.

~4400 to 3200 BD The Eldothic Conquest (The whole Galaxy)
(~3500to 2300BDC Lithian; ~25 to 65gcU Eldothic)

With an overriding goal of ensuring the safety of the Galaxy from the inevitable return of “the Adversary,” the Convocation of Exarchs set about bringing the entire Galaxy to heel. This required the creation of new Dark Engine nexuses, bringing new alien populations in line, scouring the universe for Adverserial taint, and ensuring that none posed a threat to the new Eldothic order.

The conquest took time, as the Eldoth were methodical, and because their form of hyperspatial travel was far slower. Worse, they ran into serious problems when attempting to conquer the Glorian Rim and the Sylvan Spiral. In the former, they encountered the Maelstrom and, according to Deep Engine archives, a manned Hammer of Caliban which fired upon their vessels and destroyed them, forcing them to retreat. Similarly, the Morass proved too difficult for the Eldothic Empire to conquer and this forced them to retreat.

~4000 to 3500 BD Ranathim Colonization (The Umbral Rim)
(~3100to 2600BDC Lithian; ~40to 55gcU Eldothic)

The Ranathim, like most early star-faring species, colonize the local regions around them using slower, more primitive forms of hyperspatial travel. These colonies begin highly independent of one another, prone to raiding one another for slaves, and developing independent cults.

~3600 to 3200 BD Keleni Colonization (The Umbral Rim)
(~2700to 2270BDC Lithian; ~50to 60gcU Eldothic)

The Keleni begin their colonization of the Hydrus Constellation, bringing their temples and True Communion with them. Their colonization efforts use primitive forms of hyperspatial travel, but they also move slowly to maintain close ties to one another, creating a unified Keleni star-nation named “The Temple Worlds,” focused on their homeworld of Temjara and the dominance of the “royal” Kihita Tribe.

~3500 to 3400 BD The Blood War (The Umbral Rim)

(~2600 to 2500BDC Lithian; ~55 to 57 gcU Eldothic)

The disparate Ranathim colonies have bloomed into full star-nations and begin to wage outright war upon one another during this era. The war begins to spiral beyond pirate raids and into full conquest and total destruction of populations, much to the horror of other Ranathim who all agree that the war should stop, but do not want to be the one to surrender to make it happen.

~3400 BD The First Tyranny (The Umbral Rim)
(~2475BDC Lithian; ~57 gcU Eldothic)

The homeworld of the Ranathim, Ranagant, rises supreme over its colonies, and establishes the first Tyranny. The Cult of the Mystical Tyrant claims its lineage begins with this Tyranny, and claims Ozamanthim founded this first dynasty. However, this may be revisionist history, as evidence from this era suggests the first founder was “Anthara” or “Mythamar,” and the character of the Mystical Tyrant cult of this era was much closer to a typical Divine Masks cult (though the Divine Masks, as a unifying concept, did not yet exist), with the Tyrant channeling the power of a divine “Mystical Tyrant” while in an ecstatic state as a means of making policy with “divine” assistance. This ends the Blood War.

~3300 BC Keleni-Ranathim Contact (The Umbral Rim)
(~2400BDC Lithian; ~60gcU Eldothic)

The growing influence of the first Ranathim Tyranny ran into the growing power of the Keleni temple worlds. For the first time, the practitioners of True Communion encountered practitioners of Dark Communion. In these heightened tensions, Ranathim pirate raiders fought skirmishes with Keleni temple guards, Keleni merchants swapped relics with Ranathim cultists while offering new ideas. The two sides cautiously appraised one another: the Keleni horrified but not yet willing to commit to a full military response, and the Ranathim fascinated by the beautiful and strange Keleni.

This era also saw the first contact between the Ranathim and the Trades of the core, who carried with them the stories of Eldothic horrors.

~3200 BD The Keleni Apocalypse (The Umbral Rim)
(~2270BDC Lithian; ~65gcU Eldothic)

When the Eldothic Empire reached the Keleni Temple worlds of the Hydrus constellation, they came across a force they did not understand or know how to combat: True Communion. Or, more specifically, the holy sites of their temples. Those who followed True Commonunion had a knack for cleansing the regions of “twisted psionic energy” that the Deep Engine needed to function. This threatened the whole of the network that the Eldoth had created and, despite their obvious technological inferiority, this power gave them the ability to resist the Eldothic advance. Horrified by what they found, the Eldoth turned their attention from the rest of the Galaxy and poured their firepower down upon the Keleni worlds and overcame them. They flattened temple complexes and enslaved and moved entire populations to the Arkhaian spiral to study, so they could better understand the phenomenon. This shattered whatever nominal power the Keleni had in the Galaxy, which they would never truly regain.

This era sees the first creation of “psi-blades,” used by Keleni insurgents to channel their psionic rage against the Eldoth and strike back to defend their people, a controversial move by the generally pacifistic species.

~3100 to 3000 BD The Great Monolith War (The Galaxy)
(~2200to 2060BDC Lithian; ~66 to 70gcU Eldothic)

The Keleni Apocalypse woke the Ranathim Tyranny up to the true danger posed by the advancing Eldoth war machine. From nowhere, a great power descended and destroyed a rival like they were nothing. The Ranathim hardened their defenses and prepared to resist. They used spies to subvert conquered populations and convince them to rebel, and they stole secrets from the Eldoth. With stolen Eldoth secrets, they created the Gaunt, and most True Tarvathim date from this era. Their cultists and priests used Dark Communion to send Deep Engine sites spiraling out of control and unleashing and even controlling the Deep Engine.

Despite great losses, the Ranathim marshaled their new technologies, their dark powers, and the discontent of the galaxy to drive the Eldoth all the way back to their homeworld and achieve something the Adversary hadn’t been able to do: defeat the Eldoth. Nothing remained of their empire by the end of the Monolith War.

(The Eldoth may have been fighting a two front war at this point. Constantly vigilant against the return of the Adversary, it seems a second wave from beyond the Fringe of the galaxy had struck and the Eldoth had been forced to split its forces and were thus unable to prevent their own destruction at the hands of the Ranathim).

~3155 BD The First Mug Incursion (Speculative) (The Sylvan Spiral)
(~2221BDC Lithian; ~65gcU Eldothic)

According to the Lithian calendar, this would be a moment when the Draco Cluster was “open” and the Mug could have entered the Galaxy. Some records from the first Tyranny, during the chaos of the Monolith War, report raids by pirates and the use of mercenaries that might match either the Sathran or the Mug.

A Psi-Wars Historical Timeline IV: The Ranathim Tyranny

For those just joining us, these events occur before yesterday’s post.

The Ranathim Tyranny

~3000 to 2500 BD The Reign First Tyranny (The Galaxy)
(~2060to 1550 BDC Lithian; ~70to 85gcU Eldothic)

At the end of the Monolith War, the Ranathim Tyranny found itself in control of a powerful military, including secret access to the Deep Engine, war machines crafted of synthetic flesh and raging berserkers empowered by Dark Communion and the first psi-swords. The rest of the Galaxy hailed the Ranathim as heroes, and while they hated the bizarre experiments and otherworldliness of their Eldothic overlords, much of the Galaxy had come to depend on the trade routes created by the Eldothic Empire, which the Ranathim Tyranny essentially inherited. Thus began the rule of the first Galactic Tyranny. As with the Eldothic Empire, this was limited to the Arkhaian Spiral, the Umbral Rim, and the Galactic Core.

• The Refugee Crisis: The Ranathim allowed scattered populations to return to their homeworlds, which made them very popular with races like the Keleni, but caused friction with races that had taken up those new areas. The great movement of peoples across the galaxy created a great deal of tension.
• Ranathim Decadence: The Ranathim perched atop a galaxy-spanning empire, and no longer had to fight a war to access spoils. Slowly, the tough leadership of the Tyranny began to soften into decadence and corruption and officials used their position to access the most succulent of slaves or to line their pockets or gain false prestige by conquering some minor alien race.
• Proliferation of Cults: The tension of the various cults within the Tyranny never really resolved during the existential crisis of the Monolith War, and those tensions grew greater as a pan-galactic exchange of ideas led to more and more cults, all with conflicting perspectives on similar ideas.
• Eldothic Vengeance: The Eldothic Empire may have been destroyed, bu the Eldoth themselves proved extremely difficult to kill, thanks to their regeneration sarcophagi and the hidden power of their Deep Engine. Eldothic agents began to spread poisoned secrets, foment rebellion and draw in the corrupt and decadent with promises of occult power. They then turned these agents against the Tyranny, assassinating major officials and spreading disinformation and chaos.
• The Rise of the Inquisition: The Tyrant, frustrated by heretical cults, Eldothic saboteurs and mass population movements, began to crack down on his own Empire. Once hailed as heroes, the Ranathim now deployed the very oppression that the Eldoth had represented.
• Revolution: The inquisition did little to slow the crack-up of the Tyranny, and revolts began to spread as isolated alien populations or trade networks sought independence from the leash of Ranathim slavery.

~2500to 2100 BD The Broken Tyranny (The Galaxy)
(~2060to 1650 BDC Lithian; ~85to 98gcU Eldothic)

Eldothic Sabotage, revolts, internal dissension, palace coups and religious wars finally tore the Tyranny apart. A Rump state remained in the Umbral Rim, and it ostensibly still ruled over the entire extent of the Empire, with many warlords “ruling in its name,” but in practice, the Tyranny no longer had the military might to express its power and will. It became a largely ceremonial and religious institution while Trader Caravans, Gaunt remnants, Ranathim pirate lords, Keleni tribal kings and insurgent cults divided the empire among them. Still, the idea of the Mystical Tyrant remained a potent force.

2100-1000BD The Second Tyranny(The Galaxy)
(1147BDC to 1DC Lithian; 98to 132gcU Eldothic)

A new Mystical Tyrant dynasty arose, almost certainly under the leadership of Ozamanthim (whether this was Ozamanthim the First or Ozamanthim the Second is a point of historical contention). Under his leadership, the Cult of the Mystical Tyrant took true shape as a force of cynical imperial power. He created the Divine Masks system as a way of soothing internal tension and creating tighter bonds of empire. He used force to regain his empire, but he cemented the Tyranny with social and religious bonds that allowed everyone within the Tyranny to interact. Even so, he was never able to truly regain all of the Ranathim former holdings in the Arkhaian Spiral or in the Galactic Core closest to the Glorian and Sylvan rims.

• The Spread of the Divine Masks: The idea of all cults unified spread like wildfire through the empire. For older cults, nothing changed, but younger cults sprang up on the nexus between cults. “Navare” healers began to spring up as ecumenical religious practices that allowed numerous lesser aliens to find a place for their own traditions and taboos. “Zathare” sorcerors began to look at the cults across the Tyranny as a source for occult truths, including the forbidden secrets of the Eldoth.
• New Alien Powers: The interregnum had given new alien races a chance to spread and gain influence. This era sees the first mention of the Asrathi as gladiatorial slaves and pleasure slaves, and the Slavers as sport (hunted by Ranathim lords), gladiatorial slaves and, eventually, accountants and courtly advisors. This era also sees the first official contact between the Tyranny and the Mug when the Draco Cluster leaves eclipse in 2021 BDC. This results in an early war between the Tryanny and the Mug which the Tyranny won, and the Mug thereafter engaged in trade, especially for slaves and technology.
• Eldothic Experimentation and the Awakening of the Adversary: Despite the dire warnings of Domen Khemet, the Ranathim Death-Cult who protected the Ranathim from the “Dead Gods” left over from the Eldothic depredations of the Galaxy, “Zathare” sorcerers experimented with Eldothic secrets in an effort to rekindle the wonders of the first tyranny. In so doing, they may have unlocked some of the safeguards placed over Adverserial or Corrupt powers, or may have played into the hands of a few immortal Eldothic agents. In any case, many of these expeditions end in silence, with their participants never heard from again.

1000BD The Dark Cataclysm (The Umbral Rim)
(1DC Lithian; 132gcU Eldothic)

Something causes the home-star of the Ranathim to go super-nova. In so doing, it creates a black-hole around which the shattered remnant of the Ranathim homeworld circles, now called “Styx.” The death of Styx triggers a cataclysm of hyperspatial storms and reshapes the hyperspatial routes of the Umbral Rim, and spreads a great nebula across the rim called the Umbral Veil, giving the arm its name.

–1000BD to 500 BDThe Splintering and the Third Tyranny(The Umbral Rim)
(1 DC to 500DC Lithian; 132 to 148gc U Eldoth)

The Dark Cataclysm severs the Tyranny’s ability to control the full extent of its territory, and it promptly collapses practically overnight. The Mug manage to plunder numerous worlds of the Umbral Rim, forcing client races like the Slaver to isolate and protect themselves. The Traders form new trade ties in the Galactic Core, and the Ranathim Tyranny splinters into several fragments, as none can rule from the homeworld: one centers on Chronos in the Galactic Core (heavily Trader influenced), one from Rath in the Sanguine Stars (heavily Slaver influenced) and one from Sarai in the Corvus constellation (beset by the Mug (who invaded between 27 DC and 227 DC), and considered by historians to be the primary “legitimate” successor state).

None of these survive longer than 300 years before various succession crises or rising warlords force these too into collapse. The galactic core churns with instability until all vestiges of Ranathim power have faded, leaving only pirates, aliens and, especially, Traders. Ranathim power lasts a little longer in the Umbral Rim before it too splinters.

This era is concurrent with the spread of humanity, and the records of the first human slaves show up in Ranathim court records, all of Westerly stock.

A Psi-Wars Historical Timeline III: The Rise of Humanity and the Alexian Dynasty

For those just joining us, this part of the historical timeline occurs before yesterday’s timeline.

The Human Era

~800BDHuman Expansion: the First Wave (Westerly)
(200 DC Lithian; 139gc U Eldoth)

The earliest human world to develop hyperspace travel was “Old Westerly,” a world with four moons consumed by rising sea levels brought on by mismanagement of industrial resources. The Westerly people were the first to spread throughout the galaxy and they found it already occupied by aliens. Made desperate by their misfortunes and keenly aware of ecology thanks to the collapse of their own homeworld’s eco-system, they tended to settle on harsh worlds and integrated closely with it while forsaking (or losing, over the years) advanced technology in favor of simpler, more sustainable lives, or they refused to settle worlds at all, and formed roving space-caravans of asteroid miners and, when necessary, pirates. They valued survival and fierce independence above all else, making them tenacious colonists.

~300 BD Human Expansion: the Second Wave (Shinjurai)
(720DC Lithian; 154 gc U Eldoth)

The next major wave of humanity came from the city-world of Denjuku. Unlike the Westerly, they came from a society that prized science and rationality and, indeed, this was they hey-day of Rationalism, and Rationalist sages like Tai-Sun Saga and Kun-Lun Kaku lived in this era, writing their great works and pushing their people to the stars. Their mastery of technology gave them immediate dominance over the worlds they settled and where the Westerly had to beg and struggle to find worlds to settle, the Shinjurai could afford to conquer and trade.

The Shinjurai wave followed the Westerly wave, often colonizing worlds humans had already carved out a niche on and setting themselves up as new masters, or cutting deals with alien powers to gain control over marginal worlds. The result was not a unified empire, but scattered pocket realms of the Shinjurai, each unique in its character, and open to trade with aliens, especially the Traders, who began to trade ideas with the Shinjurai, a fertile cross-pollination that resulted in rapid advancement in hyperspatial technology, hyperium fuel and the works of Trader Rationalist, Tillika. These star-nations centered on a single nexus systems, which acted as a hub of trade, and slowly grew to encompass numerous systems around them. 

Major settlements in his era include Xen and its Geno-Sages and Stanis and its Cybernetic Religion.

~100 BD Human Expansion: the Third Wave (Maradon)
(900DC Lithian; 160 gc U Eldoth)

The last wave of humanity would prove the beginning of the end of this era. They came from the doomed world of Maradon, which would be torn apart by the wars of dominance that would eventually lead to the rise of Alexus Rex as its sole master. The increasing radiation levels released by its global war and the controversies created by the newly arising class of powerful psychics led to the flight of various factions, who turned to piracy or religion to sooth their wounded hearts. The Maradon people did not travel as far as the rest of humanity and would colonize the more complicated worlds of the Glorian Rim, such as Persephone, Caliban (though this is contentious, as it may have been settled by Westerly people first, and the current people may be a fusion of both bloodlines), Bellerphone and Zaine in the Galactic Core.

The Alexian Dynasty

21 BD to 1 AE The Rise of Alexus
(1009 to 1032 DC Lithian; 163 to 164 gc U Eldoth)

By the time “Alexus Rex,” the nigh-mythical founder of the “Eternal Empire” and the Alexian Dynasty, the Maradon people had already scattered to the stars, thanks to the nigh constant warfare on their homeworld caused by the upheaval of the advent of extraordinarily powerful psychics and nuclear war. Alexus Rex won that war and achieved dominion over his homeworld; he himself was one of these “new psychics” and he gathered about him other powerful psychics into an elite force that defeated the other forces on his world. He then turned his attention to the stars, where he had already gathered some allies, where he burst free of the Maelstrom and took the galaxy by storm with a force of arms and psychic insight not seen since the first Ranathim Tyranny and, thanks to improving hyperspatial technology, at an unparalleled pace of conquest .

• The Akashic Prophecy: The first world Alexus sought to conquer was Persephone, home to the Akashic mystics and their famous prophecies. The world and its mystics readily surrendered to him and gave him his queen, the founder of House Sabine: Sissi Sabine. Akashic precognition would serve the Alexian warmachine thereafter.
• The Caliban Duel: To escape the Glorian Rim with this massive fleet, Alexus Rex needed to tame Caliban. He famously dueled Lothar Kain to a standstill and offered the pirate vassalage: to serve Alexus in return for the spoils of Empire. Lothar Kain accepted and founded the House of Kain.
• The Subjugation of the Shinjurai: The primary opponents of Alexus Rex were other humans, mainly the Shinjurai thanks to their Trader allies and their advanced technology. Nonetheless, the psychic mysteries of the Akashic mystics defeated the Rational technology of the Shinjurai and Xen was defeated (thanks to “Apex Prime,” the founder of House Apex), though Stanis, bolstered by the Hyperium Guild and the Tan-Shai family, held strong.
• The Conquest of Chronos and the Coronotion at Sovereign: The defeat of a minor warlord on Chronos signaled the end of alien power in the Galactic Core and thus the symbolic rise of man as Galactic Conqueror. However, Chronos proved too far from the Glorian Rim, and too alien in culture, to rule from. Alexus chose instead an untouched garden world, dubbed it Sovereign and on its virgin soil, held a coronation ceremony where the head of the Akashic Order placed upon his brow the Galactic Crown, initiating the “Eternal Empire” of the Alexian Dynasty

1 AE to 476 AE The Early Dynasty
(1032to 1521DC Lithian; 164to 178gc U Eldoth)

The Early Dynasty retained the martial character of the rise of Alexus, continuing his wars of conquest across the Galaxy and bringing the rest of the Galactic Core and other parts of the Galaxy to heel.

• The Trader Genocide: Shinjurai power could not be fully extinguished so long as the Traders held sway, and they had deep connections in the Arkhaian and Umbral Rim, and thus needed to be purged for Alexian power to continue. The war against the Traders proved one of the longer and more destructive wars of the Dynasty, culminating in the destruction of their homeworld.
• The Treaty of Shaddai: Even without their Trader allies, the Shinjurai nations of the Arkhaian Spiral held firm against the advance of the Alexian Dynasty, thanks in no small part to the patronage of the Hyperium Guild and the Tan-Shai family. Eventually, the Alexian Dynasty offered Mythren Tan-Shai the same deal they had Lothar Kain: vassalage in return for autonomy. He accepted, and Stanis and the Kybernian Constellation joined the Dynasty under House Tan-Shai.
•  The Westerly Rebellion: Once the Eternal Empire had subjugated all off their Shinjurai foes, with no major remaining enemies, they could turn their attention to domestic concerns, which meant raised taxes, stricter laws and a crackdown on those who did not fall in line with the Akashic Mysteries. The Westerly populations, long independent, found themselves under intense pressure and many lashed out. This proved tragic, and their populations were either wiped out or forced to migrate to the edges of Alexian control, especially in the direction of the wild and untamed Umbral Rim, where they began to settle along the edges of the Hydrus Constellation.

222 AE to 319 AE The Reign of Satra Temos (the Umbral Rim)
(1259to 1359DC Lithian; 171 to 174gc U Eldoth)

A new Tyrant arose in the Umbral Rim during the Early Alexian Dynasty, though this one was unlike any who had come before him. Rather than accept the symbolic, ceremonial rule of the Ozamanthimian Tyrants, a Ranathim under the psuedonym of “Satra Temos” wrote a diatribe about the weakness of his species, how masters had come to accept slavery. It became a racial call to arms, a demand that the Ranathim ascend to their rightful place rather than dully accepting what other races in the Umbral Rim gave them.

The work generated outrage, which Satra Temos channeled into dominion. He used his vast psychic powers to channel rebellion and revolt across the Umbral Rim, and he rose amidst the chaos. He never formally ruled anything, acting more like a master of a criminal syndicate centered on revolt, racial superiority, assassination and a cult of personality that arose around him. His reign of terror lasted a Lithian century when it abruptly ended, the shadowy Satra Temos simply vanishing from history without a trace and his dominion collapsed quickly. His legacy would carry on, however, as his disciples carried his lessons and began to build their own structures of conspiratorial power that would culminate in the Shadow Tyranny two hundred years later.

476 AE to 959 AE The Middle Dynasty (“the High Gothic period”)
(1521to 2019 DC Lithian; 178to 194gc U Eldoth)

A succession crisis within the Alexian Dynasty rocks the House of Alexus and forces them to give concessions to prevent civil war. This era sees the slow down of the Alexian war machine, the shift of the Alexian Dynasty to a more ritualistic rule, one where the Emperor rarely leaves the gardens of Sovereign, and where the heads of the various Houses begin to take on a greater role. The era sees an explosion of culture and ornately beautiful armor as military arms begin to take on a more ceremonial role.

• The Succession Crisis: the proliferation of the Alexian line led to lesser siblings being married into families or given minor titles meant that numerous families scattered across the Empire had some claim to the Alexian throne and so when an Alexian Emperor died without an heir, civil war nearly erupted until wiser heads prevailed and a successor was properly chosen from a close branch of the Dynasty.
• The Rise of the Houses: The chaos of the succession crisis forced concessions from the Dynasty to their vassal lords. The various houses, while founded in previous eras, took on a form more familiar to the modern galaxy and had a far greater measure of autonomy as the Alexian Emperors became relegated to a more ceremonial role as a “Font of Honors” and the stamp of legitimacy upon the actions of the Houses.
• The Reign of the Nameless Emperor: Curious records associated with the succession crisis show signs of a data purge surrounding one of the rulers of the Alexian Dynasty. He seems to have been the Emperor during the time of the succession crisis, either a short-lived usurper, a compromise candidate later rejected, or the rightful heir deposed and then his reign covered up. He seems to have laid the ground work for some of the advances and techniques used later by Lucian Alexus to solidify his power.
• The Reign of Tanaquil Alexus: Considered the most exemplary Empress of the era, Tanaquil Alexus proved a deeply philosophical ruler whose reign laid out the rules and expectations of the Houses and the forms of etiquette expected of those who attended the Alexian court. She also penned substantial works on the Akashic Mysteries, still used to this day by the aristocracy.
• The False Oracles and the House of Bastards: The Akashic Order’s image of perfection took a blow during the succession crisis and the rising power of the aristocratic houses made the lords less inclined to blindly follow Akashic oracles. Furthermore, as the lines of what was socially acceptable became more clearly defined, people needed to turn elsewhere for their more illicit needs, and so a trade in self-serving prophecies began to arise, with Akashic-trained Oracles offering their assistance directly to the ambition of houses, and the bastards and illicit servants of the aristocracy coming together into an informal organization known as “the House of Bastards.”
• The Conquest of the Hydrus Constellation: As it winded down, the Alexian warmachine did still manage to conquer the gateway into the Umbral Rim, ending a long period of Keleni independence. House Elegans, who had spearheaded the conquest, were given command of the region, and they ruled with a light hand, allowing the unique practices of the local Keleni and Westerly populations to remain unchecked.
• The Preaching of Isa the Exile: Integrated once more into a greater galactic community, some Keleni began to move about the population, preaching a unique form of Communion open to all species. The most famous of these preachers was the saintly Isa the Exile, who would be mysteriously martyred (some blame the Akashic Order or Keleni traditionalists, but a Ranathim assassin seems the most likely case). This lead to the widespread belief in True Communion throughout the Dynasty (but especially in the area bordering the Umbral Rim) and the undermining of many of the ideas and ideals of the Akashic Mysteries.

~500 AE to 1300 AE The Shadow Tyranny (the Umbral Rim)
(1546to 2371DC Lithian; 179to 204gc U Eldoth)

During this era, the Umbral Rim sees a slow, but distinct, shift in the institutions of political power. While still highly fractious and balkanized, the warlords, pirates and criminal organizations begin to fall in line behind a mysterious “Circle of Tyrants.” According to the lore of the era, these Tyrants were powerful psychic masters who followed the teachings of Satra Temos and ruled from behind puppets and catspaws, using manipulation and fear as their main levers of power. Definitely during this era, the various warlords of the Umbral Rim were able to set aside their differences long enough to make organized pushes, especially against the Temple Worlds, seizing it from the Dynasty, then losing it in the Communion Crusade, and then waging a secret war with the Templar, who eventually won and broke the Circle of Tyrants, but not before they had corrupted the promising Revalis White and dealt the Templars a serious blow, leading to their dissolution at the end of the Alexian Dynasty.

959 AE to 1359 AE The End of the Dynasty (“the Communion War”)
(2019 to 2432DC Lithian; 194to 206gc U Eldoth)

Decadence and corruption dominated the end of the Alexian Dynasty, as well as a reaction to that corruption in the form of the rise of the Knights of Communion, the masters of the Temple Worlds, the Space Templars. The reign of the Mad Emperor Lucian Alexus and his war on the Templars, the Communion War, would see the end of both the Templars and the Alexian Dynasty.

• The Loss of the Hydrus Constellation: the churning forces and mini-empires of the Umbral Rim managed to re-capture the Hydrus Constellation, enslaving many Keleni and humans alike and desecreting the Temple Worlds. The Alexian Dynasty did nothing, as the worlds proved too troublesome to hold and the Dynasty had turned inward at this point.
• The Communion Crusade: Dissatisfied with the lack of Alexian response, True Communion adherents such as the Westerly mercenary Pagan Hue, the space knight Troy Elegans, and the True Communion preacher An-Kellun Arrenon, took it upon themselves to stage a war to reclaim the Hydrus constellation. Former space knights joined forces with Westerly mercenaries gathered arms and took the Constellation themselves.
• The Temple Worlds restored: The Communion Crusades left the Hydrus Constellation in the hands of humans faithful to True Communion. Rather than return the Constellation to the Alexian Dynasty, they declared their independence, recreating the Keleni Temple Worlds in their own image. Where space knights had ruled the Alexian Dynasty, now the Knights of Communion ruled and guarded the Temple Worlds with their own unique brand of True Communion, which welcomed all species and all adherents regardless of station. They proved a resilient and powerful state, one which troubled the decaying Alexian Dynastry and the Akashic Order with their “subversive” rhetoric.
• The Reign of Mad Emperor Lucian Alexus: The decadence of the aristocracy allowed for the Alexian Dynasty to begin to regather power. Secretive technological projects begun by the “Nameless Emperor” culminated in the creation of “Immortal” armor and advanced fighters both capable of sustaining their occupants indefinitely and enforcing total loyalty to the will of the Alexian Dynasty. Using these, Lucian Alexus was able to break out of the cage of ceremony and ritual long imposed on the Dynasty and directly enforce his will upon the Galaxy, upending centuries of tradition and power by bringing in new houses, like Tan-Shai
  .
• The Revalis Heresy: One of the most powerful and influential Templars, now called Revalis White, broke from True Communion to side with the lurking influence of the Cult of the Mystical Tyrant, still alive in the Umbral Rim. His unique take on both philosophies created a rift within the Templars.
• The Communion War: Lucian Alexus declared war on the Temple Worlds, initiating the Communion War. This resulted, swiftly, in his death at the hands of Jax Elegans but culminated in the rebellion of the Houses against his rule, the dissolution of the Templars and the loss of the Temple Worlds as a distinct entity, and ended at last the Alexian Dynasty.

A Psi-Wars Historical Timeline II: The Galactic Federation and the Rise of the Empire

Normally, a timeline begins sequentially, starting at “the beginning of history,” and mine certainly does, but I’m going to break it up a little differently because I want to emphasize something to you, dear reader: put the most vital information in front of your players first, and bonus or reward information later, especially after some hunting.  I also want to emphasize that “starting at the beginning of time” is generally overkill, and you always have to start somewhere.  You’ll be missing a little context, but that’s okay, we’ll pick up a little earlier back tomorrow.

If you’re a little lost on the calendar notation, check out yesterday’s post on calendars.

The Modern Era

 1359 AE to 1747 AE Interregnum: The War of the Houses
(2432to2832 DC Lithian; 206to 218gc U Eldoth)

The death of Lucian Alexus did not result in the immediate dissolution of the Dynasty. Instead, a long war broke out that turned into a detente as the various houses all angled, first, for their preferred successor (similar to the succession crisis a millennia earlier), then for their own ascendancy on the throne, then for their own local concerns.

• The Reign of Shio Daijin: Lord Shio Daijin reached Sovereign first after the death of Lucian Alexus and seized it, proclaiming himself regent until a proper successor could be found, or so he claimed. The other houses and remnants of the Alexian Dynasty saw him as a usurper, and he was slain by Alexian remnant forces as a Traitor Lord and his house shamed.
   
• The Hunting of the Traitor Lords: the last remnants of Lucian Alexus’s Immortals, his body guard, and aristocrats loyal to the Dynasty, such as Kusari Kain, sought out those they felt responsible for the death of Lucian Alexus or what they saw as attempts to seize control of the Dynasty, including the last of the Templars, the House Daijin, and others, until their efforts finally collapsed.
• The War of the Houses: The last remnant of Maradon powers, absent the Alexian Dynasty, were the aristocratic houses of Maradon themselves. Powerful houses like Daijin, Tan-Shai, Sabine and Mistral vied for control, first of the Empire itself and then, eventually, over the sovereignty of their own domains. The majority of this war would turn to detente, with shifting alliances preventing any one house from dominating. As a result, regions of control slowly calcified into stable states, and the war became a formal, ritual affair focused more on negotiation, show of force and dueling rather than open warfare.

1693 AE to Present The Slaver Empire (The Umbral Rim)
(2776DC toPresentLithian; 217gc U to Present Eldoth)

The Umbral Rim lay largely unprepared for the latest Mug incursion. Scattered warlords and pirate kings cast about for allies as the Mug War-Arks devastated their defenses and scattered their forces. The Slavers, who had long supported the remaining, skeletal framework of Tyrannic economic and political power as “servants” to various warlords that seized thrones on worlds like Sarai or Rath, offered their slave armies and their starships to defend against the Mug raids. They quietly gathered up all their various favors and used the war to position themselves well, until they had sufficient wealth and power that they pushed out the Mug, seized Rath and installed their own master there, and began to dictate the course of events in the Umbral Rim. With a combination of addiction, corruption and strategic brilliance, Slaver power waxed until it had united nearly all of the Umbral Rim and managed to steal worlds from the Hydrus cluster itself, eventually threatening even the Federation.  

This resulted in the Slaver War (see below) at 2211 AE (3310 DC) when House Elegans fought back and pushed them out of the Hydrus Cluster, though suffered greatly for their victory. This pushed the Slaver Empire back to the Corvus Constellation and the Sanguine Stars.  The rise of the Valorian Empire pushed them back even further, carving away most of the Corvus Constellation and liberating Sarai from their clutches.  Never has the Slaver Empire been weaker. However, a new leader has arisen, forging ties with the Sathran race, and corrupt elements within the Valorian Empire in a bid to spread Slaver influence once again.

1747 to 2276 AE The Galactic Federation
(2832to3377DC Lithian; 218to 235gc U Eldoth)

The effect of the detenteof the War of the Houses was such that diplomacy became a dominating feature of aristocratic life. Under the vision of Valria Sabine, a great Galactic Senate was called, first as a means to hammer out a specific concord across the divided houses and then, again at her patient and insistent urging, it slowly turned into a yearly forum for treaties and discussing the direction of the Houses. Then, finally, after the tragic death of her brother, Vance Sabine, and her inspiring rhetoric, the Houses agreed to form a federation: no house would rule over another and each would be autonomous, but they would all sacrifice some of their sovereignty to the Galactic Senate, agreeing to be bound by common economic, domestic and foreign policies. 

 

This era became an era of peace and prosperity not seen for millennia. The aristocratic penchant for diplomacy spread to all aspects of their reign, and they expanded the Galactic Federation through negotiation rather than conquest. This required them to actually have something to offer, and most independent worlds that joined of their own volition found themselves improved by commerce, tourism and technological exchange, and granted religious freedoms and freedom of travel and commerce that allowed them to live with a level of freedom and autonomy they had not enjoyed under millennia of empire after empire. 

Slowly but surely, it heralded a golden age… but not a perfect one. The aristocracy held special, unique rights over the rest, and they guarded their autonomy carefully, often refusing to cooperate with one another. Critically, the Federation had no centralized military power, for each house feared whomever controlled the levers of military power would use it to enforce their vision, turning the Federation into an Empire.

• Expansion and Stability: The Galactic Federation expanded through negotiation. After the fall of the Alexian Dynasty, only parts of the Glorian Rim, the Core and parts of the Arkhaian Spiral remained under House control. As the Federation expanded, alien races such as the Sparrial, the Asrathi, Keleni enclave worlds like Covenant and even remote worlds, like the Rogue Stars and the Spindel Web, agreed to join the Galactic Federation. 
   
• The Rise of Corporations: The Galactic Federation needed to remain an economic powerhouse to maintain its appeal to its member worlds, and to do that, it needed to grant more and more sovereignty to corporate entities. At Tan-Shai bidding, the Senate recognized the Hyperium Guild, the entire corporation, as an autonomous member. This opened the gate to other powerful corporations, and given standing in the senate, they could directly vote their interests. This often resulted in greater economic prosperity, but that prosperity was often unevenly divided, especially if the majority of the Galaxy would side with a corporation against the interests of a minority of worlds…
• 2211 to 2219 AE The Slave-War and the Plague: Not every encounter with aliens went well. The Slaver clans of the Umbral Rim grew in strength over this era, and their raids resulted in the enslavement of members of the Federation. The Galactic Senate voted to allow House Elegans to go to war, and it brought numerous allies with it, and managed to push back the more primitive Slavers from their protectorate in the Hydrus Constellation, but the deep press into the Umbral Rim exposed many members of the Galactic Federation to new plagues that had long stewed in the confines of the Umbral Rim, and a plague ripped across the Federation, killing many and crippling more. While not a catastrophic loss of life, it was nonetheless influential to the era.
• The Rise of Robots: With the death of many sapients, paired with rising corporate profits, more corporations began to turn to the talents of the Neo-Rationalists in the Arkhaian Spiral, including the Council of Terminus and its intelligences, and the innovative designs of the Primus system. Robots had already been a feature of the human-dominated galaxy, but after the Slaver-Plague, their presence became more pronounced and created economic disruptions, leaving discontented populations who felt their needs were left unmet by the increasingly isolated aristocracy and profit-driven corporations.

2237 to 2256 AE The Anacridian Scourge
(3337to3357DC Lithian; 234gc U Eldoth)

Into a galaxy struggling with internal tensions, a calamatous invasion crashed in the Arkhaian Spiral. Originating in the Anacridian System (or, at least, first encountered there), the Scourge tore through the Arkhaian Spiral, devastating entire planets with its nightmarish techno-organic warmachines. All life fed its engines and it devoured entire populations to sate its hunger; those who did not die found themselves infected and changed by a techno-organic plague. The entire Arkhaian Spiral begged for help, but paralyzed by internal struggles, each House refused to move, remembering the price House Elegans had paid for its war.

Finally, an honored naval officer of House Daijin, Leto Daijin, proposed a unified military force that served no House, but the Senate itself. Houses would contribute some amount to its fleets, but the corporations would provide industrial support too, creating ships designed specifically to handle the scourge. The gambit worked: the corporations build the new fleet while Leto led a delaying action with donated vessels, stopping the Scourge in the Kybernian Cluster and then, with the new fleet, pushing the Anacridian Scourge back out of the galaxy after 20 years of grueling war that redefined the Arkahaian Spiral.

2256 to 2269 AE The Hero of the Federation and the Reform movement
(3357 to 3370DC Lithian; 234 to 235gc U Eldoth)

With the war won in the Arkhaian Spiral, Grand Admiral Leto Daijin returned a hero. He magnanimously stepped down from his position, to the collective relief of the Galactic Senate, however, at the urging of his soldiers, the people of the Arkhaian Spiral and the people of the Galaxy, he turned to politics and was elected to the Senate as a powerful new Senator. There, he urged military reforms and, based on the treatment of his soldiers after the war, and his experiences during his travels across the galaxy, he proposed several additional policies, like an oversight ministry over corporations, making the Federated military a permanent fixture and creating a substantial welfare program for citizenry displaced by robotic labor. His proposed policies, his stoic charisma, and his deeds all made him an extremely potent political force to content with, and a polarizing figure in the Senate with his threats to the status quo.

2261 AE The Cybernetic Union and Unrest
(3362DC Lithian; 234gc U Eldoth)

With such a great loss of human life, and the corruption of robotics by the techno-organic plagues of the Scourge, the robots of the more remote parts of the Arkhaian Spiral began to ran amok until the Council of Terminus, absent human leadership, stepped in to control the situation and created the Cybernetic Union, an empire governed by a totalitarian version of cyber-rationalism that argued for the supremacy of the robotic mind. It forced cybernetic implants on its human subjects and began an aggressive expansion campaign while the rest of the Galactic Federation looked on with horror.

2269 AE The Martyrdom of Leto Daijin and the Galactic Civil War
(3370DC Lithian; 235gc U Eldoth)

Once again, a great horror arose in the galaxy and the Senate did nothing. Some senators even sided with the Cybernetic Union on their arguments about the place of robots and suggested coming to some sort of compromise with the Union. Leto lambasted the senate for its inaction and then, finally, resigned his position and took up command of his old fleets, and without waiting for orders, used them in the defense of worlds in the Kybernian Cluster, holding the Cybernetic Union back while the Senate decided what to do, an act widely hailed by the populace of the Federation. Fearing a popular man with a grand fleet as his back, the Senate recalled the Grand Admiral, arrested him for treason and executed him.

The Galaxy convulsed over the rash decisions, and his lieutenants in the navy reacted with rage. His protege and “adopted son” Ren Valorian gathered their fury and directed it back at the Galactic Senate. The “Senate Fleets” charted a course for Sovereign, to march on the very Senate it was meant to answer to. The Houses gathered their own personal defenses to hold off the advance, except for House Tan-Shai which saw which way the wind was blowing and threw its support in with Valorian. The protege defeated the aristocrats and seized the remnants of the Senate, executing for treason those who had bowed to the Union, dithered before the Scourge, and seen to the execution of Leto Daijin.

Then, sitting himself on the ancient, long-absent Alexian throne of Sovereign, Ren Valorian “accepted the call” to name himself Emperor, and declared a state of emergency against the traitor lords holed up in the Glorian Rim behind Caliban and the Maelstrom, and the genocidal Cybernetic Union, and the monstrous Slavers and other alien threats.

Thus began the Valorian Empire.

2276 AE to Present (2297 AE) The Valorian Empire
(3377to3399 DC Lithian; 235gc U Eldoth)

The Valorian Empire has endured for an entire generation. The Emperor begins to grey, and his children, a princess and a prince born to him by the Lady Zandra Tan-Shai, have grown into adulthood. Those who reach adulthood in the Galaxy have known only the Valorian Empire their entire life. The days of the Galactic Federation seem like a dream clung to by the old and bitter, a fading reality that will never be again.

The Wars initiated by Ren Valorian simmer to a stalemate as he solidifies his power in the Galactic Core and sends his Imperial Knights and other agents to execute his machinations. Now, with his technological superiority nearly complete and his psychic mastery of the Galaxy nearing totality, he readies to break the stalemates between himself and the Alliance and the Cybernetic Union. The detente with the Alliance and the meat-grinder between the Empire and the Union cannot last forever…

A Psi-Wars Historical Timeline Part I: Introduction and Calendars

For April, my patrons voted for an overview of the history of Psi-Wars.  I’ve already written on the topic rather extensively:

• here (A discussion of History in RPGs)
• here (The history of the Empire)
• here (The History of the Space Knight)
• and here (the History of Communion) 

But these were rough draft concepts scribbled out when I was just beginning to put together the setting.  Since then, I’ve created a more internally consistent and cohesive history that I often refer to, but rarely fully reveal.  This week, we’re going to dive into the whole thing.  Before we do, it might be helpful to reread the first one, as today we’re mostly going to discuss the ideas of how to use history in a setting, why I chose the format that I did, and some concepts.

This series also assumes you’re familiar with the Eldoth and the Ranathim; it would help to be familiar with the houses of the Alliance as well.

How to Write your History Revisited

I’ve already dicussed this in the History of Psi-Wars post, linked above, but it’s worth revisiting.  Everything in your setting should serve a purpose, and that purpose should be to assist your game.  The average person playing D&D doesn’t need to read a 20 page timeline to understand “Kill monsters, take their things,” and so writing said timeline is generally a waste of time.  On the other side of the coin, conspiratorial settings, horror settings and other campaigns where investigation is very important, history is often central, so central that “Antiquarian” is an actual template in GURPS Horror.  How much history you need and at what level of detail depends greatly on your campaign and its needs. 

Psi-Wars leans much more heavily towards the “investigative” side of things, as do many Action movies, which may seem surprising given how HIGH OCTANE most action movies are, but if you think about it, all of them are steeped in context.  Atomic Blonde is set in the 1980s in divided, Cold War Berlin; the Bourne series revolves around a set of experiments that took place in the past; Mission Impossible Fallout and most of the current Fast and Furious franchise is heavily based on events that took place in previous films.  The swashbuckling genre, and the wuxia genre, both of which Psi-Wars heavily draws from and are in principle are kissing cousins to the action film, rely even more heavily on history, especially wuxia, which often has the hero stumbling into the midst of a century old feud while dealing with the fallout of a crumbling and corrupt empire.

In principle, a well written history can  serve several purposes for an RPG:

• It provides context: it explains why the players do what they do.  To use a D&D example, without context, then your players go through nameless dungeons killing random monsters and gaining random loot.  It might be fun, but it lacks a sense of meaning.  A named dungeon embedded in the world with consequences to the rest of the narrative can really amp of the investment the players will have in the adventure.  History can be one example of context.
• It provides continuity: a well-written history embedded in a well-written campaign begins to make the players feel like a part of a larger adventure. Their actions are a logical continuation of what came before them, and they can begin to see how history will spool out before them after their adventure continued.  They can invest themselves in the stories of the past to create the new stories of the future.
• It’s a good source of ideas: Players who read your history may want to tie themselves into that history.  They might want to acquire relics from a particular part of history, or they might want to belong to this lost but important bloodline, or they may want to hunt down some historically relevant but currently lost location.  The rolling context of history might provide plenty of things to do in the present too, giving you adventure ideas as the “press of history” forces your hand in events.
• It creates a larger picture: When looking for adventure ideas, many “sandbox” GMs like to have a full cohesive setting in which the consequences of the players’ actions naturally impact the world and create the next obvious adventures.  Having played in a few such games, I can say that they’re quite fun.  History is one ingredient that might fit into such a game.

So, when creating your history, ask yourselves a few questions:

• Will my players care?  What can they use out of this material for their own characters?
• Will it matter to my campaign? Will it provide me with ideas I can use?
• Does it feel logical, like events naturally follow from events?
• Is it fun to read? If it’s tedious, nobody will read it.

As a rule, I tend to make sure I write in interesting relics, interesting characters, and interesting locations in the past, so that players who invest in history can explore those concepts.  I also try to make sure that there’s sort of a logic that history follows. The last, though, is the trickiest.

Writing Readable History

If you’re going to write your history, how do you know people will read it?  Allow me to offer some thoughts on the shape of your history, its purpose, and how to present it.

Iceberg Theory

One of my favorite concepts for writing is Earnest Hemingway’s Iceberg theory which, briefly stated, is that you should do your homework, let your homework inform your final work, but don’t actually put your homework in your final work. When it comes to history, that means it’s important for me to have it worked out in detail, so I understand it, but I don’t necessarily put this material in my final setting document. In fact, I probably shouldn’t (it might overwhelm the reader). Very large works, like the Lord of the Rings, the Marvel universe and Transformers Prime often have a setting bible that sets out how the universe works and encourages cohesion between the various elements in the setting (Star Wars definitely lacked one of these, which explains how much crazy got injected into the EU). Think of this document as a “Setting bible” for history.

History is ultimately more for the GM than it is for the player. The best history is entirely optional.  For example, sit down and watch Star Wars: A New Hope again, and you’ll notice that literally all the history you need to know is in the opening crawl.  The prequels are unnecessary, the expanded universe is unnecessary, KOTOR is unnecessary; you can enjoy the work on its own.  In principle, your setting should be the same and, where possible, I’ve tried to nail Psi-Wars down to “There’s an Empire, it’s fighting an alliance, there are some space templars from long ago still running around: go!” and that’s all you have to know.

 

But a full document helps me understand how the world should work.  If the players investigate the past of the Emperor, what will they find?  If they go deep into the Cult of the Mystical Tyrant in the Umbral Rim, what sort of ruins might they uncover?  I can make up stuff on the spot, and that’s fine, but if the players get a sense of discovery of a cohesive world, as though the world was real and they were discovering it, they really appreciate that extra effort.

Thus the primary thing to know about history is that the GM needs the full details, but the players probably only need an executive summary and, really, will enjoy discovering history “in game” more than reading it from a book.

History as a Story

If you’re going to present your history to your players, the best way is probably in a narrative form.  The human mind naturally understands and appreciates narrative, and you can see this in history classes: students fall asleep while memorizing dates, but come wide awake when the history teacher launches into lurid stories about crimes and conspiracies in the final years of the court of the Ancien Regime.  Most successful RPG histories I’ve read follow this format: you start at the beginning and read your way forward. Such histories tend to be full of lurid details, judgement cast on the characters involved, and lead up to the present where they suddenly stop, presenting the reader with what they might be doing.

The problem with history as a story is that it’s meant to be read as a single narrative yarn, and that presents numerous problems.  The first is that they can become quite long, especially if the GM feels the need to tell you every little detail.  A player is more likely to read a single A4 of history than a 100-page volume. 

History-as-a-story also tends to be told sequentially, starting at the beginning of history and wending its way forward, as there are no natural “breaks” and jumping around might create unnecessary confusion.  This compounds the problem of a long history, since if players are only going to read a single page, and you started with the creation myth of your setting, then everyone is going to be familiar with the creation myth and have no sense of recent events, which is precisely the opposite of how people actually work.  It would be like every American being deeply aware of all of the details of colonial life in America, down to the fashions, religious practices and relations with one another and Native American tribes, but no idea who the current president is.

Finally, History-as-a-story struggles with parallel histories, and these often matter, especially if they all lead to the same point.  For example, if telling the story of WW2, you might reasonably start with the rise of Hitler, his aggression, the beginning of the war, and then America’s involvement, then the defeat of the Nazis, but then the war isn’t over, becaue the War in the Pacific needs to be won, and to explain that, you have to go all the way back and talk about how the Japanese got involved.  You might cut back and forth, but this can be challenging in the narrative as well, especially if you have a very long history (imagine being in the midst of reading of the Roman Empire and the narrator keeps cutting to completely unrelated events in China and the Americas: he’s going somewhere, but you might need to wait 1000 pages before you know what that is).

As a general rule, when it comes to History-as-a-story, I recommend keeping them tight, short and focused.  No more than a page if you can avoid it, focus on a single narrative thread, and don’t try to tell all the history of the world this way, but give an overview of the most important points.

For Psi-Wars, I handled this with my intro. I might revise and expand it, but I wouldn’t want it to be more than about a page’s worth of material, with a strong focus on the current war, the players involved and the Templars vs the Cult of the Mystical Tyrant, as these are the central conflicts of the setting.

History as a Series of Ages

Weapons of the Gods has the nicest form of history I’ve seen in a long time. Rather than “tell the history of the setting,” it talks about specific eras. This has several advantages. First, this breaks up the history into digestible chunks that don’t rely overly much on what came before it. This is also how we tend to read history: we don’t start with the Sumerians and end with man on the moon. Instead, we study “the Greeks” or “the Roman Empire” or “The Medieval Ages.”  Second, it lets you discuss everything about the era.  If you’re talking about the medieval ages, you can also talk about the armor, the culture, the weapons, the religion, interesting people, the “spirit of the age” and so on.  This makes it a great way to drop names, locations and relics that the players might connect with.  Finally, it handles parallel history better, because you can talk about a different era somewhere else: for example, you might discuss medieval history in one section, and the Islamic Caliphate in another section, and Viking History in a third.

The “Series of Ages” approach is that it doesn’t really follow the “flow” of history.  It gives the impression that history happens in chapters, as though there were romans and then, suddenly, knights, when in reality, one slowly evolved into the other.  You also have to pick arbitrary eras and choose that which you feel is most interesting.  It should be noted that neither of these are necessarily problems for a fictional setting, as the natural flow of history can be less interesting than highly specific ages (“First came the age of monsters, then the age of magic, then the age of apocalypse; now is the fallen age”).

The “Series of Ages” can make it a little difficult on the reader to know where to start.  I recommend pointing him to the sections most relevant to his character or the current setting.

This would have been my preferred way to handle showing you the history of Psi-Wars, and I started writing up these ages, but they quickly got away from me and I started running out of time.  I seem to have made a rather elaborate and detailed history.  To make sense of it, I needed a timeline, and it became easier to just give you the timeline, as that will take less time (which is very scarce at the moment, for reasons pertaining to the last post in this blog).  Which brings me to:

History as a Timeline

I tend to like this form of history the least.  It exemplifies everything boring about history: it’s a series of events noted by date, with no additional connections of context.  It serves a purpose, but that purpose is not to introduce your players to a setting.  Rather, it’s the historical equivalent to a map: it lets you sort of out specific details (“Wait. Exactly how long has it been since X happened, and how much time separated Y and Z?”).  It’s useful as a reference, and that makes it useful to the GM, but it’s not so useful to the players.

So, naturally I’ve chosen to write out the history of Psi-Wars as a timeline.  Why? Well, I need the timeline anyway, to get a sense of the flow of history.  I need to know if eras go on “too long,” or if there’s overlap between events, or where I can insert eras.  A timeline is a classic example of the iceberg theory: a GM needs it to do his homework, but it’s not something to necessarily show his players.

So why am I showing you?  Well, it doesn’t hurt to show you guys; it only hurts if I run a game and expect you to know all of this history.  As I said above, time is very precious at the moment, and since I needed to iron this out anyway, once I had done so, to stop and turn to writing the eras in detail might take me another month, and it’s better to give you what I have no than to force you to wait for what I’d like to do later, especially given that I need to get back to other things (What were we doing?  Oh right! Vehicles!)

Thus, the rest of this week will be the Psi-Wars timeline, split into large chunks.  Forgive me if you find it a little tedious to get through.

Calendars

When discussing time, it’s useful to stop and think about how one measures it. This can well be a bridge too far, as most people don’t actually care about “fantasy calendars,” at least for the most part. Consider, for a moment, the Star Wars calendar. Do you know what it is? Do you know how they measure time? The short answer is you probably don’t and, if you think of it, it’s never come up. They don’t really talk about it, and when they do mention time it seems to be in familiar units. That’s because we, as an audience, don’t really care. We want actual information transmitted to us, and knowing that something is going to happen “2.695 kilocycle” tells you nothing, not compared to “45 minutes.”

That said, we do tend to want to have some sort of distancing mechanism, something to remind us that we’re in space or in the future. Farscape did very well with its “microts” (about a second) and its “Arns” (about an hour.”) Thus we could hear an alien say “Give me 10 microts,” and we knew they meant about 10 seconds, and we also knew we were in space.

Psi-Wars is especially large, and we have a theme of creating different cultural feels for different regions of space, to give us a sense of the vast distances involved in galactic travel. Thus, it makes sense to have different calendars: a familiar calendar for humanity and the galactic center, and alien calendars in alien parts of space: the more alien the culture, the more alien the calendar.

The Human Calendar

Humanity needs an obvious calendar and, being human, there’s no reason they wouldn’t have a familiar day/night cycle. They may even descend from Earthlings and would likely favor planets with similar rotation speeds and gravity, thus seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years can all remain the same. In principle, we’d need different month names, but it’s such a rare thing that people would say in game“Let’s meet in December” that I don’t think it’s a major issue. The only real issue I see is how we note the years.

I don’t want to set this in a definable future. Is this in the year 2500 AD? 40,000 AD? Who knows. Mankind has lost its roots, which means they’ve lost connection with how we date years (And beyond perhaps Sheperdism, they’ve lost any “Christianity” they might have had). So, we need to pick a new central year, and the obvious fit is the Alexian dynasty’s founding. We’ll call this the “Alexian Era,” of “AE,” which is a nice nod to various sci-fi works that use “After Earth.” For everything before that, we’ll use “BD” or “Before the Dynasty.” Some people might prefer “Galactic Era” and “Before Galactic Era.”

The Lithian Calendar

The Umbral Rim should obviouslybe alien and unusual with unfamiliar terms and ideas, and thus their calendar should be unique. The Empire is powerful and influential enough that many denizens there might be familiar with the human calendar, but we might expect that when aliens talk to one another, they would use different units, ideas and concepts. Not terriblydifferent, but different enough that the players feel like they’re in an alien space, our “Microts” and “Arns.”

In this case, for words, we have the Lithian Conlang to draw on, so:

• Nata: year
• Marhan: Month
• Thari: Day
• Junta: Hour
• Miena: Minute
• Nita: Second

If we wanted to fill out the calendar, noting the names of the months or special days, we would note when the “holy days” of the various cults are, and that would likely dominate the calendar.

For the year, a common sci-fi trope is to give years different lengths based on the orbital period of the star. Realistically, given that the home star of the Ranathim turned into a black hole, it should be an extremely large star, so they should orbit very far away, giving them a long year. If we use GURPS Space, we come to about 1620 days for a year to give them a habitable world around a 2 solar mass star. However, I’d like to use a value closer to an Earth year, and given the “Orientalist” tropes of the Ranathim, I’d like to use a value closer to a lunar calendar, which would give them 354 days in a year, making their year almost but not quite a Human Year, which is a perfect reflection of how the Ranathim feel as a culture. Asfor their “year zero,” their dating system would probably focus on the reign of the current Ranathim Tyrant, but that’s not a thing anymore, thus they probably base their years on the “Dark Cataclysm” (Moriktani Nobet), or when their homestar went supernova, broke their homeworld and completely changed the Umbral Rim forever.

The Eldothic Calendar

Most of the Arkhaian Spiral is dominated by humans these days, but the Eldoth and their Deep Engine would use a unique time system and it would continue to be pertinent today if you want to interface with either the Deep Engine or Eldothic mysteries.

They’re a very alien species and deeply logical and clinical and they have a universal “computer” in the form of the Deep Engine, thus it seems logical that they wouldn’t bother with a time system based on something so provincial as the orbital period of their homeworld (they’re not that sentimental). Instead, they might do something similar to unix timeand have everything in seconds. They might also make it metricand describe their time in tens, hundreds, thousand and millions of seconds. We’d use the term “cycle” instead of “seconds,” and append the right metric designation. (We could use Eldothic words for it, but we’re going to translate the concept anyway, so we might as well use these words in english here).

As for their “year zero,” we’ll borrow an idea from Unix time again, and simply note everything from some arbitrary period and simply call that period “universal.” If you go before that, you’re in “negative time,” or possibly “Archival.”

• 1 “Cycle” = 1 second
• 1 “kilocycle” = about 15 minutes
• 1 “megacycle” = a bit less than a fortnight
• 1 “gigacycle” = 32 years and their preferred notation for historical dating (also the length of time most Eldoth go between regeneration cycles).
   

The Sylvan Calendar

I’ve not put much thought here. I expect the species of the Sylvan Spiral as sufficiently primitive that they have their own calendars, though if they had a universal, it might have to do with the thalline filaments cycle of “blooming” and “growth,” as that would be a useful universal for the species of the Sylvan Spiral to know.

The Draco Cluster, however, and its resident Mug civilization regularly makes incursions into the Galaxy on a cyclical basis. Their dwarf galaxy orbits slowly around the central Psi-Wars galaxy on a path that takes literally millions of years, and thus it has not appreciably moved throughout the history of the Galaxy, but it hasmoved, and its movement shifts its relationship to the hyperspatial passages between it and the rest of the Galaxy. It spends most of its time in “eclipse,” or unable to easily access the Galaxy, but for a few centuries every 1124 years by the Lithian calender (approximately, but not precisely1159 years by the human calendar), it is able to access the Galaxy. When it does so, it is able to invade the Sylvan and Umbral Rim.

The Cultural Context of the Akashic Mysteries

The Akashic Mysteries deeply tied to the Maradon culture and its rise to Galactic dominion.  The roots of the Akashic Mysteries lie in the Maradon culture’s ancestral legacy of psionics, eugenics, and the discoveries made on the new world of Persephone.

Of the original three human worlds, Maradon had the strongest psionic culture. Their civilizatoin quickly discovered and thoroughly researched psychic phenomenon. They used precognition to uncover crime, telepathy to separate truth from a lie, and ergokinesis and psychokinesis to explore new physics. The eugenic experiments that eventually created the Maradonian aristocracy arose long before the formalization of the Akashic mysteries.

Because this early era had not yet perfected psionic eugenics (and their direct genetic tampering proved disastrous), the early psions of the Maradon Culture quickly became celebraties or power-brokers. If one wanted as many as three precognitives to uncover crime or predict the outcome of a business venture, one had to search far and wide, and either enslave the precognitive or give the precognitive whatever she wanted. Thus, psions quickly came to dominate the Maradon culture; eugenics and aristocratic bloodlines, over time, only cemented this power.

The Akashic Mysteries didn’t really get their start until Maradonian colonists settled the world of Persephone. There, vast networks of caverns hid within its volcanic islands and mountainous inlets, creating a complex “underworld.” And within this underworld, the colonists discovered “the devils of Persephone”, or the Kairoskia.

Time, and the Akashic Order, has obscured the early stories about the devils of Persephone, so that fact blurs with myth. They might be symbolic, a phenomenon uncovered by the colonists, or literal monsters, or a strange bloodline that arose on the planet. What seems clear is that the Kairoskia killed many colonists until they began sacrifice their maidens by sending them into the caverns. Those maidens eventually returned, having brokered some sort of understanding with the Kairoskia, and brought with them an understanding of deep time. They claimed to have “read the Akashic record,” and to have witnessed the shape of time.

Persephone began to produce the greatest precognitives in human space. People from across the local sector began to flock to Persephone to beg the Akashic Oracles for answers to their questions. The Akashic Oracles gave them the answers that they needed, but demanded high prices. They sought initiates into their order, demanded sacrifices and mysterious favors. Finally, Alexus Rex himself came to Persephone and demanded to know how to expand his dominion. The oracles greeted him and drew him deep into their caves. When he returned, oracles flanked him and Sissi Sabine stood at his side. He announced their engagement, the truth of the Oracles and described the prophecy the oracles had given him: they saw a “Coming Storm” that would tear apart the galaxy, and that only the Alexian bloodline could guide the galaxy through that storm safely.

Thereafter, the Akashic Order accompanied the Alexian fleet as it conquered the galaxy. They descended into their dreaming pods and consulted their shadow councils. They told the Maradonian elite where to fight, who to marry, and when to make allies. The Akashic Order guided the Maradon culture to dominion, shaped their aristocracy and set them on the path to eternity. Together, the Alexian bloodline and the Akashic Order created the “Eternal Empire.”

But the Eternal Empire couldn’t last forever. As time wore on, some within the Akashic Order took less interest in the “Golden Path” of the Akashic record and focused more on personal success and happiness. They began to make alliances with powerful nobles, describing what paths they could take for immediate gain, knowing that this slowly, bit by bit, pulled humanity off the Golden Path, but leaving it to future generations. Slowly, the Maradonian bloodlines began to lose their potency and the Empire its power.

Then the Akashic Order met the philosophy of True Communion. Their profound power allowed them to side-step destiny. They preached a vision of the world where no person was greater than another, that all people had potential. True Communion undercut the very principles upon which the Akashic Order were founded upon: the weight of destiny, the rarity of psionic power, the need for powerful authority. The lesser nobles and the common man took to this new, alien philosophy and founded the Knights of Communion.

At first, the Akashic Order refuse to tolerate this dissent. They saw it as a danger to their golden path. Knights loyal to the Akashic Order formed their own Order of Akashic Knights who openly fought against the Knights of Communion. Eventually, though, the Akashic Order lost control of their own degenerate members and the mad Emperor, Lucius Alexus, and all out war erupted with the Knights of Communion, a war that destroyed the Alexian bloodline and shattered the dreams of the Akashic Order.

In the fiery collapse of the “Eternal Empire,” the Akashic Order had no haven in the storm. The had no single bloodline they could ally with. The debts of the degenerate members came due and the timeline fractured into a million unnavigable paths. Some in the Akashic Order would side with one noble house, while another portion of the Akashic Order would side with another house. One side would win, and the other would blame the portion of the Order that backed him for giving him bad advice. Slowly but surely, the Maradonian elites lost faith in the Akashic Order. Some remained true, but the Akashic Order retreated back to Persephone while the aristocracy picked up the pieces of the Empire and welded it back together as the Federation.

The Akashic Order remained on Perspephone, in an archconservative part of the Federation that still believed in the old ways. The sight of a veiled girl flanked by robed defenders became a quaint reminder of a more superstitious past. Their loss of power meant that only those who believed fiercely in the need to protect the galaxy from the Coming Storm: the fires at the end of the Eternal Empire had purged the order of the unfaithful. The Akashic Order rededicated itself to its original purpose.

They foresaw the galactic invasion for what it was: the first rumbling of the Coming Storm. They tried to warn the Federation of the need to act, but they bickered instead. They foresaw the rise of the Emperor, and they warned the aristocracy to prepare. Some, like House Sabine and Grimshaw, did just that, and were ready for the Empire when it erupted. Suddenly, the old prophecies snap into clear focus and the Akashics of the modern era begin to wonder: is it possible to bring mankind back onto the golden path again? Perhaps the galaxy can yet be saved from the Coming Storm…

Akashic Culture and Values

The Order of the Akashic Mysteries are grounded in the culture and values of the Maradonian people. Thus, their basic preconceptions tend to be grounded in the same elitist prestige, value for innocence and purity and their sense of restraint that the rest of the Maradonian elites have.

The people of Maradon believe that some people are demonstrably better than other people. Their aristocracy are stronger, healthier, smarter and more attractive than the common man, and thus more suited to rule. Even if one disagrees with these assessments on subjective grounds, objectively the aristocracy have powers that mere mortals do not: they can see the future, shape your mind and toss around electricity. The rationalists might dismiss these as tricks, but the Maradonian people know better. Because the aristocracy has powers and insights that the common men do not, they obviously have the right to rule.

But this right to rule comes with an obligation. The reason the Maradonian elite have the right to rule comes because they’re the best suited to do the job right. Which means they must do the job right! This creates a compact between the ruled and the ruler, with each bound in turn by the other. The aristocrat must rule wisely and justly and use his power to expand not only his own wealth and happiness, but the wealth and happiness of all his people. This means that the elite must exercise restraint. He is not free to act as he sees fit. They should not use a wasteful, warlike or insulting solution where an elegant, peaceful and respectful solution could work just as well.

This fosters a paternal relationship between ruler and ruled. The elites shelter the common man from the dangers of the galaxy, and thus the elites begin to value the softness associated with a well-sheltered person. A delicate princess with flawless skin and long, long silken hair who has never faced an unkind word, to the Maradon people, is not a sign of indolent degeneracy, but a sign of the power of her protectors. To the Maradon people, the ideal world is an idyllic one, full of lush pastures and happy, fat commoners who never worry about war or theft.

The Akashic Order feels the same way. They see themselves and their self-appointed leaders, as the only elites capable of ruling the galaxy. Only the strongest, the fastest, the best can possibly do the job, and the Akashic already knows who the best are. However, a heavy hand on the timeline might have unexpected consequences, and if people become too aware of the realities of the hardships that they face, or the true content of prophecy, they might begin to act unpredictably. The Akashic Order wants people to be blindly obedient so that the Akashic order can move them to where they need to be with minimal danger to all, and this even applies to its own members. The Akashic Order is rigidly hierarchical, with the most prestigious and pure-blooded at the top of the Order; they exercise a restrained rule, seldom making appearances and making small, subtle moves, while they expect their followers to blindly obey and to pull back from the world, to make as little impact on it as possible, while also allowing to make as little impact upon them as possible (to best retain their objectivity).