History of the Astral Web, Part 1

The next series of articles are going to cover the in-world history of the Astral Web. It’s just a really high level overview. I’ve always been turned off by campaign settings with hundreds of pages of background, so I was avoiding that when I wrote this. I always imagined that this was written in-world as a struggling middle school student’s essay because she was desperate for extra-credit to pass history class.

I originally wrote this history as 15 or so eras of history. Rather than give a huge post, I’m going to post each era on its own.

The first bit starts in the near future…

The First Step

In the late¹ 21st Century mankind achieved success in its first experimental terraforming project on the planet Mars. For the first time in his history, man could now live in relative comfort away from Earth, his home planet.

It was originally estimated that the Mars project would take almost a century to complete, but widespread scientific and popular interest resulted in an explosion of available resources. In the end, the planet was livable in less than half the expected time. For many the project was not completed soon enough. UNICO, the United Nations' Interplanetary Colonization Organization,² was flooded with applications from families desperate to leave an over-crowded Earth for life on a new, spacious frontier. Twenty million applications were approved, but over ten times that many were rejected.

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1. This originally said the “mid 21st Century.” I wrote that nearly 30 years ago, and we’re no closer to Mars than we were then. I guess I need to give humanity some extra time.↩

2. I bothered to make sure this organization had a pronounceable acronym. Counting this one mention, the acronym is only used one other time. The name is never used again.↩