History of the Astral Web, Part 5

This is the fifth in a series of articles covering the in-world history of the Astral Web. I originally wrote the history as 15 or so eras of history. Rather than make one long post, each era is getting its own post.

This week is a little different. This week our era contains a special “sub-era.”

The Story so Far

The First Step: Mankind had terraformed Mars, and established settlements there.

The Departure: Mankind decided to send a million settlers to establish life around distant suns.

Left at Albuquerque: The fleet leaves Earth and is scattered far and wide by some unknown event.

The Awakening (Years 1 - 167): 20,000 humans settle on the planet Dearborn.

Expansion & Empire (Years 168 – 432)

One-hundred sixty-eight years after establishing their colony, the citizens of Dearborn discovered the Nexus principle and developed the first working Nexus drive. Faster-than-light (FTL)¹ travel had finally become a reality.

The people of Dearborn quickly began to travel throughout the galaxy. In their journeys they discovered seventy-four systems inhabited with descendants of the original fleet of colonists. The vast majority of these planets were delighted to be greeted by their brethren.

In an attempt to develop a unified system of government the colonists turned to one of history’s most successful methods of ruling a large and diverse domain: the Roman Republic. Due to the public’s misconceptions on ancient history, the republic quickly became known as the Empire.

Development of Spatial Warfare (circa Year 223)

One of the greatest benefits of the Unified Empire was the development of interstellar trade. Trade allowed each planet to specialize in the goods that it could best produce, and increased the overall quality of life, level of technology, and economic well-being throughout the Empire.

In any society, though, there are always those who feel it’s easier to take than to make. It was such a group, called the Norzeyan Cabal, that developed spatial warfare. Before the Cabal began their pirating raids, no ship had ever needed to be armed.

The Imperial government responded by allowing merchant ships to arm themselves and by forming an interstellar police force called the Imperial Sentinels. While the Sentinels were successful against the Norzeyans, other groups arose and established the need to maintain the Sentinels.

Retrospective

The was originally written up as 2 eras (and a sub-era). The first era was called “Discovery” and was just the first two sentences. The remainder was “The Unified Empire.” For this post I decided that they were both so related that they should be joined as a single era.

This was one of the playable eras. It was intended to be the most Star Trek in feel. It always struck me as weird that the Enterprise kept running into human settlements even though it was “where no man has gone before.” This part of the background was meant to setup a situation where that would make sense. The players could be the crew of an Empire starship exploring new worlds. They would be making contact with other planets that grew out of fragments of the original settlement fleet, trying to convince them to join the Empire.

If I were to do a rewrite, I would change the Spatial Warfare section. It would be more interesting if it happened independently in multiple systems before being contacted by Dearborne. That way the Empire has risk when it makes contact with a new planet.

That’s it for this week.

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1. In my current incarnations, this is not really FTL travel. I will probably dedicate an entire post to the “hows and whys.” The short version is that these days my nexus drive doesn’t connect distant suns to each other. It connects parallel universes to each other. Thus every sun that the players travel to is really just another version of our sun, though it may have had a radically different history and therefore more or fewer planets. Like I said, there’s a lot more to it, and it deserves its own post.↩