Ashes of Empire

The Story So Far

The Society of Mankind, so the old stories go, was the greatest civilisation in history. Like a colossus, man bestrode the galaxy, taming wild planets, imposing order on thousands of star systems and bringing peace, prosperity and safety to all. Great strides in science and engineering birthed ships capable of outpacing light itself, or allowed men to step through doorways between stars as easily as doorways between rooms. Art and culture rose to unparalleled heights, and mankind conquered the very gates of death itself so great was their command of medicine.

Everything was destroyed during the fall. The great cities and orbitals burned, planets were shattered and entire star systems were devastated in the Society's final war, but whatever the reason for the violence was, it has been lost to the depths of time. Uncounted trillions of people were wiped from existence in the fighting, or in the wastelands left behind by the death spasms of the Society... except for the lucky few too remote, too small or simply lucky enough to be missed.

It has been five centuries since night fell on the Society of Mankind, but now, small sparks are beginning to appear in the blackness. The scattered children of the Society, at long last, have begun to reach out to the stars and reclaim what is theirs.

Ashes of Empire

Ashes of Empire is (will be?) an empire SD, where each player will take command of one of the scattered surviving colonies of mankind five centuries after a cataclysmic war came within a hair's breadth of destroying everything. It did succeed in destroying or rendering otherwise uninhabitable most of the worlds humanity had colonised up to that point, as well as almost all the infrastructure required for interstellar travel, and it has taken hundreds of years to crawl back into interstellar space.

Setting Details

Astrography and Space Travel

The old Society of Mankind was vast, and boasted a sophisticated interstellar transport network based on two different technologies. The most widespread, flicker drive, cheated Einstein by teleporting the vessel in question tiny distances almost incomprehensibly rapidly. Doing so required access to exotic matter, which occurs only rarely in nature but which could be manufactured in bulk quantities by a polity as sophisticated and with command of such depth of resources as the Society. The exact nature of how such things are manufactured has been lost, but fragmentary data archives indicate that supply was disrupted in the early stages of what was to be the Fall, and was never adequately re-established. Whatever the case, flicker drive allowed ships to travel between star systems at many thousands of times the speed of light, and was in widespread use at the time of the Fall.

Complementing flicker drive were slip points and slipgates. Both older and newer than flicker drive, slip points were in fact mankind's first method of interstellar travel, with the discovery of the Sol point at the Sol-Jupiter L3 point in the 22nd century. Ill-understood at the time, the Sol point allowed sufficiently heavily built ships to instantaneously travel to Tau Ceti, and further points in that system opened Sol's local space to the first wave of interstellar colonisation. Research on the natural phenomenon of slip points resulted, some centuries later, in artificial versions which could be directed where the builders wished. The cost of such devices was colossal even to the Society, requiring the equivalent of the output of multiple planetary economies to construct each individual gate, but by the time of the Fall the foundations of an extensive network had been built.

Beyond scattered mentions of gates being deliberately shut down to hinder opposition movement, what exactly became of that network is unknown, although it is presumably no longer in operation. The handful of gates known to Survivor States are thoroughly wrecked, and more useful as what amount to exotic matter mines. Naturally occurring slip points, however, still exist.

The old Society was a rough sphere thousands of light years in diameter, with development concentrated along naturally occurring slip point chains. In the modern day, the specifics of what is left are mostly unknown, although more or less accurate maps of the slip point network have been reconstructed.

Survivor States

The Society was an expanding polity, and maintained an aggressive, well funded colonisation and exploration programme right up until its demise. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that new colonies were being founded even during the Fall. Although the total lack of visitation by starships indicates that destruction of the Society's core and second stage worlds was complete, at least in terms of their ability to maintain technological, spacefaring civilisation, a polity as vast and widespread as the Society proved impossible to completely eliminate. As the destruction progressed, those involved in the Fall became less and less capable of projecting power and sustaining their militaries as the industrial underpinnings of their economy were destroyed. With resources becoming more and more limited, sending precious ships to attack remote colonies that were generally net consumers of resources was the height of folly. Although attacks on outlying worlds did occur early in the Fall, by its end they were so unheard of that nobody is now actually sure when the Fall ended; most surviving worlds relied on shipping to bring them news of the wider galaxy, and when shipping ceased, so did all knowledge of the outside world.

What is known is that ships stopped coming, and that none have arrived for hundreds of years. By their very nature as frontier colonies, the surviving worlds of mankind were incapable of maintaining their own technological base. Many of them, those with no manufacturing capabilities at all, simply descended into barbarism, as did many of those who suffered early attacks. Others, those slightly more developed, regressed to varying degrees before halting the decline and some, those older colonies lucky enough to avoid orbital bombardment from a visiting warship, finished their slide backwards at a point where they retained the ability to build intra-system spacecraft.

None of those worlds, however, possessed a supply of exotic matter, and the very circumstances of their survival - the lack of any shipping - meant that they had no access to working flicker drive starships. Other systems, those with slip point connections or with access to the required exotic matter - generally scavanged from abandoned equipment or housed in an orbital depot, although some of the planets that did suffer bombardment but that escaped total collapse were blessed with the wreck of the terminal gate of one of the Society's slipgate chains to mine.

In any case, chance decreed that nobody who retained the ability to make use of exotic matter had access to any supply of it, and those who did have a supply lacked any ability to reach or make use of it. In some cases, they even lacked any knowledge. Only now have the Survivor States reached a point where they can take advantage of their access to begin reclaiming the galaxy.

Technology

The Society was almost incomprehensibly advanced. Many surviving artefacts are so far beyond the current cutting edge as to be effectively black boxes, and the handful of known slipgates are brobdingnagian structures massing as much as a small moon. The old stories contain examples of weapons powerful enough to mass-scatter planets and battles fought inside stars. How much of the stories is myth and exaggeration is uncertain, but some Survivor State systems contain evidence of planetary engineering on a large scale - the rotation of gas giant planets slowed so as to allow their moons to be made habitable, planetary orbits shifted and more - and it is clear from the modern day descendants of the Society that mankind was not averse to tinkering with its own genetics. The handful of surviving starships, mothballed in parking orbits or stations to await the return of crews now long dead, feature facilities for neural interfaces, shipboard AIs - although all appear to have been thoroughly scrubbed - and other advanced technologies.

Survivor States, on the other hand, are rather more limited. The rediscovery of crude, first-generation reactionless drives and the compact fusion reactors required to supply them with energy is effectively the pre-requisite for a Survivor State to have regained the ability to take effective advantage of its own star system and any relics contained therein, and particle weapons (and the energy screens to defend against them) are ubiquitous. Fission and fusion warheads are the mainstay of missile combat.

FTL communication is possible, but requires installations of such significant size that it is effectively limited to fixed stations, forcing ships to rely on FTL courier drones. Mass radar and gravimetric sensors, on the other hand, can generally be fitted to mid-sized ships, although such FTL sensor technologies can only see ships with active reactionless drives or, at closer ranges, artificial gravity. Surviving Society ships contain much more advanced sensor suits, capable of real-time observation of entire star systems and interstellar communication over week or month-long timescales.