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.

I will be updating this page over the next couple of weeks with background information and basic rules.