A Future History
| The Novarion Sector Primer |
|---|
| A Future History |
| Worlds of the Novarion Sector |
| Notable Sci-Fi Technology |
| Novarion Sector Vibes |
The current date is approximately January 1st, 3198 CE on the Mandate standard calendar. The origin of the Novarion Sector begins centuries earlier.
The ancient history of metahumanity1 is controversial in the modern day. The consensus position is that "baseline" humans emerged from a planet called Earth or Terra sometime in the late 22nd or early 23rd century, and spread outwards into the stars. The heterodox position is that humans are actually native to a number of different planets,2 and any evolutionary discrepancies can be explained away by mismeasurement or divine intervention.
Regardless, seven or eight hundred years ago, all of human space was ruled by an entity called the Mandate. The Mandate divided the universe into sectors, built great Jump Gates to traverse the vast distances between stars, and ruled their planets with an iron fist. It built wonders never before seen by humankind, but turned them to the task of tyranny.
In 2665, the Scream erupted into metadimensional space, washing over the entire Mandate. The Jump Gates collapsed, the arch-psychics went mad, and the greater Mandate disappeared into the era of the Silence, so no more need be said of it.
At the time of the Scream and the dawn of the Silence, the Mandate had constructed one Jump Gate into the Novarion Sector. The rest of the sector was being mapped, colonized, and carved out for its Terran lords. This sheltered it against the worst effects of the Scream. There were no city-planets to starve. It was not totally reliant on the Jump Gates for FTL travel, but had ships equipped with spike drives to let them chart their own courses from star to star.
Cut off from support, the Mandate authorities did what they could to hold the worlds together, but it was a mere delaying action. Their tools broke; their systems rotted. The last of the Mandate's "pretech" was bequeathed to the ignorant Silent Generations, who cared little for the wider universe. History faded into myth.
The greatest myth from this time is the epic of the Silverbird and its titanic struggle with the god-machine3 Serpentis. Fifty years after the Scream, it sallied out from the Gateworlds and slew Serpentis over a forgotten star in the far reaches of the sector. Every culture in the Novarion Sector has a tale of when the Silverbird visited their planet on its odyssey. Everyone insists that their culture-heroes were aboard, or perhaps that they were founded by a shore party that stayed behind. Popular reimaginings crew the Silverbird with the likes of Jason, King Arthur, and Sun Wukong. After completing its final voyage, the Silverbird disappeared, and ended forever the age of legends and heroes. The Deep Silence had begun.
Five hundred years ago, history restarts. The Jian gathered the rest of the Nomad Fleets,4 and after a six-month contest of strength, unified them all. The Empire of Great Jian stretched across almost the entire sector and at its height, held over two hundred worlds in tribute, including many that are lost today. The Jian piled their shipholds and treasure-moons high with the tribute of ten thousand nations. Their empire was brought low when their ruling families settled on Hangsha, preferring to rule from their stately pleasure domes rather than their ship bridges. The other nomad fleets either sensed weakness and rebelled, or carved out independent planetary empires of their own.
Great Jian's shattering was pivotal in the rise of the next power, the Empire of La Coruna. The Empire of La Coruna was founded by Otto Zähringen-Montfort,5 who blessed it with his greatest treasure: a hundred intact, pristine, ready-to-use spike drives. When the Empire of Great Jian drilled towards the Gateworlds and La Coruna, the baroque masterpieces of the Corunan fleet overcame their scavenger ships. La Coruna rose quickly, securing dominion over many other Gateworld polities, and launching expeditions into the sector to secure treasure and glory. Corunan galleons hauled back riches from dozens of conquests. Unlike High Jian, it established colonies across the stars, spreading its influence, all guided by the hand of Their Imperial Genetic Majesties, the cloned and gene-tuned offspring of Otto.
Yet all the superhuman monarchs and colonial endeavors could not save it from the tides of history. If anything, these only accelerated its fall. Its emperors became increasingly erratic and debased; whole cohorts of princelings vied for succession through murder; and colonial overextension drained the coffers. The Empire of La Coruna never collapsed, but after rebellion and rot, it is a shadow of what it once was.
As the Empire withered, others rose. The Divergence occurred: the worlds who could develop indigenous interstellar travel did so, and the rest would remain as "lostworlds" until "discovered" by their starfaring cousins. Among the Gateworlds, benefiting from their ancient inheritance and colonial riches seized from La Coruna, new empires arose: Endon, Gallica, Konstantinia. Alongside them stood Oyuzila, the descendant of the Nomad Empires, and Hanabira, a late-arriving imperial power from the sector's center. These empires have stretched their hands across the Novarion Sector, slowly bringing more and more planets under their control. They race each other to found settler colonies, extraction colonies, and protectorates farther and farther to the sector's north.
As they expanded and explored, they encountered new worlds to conquer, but also new dangers. Fifty years ago, one such danger reared its head in the Red Christian Crisis. The Great Powers banded together to defeat the Red Christians, but the costs were immense. The economics of empire forced them to squeeze their dependencies tighter, which generated unrest, which incurred greater costs, and so it went through today. The empires are desperate for new riches to plunder, and encourage explorers and independent crews to plumb the distant stars.
In the modern day, the Novarion Sector is over two hundred stars with as many inhabited planets, where hundreds of ships crisscross the starlanes every day. Yet over half of space remains poorly explored, and many planets remain isolated from the greater universe. From planet to planet, people can live in widespread luxury or appalling inequality; in high towers of steel and glass or in carved shelters covered with bone and hide. Metahumanity expands further every day, and people of all shapes, sizes, bodies, genetic lineages and artificial constructions can be found wandering the stars. There is tyranny, poverty, and atrocities, but the future is an open book, just waiting for those with the courage to write.
A term which encompasses "baseline" humans who have the shapes, sizes, and features that were found on Old Earth, all of the various compatible evolutionary offshoots, and human-derived beings of organic and mechanical nature. It does not include the various alien species, sentient or otherwise, so far encountered.↩
Typically whatever planets would be convenient to justify the speaker's conquests.↩
Different cultures call it an A.I., a demon, a daeva, a world-serpent, a devil, the Ahriman, etc.↩
Groups of ships that survived or were launched immediately after the Scream, who remained spaceborne and interstellar the whole time, crewed by populations who never knew gravity's kiss.↩
Who was, by Church and imperial accounts a just and chivalrous warrior-noble; by other suppressed accounts, a rebel and pirate.↩