Historical Overview

The history of paleo-humanity’s rise on the fabled world of Old Earth, its dispersal across the stars, and its cladization into a myriad of forms is fragmentary at best — the result of societal collapse, transcendence events, data storage format wars, and outright censorship. Even Old Earth’s exact location is uncertain.

The Archaics rose with the aid of knowledge recovered from the ruins of the past. They built floating, crystalline cities, constructed the hyperspace travel network (even connecting the noospheres of their core worlds with superluminal relays), and engaged in planetary-scale engineering. Theirs was an age when a noble might rule an entire world populated by her clones and sophont warships fought grand battles for audiences in telepresence.

Something happened — something called the Great Collapse. Galactic civilization fractured into individual worlds, and some of those worlds slid back into savagery. Much of the available historical record of this time appears to have been deliberately altered to obscure events. The time separating the Great Collapse from the present isn’t entirely clear, but may it be 1,000 standard years or more.

In the time following the Great Collapse, systems were largely isolated, and mysterious cultures rose and fell in what was once the core of human space.

The Zurr are known from their iconography, some ritual sites with oddly angled monumental structures, and a few apparently functionless artifacts. They left no information technology or tools necessary for an advanced civilization behind, but their presence is attested on multiple worlds.

The Faceless Ones were a cabal of research-sadists who replaced their faces with featureless metallic masks that were actually incredibly powerful sensory and recording apparatus. Their goal was the exploration of the extremes of sensation, and they sought to archive all they could about their depraved experiments on those who fell into their hands.

The Radiant Polity directly ruled only a few worlds or habitats, but it claimed ultimate guardianship over the future of the entire human-descended tribe.

Through control of hyperspace network access, the Polity effectively controlled interstellar trade and influenced planetary governments. Membership in the Polity was ostensibly voluntary, yet each of its psybernetically enhanced lords wielded absolute power, checked only by other lords.

Their mantra was:
“We civilize; we do not govern. We end war; we do not wage it. We guard; we do not control. Our thoughts look always to the future.”

The Polity prohibited the export of certain memeplexes between cultures, but this effort failed, and it was torn asunder by memetic conflict. The Instrumentality of Aom was born out of this struggle.