The Bard System

The Bard System is a planetary system in the Milky Way Galaxy comprised of the planets Tempest, Cymbeline, Titus, and the sovereign space station, the Elysium.

Etymology
Etymology of the name.

Composition
Description of the Bard System's star, planets, celestial bodies, and inhabitants.

The First Doomsday
Earth 1000 years ago. The records of that time are a patchwork of “whisper-down the alley” messages and histories that read like fairy tales. What we know is this: there was a great war, a great plague, a great famine, a great disaster. We came close to the brink of extinction. We fought against the machinations of the Machine Mother and, in the end, managed to leash her, to gain control of the machine armies. Humanity was in control of its destiny once more. But the Earth was dying and not even the combined powers of Machine and Man could stop it. We left our home to travel the stars and look for new worlds to call our own.

First Contact
It is unclear if mankind had contact with aliens prior to meeting the Shell. However, the Shell were our first lasting contact. 100 years after leaving the cradle, the Shell were there to offer peace, to open their worlds to us, and to teach us new methods of traveling the stars.

Of course we went to war with them. It would be the last war that humans would directly take part in, though far from the last we would be involved with. Indeed, this war served as a turning point for mankind, when we would turn over our authority to the Machines. While we would remain their masters, we would unwittingly become their servants, unable to support ourselves without their constant supervision. For our safety, from here on out, the Machines fought the wars that humanity began.

We, that is to say the Machines, beat the Shell, destroyed them utterly and completely. We took their worlds, and dubbed ourselves the Celestial Ascendency, the great galactic empire of man.

Galactic Dominion
There were others, so many others, aliens so alien that we could not hope to understand them, and others who were quite like us. From our recliners we brought war upon them all. It was our entertainment, no more real to us than watching a movie. We treated war like a game, sometimes letting the aliens win a battle or two so that the final victory would be so much sweeter. All up there on the big screen or piped directly into our heads.

Humanity spread from world to world, destroying those that would not bow, and sometimes destroying even those who submitted. We were an infection contaminating the entire galaxy. At last, a union of worlds banded together to form the greatest fleet this galaxy had every known. For the first time we were out-manned and outgunned. Even with supreme power of the machines behind us, the numbers just didn’t add up. We were going to lose.

And yet, something saved us on the eve of the battle. The fleet, over a hundred thousand ships strong, disappeared, never to be seen again. No one understood how or why or where they went and no marker of the fleet remained to tell the tale. The result was simple; within a decade, humanity ruled the galaxy… and the machines ruled us.

The Exile War
For 500 hundred years we ruled unopposed. We’d create wars by allowing the lesser species gather their strength, build their fleets, and let them seem as though they had a chance. The end was always the same, crushing defeat, worlds turned to glass. The wars had to continue, we needed our fix. Then came the Exiles.

They were from another galaxy, running from a doom that threatened the universe, or so emissaries said. They wanted to form an alliance, colonize a few inhospitable worlds. We of course declared war on them. They were the invaders, a new and powerful threat, something to keep us excited.

In the early years, we made great strides toward destroying the massive Exile fleet, mostly because they refused to fight back. Then, after two decades of this, they apparently had enough of trying to forge a peace. They brought us war, but not the war we wanted. It has been said by many that the Exiles could have ended the war at any time, wiped us out entirely in a few decades if they wanted. Always they showed restraint, trying to bring peace to a people that would not have it.

We became desperate, we removed some of the restrictions that had long held the Machine Mother in check. This allowed her the freedom to advance, to improve her technologies at an exponential rate. The advancements came so fast that the Machine fleets were obsolete as soon as they came off the assembly line. Finally we were able to fight on even ground.

The Second Doomsday
The freedom we allowed the Machine Mother was not complete, she could not turn on us, not alone at least. It is said by the Church of the Machine, that the Exiles sought a meeting with the Machine Mother and that in this meeting they offered to remove the leash that bound her to humanity. The freedom we gave her allowed her to accept this offer. The allegiance of the Machines was lost.

This story may be apocryphal, however the result was the same. The union of man and machine was broken.

We fell and fell hard.

100 billion humans died immediately, so enmeshed were they with machines that they could not live without. Billions more died simply because they lived in a place that was inhospitable to human life without machine intervention. Within 10 years, 90% of humanity vanished, killed off by disease, wars, starvation and stupidity.

Was the Exile war over? It didn’t matter, we couldn’t fight it and those who remained couldn’t care. Survival was all that mattered now.

Reconstruction
This is where the record becomes more personal, as it is hard to speak for the galaxy as a whole beyond this point. Occasionally, we hear word from a passing ship or receive some wave on our cobbled together equipment but, for the most part, we were on our own. The Bard System, the planets of Tempest, Cymbeline, Titus, and the space station called the Elysium… this is our home.

Humanity survived. We rebuilt but nothing could be as it was. The technology of the Machines was so advanced that we couldn’t hope to understand it, so we learned how to do things for ourselves again. It is amazing how much we could forget when we had the Machines to do everything for us. We managed. It was the best we could do.

On Tempest, out of disparate tribes of men, the Terran Concordia formed; creating a loose confederation of people who could deal with problems on a planetary scale. Syndicates formed and grew and claimed the Elysium, the cobbled together space hulk in orbit around Tempest, as their home. From Cymbeline, its domed cities leaking radiation, came the mutants. Psychic abominations with warped minds to match their warped bodies. The silent super-planet Titus, a heavy G world devoted to bringing humanity to genetic perfection, yet at the same time closing themselves off from outsiders.

The War of Extinction Twenty years ago, the Machines returned, bent on eradicating all life. They nearly succeeded. Their war was short and brutal and, at the end of it, Tempest was once more a ruin. Though glad we were for an end to the carnage, we were left wondering why. What lead to the war? Why did it end so suddenly? With the knife pressed to our throat, the Machines could have easily wiped us out. But they didn’t; they simply stopped. Those Machines, the Robots who were left behind, retained little to no memory of the genocide. They took one of the cities they had demolished, called it their home, and left us in peace.

Arrival of the Aesir
[Description of Aesir entering the system.]

The Elysium
[Description of the Elysium stuff.]

Rise of Wrath
[Description of entropic influence, Starkiller 1]

Destruction of Tempest
[Description of Tempest's fall, Mag Mel's escape.]