Chegraturn/History

## Origins

Chegraturni civilization began roughly around 5000 BNE in what was hypothesised to be a crash-landing by a fleet of proto-Allerian colony vessels blown off course by a rough patch of etherfog. Of the fleet’s tens of thousands of colonists it is believed that only a very small stock of roughly two-thousand survived. Worse, owing to the catastrophic circumstances of the crash and the etherographic isolation of Chegraturn, the survivors were quickly forced to adopt a pre-industrial lifestyle of subsistence farming, learning to scratch by in small villages. Any remaining stocks of advanced technology were consumed by the first generation in the rush to establish themselves, and access to any of their electronic records was lost. The knowledge and means to recreate a spacefaring civilization died fast on a world where more basic needs were more immediately pressing.

Fortunately for the survivors of the crash, the edenic conditions of the world they found themselves on meant that the cultivation of crops and herds was easy and the bounty plentiful. Villages grew into cities, and cities into states within the first few centuries. The Chegraturni spread themselves across their new world, wrote poems and king-lists, and founded new nations. Knowledge of their true origins in the stars became hazy memories, preserved in muddled folk myths about heroes and the star mother.

### Imperial Period

The period preceding the age of Tophaxian dominance was that of large multinational empires in the “old world” of Tophax, Urchac, and Shashis, with Sheyjan remaining divided into smaller polities and proto-states until much later and Dechus not being settled until much later by Tophaxi colonists. Enabled by the emergence of new military technologies such as steel and the horse-stirrup, these empires conquered vast swathes of Chegraturn and held a multitude of nations under their rule. These empires engaged in long-range trade, frequently fought wars at their borders, and occasionally balkanised and reformed.

All of these great empires engaged in some form of star worship, a corruption of the original Rhyan Religion of the proto-Allerian colonists. This faith was instrumental in legitimating the imperial governments that ruled so much of the planet, who believed themselves, earnestly or otherwise, to be the defenders of the faith and the faithful.

As the great empires of Chegraturn entrenched themselves, the star-religions grew more doctrinaire as its priestly class grew larger and more bureaucratised. Canon became solidified, and then stagnant, and then corrupted towards profane political ends as the empires which patronised the clergy aged. The clergy engaged themselves with temporal politics, and dissent and re-interpretation among the laity was persecuted with alacrity.

As the great empires aged, they grew ineffectual and weak from a combination of institutional decay, loss of original purpose, overurbanisation, and the resultant intense power struggles that resulted from the decline and breakdown of norms. The large empires that dominated the Tophax continent broke apart into looser and looser federations, eventually collapsing completely. Elsewhere in the old world, the great empires clung to power in a reduced state, enabled by the more forgiving geography and more autocratic political traditions of Urchaci and Shashis civilizations.

### Tophaxi Renaissance

Tophax became a continent dominated by squabbling kingdoms, principalities, and republics ruled by an aristocracy of mounted warriors. The post-imperial star-priesthood acted as the moral centre and mediator of the now-divided Tophax civilization which gave it an incredible amount of soft-power over the secular leadership.

The newly balkanised Tophax became a crucible of military, industrial, cultural, and proto-scientific innovation. Competitions between Tophaxi princes was intense, and the stifling influence of an overbearing imperial bureaucracy was no longer present in this freer yet more dangerous world. The Tophax civilization developed a tradition of practicality, inquisitiveness, empirical observation, and engineering acumen rapidly, which was paired with a religious desire for perfection and a reach toward the infinite which animated their materialist inclination with an ennobling appreciation of the divine. Technological and cultural development quickened into a renaissance of civilizational vigour not seen for a thousand years.

Tophax’s renaissance brought it into conflict with an aging religious establishment. A new generation of priests, brought up in the emerging traditions of the new Tophax, began to question the ancient doctrine of the star-priesthood, as well as its excesses and alleged corruption. A reformation movement, split among a hundred different denominations, rose to challenge the old beliefs of the Tophaxi star-church: a reformation which emphasised original interpretation, the role of individual conscience, and the use of individual reason in order to serve and honour the divine. The reformation was the distillation of the new Tophax, and a statement of this young new civilization’s purpose: the confrontation with the old priesthood, the old ways, was inevitable.

### Tophaxi Reformation

While the Reformation began as an insurgent movement of dissident religious thinkers inspired by the ongoing renaissance, it grew into a formidable federation of religious movements in and of itself. Princes converted, as did their populace, in a process which was often bottom-up. Philosophers, who had in the beginning influenced the emergence of the reformation, were themselves influenced by it. The prominence of reason, empirical thought, and individual conscience in the reform movement would deeply influence the thinkers whose writings would set down the basic principles along which the Northern Alliance would be founded to protect.

The Reformation, the invention of the printing press, gunpowder, transoceanic navigation, and the rise of the modern bureaucratic state in Tophax would coincide with a period of climate and demographic disruption which prompted the decline of the old post-imperial Tophax world. The old aristocracy and old post-imperial star-church declined in prominence, and even as the cities swelled in size and grew rich from transcontinental trade the social structures which maintained a degree of safety across the continent came undone.

Disease, harsh winters, famine, and war followed, which increased the strength of the Reformation in the face of apparent impotentness from the old star-church, and the social disruptions caused by Reformation religious strife in turn exacerbated the crisis. Deportation of troublesome religious minorities to the continent of Dechus was a measure done in some areas, such as in the kingdom of Eflad, but was not practical in other areas of the continent hit hard by the combination of natural and political crises. As vast confessional wars broke out across Tophax, unprecedented scientific and philosophical progress was being made, continents were being discovered, and ancient empires elsewhere in the old world were being forced to bend towards domineering and ambitious Tophaxi armadas.

In the ashes of medieval Tophax, a renewed and vibrant civilization influenced almost totally by a triumphant Reformation emerged. The rationalism and universalist philosophy of this faith would penetrate into every facet of Tophax thinking and culture, and though the old priesthood survived along with its adherents, it too had been irreversibly changed by the Reformation. As war waned and peace returned to the ravaged continent, Tophax civilization prepared for its next metamorphosis.

### Tophaxi Enlightenment

The post-Reformation Tophax reaped the dividend of centuries of painful evolution and internal conflict. Centralised adminsitrative states, commanding large colonial empires in Dechus and small parts of the old world, governed a pacified continent safely and efficiently. Philosophy and the arts flourished in a mature cultural environment which had grown out of the disorderly cauldron of past eras.

The strains of thought that emerged in Post-Reformation philosophy formed the direct precursors to the dominant worldviews of modern Chegraturni civilization. Common to all of its branches, however, was the rapid decline of explicit religious ideals in the thought of the Enlightenment. The Reformation having removed any emphasis on ritual and spiritual orthodoxy, the Enlightenment instead secularised the metaphysical substrate on which it and all prior intellectual revolutions in Tophax’s post-imperial history had been based upon. This was a task made easier by the long, dark memory of the confessional wars of the past era, whose destructiveness and irrationality seemed to grow with every generation’s retelling of the events.

The Tophaxi Enlightenment would come to a head as the continent was rocked by a series of republican and secularist revolutions that displaced the remnants of pre-Reformation governance and rule. The revolutionary governments managed to overtake the majority of the continent, and conquered or replaced the remaining old regimes on Tophax and fight Eflad and her colonies to a standstill in a globe-spanning war fought mostly on the seas.

Eflad held fast, and even managed to fund a partially successful counter-revolution in Fral which saw the reinstallation of the monarchy (though a constitutional one bound both by a legislature and revolution-era laws enforcing secularism and the separation of powers). However, it cost Eflad its largest colony, Dechus, which split off in its own anti-colonial revolution, and discontent among the masses and intellectual class forced the Kingdom of Eflad to pass numerous reforms which dispersed the power of the Crown to numerous elected and bureaucratic bodies and abolished the Church of Eflad as an official state institution.

### Age of Reason

A series of republican governments, semi-technocracies, and constitutional monarchies emerged at the end of the roughly thirty-year revolutionary period. Long-standing programmes of centralisation and overseas conquest were joined by aggressive secularisation agenda, mass-education, and wide-scale reforms of political institutions at all levels. Modern national identities took their form in the post-revolutionary period and national values were pushed to replace the religious ones still prevalent in the majority of the population.

After the re-discovery of industrial production by the Chegraturni roughly two centuries ago, the generation of great powers created in the late Enlightenment reached maturity. The sophistication of Chegraturni technology and the size of the world’s economy grew rapidly as smog-spewing factories lined the countrysides of the Northwestern powers on the continents of Tophax and Dechus, who then took the tide of modernity eastwards and southwards through imperialistic wars of conquest and resource acquisition that massively expanded their old colonial holdings. Radical new ideologies came to full fruition, the capstone of centuries of post-Reformation secular thought totally displacing the religions of old. Lines of mutual interest, economic dependency, and ideological affinity were drawn between the great powers.

### Great War

This powderkeg exploded with the Great War, an immense conflict fought between the democratic and conservative Northern Alliance and the autocratic and racially-supremacist National Collectivists. The six-year war was fought on a global, industrial scale and saw the deaths of eighty million people in all, most of whom were civilians caught in bombing raids or slaughtered in acts of National Collectivist genocide.

The war ended inconclusively with both sides exhausted: While the Northern Alliance maintained their sovereignty and overseas empires, the National Collectivists earned international recognition through the use of force, survived the onslaught of the larger economies of the Northern Alliance, and made territorial acquisitions of most of the smaller states on Tophax, creating vast continental empires. Amid the chaos after the conclusion of the Great War, many of the Northern Alliance’s overseas colonies seceded or shook off their status as protectorates in vast post-colonial rebellions in a period lasting two years, creating both the Socialist-Futurist Vanguard Union as a third post-Enlightenment faction as well as a number of Neutral States.

### Early Cold War

As the geopolitical chaos of the immediate postwar period died down, the various great alliances of the world turned to the business of rearming themselves for the next inevitable conflict. An emerging arms race has seen the development in the past couple of years of the jet fighter-aircraft, the main battle tank, the first generation of precision-guided weaponry, atomic weapons, and most significantly the rapid advancement of radio and computer technology.

As fears of another great war mount, research into early warning and detection systems as well as more precise anti-aircraft weapons has culminated in the development of powerful radio telescope arrays by all the major alliances. These arrays, built as proofs of concept for technology to be later used in weapons systems, are ostensibly used by civilian astronomers as part of the wider scientific revolution which forms the backdrop of the present arms race.

While radio astronomy was widely recognised to be an afterthought, a thin cover for what was in reality weapons research, civilian astronomers would very quickly begin to make a number of alarming discoveries not long after these vast arrays were brought online. The crews of these arrays would rapidly catalogue thousands of unusual radio signals and dozens of stars with unusual infrared emissions. Almost all astronomical research became focused on the collection of what were beginning to be tentatively termed “technosignatures” by the international scientific community, a community which would cross alliance lines to discuss what had so quickly become the most important and cutting edge field of science.

The general sentiment around the scientific community, so long subordinated under government bureaucrats and military leaders to create ever more lethal weapons, was electric with excitement and optimism. It had been increasingly apparent that the preponderance of evidence pointed to the existence of extraterrestrial life, and the crash-landing of a mysterious unmanned probe would confirm it. A team of Frallic scientists, under the direction of the National Director, would secretly reverse-engineer the subspace transmission technology on the probe into a vast array deep in the Fral Empire around the Hrenfir Mountains, which would then be used to send an extremely powerful subspace transmission into the sky in an attempt at first contact.