Imperium of Man - Age of Strife, M25-M30: The Age of Strife, also sometimes remembered as "Old Night," was a 5,000-year-long period of anarchy, war, and destructive technological regression from the 25th to the 30th Millennia that brought Mankind to the brink of extinction -- and reversed the highly advanced scientific and technological discoveries made by the interstellar Human civilisation of the Age of Technology that had preceded it.The Age of Strife was caused by the negative psychic and physical effects of the vicious Warp Storms that ravaged large portions of the galaxy beginning in the 23rd or 25th Millennium, depending on the source, which were the "ripples" in realspace of the psychic gestation of the new Chaos God Slaanesh in the Immaterium.If the previous age had been one of prosperity and enlightenment, the Age of Strife was its dark mirror.It is hard for historitors of the 41st Millennium to separate fact from insane ramblings or prophecies of doom, but it appears that terrible wars taged across the length and breadth of Humanity's galactic domain. Many worlds were consumed entirely, while even those whose populations endured were cut off from one another by the Warp Storms ravaging realspace.During this era of isolation and hardship, many Human colonies underwent drastic and widespread mutation. Some were destroyed by it, for those mutations were the result-of Warp energies saturating their flesh and engulfing their worlds.Others underwent more natural processes of adaptation and evolution, transforming into into Abhumans such as Ogryns, Ratlings, Stiltlimbs or Beastmen. Many wondrous advancements were lost or fell into disrepair, most of the STC technologies amongst them.During the Age of Strife, Slaanesh was forming within the Warp as a result of the growing hedonism and utter excess of the ancient Aeldari Empire in the millennia before its Fall.One result of the Warp Storms produced by this long gestation was the impossibility of faster-than-light travel or astro-telepathic interstellar communication through the ravaged currents of the Warp, which led to the subsequent isolation of Human colony worlds and star systems separated by multi-light-year distances.Human civilisation in the colonised portions of the galaxy fragmented, and where it survived, it took on wildly different forms. On Old Earth, the planetary economy collapsed with the loss of interstellar trade and communication with the rest of Humanity even as the social order broke down.Subjected to Terran millennia of isolation, hardship, invasion and horror, countless worlds plunged into post-apocalyptic barbarism. Amongst them was Old Earth itself.Wars, rebellion, and the diseases that inevitably followed in their wake were rampant. Vast swathes of the advanced scientific and technical knowledge accumulated in the previous millennia was lost or forgotten, and a slow descent into pre-industrial barbarism seemed inevitable for Earth and many of its colonies.On the Human homeworld, brutal warlords emerged from amidst the strife and disorder who carved out new kingdoms to serve as their fiefdoms. The emergence of these often brutal neo-feudal kingdoms, the new nation-states of the people later termed "techno-barbarians" by Imperial historitors, imposed an uneasy peace on the Earth that was frequently interrupted by feudal conflicts.The Human species seemed on the brink of extinction by the end of the 29th Millennium. And then, in Humanity's darkest hour, came the man who would become known as the Emperor of Mankind.