Historical Stygian Reaches The Great Unmaking

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THE GREAT UNMAKING

SITE LORE

The Great Unmaking is an historical event/period which occurred in the Stygian Reaches some 10-12,000 years before the present. Characterized by war, strife and the contraction or outright destruction of many cultures in the region, the period left the ruins of great civilizations scattered across many worlds, and caused a long period of rebuilding in which the surviving effected cultures struggled to return to pre-Unmaking levels of technology, population and society. In many parts of the Reaches, local cultures have still not managed to return to their pre-Unmaking extent.

CAUSES

CAUSES​

No definitive cause for the Great Unmaking as a whole have ever been proven, although modern scholars believe it to be the result of a confluence of factors, including the emergence of new sociopolitical movements, an economic downturn effecting a number of key worlds, and changes in technology which contributed to the former.

Another major factor would have been disease; there are period accounts of a new plague spreading from Sith space, referred to as the Kintalkis Parasite or the "Black Hunger," or simply called Kintalkis. This plague apparently spread along the well-established interstellar trade routes of the day, infecting populations on many worlds and killing untold numbers. The threat of the plague also caused many planets which had not been infected to close themselves off to trade, exacerbating the ongoing economic crises.

Finally, on top of everything else, there are also references in period accounts of an external force, an aggressive culture which swept through the Stygian Reaches and attacked many of the region's largest empires. Although they were successfully repelled by most, the damage they inflicted hastened the fall or contraction of the cultures they attacked, resulting in power vacuums and other crises, which in turn led to more conflict.

EFFECTS

EFFECTS​

The effects of the Great Unmaking were widespread. Many starfaring cultures which existed at the time of the Unmaking were destroyed outright, either in conflicts with their neighbors over territory and/or resources, or through internal strife, wracked by the stresses of plague, economic collapse and political upheaval. The ruins and pitiful survivors of these civilizations, some of them enormous and sophisticated in culture and technology, lay scattered across a million worlds, their treasures and final mysteries awaiting brave explorers willing to seek them out.

Not every society which was effected by the Unmaking was destroyed, of course. Notably, the Sith of the Eternity and the humans of the Satrapy came through the catastrophe, and have since that time been the two largest cultural blocs in the Stygian Reaches, albeit that is not a high bar. Both cultures were severely diminished, losing contact with large swaths of the colonized territories and having their central governmental institutions only barely survive, beating back attempts by various internal factions to seize control. Both entities lost huge amounts of population, and with them, large amounts of historical, technical and societal knowledge; many cultural institutions have had to be rebuilt from scratch in the millennia since, or gone without, and certain technologies which were once common have disappeared or become scarce.

Of course, many other cultures did also survive the turmoil, similarly diminished to a greater or lesser extent. Most of these were smaller in extent than the Sith and Satrapy to begin with, however, and certainly have not grown to become serious rivals.

Even in the present day, population and infrastructure levels across the Stygian Reaches have not recovered to their pre-Unmaking extent, even in those areas least effected. One result of this is that a huge proportion of the region’s habitable worlds have been abandoned, either due to some local catastrophe or because there simply are not enough people to make the effort of reclaiming them feasible.

INTENT​

To create an historical event which explains the current state of civilization within the Stygian Reaches, including the prevalence of ruins and abandoned habitable worlds.