Sentai Fhtagn The Year Is 2136

[Username17]

The Year is 2136...
“Every year could be the year in which the genocidal end of our history is written.
But if you succeed, it will not be this year.”

The year is 2136, and we are at war.
Humanity is not alone in the universe. Humanity is not even alone on Earth. Human civilization wasn't even on Earth first. Long before humans planted crops or built houses the subterranean Ophidians carved underground palaces and the underwater Deep Ones erected cyclopean temples to gods more ancient still. Explorers from other worlds walked on the surface of the Earth before any native being could give it a name. Tens of thousands of years ago alien warlords took human captives to distant suns as slaves. But all that is in the distant past. Today, the year is 2136, and we are at war.
The concept of “we” is broader today than it has been in most of history. We are humans, but we are also Deep Ones, Ophidians, Oni, and Ghouls. We are Earthlings, but we are also Lunars, Belters, Dreamers, and Exo-Colonists. We are the Union, and we hang together despite different ethnicities, species, and even worlds of birth because the universe is vast and inhospitable and there are powerful things that would destroy us all. Life in different wards and in different dimensions is different, but it is life all the same and it is worth protecting. Extinction looms, and we will fight together. We are The Union. You are The Union.
Though the game and the stories it creates tend to revolve around conflict, the struggle for existence that The Union's defenders engage in; as in any era most people do the kinds of things that people do. They go to school, they get a job, they fall in love, they raise families of their own, and they grow old telling anyone who will listen how much simpler and less inscrutable things were when they were younger. It's just that in 2136, some of the people who do these things are refugees from a distant star that was conquered by other aliens and some of the jobs people have are things like “helium miner on the Moon.” Knowledge of technology and magic are greater than they have ever been in human history, and that has as profound an impact on how people's lives progress as The Union's racial diversity or any impending invasion by alien gods.
The Union is divided regionally into “wards,” many of which are further divided into provinces or states. Most of The Union's people are humans, and most of The Union's people live on Earth. Most of the Earth is part of The Union, but there are states on Earth that for various reasons are not: New Valusia, Leng, K'n-yan, R'lyeh, and Bolgania. The Union also controls the Moon, and the Asteroid Belt. It also has colonies in other dimensions known as The Dreamlands and The Underworld. Due to the odd way that distance functions in other dimensions, some of these colonies are outside of the solar system, and are called Exo-Colonies.
Communications networks have advanced tremendously in The Union, and the existence of quantum communicators allows people on different planets to share documents and have conversations in real time. The Union relies heavily upon trains and portals, with freight and passengers able to be passed along magnetically levitated railcars between a major city on land or under the Earth's sea to a major city on the Moon in about an hour. The remoteness of a place is a function not of distance, but of infrastructure.
As the Union has become more prominent in the galaxy, it has come into contact and conflict with alien empires. The Mi-Go Combine has a trading post and military base on Pluto (which they call Yuggoth). The fungal Mi-Go appear completely honorless to the people of The Union, as the Combine will alternately barter, steal, or raid for whatever it is that they wish to acquire without any apparent rhyme or reason. The Shan Diaspora has orbited a couple of temple ships around Uranus (which they call L'gy'hx). The insectile Shan have fled the destruction of their homeworld of Shaggai, and seem intent upon conquering the worlds of others. The Borean Empire had built portals on Earth in the ancient past and recently began reactivating them. The shaggy Boreans have their own human slave warriors, and seem intent on conquering Earth now that they recognize its value. The Abyss has a brood of world-conquering monsters trapped in a gravity well in the center of the galaxy. Their mother-goddess Shub-Niggurath the Black Goat sends dreams to recruit sorcerers around the galaxy to summon her forces. Now that the Earth has sorcerers of its own, the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath have made landfall.
Threats come not just from above, but also from below. Giant creatures from beneath the sea and soil as well as the Underworld have pledged to put the lesser creatures in their place. Great Cthulhu has awoken, and the nations of K'n-yan, Koth, Zin, Bolgania, and Leng have made common cause with Cthulhu's Star Spawn and Deep Ones of R'lyeh. This alliance is called the Second Chimera by The Union, but it has entirely different names in the languages of the cannibalistic Ghasts, the burrowing Cthonians, the decadent K'n-yanites, the furry Bolgani, the R'lyehan Deep Ones, or the dwarvish Tcho-Tcho. The mute Gugs, of course, do not call the Second Chimera anything at all.
The Union has advanced in its knowledge not only of the magic and science of communication, travel, and war; but also in biology, and the understanding of time itself. Medicine in The Union has advanced immeasurably. The first antibiotics are just two centuries old, but Union medicine can restore dead tissue to life and merge man and machine. The first chronoscopes and prognostication engines have been made and Union researchers have begun probing the time stream. There they have discovered yet another threat: Tindalos. Agents from the long dead planet of Yith act from our past to conquer our future.
Knowledge is as important to protecting The Union as force or resolve, and Union Security requires the work of scientists and detectives as much as it does soldiers and sorcerers.

How We Got Here
“All human actions are equivalent, and in principle are doomed to failure.”

The first settlements on Earth appear to have been built by an ancient spacefaring race whose name is lost to time, called simply the Elder Things by archaeologists. The first native settlements on Earth were by the Ophidians, whose underground culture rose and fell millions of years in the past. The next race to rise were the undersea cities of the Deep Ones, who were tutored in sorcery by the tentacled Star Spawn. But for most of the last ten thousand years, the story of civilization on Earth has been told by and about humans for the most part, and we will assume it is a story that the reader is at least passably familiar with. Where these stories begin to intertwine is in 1927 when the Deep One city-state of Y'ha-nthlei came into conflict with the United States of America, a tale that was told in the H. P. Lovecraft story The Shadow Over Innsmouth. The short version is that Deep Ones infiltrated a town in Massachusetts, and when the human government found out about it they created internment camps for the fish people and launched torpedoes into their undersea city. This heralded over thirty years of conflict between humans and other denizens of the Earth, that might still be going on were it not for the unifying force of a common threat: the Moon.
The Soviet Union succeeded in sending an unmanned mission to the Moon in 1959, which uncovered the fact that there was in fact already life there: the creatures known as the Moon Beasts. Of course, just as humans discovered the presence of Moon Beasts, the Moon Beasts also discovered the existence of Earthlings. They turned out to be highly xenophobic and hostile, and were galvanized into action and began to plot the destruction of Earth civilization. The Moon Beasts did not differentiate between the Soviets who had poked their hornet's nest and other human nations, and indeed did not bother distinguishing between human nations and Deep One nations. In 1968 the Moon Beasts shot down an American rocket, and pushed their war plans forward. They traveled through the Dreamlands and attacked the Earth with nuclear weapons in 1970 – shattering the then-relevant Earth military alliances of NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and Chimera. In the wake of Lunar aggression, Russians and Americans tabled their differences and many Ophidians, Deep Ones, and Ghouls made common cause with the surface worlders. Though it was not officially declared at the time, most historians put the creation of The Union in fact (if not in name) in the chaos of the Earth-Moon war (1968-1984).
The Earth-Moon War was a costly but total victory for the United Earth Forces. The Moon Beasts had spent most of their efforts in assassinating leaders and bombing capital cities. In seventeen year of conflict the Earth was in organizational chaos, but fiercely united in goals. A reliable means of Dreamlands travel was discovered in Nigeria in 1973, and by 1983 the Earth was able to send a planet conquering army to the Moon. By the end of the war, the Moon Beasts had nothing. Their slaves had been liberated, their factories had been razed, and their entire world had fallen into the hands of what would eventually be named The Union. Some of the Moon Beast leadership fled into the Underworld and were hosted by nations that saw the rising alliance of Earthlings as a threat: Koth, Zin and Leng. A century later, these Moon Beast expatriates were instrumental in the creation of the Second Chimera.
Currency was a big problem for The Union in its early stages. During the Earth-Moon War, many parts of the world operated without any central banks. Various militaries and local governments kept their economies moving by handing out IOUs predicated on the idea of a return to “normality” which never came. Some of these ad hoc currencies were eventually redeemed in some form, and others were not. The 1980s were a time of global currency and financial crises. The system that came out of that was a series of agreements of currency exchange rates and eventually a world wide common currency. By 2009, Union Dollars were spendable everywhere in the world.
With the Earth-Moon War behind them, The Union discovered that not all of the attacks on surface cities during the war had been from the Moon – some had been from the great worm-like Cthonians operating from K'n-yan and Bolgania. In 1988, The Union was able to field mechs with the agility and firepower to take on Cthonian Earthshakers and declared war. The First Cthonian War lasted for 3 years until the Cthonians conditionally surrendered: agreeing to refrain from future attacks on Union settlements. An agreement the Cthonians kept for 43 years until the awakening of Shudde M'ell.
The turn of the century saw the transformation of the Goat Spawn, creatures descended from Shub-Niggurath's Dark Young and local humans. Their DNA had been hybridized centuries in the past, and their true selves were unleashed in a great event known as The Night of the Goat. Tens of thousands of humans transformed into satyrs and were given visions and commands by The Black Goat of the Woods. They were to summon Abyssal forces and dismantle Earthly opposition so that Shub-Niggurath could conquer the world. Things did not go well for Shub-Niggurath, as a majority of Goat Spawn proved more loyal to the world of their birth than to their god-like ancestor. Goat Spawn told The Union of Shub-Niggurath's existence and plans, and the Dark Young actually summoned were far less than the world-conquering army that Shub Niggurath had bred for this purpose. Rather than overrunning the planet in a triumphal swarm, Abyssian forces came in piecemeal and with warning. The First Goat War dragged on for 8 years, with the Abyssians eventually giving up direct conquest and turning to simple terrorism. The Abyss has never agreed to peace with The Union, but most years too few Abyssian forces are able to get to Union territory for it to be considered “war” rather than “terrorism.”
In 2029, explorers in the Antarctic found remnants of the cities of the Elder Things. These proved invaluable in coming conflicts as Union researchers were able to master the sorcerous power of the Elder Sign and create the first “shoggoth-tech” made from shaping the amorphous shoggoth that the Elder Things had left behind. Shoggoth-tech was the first Union “arcanotech,” melding of technological devices with alien sorceries.
In 2034, the melting of glaciers in the Arctic uncovered Borean stargates, which in turn brought military units from Borea to Earth. The Boreans had arcanotechnology of their own as well as monsters of all sizes. As soon as the Borean War began, the newly awakened Shudde M'ell ordered attacks on Union settlements to renew in Africa (from Bolgania) and the Americas (from K'n-yan). Shortly after the Borean War began, the Second Cthonian War had begun as well. The Union lost a lot of people and a lot of territory in the first few years of the war, but were able to turn things around when they started fielding arcanotech weapons and mecha of their own. Formal contact was made with the Mi-Go Combine in 2038, and they seemed willing to sell The Union weaponry as they seemed quite unhappy with the prospect of Borea conquering Earth. Victory over K'n-yan, Borean, and Bolgania all were achieved in 2045. Shudde M'ell and many of the Cthonians escaped to N'kai, and neither K'n-yan nor Bolgania end up paying much of the war reparations they agreed to at the end of the war.
The Abyssians had never agreed to peace and never stopped trying to conquer the Earth. In 2056 they were able to begin recruiting cultists who lacked any Goat heritage to their cause and transform regular humans into monsters called Youma. The cultists opened gateways to the Abyss, and the second Goat War began. Instrumental in the victory in the Second Goat War was finding a way to remove Black Goat Energy from afflicted people, transforming Youma back into human beings. This was done through a Mahou Shoujo Program, which relied on sorcerers taught magic as children. There were many who objected to the use of child soldiers in war, but the successful healing of Goat-corrupted humans spoke for itself. By 2060 The Union had won, but only by sacrificing a bit of its principles. Child Soldiers were simply part of Union Security, and remain so to this day.
Sol's asteroid belt has numerous resources, and a Belter station was created in 2066. Full scale belt mining proceeded soon after. In 2067, conflict began with the Mi-Go Combine when it was discovered that Combine vessels simply took Union supplies in the belt whenever they felt like it. The reality of the Mi-Go became clear: they had absolutely no intention of honoring any trade or agreement without force being involved, and had no compunctions whatsoever against theft or piracy.
Internal strife as well as external threats have always been a thing within The Union. Nations do not instantly forget past grievances merely because a more pressing enemy exists. Many regions and nations have broken the rules of The Union or even attempted to secede. Through the 2070s, the Ophidians of Central America rallied for their own ward – a homeland for Ophidians similar to the undersea ward that was primarily the providence of Deep Ones. This region was to be called New Valusia. Various factions rose to prominence, chief being the Stygians and Serpent Command. By 2082, the Stygians had revived a charismatic and powerful sorcerer from ancient Stygia named Toth Amon. New Valusia managed to negotiate a “special relationship” with The Union, where they were allied but not specifically a ward. This proved not enough for Serpent Command, which challenged Toth Amon for leadership and ultimately led the entire region into civil war. By 2097, New Valusia had no effective government and the region had effectively seceded from The Union. The chaos persists to this day, with some cities under Stygian control and other cities under Serpent Command.
Union astronomers detected massive space ships entering the solar system in 2084. Two of them halted around Uranus, and the last came all the way to Earth. All of them were Shan Temple Ships, but one of them was severely damaged and full of refugees begging for asylum. The beings onboard were Oni. The two ships behind were the Shan – world conquering overlords from whom the Oni were escaping. Ironically, the Shan are also refugees, in that their homeworld has been destroyed by something. The Union has given shelter to the Oni and taken control of the damaged Temple Ship, which has infuriated the Shan. Over the next few decades, the Shan have become increasingly belligerent, and have performed a number of espionage activities intended to weaken or divide The Union.
Temporal physics is a relatively young field in The Union. The first working chronoscope could only scan a few minutes and was built in 2105 by Dr. Martin Brown. With refinement, Union chronologists have begun mapping time, only to make a series of unsettling discoveries. There are creatures and forces manipulating time itself. They call it Tindalos, and there are Yaoguai that come through time to attempt to kill Union scientists who study time. They appear to work for a long dead race called the Yithians who are working to conquer Earth in the future. Certain periods seem to be dangerous or difficult to get information out of, shadows out of time that are created by Tindalos.
Great Cthulhu awakened in 2130. He had been up for brief periods of time in the preceding two centuries and caused a significant amount of damage in his brief rampages. But in 2130 the stars were right and he was back on the basalt throne of R'lyeh. The R'lyehans wasted no time in making diplomatic overtures to non-Union factions. R'lyeh itself rose from the sea in 2132.
In 2135, all hell broke loose. The Shan and the Boreans began anti-Union operations. The Abyssians upped their game in terrorist attacks. And the nations of Chimera began a full mobilization for war.
The year is 2136, and we are at war.

[maglag]

Pretty nice.

But who exactly calls the shots on the Union? Are there elections for el presidente/generalissimo? King (which in turn allows for princesses)? Super computer? Magic sealed entity speaking in crytpic voices? Council with a mix of the previous? If yes then are there bureucracy delays that allow for things to slip through the cracks? Are there non-humans with authority over human-filled areas?

How authorative is the Union? Do they keep constant surveillance over everything they can in fear of infiltration, manipulating their own population at multiple levels for a greater master plan, or do they allow a great deal of autonomy and don't care how you do stuff as long as you get results?

[Josh_Kablack]

I think it could probably use an opening summary paragraph establishing the threats in the now of 2136 and then go on to use the rest as a "how we came to this" that ties back into the opener at the end.

Something along the lines of:

This is 2136. The Union is in open war with the Boreans from far stars and the Nations of Chimera here on Earth. The Union is also in a timestream war fought over concpets it has just barely begun to understand. The Shan skirmishes on the Union's extraplanetary colonies are on the cusp of blooming into a fourth war. But these wars are not all that threatens the Union and the life it protects. Toth Amon's Stygiuans and Serpent Command still harry the Union from their failed secessionist state of New Valusia. The terrorism of the Abbyssians has risen to new levels of destructiveness. The MiGo continue to confound the Union with their inability to honor treaties and unwillingness to cease raiding Union colonies and supplies. Yet Cthulu's risen R'lyeh may represent an even graver threat than all of the other matters.

***

It also needs a bit of typo cleanup, you have a bunch of little stuff like:

Yaoguai than come through

[Username17]

Did some typo fixins.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

Content is good, although I'm disappointed that the Union doesn't have some relationship with thawed-out Elder Things.

Let me pitch those - they are basically the aliens from the X-Files (a mix of the good and bad aliens from that show); they want to create yet another race of Human/Alien hybrids, who will be able to appreciate their alien modes of thought and advanced culture. This involves a lot of horrible suffering and unethical medical experiments. They sponsor a conspiracy of elements within the Union hierarchy, and they have their own agenda which might include pulling the Union into further disastrous wars. I think this opens up a lot of X-files, Evangelion and Rah Xephon like-story lines that are otherwise hard to tell, even if the Goat spawn and Shan are also infiltrating Union agencies.

Stylistic quibble, you have too many adverbs and you repeat them too much:

Humanity is not alone in the universe. Humanity is not even alone on Earth. Human civilization wasn't even on Earth first.

Emphasis added.

Could be:

Humanity is not alone in the universe. Humanity is not alone on Earth. Human civilization wasn't even on Earth first.

Or maybe:

Humanity is not alone in the universe. Humanity is not even alone on Earth, neither was humanity Earth's first civilization.

[Aryxbez]

It was actually really fun reading the lore on this, got me excited to be part of this worlds conflicts and try to resolve them. Also I'm glad we made sure there are major players of the Cthulu mythos like the name-troper itself, those guys will be punchable by the PC's some point yes?

and there are Yaoguai that come through time to attempt to kill Union scientists who study time.

Possible BearWorld Reference?

[name_here]

No, it's a Lovecraft Mythos thing. If you mess around with time too much, the Hounds Of Tindalos emerge from nearby right angles and murder you. You can prevent this by removing right angles from your vicinity. As for the name, Yaoguai is a Chinese word for demon and what Sentai Fhtagn uses for various monsters below Kaiju tier.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Pretty nice.

But who exactly calls the shots on the Union? Are there elections for el presidente/generalissimo? King (which in turn allows for princesses)? Super computer? Magic sealed entity speaking in crytpic voices? Council with a mix of the previous? If yes then are there bureucracy delays that allow for things to slip through the cracks? Are there non-humans with authority over human-filled areas?

How authorative is the Union? Do they keep constant surveillance over everything they can in fear of infiltration, manipulating their own population at multiple levels for a greater master plan, or do they allow a great deal of autonomy and don't care how you do stuff as long as you get results?

IIRC, the various Wards figure out their own government, and send representatives to the Round Table.

[kzt]

Re:"Cthonian Earthshakers". I thought they were underground, so I'm not seeing the mech connection here. Are you having the Cthonian's deploy some sort of war-thing (living or machine) on the surface?

[Dean]

I have a question about the timeline of the Abyss forces. They are introduced with this

The Abyss has a brood of world-conquering monsters trapped in a gravity well in the center of the galaxy. Their mother-goddess Shub-Niggurath the Black Goat sends dreams to recruit sorcerers around the galaxy to summon her forces. Now that the Earth has sorcerers of its own, the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath have made landfall.

Then the actual storyline is that in 2000 Abyss forces show up for no real reason, then the next event in 2029 is that humans discover Elder thing relics and begin mastering sorcery then in 2056 the Abyss forces show up to fight again. Given that we've been told that Abyss forces rely on sorcerors existence to invade it seems like a more natural chronology to cut out the first goat war, wait 20 years until there are sorcerors on Earth which we've been told is the precedent for Abyss forces, and then have the existence of sorcerors be what allows Shub-Niggurath to begin her invasion.

This also helps the series of invading forces seem like a domino effect rather than just a series of happenings. Shub-Niggurath would never have begun invading if humans hadn't learned sorcery from the Elder Things artifacts, which in turn would never have been searched out with such fervor were it not for the Moon Wars, so on and so on.

[pragma]

Shudde'Mell could use a bit more context. There's foreshadowing of his return, but his introduction lacks the usual context clues to clue-in less mythos savvy readers (me) that he's a giant Cthonian.

[Aryxbez]

While I would agree that the less savvy like myself don't know, but I can easily make a google search in the time it takes to make this post. However, stuff like the "furry Bolgani" I can't seem to find on simple google searches, so there is merit in wanting to deliver some context.

[Pedantic]

While I would agree that the less savvy like myself don't know, but I can easily make a google search in the time it takes to make this post. However, stuff like the "furry Bolgani" I can't seem to find on simple google searches, so there is merit in wanting to deliver some context.

I think that particular example is actually about right. Presumably a detail of Bolgani will actually appear in their culture or opponent entry if you did want more specifics.

[pragma]

To clarify, I actually think the introduction does a great job with most context clues: Shudde'Mell was an exception that I felt was worth noting.