The New Ice Age

Around the year 2400, man's toll on Earth's climate nearly brought civilization to a halt in the form of a new ice age. After several futile attempts to halt the advancing ice, as well as a handfull of near environmental disasters, people realized that there was no stopping it and people gathered around the equator to wait it out. And wait is exactly what they had to do.

For nearly two thousand years, the ice sheets covered much of the planet. Entire cultures came and went, though thanks to all the intermingling almost all racial issues disappeared. Countless people died just getting to the equatorial region as the nations there fought tooth and nail to keep from being overrun by refugees.

This isn't to say, though, that no progress happened - technology marches ever foward, after all. The field of genetic engineering saw the biggest boom. There were also great new social experiments that met with wildly varried success. In all, humanity came out stronger for their troubles.

A Second Renaissance

Once the ice sheets finally did retreat, Earth experienced a new renaissance - people who had been fighting for resources were able to spread out and use their time more productively. A new space age was born and exploration was the new rage. Advanced theoretical sicence predicted the existance of micro-wormholes that could link star systems - and a few centuries after space exploration began in earnest a ship found the world of Caprice. This new planet in a distant star system was just barely able to sustain human life. Another century, or so, after that, Terra Nova was discovered - a planet teeming with native life. Terra Nova was such a beautiful world that many of the corporate workers sent there decided to stay and make it their home rather than return to Earth. And so begins the tale of Terra Nova.

Unfortunately for the new colony worlds, Earth's government decided to pull back from the colonies in an isolationist move. After massive expenditures to get the colonies set up, the public perception on Earth was that the colonies would claim independance as soon as they could rather than to pay Earth back for all the resources it had used. By the end of the 5700s, Earth had recalled all its ships and resources, leaving the colonies to fend for themselves. People on Terra Nova scrounged through the leftovers and started to build a new society in the wake of Earth's abandoning them. Over the following centuries, limited contact was kept between the various colonies, but distance and lack of resources meant that the colonies could not help each other - they were truely on their own.

Age of Alliances

Over the next three hundred years, societies were built, city-states formed and alliances were made across Terra Nova. Each of the nations now recognized was formed and joined together into their respective alliances - the CNCS and AST. It was also early in this period that the first construction walkers were outfitted with makeshift weapons systems, leading to the development of the modern Gear.

Almost as soon as both the CNCS and AST were formed, a cold war started between the two polar alliances. Armies clashed quietly but regularly throughout the Badlands - doing as much damage to the people who sparsely populated the desert wastes as to each other. Eventually, everything came to a head when a downed pharmaceutical cargo ship was battled over and a plague was accidentally released that killed a large number of children around the world. A brief war followed, continuing until the two polar powers' economies collapsed and they were forced into an uneasy peace while they rebuilt.

Until TN 1939 (roughly the year 6132 on Earth's calendar), that uneasy peace was marked by small flare-ups. While each of them was bloody as battles go, things were about to get a whole lot worse. It was obvious that another global war was about to break out. It was then (fortunately or un) that Earth finally made itself known to the colony worlds again. A Colonial Expeditionary Force (CEF) landed on Terra Nova with four hundred thousand soldiers. It was their intention to re-establish their dominance on the planet. Already primed for war, the two alliances set aside their differences and turned their attention to these invaders. In the cycles that followed, the two alliances managed (with some help from until-then neutral parties) to drive the invaders back into space - sending them packing to Caprice.

In the last decade, or so, since that war, the new age of cooperation between North and South has begun to show wear at its edges - skirmishes are happening once again as old rivalries overcome new friendships. And that places us in our current day.