Timeline - Backstory

This is a supplement to the History pages, a quick breakdown of the chronicle's timeline, including many events well prior to the beginning of the Chronicle itself, also detailing many of the classic WoD metaplot events that have some impact on our Chronicle.Hal did create an ACWOD google calendar some while back, but has more recently decided that something like this might be more accessible for the players regarding tracking what happened when, without having to keep digging back to 2011 in Google.

We’ve got detailed calendars, but I’m using this to nail down just what order certain things took place for calendaring purposes, and to provide perhaps a more accessible format to view the order of events. In general, events in the history of this version of the World of Darkness are as in our own world in 2011 unless noted otherwise, though the mortal world’s history could well veer wildly off course from ours at that point. Time will tell...

The Backstory

Pre-1980

• 18th Century- The Sept of the Boiling Earth defeats the great Bane known as the Mountain-Breaking Serpent and binds it beneath Cinder Cone in what is now Lassen Volcanic National Park. 
  
• 1920s - The Glittering Dreams Sept is founded in Pasadena, CA.
• 1950s - Moon Shot's grandfather, then the Glittering Dreams sept's Don, and his pack found the The Greene, Doyle & Leotta Institute on the bawn of their Caern as Caltech grows, intent on making sure their sept keeps its finger on the pulse of the university's and JPL's development. Many of the Sept's Kinfolk and some Garou are involved with JPL from this time forth, and dance a curious dance of subterfuge and mostly polite mutual avoidance with the Void Engineers.
  
• 1961 - Ashton Harker is born.
• 1964 - Molly Brennan is born.
• March 13th, 1970 - Dr. Sylvester Morton is born. 
• 1971 - Odysseus Onassis is born in Athens, Greece.
• 1972-3 - Jeremy Reuter is born.
• 1978 - Ashton Harker and Jonathan Roberts both join the USMC.
  
• 1979 - The events of Once Upon a Time take place in Guatemala, Ashton’s first command mission as a Marine lieutenant. Ashton and Molly conceive Rowena in a past timeline, then Molly travels forward to...

The 1980s

• 1980 - 16-year-old Molly Brennan obtains the stone calendar in Mexico City and travels back to 1979, then emerges from a Paradox realm back into 1980, now pregnant with Ro. Ashton’s unit is mothballed and Molly gives up looking for him. See Once Upon a Time for details.
• February 2, 1981 - Rowena Brennan is born in Chester, CA (Aquarius)
• Late April, 1981 - Cleansing Path Sept attempts to take the Boiling Earth Caern and is badly defeated. In the wake of the decimation of his sept’s leadership, the Fostern Fianna Philodox named Purewater (AKA Kenny Fitzroy) negotiates surrender terms and the pitiful remnant of his sept pays tribute and retreats to lick its wounds and rebuild.
• 1982 - The Syndicate destroys the Sin City sept in Las Vegas, with support from Void Engineers and law enforcement groups, raiding and destroying this, one of the last strongholds of the Wise Guys camp of the Glasswalkers.
• January 16, 1983 - Mingan Johnson is born in Susanville, CA.
• July 7, 1983 - Amrita Singh  is born in San Francisco, CA (Cancer / Sokhta). Rowena’s maternal grandparents are killed and their family forced to abandon their home in Chester. Ian McIntyre takes the Brennans in, eventually marrying Joyce.
• 1984 - (date uncertain) Ashton Knight musters out of the USMC. 
• 1984 - (date uncertain)  Ro’s Brennan grandparents die in Redding, fighting the Technocracy.
• August 27, 1985 - Joseph Running Elk is born in Susanville, California. (Virgo / Hakahe)
• March 3rd, 1986 - Linda Lee is born in New Bremen, Georgia. 
• 1987 - This winter, 16-year-old Odysseus, already a precocious Scientist, has an adventure with his brother Stavros in Bucharest. He notices Stavros’ slipping sanity for the first time. 
• 1987-1988 - (date uncertain) -  Ashton (now Knight rather than Harker) joins the Dark Horse Chantry. 
• 1988 - 58th Council of Nine. 
• 1989 - The survivors of the Sin City sept win Corporate Wolf backing and help found the Mirage Casino, the first casino founded on junk bonds. They found the Sept of the Neon Strip and dedicate a Caern devoted to the totem O'Mighty Dolla' inside the casino itself on opening day.

The 1990s

• 1996 - Iron Eyes, Ian McIntyre and their cabal raid the Boiling Earth Caern and are destroyed and scattered. White Feather is exiled from the Caern. In the wake of this disaster, Molly Brennan takes her daughter and moves out of the area, to Minnesota. In India, the Jhor-ridden Euthanatos cult The Consanguinity of Eternal Joy falls. Its Archmaster Voormas flees to the Hell of Being Skinned Alive, where he receives the hospitality of the Yama Queen Tou Mou.
• 1997 - The Ascension Warrior (AKA the False Heylel) and the Hollower Jeremy Case lead an attack on Horizon that devastates the venerable Chantry.
• November 1, 1997 - Garou converge on Kursk, the former home of the powerful Zmei Gregornous Deathwing, on a Silent Strider tip that he had returned to his home after decades of absence. The Zmei is slain, but over fifty Garou die in the battle, including a number of great leaders.
• November 10, 1997 - The Conflagration: Doissetep explodes in the midst of a Hermetic civil war that leaves both Caeron Mustai and Porthos Fitz-Empress, two of the greatest Hermetic Archmasters, dead. The explosion causes a shock wave affecting everything connected to it, including the Digital Web, which experiences the Great Crash. The entire Web goes offline for three seconds, killing many, injuring others for weeks or months, and any sector that wasn't permanently erased is damaged.
• 1998 - The Garou of Russia hunt and destroy many of the agents of Baba Yaga, noticing that her structure and allies seem to be disappearing. Baba Yaga is destroyed by persons unknown to the Garou. The Shadow Curtain crashes down, reuniting the Russian werewolves with the rest of the Garou Nation.
• A terrible War in Heaven is waged as the Technocracy wipes out most of what’s left of Horizon, destroys Concordia and kills many Tradition Archmages. Tradition leadership staggers as most of their mages and council members are killed, and the few surviving Council Primi disappear, leaving the Traditions leaderless. The Technocracy intensifies its Pogrom.
• June 2, 1998 - The Shigalu Monastery falls in a vicious and unexpected attack by forces of the Wyrm.
• (date uncertain. roughly 1997-8) - The fall of Ashton's Dark Horse Chantry. Jon and Strago and Ash made up 3 out of either 5 or 7 survivors (sources are inconsistent on this figure). Ash’s fiancee Alice, who was pregnant at the time, died in that Chantry’s fall. At the funeral, The Last formed their cabal, which was short for The Last of the Riders of the Dark Horse. The Last relocate to New Bremen to prosecute their war against the Fallen, and join the Pandora's Box Chantry shortly after its foundation.
  
• 1999 - On the heels of claiming the Silver Crown and the North Country Protectorate’s Oak Throne, new King Jonas Albrecht leads a crusade that destroys most of The Seventh Generation’s leadership. The Beast Courts propose alliance with the Stargazers. Horizon realms of Mages in the Umbra begin to become more disparate from reality, some losing their connection to and from reality, others being attacked, and one may have had asteroids thrown at it by Rorg. This is likely connected to the arrival of Anthelios. By now, the Disparate Crafts appear to be falling before the intensified Pogrom, the Traditions are demoralized and reeling, and the Technocracy declares itself the victor of the Ascension War. However, they too are in disarray after the rise of the Dimensional Anomaly which cut off most of their Deep Universe Constructs and the Masters resident therein, and they find themselves presiding over an apparently apathetic human race.
• June, 1999 - In the first week of June, sensitives (including 13-year-old Linda Lee and 18-year-old Rowena Brennan) around the world begin having horrific and prophetic dreams. Some demonologists suspect this is a sign of the return of the Prince of Nightmares.
• July, 1999 - In the first week of the month, something horrible wakes up in the Indian Subcontinent and rampages across parts of India and Bangladesh, ushering in a period of appalling nightmares that continued when the sleepers awoke, riots, social unrest and out-of-control weather patterns known appropriately enough as the Week of Nightmares, which terminates when the Technocracy implement Operation Ragnarok, unleashing neutron missiles and four reflecting orbital mirrors to kill the beast while it is in Bangladesh, killing several hundred thousand people. Amrita's relatives in Kolkata mostly ride out the wave of insanity, though several are injured in the serious riots that the supernatural disturbance sparked. Social order in the region collapses for a time, and how the subcontinent actually failed to break out into nuclear warfare between India and its neighbors remains unclear.
• Simultaneously, Technocrat Xerxes Jones detonates a nuclear device in the Labyrinth at the mouth of Oblivion, while the forces of Stygia drop a relic nuke on Enoch. So much devastation in the Middle and Low Umbrae unleashes the Sixth Great Maelstrom and starts the Avatar Storm/Dimensional Anomaly, a phenomenon that annihilates most participants in the War in Ruins, and is still ongoing as of our Chronicle’s beginning in 2011. The Verbena Mistress Enid, associated with the MacIntyres and Brennans up in the Lassen area, is one of the casualties.
• The Week of Nightmares is also the catalyst for Judd Lee’s First Change.
• The Red Star — also known as Anthelios or Wormwood — appears in the sky.
• At the same time, a pup is born to two metis: the Perfect Metis. Its birth is heralded as a sign of the Apocalypse.
• July, 1999 - Judd Lee successfully Transmogrifies and is given the Spiral name Gorm. His new pack celebrates by kidnapping Linda, who was already Gorm's favorite playtoy, along with several ordinary humans. Unlike the Sleeper captives, Linda survives, but Gorm impregnates her.
• November 1, 1999 - The annual revel of the Ceilican in Scotland ends in disaster when they are attacked by Black Spiral Dancers. Most are slain, some are dragged off to be corrupted, and perhaps a handful escape
• December, 1999 - Elizabeth Genereader reveals that the Cyber Dogs had been experimenting on unwilling lupus; within a day the Glass Walkers have begun to hunt down and kill most of the Cyber Dogs. This event drives the Random Interrupts to replace the Corporate Wolves as the dominant camp of the Glass Walkers. Autofire is one of those Cyber Dogs that escapes the purge, by seeking asylum with the Sept of the Glittering Dreams.

The 2000s

• 2000 - Ashton’s twin children Ashton Jr. & Jade are born (here or early 2001). Their Glass Walker mother dies sometime between here and Ashton’s own death. The Stargazers formally secede from the Concordiat / Garou Nation to join the Beast Courts and most withdraw from the western world to try and salvage their tribal homeland. The Technocracy steps up its Pogrom against the Crafts, and devastates the Kopa Loei in Hawaii. The Children of Knowledge, meanwhile, accept the Order of Hermes' offer of membership and join as House Solificati while many Ngoma join as a House of their own as well, helping stave off those Crafts’ destruction.
• February 8, 2000 - Linda, now approaching her 15th birthday, bears baby Krissy. (Aquarius / Ruatma)
• 2001 - Holy moley. This was a heck of a year. The human race seemingly goes insane. Religious fanatics trigger wars on almost every continent. The Reckoning is officially in full swing.
• January 1, 2001 - By this point the Dies Ultimae camp of the Glass Walkers properly forms, having created the camp's handbook and several packs based around the concept.
• January 21, 2001 - Ishaq bani Quaesitor formally announces that the Quaesitori have declared a Wizards' March against House Tremere, thus beginning the Second Massasa War. Over the course of the war, House Janissary is wiped out, as the Euthanatos Tradition specifically targets them on grounds of corruption. The Euthanatos Master Black Betty personally assassinates several Janissaries that are allies of Master Horatio Vanderbeek bani Fortunae, dean of the Academy of Thorns.
• February 2001 - By now, the Technocracy has verified that it has lost contact with several Deep Universe outposts. A study of the Avatar Storm is well under way.
• May 22, 2001 - Mortal scientists detect new planetary body in the solar system, distinctly red in colour, which they dub Stellar Object #2001 KX76.
• July 4, 2001 - The original Ashton Harker-Knight dies in the Genlabs Construct in New Bremen, Georgia, as the Technocracy steps up its efforts to destroy his Chantry, Pandora's Box. Devin does his best to step into his adoptive father's shoes.
• September 11, 2001 - The WTC attacks. Amrita’s mother dies and Rowena, working as a paramedic, Awakens. Amrita, now a senior in high school, turns to drugs to deal with her grief.
• December 2001 - The New Horizon Convocation meets at The Seat of the Nine in Los Angeles near year’s end to trap the Nephandi, and decimate Jodi Blake's minions. They hope to use the success to unite the Traditions, but results are… mixed. Before long the New Horizon Council movement is considered a noble but failed effort, largely a hopeful historical footnote that may or may not presage renewal of the Traditions at some later time.
• 2002 - Taking on many of the remnants of House Thig (which collapsed in the wake of Concordia’s fall), House Verditius is restored to status as a full House. Out of the reach of Control, and exposed to wider supernatural mysteries and Traditionalists who respect reason, certain factions of Technocratic agents begin to question the Pogrom and start going AWOL or joining technomantic cabals.
• June 2002 - Amrita graduates high school, with honors, and is accepted at Stanford.
• July 26, 2002 - Odysseus blows up Stavros’ lab in Athens Greece, destroying the Mad Scientist’s mind control device. Rather than dying as Odysseus had believed, Stavros descends into Quiet and becomes a Marauder.
• July 31, 2002 - NASA issues a press release regarding the appearance of Stellar Object #2001 KX76, the tabloid-dubbed "Red Star" that recently became visible to the naked eye. The press release stated that details were still "admittedly inconclusive," but that the object is more likely to be a comet than a self-sustained radiant object.
• 2003 - Ro’s romantic relationship with the Hermetic mage Alfred Kenilworth III lasts about 3 weeks before blowing up “so badly that several Flambeau were caught in the Backlash”
• September 18, 2003 - Spokespeople for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) today vigorously denied allegations released recently on several fringe websites and other alternative media outlets, which state that many of the satellites recently launched to observe Stellar Object #2001 KX76 are actually designed to monitor the global population and tied to a massive crowd-control project dubbed "Ragnarok." They deny that William Albacastle, named in several of the reports, has ever worked for NASA or JPL.
• June, 2004 - Linda graduates high school.
• November, 2004 - Jeremy Reuter is embedded with the 7th Cavalry during the Second Battle of Fallujah. He emerges with a Pulitzer nomination and a case of PTSD for his troubles. Before long, he crawls into a bottle and descends to tabloid journalism.
• 2005 - Ro has her first (and only before Chronicle start), brief encounter with the Garou, healing a probable Glass Walker named Ramon in Manhattan.
• 2006 - Amrita graduates from Stanford and later meets and marries Jagjit Singh. Devin Knight begins preparations to establish the Overwatch HQ as a backup and fall-back point should something happen to his main operations in New Bremen and Pandora's Box. The Greylocke Incident occurs, wherein a fight between Iteration X shock troops and Hermetic mages results in a monumental explosion that kills or injures hundreds of Technocrats, especially among the NWO, creating a major rift between Iteration X and the NWO.
• 2007 - Linda becomes a Fomor, her daughter Krissy is kidnapped and her parents are murdered. Matthew Teil teleports Linda to Philadelphia to save her from Garou. Krissy begins her excursion through the foster care system after Roger Felding’s death, including stints at the New Horizons Shelter and in the care of rock star Rob Anderson. Shortly thereafter, The Dragon’s Bile Hive (to which Gorm Lee owed allegiance) is destroyed, at great cost to the Garou. The Chantry called Pandora's Box, of which Matthew Teil was the founder, falls sometime after Linda's exit from New Bremen. When the Box falls, Devin officially starts up Project: Overwatch and shifts his operations to that fall-back West Coast base.
• 2008 - The financial crash of 2008. In the wake of this event and the rising rebelliousness of the Masses against Technocratic ideals and control, pushes the NWO (which has literally lost Control) towards a defensive leadership role, and tries to blame the Syndicate squarely for the financial crisis. The Syndicate and the Progenitors grow more tightly knit, Iteration X flounders, and the Void Engineers, having suffered the worst losses from the Dimensional Anomaly, close ranks, adopt a military leadership called the Existential Threats Directorate (ETD) and wage a determined campaign of salvage and war against something they refer to as Threat Null. Just what this “Threat Null” actually is, however, remains highly classified and kept secret from the rest of the Union.
• January 2008 - Rick Degrassi proposes to Ro, but she gives him the option to walk away after revealing she's a Mage and he takes her up on it.
• Later that year, the Razor Alley sept falls, destroyed by minions of the Weaver. About a month later, an appalling terrorist gas attack kills thousands in the ghetto around the site, providing cover to agents of the Wyrm seeking to claim the Caern for their own.
• September 2009 - Jagjit Singh dies in the Station Wildfire north of Los Angeles.

The 2010s

• 2010 - Clone!Ashton wakes up in the decommissioned Genlabs Construct in New Bremen.
• July 2010 - Linda makes her way to Overwatch HQ in California looking for Devin Knight’s help and joins his chantry’s ops Cabal.
• August 2010 - the Santa Muerte Sept in Baja California falls to the Wyrm. The Hang Fire Pack escapes, with Slow Burn taking the destroyed Caern’s Pathstone with her.
• September 2010 - Last confirmed sighting of Krissy Lee, in St Luke’s Hospital ER in New Bremen, GA, from which she was transferred to a private clinic two days later. Most of the events of the Project: Overwatch chronicle took place this month, including Steve’s arrival at Overwatch.
• Overwatch Mission 1: The Best Laid Plans  (Original Summary Page) - A Technocracy lab on lockdown, and the ops cabal discovers the existence of the Containment Device.
• Overwatch Story 2: Extinction Event (Original Summary Page) - The attack on the Cleansing Path Sept, which proved to be a diversion...
• Overwatch Story 3: Shadows of the Past (Original Summary Page) - A trip to the ruins of Pandora's Box in Georgia doesn't go as planned.
• October 2010 - The Harrowing / Fall of Los Angeles / Non-Event / Incident 05092010-B17. The first blast was between 9 and 10 PM.
  
• Overwatch Story 4: Damn...Zombies. (Original Summary Page) - The Harrowing itself.
• November 2010? - Linda delivers her recording to the Child of Gaia Kinfolk and Arcanum scholar Prof. Warner. Strangelove begins searching for her. See Life as a [Data Expunged] Kinfolk.
• February 2011 - Early in the month, under guidance from the mysterious Dadeema, Amrita enters a three week hibernation from which she emerges transformed, swears oaths to Bhudevi/ Gaia and becomes a Kami. Rowena leaves New York to return to her childhood home in California.
• Late February/Early March 2011 - The fall of Overwatch. The Chantry is badly damaged and many of its staff killed during a brutal Nephandic attack that culminates with both Devin Knight and the so-called HBG vanishing amidst an explosion. The survivors evacuate before a Technocratic airstrike capitalizes on the situation and destroys the Chantry outright. Linda and Steve fall back to Las Vegas (briefly making contact with The Sept of the Neon Strip) before heading to northern California while enroute to Oregon, headed for Cleansing Path.

Continue on to the Awakening Story I-III Timeline...