Welcome to Ten Forward Fridays, where a new playable species is presented for the Star Trek Adventures roleplaying game, filling in some gaps until official material can be released.
Welcome to Mirror Universe May. For this month, my articles are focusing on the dark, twisted counterpart of the regular Prime Reality.
This week details the Terrans and their vassals, the Vulcans.
The Mirror Universe is generally thought of as the evil reflection. It’s the evil alternate reality. Really, it’s more of the Nietzschean reality, with the strong taking power. The residents of that reality were not inherently evil, but raised in a totalitarian state where they had to betray and scheme to survive, and where they were taught compassion and diversity are weaknesses.
Terrans define this change in attitudes, rejecting the spirit of cooperation found in the Federation and embracing a philosophy of human superiority. In contrast, Vulcans seem rather similar to their Prime Reality counterparts (as do Klingons, Cardassians, and even Bajorans). Arguably, it is the behavior of Terrans that makes this the darkest timeline.
Canonically, the Terran Empire fell to the Klingons and Cardassians sometime between the mid-23rd and mid-24th Centuries. Which is a shame as it makes it harder to play a Mirror Universe game (such as a one-shot or the classic crossover story), as there won’t be any Federation ships in the era of Star Trek Adventures.
However, with the revision of Discovery, we know that Qo’noS was destroyed by the Empire and the Klingons were members of a ragtag resistance, so the Cardassians were initially the power behind that alliance. It’s hard to manage that one faction defeating the entire Empire, even when it was disarming. So, perhaps, the Alliance didn’t completely destroy the Terran Empire so much as capture its central worlds, dividing the Empire into halves. There might still be large regions of Imperial space divided by the territory of the Cardassian-Klingon alliance, and lacking the resources to take back their territory.
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