Prologue: The Cataclysm

It was a good time to be a toy soldier. Although the war still raged, the newly discovered portals had changed everything. They opened a path to an unexplored world, full of amazing technologies and discoveries not even guessed at by plastic scientists.

The original inhabitants of this world, a large "flesh" being, had mysteriously disappeared long before the arrival of plastic-kind. Scientists were already reverse-engineering the "human" technology and creating incredible scientific advances. Lifespan increased, new comfort machines and entertainment became available. The disease "plastrification," a rare side-effect of living too long in the new world, was discovered and cured. Colonists came from every side of the globe, of every color and nationality, to make a new life in the "portal world" or, as it came to be named, "New Plastica."

Intelligent life was even discovered; in large quantity and surprisingly diverse. None were as powerful as the toy soldiers, or as numerous, but many were advanced and acutely knowledgeable of the planet. The most highly-developed were a race called the "Micro Machines." Though diminutive and scarce, they possessed things like hover cars, energy weapons, and the makings of what would eventually become interplanetary starships. Others the army men encountered included the "Legos," a race of dwarves that used plastic building bricks to colonize almost anywhere, and the "Action Figures," an advanced and warlike race that were also solitary and territorial.

However, plastic life was not all the army men found: there was large, though unintelligent, flesh life that thrived in this world and was, often as not, lethal to a toy soldier. There were giant, plastic-eating "ants," there were "dogs" and "birds" and many other things that would sooner digest a Plastican as look at him.

Into this varied world the toy soldiers brought their armies, their colonists, and their war. Both sides turned New Plastica into a new theater of destruction. Terrifying weapons were invented. Mass destruction became a well-known term. Huge, house-like arcologies became the battlegrounds for fierce clashes of the two sides. Colonists lived in perpetual fear of massacre by an invading army.

Many of the other intelligent races eventually became caught up in the conflict, suffering as collateral damage, and began attacking any toy soldiers, regardless of color. Some toy soldiers deserted their country and escaped into the unexplored wilderness to form their own nations or simply to leave the violent war behind them. They became nomadic groups, trying to survive and destroying anything that hampered that goal, or simply disappeared, never to be heard from again.

Several years after the initial discovery of New Plastica a strange, saucer-shaped craft crashed onto Tan-held land. Its passengers were Orange plastic aliens who claimed to be from the Orange Empire, a nation spanning several planets. The Tan commander, General Plastro, negotiated an alliance with these beings and renewed an offensive on the Greens using the superior technology of the Oranges.

However, unbeknownst to Plastro, the Oranges were in a war of their own against a group of light blue, technologically advanced army men called the Galactic Alliance. The Greens were able to secure a treaty with the Galactic troopers and, with their aid, succeeded in destroying the Orange Empire. Soon thereafter a temporary cease-fire was negotiated with the Tans and an unsteady peace settled throughout the war-torn planets.

It appeared as if a golden age was about to begin. Trade with the Galactic Alliance allowed great technological leaps to be made. All plastic life benefitted from the discovery of the new world. Soon more planets were encountered via the mysterious network of portals. Exploration teams came back with strange and wonderful stories; the universe, it seemed was open for the taking.

Then, without warning, or apparent reason, all the portals, everywhere, disappeared.

The portals, the mysterious blue gateways that linked New Plastica with Plastica, the new world with the old, and the many planets of the Galactic Alliance and the conquered Orange Empire, simply ceased to exist. The pulsing blue energy that powered them vanished.

Suddenly, covert deep-strike and exploration teams were left without means of escape, communication and trade with the Galactic Alliance cut off and, most seriously for the armies and colonists on New Plastica, the doorway back to their home closed. The chaos that followed the disappearance of the portals was unmatched.

New nations formed in the new world, it was decided that if they were stuck there, they'd be stuck there on their own terms.