The Aggressive Expansion Era was a mistake and there are few who would say otherwise, they only offer different explanations.

Sebastian Szarek’s new book, WOTC 17: Relief Force, contains an allegory for his explanation.

In it, the crew of the ever-reliable Treasure Ship Pioneer arrive at a long-neglected sector of the Peldak Protectorate as it’s coming off a devastating civil war that ruined everything for the average person. The Protectorate, made of the same good, moral people as in real life, are bringing in supplies to develop the sector, but the effort keeps running into problems.

It’s a straightforward allegory for the Aggressive Expansion Era.

The crisis, Sir Szarek writes, was largely the result of bureaucratic mismanagement, and it could have been avoided if the administrators did their job correctly. Compounding failures and the lack of urgency by the immortal elves allowed the crisis to spiral out of control. Pirates and rebels, looting and riots, a complete economic depression that within just a few years had wiped away generations of hard work by the mortal locals.

The purpose of the Protectorate, as laid out by Sir Szarek, is not just to defend the lives of the citizens, it is to defend their prosperity. On Peldor we solely defended lives because immortality was the most precious thing to us. Things always got better eventually, if we lived to see it.

But aliens are constrained by their mortality, and WOTC 17 explores this tragedy at length.

A character spent 30 years building a business and the economic crisis wiped away decades of backbreaking labor. He’s too old to restart, his life and effort amounted to nothing.

A character wasted his youth fighting for scraps and could never establish himself.

The Protectorate did not safeguard prosperity, which created desperation and escalated despair.