An Alternate Spelljammer Setting

In 1898, the people of Earth discovered they weren’t alone when a brutal invasion was launched from Mars. Luckily, the mauve, squid-headed Invaders were unprepared for the perils of Earth’s biosphere.  No one believed the human race would be so luck should they try again. Scientist went to work studying the Martian technology left behind. Their conclusions were that some sort of psychic power was needed to operate many of the devices. Men from the Society for Psychical Research were co-opted by the British government and were put to the task. Soon, seeking to broaden their knowledge base, they would actively recruit members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as well.

The conclusion the research group had come to was that Martian technology had at its base a science previously known to humanity as magic. Soon, the researchers were beginning their first cautious experimentation with operating the devices themselves.

As a new century dawned, the discoveries of Carter from Egypt suggested this science wasn't new, but had only been lost. The occult secrets supposedly uncovered by Blavatsky and others were looked at in a different light. By the second decade of the twentieth century, a space age was underway, brought into being by alien technology and the wisdom of the ancients.

Soon humankind discovered there were other species in the solar system besides the beings they thought of as Martians--a race they realized was actually from a trans-Neptunian world. Nearly every world in the solar system held intelligent life of some sort, a disparate group of species with varying degrees of mastery of the psychic sciences. What’s more, most worlds contained ruins of an even more advanced ancient race. The ruins often contained material riches as well as ancient knowledge.

The nations of earth now had a solar system to fight over. World Wars would become Multi-World Wars with powerful new sciences changing the way they would be fought.