Warframe's History in a Nut Shell

+world/desc The Origin System. Sol. The Place Humans Come From. Take your pick on what to call the solar system that Warframe takes place in. Buckle Up, Buttercup, we have a lot of things to cover and not enough words to do it in.

Before everything got going, you have the Orokin Empire; the not-so-benevolent precursors that honestly were terrible and horrible, and everything really is their fault. They're very pretty though, and most surviving accounts focus on the pretty things they did and how pretty they were, instead of how terrible everything was if you weren't part of the in-crowd. So yea, the Orokin expanded to colonize everything that could be colonized, left earth a ravaged wasteland, and sent robots out to go colonize Tau because it turns out living hedonistic eternal lives, that were eternal in the first place because you body surfing into kidnapped children whenever your old body is running on empty, off the backs of vat-grown slaves and impoverished masses leaves all your resources up in smoke because hey, had to have that gold encrusted toilet seat right?

So, these machines went to Tau on a one way trip because to go faster than light you have to go through the Void, and the Orokin were, to their credit, smart enough to realize leaving self-improving machines alone and unsupervised for centuries is generally a stupid idea, so made it so these machines couldn't take the express lane back to kill everyone assuming the ticking time bomb in their design didn't go off killing the whole lot as soon as the job was finished. Unfortunately, these machines got to Tau ahead of schedule, gained self-awareness in the process, realized the Orokin created them as disposable labor and rightfully were pissed off enough that the whole 'genocide our creators' sentiment is actually kinda justified.

This leaves the Orokin facing off against a race of Machines, now calling themselves Sentients, that are still weak to the Void, the thing that allows faster than light travel and is a major power source within the Origin system, and even if the trip back home messed up the Sentients that decided to go explain why the worker's union is unhappy the fact they're infinitely adaptable machines and were designed to adapt anything to their needs meant all the Orokin's High Technology not only was worthless, it actively got subverted and turned against them. %r%rAttempt 1 involved outfitting normal soldiers in low tech weapons to get around the fact the sentients can subvert , and went about as well as you'd think sending troops armed with muskets and swords against future angry space-terminators would go. Attempt 2 was to use a zombie plague to enhance troops and drowned the enemy in bodies under the idea that the enemy can't adapt or subvert literal zombies, which got scrapped because someone had a couple brain cells bumping around and remembered every piece of fiction in human history dealing with zombies ends with lots of people getting eaten and everything getting ripped to shreds. Unfortunately, by that point, the virus got loose on its own and on top of a killer robot invasion from space you now have a zombie plague. Good Job Orokin.

Somewhere in there, the Orokin were desperate enough to arm the Grineer, who at that point were vat grown slaves churned out by the million or five at a time, to act as fodder. Surprisingly this didn't immediately lead to a slave revolt. That would come later after the Orokin Empire was decapitated after the war.

Oh, and the Killer Robots? They were designed by someone within the Corpus. Think Space-Banker-Cultist that literally worships Profit.

Where do the Tenno fit in all this? They were kids on a colony ship that officially didn't have any children on board. The Tenno don't remember much about the accident that left this ship stranded in the void or how all the adults were gone or why they have freaky void powers. All these kids know is that they got turned into lab experiments and were slated to be Bad Thing #563858225848 the Orokins have done when the Orokin realized 'hey these kids use weird void powers. The things killing us are weak to void powers.' also the one nice lady that took care of the Tenno got incinerated for calling the Orokin out for their being mega-jerks, and another lady calling herself The Lotus (yes The is part of her name, because that's how she rolls) conveniently to take the Tenno's reins so they can be productive little mass murdering saviors the Orokin think of as demons. Since you can't send fourteen or fifteen-year-olds to war against Space-Terminators the Warframes were created to make them actually effective in the field.

To make a long story short? The Sentients were driven away, the Infestation zombie plague thing got wiped out, and the Seven emperors (very important people that never showed up anywhere) came out into the open to give the Tenno cookies and pats on the head and likely told how good and amazing they are before ordering them thrown in a hole somewhere, because the Orokin are jerks and roll like that. The Tenno beat them to the punch though and murdered the Emperors, and just about everyone else that bothered showing up, which was most everyone important. Then after committing mass genocide and not bothering to care about cleanup or 'what next?' The Tenno took a long Long nap.%r%rWith the Orokin dead and most of their stuff not working right unless you were Orokin, things just kinda started falling apart. The Grineer, you remember the vat-grown idiot slaves the Orokin decided to start handing guns out to, started conquering everything they could get their grubby mitts on. The Corpus were stuck trying to make all the Orokin toys start working again, and at the same time, they saw business opportunities by making everyone's life miserable because apparently, they're so short-sighted that they think the best way to profit is war, which leaves any independent groups in a bit of a bind. There's plenty of groups out there that get to live in peace, lucky sods , but for a lot of folk it's either live with a grineer boot slammed against your face, a corpus hand reaching for your wallet, or the zombie plague the grineer decided to wake back up trying to eat your face.

What's that? You want to know how the Tenno fit in? They got woke up because The Lotus realized the Grineer started butchering them in the cryopods they went to sleep in. They're amazing fighters, and tend to try keeping people who can't fight safe, but there really aren't enough of them to either make the Grineer stop murdering everyone, or get the Corpus to stop thinking only about money, so The Lotus has them playing a game of 'Try to keep This guy and That Guy Fighting so they don't kill Me.'

You wanted a Summary of How We Got Here? There you go. Now where's my Platinum?