The following is a timeline of the major events which have contributed to ESPER becoming what it is over the years.
- 1553: Queen Elizabeth is hunted by a werewolf, and some believe she contracts the Lycanthrope Disease, passing it to her children. Regardless, she does what is best for England and contacts her spiritual advisor, Dr. John Dee.
- 1559: Dr. Dee forms ESPER, the Society for Extraordinary Supernatural Phenomena Explored and Revealed. Its mission is to protect England, and later the world, from the threat perceived six years earlier by the Queen.
- 1600: Dr. Dee drafts the first official constitution of the ESPER organization. It is still revered to this day, unchanged, as the ESPER Code.
- 1608: Dr. Dee is widely considered to have died. His first choice for ESPER Prime Minister is Irish vampire hunter James McDermott.
- 1612: James McDermott creates the first ESPER HQ in the cellar of a local pub, Luckey's.
- 1620: John Dee resurfaces, having discovered the Philosopher's Stone and discovered the secret to eternal life. He pledges his new immortality to help ESPER in its mission.
- 1624: Dr. Dee is able to create the ESPER dimension, where the ESPER HQ main structure is protected from supernatural or paranormal attack, and can be split to allow other ESPER branches to use the same space independently.
- 1729: A British expedition to Cairo unearths a mummy curse which unleashes one week of hell for the people of the London area where the remains were shipped. ESPER is dispatched and solves the problem, but the next few years are spent perfecting ESPER's methods of working in secret.
- 1901: Theodore Roosevelt is on a hunting expedition with friends when he encounters a cryptid in the forests of New Hampshire. Everyone in the party is killed but himself, and he manages to shoot and kill the creature. He forms Department 13, a secret branch of the FBI that deals with the unsolved FBI case files which may turn out to have supernatural or paranormal origins.
- 1938: With the threat of war looming, Department 13 builds the Maelstrom, an aircraft carrier that can fly and cloak itself, with the help of Dr. Dee. As a point in the contract for helping them, ESPER is allowed to keep a headquarters on the Maelstrom.
- 1947: ESPER agents operating out of Berlin are assigned to hunt down and kill the powerful Lich that once was Adolph Hitler. They are led to a small village where the former Reich has been trying to summon a Horror of the ancient world to cast judgment on the planet for his failure. The party is successful in stopping and destroying him, but pay for their victory with their lives.
- 1981: A zombie epidemic in a small town in Texas leads to ESPER operatives having to make one of the most difficult decisions in the history of the organization... the town of Red Water Gulch, TX no longer exists.
- 1999: The year before the Y2k bug is supposed to hit, another even more terrible event occurs that no one even knows about - the Chemosh Incident, in which the ancient deity, angered by its lack of worship in the modern world, contrived a method by which subscribers to a certain dial-up internet provider would be opened up for possession by him. The event ended with ESPER cleanup crews working dilligently over the next four years to ensure no memory of the event is remembered. As a precaution, they fix Y2k it cannot be taken advantage of by a similarly motivated entity.
- 2002: The Maelstrom is dispatched to Afghanistan to assist in the war effort there. Unbeknownst to the crew, a powerful Djinn called Mestoph had been called upon to help, and the Maelstrom crashes. One hundred and twenty nine Department 13 agents and forty-seven ESPER agents are killed. The wreckage of the Maelstrom, as it is designed to do, consumes itself so that no trace is left of it.
- 2003: The demon Mestoph senses a weakness in ESPER after destroying the Maelstrom, and decides to take them out of the picture. He spends the next year raising an army of demonic entities and human slaves to rise up against them in a battle at the Tower of London. Every ESPER agent in the world is dispatched to help. Most of them are wiped out. Although Mestoph is magickally sealed within the Tower of London and is never able to breach ESPER HQ Prime, most of ESPER is wiped out, including Dr. John Dee, who dies at the age of 476.
- 2005: The few remaining ESPER agents come together and do their best to rebuild.
- 2010: Ian James McDermott, unknowingly a descendant of the first ESPER Prime Minister, becomes the current ESPER Director Prime after years of service and a perfect mission success record.
After the Mestoph Incident, ESPER has become a shell of its former self, but they have been struggling to regain their former power. While once ESPER had 15,000 members worldwide, it is now reduced to the mid-400's. There is currently a huge push to find new members and bring back the powerful organization which once stood as the guardians of mankind. Whether or not this goal will ever be accomplished is a matter of speculation, but one thing is sure...
...the enemy is currently winning the war.