Dark Reign: Rise of the Shadowhand

Dark Reign: Rise of the Shadowhand is the Expansion to Dark Reign: The Future of War. The expansion includes a new Campaign and new maps and units. It also features two new sides, Xenites and Shadowhand, bringing the total number of playable races to 4. It was released on March 31, 1998.

Story
In Rise of the Shadowhand, the story depicts the increasing desperation and despotism of the Imperium after the emergence of the Tograns as a third credible faction. The Imperium launches an armarda of 10,000 ships purging Freedom Guard space across the galaxy. A fleeing transport ship the Emancipator is attempting to meet up with Freedom Guard forces when their fleet is preyed upon by the Imperium Armarda. Severely damaged and fleeing the fleet, the Emancipator makes a desperate jump through a secret Imperium Foldgate in space, coming out on the other side at the planet Ninevah, where a secret Shadowhand base operates, as well as the Xenite forces. At the same time, the Shadowhand forces are testing an enhanced AI program codenamed Osiris that was recovered from a protoype AI facility in Mars. The Shadowhand however are unaware that Osiris is planning to take over and kill the Shadowhand forces and spread itself out through the galaxy...

Multiplayer Community
In late 2018 the Dark Reign community moved to a Discord server after www.darkreign.ws, the then defacto community hub for over a decade that hosted the majority of all community content made up until that point went offline suddenly without warning. A temporary webspace was established at www.darkreignws.com to distribute content until the original was brought back online in early 2019.