On 18Jun2020 0304, Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml
list) wrote:
> One thing that really bothered me about The Rebellion was that a > backwater domain like Illelish suddenly had all those enormous
fleets > to deploy.
the
only really large and effective fleets are probably the Solomani Rim
fleets (the Marches, Corridor, coreward Vland, and Daibei will have
experienced fleets, but probably not super-large ones), because it's the
heavily developed sector with ...
... an oppressed, captured people taken as a conquest of war and against the will of the citizens.
Terra forever!
(Wait, is my inner Scot screaming 'Freeedoooooommmmmm!' now?)
Looking at sector populations, the Rebellion probably only lasted
because the Solomani jumped in and thus pinned the Solomani Rim fleet
down.
They had their own fish to fry and had been waiting for a long while.
In one campaign I ran decades back (when MT came out), the setting was the coreward trailing (closest to the Ley Sector) section of the Glimmerdrift Reaches and the Solomani were moving broadly against the Empire including up through the Imperial borders and into Glimmerdrift and Ley.
Aside: I made 'Project Phoenix' very real and many veteran soldiers with cyber augments were awoken from deep sleep (Solomani Confed had kept building more and more in the peace time to have a large ground presence when the time came). I sort of based these fighters off Timothy Zahn's Blackcollar series.
Then everything fragments, because the new Emperor not only has a
dodgy claim (survivable) but has just shown himself to be ineffective
(not survivable), so the fence-sitters go independent.
Yes, Strephon blew it by not reading Dulinor better and by not being willing to change enough without revolution so that he ensured it (and could not stop it even with a clone). [shades of the non-TU we live in...]
At those inflection points in history, you either have the power trying to stay together 'get its game on], make some major changes and to move directly and effectively to forestall a loss of overall confidence by showing the authority, leadership and success that one requires from great leaders. If that fails, the empire is doomed.
Of course the core problem was Dulinor's lack of guts. If he'd stayed in
Capital, sitting on the throne, he might've sold his coup. As it was, he
admitted he'd failed when he fled.
Yes, he was worried about his move failing because he'd be dead. He had the guts to pull the trigger, but hadn't thought out and accepted that the necessary follow through was to brazenly situation onself, make just claim, and then never back down. If he'd done that, he might have got public support - Strephon was far from perfect. A good PR campaign might have sold it and statements like:
'I did this for the good of all citizens of the Empire and none of us wants the chaos that lead to the Wars of the Flag from the bad old day. I will address the failings of Strephon, I will work with those nobles and leaders that want to focus on fixing what is broken, and the people of the Imperium, whom I serve, will be the victors and render harsh judgment on those who tear us further apart at this challenging time."
Or some such.
Works for me.
--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
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