On 19Jun2020 1845, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:
> I had thought there was a lot more of them than I could easily pull
> up. I remember thinking the Empire's standard succession plan was
> 'shoot the guy in charge and befriend the Moot to stamp it as legit'.
I would guess that it was made up on the spot to legitimise someone
killing Cleon the Mad before he had everyone purged. Then it gets dusted
off a few times in the next couple of centuries, maybe with the Moot's
blessing, maybe just with its arm-twisted forgiveness after the fact.

Then there's that little civil war and all those Flag Emperors, and
after that everyone agrees that this is a bad idea and should be put
behind them, but the law's never removed, because it might be useful one
day, and because that would mean examining just what the Moot can and
cannot do to remove an unacceptable Emperor, and because a lot of
powerful people's dirty laundry would be put out on display in the
process. Besides, the whole thing is really only legal or not if the
Moot of the day says so, for whatever reason (plasma gun to the head
being a good one).

And then Dulinor, unimpressed by Strephon's limited moves towards more
'democracy' (at best it was a little more local autonomy, which is not
the same thing) and unswayed by the PR (Supplement 8 notes that Strephon
did a good PR job on the 4th Frontier War and came out of it looking
good even though he was far too remote from it to have influenced events
in any way), goes looking for a way for removing the Emperor (who was
his friend, by the way, though I imagine with time and distance and the
demands of power it was a pretty distant one by then) and finds it in
the history books. Not being a student of history, nor an academic, he
doesn't consider what happened last time someone did this. Nor does he
consider that the Imperium of the 1110s is not the same as that of the
240s or the late 500s and early 600s, and that his plan might result in
unintended consequences.

The rest is, well, a new edition of an rpg and a series of supplements.

I've always thought it was funny that people called TNE 'Twilight 2000
in space', yet MegaTraveller, especially from the Black War onwards, was
the game about playing in the ruins of a civilisation /as it died/, not
TNE (which was about rebuilding in the ruins of a /dead/ civilisation).
TNE was more 2300AD, but with more ruins and more looting.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>