Caught up on this and wow - quite a lot of action in just one month, and with really only a couple of relatively smaller-scale fleet engagements, much of the action was political in nature.
Kurt, I do wonder, how much of this was ordained from the beginning, and how much came down to one of your famous hidden dice rolls? Could the confrontation between the Alliance and Union have boiled over into all-out war with just one bad roll?
Very little was ordained from the beginning, however, I set up both the D'Bringi and the Humans with weaknesses and or divisions that would become problems over time depending how things went. How that would turn out I had no idea, it had to develop naturally with the story.
As for hidden dice rolls <G>, there were a few. For instance, two name two, the success or failure of the D'Bringi coup depended on two things, how much support it could gain from the D'Bringi population, and how successful it was in provoking the humans. For the first, I rolled against the D'Bringi racial outlook, modified, and found that the coup had actually very little support from the general population. That was always the most likely outcome, since the old system suppressed most of the population and limited their choices, so they were always unlikely to embrace a return to the old ways, but it was possible. As for provoking the humans, that largely depended on the human admiral in charge of the fleet that responded to the invasion. A New Dawnist, or even a younger admiral, would be more likely to be willing to act on the government's prodding towards an aggressive reaction to the D'Bringi provocations, however, an older cold-warrior, who remembered the last war, and how close run it was, would be less willing to provoke a war with the Alliance when they didn't have to. The officer assigned to the Union fleet sent to the Alliance was just that sort of person, and so acted prudently. Things still could have gone badly, if the Imperial D'Bringi forces in the Dether system were stronger than the pro-Alliance D'Bringi forces, but for various reasons they weren't, and so the coup failed on almost all levels.
If the Imperial D'Bringi forces in Dether had been stronger and had managed to inflict serious losses on the Union force, even the Union's new government wouldn't have been able to stop the storm of public opinion that would have forced them to attack the Alliance, which the Alliance would have had to respond to, and would have started a general war.
