[quote=@Polybius] Yep. The plan is to have no clear successor and a bureaucracy sort of bungling things. The imperial family will be in hiding and seeking asylum and safety with powerful houses only to be taken hostage or murdered. As for the imperial authority, specifically the tip commanders, maybe a coup in the core worlds? I'm not quite sure how to handle all of the npc factions myself. Any thoughts? IC will be up Monday PM EST at the latest. [/quote] How united is the IB? Depending on whether or not the entire body has a single agenda we could see groups backing different factions, their diverging agendas causing a rupture in the organization. How large is the Imperial Family? If there are too many of them, we could have half a dozen or so claimants popping up across the void, wherever they might find any support. We could use the military coup as spark that lit the pownder. The Emperor died, things are getting out of hand, a cabal of high ranking officers in the capital decide to seize control of the state apparatus to "save the Empire". Except the coup does not goes as planned. The capital is theirs, but loyalists managed to smuggle at least some of the Imperial Family out. And in the confusion, many of their other targets escaped. They got a puppet child on the throne, but any notion of Unity os dead. Elsewhere, we could mimic Rome and have any half popular commander declaring himself Emperor. Add separatists, Xenos and religious chaos, and we've got our overeaching plot