But I don't think any of are saying he's 'replaceable', in any stronger sense than you are. If it becomes impossible (or, pragmatically or politically impossible at least) to perform the rituals successfully to re-integrate his immortal-Egi-derived bits (or whichever the exact provenance if these portions of himself), then that's it, no more Moonson, splat. I don't think it's necessary to make this aspects of each Mask totally dominant, or much less, exclusive of a mortal 'contribution', in order to achieve this effect, though naturally I can see how it might affect the 'spin' SGU (or other sources, however far up the pipeline they might be) might put on things.
Even if the 'unique' portion of Moonson were only 1% (and I'm certain it's a dang sight more), this would still be so. A really spiffy assemblage of mortal Egi, without this part, will just give you a really spiffy mess, or at best, some _other_ super-human type who may be able to do for himself some or all of the tasks of Emperorship, as understood in the Lunar period, but would inevitably end up doing them differently, and 'from scratch'. (And more likely, he ends up as an uebermensch with an 'agenda', like Dara Happan Purism, or Pelandan Revivalism, or some other nonsense, different from the existing artful imperial fudge.)
> SGU will not cover this stuff,
> it is a players, not a GMs book. It will not contradict the RMM position and
> if it does, you can be sure I didn't write the piece.
That's fairly reassuring, then. (Maybe I can get _my_ Lunar Empire by taking my spine-bound copy of Taleses in one hand, my copy of SGU (the cheque's in the post: how far would you recommend post-dating it? ;-) ) in the other, and mentally interpolating...
> In my Glorantha I want an "alien" Emperor but I want to see more Blood in
> succession wars than even Nicks position. If I were running a game in such a
> period I'd have the Empire wracked by overt war and carnage, massive armies
> and huge sieges. I'd have heroic battles, massive quests, surgical strikes
> from the moon, raids on the moon and airborne battlefleets clashing.
You surprise me, Martin...
War as an extension of politics by other means, but you seem a little keen to concenrate on the 'other means', and skip over the politics, or at least not make it as interesting as many of us would like. Though you don't necessarily have to go out of your way to _make_ it thus, just avoid precluding this, within the context of the Official Material.
Cheers,
Alex.
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