Re: Re: The United States in Full Thrust

As an [OFFICIAL] response to this thread as a whole, rather than
individual
comments.....

The bottom line is that if you don't like the background, use your own! 
:-)
That said, I think most people on the list realise that that there is
more
than a little tongue-in-cheek humour underlying the background as
written,
and a certain amount of rattling of some nationalistic cages is only to
be
expected. Yes, parts of it were deliberately an antidote to the crop of
"America rules the Stars" game backgrounds that were around (especially
in
the early 90s, when it was written); another reason was that we wanted a
strong "Royal Navy" in the game based at least partly on UK practice -
this
is far from uncommon in space opera novels, as anyone who has read the
Honor Harrington books will be well aware....

At the end of the day, it is just a slightly unconventional twist in
order
to get to the situation that we wanted for the group of major powers in
the
game - after all, the background isn't there for it's own sake but
simply
to provide some coherency to your tabletop battles. Oddly enough, I've
not
heard anyone complain about the inclusion of the almost total
destruction
of Israel, the crushing of the LLAR, the Chinese invasion of Russia or
the
apparent domination of the FSE by the French....... guess it kind of
depends how close to home it feels!   ;-)

I sometimes find it quite amusing that a few players find certain
aspects
of the background so unacceptable, while at the same time quite happily
accepting postulations like the discovery of FTL and Anti-Grav	- which
to
my mind are far more unlikely than all the political events in the
background put together.....!!	;-)

I'll end this as I started it - once you've bought it, it's your game -
play it the way YOU want to...!

Jon (GZG)