Editing Star League (section)

=== Downfall ===
While their might was considerable, one thing that had become increasingly clear is that after Michael Cameron's death in 2602, the Camerons began a slow but steady decline in impactful leadership. All others after Michael were a pretty quick descent into numerous failsons and paranoid dipshits that ultimately only enriched the SLDF at the expense of everybody else, and their hesitance in the face of inter-league conflict meant that the myriad powers of the League began to believe that they were becoming more important to the League than the League was to them. This, on top of tensions from the Periphery States treated as second-class members with no voting power inevitably led to brush-fire revolts among dissatisfied Periphery citizens. This ultimately led to a coup by the madman Stefan Amaris, who gained the young First Lord Richard's trust, nicely drove a wedge between him and the rest of the House Lords by supporting his worst decisions, and then, having attained the peak of the young First Lord's trust and favor, slew him in a grand show of destruction, and declared himself the new leader of the Star League. The SDLF's commander-general, Alexandr Kerensky, was having absolutely none of that shit, and began the [[Amaris Civil War]], which spanned all the way from the Periphery back down to Terra, and in an extremely bloody confrontation, Kerensky finally, personally, put Amaris down, and ended the so called "Amaris Empire".

But the war had also left the Star League in tatters: worlds were devastated, the entire Terran Hegemony's bureaucracy was gutted by pro-Amaris and pro-SLDF purges, and House Cameron had gone completely extinct. To make matters worse, many powers making up the Star League were now all squabbling and declaring themselves as true heir to the Star League. Worse, Kerensky expected that he'd be called upon to support any one of the Houses that were trying to take over the now-very-dead League. Furthermore, he'd just spent 14 bloody years feeding his men into a meat grinder to save it at the cost of over 75% of the SDLF's strength being destroyed. While the overwhelming majority of the Star League's citizens supported Kerensky if he were to take the throne, all of the Great Houses distrusted him and stripped him of his leadership titles. So on the half-joke of a colleague, he brought [[ComStar]]'s Primus Jerome Blake in to tell him he was going to leave the inner sphere altogether, with as many members of the SLDF as he could, and he would like his help in masking his retreat. Blake naturally resisted, since that meant ComStar was just as susceptible to control, but he ultimately backed down out of respect for Kerensky and after Kerensky negotiated the integration of the SLDF remnants who stayed behind to serves as the Com Guard. With that, the last vestiges of the Star League, it's defense force, left the Inner Sphere entirely, never to be seen again until their grandchildren came back as [[the Clans]]. 

From there on, the [[Succession Wars]] began.