Succession Wars

The Succession Wars were a series of conflicts between the powers of the Inner Sphere from the late 28th to early 31st centuries in the Battletech Universe. With the eradication of House Cameron by Stefan Amaris and the Rim Worlds Republic' secret long-term infiltration into the Star League's trust as a poster child Periphery State, there was no one left to take over as First Lord of the Star League. To make matters worse, each of the Great Houses distrusted Alexander Kerensy. Outside of appointing Jerome Blake as head of Comstar to keep the HPG network running, their last action as a unified body was to strip Kerensky of his title as head of the SLDF. While the SLDF was still the biggest military in human history, they were decimated from their grinding attritional war while fighting back from the Periphery to Terra. That, alongside Kerensky's antipathy to politics, made him convinced the best way to save the Star League was to take it's entire fighting force into exile in hopes the threat of retatiation would make the Great Houses compromise. Once he had gone into exile, the Succession Wars began among the Successor States to establish who'd replace House Cameron as the head honcho of the Inner Sphere after the fall of Star League, they were utterly devastating.

History

First Succession War

Almost from the minute Kerensky and the SLDF fucked off into the Deep Periphery, all the Successor States braced for what they knew was inevitable conflict. Knowing that becoming First Lord would inevitably mean they could run their opponents off the map forever, all five Successor States waited with baited breath at the opportunity to actively begin the violence, and wouldn't you know it, the Draconis Combine started the whole damn thing as Minoru Kurita decided to kick things off.

What happened next is that the Inner Sphere basically warcrime'd itself for 34 uninterrupted years. Biological, Nuclear, and Chemical warfare were rampant, and billions of lives were lost in senseless battles to claim long disputed systems and further territory over what was ultimately petty grudges; to the point that worlds that could produce clean drinking water were as valuable as they were when they were first discovered. It got so bad at one point that the Mercs, who were already a huge part of everybody's battleplans, basically had to start reigning in the violence themselves by forcefully refusing any contract that involved a breaking of "The Conventions" that was offered to them, usually by doing just as much damage for the other side the old fashioned way as they might've for the offer. By the end of the war, grand full-scale invasions and warcrime-laden battlefields gave way to simple skirmishes and raids to stop each other from producing more Mechs and other vital military equipment.

This is also where the Kentares Massacre happened; wherein Minor Kurita got his brain ventilated by a sniper, and his deeply unstable child Jinjiro basically decided that everyone on that planet had to die as quickly and painfully as possible as penance for this action. To make matters worse, any Draconis Combine soldier who protested was killed alongside the civilians themselves; often with a katana as Jinjiro figured it would waste less ammo. The local ComStar representatives, deeply concerned by Jinjiro's openly genocidal nature, broadcast the whole thing to the entire Inner Sphere. They got killed ny Jinjiro too, but made sure that even if everybody was picking a fight with everyone else, they definitely had an undisputed "bad guy" now. After a series of FedSun counterattacks to liberate worlds picked up early on by the Combine, pretty much everybody was exhausted and now very resource-poor, and eventually most fronts just ceased being fronts at all, with everybody deciding to call it quits and come back when they were ready for next time.

Consequences

As a consequence of the Succession Wars, all of the Great Houses expended the bulk of the Inner Sphere's riches and advanced technology while making life go back centuries in terms of living quality for civilians. While the discovery of the Helm Memory Core by the Grey Death Legion would partially bring back the Inner Sphere's technological development and the newly formed Federated Commonwealth seemed the most likely hegemon to come, all that came crashing down once the Clan Invasion began with the descendants of Kerensky's followers would return after 300 years of isolation due to probing expeditions from the Inner Sphere.

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