After a century of fighting and four major wars, the D’Sev Holy Imperium lost to the Peldak Protectorate.

Now everyone, including the D’Sev, knows that the Protectorate is dominant, so the villains of the stars keep trying to push back our dominion and carve out their own spheres of influence. Some fools even think they can take us down and supplant us as the hegemon of the stars.

But the D’Sev are incredibly bitter over their defeat, and they’ve made an alternate history setting to cry about it.

The Festival of Souls places its point of divergence in the Third D’Sev War. Rather than basically everything going wrong for Commander F’Amarr W’Karri during his invasion of Peldor, it starts with only 80% of his troops dying during the crash landing, giving him double the number of troops to work with. It’s not unfair to suggest that perhaps he may have won the Peldor front or at least drew our troops away from other battlefields with this change.

From there they negotiate a peace similar to ours, where the Imperium dismantles our network of allies and forces a retreat to Peldor.

Then, a few decades later, the Imperium launches the Fourth D’Sev War and effectively prevents the peldaks from ever challenging their hegemony. The aliens would be unable to stand up to their psychic dominance; the Imperium would have won.

The Festival of Souls seems to be a collaborative writing effort from a dozen D’Sev authors and artists. Their works are being distributed by a noble house named E’Warna, and it seems to have met with great initial success.

It’s embarrassing enough that there’s more than one D’Sev writing this bitter, spiteful nonsense, but what’s even funnier is that enough D’Sev are buying the books to make it financially profitable.