>>6179361
>You were the king in your own mind even before you were crowned. You will not let what happened to your parents and grandparents happen to you. And that will require a firm hand.
Firm, but not insanse. Lets hope.

>>6179361
>You seem to inherited your grandmother's looks, particularly her ice-blue eyes. You've been given a wide berth for this, leading to a lonely life

>>6179361
>>You have very high standards, expecting perfection from yourself as much as you do from others
We must go more insane. Make mom and grandpa proud.

>>6179361
>>You have very high standards, expecting perfection from yourself as much as you do from others

>>6179415
>>6179424
>>6179373
>>6179365

Perfection in all things has been your watchword almost as soon as you could speak. It is perhaps only your elder sister who understands your unforgivingly high standards. She has gone unmarried for your sake (lest a pretender seize the throne through marriage as your father did) and is your only familial comfort as your reign begins.

That soon changes, however, as proposals of marriage accost to you from all sides. As you are surrounded by serpents hidden beneath smiling faces and solemn oaths, you are advised to ally yourself with someone who can support that last argument of kings, should it ever come to that. You, of course, have no issue with dispensing with foolish notions like affection and attraction. Power is a far greater aphrodisiac than any shapely bosom.

Whom do you marry, in this, the 2nd year of your reign?
>Mary, a distant cousin from your grandfather line, whose father is the strongest among the lords who reside in your kingdom. You are told the marriage would put to bed all whispers of conspiracy, though it does put a sour taste in your mouth to call father the very man who shot an arrow through your mother's heart.
>Genevieve, a foreign princess, daughter of a mighty emperor whose support and absolute promises of safety come at the expense of a certain humiliation. The difference in powers ensures you will always live under a foreign heel (even if that is the safest place to be).
>Simona, the sister of a relatively obscure lord, but one of the few that did not participate in the insurrection and one whose martial genius is so great that the others did not dare to coerce him. His father was one of those who was lifted into nobility by your father's hand. The union would therefore send an unwelcome message to those older barons, of a possible changing of the guard.

>>6179454
>>Simona, the sister of a relatively obscure lord, but one of the few that did not participate in the insurrection and one whose martial genius is so great that the others did not dare to coerce him. His father was one of those who was lifted into nobility by your father's hand. The union would therefore send an unwelcome message to those older barons, of a possible changing of the guard.
Barons delenda est.

>>6179454
We're insane, perfect excuse to marry our sister

>>6179454
>Simona, the sister of a relatively obscure lord, but one of the few that did not participate in the insurrection and one whose martial genius is so great that the others did not dare to coerce him. His father was one of those who was lifted into nobility by your father's hand. The union would therefore send an unwelcome message to those older barons, of a possible changing of the guard.
A wolf may shed his coat, but never his own nature.

>>6179454
>Mary, a distant cousin from your grandfather line, whose father is the strongest among the lords who reside in your kingdom. You are told the marriage would put to bed all whispers of conspiracy, though it does put a sour taste in your mouth to call father the very man who shot an arrow through your mother's heart.

>>6179468
>>6179469
>>6179470

Your union with the sister of an obscure, recently knighted lord (or what goes for recent in the minds of those obsessed with lineage and heredity) is seen as a troubling sign of unwelcome change. Simona's brother, Lord Samuel Porter, never expected to receive the favor of a king, but in becoming one of your brothers (and your elder to boot) he seems to take to the office of protector with a seriousness and attention to detail that equals your own. For all that he lacks ambition, and sees his duties as more familial than official. He is a brother first, and you feel you can trust him.

As for Simona herself, she is a sweet, tenderhearted creature, the sort to cry over a sparrow lying crushed on the road. Not long after your wedding vows the second purpose of your marriage is fulfilled, and later that year she gives birth to a healthy girl. Not soon after that she is with child again. This time it is with a true heir, a son; in fact, a pair of sons, a double bounty.

Alas, a few years later, one of the twins suffers an accident which leaves him crippled and in permanent pain. The other, who will now inherit your crown without contest, refuses to leave his brother's side, at the expense of his studies and education in these crucial formative years. The physic assures you that he can support the poor cripple's life for another two or three miserable years, especially with the unceasing attention that your wife gives him. Yet, even he advises you to end your child's suffering. He says nightshade is painless.

And you need only one heir.

What will you do with your ailing child, in this, the 11th year of your reign?
>Let him go to eternal rest, come what may. His brother will only be further motivated to greatness by the loss. His mother will hate you as long as you live, but such things can endured, if one is a king.
>Let him live on by whatever art and care are available, even if it means his own suffering and the loss of competence of your heir. You cannot withstand such a stain upon your soul.

>>6179494
>>Let him go to eternal rest, come what may. His brother will only be further motivated to greatness by the loss. His mother will hate you as long as you live, but such things can endured, if one is a king

>>6179494
>Let him go to eternal rest, come what may. His brother will only be further motivated to greatness by the loss. His mother will hate you as long as you live, but such things can endured, if one is a king.

>>6179494
>Let him go to eternal rest, come what may. His brother will only be further motivated to greatness by the loss. His mother will hate you as long as you live, but such things can endured, if one is a king.

>>6179494
>Let him go to eternal rest, come what may. His brother will only be further motivated to greatness by the loss. His mother will hate you as long as you live, but such things can endured, if one is a king.
Perfection demands sacrifice, no?

>>6179494

>Let him go to eternal rest, come what may. His brother will only be further motivated to greatness by the loss. His mother will hate you as long as you live, but such things can endured, if one is a king.

Surely we can make it seem like an accident or otherwise obscure our action?

>>6179494
>Let him go to eternal rest, come what may. His brother will only be further motivated to greatness by the loss. His mother will hate you as long as you live, but such things can endured, if one is a king.

>>6179494
>End his suffering.

Perfection demands sacrifice.

>>6179504
>>6179509
>>6179513
>>6179514

You order the nightshade be prepared, and when the time comes you are the only one present in the room when the physic administers it. He tells you that the poison will numb the pain before it exacts its price. But even the small, final smile upon your son's face is little comfort to the anguished screams and door-beating of your wife, who begs, who demands, who bargains to be let in, to put a stop to this.

And when the deed is done, something cold and quiet entangles itself about your heart. In the moments before dawn or after midnight, you sometimes ponder the meaning of that smile, but to no satisfactory answer.

Your wife does not speak to you for two years. But no matter, she cannot refuse you her nuptial purpose, and two more children are born in the interim. A son and daughter. But these seem only to remind her of what she has lost, what she deems that you have taken. Her severe despondence requires, several times, dramatic intercession. And her vow of silence is finally broken only to throw the bitter irony in your face. You would kill your son to spare his pain, but not afford your wife the same mercy.

As for your heir, as you predicted, the death of his counterpart spurs him to ferocious pursuit of excellence, which, combined with his natural gifts, allows him to not only meet but exceed the standards you demand of him. And if he shares in his mother's hatred of you, he does not show it.

The years of peace you've thus far enjoyed are suddenly broken by the action of brigands on some of your border territories. These are lands owned by the descendants of those whom your father had raised from commonhood, A proper response would require exhausting a significant portion your coffers, money you have painstakingly saved over the last decade. And these lands are not of such great worth that their loss would pain you.

What will you do about these brigands, in this, the 13th year of your reign?
>Muster the men of your castle, with yourself and your brother-in-law at the helm. What is the point of wealth if it is not spent in defense of your kingdom?
>What are the barons for if not to serve their king when he needs them? Summon the old barons and coerce them to campaign against these brigands--at their own cost, of course.
>Leave the brigands alone. They will not dare to encroach beyond the limits they've set for themselves, and once the spoils in them are exhausted, they'll leave of their own accord.

>>6179556
>Muster the men of your castle, with yourself and your brother-in-law at the helm. What is the point of wealth if it is not spent in defense of your kingdom?
While the lands aren't worth that much, it's our reputation that's at risk. Besides, such vermin don't deserve to plunder in our kingdom.

>>6179556
>What are the barons for if not to serve their king when he needs them? Summon the old barons and coerce them to campaign against these brigands--at their own cost, of course.

>>6179556
>Leave the brigands alone. They will not dare to encroach beyond the limits they've set for themselves, and once the spoils in them are exhausted, they'll leave of their own accord.

We married their *spits* common-blooded daughter. That should be enough to satisfy those descendants of trash. No need to exhaust our coffers when those vassals already got great servicefrom us.

>>6179556
>Muster the men of your castle, with yourself and your brother-in-law at the helm. What is the point of wealth if it is not spent in defense of your kingdom?

>>6179556
>Muster the men of your castle, with yourself and your brother-in-law at the helm. What is the point of wealth if it is not spent in defense of your kingdom?

>>6179556
>Muster the men

We aren't saving for any great purpose.

>>6179561
>>6179608
>>6179655
>>6179661
>>6179663

You muster the fighting men of your castle and set off on campaign yourself, with your brother-in-law in tow. Although you cannot boast to possess a keen tactical mind, in strength of arms you have no equal, having engaged in rigorous training since you were a boy.

The brigands turn out to be not mere peasant rabble, but displaced veterans of the emperor across the sea, led by a man with almost as much cunning as your brother-in-law. His hit-and-run tactics make him an elusive enemy (and expensive to pursue), but at last, just as your funds are near depleted, the scoundrels are ensnared in a trap, and their leader finds his death upon your own lance.

You slaughter the rest and put their bodies on public display. It will not bring back those you have lost, nor the money you have spent, but your rage, at least, is satisfied. And the gesture seems to work, for another six years passes in perfect peace.

Your wife bears you another son and daughter. The last one must be cut out of her. Her final words to you are to name this child (a boy) after the you both have lost. Her last gesture is one of love: a tender caress to join the gentle smile you think so often of. At the funeral you do not weep, which is proper. But even in private you cannot summon tears, which frightens you, though you tell no one of it.

Your heir is a man grown now. He has the astonishing beauty that your father possessed, golden locks and a well-formed face. From you he inherited strength and a cool disposition. Of his heart and his true thoughts, however, you know absolutely nothing.

One evening, out on a hunting trip, the two of you encounter a great and ancient stag, with horns that appear as gold in the dying light. When your son reaches for his spear, you stop him. The stag suddenly raises its head and gazes at you and then just as suddenly it bounds away. You forbid your uncomprehending son from giving chase, without yourself knowing the reason. However, later that night, you find yourself unable to sleep, weeping uncontroably.

You see a shadow move across your tent, with a long sharp thing in its hand. It stops before the entry flaps. Pauses. You tell it to enter, in a voice without fear or reprimand. The flaps part, your son's head appears, then his body. He studies your face a moment, your tears shining by slat of moonlight. Then he bows his head and slips away. When morning comes you cannot discern the night before from a dream, but the stag leaves an indelible impression.

You ponder its significance for many moons.

What will you do about this portent, in this, the 20th year of your reign?
>Ignore it. It was nothing more than a meaningless combination of happenstance.
>Change your house's sigil to the pattern of the stag. The time is right for such a change.
>Return to the forest, find and kill the animal and mount it on your hall.

>>6179716
>Change your house's sigil to the pattern of the stag. The time is right for such a change.

>>6179716
>>Change your house's sigil to the pattern of the stag. The time is right for such a change.
It is so

>>6179716
>Return to the forest, find and kill the animal and mount it on your hall.

Fucking spiritual shit. WE ARE THE KING! The only thing I bow down to is OURSELVES. Mount it's head as proof of our dominance.

>>6179716
>Change your house's sigil to the pattern of the stag. The time is right for such a change.

>>6179720
the kid was about to murder us, pretty sure this'll fast track that murder

>>6179716
>Change your house's sigil to the pattern of the stag. The time is right for such a change.

>>6179716
>>Return to the forest, find and kill the animal and mount it on your hall.

No spiritual shit

>>6179724
So be it. We will show no fear, no weakness, and definitely no tears. If we die it will be silently and with pride and a king's authority.

>>6179716
>Return to the forest, find and kill the animal and mount it on your hall.
As an anon said, perfection demands sacrifice

>>6179716
>Change your house's sigil to the pattern of the stag. The time is right for such a change.

>>6179716
>Change your house's sigil to the pattern of the stag. The time is right for such a change.

>>6179716
>Change your house's sigil to the pattern of the stag. The time is right for such a change.

>>6179716
>Change your house's sigil to the pattern of the stag. The time is right for such a change.

>>6179716
>Change the pattern to a stag

>>6179716
Sorry I can't quote everyone, 4chan thinks its spam for some reason...

You order all the tapestries be ripped from their mounts. You order the shields and the banners remade in a new image. The image of a stag with golden horns. The old barons are not pleased with such a change, but the years following your last campaign were filled with plenty and having seen for themselves what you do with your enemies, they remain reluctant friends.

As when a man changes his soiled clothes to what is clean and fresh, the change of sigil seems to reinvigorate not only yourself but your kingdom as well. You are now in middle age and fall to think on posterity. How will your people remember you? You have not tortured them, like your grandfather, nor let them suffer the consequences of incompetence and imprudence, as your own parents. You have been just, mighty, careful, honest.

Yet something feels missing. It is not quite the height of perfection you imagined for yourself when you were a boy. Will they even remember such a placid existence? Finally, one day, you hit upon the solution: a great work. Not some gaudy monument of worship, but something that will touch the lives of all who reside in your kingdom. It will take generations to bring to being and must influence generations to come.

What great project will you undertake, in this, the 21st year of your reign?
>A great road which circles your kingdom entire, from the southern coast to the northern isles, from the vast eastern sea to the channel in the west. A strong trunk to unite all the broken roads, that all the wanderers traveling among them may remember your name.
>A great fleet of ships to the east, in anticipation of a quest for uncharted lands. How dull it would be to die in sleep, to succumb to the body's weakness and density of time. You'd rather strive for something hopeless and impossible and test the limits of perfection.
>A great library, like the ones of old, where all the world's knowledge is gathered from all the world's secret places, the ruins and wrecks, the ancient minds. You shall send out your scholars, two-by-two, and you shall train a new generation of academics, as strong in will as in word.

>>6179988
>A great library
You were perfect in body at youth, and now you must be perfect in mind. Build the library and dedicate yourself to study. Your son is ready to take the crown, so let him and become his advisor. You will be remember as both warrior and scholar.

>>6179988
>A great road which circles your kingdom entire, from the southern coast to the northern isles, from the vast eastern sea to the channel in the west. A strong trunk to unite all the broken roads, that all the wanderers traveling among them may remember your name.

Roads last longer than wood and pulp.

>>6179988
>>A great road which circles your kingdom entire, from the southern coast to the northern isles, from the vast eastern sea to the channel in the west. A strong trunk to unite all the broken roads, that all the wanderers traveling among them may remember your name.

>>6179988
Hmm. A road is an objectively safer and arguably better prospect that improves everything it touches.

But our king is a perfectionist. So yes, make ready for a travel exploration. We'll abdicate the crown to our heir, who is excellent, and set out on a risky expedition. If we die then we have sailed into legend leaving a secure kingdom. If we return, then it is a larger jewel on our crown.
And our kid would probably kill us, but that's alright. Perfection demands sacrifice

>>6179988

>A great road which circles your kingdom entire, from the southern coast to the northern isles, from the vast eastern sea to the channel in the west. A strong trunk to unite all the broken roads, that all the wanderers traveling among them may remember your name

There’s probably no bigger benefit we can provide, plus it sets a tradition for great public works. Hopefully our son will keep that in mind after he assassinates us.

We might preemptively make an arrangement with him for abdication in 5-10 years, in order to prevent our death, btw.

>>6179994
>>6179998
>>6180002
>>6180013
>>6180030

All across your kingdom, you raise the call for laborers, surveyors, carpenters, masons to apply themselves to the construction of a great road. One that will take generations to complete.

You try and impress upon your son the significance of this work so that he at least will continue it after you are gone. But you do not know if he truly understands.

Seven years pass in endless toil.

The old barons sneer at the imagination of a king, who in the end, proves himself the descendant of a stonecutter. When your coffers run dry in the unquenchable pit of this project, they refuse to open their own. Instead they conspire with the emperor across the sea to strike you while you are weak. They entreat him to send his army. Some of them send him their swords, a gesture of future fealty. All this does not pass without your knowledge.

The time comes when the emperor's ships are sighted on the same coast you had hung his deserters. Upon that coast you meet them with your men, those barons who had not betrayed you, your brother-in-law, and also your son. You are outnumbered. And your scouts warn you that the emperor's forces will be joined by your old barons (swiftly, by your own road) just as soon as they prove a sufficient advantage. You must achieve victory here and now, or your kingdom will be lost.

Your son and your brother-in-law debate tactics and strategy, but, in the end, the battle is decided by force of will. The whole host of your cavalry, with yourself at their helm, lead an unstoppable charge at the decisive moment, unhorsing the emperor's general--his brother--and taking him captive. But as you wheel back to your own lines, you feel a sudden hot breathless pain. An arrow has struck just between your shoulder blades. Your vision blurs. Your men rally to protect you and carry you from the field, but from the numbness that so rapidly replaces the pain, you know death has come.

In the tent, it is your brother-in-law, steadfast to the end, who holds your hand as you die. He tells you that your son has completed your victory, not satisfied with merely routing the enemy, but going so far as to set fire to their ships and hold all of them captive. The ransoms will be enormous. But as for your wound--and here you touch his hand and beg him to be silent on what you already know. You tell him to watch over your son and your other five children. You tell him not to punish the old barons overmuch, for they were thinking of the kingdom too, in their own shortsighted way. And you thank him for being by your side.

His image fades, replaced by warm, painless light. What you see next is the answer to that smile you have held sacred in your memory for so long, but what it is no man can fathom until his hour is come.

And then you die.

What will history remember you by, in this, the 28th (and last) year of your reign?
>Chose name: _
>...the Builder
>...the Able
>...the Perfected

>>6180037
>...the Builder
For we weren't the perfection we sought for, but we have layed the foundations, the foundations of a road to the future, a strong dynasty and a stronger kingdom.

>>6180037
>The builder.

An epitaph fitting.
Our subjects ought regard us better than the last two.

But these barons have betrayed the royal line twice.
They are unfit for their positions.

>>6180037
If it wasn't clear: you can also name this king (who has, thus far gone nameless), the epithet will be appended to that.

>>6180037
>...the Builder

We were a good king.

>>6180053
Joachim the Builder.

>>6180037
>Chose name: Walter II

Our peasant father wanted to ape the traditions of kings, our name is a monument to his ego. The byname we carry will be our real legacy, and a spit his eye, as we excelled, where he fell from power the same way he rose to it.

>>6180037
>>6180062 +1
The builder

>>6180062
I'll support it.

>>6180039
>>6180052
>>6180062
>>6180066
>>6180071
>>6180054
>>6180055

You have buried your father today. The crowning ceremony is in a few weeks, but that crown you saw upon his head your whole life, is already heavy upon your own. You are nearly twice his age when he sat upon the high seat, yet you feel as unready as if you were still a boy.

The funeral was as perfect as any that has ever been witnessed by men. You saw to that yourself, and the name upon the cairn. King Walter the Builder. Your father would have been pleased.

Something about that irks you. That even in his death he would demand from you his pleasure, your total perfection. As you sit here now alone, with your ghosts, with the only memory of him that has any meaning to you, the rest too inscrutable to unentangle, you ponder whether you would have actually done it. If you had not seen the tears, heard the moaning in his sleep and the whispered names, and if your breast had not been smote by the sight of your father's secret grief--would you have slain him?

But you did see all this. And you did not destroy him.

You are certain it affected your character:
>It showed you that none are infallible. You should have fulfilled the dread purpose you swore yourself to so long ago, and it was only because you were a man that you could not. Therefore do not be a man henceforth, but a wolf.
>It robbed you of your glorious purpose, leaving you with a gnawing hole in the very center of your heart. You sense with dread that your remaining life will revolve around its brief and futile reliefs.
>It revealed to you the true nature of God as neither benevolent nor merciful, but a punisher and a true judge. It is simply that all are damned. And if so, and if all are also made in His image, then why not pursue that judgement here on earth? And who better a punisher, than a king?

>>6180096
>>It showed you that none are infallible. You should have fulfilled the dread purpose you swore yourself to so long ago, and it was only because you were a man that you could not. Therefore do not be a man henceforth, but a wolf.

>>6180096

>It robbed you of your glorious purpose, leaving you with a gnawing hole in the very center of your heart. You sense with dread that your remaining life will revolve around its brief and futile reliefs.

An unresolvable knot!

>>6180096
>It showed you that none are infallible. You should have fulfilled the dread purpose you swore yourself to so long ago, and it was only because you were a man that you could not. Therefore do not be a man henceforth, but a wolf.

>>6180096
>Be a wolf.

>>6180096
>It showed you that none are infallible. You should have fulfilled the dread purpose you swore yourself to so long ago, and it was only because you were a man that you could not. Therefore do not be a man henceforth, but a wolf.

>>6180096
>It showed you that none are infallible. You should have fulfilled the dread purpose you swore yourself to so long ago, and it was only because you were a man that you could not. Therefore do not be a man henceforth, but a wolf.

>>6180096
>It robbed you of your glorious purpose, leaving you with a gnawing hole in the very center of your heart. You sense with dread that your remaining life will revolve around its brief and futile reliefs.

>>6180096

The sigil stag stares down at you from the wall. In its visage you see something of yourself, the pensive eyes, the staid mouth, and, of course, the golden horns like your own golden curls. And that was perhaps how your father saw you. A herbivore, with equipment to defend itself and its own, but nothing else.

But that is not how you see yourself. What is a man really but some amalgam of beasts and gods? His high natures profit him nothing. It robs him of control or gives him the mere illusion of it. Better to be a beast. A stag? No. Better to be the hunter than the hunted. And therefore a wolf.

Teeth, claws and speed. God grant you these things. All else is the vestige of man.

Your first test of this philosophy comes quite soon. Your father-in-law, no doubt from a dying charge of your father's, is keen to see you married. At twenty-six and still chaste, you are already something of anomaly in your court. Even your two younger brothers have already consummated the deed, even the youngest one (who is scarcely past boyhood) that bears the name of your lost counterpart.

You entertain the idea of a queen, if only to humor your pestering father-by-proxy.

Whom do you marry in this, the 1st year of your reign?
>Catherine, the rich, youthful widow of the head of the old baronial faction. A rebellious spirit, so it is said, and so much the more for her treasonous husband's death at your hands.
>Libella, an ugly prophetess whom even the ancient nuns regarded with respect, though they did not let her join in their habit. Her auguries are never wrong they say.
>No one. Women are creatures who are prey of wolves in all the tales, not their comforts or consorts. And they shall never be even that much to you.

>>6180316
>Libella, an ugly prophetess whom even the ancient nuns regarded with respect, though they did not let her join in their habit. Her auguries are never wrong they say.

Madness maxing go!

>>6180316
>Catherine, the rich, youthful widow of the head of the old baronial faction. A rebellious spirit, so it is said, and so much the more for her treasonous husband's death at your hands.

>>6180316
>Catherine, the rich, youthful widow of the head of the old baronial faction. A rebellious spirit, so it is said, and so much the more for her treasonous husband's death at your hands.

>>6180316
>Katherine

For explicitly her rebellious spirit.
I expect some level of abuse at her, but in a nice fantasy she is a rebellion of our own.
Mother was a meek thing. We have no use for meek things.

>>6180316
>Libella, an ugly prophetess whom even the ancient nuns regarded with respect, though they did not let her join in their habit. Her auguries are never wrong they say.

>>6180316

>Libella, an ugly prophetess whom even the ancient nuns regarded with respect, though they did not let her join in their habit. Her auguries are never wrong they say.

There’s obviously something deeply wrong with us but I’m here for it

>>6180316
>Libella
We need a heir and maybe he will inherit his mother gift. Also she can become a trusty advisor,
Her ugliness is of no consequence, no one will question our choice (without suffering the consequences) and if we want some beautiful body there are plenty of maids in the castle.

>>6180316
>>Libella, an ugly prophetess whom even the ancient nuns regarded with respect, though they did not let her join in their habit. Her auguries are never wrong they say.
The frog will kiss the prince and turn into a beautiful woman

>>6180316
>Libella, an ugly prophetess whom even the ancient nuns regarded with respect, though they did not let her join in their habit. Her auguries are never wrong they say.

>Libella, an ugly prophetess whom even the ancient nuns regarded with respect, though they did not let her join in their habit. Her auguries are never wrong they say.

>>6180316
>Catherine, the rich, youthful widow of the head of the old baronial faction. A rebellious spirit, so it is said, and so much the more for her treasonous husband's death at your hands.

>>6180316
>Catherine, the rich, youthful widow of the head of the old baronial faction. A rebellious spirit, so it is said, and so much the more for her treasonous husband's death at your hands.

>>6180316
>>Catherine, the rich, youthful widow of the head of the old baronial faction. A rebellious spirit, so it is said, and so much the more for her treasonous husband's death at your hands.

>>6180316
>Libella, an ugly prophetess whom even the ancient nuns regarded with respect, though they did not let her join in their habit. Her auguries are never wrong they say.

True prophecy is a great tool in the hands of a king.

>>6180316
>Catherine, the rich, youthful widow of the head of the old baronial faction. A rebellious spirit, so it is said, and so much the more for her treasonous husband's death at your hands.

>>6180316
Against the wishes of everyone in your family and even the general rules of propriety you have so fastidiously followed all your life, you marry an illiterate, pockmarked hag who lived in such severe isolation that even the ancient nuns who supported her with their alms regarded her with a mix of fear and awe.

Libella the Prophetess they call her.

On your very first meeting, she snatches your hand, tracing the lines on your palm with her overgrown nails, without her (surprisingly beautiful) eyes leaving your face, and declares that you will live to a ripe old age, that your kingdom will prosper beyond your imagining, and that the moment you consummate your marriage with her will begin the destruction of that which you hold most dear in this world. She promises you thirty years of unendurable suffering. She promises not a single heir to issue from her womb, and the loss of her prescience. And finally, she promises perfect loyalty and obedience as your wife, for as long as she lives. And her auguries are never wrong.

You marry her the very next day and consummate the marriage that very night. You find her praying over you in the morning, and every morning for the next ten years without any lapse. And a strange thing happens over those ten years, first, her disfigurements gradually fade away. Every night you find her with one less blemish on her cheek, until finally there remains only a radiance that makes her the envy of all women who behold her, and yourself the envy of all husbands. Second, you discover in her a companion and confidant you could never have expected of a woman. As she promised, her powers of augury are gone (or she has abandoned them, and nothing you offer or threaten can seem to change her mind to prophecy again), and her words, when she speaks at all, are either cryptic or painfully blunt, but she is almost never wrong.

There are only two strikes against her: first, she seems to be barren (a point of great interest for the old barons). Second, at the end of the fourth year you contract a strange, persistent cough that none of your physicians can heal. But it is only a mild annoyance and it comes and goes with the turning of the seasons. And you could ask for no better or more attentive nurse than your wife.

The construction of the road which your father had begun so many years ago leads to an interesting development among the skilled laborers in your kingdom. They have organized themselves into a guild, lead by a group of educated and wealthy masons, and demand greater protections and rights under the law, particularly against injustices committed by the nobility.

What will you do about these upstarts, in this, the 11th year of your reign?
>Grant them their privileges. They seek only the means to author their own fates and that is admirable and good.
>Refuse them their rights and crush their efforts at organization. Creation is done and the troupes were cast a million years ago. Nothing of that can be altered.

>>6180750
>Grant them their privileges. They seek only the means to author their own fates and that is admirable and good.

>>6180750
>>Refuse them their rights and crush their efforts at organization. Creation is done and the troupes were cast a million years ago. Nothing of that can be altered

>>6180750
>Refuse them their rights and crush their efforts at organization. Creation is done and the troupes were cast a million years ago. Nothing of that can be altered.
First they demand rights, next they upend the social order. Die

>>6180750
>Grant them their privileges. They seek only the means to author their own fates and that is admirable and good.
They might prove a very useful weapons against the old barons.

>>6180750
>Grant them their privileges. They seek only the means to author their own fates and that is admirable and good.
If we want the kingdom to prosper guilds are the natural next step for an enlightened king

>>6180750
>Grant them their privileges. They seek only the means to author their own fates and that is admirable and good.

>>6180750

>Grant them their privileges. They seek only the means to author their own fates and that is admirable and good.

Isn’t this exactly what our father had hoped to achieve - setting our people on a path to greatness?

>>6180750
>>Refuse them their rights and crush their efforts at organization. Creation is done and the troupes were cast a million years ago. Nothing of that can be altered

>>6180750
>Grant them their privileges. They seek only the means to author their own fates and that is admirable and good.
The guilds will serve as a counterbalance to the barons.

>>6180750
>>Refuse them their rights and crush their efforts at organization. Creation is done and the troupes were cast a million years ago. Nothing of that can be altered

>>6180750
>Grant them their privileges. They seek only the means to author their own fates and that is admirable and good.
Fuck the barons. Drop kick the barons. Punch the barons in the head.

>>6180750
>Grant them their privileges. They seek only the means to author their own fates and that is admirable and good.

But make them pay an annual fee to the Crown for this new ‘Royal Charter’

>>6180750
>Grant them their privileges. They seek only the means to author their own fates and that is admirable and good.

>>6180750
>Grant them the rights.

>>6180750
We are going to suffer 30 years of pain from that cough because of her aren't we? Well, so long as we can find someone to be our heir that isn't from her, say an adoption, then we shouldn't need to worry about the barons trying to be fucking clever with how they try and get more power for themseves like always.

>Grant them their privileges. They seek only the means to author their own fates and that is admirable and good.
Weaken the barons and our reign grows ever stronger over them.

>>6181035
>Well, so long as we can find someone to be our heir that isn't from her, say an adoption
I say find a willing bedwench and father a bastard that way. Like Abraham and Hagar.

>>6181035
I assumed our throne would pass to one of our brothers or nephews upon our passing. Maybe we can take one under our wing to ensure a smooth transition.

>>6181051
Just to clarify current rules of succession in this quest:
- Goes to eldest son
- Or eldest son of next eldest sibling (brother or sister), i.e nephew
- Or eldest daughter's husband

Beyond that the line of succession is not clear and can lead to trouble.

>>6180750
Granting rights and privileges to these masons, in the form of a formal guild, seems just the thing to erode the barons' powers (whom you had to release from punishment to keep your father's word) without relinquishing any of your own (indeed, a new guild tax should fill your coffers). These peasants' ambition to author their own destiny also appeals to you, for you seem not to enjoy that same freedom.

The thirty years of suffering your wife promised now begin to intensify in pitch. One particularly harsh winter leaves you greatly weakened, your cough changed to a horrible rattle that is often accompanied by the sight of blood.

The physicians fear you have the wasting disease. Death is certain, but slow, and disease passed easily among men by the invisible miasma they say surrounds you. And thus, you begins your self-imposed exile in a lonely tower of the castle. Reports are announced nervously beyond the threshold by your courtiers or by a herald standing at the base of your tower.

Only your wife dares to come near you, and nurse you, and pray over you every morning, despite all your protestations and entreaties. Perhaps, she has seen her own death and knows it will not be from this terrible sickness. That is the hope you cling to in the 8 years which follow, with her in perfect health and you with the gradual deterioration of the body you have spent your whole life perfecting.

Meanwhile, the guild grows in power and influence, much to the chagrin of the old barons. One summer season one of their representatives comes to present a new invention. A kind of plow, with a heavy blade of wrought iron that can only be pulled by a beast of burden. The guild, still with your father's ambition as their primary interest, have been using the tool to clear the earth for their road, but they make the outrageous claim the plow can turn over a furrow even in the hard clay of the north. If it is true, it will change the balance of wealth and power in your kingdom forever, for nearly all the wealthy barons are from the south, where the soil is soft and the weather mild.

But the peasants of the north (and even their ruling lords) are impoverished. The guild wishes to supply them with the heads of oxen and horses they will need to pull this new plow, funded, of course, by your august person. An expensive proposition.

What will you do about this new invention, in this, the 19th year of your reign?
>Purchase all that is necessary from your own treasury. This will eventually allow your kingdom to reach new heights of prosperity.
>Refuse to purchase anything and forbid this technology to prevent further instability in the current order.
>Purchase the oxen on the sly for cheap from the southern barons and from across the sea, thereby supporting the shift in powers gradually and irrevocably.

>>6181178
>Purchase all that is necessary from your own treasury. This will eventually allow your kingdom to reach new heights of prosperity.

>>6181178
>Purchase all that is necessary from your own treasury. This will eventually allow your kingdom to reach new heights of prosperity.

>>6181178
>Purchase all that is necessary from your own treasury. This will eventually allow your kingdom to reach new heights of prosperity.
It's time to send the barons and the northern lords the message that we will keep favoring the north in exchange for loyalty.

>>6181178
>Only your wife dares to come near you, and nurse you, and pray over you every morning
She is slowly poisoning us, isn't she
>Purchase all that is necessary from your own treasury. This will eventually allow your kingdom to reach new heights of prosperity.
No time to waste, we will be dead before long

>>6181178
>Purchase all that is necessary from your own treasury. This will eventually allow your kingdom to reach new heights of prosperity.
>Inb4 everything our father stabilised falls apart under our weak sickly rule

>>6181197
>spoiler
We should be taking one of our nephews under our wing already to make sure the succession is a little more stable.

>>6181198
Eh too much energy let someone else handle it.

>>6181178
>Purchase all that is necessary from your own treasury. This will eventually allow your kingdom to reach new heights of prosperity.

>>6181178

>Purchase the oxen on the sly for cheap from the southern barons and from across the sea, thereby supporting the shift in powers gradually and irrevocably.

If we push the barons too hard, they’ll revolt and we don’t have the strength fight a civil war. We have to slowly tip the scales

>>6181178
>Purchase the oxen on the sly for cheap from the southern barons and from across the sea, thereby supporting the shift in powers gradually and irrevocably.

>>6181154
Wait, the nephew has primogeniture before our brothers? Interesting.

>>6181178
You've outlived your father now, but your illness has robbed you of all your ambitions. Glory and conquest are mere abstractions now. The money you've gathered will not fund new campaigns and your kingdom has grown so accustomed to peace that not even the old barons dare to stir up trouble. And so, you decide to spend it all supplying these peasants with their cattle and their asses, swallowing the bitter irony of your old oaths.

It does not take long for the invention to bear its literal fruit. In six short years the northern fiefs transform into a second, even greater, fount of wealth than their counterparts in the south. This shift in power is aided considerably by a famine which sweeps the realm, devastating the empire across the sea, but passing through your lands almost without consequence because of the enormous surplus that has been steadily accumulated in the granaries of the north, and because of its swift distribution by the ever lengthening road your father began.

But as your people grow fat on their spoils, your disease steadily progresses to its final stage. Your flesh begins to slough off your body like floes in the spring thaw. You can keep nothing down except the blandest concoctions of porridge and paste. You stomach sticks to your ribs like wet cloth. Your cheeks are sunken, hollow, and pale. You should be dead. You wish for that release now, but your wife promised you another ten years of suffering before it will come. Again and again you beg her to abandon you to your fate, sometimes in explosive bursts of anger, ashamed and disgusted of your weakness. Always she remains.

Then one night you are wakened by the sound of a coughing fit, with the same death rattle in her throat, and your last hope is lost.

All the while your kingdom prospers, just as you (or your wife) had predicted. The peasants have done so well with this plow that many have acquired enough wealth to pool it together and purchase lands from the very lords they served. Numerous new guilds have spawned from the original, whose representatives are frequent visitors to your castle. They have skillfully profited from the famine, brokering the desperate trade of grain and flour from the northern peasants for the aforementioned lands in the south when they had fallen barren. Now these landowning peasants wish to appoint a permanent member from among their class to your court, to lobby for their interests.

What will you do about this radical proposal, in this, the 25th year of your reign?
>Refuse, the peasants have gone too far this time. Confiscate their lands by levying insupportable taxes and return them to the nobility.
>Accept, knowing that by doing so, you will have effected an irreversible change in the structure of your kingdom henceforth.

>>6181255
>Accept, knowing that by doing so, you will have effected an irreversible change in the structure of your kingdom henceforth.
The replacement of the nobility with an educated managerial class. If we pivot this correctly, we could create an absolute monarchy with a loyal bureaucracy.

>>6181258

Support - as we die, so does the absolute monarchy. We shall be the last true king!

>>6181255
>Accept, knowing that by doing so, you will have effected an irreversible change in the structure of your kingdom henceforth.

>>6181255
>Accept, knowing that by doing so, you will have effected an irreversible change in the structure of your kingdom henceforth.
If a revolution does start, we better stay in the side that will be grateful and merciful to our family (hopefully).

>>6181255
>Accept, knowing that by doing so, you will have effected an irreversible change in the structure of your kingdom henceforth.

>>6181255
>>Refuse, the peasants have gone too far this time. Confiscate their lands by levying insupportable taxes and return them to the nobility.
I fucking told you

>>6181258
>>Accept, knowing that by doing so, you will have effected an irreversible change in the structure of your kingdom henceforth.
Yep, let the peasants rise up and supplamnet there former owners, and in so doing be even more stupid and ambitionless then they were and be more dependent and loyal as a result!

>>6181255
>Accept, knowing that by doing so, you will have effected an irreversible change in the structure of your kingdom henceforth.
We can't backslide now, because the peasant revolt would be fucking mental. However think about it. We are replacing old disloyal nobles, with somewhat loyal and mercantile petit bourgeois. A loyal strong middle class is worth more than too powerful nobles.

>>6181255
>Accept.

BAHAHAHAHA
Suck it you disloyal pricks

>>6181255
>Sell noble titles to the wealthiest of the new land owning peasants and grant them positions at court

This provides a pathway of change, but doesn’t destroy the delicate social system within the kingdom.

For if wealth is all the matters - by what right do we have to rule?

>>6181255
You eventually sign their proposed charter after the customary refusals and amendments. You sign it with a mirthless smile, against the advice and counsel of all the barons (even those descended from the peasants that your grandfather had ennobled--how quickly ones lineage is forgotten!), and the threats of those who cling tightest to the old order. How strange it is to finally achieve a conquest, to redress the former betrayals, but in a fashion so utterly bereft of blood and nerve that it summons no satisfaction.

The representatives the peasants choose is the same who sits at the head of the mason's guild. He takes his time in the exercise of his powers, waiting a full nine years before making a move. A move which takes all by surprise with its seeming innocence.

In the meantime, having lost all that had made life dear to you, and denied even the reprieve of death, your wife one night announces that she shall not survive the morrow. Her disease has not progressed to your state of emaciation, but the physicians say that it is possible to perish before then. What is left but to wring your hands and rage her foolishness, to question her motives and sanity. Why, why did she come to you if she knew this was to be her end? Why bend so willingly to fate? What was the purpose? What did it mean?

But if she knows, she will not tell. She whispers that she will pray for you. Her eyes, still beautiful, close quietly, and faint light falls through the casement to illuminate them. You grieve hard. And then grief is spent or changed into something subtler and they take her.

And still another five years before your own appointment.

As for the peasants, the mason, far from inciting a renewal of the revolutionary sentiment, merely proposes a new scheme of planting, one that has already arisen naturally in the north as a consequence of the increased yield by the plow. A division of plots into three fields, two which are planted, one with wheat and rye, the other with summer harvests, and one which is kept fallow, rotating among these three from year to year. His patience was necessary to gather irrefutable evidence of the method's advantage. He might have waited even longer, if you were not already death's door, and if he had any trust in whoever will succeed you.

The barons scoff at this preposterous new endeavor, but that is just as well, for the mason wishes the rights of its practice to be limited only to the free peasants, and to be forbidden in the fields of the lords.

What will you do about this proposal, in this, the 31st (and last) year of your reign?
>Accept, finishing the long arc of what you had begun (or perhaps had begun with the usurpation of your grandfather) in one final stroke, to the benefit of your lowest people
>Refuse, you are tired of life and its endless competitions and evolutions. Leave it in the hands whomever will come after.

>>6181361
>>Refuse, you are tired of life and its endless competitions and evolutions. Leave it in the hands whomever will come after.

>>6181361
>Refuse, you are tired of life and its endless competitions and evolutions. Leave it in the hands whomever will come after.
The lords' fields are their own. The peasantry may plant at their leisure, but to infringe on the nobility is an overreach.

>>6181361

>Accept, finishing the long arc of what you had begun (or perhaps had begun with the usurpation of your grandfather) in one final stroke, to the benefit of your lowest people

Finish what we started!

>>6181361
>Refuse, you are tired of life and its endless competitions and evolutions. Leave it in the hands whomever will come after.

>>6181361
>Refuse, you are tired of life and its endless competitions and evolutions. Leave it in the hands whomever will come after.
Sorry, but that's dumb. You cannot limit that right. who's going to control it? if you limit that you get civil war.

>>6181361
>Accept, finishing the long arc of what you had begun (or perhaps had begun with the usurpation of your grandfather) in one final stroke, to the benefit of your lowest people

What do we care, at our lowest point? At least we'll be done with this. Should the tension overboil, then good, let it escape, like the last breathe from our body.

>>6181361
>Refuse, you are tired of life and its endless competitions and evolutions. Leave it in the hands whomever will come after.

>>6181361
>Accept, finishing the long arc of what you had begun (or perhaps had begun with the usurpation of your grandfather) in one final stroke, to the benefit of your lowest people
No half measures

>>6181366
Supporting this - we will not command people on how to till their own fields

>>6181361
>Accept, finishing the long arc of what you had begun (or perhaps had begun with the usurpation of your grandfather) in one final stroke, to the benefit of your lowest people

>>6181361
>Refuse, you are tired of life and its endless competitions and evolutions. Leave it in the hands whomever will come after.

>>6181361
>Refuse, you are tired of life and its endless competitions and evolutions. Leave it in the hands whomever will come after.

>>6181361
>>Accept, finishing the long arc of what you had begun (or perhaps had begun with the usurpation of your grandfather) in one final stroke, to the benefit of your lowest people

>>6181361
>>Refuse, you are tired of life and its endless competitions and evolutions. Leave it in the hands whomever will come after.

>>6181361
>Refuse, you are tired of life and its endless competitions and evolutions. Leave it in the hands whomever will come after.

Do it if you will, but if the practice is sensible it makes sense for all to do it.

>>6181361
>Refuse, you are tired of life and its endless competitions and evolutions. Leave it in the hands whomever will come after.

Let it rot...

>>6181361
>Refuse.

It is a good scheme. But we shall not aid it.

>>6181361
>Refuse, you are tired of life and its endless competitions and evolutions. Leave it in the hands whomever will come after.

Goofy ass peasants, taking too much

>>6181361
You ponder over the proposal for many moons, turning it over and over in your mind, its various possibilities, the various threads of posterity you will not witness. Finally, you find yourself exhausted. Not merely with these duties but with life itself. You refuse the mason's request. Let men plow how and when and where they will, without the edicts or limitations of kings.

Just as soon as this verdict is delivered, you begin to refuse all food to your dark tower. This resolution begins merely as dumb fury, some remnant of your ancient covenant, but on the third day you experience a clarity that is wholly incompatible with rage. In the midst of this you pick up one of the books that your wife was constantly poring over (you had cured of her illiteracy long ago). You open to a folded page and the words, which you had heard before in other contexts, seem suddenly bright and transparent.

Go, it says, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Do not give your heart to that which does not satisfy your heart. Sit alone in quiet and escape from three wars: hearing, speaking, and seeing. Then against one thing you shall continually battle: that is, your own heart. If you wish to find rest in this dusty world, in all circumstances ask yourself 'Who am I?'

This is what your wife kept in her mind and heart at all times. This was how she endured all without demonstrating the least sign of its burden. And you do find some measure of relief in these words, but it is brief, and the pain and the anguish and hopelessness soon return again. You sit and weep and meditate on pain. And you ask yourself as it commands, 'who am I?', and the answers are swift as they are meaningless. A king, a man, a wolf, an invalid, an existence cursed, a twin, a dutiful son, a husband, a failure, a fool, a little boy forever frightened of loss, of the vagaries of chance. The question pursues you in your dreams, whose boundaries hunger and starvation erode into nothing. You are certain you are mad. At other times, you feel you glimpse what your wife must have seen, the long chain of causality, the endlessness of all earthly effort bound eternally to this one question.

Forty days pass in contemplation. Just as the answer seems at hand, you are lost to profound darkness, never to alight again.

What will history remember you by, in this, the 31st (and last) year of your reign?
>Enter name:
>...the Farmer
>...the Damned
>...the Glutton

>>6181564
>...the Damned

>>6181564
>the Damned
they did 'Jet Boy, Jet Girl'

>>6181564
>...the Damned

>>6181564
>>...the Farmer
our agriculture reforms saved the nation from starvation and turmoil.

>>6181564
>the farmer

>>6181564
>Roland the Farmer

>>6181564
>>...the Farmer

Most people will have no idea about our physical decline - all they’d know is that during our reign, they always had enough to eat

>>6181564
>John
>...the Damned

Whomever writes our biography isn't likely to be a peasant brimming with kindly thoughts of our foresight. More than likely it will be one of the barons who curses our name, or a monk or scribe paid by one such noble.

>>6181564
>>...the Farmer

>>6181564
>>...the Damned
you just know the Barons will use our class mixing and slow death as institutional reinforcement for why we should stick to the nobles.

>>6181564
>...the Farmer

>>6181564
>the Damned
May he rest in the peace he never received in life.

>>6181564
>...the Damned

>>6181564
>Roland the Farmer

>>6181564
>The farmer.

>>6181564
>Roland the Farmer
I kinda imagine it being used in a positive way by the commoners, but a negative one by the barons.

>>6181564
>Roland the Farmer
The farmer works perfectly as an insult by the barons and as an endearing memory for the peasantry and merchants

>>6181564
Your father said that you will be king from now on.

Uncle Roland, who lived in the big tower that your mother said you must always stay from or the witch who lives with him will gnaw off your fingers one by one (though you know that she has been dead for many years), is gone. That is to say, he is dead. Everyone has started to treat you very kindly now, especially the gentlemen of the court who often give you sugared almonds and honey cakes and little cinnamon biscuits whenever they see you (but your father says you should not take them). Well, almost everyone. The mater familias is very cold to you. Your mother says it is because she is sad because her two sons have died. The three of you used to play nine men's morris and joust against one another on your cockets, but then the eldest of them, who was quite bossy but usually very nice, got sick, and your mother forbid your going near them again. It was the most terrible disease, she said, even more terrible than what your uncle and his witch suffered from. Your mother would wipe away tears when she spoke of this, because the mater familias is her sister (though they do not speak so much nor go on walks in the garden anymore) and your uncle was her brother. Your father, however, says it was because they were not pure of heart and not true-blooded that such things afflicted them.

You wonder sometimes if you are pure of heart. You can remember the ugly red patches on your cousins' face and hands, and neither eyebrows or eyelashes. The sight frightened and disgusted you. You ran back to your chambers and remained there all day and night without anyone, not even dear Hilda, being able to get you out. Hilda is your nurse. Everyone calls her Fat Hilda because there is another maid in the house who is called Hilda who works in the kitchen and is not so fat, but you do not call her this because you think it is impolite. Now that you are king, Hilda always courtesies very low when she comes to see you, which always makes you giggle (though your father says a king should never giggle). There are many things a king should not do.

The other day you overheard your father talking with your mother about a "possible arrangement" for you. Your big sister says that means you will be married soon. You told her to stop saying this but she wouldn't stop, so you punched her in the nose. You thought you would get in big trouble for this, but your father simply said that a king should never punch his subjects. Then your big sister began to howl, saying that she would never be your subject.

You father admitted that you would have to marry, however.

Whom have your parents arranged for you to marry, in this, the 1st year of your reign?
>Matilda, a very comely girl from a family that your father calls "very true-blooded"
>Sam, a cousin from your grandmother's side of the family. She is very clever, but too bossy for her own good.
>No one, on account of your ferocious refusal to cavort with the fairer sex.

>>6182074
>Matilda, a very comely girl from a family that your father calls "very true-blooded"

Can we just fuck the hot one for once? I'm tired of ugly hags and obscure peasant women.

>>6182074
>Matilda, a very comely girl from a family that your father calls "very true-blooded"

>>6182074
>Matilda, a very comely girl from a family that your father calls "very true-blooded"

>>6182074
>Matilda, a very comely girl from a family that your father calls "very true-blooded"

>>6182074
>>No one, on account of your ferocious refusal to cavort with the fairer sex.
THEY ARE ICKY
More seriously, we are young enough we can be easily manipulated by a wife

>>6182074

>Matilda, a very comely girl from a family that your father calls "very true-blooded"

>>6182152
It's a little weird shit hasn't started going down yet, we're a young king that follows a long sick king.

>>6182074
>Matilda, a very comely girl from a family that your father calls "very true-blooded"

>>6182102
Okay.

>>6182152
Eh, the bossy, clever one will definitely dominate the throne, not sure about Matilda.

>>6182074
>No one, on account of your ferocious refusal to cavort with the fairer sex.

>>6182074
>>No one, on account of your ferocious refusal to cavort with the fairer sex.

>>6182074
>No one, on account of your ferocious refusal to cavort with the fairer sex.
We are the king, not our father. In time we will marry woman of our choosing.

>>6182342
Also a literal child being told by our Father what we should do.

The girl that your parents choose for your bride is the daughter of a very ancient family, whose line stretches back before the time of your great-grandfather. Everyone in the castle adores her and says that she is very pretty and always try to put the two of you together into things, at the dinner table or with your tutors. Well, at least she a polite girl, if a bit distracted, always fussing with her hair or her clothes.

As the years go on the pressure of your studies become more bearable. Your bride-to-be is removed to focus on more womanly arts. Your meetings with her are brief and careful now and enflame a passion which it pleases you to be able to render now into language. Ovid and Horace, or the Song of Songs, or lais that are recited in the hall (which you encourage) are your constant companions. You feel sometimes that are you less enamored of your lady's beauty than you are of the verses to describe them. You wish sometimes that she could respond to you in kind, as it was with Solomon, but you suppose it is enough to see her flush, as though intoxicated, from your fevered whispers.

What is certain is that all this restraint increases the sport of your marriage bed, when at last you are joined in holy matrimony. And you are very soon astonished to find that her bridal beauty was only a prelude, it is when she is with child (which given the frequency of your exercise was inevitable) that her charms seem to reach their height. That old question which had not only haunted but built, by your education, the very castles in your soul which it prowls, seems decided. You must be pure of heart, for how else could one enjoy such perfect bliss?

But, domestic matters do not always reflect nor coincide with matters of state. Your father, who had held the throne in regency all these years, at last relinquishes it to his son. It seems he had worked hard to balance the positions of the barons against the upstart guilds and free peasants. In so doing he had negotiated the sale of some of the northern territories to foreign vandals, in exchange for protection along our coasts (protection, mostly, from the vandals themselves). These vandals, however, being uneducated godless heathens, have grown so bold as to lay claim to parts to which they were not entitled in the original agreement.

Whatever avenues of diplomacy there were have already been explored and exhausted. What remains is a show of force. Though the king's retinue is not what it used to be.

What will you do about these encroaching foreigners, in this, the 8th year of your reign?
>Begin construction of castles all along the current borders. Let the heathens keep what they've taken, but they'll go no further.
>Muster the barons and gather a great army to lay siege to the castles the heathens have taken and drive them back to their longships.
>Do nothing. The vandals have provided more benefit by their inactivity than whatever you stand to lose by this encroachment.

>>6182433
>Muster the barons and gather a great army to lay siege to the castles the heathens have taken and drive them back to their longships.
Hey QM, are write-ins allowed? I have an idea, but I feel like we usually have to choose one of the given choices.

>>6182433
>Begin construction of castles all along the current borders. Let the heathens keep what they've taken, but they'll go no further.

>>6182435
Yes, write-ins are always allowed. I just omit the option for character count.

>>6182444
Then, I will change my vote to:
>Pit them against each other. Favour one of the savages over the others and see them squabble over the northern lands. Throw a bone to the dogs and watch the pack descend on each other. With time, those favoured may even learn the beauty of poems and songs.

>>6182433
It's been only two kings before us now, so I'm sure there's some records on how the Barons of that time were going to use the Roads the previous King made to aid the Emperor's forces.

I feel that making a those new castles would end up like: Make new castles, having such lame army that they can't defend it, and lose it to the brigards, who in turn leaves us unconnected to the Sea

>Ask for the Barons and Guilds to open their coffers, make inventory and sell the idea to contact the Emperor's forces to give us generals willing to train our army, and a contingency of mean willing to defend our territory while we train our forces

The times of peace and prosperity were already secured, the Barons got fucked but now there's the prospect of some bloody war with these heathens. This will be a huge investment on all the military force of our region, and bring unity against this common enemy. Those barons who don't pay, their army's won't be receive training and stay behind, and the Free rich Peasants will be able to lift themselves, maybe buy a small mercenary force to defend themselves. I believe our growth on strength will take time, but will greatly outclass the vandals. They're greedy, and maybe they're not as organized as us, their hubris will let them thin themselves on our territory and we will just sweep them on a bloody crusade to take our land back

>>6182433
>>Muster the barons and gather a great army to lay siege to the castles the heathens have taken and drive them back to their longships.

>>6182433
>>Muster the barons and gather a great army to lay siege to the castles the heathens have taken and drive them back to their longships.
Let the heathens die out.

>>6182433
>>Ask for the Barons and Guilds to open their coffers, make inventory and sell the idea to contact the Emperor's forces to give us generals willing to train our army, and a contingency of mean willing to defend our territory while we train our forces.


>In so doing he had negotiated the sale of some of the northern territories to foreign vandals
Fucking shortsighted idiot.

>>6182433
Oh, so we're being invaded by the not!Vikings?

>Begin construction of castles all along the current borders. Let the heathens keep what they've taken, but they'll go no further.

Risking a pitched battle is a gamble. If we lose, they take much more. Better to contain them, until we are in a better spot to push them out permanently. The local armies of the rich north should be strong enough with the castles to hold the line.

>>6182450
We are surrounded by the sea on four sides, see the 'great road' prompt here >>6179988

>>6182433
>Begin construction of castles all along the current borders. Let the heathens keep what they've taken, but they'll go no further.

I personally believe the write-in is kind of retarded. We're the king. Our entire right to rule (which is shakey due to us just inheriting and being only a nephew of the previous king) is based on our ability to defend our territory.

Getting in to debt with the barons and guilds is a terrible idea.

>>6182606
There's literally nothing for them to win if a bunch of bandits and mercenaries just come over, fuck over everybody and ruin what the previous King made, and losing land to let them regroup as much as they want is as retarded, specially if they decide to grow bolder while we construct our defense and take that territory as well. They already feel like the owners of the place because of our dumbass father.

You can make the argument that they won't see if this way if the barons and guilds aren't affected, but there's going to be a open fight at some point, and people who lost their land are going to band, and take us out because they believe they could do our work better, all with an army that hasn't seen any real combat for some while.If you don't wanna take a huge debt with all those nobles and guild, fine, then let's change it to just use our money to pay for whatever army and trainers we can get.

>>6182433
>Muster the barons and gather a great army to lay siege to the castles the heathens have taken and drive them back to their longships.

If they have violated the original agreement that gave them their current lands in the first place. Then the must be driven out, if they wont abide by treaties they themselves signed.

Static defenses and ignoring it will do nothing to solve the issue. They must be warded off by strength of arms.

>>6182735
With what great strength? Unlike Walter we have no genius generals, unlike Roland we are not gifted with great ability or the guarantee of prophecy, and our retinue "is not what it used to be". We are young and inexperienced, the barons may drag their feet in order to avoid losing too much assisting the free peasants reclaim their lost land. As much as our father's choices have put us in a bind, he presumably had a good reason for his cowardly danegeld, we were likely not in a position of strength against them. Better to gather strength and wisdom, before sallying out in the years to come from beyond our network of defences.

>>6182433
>Muster the barons and gather a great army to lay siege to the castles the heathens have taken and drive them back to their longships.

>>6182746
Youngs kings are often not wise.

>>6182769
Now we're rping as a retard?

>>6182798
>>6182746
>>6182769
These are ambitious raiders who have taken a fraction of our Northern lands. They are not a massive army, with the force of a powerful empire behind like the one our grandfather fought.

The only people they have fought have been rural villagers and each other. So they likely don't even have experience being on the defensive tied down to the land they are claiming.

Furthermore they aren't expecting an all out counter attack. They presume that we will be as accommodating and diplomatic as our dad. That means by striking first instead of letting them attack us we will have the initiative.

>>6182746
If we're not what we used to, and we don't know the full scope of what we can or can't do, then I would be willing to change my vote to

>Ask our advisors and barons to count their available forces and make an analysis on how good we could fair against the invading forces

What my plan is, is that we could delay their expansion and also get our army in shape. If we wall them off, thee word of their main forces will get out and more of them will come, from whatever they come from, and they'll consolidate their stay on the island. If we go to war, we might get our nose bloodied, we don't know exactly how many they are of if they can afford their losses more than what we do, but at least they'll get weak and we can learn from them on the next attack

Another option I would be willing to support is the siege, is the most secure one, but I feel that a simple misstep to corral them to their castles, and the losses would be even worse. I don't know

>>6182433
Qm, if my vote from >>6182450 is in a tie or something, then ignore it and change it for

>Siege the castles of the enemy

>>6182433
>>Muster the barons and gather a great army to lay siege to the castles the heathens have taken and drive them back to their longships.

>>6182433
You see no other recourse than to muster all your men and to go on campaign against these trespassers. You have long since abandoned the childish dreams of martial greatness. In manhood, you've discovered yourself to be a lover not a fighter. But, as your uncle must have surely known (and as everyone else, especially your wife, seems not to understand), no one is master of his own fate. Least of all a king.

Many of the barons have grown fat in peace, especially those from the north, who were once the hardest warriors, but there are some, whose houses have grown lean in the intervening years, who are ravenous for spoils and glory, and have spent their youth tempering their souls into iron. You wish now that you had Marshal Porter, the old legend, to lead them. But he was laid to rest by your grandfather's tomb many years ago and all that remains of his genius are the records of his battles, which you have studied over and over, until their particulars have become as your own thoughts. You study also the enemy, these vandals from across the sea, their customs, their ways of fighting and living, what they love and what they despise.

And from all this, you concoct a plan.

First, a siege must be avoided if possible. These are your own lands, your own castles. Whatever instruments you use, you are destroying that which you must yourself rebuild. Not to mention the difficulties and horrors that usually accompany long sieges. Therefore, you must meet them in the open field. Second, the vandals are warriors through and through, theirs is a culture not unlike the Spartiates of old, though they lack the same austerities. Their weakness is for women and wine. And they have no real allegiance to their king, except through common purpose. Rather their loyalties lie with the members of their own family or clan, and for them and for their dubious sense of honor, they would be willing to do almost anything, even if it is to their own disadvantage--or destruction. But should someone outside that limit be at hazard, it is nothing.

And therefore, third, you will not face them on a united front. You will exsanguinate them through a thousand cuts.

Very carefully, you construct an insult so biting that it cannot go unanswered, but so distinct that it shall only be answered by single clan. And answered all the more readily for the mocking the vandals will inflict upon each other, when one of their own is aggrieved.

You naturally begin with those who reside in the fiefs beyond the agreed limits. And as you draw them out into the field to address their wrongs, and crush them with overwhelming force (for no tactics are required with such superiority in numbers), their king, not wishing to interrupt his comfort, nor that of his unruly subjects, merely watches on. The other clans regard this as just desserts for overreaching, and weakness on the part of the defeated. Indeed, you leave none of your captives alive or free to speak otherwise.

1/2

>>6182928
This, your father says, is a cowards way of fighting, but his counsel goes unheeded in the face of unceasing victory. Once the territories are recaptured, the castles, still in perfect condition, are further reinforced at small cost. These are granted to those hungry nobles who demonstrated their powers in the battles, to show the others that you are free with your rewards to the bold.

When you begin to go further and harass even those vandals who occupy the lands your father had sold them, their king wises up to your ruse and attempts to muster his own men. Carefully planned gifts to key members of his retinue delays his best efforts, while you slaughter and rout the weaker players. Very soon, you have cut off their main route of escape, toward the eastern channel, upon the very road your grandfather had begun. Now, the king is able to rouse his men and marches to meet you in open battle, to decide things once and for all.

But why should you? The insults they send you do not move you. You and your barons hole up in the castles you've been reinforcing and stockpiling all the while. The vandal king directs his armies to one or two of these, if only to satisfy the bloodlust he has awakened, but these barbarians have little experience with siege, and even less patience. Not two years passes before the king is abandoned by his own subjects, taking surreptitious deals with some of your "traitorous barons" to escape upon their longships. Deals, which, of course, you had authored in advance. The king soon follows suit.

And so, you regain all that you had lost, with relatively little bloodshed, with still less depletion of your treasury, yet at the cost of your domestic happiness. The son which was to be born died before you could even witness him. Your wife, undeterred, is with child again not long after. But it does not escape the attention of the court (nor your own, of course), that it happened in your absence.

One of your subjects was even so bold as to author a morality play, in which a queen named Beauty cavorts and conceives a child with Temptation, while her comically oblivious husband, Horns, is away at war. The play is not even well-written yet is quickly becoming a hit among the free peasants and the guilds.

What will you do about this outrageous play, in this, the 10th year of your reign?
>Forbid it from being performed under punishment of death, and execute the author. How dare they mock their king?
>Allow it, secure in the knowledge that men have short memories and this gaudy nonsense will not survive posterity

>>6182929
>Find who are the most famous people who make this play and find any loophole or way to fuck them up and ruin their lives while feigning ignorance
>ignore any other who decides to do the play unless they get more famous
>Slowly abandon our wife and isolate her from us or any other noble, do so until she had no one left while at the same make her dependant of only us. Once she confesses her crimes we see what we do. In the meanwhile look around for any other cohort to have a child and to replace our old wife.

Fuck that nigga and fuck that bitch. Our legacy is going to be on how we brought ruin to anyone who slighted us, no matter who they were. Another reminder that our bloodline is looking first and foremost loyalty.

>>6182929
>Allow it, secure in the knowledge that men have short memories and this gaudy nonsense will not survive posterity
If we take action against it some people will see it as us admitting it is true

>>6182929
>Allow it, secure in the knowledge that men have short memories and this gaudy nonsense will not survive posterity
A crackdown is likely to backfire. Just let it run its course while we do our job.

>>6182929
>Forbid it from being performed under punishment of death, and execute the author. How dare they mock their king?

>>6182929
>Allow it, secure in the knowledge that men have short memories and this gaudy nonsense will not survive posterity
Aren't we a great lover of poetry and the arts? Sure, it's mocking us, but what kind of message would it send if we fought it so vehemently?

>>6182955
Support this

>>6182955
supporting this

>>6182955
Supporting this

No random wench can match the glory of the Crown

>>6182929
Ah, I see. The thrust of our life is that it is the canvas on which god paints his next drama, not of our lack of talent. This will be a wild ride, I can tell.

Support this >>6182955

It'll tickle some future historian to read of our life, yes indeed.

>>6182955
>Bitchesandwhores.png

+1

>>6182955
This. Let's see if he comes and 'saves' her, or if he's as transient as she is.

>>6183126
>Support.

Laugh at it.
Maybe have it played in court and laugh. Any insult you meet with laughter loses its sting. And it's a badly written Wretch anyway

>>6182929
You use the play as a device to identify those who feel your office in name only and not substance. They see your wordless smiles and they think themselves beyond your powers or concern, but letters are written by candlelight, purses put into the hands of thieves and scoundrels, evidence planted for deeds to horripilate the flesh, and fortunes destroyed in false ventures.

One man is accused of laying with a pig in his drunkenness--a pity he cannot recall the night, so unnaturally strong was his ale. Another sees his house burn to ash before his eyes, his family left destitute. One man discovers his only daughter has run away from home with some handsome stranger, and finds her, after a long painstaking search, in a brothel overseas. As for the distinguished playwright who authored this little farce, his wife, his four children, his parents, his sisters, even his servants, die of a mysterious outbreak of plague. Seventy other members of his village also succumb to the disease, for which they will forever believe he was the cause, not only because a trusted religious official declared as much, but because it has been written in your histories, in your own hand. What great satisfaction it was to pen that he died last of all, after burying his two year old daughter, in a row with his other children, in graves overlaid with snow.

Your coffers are drained in the pursuit of your satisfaction, but what of it? What is the office of king, what is a kingdom, what is sovereignty?

You are the state.

It does not matter who or what relation opposes you. When you find your own father among the hecklers, was there any hesitation in bringing his embezzlement of the treasury to light? Never mind his desperate pleas and declarations of his innocence. The ledger holds the truth, does it not? Never mind your mother and sister wailing at your feet, begging your father's release, your solemn promises (with actual tears in your eyes!) to do all in your power to absolve him, to consign him to the lesser perdition of exile or arrest.

You watched him hang all the same.

1/2

>>6184068
And as for your wife, the design is simpler. First, isolation. The physician suspects she has contracted the same wasting sickness that plagued your uncle and his queen, and confines her to the same tower. And then dependence, through a few drops of theriac in her wine every night, which calms her nerves except when its administration is interrupted (which happens occasionally at your pleasure). The ministers tell you that the knot of matrimony, especially a royal one, can only be broken by death, but in the interim you see no need to restrain your appetites while your wife languishes in illness. It is what she would want. After all, she told you herself (never mind the contingency of her comforting glass of wine put at hazard, you're certain she was quite sincere). Alas, her illness also seems to destroy the child that was put in her, and destroy the means of procreation itself. Twice more she swells with significance. Twice, she labors without fruit. Then the illness (or is it the cure?) robs her of her beauty. Gone the roses, the apples, the pearls, the snow, the raven locks, the vitality of the eyes and spirit. She spends her hours in sleep and wakes in a blindfold, stumbling over stones and low stools, because you have filled her chamber with mirrors.

In only the first year, she reveals all. His name, his advances, her lingering feelings, her hatred. By the second year, she begs you to destroy him, to give her the knife if you like, but to let her free. To help her. To love her, again, at any cost. After five years, she longer screams nor begs for release. The physician, having pity on her, sneaks her a full vial of her poison, and she at last achieves a final, restful sleep.

A strange thing. After your wife's passing, you cannot find it in yourself to marry again. What was once in you merely broken, you have mangled beyond repair.

It is that same year that you discover, in slashing your hand open while drawing a bowstring, that you've become inured to pain in your extremities. Your aunt, being the expert of this particular disease, advises you to call for physicians from abroad, at once. One soon arrives to your court from the vast desert lands to the east. A slave made from the holy war that rages there between the foreign empire and his own stranger people. His tales beguile the imagination and make you dream as your poets once did.

What will you do about these feelings, in this, the 15th year of your reign?
>Gather those who will follow you and sail across the seas to the join them in their crusades
>Spin them into finished tales and poetic works which you hope history will remember you by

>>6184069
>Gather those who will follow you and sail across the seas to the join them in their crusades

>>6184069
>>Gather those who will follow you and sail across the seas to the join them in their crusades

>>6184069
>Gather those who will follow you and sail across the seas to the join them in their crusades

God Wills It!

And what beautiful destruction we have wrought upon our domestic enemies

>>6184069
>>Gather those who will follow you and sail across the seas to the join them in their crusades
Let all know that this time Baldwin the IV, will be reborn and Jerusalem will not be given over to that swine of a pig, Guy of Lusignan!

>>6184069
Brutal...

>Gather those who will follow you and sail across the seas to the join them in their crusades

Someone else will write the poems and histories, we'll perform the deeds they speak of.

>>6184069
>>Gather those who will follow you and sail across the seas to the join them in their crusades
>make you dream as your poets once did
What greater thing is there, than to pursue a dream

>>6184069
4th Crusade time

OP here. Having an absolute motherfucker of a week. Updates will likely be sparse for a bit.

>>6184619
Take care OP, it has been great so far.

>>6180316
>Libella, an ugly prophetess whom even the ancient nuns regarded with respect, though they did not let her join in their habit. Her auguries are never wrong they say.
We NEED the magic mojo

>>6185264
My guy, you are helplessly far behind.

>>6184069
For three moons you banish yourself to the same lonely tower that you had confined your wife, ravaged by the slow progression of your disease. You look upon your face and body disfigured by the lesions you fled from in disgust in your youth in the same mirrors you used to torture your wife. There is no cure for this illness, says the physician. Indeed, it is a mark of deeper impurity, a visible sign of the fires "whose fuel is men and stones" that awaits you in the hereafter.

What then remains? They say that in the holy land one can be washed of all one's sins, by the blood one spills of the enemy. What choice then, even for a king?

Deus vult. God wills it

You gather what men are willing to follow you. Those upstart barons hungry for glory and the promised riches of the east, some older ones who wish die with battle in them, and some, like you, who are seeking renewal.

Before you leave, you tell your aunt that you will pray for her sons there upon the mount, if she will pray for you here, for there are none left to do you that service. Your sister despises you. Your own mother is terrified of you. Neither are there to offer you blessing for a journey from which you may not return.

But let that be. Deus vult. All is as god wills it.

Yet, in all the four years which you spend abroad you find nothing of that promised sacredness or peace. Fighting, yes, and glory, and treasures beyond imagining, and the sweet inimitable taste of victory, but all this at the expense of black deeds--even devils should shudder to see what you have seen. But victory. For which men worship you and call you pure and love you.

But neither this praise nor the shame nor the horror touch you. The insensibility conferred upon your by your disease, or some other one, gradually encircles your whole being. Confined to bed for your few last months on earth, you dictate a history of your life to a scribe, exhausting the last vestiges of your lyric soul.

It is a great work, and honest even to the point of cruelty. But that forthrightness is for a secret hope that someone in posterity will read your thoughts, look at your denuded deeds, know you as you were, not some gaudy thing, and certainly not a hero or saint, and still love you. It is that hope allows you to die.

What will history remember you by, in this, the 19th (and last) year of your reign?
>Enter name:
>...the Pure
>...the Serene
>...the Poet

>>6186120
>...the Pure

>>6186120
>...the Pure
He was a decent king, if ruthless and scheming.

>>6186120
>Ewan the Restless

Idk if it's a good title and it could be twisted to something bad or sinister, but his travels while being ill of that debilitating sickness it could justify being called that. Or maybe something like "The Perseverant" "The Fair"? Idk, I want to think of something benevolent but also strong and with conviction, after all its the last years of his lives and his crusades the ones that gained most attention, his early war with the invader nor how he was cucked.

Maybe, on another life, he could be called The Poet, or The Artist

>>6186120
>…the Ruthless

It speaks to our nature more honestly

>>6186120
>…the Ruthless

>>6186120
>…the Ruthless
He was shitty king that didn't do nothing other than killing others (even his family)

>>6186120
>>...the Pure

>>6186120
>The poet.
He had a chance to be a better man when a play mocked him. Before he was a canny politican and a poet.

After he was a twisted and cruel wreck of a man.

>>6186120
I'm >>6186285 and will change my vote to
>...the Ruthless

>>6186420
To be fair, his father did sell part of the kingdom and his wife did cheat on him. His reaction went too far but it didn't happen in a vacuum.

>>6186120
I'll switch my vote.

>Ewan the Ruthless

>>6186120
>…the Ruthless

>>6186120
>The Ruthless

>>6186120
You find it difficult to believe the things they are saying about him, what they say are his own words. His confession. The cruelties he inflicted on his wife seem so contrary to the gentle touch and paternal care with which he honored you, that you are certain this account was merely overindulgence in his poetic sensibility.

He raised your house, and others, from obscurity. He was kind and generous. It is true he was victorious in battle, that realm of strange madness which no woman can intrude upon without perversity, but in all the hours which you spent with him in the holy land, he seemed unencumbered by his violence. It seemed to roll off of him, in the same way of the heathen blood which you sponged from his body (to you alone he gave this privilege of beholding his disfigured form, the carbuncles of which he was so ashamed).

The son (and you are certain it is a son) which you hold within you, his son, the future king (so insists your brother), shall never learn these things about his father. Or if learn them, never believe. To that you have sworn yourself.

But, in the meantime, you confess you are frightened of the court. Of the late king's family. His sister, who seems to drive daggers into your belly with her eyes. Her mother, who seems merely afraid of your office. You know what the courtiers say about you. Especially those members who represent the guilds, those poisonous upstarts. But your brother assures you that it is all talk. None dare move against you while he holds command of the army that has returned from the holy land, laden with immense treasures and with renewed temper of battle.

More than this, it was the late king's wish that your child should be his heir. Your brother tells you that he and the late king conversed on this topic on many occasions (though it never came up in your own conferences). It is true that he had no children by his late wife, on account of her illness. And while there still remain those descendants of King Walter's line who have some claim, your brother says they no longer possess the hunger to defend it.

So then, you are queen. At least until your son is born, at which point your brother shall take over as regent.

At least, that was the plan. But your son perishes in your belly only a few months after your return, and having already ascended to the role of queen, your brother says you cannot now abdicate without risk of violence.

Instead, he compels you to marry, to further secure your office.

Whom will you marry, in this, the 1st year of your reign?
>Guillaume, Duc de Montou, a prince of the foreign emperor who rose to prominence not by force of arms but by skulduggery and shrewd political maneuvering
>Zebediah Stone, the current representative of the powerful Stonemason guild, and a courtier in your court
>Lord Wensleydale, a charming, handsome noble of sweet temperment who is also your brother's closest friend

>>6186783
Oh boy, well, this is certainly unexpected.

>Guillaume, Duc de Montou, a prince of the foreign emperor who rose to prominence not by force of arms but by skulduggery and shrewd political maneuvering

Though the other two are perfectly fine too. Should our brother perish to treachery, marrying Wensleydale could ensure the army is still on our side, perhaps. I'm interested in seeing where our entanglements with the empire goes though. Sad we didn't hear more of the empire and the lands beyond during our crusading adventures.

>>6186783
>Guillaume, Duc de Montou, a prince of the foreign emperor who rose to prominence not by force of arms but by skulduggery and shrewd political maneuvering

>>6186790
>>6186793
Selling yourself to the Empire dog. Treason!
>>6186783
>Organise the tournament, the winner will be the king. But only in name, he will be the puppet used by the Queen to rule.

>>6186783
>>Guillaume, Duc de Montou, a prince of the foreign emperor who rose to prominence not by force of arms but by skulduggery and shrewd political maneuvering

>>6186783
>Guillaume, Duc de Montou, a prince of the foreign emperor who rose to prominence not by force of arms but by skulduggery and shrewd political maneuvering
Easier to keep a foreigner under control than a local winner who gained popularity by winning a tournament

>>6186783
>>Zebediah Stone, the current representative of the powerful Stonemason guild, and a courtier in your court

>>6186783
>Organise the tournament, the winner will be the king. But only in name, he will be the puppet used by the Queen to rule.
We can't just have a foreigner rule our kingdom

>>6186783
>Organise the tournament, the winner will be the king. But only in name, he will be the puppet used by the Queen to rule.

Make sure a man wins who is strong in body, but weak of mind. We will control him and this kingdom…

>>6186783
>Organise the tournament, the winner will be the king. But only in name, he will be the puppet used by the Queen to rule.

>>6186783
>Organise the tournament, the winner will be the king. But only in name, he will be the puppet used by the Queen to rule.

>>6186783
The announcement of a grand tournament is welcome news to the guilds, who are ever bending their minds to pursuit of profit and the use of their never ending road.

You oversee all the preparations and find in yourself a newfound competence for organization. Visions seem to linger before you upon waking, which you render into reality by the aid of the servants and courtiers. When all is said and done, the tournament proves to be a grand spectacle, one that will be remembered and imitated for generations to come. The actual games hardly amuse you, however. The smashing of lances against shields and armor and the cacophony of four dozen men crashing headfirst into one another on their horses, are all noisy nonsense.

But there is one point of interest. It begins as a mere curiosity, an unknown knight astride a tired nag, with face hidden beneath a bucket helm, who somehow survives the preliminary rounds and even manages to unhorse one of the more prominent barons, thereby earning his white steed. But as the tournament progresses and none are able to defeat the "bucket knight", that curiosity grows into a universal hunger.

The truth is even more shocking than anyone had imagined. First, upon receiving the championship's prize, he is ordered to take off his helmet. There he reveals a face that seems shameful even to look upon, for the deep possession it arouses.

He then declares he is lowborn. He would not have dared to compete, except he received a vision from God, and, after conferring with his bishop, saw he had no choice but to fulfill the Almighty's will. The bishop is summoned amongst great consternation. The story is verified.

You marry him, fulfilling the unspoken promise of the tournament, and securing the throne for yourself without further contest.

Your husband is a crude, common man, who must slowly learn the ways of his new royal life, but to which he never really becomes accustomed. The vision he spoke of is his constant assurance of his own holiness even in the absence of further revelations. He pursues chastity, humility, and poverty, the virtues of the monks, whenever he can (which often proves an obstacle to marital passions) and avoids matters of the court. Even so, his mere presence and existence is sufficient to tip the balances of power.

By the end of the seventh year, your kingdom has come to an internal crisis. The old laws are no longer sufficient to govern the large body of free-men that inhabit your country, nor the now powerful guilds into which they have organized themselves.

What will you do about this legal crisis, in this, the 7th year of your reign?
>Design a completely new set of laws that include the guilds and free-peasants, and codify it for posterity
>Let the law alone. Instead, allow the barons to institute their own local laws concerning their lands.
>Update the existing laws to accommodate these new pressures without abandoning their essence

>>6187472
>Update the existing laws to accommodate these new pressures without abandoning their essence

The laws were as they were for a reason. Our mandate to rule in our own right is not license to do away with centuries of precedent in its entirety. Still, we must meet reality, while still retaining a single body of laws, and not allowing our queendom to splinter into a land where crossing some invisible boundary post in the midst of a field changes what laws applies to someone.

>>6187472
>>Update the existing laws to accommodate these new pressures without abandoning their essence

>>6187472
>Update the laws
>Still codify them.

>>6187472
>Design a completely new set of laws that include the guilds and free-peasants, and codify it for posterity

>>6187472
>Update the existing laws to accommodate these new pressures without abandoning their essence

>>6187472
>Update the existing laws to accommodate these new pressures without abandoning their essence
Did we have children?

>>6187472
>Design a completely new set of laws that include the guilds and free-peasants, and codify it for posterity

>>6187472
>Update the existing laws to accommodate these new pressures without abandoning their essence

>>6187472
>Design a completely new set of laws that include the guilds and free-peasants, and codify it for posterity
Change with the times

Sorry for the delay milords. Another grueling week looks to be ahead. Will try to post after work.

>>6187472
Wishing to play the moderate in this game of extremes you decide to simply codify and update the existing laws to include edicts concerning the free-men. In truth, this compromise pleases no one, but in the years to come it proves to be a wise decision. It shows the barons that, despite your choice of husband, you are not like the late King Roland the Farmer, your alleigances remain with them. At the same time, the free-men and the guilds are kept busy with interpreting and testing the new edicts you've set down--many of them based on old rulings. Here again, your abilities of organization shine through. While the courtiers scrabble over minor details, you alone are able to see in a sudden shining vision, the preferred order of things. The rest is tedium.

You find some solace in your husband, whose monkish habits wane with the years and with the freedoms and pleasures of sovereignty. You are with child once more, but once more the child perishes in your belly. It is only from the ceaseless duties of your kingdom (your queendom, you should say), that you do not fall into a hopeless despondence. Your husband, however much he has changed, is not fit for the throne nor wants it, and the people are not entirely unhappy to have you as their queen.

In the six years that follow, your opposition quietly wink out. The late king's mother passes away. His sister takes the opportunity to move away to live with her husband (who no doubt wanted to remain at your court). Your husband retreats into a kind of natural hermitage in your vast estate, following the news of child's death. And then your brother dies, and in the most unusual circumstances.

They find him horribly mangled, along with his guards, their bodies literally torn apart by some terrible force of teeth and claws, and parts of their faces chewed away. In the months following several more bodies, similiarly destroyed, are found. The only commonality between them is that each one was found close to King Walter's Road or near a town through which the road runs. Among the victims are women, old men, dogs, cows, even children. Over 70 victims have discovered thus far and news has spread (through the same road, no doubt) all across your kingdom. The people, even your own courtiers, are terrified. The stonemason's guild demands a response, for the road represents their very livelihood.

What will you about this strange creature which seems to stalk your land, in this, the 13th year of your reign?
>Nothing, this is superstition born of an accident of coincidence. It will go as it came.
>Recruit a task force to investigate these killings and locate and capture their source.
>Increase the patrols on the road to appease the guilds and institute a draconian curfew to protect your people

>>6190052
>>Recruit a task force to investigate these killings and locate and capture their source.

>>6190052
>Recruit a task force to investigate these killings and locate and capture their source.
Succession is gonna be an issue if we don't deal with it soon

>>6190052
>Recruit a task force to investigate these killings and locate and capture their source.

>>6190052
>Recruit a task force to investigate these killings and locate and capture their source.

On the topic of succession, given our poor family relations and inability to have a child, can we look at adoption…? Was very common amongst Roman Emperors

>>6190052
>Recruit a task force to investigate these killings and locate and capture their source.

>>6190052
>Recruit a task force to investigate these killings and locate and capture their source.

>>6190052
>Recruit a task force

>Use this as a filter, to shiv the the chaff from the wheat. We wish to find an heir, who is intrepid and canny, but bold and level headed. And if they bring the source to heel, they will have the popular support needed to be raised to princedom