He was a great king, who united the land and vanquished his enemies, and expanded the kingdom. Generous and just, He was loved by his people, and honored by his friends. He brought peace and prosperity to the land, and established a just and fair kingdom.
However...
His dick didn't work
and thus he left no legitimate successor
Wait, I've seen this one before.
Almost like limiting your pool of future leadership candidates to the immediate family of your current ruler whose qualitiesare decided by the rng of genetics is a bad idea...
Perhaps, but limiting your pool of leadership to grifters that mastered appealing to midwits is even worse idea.
The best option is to have tryouts for the position including a written test and the smart people who pass said test then free for all melee fight to the death at the end.
The Chinese kind of did this except instead of a melee fight it was a poetry competition.
Democracy doesn't limit the number of candidates but increases it.
That's the problem.
Learn to strawman better.
If it's such a terrible idea, why have humans been doing it for thousands of years?
Your genes want to be fruitful and multiply. If you let your in-built genetic desires drive you they will lead you to anything and everything that gets as many of your genes as far into the future as possible.
From the perspective of your genetic material, a complete disaster that kills 99% of mankind and kocks us into the Stone Age is fine as long as the survivors are disproportionately your descendants.
People have also know that inbreeding is bad for thousands of years but they still did it for consolidation of power, wealth and wealth..
Forgot picture.
But enough about Alabama.
Same reason we attempted to placate imaginary deities to gain relief from lightning strikes instead of just putting up lightning rods: we didn't know any better back then.
Because the people who wanted it to be that way had weapons and used them to enforce their system.
Humans also existed for 300,000 years before agriculture, but I don't see anyone who thinks we should go back to that just because it was normal
Competency is not what you seek in politics (advisors and civil servants can provide competency). What you seek is political stability and predictability. Families provide them by eliminating a lot of infighting that would otherwise happen between the elites. Your liutenants depend on your position being stable to get a steady flow of money and resources which they need to pay their own liutenants. A passing of power is a delicate time because it is easy for the whole house of cards to collapse into an high stakes, high risk game of finding a replacement. That's why spreading rumours of sickness is deadly in a political system. If your liutenants suspect you will die on them, they'll conspire to find your replacement. That's why political families are popular. They limit the number of candidates even if family members conspire against each other.
He bedded the hot desert witch and spawned forth a dozen hot desert witch daughters. They were evil, but very hot.
>Players must choose which hot desert witch to support in the battle for the throne
I will now play your campaign
Many such cases.
Succession wars are the most kino backdrops for any medieval/fantasy fiction.
I only now noticed that an assassination plot on the count the PCs in my game currently serve is just what I needed for my next campaign. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
Before the King died, he secretly made a plan with the court sorcerer to ensure the well-being of the kingdom and his legacy, he cast a spell on his seven sons that turned them into beautiful women with enormous busts and fertile hips, Only the princess who manages to marry for love will become a man again and will be the new king.
...he was a master propagandist, so it's impossible to say how much of the proceeding was true.
the secret to his success was his ability to anticipate and counter chaotic events. This skill remained sharp only thanks to years of wargaming with his ridiculous catfolk court jester. Nowadays, the overweight felid jester spends his time lounging atop armoires and bookshelves and simply cannot be found most of the time. The king and his loyal, if more than a little silly, jester have agreed to find an equally ridiculous replacement so that the king's heirs might follow his example. Can the party secure a new court jester of comparable absurdity and wargaming enthusiasm or will the good king's legacy fade like so many others?
He put his faith into his trusty advisor Liar Darkfalse, and never came to regret that
His evil court wizard brought him back to life while replacing his crown with a helm of opposite alignment
The Ottoman Turks of the 16th Century had a novel way of avoiding this. With the Sultan usually having many male children via his various harem wives, it became standard practice for the Sultan on his deathbed to name his heir, and the palace attendants would simply strangle all the other potential claimants in their beds. Job done... except that having more than one wife meant that they could start the succession crisis on behalf of their children well before he died, and when one of the kids survived, they tended to be angrier.
The rate at which historical nobles murdered their own family in apparent zero-sum grabs for power kinda boggles my mind.
If your kingdom explodes on your death / during your heir's rule then you failed as a king and your empire wasn't an empire
>sad Alexander noises.
It is all about he systems and institutions. Frederick II of Prussia (the Great guy) did literally everything he could to sabotage and publicly humiliate and discredit his nephew heir because he wasn't his preferred successor but had to be named as such due to Prussia's succession laws. The succession still went smoothly and Frederick William II became a good monarch because Prussian institutions and bureaucracy worked too well to fall apart and the professional statesmen had no interest in rocking the boat.
To be fair, Alexander did that on purpose.
Why?
He was a god amongst men. No-one could ever surpass him.
Humans have an innate genetic urge to improve the circumstances of their offspring, which is why feudalism is the natural tendency that accumulated power tends to take. That's neither good nor bad.
We got too wienery, fertile crescent bros
It was a land of rugged and untamed beauty. A land whose people held fast to the old ways. ... As the times changed, the people slowly embraced the mandate of a new world. ... The old way and the new way became one. ... It was here in this land that a son was born to ... a mother who many considered a sorceress. The child grew up near the river learning the ways of manhood and the spells of witchcraft. At age 17 he became a soldier. He excelled in sports and in battle. He became a leader of men... As his power grew, so did his lust for political supremacy, for absolute rule. The country watched, the country waited and the people blindly followed a man who would become a tyrant.
Many such cases in history.
I would be a good boi son that becomes a loyal vassal and forms a cadet house to keep the empire intact.
He was white, and thus evil.