A Queen for our King

[Chadlee Windham]

My players have actually passes a LOT of time in the firzt two modules due to real life forcing us to play shorthanded at times. Hence, after five years of kingdom-building, Duke Boris Molotov (Paladin of Erastil) of Falconia had yet to take a bride, and the kingdom was getting antsy at him to produce an heir.
And so, an aide to the Duke compiled a list of elligible bachelorettes with proper pedigree for possible courtships. As I like to put them up on Obsidian Portal, I felt it was proper to chose pictures to associate with each.
We started with Syrah Parsal, only daughter of Lord Achille Parsal of Liberthane. A Milani-following general housekeeper and support force for her father's forces. Though no dowry came with her, she seemed to be capable enough. Her picture is that of Sorcha from Willow.
Next came Miriam Varn, eldest daughter of Maegar Varn. She is well-trained to be matriarch of a noble family, always accompanied by a bevy of handmaidens. As a follower of Erastil, she appears to be a perfect match for the Duke. For her portrait, I chose a young Angelina Jolie.
With much pomp and circumstance, Falconia welcomed Janella Freth, daughter of Arena Fight Manager Barven Freth of Tymon. Her book-keeping and crowd-pleasing skills are renowned, as is her appearance. Knowing the Duke's player well, I chose a picture of a well-built bodybuilder that I was certain would appeal to him.
Finally, there was Estelle Enscivaan, daughter of Esteban Enscivaan of the Numerian Noble House Enscivaan. Her cultish following in Numeria made her easily the most foreign of the potential Queens. Her general demeanor, as well as her family's association with harvesting skymetals and odd relics, made me choose a picture of Kat Von Dee to represent her.
After meeting them all, he took the winter to decide upon which one he wanted. In the end, with the spring thaw he sent word to Varnhold that he wished to begin courting Miriam Varn.
One, two, then three months passed with no response. Planning to send a messenger to be assured that his message had arrived, the Duke was surprised to receive a missive from Jamandi Aldori, Swordlord of Restov...

[Turin the Mad]

Heh heh heh ... well done sir, well done. :)

[Chadlee Windham]

The best part is, I had planned the missive all along to be given to the party at the end of the night. We are moving to another game for a few months, then going back to Kingmaker.
Major messages I print out on parchment then put a wax seal on them well in advance. I had that one sitting on top of the DM screen all night.
We played through more than a year's worth of turns that night. Three turns before we ended, the Duke sent out his message.
I took one look at the clock, realized that we would get two or three more turns out the night.
I could not have asked for better timing...

[Shieldknight]

Whatever happened to Lily? My group also has a Paladin of Erastil as the ruler. However, they haven't spent much time kingdom building. Instead Lily has shown up and asked for her items, and in the process has stricken the Paladin with loves curse.

[Chadlee Windham]

My group tends to forget about the miscellaneous quests until they find something to jog their memories. Additionally, they have nominally decided that they aren't "allowed" to go even as far west as the map from books 1 and 2 shows, due to their interpretation of the initial charter.
Thusly, they have not found the thing Lily is looking for.

[Shieldknight]

RRR:

If I remember Rivers Run Red, there is an elf statue in the tower with the dancing lady. Wouldn't that fullfill the quest?

My Baron (Paladin of Erastil) is being "convinced" that a marriage to Lily is the best thing ever.

Lily:

Lily is convinced that this easy target is her best way to Queendom.

[DM Jeff]

What a great story, thanks for sharing!

In our game Duke Trent McCormick finally chose Rachella Varn (Maeger Varn’s younger sister) as his bride. As GM I kinda took liberties, I gave her all the qualities I knew the player finds irresistible. Perfect timing was with my game as well. He courted her for over a year before popping the question and was surprised that no response came. I felt like Joss Whedon. On dope.

As for Lilly I saw her as a sort of elf groupie. She latched on pretty heavily to Phos the elf druid of the party and they’ve had a romance for most of the campaign. Only in the last game did she fall victim to a Witchfire that came for revenge on the group. Phos had her raised from the dead by high priest Jhod, to then promptly dump her and tell her to leave, as he could not bear to watch her age and die during his long life (in what I call the Highlander Syndrome). Ouch.

[Rune]

In my Kingmaker campaign we actually have a queen, Lady Yelena Eveningstar (formerly Adelle Orlovsky, bride-to-be of Regent Noleski Surtova. She is a swordswoman trained in Aldori dueling, of strong personality and terrible experiences of arranged marriages (having stabbed Noleski in the guts and left him bleeding out while she ran south and changed her name).

From the start people were suggesting a marriage, but who could it be? The wizard noble and the rogue spymaster combed the realms looking for a match, ideally someone with qualities she would approve (swordsmanship and courage, but not strong enough that would try to take her place of rulership).

Then comes Maegar Varn, skilled nobleman and able swordsman, highly educated but frank in all dealings (I've played him as tired of the backhanded noble scheming, intelligent but hot-headed). They approached Varnhold as early as the start of the second book, and started some trade.

In an impromptu visit (he disguised himself as a wagon-driver and delivered some of the Varn-ale dark beer) to assess the neighboring kingdom, he managed to charm Yelena with his honesty and general bad-ass-ness, and they had a secret fling.

A couple winter months later, she visited Varnhold and they had another secret encounter (in a "secret hideout" on the falls of Crooked river) in which they talked about marriage. They hatched a plan in that he'll start sending gifts so EVERYONE will know of his intentions (and hopefully no one will suspect they already... hmn... closed the deal) and stablish a long and formal courtship (they ARE both rulers of their kingdoms). I plan to have him propose her before the winter, saving the winter months in preparation for the wedding. When the spring comes, though, messages will suddenly stop coming...

[Bigrin da Troll]

Chadlee Windham wrote:

My group tends to forget about the miscellaneous quests until they find something to jog their memories.

My group is similar, so I decided to hand out 'quest cards'. Each card has the name of the person or group that offered it on one side, with the details of the task and reward on the other. Now when they encounter a shambling mound someone says "Wasn't somebody offering us money for one of those?" and party shuffles through their little cards until they find the one that mentions shamblesap.

Plus, it helps keep them on track when they don't know where to go next. They look through their outstanding quests until they find one that suggests a direction. ("Roc eggs? Rocs are found in the mountains, we should head that way.")

[Palious13]

In our campaign, I was the ruler and indeed everyone was pushing me to get married as soon as possible. As an adventuring sorceror, myife expectancy was not great. Lily was considered but discarded but me as too "common." (My character is actually a cousin of the King of Taldor) A varisian harrower was very breifly considered because she had the charm. But again, she was a commone, and a varisian, not a good choice for a leader. There were a few others. In the end, I decided on a candidate from Restov. My grand Diplomat, a cleric of Abadar (my religion as well)suggested her, as she was a childhood friend. She is a broke noble woman. She is quite loved by the common folks and despite it being an arranged marriage, we have grown quite fond of each other. Only after marrying her did we find out she had a 18 charisma. Extra bonus for Ruler additions.

[jennibert]

My campaign has a female leader--currently a Duchess. She had little interest in marrying, but finally did so partially to quiet the "you're such a nice girl, you should get married" people and to help distract from Grigori. Despite having a childhood friend written into her background who is rather desperately in love with her and some advances from Maeger Varn, she chose our Diplomat, a high elf named Catesbaei Hansonii--a restatted version of Lily Teskerton. Our party being largely female (except for the centaur), our DM decided that a male flirt worked better. He's a bit of a snob and would really have preferred an elven wife instead of a half-elven one, but put aside his principles so he could get a title.

The Duchess, who is my character, knows why he married her, but is still quite fond of him. I have heavily implied to the DM that I would be amused if he either a) gets caught cheating on her or b) is assassinated. :)

[Mactaka]

We had a queen who was one of the PCs.

Spoiler:

She was killed by one of the lich's henchmen

Now the king is looking for a new queen, but is still gun-shy though prospects have been some of the bachelorettes among the Brevoyan nobility.

[Volaran]

The leader of my group's kingdom is Duke Valtas Sokolovsky (formerly Orlovsky, but he decided to change the name once the country was formally founded). He's a free-wheeling Oracle of Life and follower of Cayden.
(His mini can be seen here)

I knew his player was considering taking Leadership when Valtas hit 7th level, and we'd been discussing how we might work a spouse into it. We'd thought about him coming back from a night out on the town, being married without any memory of it, and just kind of rolling with it. We'd decided that she would be a bard, and that I might play her as someone whom the party would find suspicious, never quite sure if she was manipulating them.

Then we had a better idea. We decided that Valtas had _already_ been married when he left New Stevten to stop by Restov looking for employment...that was four years ago, as he'd gotten caught up in events and just sort of never mentioned her.

Nessiel herself was a very well known performer in Brevoy (she's a forlorn elf, an a bard with the Celebrity archetype). Valtas is in his late 30's, and frequently wanders away, so she'd only recently been getting irritated that she hadn't seen him in a while.

Then she got a message delivered to her...scrawled on a napkin, that he'd founded a country, changed their last name, and would she be a dear and check in on the place because he had to go investigate something in Varnhold and wasn't sure when he'd be back.

So, the first thing the party heard of her was when they returned to Longshot, the capital of the Duchy of Sokol, built around the Stag Lord's old fort. Things were running much better than when the party left (there had been a fair amount of unrest when the party left, and they'd been gone too long, and so missed their Kingdom Building phase for the month.) Citizens confidently told them that 'No worries. The Duchess handled everything', after which the Duke's player got to explain the story. We even had the stained napkin prop prepared...I think it says something about the Duke that none of the citizens even questioned a drunken note with no seal as proof...though she is very convincing.

The citizens, and the party seem to have taken a liking to her. She's much more shrewd than her husband. Presently she's attending the Outlaw Council in Daggermark while the party has some downtime and attends to the country themselves.

[Kaisoku]

Heh, yeah... that was a fun session.

Right at the end of our 2 year stint of kingdom building, I fail a critical series of checks. Right when we are pulling cash out of the kingdom funds for personal use, and right when an assasination event occurs (killing our general).

And that's when we get the message to go check out Varnhold. Yeah... take out a bunch of cash from the kingdom, pissing off the citizenry, our general is killed, so best thing to do? Wander off "adventuring".

This was also the first time we had to travel so far from home, so the group wasn't used to thinking about return time to get back for kingdom phase, heh.

I liked playing the whole "Oh yeah.. that thing" aspect of my character. The other players (players not characters) started freaking out.
My brother couldn't get past the whole elf-human relationship thing. By the time he said "But what do you see in him!?" the 5th time, she had to tell him she was getting a little offended.

I also had a "Contingency Plan" for if leadership was suddenly devastated, that was pulled from a Simpsons episode. Just: "If there is loss of leadership, then replace leaders with super-intelligent sentient constructs. If constructs are not available or too expsensive, then use prominent members of the city."

Considering the cohort has had no combat related benefit yet, this has been very good use of the Leadership feat so far. That and she's also our item crafter.

Explaining this to my real-life wife feels awkward still, although she has played D&D before so she just smirks.