Headscratchers / Deltora Quest

• Did Jasmine's parents just never tell her their names?
  • It's actually quite possible that they didn't, because if you're hiding in the woods, you wouldn't want to risk having a young child call out a name where anyone can hear it. So, if they only taught her to call them 'Mother' and 'Father,' it would both protect their identities in case she was captured by Grey Guards and keep her lineage a secret.
• If the tribal leaders of the Masked Ones were actually descended from the bloodline of Ballum, King Elstred's younger brother, wouldn't that mean that Bede is Lief's heir, and not Marilen? A possible explanation for this plothole is that Ballum's line ended at some point, either through adoption or other means, but that would utterly mess up the explanation for why Bede looks like Lief in the first place!

  • Easy answer to that one - Marilen is said to be only one of several identified living relatives of Lief's - and thus potential heirs. He picked her out, that's all.
  • Even Easier answer- Marilen is said to be the decendent of Adin's second child out of five. This would place her far above the decendents of the last of Adin's children, and would make her second in line, especially if her mother is no longer alive. Due to lack of reference to her, that is something we can assume. So, in order for any of Ballum's decendents to become King/Queen, all the other decendents of all of Adin's other four children would have to die first.
  • Ballum's very existence causes problems, seeing as how it seems to contradict canon; remember, the reason that Lief had such trouble finding an heir was that part of the Rule was that the current King or Queen would have one and only one child. Adin was supposedly the only one who had multiple kids, which is why Lief had to trace his bloodline all the way back to Adin's time, and then down the bloodlines of one of his 5 original children. If any of the kings or queens had multiple children with the blood of Adin, his job would have been a lot easier - but if they didn't, that means that King Elstred couldn't have had a younger brother.
  • King Elstred was the oldest of Adin's five children, and by chance he only had one child. Ballum is Adin's youngest child, who was driven out of the castle by a rumor that he was planning on killing his older brother. So, Adin's second through fifth children had many children themselves, it was only the decendents of the first that had one. Because of this, Lief had to track down the decendents of Adin's second child, which was Marilen, which allows the cannon to still be in place, for the Masked Ones would come up as heirs to the throne, but a lot of people whould have to die before they could take over.

  • King Elstred and Ballum are Adin's grandsons, not his sons. Elstred and his daughter Adina started the tradition of the single heir. As for why Marilen was picked and not Bede? Yes, Bede is still technically closer in line, but the Masked Ones have hidden their relationship to the throne for centuries. Ballum's bloodline was probably thought extinct or untraceable. One final point: Lore says it must be worn by an heir of Adin. Not that the heir must be next in line. Presumably the Belt could jump around between heirs depending on circumstances, availability, and capacity to rule.
    • It is also possible that, while Ballum's descendants may or may not be closer in line by blood than Marilen, their exile and subsequent vendetta against the royal family has revoked their inheretence to the Throne and the Belt. It is stated in canon that the Belt and Lief's mask are opposing forces, so the Belt may well reject any of Ballum's ancestors, royal blood or no.
• Why on EARTH didn't Sharn and Endon have more than one kid? If you have to have a blood heir to make your Macguffin work, ideally wouldn't you want as many as possible?
  • Covered in canon. It was a "custom" propagated by evil chancellors.
    • I think they mean why didn't Endon and Sharn have more children after learning that the Rule was bogus. Well, there are several possible reasons. (1) Simply not wanting another child. (2) Not being able to afford supporting another child on the modest living they were making from Endon's smithery. (3) Not wanting to bring more children into a world dominated by the Shadow Lord (they had conceived Lief while still blissfully unaware). (4) Not realizing that it doesn't have to be the first descendant in line in order to use the Belt. Actually, I don't think that was common knowledge, was it?
    • Also... If you're going to send that child on a round-the-country trip where Everything Is Trying to Kill You, you'd think a backup plan would be warranted, non? The reasons in the above entry do still hold, though.
    • Maybe Sharn nearly died in childbirth? The shape the country was in by then was hardly one where they could have gotten her help.
• Why didn't Jasmine ask Doom about Faith? Granted, she and Doom weren't that close in the beginning, and he wasn't easy to find, but surely Jasmine could have tried to make sure that Faith was who she said she was. After all, you have to be suspicious of an unknown voice coming from the Shadowlands...
  • Given Lief's policy on offensive operations against the Shadow Lord (i.e. not doing them because they'd get a Curb-Stomp Battle), she didn't want to tip off anyone that she was going to try to rescue Faith, reasoning (probably correctly) that they would try to stop her, and she was used to making decisions on her own.
  • Also consider that as far as Jasmine assumed, Leif and Doom were keeping secrets and she was more than a little bit salty about that.
• What they did worked, but on Jack's ship, once Lief and Barda learned about the "3:1 rule", Lief could have simply told Barda how to solve the puzzle, getting them another coin, at which point they would have had the necessary three for the repayment. Given Jack's very Lawful Evil, Rules Lawyer modus operandi, that would almost certainly have worked.
  • By the time they learned about the rule, the candles had gone out in the saloon, so they couldn't find their way back to the chest or the game. Plus they were being chased by the zombie rowers and mostly concerned with getting off the ship before they could be seized.