Video Game / King of the Castle

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

King of the Castle is a Competitive Multiplayer Management Game developed by Tributary Games and published by Team17, released for PC on March 2, 2023. The game can be played among a group of friends, or integrated through the Twitch streaming service so a host can compete against viewers sorted into teams.

The game is set in the world of Celest Ath, in a realm known as the Kingdom. The goal of the game, if you are the King (if male), Queen (if female), or Monarch (if non-binary), is to successfully rule the Kingdom, which consists of three (out of five) potential territories: the bleak March, the wintry North, the desolate East, the scorching South, and the wealthy Coast. To do this, you must keep the kingdom's Authority, Stability, and Treasury high, in addition to producing an heir and achieving an ambition by raising the Kingdom's Trade, Military, Faith, and/or Farming. If you are not the Monarch, however, the goal is to depose the Monarch and put your own representative on the throne, whether it's through monopolizing the economy, receiving the blessing of the Ninth God, a gunpowder plot, a full-blown rebellion, or some other scheme.

Ambitions: Monarch's Paths to Victory

The Monarch has six possible paths to victory, suggested by their inner circle of advisors; each one requires passing two stat checks, and the probability of passing them increases as the relevant statistic increases (or with subsequent attempts after a failure).

• Beloved: On advice from the Chancellor, the Monarch's chief political advisor, a public relations campaign is launched to make the Monarch universally beloved by the Kingdom's peasantry.
• Conquest: On advice from the Marshal, the Monarch's chief military advisor, the Kingdom wages war against the neighbouring Ashmedean Empire, allowing the Monarch to cover themselves in the glory of a conqueror.
• Sainthood: On advice from the Archbishop, head of the Church of the Ninth, the Monarch helps to promote faith in the Ninth God in exchange for a search for "miracles" that can see them elevated to the status of a living saint.
• Sceptre of Sages: On advice from the Treasurer, the Monarch's chief economic advisor, the Monarch goes on a quest to retrieve the Sceptre of Sages, a magical artifact whose holder is prophesied to rule over a golden age.
• Spy Network: On advice from the Spymaster, the Monarch's chief intelligence advisor, the Monarch has spies planted in the houses of the Council to dig up enough Blackmail material to ensure their unquestioned obedience.
• Tyranny: On advice from the Marshal, the Monarch rallies the Kingdom's armies behind them and uses threats and torture to make the Council do as they command.

Schemes: Nobles' Paths to Victory

Each of the five regions has three unique schemes, and there are a further six schemes that can appear for any region; each one (apart from the Loyalist scheme) requires passing three objectives by getting a statistic for the scheming region, every region except the scheming region, all three regions, or the Kingdom to a certain minimum or maximum level. The regions will be offered two choices for how to complete the third stage of their scheme.

Marcher Schemes

• Gunpowder: The Barons smuggle in gunpowder, usually a very rare commodity in the Kingdom, from the Republic of Kirth. They can vote to either succeed where Guy Fawkes failed by blowing up the Palace with the Monarch inside, or outfit their military with muskets and cannons and attack the capital.
• Modernization: The Barons enact sweeping reforms to re-equip and re-train their military into an elite fighting force, the New Model Army. They can vote to either march the army on the capital, or sneak clauses into the military reforms giving them control and forcing the Monarch to abdicate.
• Propaganda: The Barons launch a public relations campaign to persuade the population that their claimant is the strong, charismatic, intelligent ruler the Kingdom needs. They can vote to either provoke a civil war and offer emergency "assistance" to the Monarch that becomes permanent, or simply depose the Monarch in a coup.

Northern Schemes

• Hornblower: The Chiefs go on a quest to retrieve Odheld's Horn, an Artifact of Power that can cause earthquakes or collapse buildings. They can vote to either threaten to use the horn to destroy the Kingdom's food supplies unless the Monarch steps down, or collapse the Palace onto the Monarch's head.
• Prophecy: The Chiefs persuade their followers that their claimant is the Lordrender, a prophesied hero who will topple a tyrant and rule over a golden age. They can vote to either bring down a blizzard and attack the paralysed capital, or lure the Monarch to the North and sacrifice them in a pagan ritual.
• Ragnarok: The Chiefs broker an alliance with neighbouring ice giants to bring about The End of the World as We Know It: Ragnarok. They can vote to march on the capital with the ice giants, or let the ice giants attack and then "save" the Kingdom before taking over the throne in the aftermath.

Eastern Schemes

• Ascension: The Counts launch a charm offensive to persuade the Monarch to give up the throne in exchange for initiation into a secret society of immortal blood drinkers. They can vote to make good on their promise and grant the Monarch immortality, or pretend to do so and kill them instead.
• Blood Ritual: The Counts research a spell to summon one of two famine demons - Ankharazzad, Lord of Dismay, the Seventh God's Smile, or Belpheminar, the Hungering Absence, Queen of Corruption - to terrorise the Kingdom and either kill or exile the Monarch.
• Possession: The Counts research a Demonic Possession spell to summon one of two demons - Racchamassa, the Mad Tyrant, the Cockroach Queen, or Murmuriach, Duke of Greed, the Face of All Coins - to possess the Monarch and either render them a Meat Puppet or subject them to a Forced Transformation.

Southern Schemes

• Excommunication: The Grandees gather "evidence" that the Monarch is a heretic so that they can be put on trial by the High Inquisitor. They can vote to denounce the Monarch as either a power-hungry tyrant or a greedy money-hoarder.
• Fervour: The Grandees champion their claimant as having been chosen by the Ninth God to rule the Kingdom. They can vote to either use the population's religious fervour to wage a holy war and claim the throne, or pray for a miracle from the Ninth God to strike down the Monarch.
• Witch Hunt: The Grandees look for evidence to denounce the Monarch as a heretic and practitioner of dark magic in the eyes of the Church. They can vote to either have the Monarch burned at the stake, or show mercy as long as the Monarch surrenders the throne to their claimant.

Coastal Schemes

• Conspiracy: The Patricians take advantage of the Kingdom's debts by giving them a loan with exponentially increasing interest. They can vote to either bleed the Kingdom dry under threat of force, or offer to cancel all debts in exchange for the Monarch's abdication.
• Corruption: The Patricians turn the royal court into a cesspool of corruption by bribing everyone senseless. They can vote to either use their influence to auction the throne off to the highest bidder, or publicly accuse the Monarch of being the corrupt one and "save" the Kingdom from their "crimes".
• Monopoly: The Patricians privatise the entire Kingdom by buying up land, roads, bridges, anything that can have a price tag put on it. They can vote to either extract money from the Kingdom until the economy collapses, or make the Monarch their corporate mascot.

General Schemes

• Doppelganger: A region's nobles look for an exact lookalike of the Monarch. They can vote to manufacture either a famine or civil unrest, both of which are intended to lure the Monarch to the region so that they can Kill and Replace them with their double.
• Intimidation: A region's nobles corrupt the Palace Watch with a mixture of bribery and blackmail to relax Palace security. They can vote to either have the Watch stand idle while they kill the Monarch, or replace the Palace Watch and threaten the Monarch with assassination unless they become a puppet.
• Loyalist:^note Added in Patch 1.2. If a region succeeds in getting their claimant onto the throne, they can spend the next reign assisting the Monarch instead of trying to depose them in favour of a new claimant. They can still get the new claimant onto the throne by rebelling if their Defiance is high enough.
• Sorcery:^note Added in Patch 1.2. A region's nobles recruit the assistance of a wizard (the specific wizard depends on the region^note Gordias, wizard of stone, for the March; Brzzkt, wizard of sound and silence, for the North; Pestia, wizard of plagues, for the East; Athmorel, wizard of storms, for the South; Scrampton, wizard of the seas, for the Coast.) to depose the Monarch. They can vote to have the wizard either curse the Monarch with a Fate Worse than Death, or send them to Another Dimension, never to return.
• Subterfuge: A region's nobles sabotage the reputations of the Monarch's inner circle of advisors so that they can be removed and replaced with members of their own ranks. They can vote to either demand the Monarch's immediate abdication, or allow the Monarch to stay on as a powerless figurehead.
• Uprising:^note Added in Patch 1.2. A region's nobles foment unrest among the Kingdom's common folk to spark them into revolting against the Monarch. They can vote to either devalue the Kingdom's currency to create widespread poverty, or manufacture a food crisis to create widespread starvation.

Gameplay thus becomes a balancing act, wherein the Monarch must manage the kingdom's resources to achieve their ambition without also giving their rivals the means to enact their schemes, and the schemers must sabotage both the Monarch and each other in order to take control of the land. As an additional twist, the majority of decisions that determine the fate of the kingdom are decided by a vote among all the players except the Monarch, who can merely influence the results by making edicts such as vetoing one possible option, offering money to all nobles who vote for one option, or having nobles vote for their least favored option (so that the option with the fewest votes wins).

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Tropes of the Castle:

# - F

• 0% Approval Rating: There are multiple ways for the Monarch to earn the hatred of the entire Kingdom, all of which result in an immediate Game Over.
  • If the Kingdom's Stability reaches zero at the end of a season, the entire nation is consumed by riots, with peasants massing at the Palace gates. The Marshal is futilely trying to contain the riots, the Treasurer has absconded with most of the Treasury funds, the Chancellor jumps out of a window to their death, and the Spymaster brings an end to the chaos by assassinating the Monarch for the good of the country.
  • If all three regions rebel against the Monarch simultaneously, the Marshal gets drunk instead of trying to organise the troops to put down the rebellion, and with no-one left to support them, the Monarch is soon arrested and executed by the rebels.
• Abdicate the Throne: Several of the nobles' schemes or rebellion paths include an option to force the Monarch to abdicate in favour of their chosen claimant if they succeed; this isn't always a bad thing for the Monarch.
  • In the Barons' Modernization scheme, if they vote to march the New Model Army against the capital and meet their final objective, the Monarch may choose to flee the capital (with their Consort if they have one and are Happily Married) before the Marcher army arrives and live out their life as an adventurer in the distant land of Valamyr. This option is also available in the Barons' Propaganda scheme if their claimant offers to assist in putting down a revolt and effectively takes over the reins of government, and the Monarch decides not to stick around to become a figurehead.
  • For the third stage of the Chiefs' Hornblower scheme, they can vote to demonstrate the horn's power by levelling a mountain in front of the Monarch and telling them that more destruction will follow unless they abdicate. However, if the Monarch agrees, they are thrown in the dungeon and forgotten about.
  • The final stage of the Counts' Ascension scheme can involve genuinely offering the Monarch initiation into a secret society of immortal blood drinkers in exchange for the throne, or pretending to do so and killing them instead. If they choose the former option and succeed, and the Monarch is won over by the idea that Living Forever Is Awesome, they happily yield the throne to the Counts' claimant and spend the rest of their (eternal) life in an Eastern sanctum.
  • In the final stage of the Counts' Blood Ritual scheme, they can threaten to have their summoned demon kill the Monarch unless they leave the country and never return. If the Monarch agrees, they are taken to a remote island and live out the rest of their days herding goats, although the demon's shadow continues to loom over them; if the demon is Ankharazzad, the Seventh God's Smile, the Monarch is said to hear demonic laughter and have a fixed grin while sleeping, whereas if the demon is Belpheminar, Queen of Corruption, the troubled Monarch rises as a ghoul after death and haunts the area for many years.
  • For the final objective of the Grandees' Fervour scheme, they can vote to lead the South in a holy crusade for the throne and demand the Monarch's abdication or death, while in the Witch Hunt scheme, they can vote to show mercy for the Monarch's "heresy" as long as they surrender the throne in favour of the South's claimant. In both cases, if the Monarch consents, they are made to join a monastery or convent and take a vow of silence, while in the former case, if the Council votes for their abdication before the Southern army arrives, the Monarch instead charters a ship to Danea and becomes an innkeeper.
  • Multiple schemes, including the Barons' Modernization scheme, the Chiefs' Ragnarok scheme, the Patricians' Conspiracy and Monopoly schemes, and the Subterfuge scheme, can result in the Monarch being obliged to surrender the throne and become a sheep farmer miles from the nearest village (sometimes with a taxpayer-funded stipend). If they accept, the Monarch finds the pastoral life hard work and secretly misses being on the throne at times, but ultimately decides their new situation has its pleasures.
  • At the conclusion of the Uprising scheme, if the Monarch agrees to meet with peasant revolutionary Laila, they will be offered the choice of abdication or execution. If they choose the former, they are soon living in a squalid apartment in the Capital, and to keep up with rent (a new concept for the now-former Monarch), they are forced to seek employment as either a carpenter, a blacksmith, a cobbler, or a jester. Whichever they choose, they carve out a few years of modest success before being run over by a horse and cart.
  • If the Monarch's Authority drops to zero during a Rebellion before either side wins, the loyalists will tell the Monarch that they do not trust them to lead their regions to victory, and that they have agreed a truce with the rebels if the Monarch abdicates. If the Monarch agrees, they can formally abdicate the next day, or say "Screw This, I'm Outta Here" and run away that night. The end result is the same: the Monarch fleeing across the Ghost Sea to an uncertain future.
  • If a Monarch is forced off the throne in favour of one of the claimants, the dynasty storyline that begins with "The Rightful Heir" sees the return of the previous Monarch's heir, pleading for aid from their parent's home region to restore them to the throne. If the nobles vote to give the heir a battalion of soldiers to march on the capital, it leads to the event "Insurrection!", which may end with the Monarch deciding they're fed up with governing and letting the former heir take over (though only for long enough to die in a civil war). They settle in Kirth, where they become a noted anti-monarchist public speaker.
• Absurd Phobia: If the Spy Network ambition succeeds, the Spymaster tells the Monarch that one of the nobles is irrationally terrified of lemons. At the next Council meeting, she Blackmails the noble in question into doing as the Monarch commands by casually offering them a glass of lemonade.
• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • The story event "An Embarrassing Problem", which can spawn if an auction results in a Monument being built in one region, involves a noble from the region reporting that said structure has been defaced with obscene graffiti (implied to be crudely-drawn male reproductive organs). If the Council vote to investigate, one possible outcome is the culprit being the very noble who reported the vandalism, who was protesting the Monarch's tyranny. The Monarch can decide they see the humour in the situation and let the noble go free.
  • In "A Laughing Stock", a popular playwright has written a satirical play in which the Monarch is portrayed by a professional clown as a bumbling moron who ends up on the receiving end of slapstick abuse before being shamed into handing the crown over to the play's hero. The Monarch can choose to attend the play in person and calm the players' and audience's nerves by declaring it entertaining.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy:
  • One version of the title event in "A City in Flames" can be the consequence of a group of soldiers getting stinking drunk and tying a burning stick to a cow's tail, causing the terrified animal to bolt through the city streets, spreading fire in its wake.
  • "A New Festival?" sees the Treasurer stoking the Monarch's interest in reviving a harmony-promoting holiday called the Day of Kinship, but if the Monarch suggests a more low-key celebration, they can get completely plastered with their inner circle of advisors and do something reckless or ill-conceived:
    • They may declare their intent to climb the Palace's highest tower, which involves climbing out of the window and onto the ledge, convinced that they're in no danger. If they decide to keep moving out onto the ledge and fail the ensuing stat check, they slip and fall to their death.
    • They may call a Council meeting to vote on whether to paint the buildings of the Capital yellow (the Chief Architect's idea), give cows the right to vote (the Treasurer's idea), give the advisors a pay rise (the Chancellor's idea), or declare war on the Ashmedean Empire (the Marshal's idea). Each of the first three causes some combination of a drop to Authority or Stability and a jump in Defiance, while the last can be disastrous if the Kingdom's Military numbers are subpar.
• Angry Mob: Many events can spark the population into rioting, such as the Kingdom's Stability or Treasury dropping to zero or certain schemes reaching their final stage. The mob's behaviour ranges from Produce Pelting if the unpopular Monarch tries to address them or is brought before them as a prisoner (as happens if they are facing execution by victorious rebels) to Torches and Pitchforks if things have become so bad that they are demanding the Monarch's violent ouster. In the Uprising scheme, one region's nobles weaponise the peasants' anger to depose the Monarch in favour of a republic, which is soon swept aside in favour of restoration of the Monarchy.
• Another Dimension: For the third stage of the Sorcery scheme, the nobles can vote to have their wizard send the Monarch far, far away, never to return to Celest Ath. In each case, this involves taking the Monarch into a surreal dreamscape and then casting them through a portal into another dimension; this usually ends surprisingly well.
  • At the Barons' behest, Gordias sends the Monarch to the brightly-coloured, children's story-like land of Paffle, where they are met by a lion/rabbit hybrid named Wiggy Rimples and have "increasingly absurd adventures" solving puzzles and fighting weasels.
  • By order of the Chiefs, Brzzkt sends the Monarch to a desert world, where they are captured by soldiers and taken to a research facility on a nearby moon. They proceed to mount a "daring escape" and forge a legendary career as an interstellar smuggler.
  • Per request of the Counts, Pestia sends the Monarch to a strange, empty world where they eventually find a brick wall with a door in it; inside are a group of skeletons playing poker^note confirmed by KOTC writer Harry Tuffs to be a reference to the Skeleton Party from his game A House of Many Doors, and the Monarch is forced to play for their soul. They lose and become just another skeleton at the table.
  • On command from the Grandees, Athmorel sends the Monarch to the emerald Izho Jungle, where they befriend the local parrot people and carve out a "surprisingly happy" life for themselves.
  • Acting on the Patricians' instructions, Scrampton sends the Monarch to a bustling world of buildings ten times higher than the Palace, with thousands of windows, clearly implied to be contemporary Earth. They eventually get a job at a mattress company as a social media manager.
• Arranged Marriage: Two seasons into the game, the Monarch will be told (by the Queen Mother if they are at the beginning of a dynasty, by the Chancellor if they are the previous Monarch's heir or a usurper) that they must get married to the scion of a noble family from one of the three regions, with political alliances emphasised over personal feelings. When presented with the candidates, the Monarch can either choose one of them or, at risk of raising all three regions' Defiance, take a fourth option and not get married at all, or marry a commoner or one of several NPCs for love.
• Artifact of Power: The Chiefs' Hornblower scheme revolves around retrieving Odheld's Horn, which Odheld endowed with the power to collapse buildings, cause earthquakes, or destroy mountains. If the Chiefs pass the second stage of their scheme and successfully bring the horn back to the North, they can vote to use the horn to either threaten to destroy the Kingdom's food supply unless the Monarch gives up the throne to their claimant, or bring the Palace crashing down on the Monarch's head.
• Astrologer: As in mediaeval Europe, the motions of stars and planets are regularly interpreted by seers, whether in the clergy or the nobility, as predictive signs for the future.
  • In "Comet Sighting", a blood red comet seen over the sky of one region is interpreted by the peasants as an evil omen, but the Monarch can ask the Church to push a new interpretation of an obscure cluster of stars as "evidence" that the comet is a sign of the Ninth God's favour.
  • "Planets in Retrograde" involves a noble from a region that has been experiencing repeated Trade and Farming problems attending a Council session with a leatherbound grimoire of astrological observations. They claim that, according to the grimoire, the troubles in their region are caused by the stars, and they ask for an investment to continue their research, which, if the Council agrees, may improve their region's economy.
• The Atoner:
  • In "A Pillar of the Community", a noble from one region asks the Monarch for permission to extradite a murderess who has fled to another region, where she has become celebrated for her work with local orphans. If she is summoned for an audience with the Monarch and forced to admit her criminal history, she may claim that her charity work in her new hometown is an attempt to make up for her past transgressions.
  • If the noble who escapes the dungeons in "Jailbreak!" is a Grandee of the South, the sequel event "The Penitent Grandee" finds them wandering the Southern desert, their clothes reduced to filthy rags, preaching the word of the Ninth God to a small but growing following as penance for their earlier transgressions.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work:
  • If the noble who breaks out of the dungeons in "Jailbreak!" is a Chief of the North, it may spawn the sequel event "The Bandit Chief", in which they recruit warriors from their clan hall and hide in the Northern mountains, raiding merchant caravans and stealing from farms. The Council may vote to get the ice giants involved, but since they are enemies of the Kingdom, the Marshal declares the plan requires more finesse. First, a caravan loaded with treasure is sent to the North as bait for the bandits, then the ice giants happen to receive word that the bandits have just acquired a vast hoard of riches. Sure enough, the ice giants hurl boulders at the bandits' tents and squash them "like ripe plums" before stealing the treasure, allowing the Monarch and the Council to solve the problem without getting their hands dirty.
  • "A Fortress Besieged" may spawn during a Rebellion and involves a loyalist noble telling the Monarch that the rebels have trapped a fellow loyalist noble in their fortress and, since it is too strong for a frontal assault, are laying siege to it. The loyalist regions can smuggle in food to help the noble wait out the siege, but as they find the act dishonourable, they decide to recruit local "traders" (that is, outlaws) to get the supplies into the besieged fortress.
• Bears Are Bad News:
  • The storyline that begins with "A Contentious Sale", which requires that the North be one of the chosen regions, revolves around a bear which is claimed by a Chief as the avatar of Skurinorn, the Northern goddess of medicine and knowledge, to the frustration of the noble from another region who was trying to purchase the bear from the adventurer who captured her. Whichever noble ends up with the bear finds that feeding and caring for her is expensive, and if they are unable to provide for her, she may go on a deadly rampage through the nearby countryside. If the Monarch purchases her and keeps her at the Palace, this may lead to the event "Escaped!", in which the bear escapes her cage and leaves a trail of dead in her wake. If the Monarch rides into the Blackweald Forest to re-capture the bear but fails the relevant stat check, they are mauled to death.
  • "Noises in the Night" finds the Monarch getting jarred awake by horrible screams in the Palace courtyards. If they decide to pick up a weapon and investigate, they find a giant bear ripping the members of the Watch to shreds... before turning its attention to the Monarch. If they survive the encounter (which requires either passing a stat check or being saved by the Honour Guard), they are visited by a scholar from Quayle University in the sequel event "In the Name of Knowledge"; the scholar reveals that the bear was a member of the Palace Watch under a therianthropic curse and asks for permission to study the body further. If the Monarch accepts, another rampage leaves dozens of university faculty dead.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: If the Council vote for a nationwide rollout of the guillotine-under-another-name in "A New Contraption", the dynasty event "An Ironic Execution?" sees the scion of the family who invented the device (and for whom it is named) being discovered to have sold military secrets to Ashmede. They are swiftly convicted of treason, but they protest that they cannot be executed by their family's invention, citing a promise to their family by the previous Monarch. The Council can vote to execute the traitor by shooting them full of arrows instead.
  Noble: Hang on... Maybe cutting my head off would be quicker. Is it too late to change my mind?
• Better to Die than Be Killed:
  • In the "All is Lost!" story event, which occurs if Stability falls to zero, the entire Kingdom is consumed by riots, and a mob descends on the Palace, baying for the Monarch's blood. The Chancellor tells the Monarch they only have one idea... which involves jumping out of a high Palace window to their death.
  • If the Monarch is Happily Married to an amateur scientist Consort but is facing defeat in a Rebellion, the Consort may prepare a fast-acting poison that will kill them both before the rebels can finish storming the Palace to arrest and execute them. If the Monarch agrees, the couple share a final drink and a quick, painless death.^note  Which can be a horrible mistake if, unbeknownst to the Monarch or the Consort, the loyalists have defeated the rebels laying siege to the Capital...
• Bewitched Amphibians: In "The Uninvited Guest", the Monarch walks in on the Consort in a state of undress with an NPC noble who is said to be a serial heartbreaker. If the Consort is unapologetic and laughs off the Monarch's demands that they stop seeing their lover, it leads to "The Unfaithful Spouse", in which the Spymaster says that the continued affair makes them look bad, and they need to do something about it. One possibility is to hire a witch, and in "Very Froggy Frolicking", it emerges that the Consort was having multiple affairs, as the witch has used a curse to turn all of their lovers into frogs.
• Blackmail: In the Spy Network ambition, the Monarch and the Spymaster arrange to have the latter's spies placed in noble houses, disguised as travelling bards and relaying all the nobility's embarrassing secrets (in some cases, including extramarital affairs between the spies and their hosts) back to their boss. Eventually, the Spymaster has so much dirt on the entire Council that she just has to casually allude to something a given noble is desperate to keep under wraps to get them to vote as the Monarch desires.
• Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: "Red Hot Chillies", which can spawn in the South, revolves around the Grandees holding a competition to see who can grow the hottest chilli pepper. As the event opens, two nobles from the other regions are chewing each other's peppers to see who cracks first; the Monarch can ask to compete against the winner. The Council can then vote on whether the Monarch will sponsor one of the regions in the competition, sponsor the competition itself and double the prize money, or step back and remain neutral.
• Bodyguard Betrayal: The Intimidation scheme involves bribing the members of the Palace Watch to help a region's claimant overthrow the Monarch. If the scheme reaches its final stage, the nobles can vote to have the Watch either stand down while they storm the Palace and assassinate the Monarch, or escort the Monarch to them and force them to become a puppet under threat of assassination. If the Honour Guard are from the scheming region, they will also be complicit in the plan (otherwise, they may be killed trying to defend the Monarch).
• Bounty Hunter: Several events involve the Monarch offering financial compensation for the capture, dead or alive, of criminals.
  • "Dangerous Roads" sees a region being overrun by bandits. The Council can offer a bounty for bandit scalps, though this usually leads to overzealous bounty hunters scalping random locals. If the bandit problem worsens and a charismatic bandit leader rises in the region, the Council can vote to place a bounty on their head.
  • In "Horror in the East", locals report a monster of fangs and fur rampaging through the countryside by night, slaughtering dozens. The Council may vote to offer a bounty for the monster, which may be claimed by one of two bounty hunters, Marle or Vogun. Marle informs the Monarch that the "monster" is a Count affected by lycanthropy before asking for permission to decapitate them; Vogun simply shows up at a Council session with the werewolf Count's severed (human) head.
  • If the Kingdom is unable to get the title problem in "Pirates!" under control, the sequel event "The Pirate Queen" sees the rise of the Bloody Gull, leader of the pirates pillaging Coastal trade routes. The Council may vote to have a bounty put on the Bloody Gull's head, and if the ensuing stat check passes, the bounty is claimed by a former cohort of hers named Topcoat who resented her insistence at being addressed as "Your Majesty" and treated like royalty.
  • "Jailbreak!" involves a noble who was thrown in the dungeons in an earlier event in the reign escaping from their cell and going on the lam; the Council can vote to offer a reward for the fugitive noble's capture, with the probability of success increasing with the size of the bounty. If they offer the maximum of 2000 gold and pass the ensuing stat check, the bounty is claimed by the wizard Pestia, the Lady of Pestilence, who moonlights as a bounty hunter.
  • Other countries have similar policies in place, as illustrated in "The Bounty Hunters" when the Republic of Kirth sends the title group to the Kingdom in pursuit of Oreid, who stole the weapons shipment she offered to the Kingdom in exchange for safe harbour; the Monarch can either surrender Oreid to them, have them thrown out (which leads to a trade war between the two countries), or bribe them to take back a random prisoner's head.
• Brown Note: If the Chiefs vote to inflict a Fate Worse than Death on the Monarch as part of the Sorcery scheme and pass the final objective, then the Monarch tries to summon the Honour Guard when Brzzkt, the scheme leader, and the claimant show up in their office, Brzzkt will ring one of his bells, shattering the Honour Guard into thousands of messy pieces.
• Burn the Witch!: The Church's preferred punishment for witches and heretics - common folk, nobles, even the Monarch - is to burn them at the stake, and this comes into play in several storylines.
  • The Grandees' Witch Hunt scheme sees them gathering "evidence" of heresy in the capital that will lead to the Monarch being forced off the throne by the High Inquisitor. For the third stage of their scheme, the Grandees can vote to either show mercy to the Monarch as long as they abdicate, or get rid of them the old-fashioned way by burning them at the stake.
  • The Counts' Possession scheme entails turning the Monarch into a Meat Puppet with a Demonic Possession spell. If the scheme fails, the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue reveals that the Count researching the summoning ritual was arrested by the Inquisition and burned at the stake for practising evil magic, and they shouted the true name of the Seventh God as they died.
  • The "Escaped Experiment" story event involves a creature sewn together from corpses by one of the Counts, who explains that the creature is their "son" and is normally chained up securely to prevent him from causing harm to himself or others. The High Inquisitor declares that both the creature and his creator are evil and must be burned; the Council can vote to burn both of them, just the creature, or neither of them.
  • In "Horror in the East", the Eastern countryside is terrorised by a nocturnal monster with fangs and fur, ultimately revealed to be one of the Counts, who turns into a werewolf every seven days. The Monarch can decide to send the Inquisition to investigate, and when they return, the High Inquisitor suggests the lycanthrope be burned publicly as an evil monster.
  • If the Monarch is affected by therianthropy, whether as a wereboar, a werebear, or a werewolf, and their condition attracts the attention of the Inquisition, the High Inquisitor may demand that the Monarch be burned at the stake as an abomination.
  • "Blood Money" revolves around a noble who made a deal with a witch: enough money to solve their financial troubles in exchange for a drop of blood. However, the witch has taken over the noble's land and put a curse on them to prevent them from telling anyone (the noble sidesteps this by talking about a witch who hasn't taken over their land and hasn't put them under a curse). One option to deal with the witch and restore the noble's lands is to burn her at the stake.
  • If the Monarch stumbles on the true nature of the Crimson Vigil (a ritual sacrifice) and reports back to the High Inquisitor in "A Dark Secret Revealed", she may go on a tear through the region, burning everyone connected to the secret at the stake for practising evil magic.
  • The cause of the fire in the story event "A City in Flames" varies, but one possibility is the locals arresting a wizard who was passing through town and trying to burn them at the stake. The wizard uses their magic to walk away unharmed and sets fire to the town in retaliation.
  • The story event "Sigils and Stone" may spawn as the result of a successful building auction, as a noble from the region in which the edifice is constructed reports that strange symbols are being painted all over it. Further investigations may reveal the sigils to be the work of a warlock who lives in tunnels below the building and insists they are protective wards. The nobles are sceptical, however, and the High Inquisitor immediately suggests burning the warlock at the stake.
  • "The Archbishop's Fury" is a dynasty event that can spawn if use of the title device in "The Printing Press" is either restricted to the Church of the Ninth or open to anyone; a reformist priest named Smote Lemongrave nails an essay to a cathedral door denouncing the clergy as corrupt for selling "tickets to a cushy afterlife". The High Inquisitor says Lemongrave is a heretic, and says she can have a pyre built in a public square by midday. If the Council vote to burn Lemongrave, he tells them You Cannot Kill An Idea as he dies, and the backlash against the Church intensifies after his death.
  • If the Sainthood ambition succeeds, the Monarch is elevated to the status of a living saint, and the Council ranks swell with members of the Inquisition. In the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, their reign is said to be one of warmth, which may have something to do with all the heretics being burned.
• But Thou Must!: If one of the regions' schemes reaches its third objective or Authority, Stability, or the Treasury reach zero, the following season will feature a single event in which the Monarch is ousted in favour of one of the claimants. There are still dialogue options in these scenarios, but at most they may determine how, not whether, the Monarch is forced off the throne (abdication, exile, death, etc.), as well as some of the statistics inherited by their successor (for example, if the Monarch orders the military to fight to the last against an invading or rebel army and they obey, the loyal regions' Military numbers take a hit).
• Came Back Wrong: The "Saint or Sinner?" story event revolves around one of the Grandees of the South insisting that they are descended from St. Umber, and as the bodies of saints do not decay after death, they ask for permission to exhume the body. However, if the body has decayed, the later event "An Abomination" sees the mortified Grandee admitting that they paid a witch to summon their ancestor's spirit into their bones in search of answers, only for the re-animated skeleton to kill the witch and flee. The Council can vote to burn the Grandee for practising dark magic, while the skeleton can become the founder of its own cult, denouncing the Grandees as evil necromancers.
• Capital Offensive:
  • The goal of Rebellions, if the rebels don't decide to simply have the Monarch assassinated and then sweep into the power vacuum, is to lead their armies against the Kingdom's capital. They may decide to lay siege to the city until the Monarch is forced to surrender, or launch a full scale attack if they have numerical superiority.
  • Several schemes can end with a region's army specifically targeting the capital. The Barons can vote to march the New Model Army on the capital in the Modernization scheme, the Chiefs can sack the capital during an unseasonable blizzard in the Prophecy scheme or sic the ice giants on the capital (whether while marching alongside them or sweeping in at the last minute to "repel" them) in the Ragnarok scheme, and the Grandees can storm the capital as part of a holy war in the Fervour scheme.
• Cat Up a Tree: In "A Capital Proposition", a noble from a region with high Military will offer to send some of their soldiers to the Capital to bolster security, while a noble from a region with lower Military will protest that they could use those soldiers to train their own. If the Council vote to send the soldiers to the Capital, while their presence unsettles nobles from the other two regions, the locals are won over, not least as the soldiers are happy to assist in getting cats out of trees or children's balls off of roofs.
• Character Customization: Any player that has their own copy of the game can customize their appearance as a member of each of the game's factions, including the Monarch. Players that don't have the game merely state their preferred pronoun between he, she, or they, and get a randomly generated avatar with a matching gender.
• Chess with Death: If the Counts pursue the Sorcery scheme and vote to have plague wizard Pestia send the Monarch to another dimension, then meet their third objective, Pestia sends the Monarch to a world where they find themselves at a card table where the other players are all skeletons, where they are made to play poker for their soul. In the epilogue, we learn that they lost after folding on a bad hand and became just another skeleton at the table.
• Choice-and-Consequence System: Every decision made, by both the Council of Nobles and the Monarch themself, will have consequences that have to be dealt with later. For example, a vote to determine what to do about a plague can lead to an outbreak and dwindling resources if not contained, or the plagued territory needing financial aid if it is contained and trade routes are cut off.
• The Chosen One:
  • The Chiefs' Prophecy scheme sees their preferred claimant held up as a great ruler whose coming was foretold in old prophecies (as long as they are interpreted a certain way), and the three objectives of the scheme involve manipulating the Kingdom to make it appear as though the prophecies are coming to pass.
  • The Grandees' Fervour scheme entails presenting their claimant as having been chosen by the Ninth God to rule the Kingdom, and the objectives involve persuading the peasants that a bountiful harvest is evidence that their claimant enjoys the Ninth God's favour.
  • If the Barons pursue the Sorcery scheme and choose to have Gordias banish the Monarch to Another Dimension, they end up in the colourful fairy tale world of Paffle. They are met by a lion/rabbit hybrid named Wiggy Rimples, who asks if they are the hero foretold to defeat the Weasel Queen. If the Monarch goes along with it, the epilogue reveals that although they never saw Celest Ath again, they did save Paffle from the weasels.
  • The Sceptre of Sages ambition involves the Monarch going in search of said MacGuffin, the holder of which is prophesied to rule over a golden age. The Treasurer tells the Monarch that only the pure of heart can wield it, which in the context of the game involves passing Trade and Faith checks.
• Cold Snap: The story event "Winter Chill", which can spawn in the March or the East, sees the affected region suffering an unusually bitter winter (if the North are one of the other regions, a Chief will sneer that they have no idea what it really means to be cold) that threatens their food supply for the forthcoming year. The Council can vote to send in soldiers from another region to clear the snow and ice from the roads, donate food from either the Treasury or surpluses from another region, or do nothing.
• Color-Coded Armies: A character's faction can be immediately deduced by the color of their outfit. Barons from the March wear red, Chiefs from the North wear blue, Counts from the East wear purple, Grandees from the South wear yellow, Patricians from the Coast wear green, and the Monarch's personal inner circle wear a mixture of colors with gold accents.
• Conspicuous Consumption: For the third stage of the Patricians' Monopoly scheme, they can vote to keep filling their own coffers while the rest of the Kingdom sinks into poverty. If they succeed, they engage in outlandish displays of wealth, such as holding boating parties on specially made rivers of wine, or buying up entire villages and having the inhabitants fight each other for entertainment.
• Conspiracy Theorist: The story event "A Plot Uncovered" sees the Chancellor reluctantly granting an audience to a noble who is adamant that one of the regions is governed by frog people who are conspiring to put their claimant on the throne and mandate spawning in ponds and eating of flies. If the Monarch doesn't have the "confused" noble arrested immediately (which, inevitably, just reinforces their belief in the conspiracy), the Council can vote to ignore them or have the rumours investigated; the latter leads to the Monarch becoming a laughingstock.
• Continuing is Painful: If one of the territories gains a Defiance score higher than both the Monarch's Authority and Stability scores, the players representing it can instigate a Rebellion. If the Rebellion succeeds, they instantly win, but if it fails, they often end up worse off than they were before. Their Defiance drops to zero, and all progress on achieving their own Scheme is paused during a revolt, while the other two factions can progress theirs and take the lead. Failing a Rebellion is especially bad if the region was pursuing the Loyalist scheme, as it means they have to start an entirely new scheme with very little time before either the Monarch completes their ambition or one of the other regions completes their scheme.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: If the Monarch marries a Consort who is obsessed with making money, the first season after the wedding may include the story event "A Helping Hand", in which the Consort uses their new access to the Crown to ask for preferential treatment for the businesses they run in their home region (relaxed quality standards on lumber in the March, the North, or the East, relaxed safety standards in textile mills in the South, or reduced import duties on Aateshi jewels in the Coast). If the Monarch refuses, their marriage takes a downward turn, but if they put it to a Council vote and it passes, it may cause a drop in Stability and/or jump in other regions' Defiance.
• The Coup: Although some of the really sneaky schemes are technically within the law, others involve the Monarch's violent ouster by illegal means, mostly involving murder or marching an army against them.
  • Among the Barons' schemes, the Gunpowder scheme can end with the Monarch being blown up or forced off the throne by an army with superior firepower, the Modernization scheme can end with the New Model Army marching on the capital to overthrow the Monarch, and the Propaganda scheme can end with the March's claimant showing up at the Palace and murdering the Monarch in cold blood.
  • The Chiefs can stage a coup in the Hornblower scheme by collapsing the Palace onto the Monarch's head with Odheld's Horn, in the Prophecy scheme by either attacking the capital during a blizzard or ritually sacrificing the Monarch during a visit to the North, and in the Ragnarok scheme by either storming the Palace by the ice giants' side or sending them in and then "fighting them off" while murdering the Monarch in the chaos.
  • For the Counts' schemes, the Ascension scheme may end with the Monarch being assassinated during a fake immortality ritual, the Blood Ritual scheme may end with the Counts' summoned demon killing the Monarch for refusing to step aside, and the Possession scheme can end with a demon inflicting a Forced Transformation on them to get them out of the way if they refuse to obey orders.
  • The Grandees' schemes mostly work within the law - with the notable exception of the Fervour scheme if they decide to march on the capital in a holy war and the Monarch refuses to back down.
  • The Patricians' schemes usually go out of their way to work within the law - unless, for the final stage of the Corruption scheme, they decide to auction the throne out from under the Monarch and then have them disposed of.
  • Among the schemes available to every region, the Doppelganger scheme involves kidnapping the Monarch and replacing them with a double while the original is taken away and disposed of, the Intimidation scheme can involve killing the Monarch in their bed while the Palace Watch stand aside, the Sorcery scheme entails recruiting a wizard to remove the Monarch from the throne by either condemning them to a Fate Worse than Death or exiling them to Another Dimension, the Subterfuge scheme can end with the Monarch's assassination if they refuse the demand of their new "advisors" to abdicate, and the Uprising scheme revolves around manipulating the peasants into revolting against the Monarch and potentially executing them to pave the way for the region's claimant.
  • The goal of Rebellions is to stage a military coup to remove the Monarch from power and replace them with the rebelling region's claimant (or one of them, if two or more regions rebel).
• Decadent Court:
  • The main premise of the game is that all of the land's nobles are trying to usurp the Monarch, and must enact a three-part scheme in order to do so, usually resulting in at least the current Monarch's demise.
  • Mirroring yours, the Ashemede Empire is also fraught with a politically weak emperor and strong generals, each trying to get an edge so they can become emperor in turn.
• Defector from Decadence:
  • "A Petitioner from Afar", which can spawn in the Coast, sees the arrival of Oreid, a military expert who offers the Kingdom three ships' worth of muskets and cannons (and training in how to use them) in exchange for safe harbour, but who is initially evasive regarding questions about her background. If the Kingdom accepts (resulting in a significant Military boost in all regions), she may reveal in subsequent events that she is a former Senator of Kirth who became disillusioned with the republic's political direction, and she stole the ships and their contents from their military in an act of defiance.
  • The dynasty event "The Rightful Heir", which can spawn if the reigning Monarch ousted the previous ruler, sees the return of the former Monarch's heir, who petitions the nobles from one of the regions to assist them in reclaiming their birthright. If the nobles lend the rightful heir a detachment of soldiers, it leads to "Insurrection!", in which the army marches on the Capital. If the soldiers the current Monarch sends to put down the insurrection are defeated, they may decide they're sick of being on the throne, abdicate on the spot, and move to the Republic of Kirth to become a noted orator on the evils of monarchy.
• Defiant to the End:
  • If a scheme ends with the Monarch being offered a choice between abdication or imprisonment and/or death, the Monarch's choices for the latter often involve telling the scheming nobles, sometimes in so many words, to go to the Seven Hells. It is frequently the last thing they say before they are executed.
  • If a Rebellion is defeated, the leader of the rebels (generally the first noble to vote to rebel) will be unrepentant, declaring that someone had to stand up to the Monarch's tyranny or that the Monarch didn't have the strength to rule the Kingdom. If the Monarch sentences them to death, they maintain this defiant attitude right up to their execution.
• Dem Bones: Several story events see appearances by skeletons capable of movement and speech despite lacking muscles and lungs.
  • If the noble answering the title advertisement in "A Call for Apprentices" is allowed to keep their title while pursuing their wizard apprenticeship, they may accidentally reduce a fellow noble to a walking skeleton in an act of revenge gone wrong in "Inappropriate Magic", or they may themselves be reduced to a walking skeleton after being discovered to have no talent for magic in "Cast Out". In both cases, the skeleton lives for just long enough to air their grievances to the Monarch before collapsing.
  • In "Saint or Sinner?", one of the Grandees claims descent from St. Umber, a minor saint of decay, and a rival noble observes that saints' bodies do not decay after death, so the Grandee asks for permission to exhume the body. But if they fail the Faith check and find a skeleton in the tomb, it may lead to "An Abomination", in which the Grandee admits to the Monarch that they paid a witch to re-animate the skeleton in search of answers about their heritage, only for the skeleton to kill the witch and flee into the desert. It may inspire a cult of its own as it preaches of how the Grandees have fallen from the Ninth's grace, as evidenced by their dabbling in necromancy.
  • "Missing Nobles" revolves around three nobles disappearing in the East on their way to a meeting with one of the Counts. If they are found in the Twilight Lakeland, one of them may later be taken ill, and it emerges that they found the skeleton of the Eastern Queen Sashara and are now keeping it in their basement. If the Monarch asks for the skeleton to be brought to the capital, they may meet Queen Sashara face to face in "The Skeleton", although she is surprisingly polite under the circumstances.
• Demonic Possession: The Counts' Possession scheme involves summoning one of two demons to possess the Monarch and have them act as a puppet until they go insane and die, paving the way for the real string-puller, the Counts' preferred claimant. If the scheme succeeds, the Monarch either becomes a prisoner in their own body, no longer able to speak or act for themselves, or undergoes a Forced Transformation as the demon consumes them body and soul.
• Department of Redundancy Department: In the Northern version of "An Invitation", the Chief inviting the Monarch to their clan hall for Winterfeast describes the event as ten days of "drinking, eating, fighting, competing, drinking, singing, stamping, drinking, and drinking". If the Monarch chooses to attend, Winterfeast lives up to this repetitive summary with large-scale consumption of alcohol all round (if the Monarch decides to remain sober, the Chiefs will be offended).
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • The storyline that begins with "Avalanche!", which spawns in the North, leads to the uncovering of a tomb of ancient ice warriors. If the Council vote to send scholars to investigate the tomb, they report that the ice warriors swear loyalty to the Northern King Bjarnolf... who has been dead for centuries. The Council can then vote to tell the ice warriors the current Monarch is King Bjarnolf, which they will believe. However, if the Monarch then insists the ice warriors head south to swear fealty to the crown, they will have almost completely melted by the time they arrive; the Monarch's dialogue options include "How was I supposed to know this would happen?"
  • If the Intimidation scheme reaches its third phase, the scheming region can vote to persuade the Palace Watch to let them assassinate the Monarch. If they pass their final objective, the Monarch may try to escape their assassin by jumping out of their bedroom window... forgetting until they are on the other side that the window is hundreds of feet above solid ground. The road on which they land is re-named Pancake Lane in their "honour".
  • "A Bright Idea" spawns if the Consort is an abject failure at everything they try to do and entails a request for the Monarch to invoke an old law and make them a regional governor for six months. Several of the directions the governorship can take involve the Consort implementing a plan that backfires in ways they really should have seen coming, including crashing the economy by losing a fortune in treasury funds at the casino or mass scrapping industry subsidies, causing food shortages by converting farms to wild game preserves which are quickly hunted clean, making soldiers practise combat by fighting each other with real weapons, or building a tall copper church on a hilltop that acts as a lightning rod and electrocutes the entire congregation during a storm.
• Duel to the Death: The code of the duel is an integral part of the culture of the South, and several story events, including "An Honourable Challenge" and the storyline that begins with "An Untimely Death", see various Grandees getting into duels on matters of honour with nobles from other regions; though the object is usually first blood, sometimes the duels get out of hand and the loser is killed. If the Monarch sanctions the duels, they risk the practice getting out of control and leading to many deaths, but if the Monarch bans duelling altogether, the Grandees' Defiance will spike, as they regard it as an attack on their traditions.
• Eldritch Location: The storyline that begins with "A Mysterious Ship" involves a ship from one region suddenly showing up on land in another region; the only surviving crew member remembers nothing of what happened. Subsequent events can involve the ship being explored by scholars or adventurers, who report that, following an unfortunate encounter with a sea wizard, the interior of the ship has been transformed into a labyrinth so disorienting that they're not sure if it goes down into the earth or up into the sky, and the ship continues to exert amnesia-inducing powers on those who venture too near.
• Enemy Mine:
  • Whichever regions are chosen for a given round, they are all fiercely competing with each other to get their claimant on the throne, but in some situations, they are willing to work together against a common enemy.
    • If a Rebellion begins, then one or both of the other regions' Defiance ticks above Authority and Stability and they decide to rebel as well, they unite with the first group of rebels to attack the capital. This alliance lasts until the end of the Rebellion (whichever side wins), after which they go back to fighting over whose claimant gets the throne (whether by a vote if the rebels won, or by finishing their schemes if the loyalists won).
    • If the Conquest ambition succeeds, the initial victories and territorial occupations in the Ashmedean Empire prove fragile, and the fighting soon begins anew. At the Marshal's urging, the Monarch orders Council sessions suspended until the dust settles from the war, and the regions agree to set aside their differences, saying that if there's one thing they hate more than each other, it's the Ashmedean Empire.
  • If the Kingdom chooses to launch a full scale war against the Ashmedean Empire in the March-specific event "Itching for a Fight", the Marshal will note that despite being larger than the Kingdom, the Empire is weak and divided after years of internal conflict. However, if the Kingdom refuses their offer of a truce, the warring factions in Ashmede will unite against their common enemy and destroy the Kingdom with the aid of Immortal golems.
• Engineered Heroics: For the third stage of the Chiefs' Ragnarok scheme, they can vote to send the ice giants to attack the capital, and just when all seems lost for the Kingdom, The Cavalry will arrive in the form of the Chiefs themselves. They will then declare that the Monarch's inability to repel the attack makes them unworthy of the throne and either force them to abdicate or, if they refuse, kill them and blame the ice giants.
• Epic Fail: One of the possible "hooks" for the Consort is utter incompetence at everything they try to do; they don't just fail, they fail spectacularly. The stage is set in "A Bright Idea" with narration that tells us they almost drowned when they took up swimming, gave the Monarch a twelve-sleeved shirt when they tried their hand at knitting, and put half the Palace Watch in the hospital after a foray into beekeeping.
  • Their "bright idea" is to take advantage of an old law that allows the Monarch to appoint the Consort as a regional governor for six months (though not of their home region, where they are too well-known), and whichever region they are given to administer, their efforts to improve things go horribly yet hilariously wrong.
    • If they focus on Trade, they'll either embezzle a huge portion of the region's treasury and try to double it at the gambling tables, only to lose it all, or scrap all industry subsidies since they don't know what they are, sending the regional economy into freefall.
    • Should they concentrate on Farming, they'll either poison the soil with a fertilisation formula of their own creation and kill all of the crops (and some of the cows), or decide hunting is just as good as farming and turn most farms into wild game preserves (which are soon picked clean).
    • Directing their attention to Military results in either giving the soldiers real battle experience by having them fight each other with real weapons, resulting in many deaths, or having the soldiers read seventeen huge books on historic battles, resulting in many desertions.
    • If they aspire to spread the word of the Ninth God, they build a tall copper church on a high hilltop. Then a thunderstorm hits during a service, and lightning strikes the tower and electrocutes the entire congregation.
  • The failures continue in "Another Bright Idea" if the Monarch is willing to give the Consort another chance.
    • They can make them Commander of the City Watch, which crashes the Treasury when the Consort decides to pay the officers per arrest, causing them to throw citizens in jail left and right for even the most minor crime (or even for no reason at all).
    • If they are put in charge of overseeing the construction of a giant statue of the Monarch, the resulting monstrosity has a lopsided face, bugged out eyes, and too many teeth, turning the Monarch into a laughingstock among the common folk and nobility alike.
    • The Monarch can decide to aim low by asking the Consort to keep the Treadwater River flowing... but they decide its course is too inefficient and try to build a straight channel for it, and when the river doesn't follow the channel, they build a dam to force it through, resulting in the entire Capital being flooded.
• Epic Race: The storyline that begins with "A Risky Wager" revolves around a boat race around the coast of the Kingdom between a Patrician and a noble from one of the other regions. The race continues through the next three seasons, and the racers can have such adventures as discovering a new island, running low on food but discovering a large quantity of possibly edible seaweed, falling overboard and being held for ransom by the finfolk, being blown off course by a storm, having the crew mutiny, or uncovering a smuggling operation.
• Every Man Has His Price:
  • The object of the Patricians' Corruption scheme is to saturate the royal court with bribes to weaken their principles. The second part of their scheme involves shifting from bribing lesser members of the palace hierarchy to buying the loyalties of the Monarch's inner circle; the Spymaster is too savvy to fall for it, while the Chancellor is (usually) fiercely loyal to the Monarch, but the Treasurer and the Marshal are more receptive to having their allegiances bought off.
  • The Intimidation scheme involves infiltrating the Palace Watch by either bribing or Blackmailing the soldiers to either swear allegiance to the faction's claimant or step aside in favour of someone more easily bought. For the final stage, the nobles can use the purchased loyalty of the Watch to either assassinate the Monarch or render them a puppet under threat of assassination.
  • The premise of the Monarch's Golden Choice voting option is to buy votes by offering 500 gold in personal Wealth to all nobles who choose the Monarch's preferred option. (This can be used against the Monarch in a bribery trial if the Patricians' Corruption scheme succeeds.)
  • The story event "Undercutting" sees a Patrician complaining to the Monarch that trade of a particular good between the other two regions,^note The goods in question vary with the other two regions. The March imports mead from the North, iron from the East, and linen from the South; the North imports arms from the March, honey from the East, and dyes from the South; the East imports furs from the March, tallow from the North, and perfumes from the South; and the South imports copper from the March, gold from the North, and silver from the East. previously facilitated by the Patricians, is now being carried out between the regions directly, resulting in financial losses for the Coast. The Monarch can offer to bring the matter to the Council, refuse to do so outright, or bribe the Patrician with 1500 gold to forget the matter. If they choose the bribe, the Patrician muses that it would offset their losses, and the accompanying narration quips that money truly does make the world go round.
  • "Workers on Strike!", as the title implies, sees labourers in one of the regions unionising and demanding higher wages and better working conditions. The Council can vote to send in the military to break the strike, give them everything they ask for, or compensate them with funds from the Treasury. If they choose bribery and pass the ensuing Stability check (the probability for which increases with the size of the bribe), the narration notes that "with enough money, you can solve any problem."
  • "The End is Near", the final event in the boat race story that begins with "A Risky Wager", involves a noble from the region not competing in the race mentioning that they have a cargo ship on its way to Tavallin which is due to intercept the racers' path, openly fishing for a bribe to have their ship change course so that it delays one of the racers and changes the final outcome (and gets to Tavallin on time, boosting their own region's Trade).
  • If the Monarch is deposed after producing an heir, the next Monarch's reign may see the dynasty storyline that begins with "The Rightful Heir", in which the ousted Monarch's heir re-appears and seeks aid from one of the regions in regaining the throne. But if the Council accept the Treasurer's suggestion that the heir should be paid off, they decide that power only got their parent an early grave and a stolen throne, and they'd rather have money after all. The last the Monarch hears, the former heir settles in the region that offered to help them, living a life of parties and hedonism in a fine mansion.
  • "The Donor", a rare alternative to the "Bankruptcy Looms" event if the Treasury is low, shows that even the Monarch may be bought for the right price. A wealthy noble tells the Monarch that, if a law can benefitting their region's economy can be pushed through the Council, they will make a totally unrelated donation to the Crown; refusing raises the Defiance of the noble's home region, while agreeing lowers the Monarch's Authority.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • If the Grandees pursue the Sorcery scheme and vote to inflict a Fate Worse than Death on the Monarch, Athmorel, the wizard they have recruited to this end, is outraged, saying she was paid to depose the Monarch, not torment them. She raises the price of her services, and when she shows up to fulfill her end of the bargain, she is sympathetic enough to give the Monarch a moment to see across time and realise how fleeting life is before sending them to their promised fate.
  • If the Uprising scheme passes its third objective, the Monarch may ask if the Spymaster can simply kill Laila, the former shipbuilder leading the peasant revolution. The Spymaster will point out that another leader will take her place, so the Monarch shifts to asking the Spymaster to kill her family, then to kidnap her dog. If they force the issue, the Spymaster complies, but resigns immediately afterward, saying that she draws the line at the sort of petty tyranny to which the Monarch is resorting in a desperate bid to hold on to power.
• Evil Laugh: Some of the ambitions involve ruthlessness on the Monarch's part, and they are not above a bit of mad laughter if they succeed.
  • If the Spy Network ambition passes its stat checks, the Spymaster tells the Monarch that several of her spies are having affairs with their noble hosts, and the Blackmail writes itself. One of the Monarch's dialogue options is maniacal laughter, which prompts the amused Spymaster to say a bit of insane laughter now and then is good for the soul.
  • If the Tyranny ambition meets its goals, the Monarch makes an example of an irate noble during the final Council session before its forced dissolution. Once the other nobles have been terrified into submitting, the Monarch lets out a "joyful" laugh, and the narration adds, "Maybe some would describe it as an 'evil cackle'."
• Evil Reactionary: While all five regions' nobles are scheming to usurp the Monarch and shift the balance of power within the Kingdom in their favor, the Counts' claimant and their supporters explicitly cite reviving the "glory days" of the once-independent East as their motives. And while the "evil" part is subjective, they're most likely to try and accomplish that by summoning literal demons to do their dirty work for them.
• Exact Words: In the Northern version of "A Matter of Faith", one of the Chiefs asks the Council for permission to build temples to the Northern gods in other regions, motivated by a desire to spread their faith. If the Council vote to allow them to build one temple only, the Chiefs comply... by building a single temple over a hundred feet high right on the border between the other two regions, causing a Kingdomwide drop in Faith.
• Face–Heel Turn: If a region gets their claimant onto the throne, they may choose the Loyalist scheme in the next reign in a bid to ensure they retain control. However, if their Defiance gets high enough, they may rebel in a bid to get their new claimant onto the throne, and if the Rebellion fails, they are offered another choice of three schemes to oust the reigning Monarch in "A New Strategem".^note  It is nearly impossible to win if this happens, since the new scheme starts completely from scratch at a time when either the Monarch or one of the other two regions is likely to be one step away from victory.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Each of the kingdom's territories have a real-world inspiration.
  • The March is based on central Europe, particularly Germany and Austria. The NPCs and cities have Germanic names, the Barons wear German and/or Russian-inspired clothing, they are keen hunters, the region is prone to occasional severe winters, local cuisine includes veal dishes and beer, their favoured boats are cogs,^note Trade vessels that rose in popularity in the 12th and 13th centuries, particularly among the Hanseatic League cities on the coasts of the North and Baltic Seas. and they have region-specific schemes involving militarism and charismatic generals.
  • The North is patterned after Scandinavia, with elements of Scotland. The NPCs and cities have Nordic names, the Chiefs are clad in Viking-inspired outfits (mixed with Scottish tartan), the winters are brutally cold and snowy, local food and drink includes pickled herring, fermented fish, sheep's eyes, turnips, and honeyed mead, their preferred seafaring craft are longships and karves,^note The smallest category of longship. and they have unique schemes involving ice giants and causing Ragnarök.
  • The East is based on the Balkans, especially Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. The NPCs and cities have Slavic names, the Counts dress in Hungarian-inspired costumes, they share the March's tendency toward the odd frigid winter, local cuisine involves cabbages, honey, and baklava,^note Introduced to the Balkans by the Ottoman Empire. their boats of choice include carracks and strugs,^note Respectively three- or four-masted ocean-going ships (mostly associated with Spain and Portugal, but the Republic of Ragusa in what is now Croatia used a version known as the Dubrovnik carrack) and riverboats popular in Russia from the 11th to the 18th centuries. and they have region-specific schemes involving devil summoning and vampirism.
  • The South is the counterpart of the Iberian peninsula, chiefly Spain. The NPCs and cities have Spanish and/or Portuguese names, the Grandees^note The highest rank in the Spanish and Portuguese aristocracies, comparable to a Duke in the British aristocracy, though sometimes used more generally to refer to a person of high rank. wear Spanish-inspired outfits, they are devout followers of the Church of the Ninth, the region is prone to hot summers yet remains a popular holiday destination, local culinary traditions revolve around olives, wine, and pungent cheeses, their preferred ships include naus and caravels,^note The nau was a Portuguese variant on the carrack, while the caravel was a smaller ship used for coastal exploration. and they have special schemes involving Church Inquisitions and witch hunts.
  • The Coast is patterned after Mediterranean Europe, particularly Italy and Greece. The NPCs and cities have Latin and/or Greek names, the Patricians^note A term that originally referred to a member of one of the original citizen families in Ancient Rome. dress in Italian-inspired clothing, they are keen fans of Gladiator Games, they share the South's summer heat and popularity with holidaymakers, local agriculture focuses on olive and lemon groves and vineyards, their boats of choice include galleons^note As with carracks, though galleons are more commonly associated with Spain, they were also widely used by the Republic of Genoa in the 12th and 13th centuries. and triremes, and they have unique schemes involving bribery and economic manipulation.
• Fantasy Pantheon: The Kingdom, regardless of the territories forming it, has a religion based around the Ninth God, who slew eight other creation deities.
  • According to official game lore, the First God disappeared when the Ninth arose and was never seen again, while the Ninth God conspired with the Sixth God to depose the others. The Second God was stripped of his powers and has been Walking the Earth ever since, while the Fifth God was burned to ash and scattered across the world; they are only sparingly mentioned in the game, but the other deities play larger roles.
    • The Third God was drowned in the ocean's darkest depths and lives there in endless torment. In the "Fate Worse than Death" ending of the Patricians' version of the Sorcery scheme, the Monarch is exiled to the Third God's court to serve her for all eternity.
    • The Fourth God was eaten in a banquet at which the Ninth God betrayed the Sixth God by poisoning her wine. The play performed by the sleepwalking actors in the event "Stage Fright" re-enacts this banquet, with the actors variously playing the Fourth, Sixth, and Ninth Gods.
    • The Seventh God was banished to the Seven Hells (along with the demons that rose from the Fifth God's ashes) to plot revenge; the equivalent of devil worshipping in the Kingdom is worshipping the Seventh God, which is common among the Counts of the East.
    • The Eighth God was carved into eight pieces buried in eight separate places. In the story chain that begins with "A Dangerous Cult", one of the Eighth God's arms is re-activated and becomes the weapon of a splinter religion, while the story chain that begins with "Strange Crops" may involve an iron mine discovered to contain another piece of the Eighth God that a scholar hopes to use to develop powerful weapons.
  • The North has its own pagan pantheon, led by Morgana, also known as the Witch of Three, the Mother of Mountains, or the Ageless Crone. Other deities mentioned in dialogue include Skurinorn, goddess of knowledge and medicine; Knelquiss, the trickster god; Chalith, goddess of the harvest; Valtor, the Star-Flayer; Grahala, the Forged Maiden; and Odheld, the Hornblower.
• Fate Worse than Death: For the third phase of the Sorcery scheme, the nobles can vote to pay the wizard not to kill the Monarch, but to inflict some sort of eternal transformation on them. Some of the Monarch's fates are worse than others, ranging from Gordias turning them into a statue that can see, hear, and think but not move or speak, to Brzzkt turning them into the clapper of one of their thousands of bells, to Pestia infecting them with a new disease that has no effect on them but will kill anyone who gets near them, to Athmorel giving them a moment of clarity to see through time before turning them into a sheep, to Scrampton taking them to an undersea abyss to spend eternity serving the Third God.
• Feuding Families: In "A Theft!", a Baron of the March and a noble from another region demand an audience with the Monarch after the Baron accuses the other noble of stealing a ring from their hand during a supposed handshake of reconciliation; the ring is said to bring good luck to its wearer and is to be gifted to a relative of the Baron's for their wedding. The two nobles' families have been at odds for several generations at this point; the precise reason depends on the other region involved.^note  The Chief's ancestor put a hex of Morgana on the Baron's ancestor turning every second daughter's hair bright blue in revenge for poisoning their well and killing half their household; the Count's ancestor tied the Baron's ancestor to a rock and left them to be eaten by wolves, also in revenge for poisoning their well; the Grandee's ancestor turned the Baron's ancestor over to the Inquisition as a demon-worshipper for growing horns out of their forehead; and the Patrician's ancestor left the Baron's ancestor penniless after a cutthroat dice game. The situation is complicated when it emerges that the ring was taken by the Baron's relative... for their upcoming marriage to a member of the rival family. Even if the wedding goes ahead with the Crown's blessing, the feud continues.
• Fish People: The finfolk are a sapient, amphibious, humanoid species who live in the seas surrounding the Kingdom. The story event "A Fishy Wedding" involves an Interspecies Romance between the prince of the finfolk and the Archduke of the nearby island of Saal.
• Flowery Elizabethan English: If the title characters in "Missing Nobles" are found in the Twilight Lakeland, one of them secretly returns with the animated skeleton of Queen Sashara the Melancholy, who ruled the East when it was still independent. If the skeleton is brought to the capital, then in "The Skeleton", she escapes and decides to return home, but not before approaching the Monarch in the Royal Gardens. Her status as a relic from a bygone era is reflected in her use of archaic spelling and grammar that reads like something out of a first edition King James Bible or William Shakespeare play.
  Sashara the Melancholy: Goode evening.
  Monarch dialogue option: Hullo. How are you?
  Sashara the Melancholy: I be well. I heare thou art the Monarch now. Gratulations to thee. But wher be my manners? I be Quene Sashara, of the Est, beknown as the "Malencolie". I moste saye, those scolares of thine were not gentle with their examinations. How-ever, I thoughte it prudent to stoppe by on my way home. How fares the Kyngdom?
• Flowery Insults: The various nobles often hurl insults at each other that sound like something out of a William Shakespeare play. For example, in "An Old Debt", the noble being ordered to pay a debt incurred by their great-great-grandfather after losing a foot race to the great-great-grandfather of another noble centuries earlier addresses their "creditor" as a "crack-brained simpleton" and a "pimple-headed lackwit", while in "Saint or Sinner?", the Grandee who is convinced they are descended from St. Umber calls a sceptical fellow noble a "hedge-born puzzlewit".
• Forced Transformation:
  • The Counts' Possession scheme entails summoning one of two demons to possess the Monarch and make them act as a Meat Puppet for their claimant until they go insane and die. If, however, the Monarch uses a rare moment of lucidity to declare their resistance to the idea, the demon will transform them into something more co-operative. If the demon is Racchamassa, the Cockroach Queen, the Monarch is turned into a giant cockroach and kept around the Palace as a pet by their successor; if the demon is Murmuriach, the Face of All Coins, the Monarch is turned into a coin (on which their face is said to be screaming) and tossed into the Treasury.
  • In the Sorcery scheme, one region's nobles hire a wizard to depose the Monarch with magic, and for the third phase, they can vote to subject the Monarch to a Fate Worse than Death, which sometimes involves transforming them against their will. Gordias (who is recruited by the Barons) turns them into a sentient but immobile statue, Brzzkt (who is recruited by the Chiefs) turns them into the clapper of a bell, and Athmorel (who is recruited by the Grandees) turns them into a sheep.
• Foreign Queasine:
  • If the Monarch chooses to attend Winterfeast in the North and samples some of their host's mead, they may get into an eating contest with a Chief which involves the consumption of an appalling-smelling rotten fish that has been fermented underground for six weeks.^note This makes it the fictional counterpart of such dishes as the Swedish surströmming or the Icelandic hákarl. Even the Monarch's opponent cannot keep it down for long before vomiting it back up again. The more drunk the Monarch is, the better their chances of getting it down, in which case the next dish is raw sheep's eyeballs, and if they can stomach that, the next dish is a mysterious, pulsating red meat which even the Chiefs are reluctant to touch. With good reason, as the Monarch becomes a werebear if they eat it.
  • The event "Famous Cuisine", which can spawn as the result of a building auction, involves a chef from one of the regions creating a delicacy that has skyrocketed in popularity locally, but which (with one exception) makes the Monarch's eyes water, while nobles from other regions find it disgusting. Dishes range from Marcher veal (so overpeppered that one noble likens its taste to boiled bark) to Northern pickled herring (so pungent the Monarch loses consciousness for three minutes, while one noble says it tastes like urine) to Eastern baklava (sweet enough to be compared to a musty tome by one noble) to Southern cheese (so strong that one noble says it tastes like ancient mortar) to Coastal pickled lemon (sharp enough to be likened to rotting flesh by one noble).
• Foul Waterfowl: "Swan Trouble", which can result from a successful Deer Park auction, sees a noble interrupt a game of croquet between the Monarch and either the Consort or the Chancellor (depending on the Monarch's marital status), arm in a sling, to complain about being attacked by a swan on the grounds of the deer park and having their arm broken by the bird's wing. As the Monarch owns every swan in the Kingdom, the noble demands justice, which, if the Council agree, can take the form of a cash payout, the execution of the offending swan, or the surrender of swans from the Monarch's ownership.
• Full-Circle Revolution:
  • When a round of the game ends, the players can choose to "create a Dynasty" and carry over the previous round's resources and state of the kingdom into the next round. Regardless of who won or lost, all three territories immediately start conspiring against the new Monarch (unless the winning region from the previous reign chooses the Loyalist scheme), with the only difference if one territory won being that they start with a lower Defiance score (which determines if they can instigate a Rebellion) than the others.
  • If the Uprising scheme succeeds in meeting its third objective, the Monarch is deposed by a peasant revolt, and a People's Republic is declared, led by one of the revolutionaries, a former shipbuilder named Laila. However, she is soon assassinated, and the peasants decide to rally behind the claimant of the region behind the uprising, reasoning that they have proven themselves loyal to the cause. Once the claimant is in charge, they immediately re-establish the Monarchy, to the revolutionaries' chagrin.
• The Fundamentalist: The Grandees of the South start with the highest Faith value of all the territories, and the majority of their unique game-winning schemes involve raising it even higher in order to gain the blessings of the Ninth God or denounce the current Monarch in a witch hunt.

G - P

• Giant Spider: The story event "Giant Spiders!" is about, as the title implies, enormous arachnids overrunning one of the regions, some said to be as big as horses. The Council can vote to send in the military, burn the affected area, offer bounties on the spiders, or try to co-exist with them. Several of these options may lead to the problem growing out of control, until even the capital is overrun, resulting in a Nonstandard Game Over if the Monarch has no Honour Guard to defend them. However, success may be equally undesirable, as it can turn out that they were the only thing stopping the kingdom from being overrun with giant insects. Meanwhile, co-existence can lead to the spiders being raised as cavalry steeds, or as livestock for their venom or silk.
• Gladiator Games: The Patricians of the Coast love nothing more than to watch two combatants fight each other to the death in the arena. They offer gladiators as candidates for the Monarch's Honour Guard, the story event "Dissent at the Arena" involves a particularly talented gladiator named Onyx saying they'd make a better ruler than the Monarch, and the Coast's version of the story event "An Invitation" sees the Monarch invited to the Summer Games, in which they can choose to either watch two gladiators fight each other or watch one gladiator fight a wild animal (and make a Side Bet with their Patrician host on the outcome).
• Golem: The Ashmedean Empire uses clay golems brought to life by prayers to their machine god, Kaldovaga, for both manual labour and military applications, and this plays into several storylines that can arise if the March are one of the three regions.
  • In "Itching for a Fight", the Barons petition the Monarch to give their newly-reformed military something to do to keep their fighting skills sharp, one choice for which is to invade the Ashmedean Empire. If the war goes on for long enough, the Ashmedeans send golems into battle; the basic golems can be defeated by luring them into a swamp, but, if pushed, the Empire will call on Immortal golems the size of churches, who smash the Kingdom's armies into pulp.
  • In "Rogue Golem", an Ashmedean golem is commanded to dig a trench and then not told when to stop, so that it ends up deep into Marcher territory. The Council can vote to employ the golem for manual labour, add it to the Marcher army, take it apart to see how it works, or simply destroy it. If they vote to see how it works and pass the ensuing Trade check, the March may fashion its own golems (although they require prayers to Kaldovaga to operate, which the High Inquisitor immediately denounces as heresy).
• Go Through Me: If the Monarch is being threatened with murder at the end of their reign and their marriage to their Consort is a happy one, the Consort may try to interpose themselves between the Monarch and their would-be murderer, saying a variation on "If you want to kill them, you'll have to go through me first!" This is never enough to save the Monarch, although the more conscientious killers (such as the Spymaster if Stability hits zero or two Rebellions happen in one reign) may at least spare the Consort if asked to do so.
• The Grand Hunt: The March's version of the story event "An Invitation" is based around the Lord's Hunt, a huge social gathering of Barons to hunt the local wildlife. If the Monarch attends, they can choose a weapon, an accompanying animal, and the prey they plan to hunt. The most ambitious choice for the prey is the White Hart; the probability of even finding one, much less killing one, is always very low, but the rewards for success are high (as is the price, as the White Hart is guarding its foal, whose wide, pleading eyes are said to haunt the Monarch's dreams for weeks afterward).
• Grim Up North: The North, fittingly enough, is depicted as a Viking-inspired culture whose home is an icy tundra, with ice giants a legitimate threat (or ally, depending on their scheme).
• Happily Married: If the Monarch enters into an Arranged Marriage with a member of a noble house, their conduct on the wedding night and in subsequent events can lead to what begins as a purely political arrangement growing strong and steady, "like an old castle wall"; if the Monarch chooses instead to marry a commoner or one of several story event NPCs, the marriage is nearly always said to be a very happy one, with the Monarch said to have found their soulmate. A happy marriage makes it more likely the Consort will share the Monarch's fate in the endgame, for good or for ill.
• Heat Wave: The story event "Blistering Heat", which can spawn in the South or the Coast, sees the affected region suffering unusually severe summer heat. The Council can vote to force peasants to work in spite of the heat, bring in foreign workers to assist, or mandate midday siestas.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Several of the schemes are explicitly said to backfire onto the nobles in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue if they fail to get their claimant on the throne.
  • The Barons' Gunpowder scheme involves buying said substance, usually almost unheard of in the Kingdom, from the Republic of Kirth. If they fail to complete the scheme, it literally blows up in their face, reducing the Baron who organised the purchase of gunpowder from Kirth to a pair of boots (with feet still in them).
  • The Chiefs' Ragnarok scheme entails an alliance with the ice giants to bring about the end of the world and claim the throne for the North. If they are unable to finish their third objective, the ice giants attack the North instead of marching on the capital with them, and the fields are littered with Northern dead.
  • The Counts' Blood Ritual scheme involves summoning one of two demons to bring chaos and destruction to the Kingdom, allowing them to either kill the Monarch or force them into exile. But if the Monarch or another region wins, the Counts are said to have attempted the summoning too early, and their failure to control the demon results in many deaths, including those of their claimant to the throne and the Count overseeing the ritual.
  • The Sorcery scheme revolves around a region's nobles recruiting the assistance of a wizard to remove the Monarch from the throne with a spell to either exile them to Another Dimension or subject them to a Fate Worse than Death. But if they fail to meet their third objective, the wizard turns on them; Athmorel simply takes off into the clouds and abandons the Grandees, but Gordias incinerates the Baron leading the scheme with a fireball, Brzzkt traps the Chief leading the scheme in a bubble of silence from which there is no escape, Pestia curses the Count leading the scheme with explosive haemorrhoids, and Scrampton feeds the Patrician leading the scheme to a kraken.
• Holy Burns Evil: If the Counts' Possession scheme succeeds, whether the demon they have summoned to possess the Monarch is Racchamassa, the Cockroach Queen, or Murmuriach, the Face of All Coins, the Monarch may react to their increasingly frequent blackouts and comments about their recently erratic and/or autocratic behaviour by asking to be cleansed in holy water. However, just the scent of the water causes their nose and throat to sting, and when they lower themselves into the water, the adverse reaction is so powerful they lose consciousness.
• Holy Is Not Safe: The story event chain that begins with "Saint or Sinner?" revolves around a Grandee of the South claiming to be descended from St. Umber (to ridicule from another noble), a minor figure in the Church of the Ninth. As saints' bodies do not decay after death, they ask for permission to exhume the body, and if they pass the ensuing Faith check and the body is found intact, it is put on display as a pilgrimage site for the faithful. However, problems arise when sceptics (possibly including the other noble from "Saint or Sinner?") visit the body... and are immediately reduced to ash by a piercing glow from the saint's eyes (to the delight of the High Inquisitor, who wants to weaponise this power; if the Council agree, even the Monarch is made to submit to St. Umber's judgement).
• Hostage Situation: Several events involve negotiations between hostage takers and the Council, with the latter usually voting between agreeing to the captors' demands, sending in the army, or doing nothing.
  • "Mutiny at Cuervo Keep", which can spawn in the South, involves a takeover by the inmates of the title prison. The guards are held hostage as the prisoners demand full amnesty for their crimes as well as money and safe passage to Ashmede. If the Council are feeling particularly sneaky, they can vote to pretend to agree to the demands and then kill the criminals as they leave the prison.
  • In "Kidnapped Noble", a criminal gang capture a noble from one of the three regions and send a ransom demand that includes safe passage to Ashmede as well as money.
  • "A Peasant Uprising" involves the storming of a noble's estate by armed peasants, who hold the noble and their family captive while issuing demands that their wealth be re-distributed among the common folk.
  • "Border Skirmish", which can spawn if the March has subpar Military, involves an attack by Ashmede as a trial run for a possible future invasion in which sixty or so Marcher soldiers are taken prisoner, with the Ashmedean Emperor demanding a ransom payment for their safe return. Since this lowers the March's Military even further, the chance of successfully rescuing the captives by force is always low.
  • "Murder on the Road" is a possible event in the story chain that begins with "Dangerous Roads" if the bandit problem gets out of hand and the bandit leader who rises from the chaos is the Gallows Man. When a noble is robbed and murdered by the Gallows Man's outlaws, a fellow noble tries sending soldiers to arrest him, but when he is cornered in a village, he and his cohorts herd the villagers into the church and threaten to kill them all unless the soldiers stand down.
• Hostile Weather:
  • For the final stage of the Chiefs' Prophecy scheme, they can vote to offer up an animal sacrifice to Valtor to bring down a deadly blizzard on the Capital; if they succeed, no matter what season it is, the snow is so heavy and the winds so strong that the Monarch and their soldiers can't see more than a few feet in front of themselves. The Chiefs, being used to such weather in the North, descend on the Capital with an army of werewolves, one of whom rips the Monarch to shreds.
  • Several story events revolve around a region's brush with inclement weather, usually with adverse impacts on Farming and Trade, ranging from a Heat Wave baking the South or the Coast in "Blistering Heat", to a Cold Snap freezing the March or the East in "Winter Chill", to a violent tempest battering one of the five regions in "A Powerful Storm".
• Human Sacrifice:
  • The Monarch can stumble into a ritual sacrifice and become its next victim in "The Crimson Vigil" if they insist on playing the Monarch-in-Exile, then flee from the Hounds of the Betrayer into the dungeons (against instructions) and fail the relevant stat check. They discover a circle of Counts around a half-human, half-goat creature; the Monarch may demand an explanation, but this requires passing an Authority check. If they fail (and are equally unsuccessful in fleeing), or if they pass but then demand the ritual stop, the Counts will turn their knives on the Monarch and sacrifice them as well.
  • The Northern pagan tradition includes human sacrifices to their gods, and in "A Sacrificed Priest", the Archbishop tells the Monarch that a priest of the Ninth God was found murdered outside the village of Talander with antlers stuck embedded in his head and his body draped across a stone altar.
• I Coulda Been a Contender!: The Barons' Propaganda scheme involves trying to persuade the Kingdom that their claimant, a charismatic general, would be a much better Monarch than the throne's current occupant. If the scheme fails, the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue reveals that they eventually became just another bitter old has-been, grumbling about how they could have been Monarch.
• If I Can't Have You…: If the Monarch persuades Prince Glorb to call off his wedding to Archduke Shomo of Saal, then marries him themselves, the Archduke will show up at their wedding to object. After he is escorted out, his jealousy-driven revenge escalates, leading to the event "A Saalish Assassin", in which he sends a hired killer to shoot Glorb with a crossbow bolt as he strolls the Palace gardens with the Monarch.
• I Have This Friend: If the Monarch finds their Consort in bed with another (NPC) noble in "The Uninvited Guest" and asks to have dinner with them, if the dinner goes well, all three can end up in a polyamorous relationship. In "The Royal Triad", the Consort's lover expresses frustration with having to keep their situation secret, so the Monarch can offer to ask the Council to legalise polygamy so they can get married. When a sceptical noble asks why the Monarch is suddenly interested in the subject, one dialogue option is to say the Monarch has a friend who wants to marry a second spouse.
• Implausible Deniability: "A Duel Gone Wrong" is set in motion by a Grandee of the South killing another noble in a duel, with the dead noble's successor insisting that this amounts to murder.^note  If the Spymaster is sent to investigate, it may emerge that the Grandee did murder the other noble, potentially after they discovered evidence of a Southern economic conspiracy against another region. If the Council decides that this is simply a risk of fighting a duel, this may spark "Another Duel Gone Wrong", in which the Grandee gets a knife in their back from the outraged noble's successor. The latter claims that this was another duel, and they did find it odd from a strategic standpoint that the Grandee decided to turn their back on their opponent.
• Implied Death Threat: The Subterfuge scheme revolves around sabotaging the reputations of the Monarch's inner circle so that they are forced to step down in favour of nobles from the region. If they fail to meet their final objective, the mastermind of the scheme wakes up one night to find the Spymaster in their bedchamber, smiling and holding a knife to their throat, "kindly" asking them to knock it off.
• Insistent Terminology: If the Treasury is doing poorly, "The Donor" may spawn as an alternative to "Bankruptcy Looms" and entails one of the wealthiest nobles offering the Monarch a deal: push a law through the Council that benefits their region's economy, and they'll make a "totally unrelated donation" to the Treasury. If the Monarch says this sounds suspiciously like a bribe, the noble will insist they misheard; it's not a bribe, it's a totally unrelated donation.
• Interspecies Romance: The storyline that starts with "A Fishy Wedding" involves the Archduke of Saal's engagement to Prince Glorb of the Finfolk, a sapient amphibious species who live in the waters between the Kingdom and Saal. The Monarch is invited to attend the wedding but can choose instead to sabotage it, which can involve sending the Chancellor to seduce Glorb (resulting in their marriage) or having the Monarch do so themself (resulting in their marriage)! Whomever Glorb marries, the wedding inspires many other romances between humans and finfolk.
• Irony: In "A New Contraption", a noble invents the KotC equivalent of the guillotine as a more humane method of execution, naming it after themselves (since Joseph-Ignace Guillotin does not exist in the game's world). If the device is rolled out across the Kingdom and the noble's player participates in the next reign in the dynasty, it can lead to the event "An Ironic Execution", in which the current scion of the family is found to be selling military secrets and sentenced to death for treason, with the execution carried out by the device they invented.
• It Has Been an Honour:
  • The Chancellor is generally the most personally loyal of the Monarch's inner circle of advisors, and if the Monarch's reign is about to end violently, the Chancellor may express gratitude for the honour of serving them.
    • If the Grandees' Witch Hunt scheme reaches its third phase, they can vote to show mercy to the Monarch as long as they abdicate. But if the Monarch refuses and chooses instead to have the High Inquisitor arrested, the entire population becomes one giant Angry Mob, and eventually the advisors disappear, flee, or are killed except for the Chancellor. One dialogue option as the Monarch resigns themselves to fate is to tell the Chancellor it has been an honour to serve with them, a sentiment the Chancellor returns.
    • The "All is Lost!" event, triggered by the Kingdom's Stability falling to zero by the end of a season, involves a peasant revolution to topple the Monarch and replace them with one of the regions' Claimants. The Chancellor decides it is Better to Die than Be Killed and jumps out of a window to their death, but not before telling the Monarch "It has been an honour."
  • If the Chiefs' Ragnarok scheme enters its final phase, they can vote to have the ice giants attack the capital and then position themselves as The Cavalry to "save" the Kingdom at the last minute. If they succeed and the Monarch decides, when all appears to be lost, to resign themselves to fate and Face Death with Dignity, the Marshal tells them it has been an honour to serve them.
• It's Personal: "An Urgent Meeting" can involve the Marshal revealing to the Monarch and their Consort that a band of outlaws have been going on the rampage in one of the three regions, or the Spymaster handing over a sheaf of poems by a writer known as "Sapphire" insulting one of the regions' nobles. If the Monarch asks for an investigation, it emerges that the Consort is behind the raids or poems and has been targeting the region as revenge for a personal slight by one of the nobles from years earlier (possibilities include insulting the Consort at the Royal Wedding or driving one of their relatives into bankruptcy and despair). This may be foreshadowed in "Eligible Options" if the Consort is said to mutter about plotting revenge or to nurse a grudge.
• Jack of All Stats: The Barons of the March begin each new Dynasty with balanced, middle-of-the-road stats in every sector (save Defiance), lacking the specialization of the other regions but still able to closely compete with them while retaining some flexibility in meeting their objectives.
• Kangaroo Court:
  • If the Grandees' Excommunication scheme succeeds, they hold a show trial in which the Monarch's conviction for heresy is guaranteed, with countless witnesses reciting prepared (and mostly fabricated) testimonies and any words the Monarch says in their defence being completely ignored, resulting in their immediate dismissal from the throne (since the law requires that the Monarch be a member of the Church).
  • For the third stage of the Patricians' Corruption scheme, they can use the purchased loyalties of the Treasurer, the Marshal, and the judiciary to accuse the Monarch of being the source of the corruption and bribery that has infested the Palace. If they succeed, the verdict of the ensuing trial is pre-determined, with the Monarch's attempts at defending themselves being brushed aside in favour of (exaggerated and/or invented) testimonies of witnesses for the prosecution.
  • If the Uprising scheme succeeds and the Monarch meets with Laila, the former shipbuilder leading the peasant revolt, she will give the Monarch a choice: abdicate or die. If the Monarch refuses to abdicate, they are at least given a trial, but even before they are released from their dungeon cell to face judgement, they know the guilty verdict has already been decided on, and nothing they say will change this.
• Karmic Transformation:
  • In the story event "A Curious Curse", a noble has been cursed by a sea wizard with a set of gills (requiring them to live in a giant glass globe full of water) because they own a tannery that has been polluting a beach the sea wizard likes. The Council can vote to ask the wizard (forcefully or diplomatically) to remove the curse... or they can agree that the noble got what they deserved and make them spend the rest of their life in a fishbowl.
  • If the title characters in the Eastern story event "Missing Nobles" are found in Illarion's Haunt, they offer the Monarch a teapot they found in a bog while lost. The teapot contains the spirit of Illarion, the last independent King of the East, who now takes the form of a sentient fireball as punishment for his final act in life: killing his family in a fire.
• Kill and Replace: The Doppelgänger scheme involves finding someone in their territory that looks identical to the current Monarch and then killing and replacing the Monarch with the lookalike, who then abdicates to allow the territory's preferred claimant to ascend the throne.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Sometimes, if a region's scheme fails, they decide to cut their losses and adopt a "Perhaps next time" philosophy.
  • If the Barons' Modernization scheme is unsuccessful, they decide to shelve their military reforms for now, deciding that they can always use them if the opportunity presents itself later.
  • Should the Chiefs' Prophecy scheme be unable to achieve their goals, they decide perhaps the time wasn't right after all, and the prophecy is forgotten by all but the Godspeakers, who decide to keep an eye out for signs that the prophecy might come true in the future.
  • If the Grandees' Excommunication scheme cannot complete its objectives, their claimant and the Grandee leading the "investigation" into the Monarch's "heresy" share a bottle of their best wine and hope that they will fare better next time.
  • If the Patricians' Conspiracy scheme doesn't pan out, they go back to collecting interest and hoarding wealth, waiting for the right moment to sink the Kingdom in debt to strike again.
  • Should the Patricians' Monopoly scheme not get past the third stage, various Patricians file for bankruptcy and/or make notes in "secret ledgers", and they conclude that "the risk-reward calculus [isn't] favourable", vowing to try again one day.
• Kraken and Leviathan: The "A Kraken!" event is exactly what the title suggests: the appearance of a Kraken off the Kingdom's shores. The Council can vote to send the Navy to fight the giant monster, try to appease it with an offering of livestock, or simply leave it alone.
• List of Transgressions: Should a region begin openly rebelling against the Monarch, then after receiving their declaration of war, the Marshal will give a brief list of the rebels' grievances consisting of every botched event or unfavorable vote outcome that caused their defiance to spike.
• Living Forever Is Awesome: The Counts' Ascension scheme involves offering the Monarch a drink from a potion of immortality, and if the scheme succeeds and the Monarch is sufficiently intrigued by the Counts' pitch of how amazing it is to live forever, they agree to surrender the throne to the East's preferred claimant (although they do have to spend eternity avoiding sunlight and Church Inquisitors).
• Loyal to the Position: It doesn't matter if the Monarch lives out their reign in peace or tyranny, or if they are toppled by a usurper from one of the other regions; if you continue a Dynasty, the Chancellor, Marshal, Spymaster, and Treasurer will act in the same capacities for the new Monarch as they did for the old one. And again after the new Monarch's reign ends, and again, and...^note  Although the advisors are not always the same as those of the previous Monarch; some schemes can end with the deaths or forced resignations of one or more of them.
• Ludd Was Right: New technological advances in the Kingdom tend to be greeted with scepticism, either because the region behind an invention wants to keep it to themselves or because the nobles believe no good can come of the technology's proliferation. Perhaps the best example comes in the story event "The Printing Press"; the invention in question may revolutionise the spread of information, but the nobles are not convinced this is a good thing. If the Council vote to allow printing presses to be used on a large scale, it can lead to a backlash against the Monarch (especially if it gives rise to the news media in "A Paper Full of News" or a republican movement in "Stop the Presses!") as the newly-educated common folk begin demanding more rights and questioning whether the Monarchy is even necessary.
• MacGuffin: The Sceptre of Sages ambition involves the Monarch going on a quest for the magical artifact of that name, said to date back to the reign of Queen Alma the Wise. If the Monarch retrieves it, they inspire absolute devotion in the Kingdom while they wield it, but it doesn't seem to do anything besides glow mystically, and it could just as easily be a magic jewel or sword - or even the ordinary staff it appears to be until the Monarch touches it - for all the effect it has on the story.
• Magic Music: A series of story events revolves around the Songstress, a bard whose sudden popularity leads to riots at her performances. Her music is so hypnotically appealing that all who hear it obey her every command, which she uses to rob audiences (and the Treasury, if the Monarch invites her to give a private performance) and evade assassins. It emerges that her lyre is the source of her magic powers; without it, her singing is mediocre at best. Methods of defeating her include drowning out her performance with church bells and smashing her lyre, or sending a deaf assassin to shoot her with a crossbow.
• Magic Versus Science: Several events involve Council votes or Monarch decisions where the options include appealing to scientists or wizards; the wizards generally produce better results but demand higher payment.
  • "Sickness Spreads" only appears during a Rebellion and finds a disease running rampant among the loyalist troops, leading to many latrines and graves being dug. The loyalists on the Council can vote to ask for help from a medical doctor or send for the wizard Pestia, the Lady of Pestilence; the former option requires passing a stat check, while the latter is guaranteed to pass as long as the Monarch can meet Pestia's asking price.
  • In "The Stone Maiden", the options for dealing with the Living Statue in the title that has been leaving the people of one region Taken for Granite include sending for a folklorist from Quayle University, whose advice is free of charge but only has a 55% chance of being useful (in which case, they will explain that the Stone Maiden stays far inland, suggesting she is vulnerable to salt water), or sending for the wizard Gordias, the Stone-Talker, who is guaranteed to solve the problem but charges 2000 gold (and one of the Monarch's teeth) for his services.
  • If the fugitive noble from "Jailbreak!" is a Count of the East and is not brought to justice, "An Ancient Monster" reveals that they unleashed the Grave Beast from its Eastern tomb as an act of revenge against their captors (only to become the beast's first victim). The Council's options to deal with the Grave Beast include asking for advice from Quayle University scholars (whose research suggests the Grave Beast is repelled by juniper, but this only has a 50% chance of success) or deciding that wizard problems require wizard solutions and hiring Athmorel, the Storm-Bringer (who defeats the Grave Beast but charges 1800 gold to do so).
• Make It Look Like an Accident:
  • If the Monarch's Authority drops to zero during a Rebellion, the loyalist factions may decide to turn on them and persuade them to pacify the rebels by stepping down. If the Monarch refuses, the loyalists promise the rebels that if they stand down their military, the Monarch will be disposed of, and they offer to make it look accidental. The fact that the official story is that the Monarch tripped while descending the stairs and fell onto a sword suggests the loyalists had a loose interpretation of "accidental"...
  • The event "An Uninvited Guest" involves the Monarch discovering their Consort in flagrante delicto with an NPC noble. If they decide the only way to resolve the apparent Love Triangle is to Murder the Hypotenuse, they may ask the Spymaster to arrange a convenient "accident" for the Consort's lover (the precise nature of which depends on the lover's interests; for example, an amateur scientist may be blown up in a lab explosion, while an expert swordsman may be killed in a sparring match gone wrong).
  • In "Dissent at the Arena", a gladiator named Onyx is getting carried away with his arena prowess and declaring that he would make a better Monarch than the throne's current occupant. The Council can vote to silence Onyx by having the Spymaster arrange for him to meet with an "accident"; she later reports that her method involved a trident, oil on the sand, a weak point in a helmet, a copper net, and a pair of wild horses.
• Man on Fire: For the third stage of the Counts' Ascension scheme, instead of inducting the Monarch into their secret society of immortal vampires, they can vote to put together a fake ritual that will kill them. If the Monarch drinks from the goblet that will supposedly grant them immortality, their body bursts into flames and is reduced to a pile of ash.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: If the Grandees vote to pray for a miracle for the third stage of the Fervour scheme and succeed, the Monarch meets with the South's claimant in St. Bertrand's Cathedral, only for a huge barrel of beer at the brewery next door to burst and flood the building, drowning the Monarch and many nobles from other factions but sparing the Grandees (who are in the balcony) and their claimant (who is in the pulpit). Whether this is a genuine miracle (as the Grandees claim) or just a coincidence is deliberately left vague.
• Multiple Endings: As there are four factions - the Monarch and three regions of nobles - competing to gain or keep the throne, there are dozens of possible ways the game can end for all involved.
  • The Monarch can win by achieving one of six ambitions which see them variously become a bloodthirsty tyrant, a heroic conqueror, the ruler of a golden age, a beloved icon of the peasantry, a living saint, or a master Blackmailer. They can also win posthumously if they die after they have an Heir but before any of the regions complete their schemes and none of them are rebelling; the vote for their successor will be between the claimants of the two leading regions and the heir apparent, and if the latter wins, it counts as a victory for the Monarch.
  • But the Monarch can be deposed by one of twenty non-Loyalist schemes (three unique to each region, five available to any region), each with two choices for the final stage (some of which lead to the same ending as each other), some of which have even more possible endings depending on the Monarch's reaction; they could be forced to abdicate, reduced to a figurehead, blown up, assassinated by traitorous nobles, crushed by their collapsing palace, drowned in milk, drowned in beer, burned at the stake... They could also be toppled by a Rebellion and publicly beheaded, murdered by a vengeant witch or assassin, torn apart by a werewolf, killed by giant spiders, or something else again.
  • Meanwhile, each scheme has a "failure" ending which can involve the nobles being Hoist by Their Own Petard, deciding they Know When to Fold 'Em, being arrested and/or executed, or having their scheme simply fizzle out. If the game ends during a Rebellion, the factions will get different endings depending on whether or not they joined the rebels and whether or not they got their claimant onto the throne.
• Musical Assassin: The Chiefs' Hornblower scheme involves the retrieval of Odheld's Horn, an Artifact of Power that, when blown, can cause earthquakes and other forms of destruction. For the third stage, the Chiefs can vote to either demonstrate the horn's power by destroying a mountain and threatening more of the same unless the Monarch abdicates, or use the horn to collapse the Palace while the Monarch is inside.
• The Mutiny:
  • If the Monarch pursues the Tyranny ambition, soldiers all over the Kingdom rise up and overthrow their commanding officers to swear loyalty directly to the Monarch. In the final Council meeting, one of the nobles confronts the Monarch over some of their best officers having been killed in the uprising.
  • "Mutiny", one of the events that can spawn during the boat race that begins in "A Risky Wager", sees the crew on one of the boats rising up against the harsh treatment of their captain. The Council can vote to send in the affected region's military, give in to the mutineers' demands, or do nothing.
  • If the March is one of the three regions, their complaint in "Panic in the Council" involves battalions of the Marcher army taking advantage of the Kingdom's instability by killing their commanding officers before deserting and living in the forests as outlaws.
• Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight: In the Gunpowder scheme, if the Barons vote to fashion new cannons and muskets for their army and storm the capital for the final stage, the other factions meet them on the battlefield with more traditional mediaeval weapons... and are inevitably routed.
• New Game Plus: Continuing a dynasty, whether the previous Monarch won or lost, involves beginning with the same statistics for each region from the end of the previous reign (apart from Defiance, which resets to 2 except, if appropriate, in the region whence the new Monarch hails, in which it is 0). There may also be Dynasty Events continuing storylines from the previous reign, some of which pick up where the scheme that got the new Monarch onto the throne left off. For example, the Barons' Gunpowder scheme can end with the Palace being blown up, while the Chiefs' Hornblower scheme may result in the Palace being collapsed into rubble, and in both cases the new Monarch must then re-build at the beginning of their reign; meanwhile, the Grandees' Fervour scheme can end with the Monarch drowning in beer after a brewery accident, and the brewer will be brought before the new Monarch to potentially stand trial.
• Nonstandard Game Over: A round of the game is intended to end with either the Monarch succeeding at their ambition, or one of the Noble houses succeeding at their Scheme or Rebellion. However, there are also decisions that can immediately end a reign, such as the Monarch angering a Witch or Assassin and getting killed in revenge, that lead to everyone voting on which of the two Noble factions that were closest to winning getting their representative on the throne (if the Monarch has an heir, they will also be presented as a candidate in the vote).
• No Sparks: Depending on the answers given by the Monarch on the night of their Arranged Marriage and subsequent events involving their spouse, by the time they start thinking about producing an heir, their marriage may have become stale, with the two getting along just fine but having no real spark, or it may have been dead in the water from the start, with the two almost completely ignoring each other by day and sleeping separately at night. If things get bad enough, the Consort may even request a divorce.
• Not Helping Your Case: "A New Trend" involves a Patrician trying to pique the Monarch's interest in the new fashion for keeping expensive jewelled crabs as pets. When the economic bubble generated by trading the crabs inevitably bursts a few months later, the Patrician is notably the only one to cash out before the market crashes, and the Council can vote to have them arrested and their crab wealth confiscated. In "The Crab Trial", the defence they offer is "I am only guilty of making money! So I broke a few laws along the way, is that a crime?" To which the Chancellor replies, "Yes! Obviously!"
• Not in This for Your Revolution: The various wizards who can be recruited in the Sorcery scheme bluntly tell the nobles and claimant from the region that hired them that they're not interested in assisting them further once the Monarch has been deposed, sometimes implying that they regard the usurper as little better than the ruler they are replacing; they're just in it for the money and to get the Monarch out of their own hair.
• Off with His Head!:
  • The favoured method of execution for the nobility is a date with the chopping block, and this includes the Monarch if they are overwhelmed by a Rebellion, attacked by superior forces in the Barons' Gunpowder, Modernization, or Propaganda schemes, or assassinated in the middle of the night in the Intimidation scheme. Afterward, their head is usually mounted on a spike outside the Palace.
  • If the Monarch is defeated by a Rebellion, the Spymaster may lead them (and their family, if they have one) out of the Palace to ride out to a loyalist region to plan revenge... only to be decapitated by one of the rebels as soon as she brings the Monarch to a group of horses.
  • The story event "A New Contraption" involves the invention of a new method of execution by one of the nobles: a wooden frame with a hole for the condemned person's head to be cut off with a falling blade. Since Joseph-Ignace Guillotin does not exist in the KotC-verse, the noble plans to name the device after themselves. The Council can vote to roll out the device nationwide (possibly testing it on its inventor first), though this may lead to the dynasty event "Cutting Remarks", in which the nobles protest using the same method of execution for nobles and common folk (who are usually hanged for capital offences).
• Oh, Crap!: If the Spy Network ambition succeeds, at the next Council vote, the Spymaster takes the various nobles aside one by one and whispers to them, causing their expressions to shift to pure horror as they realise that from now on, they must do exactly as the Monarch commands or risk the disgrace of having their darkest secrets become public knowledge.
  Noble 1: By the Ninth... How did you know that? Only my mother knows about that!
  Spymaster: And it can stay that way. Just vote the way we tell you to vote.
  Noble 2: I destroyed the evidence! You can't prove anything!
  Spymaster: You'd be surprised what I can prove. I know exactly where to dig, but if you vote the way I tell you, maybe I'll misplace my shovel. [to Noble 3] Hey! Care for some... lemonade?
  Noble 3: Ahhhhh! Leave me alone! I'll do whatever you say!
• Oh, My Gods!: As the religion in King of the Castle revolves around worship of the Ninth God and fear of the Seven Hells, common exclamations of shock or disgust include "By the Ninth!" or "Depths below!"
• One Nation Under Copyright: The object of the Patricians' Monopoly scheme is to privatise the entire Kingdom by buying up roads, bridges, and other infrastructure and then charge exorbitant fees for their use. For the third stage, they can vote to add new meaning to the phrase "the business of government" by turning the entire Kingdom into one giant corporation. If the scheme succeeds, they tell the Monarch that they now own all of the industry in the country and have replaced the Council with their all-Patrician corporate board of directors; as they are, in their words, "too big to fail", the Monarch has no choice but to submit to being a powerless mascot.
• Our Mages Are Different: The Kingdom is home to various witches and wizards, the important distinction being that witches are given their magical powers (which they may use for healing purposes or to inflict curses), whereas wizards have taken their magical powers from the natural world (which allow them to, in the Chancellor's words, "tame creation" and re-shape it at will). As such, witches mostly stay in one place, the better to receive their power, while wizards need to stay on the move, as the land will be poisoned (resulting in a drop in the region's Farming) if they draw too much power from one location.
• Our Vampires Are Different: The East, as befits its "gothic horror" aesthetic, is a haven for vampirism, and this comes up in several storylines.
  • In "A Grim Discovery", which can arise if the title characters in "Missing Nobles" are not found, the Council can vote to search the home of the Count they were supposedly travelling to meet. A spy reports back that the Count had a whole dungeon full of people whose blood they have drained (including the missing nobles, who have been drained dry), and they turned into a bat and flew away when the spies tried to arrest them.
  • The Counts' Ascension scheme entails inducting the Monarch into a secret society of immortal blood drinkers (or pretending to do so and then killing the Monarch by either burning them in a false ritual or stabbing them and drinking their blood if they try to flee). Although the word "vampire" is not used during the scheme, the fact that the blood drinkers must spend eternity hiding from sunlight and the Church Inquisition makes it clear what they are.
• Our Werebeasts Are Different: Therianthropy can be transmitted to the Monarch in several ways, depending on the region; in each case, there are various methods to cure or live with it, but letting it go out of control tends to be detrimental to Stability and may result in accusations from the High Inquisitor. And if the cure in "The Ritual" fails the relevant stat check, it results in a Nonstandard Game Over as the Monarch gives in to their animal side permanently.
  • The March's werecreatures of choice are wereboars. In "Roving Hunters", two Barons stop by the Palace after a hunt, seeking shelter for which they offer both a hunting trophy from one of the other two regions^note Chosen from among the barbed tail of a Northern wyvern called the Sky-Darkener, the antlers of an Eastern stag called the Weald Lord, the head of a Southern lion called Prideclaw, or the claw of a Coastal crab called Headpincher. and the meat of a huge boar called Hoartusk. However, later that night, the Monarch finds the two Barons transformed into wereboars, having been cursed by the meat. The Monarch can also become a wereboar if they either join the Barons at the feast or express interest in gaining the Barons' shapeshifting power.
  • The North is home to the Ulthrandr, who take many animal forms, including werebears.
    • "Noises in the Night", which can spawn in the Palace if the North is one of the three regions, sees the Monarch (and the Consort, if they have one and are on good terms with them) woken up by a nighttime commotion as something brutally attacks the Palace Watch; the following season, "In the Name of Knowledge" reveals that the attacker was a member of the Watch who had turned into a werebear. If the Monarch chooses to investigate during "Noises in the Night" and grabs a weapon, then fails the ensuing stat check when fighting the werebear, they will be saved by their Honour Guard (who pay with their lives),^note Unless they don't have an Honour Guard, in which case they are killed. but not before being scratched and contracting the condition themselves.
    • The Monarch can also become a werebear if they attend Winterfeast and participate in an eating contest in which they first stomach rotten fish and sheep's eyeballs (the chances of success improve with how drunk the Monarch is at the time), then tuck into the final dish: cursed Ulthrandr meat, which the embarrassed Chiefs believe someone served as a joke and refuse to touch.
  • In the East, lycanthropy is alive and well, as set in motion by "Horror in the East", in which one of the Counts tells the Monarch that something is attacking local peasants. In "The True Monster", which spawns from most Council decisions in "Horror in the East" except successful military or bounty hunter expeditions, the monster is revealed to be a Count who turns into a werewolf every seven days. They can transmit the condition to the Monarch if either they are imprisoned and then the Monarch visits them in their dungeon cell, or they are told to control their condition, only to lose their grip in the middle of a Council meeting (with casualties including another noble with whom they were arguing and the members of the Honour Guard).
• Our Wormholes Are Different: In "A Prediction", a noble tells the Monarch that, in their capacity as an amateur astronomer, they have determined that their home region will be the perfect viewing site for an upcoming solar eclipse. If the Council vote to encourage visitors to the region, it leads to the event "Solar Discovery", in which a shadowy, door-sized portal opens in the region ahead of the eclipse. The visiting noble who discovered it says they threw a rock into it, and it was thrown out again as a slab of polished obsidian, and a servant sent through to explore reported a red wasteland beneath an odd-colourd sky. The noble compares it to a folk tale of a land where fairy beings grant visitors great riches, and the Council can vote to allow either the noble who discovered the portal or the noble who owns the land on which it opened to explore it themselves or hire an adventurer.
• Overly Long Name: In the dynasty event "The Archbishop's Fury", the Archbishop tells the Monarch that a "two-bit priest" named Smote Lemongrave has nailed a printed essay to a cathedral door denouncing the Church of the Ninth as corrupt. If the Monarch's reply is "Great name," the Archbishop explains that "Smote" is short for "May-I-be-smote-by-the-Ninth-if-I-ever-prove-unworthy", a name conferred on him by his very religious family.
• Parental Marriage Veto: In "A New Festival?", if the Monarch decides to celebrate the Day of Kinship with a low-key dinner at the Palace for their inner circle of advisors instead of a parade, they may end up getting fall-down drunk with everyone else present and, if they are not already attached, announce their intention to marry one of them. Whichever advisor they marry, the "wedding" is interrupted by the enraged Queen Mother, who demands that the Archbishop annul the marriage immediately (which is easily done, as there's no written record of it).
• Pet the Dog: Of the five wizards that can be summoned for the Sorcery scheme, Athmorel is the most sympathetic toward the Monarch, telling the Grandees that she doesn't believe they deserve a Fate Worse than Death if they ask for one. If they are able to meet her increased asking price anyway, she fulfills her contract, but softens the blow by giving the Monarch the brief ability to see across centuries and realise just how fleeting and inconsequential their struggles are when compared to the vastness of time and space. She finishes by taking them to a distant pasture and turning them into a sheep, but expresses her hope that the grass remains juicy before departing; the Monarch is ultimately happier as a sheep, and the shepherd who tends to their flock muses that he's never seen a more docile animal.
• Phony Psychic: Several possible outcomes of "A Clairvoyant Visit" imply that the noble supposedly having prophetic visions is a charlatan. If the Council vote to have the "prophet" offer a prediction, then the ensuing stat check passes, they will declare that good fortune will bless the Kingdom in the near future, which comes in the form of an advantageous tax treaty with Ashmede. However, immediately after the prediction, the Monarch notices some coins changing hands between the "prophet" and the noble who initially presented them to the royal court. Alternatively, if the Council vote to make the "prophet" an official adviser, their "visions" are all beneficial to their own region at the expense of the other two, leading nobles from those regions to mutter about the Monarch's gullibility.
• The Plague: Several storylines revolve around a disease running rampant across the Kingdom.
  • In "Plague Ship", a Danean ship carrying fine silks and dyes has docked, but the sailors aboard display symptoms of the Creeping Scourge, a sickness that, according to the Marshal, "killed half the Kingdom" years earlier. If the Council allows the sailors ashore or unloads the cargo while keeping the sailors aboard but fails the ensuing stat check, the Creeping Scourge will kill thousands of people, leading to sharp drops in every region's statistics.
  • "The Crystal Pox" sees a region overrun by a disease in which the victims' skin is covered in boils which then crust over in crystals that, according to the Treasurer, can be harvested and sold for a healthy profit. The Council can vote to quarantine the affected region, deliberately spread the pox and harvest the crystals, or do nothing; in the latter two cases, the Kingdom is quickly overrun, leading to declining stats across all three regions (but a significant boost to the Treasury).
  • "A New Plague" is the Kingdom's version of the Dancing Plague of 1518, in which between 50 and 400 residents of Strasbourg danced themselves to death over several weeks.^note The precise cause of the "plague" remains unclear. The KotC version sees an outbreak of frantic dancing in one of the three regions; the Council can vote to quarantine the affected region, outlaw dancing, or do nothing. The latter two options both lead to the plague spreading, and the Council can then vote to infect the nobility as a show of solidarity with the peasantry.
• Playing Both Sides: "A Peasant Uprising" revolves around a group of peasants storming the estate of a noble from one region with surprisingly powerful weapons. In "The Conspiracy Revealed", nobles from the region in which the uprising took place announce that they've intercepted another weapons shipment and have traced it back to nobles from another region, trying to foment peasant unrest on their land. If the Council vote to fund a far-reaching investigation, the Spymaster may discover that it was the third region that was playing the two sides against each other, mostly for their own entertainment.
• Polyamory: In the story event "The Uninvited Guest", the Monarch arrives at their Consort's bedchamber to find them in a state of undress with an NPC noble, who promptly makes excuses to leave. However, if the Monarch tells their Consort they'd like to meet their lover, or the Consort invites them to do so,^note Whether this option appears depends on the Consort's personality. If they are shy, naive, or melancholy, they will be embarrassed by their adultery, and the Monarch may ask to meet their lover, or the Consort may invite them to do so. However, if they are blunt, ill-mannered, or egotistical, they will be unapologetic about their indiscretion, and at most the Monarch can ask them to be more careful. it triggers the event "An Awkward Dinner", and if the dinner goes well, the Monarch, their Consort, and their lover can end up in a polyamorous relationship... and, if the Monarch then persuades the Council to legalise polygamy, they can get married!
• Potty Emergency: The story event "A Late Night Visit" sees a noble stagger into the Monarch's chambers late one evening, drunk as a skunk. They ask the Monarch to tender their apologies to the Archbishop about his hat, which they offer to replace; the privy was occupied and they were desperate. The Archbishop shows up the next day, minus his mitre and furious enough about its profanation to become a Dry Crusader.
• Praetorian Guard: In the first season after the coronation, the Marshal persuades the Monarch to appoint an elite Honour Guard to personally protect them from assassins and other threats. There are five choices, one from each region: battle-hardened veterans from the March, warrior heroes from the North, Knights of the Drowned Rose from the East, battle nuns from the South, and gladiators from the Coast. Each has divided loyalties to the Crown and their region (and, in the battle nuns' case, to the Church) and may participate in a Bodyguard Betrayal if their nobles' scheme reaches its final stage. The Monarch can also choose to hire foreign mercenaries (who are only in it for the money) or not to hire an Honour Guard at all (which can be disastrous if a story event involves an assassination attempt or another direct threat to the Monarch's life).
• Product Placement: For the third stage of the Patricians' Monopoly scheme, they can vote to allow the Monarch to keep the throne, but only as a mascot for their cereal company, Coastbrek. If they succeed, they force the Monarch to include glowing references to their product (particularly its "creamy Coastal crunch", the source of which disgusts the Monarch) in all of their speeches.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: The Chiefs of the North is a faction composed of them, starting with the highest Military value of all the territories, and being the focus of events such as wrestling bears and fighting ice giants.
• The Puppet Cuts His Strings: The nobles rallying behind a claimant are only doing so on the understanding that, once the claimant gets the throne, they'll just be the face of the Kingdom while the nobles hold the true reins of power. However, not only is the claimant free to act as they please if the dynasty is continued, but several schemes, even if they succeed, explicitly feature a "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue revealing that the claimants turned out to be more troublesome than expected.
  • If the Barons' Modernization scheme meets its three objectives, the epilogue notes that the New Model Army quickly fell into disarray thanks to nepotism and corruption on the part of the Barons, while the claimant proved more difficult to control than they hoped.
  • Should the three objectives of the Barons' Propaganda scheme succeed, the epilogue observes that the would-be puppetmasters in the March are already concerned that the new ruler is pulling their own strings.
  • After a successful run of the Counts' Possession scheme, the epilogue notes that the Counts found it more difficult to control a ruler who doesn't have a demon living inside their head.
  • Should the Grandees' Excommunication scheme succeed in its three objectives, the epilogue reveals that despite their claimant's unimpeachable religious credentials, they turned out to be more independent than the Grandees imagined.
  • If the Patricians' Conspiracy scheme passes its final objective, the epilogue remarks that despite squatting on their debts like a dragon on a treasure hoard, the Patricians were surprised to discover their claimant wasn't the obedient puppet they thought them to be.
  • Whether the Subterfuge scheme results in the Monarch being persuaded to step down, murdered, or kept on as a puppet until they outlive their usefulness and are replaced with the region's claimant, the epilogue states that the nobles were profoundly mistaken in their belief that they would continue to hold the reins of power under the new ruler.
  • If the winning region from one reign pursues the Loyalist path in the next reign and succeeds in helping the Monarch realise their ambition, the epilogue notes that rumours began spreading that the nobles had lost control of the Monarch, who consolidated power around their heir.
• Puppet King: Multiple schemes involve the nobles trying to reduce the Monarch to a powerless figurehead who answers to their every command.
  • The Barons' Propaganda scheme involves rallying the people behind their charismatic claimant, and if they reach the third stage, they can vote to offer emergency "assistance" that becomes permanent, rendering the Monarch's title purely ceremonial until their death.
  • The goal of the Counts' Possession scheme is to make the ruler a Meat Puppet King by summoning one of two demons to possess them, forcing them to do the East's bidding on behalf of their claimant until they go insane from the voices in their head and die in madness.
  • One possible outcome for the Patricians' Monopoly scheme involves the Monarch being allowed to keep the throne, but only as a corporate mascot for the Patricians, who hold the true reins of power.
  • The Doppelganger scheme revolves around finding a lookalike for the Monarch, whom they lure into a trap in which the ruler is murdered and replaced with the double. The double, a peasant from the scheming region, has no real power and immediately abdicates in favour of the region's claimant.
  • The Intimidation scheme entails bribing or Blackmailing the Palace Watch into either swearing loyalty to the region's claimant or stepping down in favour of soldiers more loyal to the region. For the final stage of the scheme, they can vote to threaten the Monarch with assassination unless they are completely obedient (an arrangement that lasts until the Monarch dies in a Hunting "Accident").
  • If the Subterfuge scheme reaches its third stage, the nobles can vote to render the Monarch's presence on the throne purely ornamental while the new advisors make all the real decisions (until the Monarch outlives their usefulness and is quietly disposed of).
  • If one of the regions succeeds in getting their claimant onto the throne, continuing the Dynasty reveals that the nobles from that region - whichever it may be - are hoping that they will make all the important decisions while the Monarch just does as they're told, and they begin making backup plans immediately just in case they decide the Monarch can't be relied upon to be a mindless puppet.
• The Purge:
  • For the third stage of the Barons' Propaganda scheme, they can vote to simply send their claimant to the Palace at the head of an army of loyal soldiers armed to the teeth and seize power in a violent coup. If they pass their final objective, they assassinate not just the Monarch, but everyone loyal to the old regime - advisors, staff, and the Consort if they try to defend the Monarch.
  • If the Intimidation scheme reaches its third objective, the region in question can vote to bribe the Palace Watch to allow their soldiers to assassinate the Monarch. In the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, it is revealed that the nobles also massacre the Monarch's supporters, and the Palace staff are still cleaning up the blood weeks later, while the peasantry mutter that reigns born in blood often die in blood.
• Pyrrhic Victory: There are multiple scenarios in which the Monarch or the nobles win the battle but lose the war for the throne.
  • If a region rebels while one or more regions are in the third stage of their scheme and the loyalists successfully quash the rebellion, it is possible for the Kingdom and/or regions' statistics to align in the right way for one of the regions to meet their third objective (particularly if their final goal is to get their Defiance down to a certain level, or Authority or Stability up to a certain level), so that the Monarch puts down the rebellion and immediately loses the throne anyway (potentially to the same region that rebelled).
  • In the Barons' Modernization scheme, the March leads the way in much-needed military reforms, which it plans to use to storm the capital and secure the throne. However, if the scheme succeeds, the epilogue reveals that the New Model Army promptly fell back into chaos thanks to the Barons' corruption, and the claimant they assumed would be a Puppet King immediately cut their strings and began thinking and acting for themselves.

Q - Z

• Read the Fine Print:
  • For the second objective of the Barons' Modernization scheme, they have the Monarch sign their reforms into law while sneaking in several clauses handing the chain of command of the New Model Army to the March, after which they can vote to either lead their forces in an assault on the capital or demand the Monarch surrender the throne to their claimant.
  • If the Patricians' Conspiracy scheme achieves its first objective, they "kindly" offer the Treasury a loan to cover the Kingdom's massive debts, but they deliberately insert all manner of clauses in the fine print that result in exponential accumulation of interest. The Treasurer doesn't bother reading the fine print and unwittingly signs the throne away.
• Rebellious Princess: Or Rebel Prince or Royal Heir if the Monarch is male or non-binary. If the Monarch tells the Queen Mother or Chancellor they refuse to get married because they are already in love with a commoner, the ensuing event "A Secret Romance" reveals that they met their beloved years earlier when they got bored of Palace life and decided to sneak away and explore life on the outside.
• Riches to Rags: Several of the schemes involve the Monarch being deposed but not killed, often reduced to poverty (though not always misery).
  • If the Barons' Modernization scheme reaches its final stage, they can vote to force the Monarch to abdicate under threat of turning the New Model Army against them, while if the Chiefs' Ragnarok scheme reaches its final stage, they can send the ice giants against the capital and then "save" the Kingdom at the eleventh hour before suggesting the Monarch step aside in favour of a stronger ruler; in both cases, if the Monarch accepts, they live out their days peacefully on a farm miles from anywhere, and few people are said to miss them.
  • The Grandees' Excommunication scheme entails putting together enough "evidence" for the Church to condemn the Monarch as a heretic in a Kangaroo Court, after which they are thrown out of the Palace and end their days begging on the streets until dying from an infected blister.
  • For the final stage of the Grandees' Fervour scheme, they can vote to use the population's belief in their claimant as The Chosen One to march on the capital in a holy war and demand the Monarch's exile, while if the Witch Hunt scheme reaches its last stage, the Grandees can vote to coerce the Monarch into abdicating as penance for their "heresy". In both cases, if the Monarch gives in, they are forced to join a monastery or convent and take a vow of silence, forced into a life of austere religious contemplation.
  • If the Patricians' Conspiracy scheme reaches its final stage, they can vote to either bleed the whole Kingdom dry financially until they can forcibly evict the Monarch, or offer to cancel all debts in exchange for the throne, while if the Monopoly scheme reaches its third phase, the Patricians can vote to tighten their grip on the economy until it collapses, then, as in the Conspiracy scheme, evict them for non-payment of rent on the Palace. In all cases, if the Monarch accepts their fate, they spend the rest of their life as a sheep farmer, ten miles from the nearest village. After adjusting to getting up at dawn every day to muck out stables, they ultimately decide their new life has its pleasures.
  • For the final stage of the Subterfuge scheme, the Monarch's new inner circle of scheming nobles can demand that they abdicate immediately in exchange for a modest stipend to live in obscurity on a remote farm, as in the Modernization, Ragnarok, Conspiracy, and Monopoly schemes. If the Monarch accepts, the outcome is the same as it is for the other schemes, with the Monarch leading a meagre but happy existence herding sheep.
• The Rich Want to Be Richer: Various story events and schemes show that nobles from all regions (but especially the Coast), no matter how much money they already have, would rather profit from a venture than explore its possible benefits to the Kingdom (at best, they may offer to do both of those things at once), and trying to force them to do otherwise causes a jump in Defiance.
  • In "A Miraculous Discovery", a peasant who works on one of the nobles' lands tells the Monarch that she got lost and ran out of water when the Ninth God Himself made a spring appear and bade her drink, revealing that the water has healing powers. The Archbishop is delighted and wants to make the spring a pilgrimage site, while the landowning noble insists they must charge admission, claiming that the spring is the region's reward for its faith and that the Ninth would want them to profit from it.
  • "A Mercantile Complaint" sees a merchant petition the Monarch to break up an Executive Charter granting exclusive control over the export of a region's most widely traded goods^note Copper and furs for the March, wool and tallow for the North, silver and lumber for the East, perfumes and dyes for the South, jewellery and glassware for the Coast. to a group of nobles from that region, giving them absolute control over prices at the expense of small business owners such as the petitioner. The Council can vote to revoke the Charter, or they may decide instead to declare the monopoly to be "just good business" or funnel some of the bribes to the Treasury to persuade the Monarch to look the other way (while the petitioner is found dead in an alleyway... "probably just a coincidence", says the narration).
  • In "A Booming Crop", a scholar tells the Monarch that one of the regions' farms is producing an extraordinary crop in vast quantities (Marcher barley that can be brewed into beer that doesn't cause hangovers, Northern turnips the size of houses, Eastern cabbages that cure nightmares, Southern wheat that can be made into bread of which a single slice is enough sustenance for a day, or Coastal lemons whose juice can be used as an antiseptic), which could revolutionise the Kingdom's agriculture. The nobles from the region are outraged at the idea, as they are in the middle of negotiating a deal with Tavallin that could make them a fortune from the crop.
  • The event "A Brand New Harvester" involves the invention of a new "wheat-eater" that can harvest grain much faster than a crowd of peasants with scythes, but the region in which the device was invented has no interest in sharing it, as they'd rather reap the rewards (in several senses) for themselves alone.
  • "A Tasty Innovation!" spoofs the apocryphal story of the sandwich's creation as a noble produces a slice of meat between two slices of bread, which a servant made for them during a long gambling session, and announces their intention to name the new food after themselves... and collect royalties on them whenever they are consumed.
  • Several of the already-wealthy Patricians' schemes involve not just getting the throne, but making themselves even more insanely rich in the process.
    • The Conspiracy scheme involves the Patricians giving the Treasury a loan with astronomical interest rates, then buying up the debts of the other two regions and hiking their interest rates as well. For the third stage, the Coast can vote to keep putting the squeeze on the rest of the country until the Monarch is forced to sell the Palace for some quick cash and live in it as a tenant, after which they will be evicted for non-payment of rent.
    • In the Monopoly scheme, the Patricians privatise the entire Kingdom by buying up land, roads, bridges, and other Crown-owned entities, then charging a fortune in tolls and taxes for their use. For the third stage, they can vote to keep bleeding the Kingdom for wealth until the economy collapses, with peasants unable to buy bread and merchants jumping off towers after losing their businesses, all while the Patricians get richer and richer. As in the Conspiracy scheme, the Monarch is forced to sell the Palace to the Patricians, then thrown out for falling behind on the rent.
• Riddle of the Sphinx: In "Easing the Tension", one of the options for achieving the title objective is a game of riddles with a 1000 gold prize. The court jester acts as the chief riddler, but the nobles immediately recognise the first riddle as the sphinx's riddle to Oedipus and shout out the answer before the jester can get more than a few words in; the jester responds by breaking out some "new material" which isn't nearly as widely known.
  Jester: Prithee, what walks on four legs in the -
  Noble 1: MAN! It's man!
  Noble 2: By the Ninth, that was an easy one!
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: In the Conquest ambition, the Kingdom declares war on the neighbouring Ashmedean Empire, which is larger but torn apart by internal strife. If the ambition succeeds, whether the Monarch leads the military from the front or spends the war in a tent looking at maps and discussing strategy with the Marshal, they are hailed as a great leader by the common folk, although at the cost of spending the rest of their reign fighting endless battles to gain new territory or re-gain lost territory.
• Scare Quotes: If the Chiefs' Prophecy scheme is poised to reach its second objective, it triggers the potential stalling event "Pagan Prophecies", which opens with the High Inquisitor expressing her disdain for the North's pagan traditions by telling the Monarch that the North's "'godspeakers' have 'uncovered' an 'ancient' 'prophecy'."
• Science Is Bad: The higher a region's Faith, the more likely it is the nobles and common folk alike look down on science as heresy; this is especially true of the South. For example, in the story event "Stargazing", a scholar from Quayle University tells the Monarch that they have found the perfect spot for an observatory, but the Grandee who owns the land refuses to let them build it, claiming that the stars are just as near as the Ninth God intended. If the Council votes to construct the observatory anyway but the ensuing Authority check fails, the local peasants attack the builders until the project is abandoned.
• The Scottish Trope: "A Fossil Unearthed" may spawn as the result of a successful building auction, and it opens with a noble reporting an expansion to the building that has run into problems after workers found enormous fossils on the premises. They lower their voice as they explain that the bones are believed to be from a "flying reptile", their preferred euphemism for "dragon"; the narration notes that it has been seven centuries since a dragon was last seen in the Kingdom, but such was the devastation it wrought that people are still afraid to say the word "dragon".
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: The Patricians are the wealthiest of the five factions of nobles, and their region-specific schemes involve leveraging their money into taking over the throne, whether by offering "generous" loans at high interest rates to cover the rest of the Kingdom's debts and re-possessing everything up to and including the throne if they are not repaid, bribing the entire Palace hierarchy and either buying a guilty verdict for the Monarch in a bribery scandal or auctioning off the throne, or buying up the Kingdom for their own private enterprises at the considerable expense of the Monarch and the other regions. In each case, they effectively tell the Monarch, "We're too rich for you to refuse us."
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • If the Kingdom's Stability drops to zero, triggering the "All is Lost!" event, the Spymaster tells the Monarch that the Treasurer has fled the popular uprising against the Monarch - and taken most of the contents of the Treasury with her. She also flees with most of the Treasury in the Grandees' Witch Hunt scheme if they vote to force the Monarch to abdicate, but the Monarch refuses and has the High Inquisitor arrested, sparking a kingdomwide Angry Mob.
  • If the Kingdom's Treasury drops to zero, setting up the "Bankrupt!" event, the Treasurer tells the Monarch that the military have mutinied over being unpaid. Instead of trying to talk them down (which ends badly), the Monarch can try to flee the capital on horseback, but their daydreams of revenge cause them to stop paying attention to where they are going, and they are killed when they are knocked off their horse by a low-hanging sign and bash their brains out on the cobblestones.
  • If the Kingdom's Authority drops to zero during a Rebellion, the loyalist regions will try to persuade the Monarch to abdicate, explaining that they are clearly incapable of defeating the rebels, with whom the loyal regions have agreed a truce if the Monarch steps down. If the Monarch agrees to abdicate, they may choose to flee the night before the formal handover of power to the rebels' claimant, hiring a ship to cross the Ghost Sea and seek their fortunes elsewhere.
  • If the Kingdom goes too far in pursuing war with the Ashmedean Empire outside the Conquest ambition, the Ashmedeans may settle their internal differences and storm the Kingdom with building-sized Immortal golems. Faced with imminent defeat, the Monarch can decide to flee the capital to save their own skin, but they don't get far before an Angry Mob of commoners attacks them for abandoning them to the enemy.
  • If the Barons pursue the Modernization scheme and vote to lead the New Model Army in an attack on the capital, or if they pursue the Propaganda scheme and vote to provoke civil unrest which their claimant will offer to "assist" in putting down as a first step to taking over the throne, the Monarch may choose to run away (with their Consort, if they are Happily Married), forsaking the throne for the life of an adventurer in the distant land of Valamyr. The epilogue remarks that that's a story for another time...
  • If the Grandees decide, for the final phase of the Fervour scheme, to attack the capital as part of a holy crusade, the Council may vote to persuade the Monarch to abdicate before the Southern army arrives. However, the Monarch may decide to run away the night before and charter a ship to Danea, where they live out their life as an innkeeper.
  • If the Sorcery scheme fails, the wizard recruited by the nobles will get tired of their political machinations and leave, sometimes after subjecting the noble leading the scheme to an unpleasant fate (Gordias incinerates the lead Baron in a fireball, Brzzkt traps the lead Chief in an inescapable bubble of silence, Pestia gives the lead Count a case of explosive haemorrhoids, and Scrampton feeds the lead Patrician to a kraken).
  • If the previous Monarch was forced off the throne by a claimant, their heir may return in the following reign in the dynasty event "The Rightful Heir", appealing for their parent's home region's help in regaining the throne. If they lead an army on the capital, the Monarch may decide they're sick of the throne and voluntarily step down in favour of the former heir. They charter a ship to Kirth and become a famous anti-monarchist orator.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: In the East's version of the story event "Missing Nobles", a group of nobles go missing near the remote estate of one of the Counts; if they are found in Illarion's Haunt, they offer the Monarch a teapot they found in a bog. If the Monarch decides to deposit the teapot in the treasury, it leads to the later event "Fire!", which, as is evident from the title, involves the Palace being consumed by fire; the teapot contained the spirit of Illarion, the last King of the independent East, who now takes the form of a sentient fireball. Even if the Monarch passes the stat checks necessary to stop Illarion from killing them, the Palace burns to the ground, taking most of the Treasury with it.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: In the Beloved ambition, the Monarch becomes a champion of the commoners, passing sweeping reforms to improve their welfare. In the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, it is revealed that the reforms were promptly undone after the Monarch's death (but the peasants thought it was nice while it lasted).
• Shaped Like Itself: The official name of the kingdom in which the game takes place is... the Kingdom.
• Shoot the Messenger: If a defiant region begins rebelling against the Monarch's authority, they will send a messenger to the court to formally declare war on them. The Monarch can either let them go with a threat, which lowers their Authority, or have them arrested and executed on the spot, which keeps it intact but lowers Stability due to violating The Laws and Customs of War.
• Shout-Out:
  • A developer stream confirmed that the coronation event in which the Monarch is carried through the city on a shield, only to be dropped facefirst into a puddle when one of the shieldbearers trips on a cobblestone, is a tribute to the Running Gag in the Asterix books of Chief Vitalstatistix falling off the shield on which he is carried everywhere.
  • If the Doppelganger scheme fails, the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue says that all that remains of the plot is a forgotten prisoner in an iron mask, shrouded in rumour, a reference to Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers sequel The Vicomte of Bragelonne, which features the Trope Namer for Man in the Iron Mask, the identical twin of the king.
  • The achievement for the Monarch marrying Prince Glorb of the finfolk is called "The Shape of Water", a reference to said film's romance between a human and an amphibious creature.
  • "Shark Attacks" is a story event involving, as the title makes apparent, attacks by a man-eating shark, but a noble from the affected region is adamant that the beaches remain open for fear of losing income from tourism, a reference to the plot of Jaws.^note  The noble who protests the closing of the beach is referred to in the game's code as "MAYOR_FROM_JAWS". One possible solution involves sending a Quint-like adventurer after the shark, whose opening line may be "Dead eyes. Like a doll's eyes," a paraphrase of a similar comment Quint made about sharks.^note  Although, in context, the adventurer is thinking about their landlord, to whom they owe rent.
  • The story event "A Theft!" involves a Baron and a rival noble arguing over the apparent theft of a ring, which the Baron intends to be used in a relative's upcoming marriage... only to discover said relative is marrying a member of the rival noble's family, and if the marriage is prohibited, they may take simulated poison that makes them appear dead for long enough to divert attention while they elope with their beloved. In case the Romeo and Juliet parallels aren't obvious enough, if the Monarch and/or Council condemn the union, a later story event, "Bad Press", involves an in-universe shout-out as a play is written about the romance, named for the young lovers and negatively portraying the Monarch and the nobles. The Monarch can demand that the playwright accept a commission for a new, more cheerful play called Midwinter's Day, a tale of "misunderstandings, mistaken identities, and characters being turned into animals" that is a clear nod to A Midsummer Night's Dream.
  • In the "Dangerous Roads" event, a randomly chosen region develops a problem with bandits; if it is allowed to grow out of control, it leads to the "Overrun by Bandits" event, in one version of which the Monarch is told that the people regard the bandits' leader, Thomas Greensleeves, as a folk hero and hide him whenever the sheriff tries to arrest him. The fact that Greensleeves claims to steal from the rich and give to the poor makes him an obvious reference to Robin Hood, while the songs that are said to be written about him are a nod to the 16th century English ballad "Greensleeves".^note  Which was probably not, contrary to rumour, composed by Henry VIII, as it owes a stylistic debt to an Italian musical tradition that did not reach England until after Henry's death. If the Monarch has Greensleeves murdered by bounty hunters, the ballads shift to paint them as a tyrant, playing the same role as Prince John in the Robin Hood mythos.
  • In the "Escaped Experiment" story event, a creature stitched together from human corpses has been alarming the peasants in villages near the castle of one of the Counts of the East, who claims responsibility for creating the creature, a lift from the plot of Frankenstein.
  • If a dynasty is continued after a successful run of the Barons' Gunpowder scheme that ends with the Palace being blown up, the event "A Smoking Crater" focuses on re-building the Palace. One of the other nobles will curse out the Barons for their demolition by saying "[Y]ou blew it up! Damn you! Ninth damn you all to the Seven Hells!", a nod to the final line of Planet of the Apes (1968).
  • In the storyline that begins with "A Contentious Sale", a bear claimed by a Chief of the North to have the mark of Skurinorn, Northern goddess of medicine and knowledge, is purchased by a noble from another region for their menagerie. If the Council vote to give the bear to the other noble, it will struggle in its new environment, and the Council can vote to bring in a second bear. This in turn can result in a group of cubs being born, one of which may be adopted by the Palace, where it is said to cause mischief and steal marmalade... just like the title character in Paddington Bear.
  • "The Printing Press" sees the invention of the title object, and if the Council vote that it can be used either only by the Church or freely by anyone, it may lead to the dynasty event "The Archbishop's Fury", in which the Archbishop protests to the Monarch over a priest named Smote Lemongrave nailing a letter to a cathedral door denouncing the Church as corrupt, particularly for selling "premium tickets to a cushy afterlife at a hundred gold a pop". This marks Lemongrave as the KotC version of Martin Luther, the German theologian who allegedly nailed a copy of his Ninety-five Theses, a list of grievances against the Catholic Church (especially the sale of indulgences^note Certificates claiming to reduce the amount of time a sinner had to spend in purgatory after death.), to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg in 1517.^note Even though it is often mentioned as a seminal moment in the early Protestant Reformation, many historians doubt that Luther really nailed a copy of the Theses to the church door.
  • In one of the Southern versions of "A Matter of Faith", one of the Grandees asks the Monarch for Treasury funds after a Southern artist named Galbia had a vision from the Ninth God of an elaborate fresco (most of the subjects in which are said to be nude) painted on the ceiling of the cathedral in Calebra, a reference to Michelangelo Buonarroti's decoration of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
  • "Jailbreak!" sees the escape of a noble imprisoned in a previous event, and the person who passes the news to the Monarch explains that they concealed their escape tunnel behind an oil painting of cavorting nymphs, a reference to Andy Dufresne concealing his escape tunnel behind posters of first Rita Hayworth, then Marilyn Monroe, then Raquel Welch in The Shawshank Redemption.
  • One of the options to deal with the title coins in "Counterfeit Currency" is to invent a new coin that is harder to counterfeit. The solution involves putting ridges around the edges of the coins, a reference to the practice of reeding as introduced in England in 1698 at the recommendation of Sir Isaac Newton.
  • If the Council vote to approve subsidies for beekeeping in one of the three regions for either sap-encased bee jewellery in "The Latest Trend" or honeyed mead in "The Finest Mead", the later event "Bees!" finds the Archbishop protesting the effect the hives are having on the regions' peasants, despite denials from the noble who suggested the idea. If the Council vote to burn the hives, the noble's reaction is "Not the bees! Not the bees! Noooauurrghhh!", a reference to one of the most iconic lines from The Wicker Man (2006).
• Shrinking Violet: The candidates for the Monarch's spouse in "Eligible Options" sometimes include a shy noble who, if chosen, will blush every time anyone looks at them during the wedding festivities and, when they are alone with their royal partner, can only stammer "Um... Hello." They can eventually emerge from their shell if the Monarch offers them the time and space to do so rather than forcing the issue.
• Side Bet: Several story events, particularly those involving the wealthy Patricians of the Coast, involve nobles making bets with each other (or with the Monarch) over the outcome of an event.
  • "Red Hot Chillies" involves the South sponsoring a "hottest pepper" growing competition between the other two regions, but as the event begins, the nobles are also placing bets to see who can chew the other's pepper for the longest. Once the initial round is over, the Monarch can put some money on the line to compete against the winner.
  • In "A Risky Wager", a Patrician has wagered their life savings against those of a noble from another region in a boat race around the coast (which lasts through the following three seasons). Both competitors appeal for royal sponsorship, but whether the Monarch sponsors either, neither, or both of them, as the race gets under way, another Patrician asks if the Monarch would like to make a wager on the outcome.
  • If the Monarch accepts the invitation to the Summer Games in the Coast's version of "An Invitation", whether they ask to watch a fight between two gladiators or a fight between a gladiator and a wild beast, they will be told by their Patrician host that half the fun of the games is betting on the outcome, and whichever combatant the Monarch bets on to win, the Patrician will bet on the other.
• The Siege: A common tactic for a single-region Rebellion is to lay siege to the Kingdom's capital in the hope that cutting off the city's supply routes will starve them into surrendering. The success of this approach depends on both stat checks and the willingness (or lack thereof) of loyalist regions to send their armies to break the siege in the Monarch's defence.
• Snake Oil Salesman: When tax season rolls around, one of the possible sources of additional Wealth in the Coast is "snake oil" that the Patricians claim cures scrofula, netting themselves a tidy 500 Wealth from the gullible peasantry.
• Stealing the Credit: In the event "A Tasty Innovation!"^* Loosely based on the apocryphal origins of the sandwich, a noble presents the Monarch with a new kind of snackfood - a selection of meats and delicacies served between two slices of bread - that their servant made for them during a card game and asks to patent the dish in their name, on the grounds that it was created by their servant and he wouldn't have done so had they not vaguely requested a snack. The Council can vote to acknowledge the noble's claim (and if so, how best to mete out the royalties for the invention), or subvert this and give proper credit to the servant for the snack's creation, naming it the Footlong (after the servant's very large feet) in his honor.
• String Theory: If the winning region from one reign pursues the Loyalist scheme in the next, then one of the other regions passes the first objective of its own scheme, the event "Plots and Counterplots" sees the loyalist nobles sorting through letters and other correspondence in a room with a corkboard on one wall, criss-crossed with pieces of string in multiple colours, implied to connect pieces of evidence relating to the other schemes.
• Stripped to the Bone:
  • If the Counts vote to summon Belpheminar, the Hungering Absence, for the third phase of the Blood Ritual scheme and pass their final objective, then if the Monarch refuses to surrender, their body is covered by a swarm of insects that devour their flesh, leaving only a skeleton.
  • If the Sorcery scheme passes its third objective and the nobles have voted to condemn the Monarch to a Fate Worse than Death, the Monarch may try summoning the Honour Guard, always to no avail. If the wizard is Gordias (allied with the Barons), he will flay the guards' flesh from their bones, leaving charred skeletons and piles of "goop", while if the wizard is Athmorel (allied with the Grandees), she will electrocute them, frying them to "crispy" skeletons.
  • In "A Call for Apprentices", one of Athmorel, Brzzkt, Gordias, or Pestia moves to a town in one of the three regions and advertises for an apprentice, and a noble from another region states their plans to apply. If the Council vote to allow the apprenticeship to go forward but do not require that the noble forfeit their title first, there are two possible sequel events that involve someone being reduced to a skeleton.
    • In "Inappropriate Magic", one of the apprentice's rival nobles shows up in a Council session in utter agony, their flesh having withered away to leave only a skeleton (that soon collapses into a pile of bones). The sheepish apprentice explains that they only intended the spell to give their rival a toothache as revenge for stealing their prized Aateshi toothbrush.
    • In "Cast Out", it is the apprentice themselves who is reduced to a skeleton, and they angrily inform the Monarch that the wizard said they had no discernible magical talent whatsoever before dismissing them. The Council may try to prosecute the wizard for "skeletonization", but the wizard ignores them, and whatever they do, the apprentice drops dead after the magic animating their skeleton wears off.
• Stuff Blowing Up: For the third phase of the Barons' Gunpowder scheme, they can vote to sneak their entire stockpile of gunpowder into the foundations of the Palace to blow it up. If they meet their third objective, the Monarch and a search party find the powder while carrying burning torches, and a stray spark reduces the Palace and everyone in it to a smouldering crater.
• Summon Bigger Fish: "Itching for a Fight", which can spawn if the March is one of the three regions, sees the Barons shaping their army into an elite fighting force and asking the Monarch to give them someone to attack. One option is the Ashmedean Empire, which is plagued by internal strife. The Empire eventually sends golems into battle, but if they are defeated, the Ashmedeans seek a truce. However, if the Council refuses in favour of continuing the war, the warring factions in Ashmede settle their differences and summon Immortal golems, larger than churches and impossible to defeat. This leads to an immediate Nonstandard Game Over as the Kingdom is overrun and the Monarch is captured and executed.
• Taken for Granite:
  • The story event "The Stone Maiden" sees the appearance of a Living Statue whose gaze petrifies all who meet it, including an unfortunate noble who is brought before the Council in their new stone form.
  • The Counts' Ascension scheme entails persuading the Monarch to give up the throne in exchange for initiation into a secret society of immortal vampires. However, if the Monarch loses their nerve during the ceremony and tries to back out, the ritual is disrupted, and the Monarch is turned into a statue.
  • If the Barons pursue the Sorcery scheme and vote to have Gordias inflict a Fate Worse than Death on the Monarch, then meet their third objective, Gordias will tell the Monarch that he was turned into a stone statue by the Triumvirs of Sarakan, but had enough magic powers to re-gain the ability to move and speak. However, as he casts a spell to turn the Monarch into a statue, he remarks that they will probably not be so fortunate.
• Take That!: In-universe, the story event "A Laughing Stock" involves a popular new play in which the Monarch is portrayed as an incompetent buffoon, played by a professional clown named Biffo who is a dead ringer for the Monarch. The Monarch can turn this to their advantage by attending the play personally and praising the performers for a job well done, thereby persuading the audience that they have a sense of humour about themselves.
• Taking the Bullet: The story event "A Saalish Assassin" can spawn if the Monarch successfully woos Prince Glorb away from the Archduke of Saal. The Archduke decides that if he can't have Glorb, no-one can, and he sends a crossbow-wielding assassin to the Palace gardens to shoot Glorb. The Monarch can choose to jump in front of Glorb and take the bolt instead; this requires passing a stat check to survive unless they have an Honour Guard, one of whom will jump in front of the Monarch and take the bolt.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: One of the nobles' favourite ways to get rid of the Monarch, whether before or after ousting them from power, is with good old-fashioned poison in their meals.
  • Should the Gunpowder scheme end with the Barons voting to march on the capital with gunpowder-driven weapons and force the Monarch off the throne, they will be imprisoned for long enough to placate the peasantry while the March's claimant solidifies their rule. When they have outlived their usefulness, they are murdered with poisoned gruel.
  • If the Patricians' Corruption scheme ends with the Monarch being removed from power after the Patricians accuse the Monarch of being the corrupt one and "saving" the Kingdom from their excesses, they are thrown in the dungeon, and before the next Monarch is crowned, someone "accidentally" spills arsenic into the now ex-Monarch's porridge.
  • The region behind the Subterfuge scheme can vote to demand the Monarch's abdication once they have replaced their advisors with members of their own nobility. If the Monarch refuses, they are soon killed when poison is injected into their boiled egg at breakfast.
  • One possible option during a Rebellion is for the rebels to hire an assassin to kill the Monarch, which gives them an instant victory if the plan succeeds. The assassin may pour a poison called Ainwick's Cascader into the Monarch's wine which causes them to turn purple and swell up like a blueberry before exploding (with anyone hit by their bloody remains meeting the same fate); however, if the Monarch has an Honour Guard, part of whose job is tasting the royal food and drink, they will fall victim to the poison instead (unless they are from the rebelling region, in which case they are Playing Sick). If the Consort is an amateur scientist and Happily Married to the Monarch, they will smell the poison and knock the wine glass out of the Monarch's hand before they can take a sip.
• Targeted Human Sacrifice: The Chiefs' Prophecy scheme sees the North's claimant held up as a great ruler whose coming was foretold in old legends. If they reach the final stage, they can vote to either sacrifice animals to appease the old gods and bring down a blizzard on the Kingdom (whatever the season), thereby allowing them to sack the capital and take the throne, or invite the Monarch to the North and then sacrifice them, satisfying the gods and clearing the path to the throne in one fell swoop.
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: The title character in the story event "Your Distant Cousin" is the Monarch's useless relative Lord Fitzalbert, who is being put up (and/or put up with) by a noble whose personal finances have finally reached breaking point. The Council can vote to have Fitzalbert moved to the Palace instead, where he becomes a drain on the Treasury as he pursues all manner of half-baked schemes to make himself rich and/or respectable, nearly all of which backfire in embarrassing fashion and increase the Monarch's desperation to be rid of him.
• Total Eclipse of the Plot: The story event chain that begins with "A Prediction" revolves around a self-styled amateur astronomer noble from the region with the lowest Faith announcing a total solar eclipse that will be visible from their home region later in the year, which they hope visitors will flock to the region to witness. A noble from the region with the highest Faith balks at the idea, saying that eclipses are a sign that the Kingdom has fallen to shadow figuratively as well as literally. On the day of the eclipse, the capital merely has a greyer sky than usual, but the outcomes in the region of totality range from the predictor of the eclipse becoming host to a demon (if the Council vote to seek holy protection against the eclipse) to a shadowy, door-sized portal opening to Another Dimension (if the Council vote to encourage visitors) to a wizard harnessing the power of the eclipse to produce riches from the ground (if the Council vote to make the region focus on its land, not the sky).
• The Tourney: The Barons of the March love a good joust and regularly hold tournaments. "The Jousting Tournament" involves the Monarch being invited to a contest, and they can either sponsor one of the knights in the tournament or declare their intent to compete themselves; if the Monarch competes openly, their opponents will deliberately lose out of fear of retaliation for injuring the ruler, but if they don a Secret Identity, they will actually get a proper fight out of their opponents.
• Trap Door: If the Monarch pursues the Tyranny ambition, they'll install one of these in their throne room that drops people into a snake pit, which the Marshal approves of. If they succeed at this ambition, they can even use it on an uppity noble that threatens to rebel, immediately silencing the others.
• Trial by Combat:
  • In years gone by, the official justice system for the Barons of the March was the jousting arena, and if jousting comes back into fashion in the March thanks to royal patronage, they may ask to revive this system as a replacement for the courts.
  • The Northern tradition of "Morgana's justice" involves accused criminals fighting for their innocence in battle. For example, if the story chain that begins with "Border Raids" involves the Chief accused of leading said raids being imprisoned to await trial, they will insist that the trial take place in the arena rather than the courtroom, with their opponent chosen by the Monarch.
  • The Grandees of the South are firm believers in the virtues of allowing accused criminals to "demonstrate" their innocence in arena fights, and several potential story events revolve around a randomly chosen Grandee demanding their right to trial by combat after they are implicated in a crime. The Monarch can refuse, risking a spike in Defiance, or accept and nominate a champion to face the accused (or even do so themself).
• Turncoat: As the Chancellor warns the Monarch at the beginning of a dynasty, "when the nobles get restless, they take their daggers and look for the nearest back." As such, several events involve opportunistic nobles or soldiers betraying their erstwhile allies for the right price:
  • If one region rebels, there's nothing that says the loyalist regions must follow orders, even if their Defiance is too low to allow them to join the Rebellion, hence the Marshal's observation that "treachery can thrive on a battlefield". For example, if they are ordered to attack the rebels, they can simply sit back and let them march on the Capital instead. And if their Defiance does rise above both Authority and Stability, they can perform a Face–Heel Turn and join the Rebellion (and possibly get their claimant onto the throne if their other statistics are high enough). On the other hand, "Defectors" involves rebel soldiers breaking away and joining the loyalists (who initially regard them with suspicion).
  • If, in "The Gossamer Shield", the Council vote to have the title Eastern order of knights join the Palace Watch to restore them to glory, the Marshal grows suspicious of their apparent riches, and if the Spymaster is asked to investigate, she discovers that they are passing state secrets to the Gaunt of Tavallin. The Council can vote to have them executed as traitors, possibly along with the Count who originally brought the order's "fall" to the Monarch's attention.
  • The dynasty event "An Ironic Execution?" involves the discovery that the scion of the family for whom the Kingdom's version of the guillotine is named has been passing military secrets to Ashmede for financial gain. If they are condemned as a traitor, they protest that they were promised by the Monarch that, as a reward for inventing the device, their family would never be executed with it; the Council can follow the letter of this alleged promise by having them shot full of arrows instead.
  • If the noble who breaks out of the dungeons in "Jailbreak!" is a Baron or a Patrician and they are not re-captured, the respective sequel events "The Ashmedean Advisor" and "The Exiled Patrician" see them fleeing to Ashmede (in the Baron's case) or Saal (in the Patrician's case) and passing on details of trade routes, military deployments, and spies. The Council may vote to have the traitor extradited (a request that is usually ignored or rebuffed) or assassinated.
• Überwald: The East, the land of the Counts, is a dark, desolate and highly agrarian place full of dense forests, gloomy wetlands, ancient castles and cemeteries. The region’s peasantry are deeply superstitious and practice strange traditions and rituals, the Counts themselves are black magic practitioners with a fondness for eveningwear and capes, and many of their events deal with some monstrous were-beast or escaped experiment terrorizing the Eastern countryside.
• Undignified Death: Some of the potential fates of the Monarch are particularly embarrassing.
  • If the Patricians' Monopoly scheme succeeds and they vote to turn the Monarch into their corporate mascot, the Monarch will end up drowning in milk while advertising cereal.
  • If the Intimidation scheme succeeds and the nobles vote to have the Monarch assassinated, the Monarch can try to escape by jumping out of their bedroom window... forgetting until it is too late that there is no moat, and they fall hundreds of feet onto cobblestones.
  • If the Treasury is completely emptied and the Kingdom goes bankrupt, the Monarch can opt to flee the Palace on horseback to avoid an angry mob (or, if one or more region is in rebellion, the advancing rebel army). As they ride off, they vow that this is only "a temporary setback" and immediately start dreaming up their triumphant return to the throne, however they get so caught up with their fantasy that they stop looking where they're going and are knocked off their horse by a low-hanging sign, smashing their brains out on the cobblestones in worthless ignominy.
  • If the Monarch's Authority falls to zero and they resign themselves to being a meaningless figurehead, they become morbidly obese and eventually die of a heart attack on the privy.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: The story event "A Curious Curse" involves a Patrician cursed with a set of gills by a sea wizard in retaliation for their tannery polluting the wizard's favourite beach, requiring that the Patrician live in a giant glass globe of murky water. The Council can vote to petition the wizard (either forcibly or politely) to remove the curse, close down the Patrician's tannery, or send the wizard fine cheese and wine. If they choose the last of these, the unfortunate Patrician's globe becomes a fixture of the Council hall, and the other nobles eventually learn to ignore it.
• Victorious Childhood Friend: If the Monarch refuses to marry any of the title characters in "Eligible Options" and tells the Queen Mother or Chancellor that their heart belongs to a lowborn commoner, it sets up a story event in which we learn that this relationship has been going on since the Monarch was very young. They can then decide to stop sneaking around and make their love official by getting married (enchanting the peasantry but causing the Defiance of all three noble factions to spike).
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: The story unfolds based on the decisions of the Monarch and the nobles, and some of the choices are outright sadistic. A gang of ruthless bandits has surrounded a village and threatened to kill them unless the Monarch calls off the soldiers sent to arrest them? Burn down the whole village, bandits and all. A region has been affected by a plague of some sort? Too bad, let them die, and if it spreads to other regions, let them die as well. And while ordinarily, the most vicious decisions lead to plunging Stability and/or skyrocketing Defiance, the Tyranny ambition sees the Monarch establishing their entire reign around cruelty to anyone who opposes them, such as dropping a rebellious noble through a Trap Door into a pit of snakes.
• Weaksauce Weakness: The title charager in "The Stone Maiden" is a Living Statue who turns all who meet her gaze into stone and has risen in one of the regions after years of dormancy, leaving a trail of incredibly detailed stone statues in her wake. If the Council vote to ask for help from a folklorist from Quayle University and pass the ensuing stat check, they learn that the Stone Maiden always stays far inland because she is vulnerable to salt water. Soldiers in the region go on the march against her armed with buckets of seawater and are able to drive her back to her cave, where she returns to her slumber.
• We Are as Mayflies: Of the five wizards who can be recruited for the Sorcery scheme, Athmorel, wizard of storms, is the least sympathetic to the nobles and the most sympathetic to the Monarch. As such, if she is asked to send the Monarch to a Fate Worse than Death, she first allows them a moment to see across many centuries all at once, impressing on them that their life is just a brief moment in the grand scheme of things. (Since Wizards Live Longer in the world of KotC, Athmorel's life is slightly less fleeting.)
• What Did I Do Last Night?:
  • The North's version of the story event "An Invitation" sees the Monarch invited to Winterfeast, a ten-day celebration of food and drink (mostly the latter) at one of the Chiefs' clan halls. If the Monarch decides to throw themselves into the "drink" side of things, they wake up the next morning with a shocking hangover and try to piece together the hazy memories of what they did the previous night (which could be getting into a fight, taking part in a contest, or leading the hall in battle songs).
  • The storyline beginning with "A New Festival?" revolves around the revival of the Day of Kinship, a holiday intended to promote harmony between the Crown and the three regions. After a parade with floats for the Monarch and each region, there is a festival of food and drink, and if the Monarch overdoes it on the wine, they wake up the next morning in the remnants of their parade float with vague memories of what happened the previous night (which could be breaking something, starting a fight, or something involving geese).
• When Trees Attack: In "Low on Lumber", the nobles of one region have been promised a logging contract by the nobles of another region, but the forest targeted for lumber harvesting is said to be haunted. If the Council vote to approve the contract and the ensuing Trade check fails, the trees attack the would-be lumberjacks and go on a rampage across the region, with the human victims harvested as spirits for new trees. Subsequent events may lead to a parley between the Monarch and the trees in which the latter demand that the holder of the logging contract be handed over to them; the Monarch may offer to hand themselves over instead, resulting in an immediate Nonstandard Game Over.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: A round of the game ends with a few statements about what happened to each of the factions in the end, with the text dependent on which side won and what schemes the losing factions were attempting at the time.
• Wine Is Classy: The Grandees of the South certainly think so, as their vineyards are a point of regional pride, and their wines are popular with the nobility at ceremonial dinners and other special events across the Kingdom (except in the North, where they share the peasants' preference for mead); in "A Tale of Two Vineyards", they react with outrage when another region starts its own wineries and demand that they step back to allow the South to retain its monopoly on wine. Several of the Grandees' scheme events also mention wine; if the Fervour scheme passes its second objective, the conspirators toast the Ninth's Herald with glasses of their host's wine, while if the Excommunication scheme fails, the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue notes that the scheme leader and claimant consoled themselves with a bottle of the former's best vintage.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: If the Doppelgänger scheme reaches its final objective, the nobles can vote to orchestrate a famine in their region which requires a personal visit by the Monarch. If the objective succeeds, the Monarch will be murdered and replaced by a lookalike during the visit.
• Written by the Winners:
  • If the Chiefs' Ragnarok scheme reaches its final stage, they can vote to send the ice giants to attack alone and then show up to "save" the Kingdom while murdering the Monarch in the chaos (if they refuse to abdicate). If they choose the latter and succeed, the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue observes that the history books claim the Monarch was killed by the ice giants, not the traitorous Chiefs.
  • If the Patricians reach the final stage of the Corruption scheme, they can choose to publicly accuse the Monarch of being the corrupt one and position themselves as the saviours of the Kingdom. If they succeed, and the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue notes that this perspective is reflected in the history books, referencing this trope by name.
• You Cannot Kill An Idea: In the dynasty event "The Archbishop's Fury", renegade priest Smote Lemongrave takes advantage of the Church of the Ninth's access to printing presses to distribute copies of an essay denouncing the Church as corrupt and in need of reform, one of which he nails to a cathedral door. If the Council vote to accept the High Inquisitor's offer to burn Lemongrave at the stake for heresy, he defiantly declares that his death will not wipe out the people's doubts about the Church's integrity; sure enough, it leads to the formation of the United Separatist Church of Radical Reformation and True Belief (the True Believers for short), while Faith craters Kingdomwide (especially in the region in which the True Believers' church is founded).^note This can also happen if Lemongrave is invited to an audience with the Archbishop, but they are unable to resolve their differences.
• You Dirty Rat!: "A Plague of Rats", as is evident from the title, is about said rodents overrunning the fields and barns of one of the three regions after they run out of rat poison; one of the nobles brings a dead rat to a Council meeting to shock them into acting. They can vote to do nothing or send rat poison, cats, or adventurers to deal with the problem; several of these involve stat checks which, if failed, result in the rats spreading across the Kingdom.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Several schemes end with the throne's current occupant being quietly bumped off when they are no longer useful to the scheming region.
  • The Barons' Gunpowder scheme may see them outfit their military with muskets and cannons and attack the capital. If they succeed, they imprison the Monarch in the dungeons rather than executing them, keeping them alive as a figurehead to placate the peasantry until their claimant solidifies their rule, after which the former Monarch is fed poisoned gruel.
  • The Doppelganger scheme involves finding a perfect double for the Monarch among the region's peasants and then luring the Monarch into a trap to murder them and replace them with the lookalike. The double is immediately made to abdicate in favour of the region's preferred claimant, after which they are killed both to keep them quiet and because they have served their purpose.
  • In the Intimidation scheme, the nobles can use the Palace Watch's purchased loyalty to infiltrate the Palace and threaten to murder the Monarch unless they dance to the nobles' tune. If the Monarch agrees, they are allowed to act as a figurehead for a while, long enough to name the region's claimant as successor, before their death in a "convenient hunting accident".
  • The Subterfuge scheme revolves around the Monarch's inner circle having their credibility destroyed until they are pressured to resign (or disposed of), at which point nobles from the scheming region sweep in to take their place. For the final stage of the scheme, they can vote to allow them to keep the throne, but with no real power. If they succeed, the Monarch is said to outlive their usefulness before long.
  • For the Uprising scheme, a region's nobles stoke revolutionary sentiments among the Kingdom's commonfolk, whipping them into a frenzy to depose the Monarch in favour of a People's Republic. However, the leader of the revolution doesn't get to enjoy executive power for long, as she is assassinated on orders from the nobles behind the revolt, and their region's claimant quickly re-establishes the Monarchy.
• You Lose at Zero Trust: If the Kingdom's Authority, Stability, or Treasury reaches zero, the Monarch automatically loses because their staff thinks they're incompetent, and whichever noble house was closest to winning becomes their successor (or, if two were equally close, a vote is held to determine the successor).

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