publication croisée depuis : https://lemmy.world/post/1892386

Behold, envision a figure of unparalleled greatness, a majestic legend whose name echoes through the ag- Ok I’m doing too much. So, Imagine the king is an absolute legend of a hero, and people think he’s ruling over the land but he’s been dead for 50 years and no one knows, and people create a Mythos about him, saying things he never actually did to want to look cool and say they saw him

  • Infynis@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    There’s an in-world story in the Stormlight Archive about exactly this. The emperor of an island nation is so fearful that no one dares enter his tower. They are generally totally peaceful, but brutally murder anyone that makes a mistake, because their “Emperor won’t suffer failure.”

    The characters in the story go to confront the emperor because they can’t stand for these murders, and find that the emperor is just a desicated corpse because no one has been into the tower for like 50 years. The island is thrown into chaos as the people are forced to come to terms with the fact that they’ve been killing each other for decades for no reason.

    It’s pretty cool

  • anaximander@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    My setting has a kingdom whose last king died and their heir went missing; the last king had become a bit of a mad tyrant when they were alive, so the people are in no hurry to have another one. The country is ruled by a Regent’s Council with the elected Regent as a sort of chairperson. Every session of the Council starts with a statement that the King can’t be present and that the council will make decisions in his stead. It’s been so long that the king’s heir, who was a toddler when the king died, would be middle-aged by now, but they’re in no hurry to find him and the heir himself has no intention of coming forward, if he even knows that he’s technically king. They’ve basically become a democratic republic while still being a kingdom on paper - which is deliberate, because there would be political consequences to not being a kingdom any more. For years everyone’s just politely pretended not to notice.