Stormrunner
Explorer
Just make a Cloak of Greater Displacement part of the royal robes.s-dub said:
The Throne Room
Quartz
Hero
The throne is probably enchanted to give +6 Enhancement to the mental stats and to Mind Blank the occupant too. The dais on thich the throne stands gives +6 to the physical stats of the bodyguards and Mind Blanks them too - can't have them being charmed into attacking the king - and operates a Protection from Evil effect. The area right in front of the dais, where supplicants and courtiers stand, is a Zone of Truth. etc.
Elethiomel
First Post
Most of these assume that the guards are loyal. How do you protect from disloyal guards (not magically compelled, just bribed, blackmailed, or otherwise convinced getting rid of the King is a good idea)?
Elethiomel said:
well, thats easy...
who needs pesky human guards when you can have constructs? depending on the layout of the throne room, you can have "ceremonial statues" of former kings/regents, and simply make it a golem, activated under a command word from their lord.
a dozen or score of iron golems can make any would-be assassins think twice
Jack Simth
First Post
Fundamentally? You can't. Seriously. Unless you can do everything yourself (in which case, you have no need of a kingdom at all), you're going to have people doing things for you because they're things you want done. If you can't trust them to do the tasks, you can't assign them tasks.Elethiomel said:
Consider a war. The king is in his throne room. He has to trust his scouts to give honest reports of enemy movements. He has to trust his generals/lieutenants to train his armies. He has to trust that those troops he inspected aren't actually a troupe of actors hired for the inspection while the "general" takes the army budget and buys a tropical island to retire on. He has to trust that the weapons he inspected are actually a representative sample of the worksmanship of the smith he's hiring to equip his army. He has to trust that the cooks he hired are buying food from sources that don't poison them.
At best, you can minimize the effects of individual betrayals, or raise the costs of betrayal so that individual betrayals are unlikely. If one judge is making unreasonable rulings, the attorney can bring it to your attention, and you can replace the one judge; he will be removed, and serve as an example that abuse of your position or incompetency in it leads to losing it. If one general is giving funny orders, the other generals will see it, report it, and the same thing happens. If one scout is dishonest, his story won't match up with the ones from the other scouts, and so on. If all your guards are equipped with reach weapons, they have to step out of position before they actually threaten you - stepping out of proper place is going to be a giveaway that something wrong, so the other guards have a chance to react. If they sneak a short-range weapon in, then when you've got two guards with reach weapons adjacent to you, they're threatening each other. There's nothing quite like knowing that if you kill your leige, you won't outlive him by more than six seconds to keep the maybe-disloyal guard in line.
If you face a sizable conspiracy of people you trust, you've already lost. You cannot rule without trusting a sizable number of people.
There's a reason the sword was hanging by a thread over the head of he who wanted to know what it was like to be king in the old tale.
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