Of Overlords, Kings and Barons, Building a Feudal Setting Part 15

Continuing a series of posts detailing how I developed the feudal system of the City-State in my Majestic Wilderlands campaign.

The Royal Guard

The head of the Royal Guard is the MARSHAL OF THE ROYAL GUARDS. The Marshal is responsible for the personal protection of the Overlord.

The personal bodyguards of the Overlord. The spiritual descendants of the original Tharian housecarls who were men personally loyal to the chief of the clan.

The Royal Guards also organize the Overlord's Hunts, and his personal herd of horses.

The most important division of the Royal Guard are the Regulators. They are in essence a group of high level adventurers personally loyal to the Overlord and his family. They were established by Lucius the Great in his war against the Tyrant mage Salm-Lorin. Since then the Regulators have hand-picked their successor to maintain their tradition of personal loyalty.

They are headquartered in the dungeon levels underneath the Cryptic Citadel. There they maintain the true magical treasures of the Overlord and undertake missions that no other group can deal with.

This of course leads the question, why if the Overlord has such a powerful group they don't just literally blow up all the enemies of the Overlord. They do deal with some threats in that way, the reality is that other sovereigns have similar groups of their own. These disparate high level groups of adventurer types are basically the nuclear option of the Majestic Wilderlands except that because of the personal nature of most magic they can't wipe out whole realms. Groups of individuals and small area, sure thing.

For all their power, these groups are not particularly effective against the divine powers and are vulnerable to corruption by demons. It is known that extensive use of magic and supernatural powers seems to give the deities more leeway for intervention including liberal use of miraculous resurrection from the dead.

One Regulator after she was initiated remarked, "You mean we have all this and we can't use it to win?! Sometimes I feel I did more when I was just starting out and smashing up skeletons just inside the entrance of the dungeon."

One useful tool to handle this as a referee is to look at how things are handled in the world of comic book superheroes. Writers of Superhero stories have come up with a number of clever ways of integrating super powered being into otherwise normal world.

Under the Marshal of the Royal Guard are:
Captain of the High Guard
5 Companies
Captain of the Low Guard
20 Companies
Master of the Squires
Master of the Hunt
Falconer Royal
Master of the Hounds
Royal Weaponcrafter
Weaponcrafters
Royal Ostler
Ostlers
Captain of the Regulators
Regulators

With this post we conclude this series of posts. I am working on integrating all of this into a PDF that I will release. There will be two releases, the first a 'as is' compilation of all the posts. The second a Bat in the Attic Product that will have a similar setup but in a more polished form with some extras.