#he's already a rather minor god dividing his power more than it is isn't a good plan

[tethys-the-aquatic-sea-godness]

One other thing that bothers me in the Bhaal plot of BG3 is that they made it sound like Bhaal created his Bhaalspawns as... servants? Puppets? And that's never been the purpose of the Bhaalpsawns? Ever? Every new Bhaalspawn he created in BG3 is counterproductive to his plan.

Bhaal knew in advance he would die, so he divided his divine essense into many mortal vessels. Then he charged his faithful (cough) high priestess Amelyssan to ensure every Bhaalspawn was killed after his passing, so that his power could be returned to him and he could be reborn.

Thats' the plan. A plan that's impeded, not helped, by more Bhaalspawns. It means splitting more of his essence.

Bhaal never wanted those spawns, he never intended to keep them, he never wanted a 'perfect child', they were fuel, born to be consumed for his return.

And that Larian has to make their dark urge the one true most *specialest* Bhaalspawn is just... pathetic. Can't find another word for it. They're trying to push aside Gorion's ward entire storyline, two incredible previous games, just to shove in their perfect, most special Bhaalspawn of all Bhaalspawns. And what flesh and blood of Bhaal is the Dark Urge made of? When Cyric killed him, he didn't have a mortal body, he was possessing one. Is the Dark Urge made of the dead flesh and blood of the guy he was possessing? Doesn't feel that special, but sure, go ahead.

I'm not saying their main charatcers shouldn't have been special somehow, it's part of the salt, but they should've have made it special with their own story. Not by trying too hard, and failing, to match the previous two games. I don't know, make the main character special reguarding something Illithid? You know, the supposed main focus of this game?

And yes, they do fail. The original game gives you the opportunity to become a god, in this one, your great evil achievement would be to be to work for a god. Congratulation, you've got a job. The one where you control the brain would be the only one where you truly achieve your evil overlord dreams. Surprise, surprise, that's the one connected to Illithid plot, not the Bhaal plot. They can do good work when they're not trying to one up their predecessors.

[janeaustentextposts]

Hello, I know this isn't exactly austen related but you're the only one I can think of who might be able to clarify this for me. I was wondering how exactly cadet branches of houses are formed? I mean I know It comes from a yonger son and so on but what makes him not take his ancestors name/house and instead found a new one? Like the yorks that came from the plantagenets for example? thank you so much for all the questions you answer here, It makes my history nerd heart very happy

Oh boy, genealogy and the Wars of the Roses are not in my wheelhouse, but I’ll paraphrase Wikipedia to the best of my abilities try.

As best as I can tell, the reason why a younger son wouldn’t just take the family name and establish himself elsewhere is just that there’s no real getting away from a powerful dynasty, and it’s probably more advantageous to be connected with the main family than to try and strike out on one’s own.Cadet branches were not expected to submit to ancestral duties in quite the same way as senior heirs, so they could enter into alliances and lines of business which perhaps would have been considered beneath the main family line, though they could then bring in useful wealth and connections, and establish themselves as men of importance in their own rights, to some extent, though they would always be somewhat inferior to the main line with the best ancestral titles and properties.For example, in my own family I can trace a line back to the Howard family of England, but my connections are only to the Carlisle branch of the family, which is itself a cadet branch, alongside other such branches–the Effingham Howards, the Suffolk Howards, and the Penrith Howards. (Also my exact connection is nothing very noble or even definitively provable–my great-great grandmother was a servant at Castle Howard who bore her employer’s illegitimate child.) These families are certainly wealthy and have their own standing, peppered with earls and barons, but the head of the family as a whole is still the Duke of Norfolk, highest in rank and likely holding the best properties traditionally gifted to the holder upon the creation of the title.As to the Plantagenets…are you at all fond of the names Henry and Edward? You won’t be by the time I’m finished.

In the power-struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster, the problem was that York and Lancaster were both cadet-branches of the House of Plantagenet, and could not (or would not) agree which of them had a greater claim to the English (or, by then, mostly English) throne. The family had its roots in France, (we’ll try to ignore this because it’s less important as time goes on and the real beef is over England,) and eventually established themselves as kings of England, with some apparent discord between historians as to whether Henry I is the first English Plantagenet king or whether it’s actually Henry II via Henry I’s daughter Empress Matilda or even Henry III; and they didn’t actually really call themselves Plantagenets, exactly, because they were also “Angevins” with holdings in France but it’s hard to draw a line between where they stop being Angevins and start being Plantagenets with the shifts in what land was held in France being lost over the years and alternative political changes happening in England at the same time.

Henry II has a younger brother, Geoffrey, and French inheritance customs are different back then so it’s assumed Henry will take over the English holdings belonging to his mother Empress Matilda and maternal grandfather Henry I of England, while his brother Geoff will take over the paternal claims to French lands, dividing up the ‘kingdom’ holdings of the family. Anyway, with people being busy ruling on different sides of the Channel and all that, when Henry I died, Matilda’s cousin Stephen (who was also mostly French but again the lines between French and English are super-murky at this point with all the inter-marrying and having all these French and English holdings,) seized the English throne, and Matilda hears about this over in France while she’s dealing with the French side of the family’s stuff and was like oh shit that’s a problem.

So England ultimately falls into civil war because a lot of powerful people all over the British Isles and France are now giving Stephen some obvious side-eye like dude, seriously? Also if there’s a power-vacuum EVERYBODY IS GONNA PILE IN AND TRY TO GRAB A PIECE OF THAT SWEET, SWEET FEUDAL TERRITORY; so if it’s good enough for Stephen to step up and say “I’m having this throne” what more encouragement do other power-hungry entitled men need to try the same trick?

This is also why a cadet branch wouldn’t just go off an establish its own dynasty–you need to control vast swaths of land to have that kind of power, which is why all of this in-fighting happens. To these people it makes more sense to fight their own relatives for control of the biggest and richest bits of property than to try and go off and establish their own rule over smaller and shittier bits of property. After all, what’s the point of having something if someone else has something better? Mix ambitious power-grabs with a staggeringly heady sense of God-given bloodline-based entitlement, and hey presto you’ve got civil wars happening because when these royal relatives aren’t marrying each other, they’re killing each other. There are some peasant rebellions and insurrection-type movements happening at important points throughout this history, particularly when we get the Magna Carta with King John and some commoner uprisings in the rule of Richard II which were a public-relations nightmare I tell you what; but ultimately the driving force of most of the strife is this one mega-batshit extended family unit who can’t agree.All these minor kingdoms and duchys and whatever else they had in France which was obviously not THE France we know as a whole collective country today were having armed conflicts over territory, themselves, so basically there’s a whole lotta fighting going on. Anyway, eventually Steve the Ultimate Black Sheep of the Family and Matilda’s son Henry agree to just let Stephen be king until he dies, and then Henry can take over, promise! Which happens shortly thereafter, luckily, and Henry II is now King of England.He is married to Eleanor of Aquitaine, who I have definitely already heard of, and she is fierce as fuck, rich as fuck, was the Queen of France for fifteen years, got that annulled because the King needed a son, not daughters (high-fiving Henry VIII in the afterlife, honestly,) and so she then married Henry II and became Queen of England because why not? Went on to have eight kids, including five sons because fuck you Louis VI. And spent long stretches of time in prison because schemes galore. (Where is her dramatized biopic miniseries, BBC?) Three of those sons went on to be kings, including Richard the Lionheart, who Disney interpreted rather literally in their version of Robin Hood.

He was ultimately followed onto the throne by his unruly brother John, and the lack of direct heirs began the crumbling of the Angevin empire. John loses a bunch of lands in France, but signs the Magna Carta in England, so he’s a pretty mixed bag as monarchs go, but undoubtedly important, history-wise.

John’s son Henry III refocused on power in England, though he did try to gain back some of the French lands, without much success. There was no more English messing about with Crusades, though Henry III was very shitty to Jewish people in his kingdom, so fuck Henry III, moving on.

His son was Edward I, aka Edward Longshanks, which I only know because I was am a hopeless nerd who loved playing Age of Empires II back in the day and the William Wallace campaign is the learning campaign you gotta play through and Longshanks is the antagonist, so…he…fought the Scots. That’s all I know. Something something they may take oor lives but they’ll never take oor frrreedom! I am flying blind here, can you tell? I just wanted to gather berries and build my castles in peace, okay? It was Sim City for history nerds.

His kid Edward II takes over pounding on the Scots, (and was probably also pounding Piers Gaveston, if you know what I mean. God bless.) He actually had a lil’ family tiff with a branch of the family which was also called the House of Lancaster, but it was a different House of Lancaster which ultimately caused the problems later on down the line with the House of York, so we’ll ignore this House of Lancaster.

I dunno what Edward III did exactly but his accomplishments and failings are largely irrelevant for my purposes of trying to determine what happened with the Plantagenets, so he passed on the crown to his grandson Richard II, who was the son of Edward, the Black Prince, who was played by James Purefoy in the totally factual and in no way fanciful documentary A Knight’s Tale.

(…take five, everybody. We’ll pick this up once we have our breath back.)

So Richard II became king when he was ten years old, and this is where shit starts getting out of hand. His uncle, John of Gaunt, (himself a son of Eddie #3,) holds a lot of power. While most nobles preferred Richard to rule with a series of councils, rather than a regency under the legal control of his uncle, John still had a lot of influence over the young king. Richard II’s rule was riddled with rebellions and crises, and ultimately it seemed to be felt by some that he was a weak and tyrannical young king, leading his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, son of John of Gaunt, to overthrow Richard and place himself on the throne as Henry IV. Bolingbroke would not have been Richard’s heir–that was Richard’s first cousin twice removed, Edmund Mortimer–but Henry argued that that was a claim through Edmund’s grandmother, whereas his claim was through male descendants. Edmund, understandably, was super-pissed about this development and spent the rest of his life plotting and rebelling against Henry and Henry’s son…Henry V.

His son, Henry (…wait for it…) VI, was the king in whose rule conflict would break out which would later be known as the real starting-point for the actual Wars of the Roses. (There’s more fuckery involving wars over territory in France but I am not going back over all that so help me God. All these dudes just need to maybe admit that they are not owed kingdoms by grace of who their parents or grandparents or second-cousins-twice-removed were.)

Edward IV (Yorkist,) having inherited Edmund Mortimer’s indignant rage, kicked Henry VI’s ass and took over the English throne while Philippa Gregory went positively giddy with excitement and I tried not to wince at this casting:

His twelve year-old son reigns for 86 days as Edward V, then enter everybody’s favourite propaganda chew-toy: RICKY THE THIIIIIRD! [blasts airhorn]

Endlessly maligned Good Egg with gentle ways and good bone-structure or cold-blooded incestuous vicious child-killer with a visible disability because back then they believed that kind of thing was a Sign from God that He hated that person for a reason. Depends on who you ask.

Anyway, Richard III was definitely the last of the Plantagenets and he was killed by Henry Tudor, who then took the throne of England as Henry VII and if you can guess what royal dynasty he founded, you get zero points.

So it was John of Gaunt’s legitimate male descendants who would form the House of Lancaster which began causing problems when his son Henry Bolingbroke/Henry IV overthrew Richard II and usurped Edmund Mortimer, the heir apparent. The House of York that would fight them were the descendants of Edward III’s second and fourth sons, in different lines. I don’t fully understand what it all means, exactly, but clearly there’s a lot of arguing going on about family trees and which bits of it are technically better or make a blood-tie to a common ancestral king stronger or weaker than someone else’s blood-tie. As the Yorkists had connections to TWO sons of Edward III, well, clearly that counts for something. Mostly a worrying amount of inbreeding among nobles, if you ask me. Which you did. And I’ll bet you’re sorry you asked, now! :)