30 Queens

1-Queen of Architects

This Queen is obsessed with making her capital the most well built and beautiful capital in the world, and loves to hear it being compared to The Citadel of Duthelm

In truth, whilst it is impressive, it is nowhere near that large or that secure. Critics have been quietly complaining amongst themselves that her building projects have destroyed many old quarters of the city and made many of the poorer people lose their homes. They keep their complaints to themselves since the Queen is known to be rather intolerant of any opposition.

2-Queen of Bankers

This Queen is rich even by the standards of royalty, and she has become so wealthy by setting up a state bank with the help of 30 Merchants There are rumours, which may or may not be true, that the bank turns a blind or at least a cloudy eye towards dirty money invested within it. Enough wealth has trickled down to the people to make this Queen highly popular, whilst her army makes up in professionalism and esprit de corps what it lacks in size. She tries to stay out of war, thinking it expensive in money, time and lives. If her country was attacked however, she could not only hire the best mercenaries but also pay them more then her rivals, ensuing their loyalty.

3- Queen of Bards

This Queen loves music of almost all kinds, provided the songs are well done. To her favourite singers she grants rich rewards, and it is said she will grant any singer one royal audience to give him or her a chance to sing their way into the royal favour. Her court is one long songfest broken only for important royal business, whilst the lower ranking bards entertain the common people. Those who break the laws and are caught will end up in The Songpit where they will entertain either with their voices or with their pain.

4- Queen of Clean

This Queen keeps the white marble walls of her palace shining, and the inside of it is also clean as well, her servants being kept constantly polishing, washing, painting and swabbing her palace. The Queen herself is always clean and well dressed and expects her nobles, servants, soldiers and other subjects to look their best. Her interests in cleanliness go beyond her palace walls, and her royal capital is one of the cleanest cities in the world, with the result that disease and food poisoning is much reduced. The main job of her army is to guard the borders and keep the unwashed masses from other countries out.

5- Queen of Clubs

The capital and large towns of this Queen’s country are well known for their nightlife, and are full of clubs of all types, from the sleazy, often dangerous clip joints to the clubs for the nobility. There are plenty of jobs there for the enterprising, as dishwashers, waiters, entertainers, barkeepers, and for those tough enough, bouncers. People have to check their weapons in at the gatehouses when entering the cities, to avoid brawls becoming deadly, and they are returned to them when they leave. The Queen herself is known to go clubbing on occasion.

6- Queen of Diamonds

This Queen is rather obsessed with the way that she and her courtiers look. She is never seen in public without at least one diamond necklace around her neck and the finest clothing to go with it. She insists that her courtiers are equally well dressed, not just at the great state occasions but also whenever they are within her sight. Understandably she and her nobles are deeply unpopular with the public who resent the high taxes exacted from them to pay for the fine clothes of the royal court.

7- Queen of Doctors

This Queen is interested in the medical arts and her capital has two large public hospitals within it. Whilst the doctors of most countries rely mainly on purges, bleeding and other “cures” of that nature, her doctors know how to use such medical instruments as The SawHeal and it is said they can cure many diseases that can be cured nowhere else. The sick and the maimed flock to her country to be cured, and recently she has promised a hefty reward to those who can find 30 Legendary Antidotes/Cures for her.

8- Queen of Feminists

This Queen has a marked distrust of males, seeing them as exploiters of women and potentially violent. Males are not allowed to travel armed in her Queendom and rapists are publicly castrated and hanged. Of course, rapists face that fate in many lands, but here they have a much larger chance of being arrested and convicted. She has a small but well trained and utterly dedicated personal guard of shieldmaidens. Many males avoid going into the lands she rules over.

9-Queen of Green

This Queen lives in a sky-city within the trees, all the buildings being made of wood and rope, which is built in such a way that there is very little need for nails, the buildings being either tied or slotted together. The people live mainly on fruits and vegetables harvested in the canopy, and the main danger is that of fire. Great precautions are taken against it, for should any really large fire take hold, then it could easily burn the whole city from end to end.

10- Queen of Hearts

This Queen is happily married and deeply in love with her husband, and she thinks everybody should have the chance to experience romance. To this end, she plays matchmaker at court, allows The Bowmen of Love to operate openly in her kingdom, and will not extradite elopers who cross her borders, providing that they really are eloping and are not criminals on the run. She loves the sight of happy couples and hates divorces.

11- Queen of Housewives

This Queen was ousted in a military coup and placed under palace arrest with a jester and a small personal staff who remained loyal to her. With little to do and starved of news from the outside world, she has taken to obsessively cleaning her palace from top to bottom and preening herself in front of the mirror for hours on end. Some of her staff feel sorry for her whilst others fear that she is losing her mind.

12- Queen of Jailors

This Queen is obsessed with security and has a constant fear of assassins, particularly the Order of the Red Knife. She is never seen in public without at least 30 Guards and her royal palace is on a near constant lockdown when the Queen is in residence. To a lesser extent the same is true of the capital of the country, with curfews at night, high city walls, and suspicious guards to the point that trade is inhibited and there are (false) rumours of plague in the city. As you can imagine, she is not a very popular Queen, and her nickname on the streets is The Warden.

13- Queen of Jesters

This Queen genuinely loved her husband, and when he died fell into a deep depression. Her jester’s efforts raised her spirits, and she decided to hire as many new jesters as she could to keep her happy. It is said that almost anybody claiming to be a jester will get one chance before the Queen herself; if he makes her giggle, he is hired. When not entertaining the Queen, they entertain others, even, on the great festival days, the common people. Because of the jesters the Queen’s depression is kept at bay, allowing her to rule her country reasonably well.

14-Queen of Lawyers

This somewhat autocratic Queen is very interested in the law and has played a large part on the creation of new laws, ranging from the common sense to the idiotic, and resulting in a rather Byzantine court system in her country, which also has a lot of police to enforce the laws, judges to try cases and of course, lawyers. The Queen serves as the final court of appeal and enjoys sitting in on trials and giving verdicts.

She has heard of The Order of Dalraaen and decided to convert to that religion.

15- Queen of Mean

This Queen collects very high taxes from nobles and peasants alike. Some is of course spent on administration and the other costs of the Queendom, but it is a mystery where the rest has gone. Certainly none of it is spent on the lower orders; those caught begging are flogged or worse. Nor does the Queen spend much of it on herself; her meals are no bigger then those of the minor gentry and her royal robes are patched and dusty. And any noble who steals some of it and makes the mistake of openly displaying the stolen wealth risks beheading and the confiscation of all of his or her assets, meaning his family will starve. Many think that the royal treasure houses are packed with gold and silver, and they are probably right.

16- Queen of Parties

This shallow-minded Queen cares little for her country and her people, or indeed for ruling, allowing her ministers to rule in her name as long as she is able to party long into the night, wear fine clothes and enjoy herself. Her ministers enjoy this state of affairs and are making long term plans to make sure it stays like this. Not be murdering the Queen; they take great care to keep her safe, but by poisoning her son and heir and bringing up her daughter to be just like her.

17- Queen of Police

This Queen is interested in, and some would whisper, obsessed with, police work. She is not so interested in justice however, so her Queendom has turned into a bit of a police state. Captured criminals are fitted with a Convict Collar to stop them misbehaving. The lucky ones that is, the unlucky ones can rot in prison for years without a trial, or face the gallows for murder or high treason.

18-Queen of Priests

This Queen is interested in the divine and, unlike most of her fellow rulers, has allowed a cornucopia of priests and priestesses from nearly all religions to settle and preach in her country. Only dangerous cults such as The Children of Ma-O or the Cultus of Vautu remain illegal. Whilst the majority of her subjects are delighted to have near-freedom of religion, a few worry about the danger of the different religious groups attacking each other. The rulers of those countries that only allow a single religion to openly exist fear her country and see it as a threat to them, like a time bomb waiting to explode. As for the priests of the former state religion, they are outraged that their Queen has abandoned them and let in all this religious competition.

A few would happily have her murdered if they could.

19-Queen of Queens

This Queen looks beautiful, but is in fact, a King. His father was a warrior-king, expanding his kingdom in war and ruling it wisely in peace, and when he died his nobles expected that his twenty-year-old son would rule in the same way. However, they were to be bitterly disappointed, for upon his father’s death his son revealed himself to be a transsexual. Instead of his father’s chainmail armour and royal robes, he wore the dresses and fine jewellery that a Queen would wear, his face made up and with a wig, his clothes with fake breasts inside them.

Instead of going to war, leading his army from the front and forcefully expanding his kingdom, he prefers negotiation with rival powers, and has fallen in love with a young and ambitious nobleman. He allows transsexuals of both genders to dress as the opposite gender openly in his court.

The majority of his nobles are outraged with him, but as he has no heir, not even a baby, they fear plunging the kingdom into civil war and leaving it vulnerable to foreign interference if they have him murdered.

20-Queen of Rangers

This Queen is interested in the beauty of nature and the wilderness and wishes to keep at least some of it intact. It was her who had the Sorcery Springs Geyser Basin safeguarded as a national park for all to view and enjoy (for a fee.) And she is thinking of treating some other beautiful areas within her country in the same way. There are those amongst her advisors who privately think that she is standing in the way of progress, but they dare not oppose her royal will openly.

21-Queen of the Seas

This Queen rules a fleet of mainly smaller ships, with one large flagship. Their Queendom conquered by a brutal army with a terrible reputation, a large part of the surviving population became boat people. At first pirates attacked them, but after the warships of the Queen’s Navy slaughtered a few boatloads of pirates, they were left alone.

The Queen herself wears an Admiral’s uniform, makes sure that discipline is strict but reasonably fair for the benefit of all, and tries to avoid staying in any one port for too long so as not to become deeply unwelcome. Although her subjects are able to catch enough fish to survive, they are running out of money to buy fresh water and the other goods that are necessary for survival, and no country will agree to take in the refugees, so she is considering ordering her subjects to turn to piracy if another solution cannot be found.

22-Queen of Soldiers

This Queen runs her country like a military camp. Every man fit enough to bear arms is drafted into the army, and women may volunteer to join and will be accepted if fit enough. The food for the country is grown in places such as WheatSword. Wages are low, prices are strictly controlled, and those who break the law or just misbehave are treated as mutineers and face the bite of the lash and for serious offences, the gallows. She has invited Sir Whitewing to come and help train her forces. Neighbouring kingdoms wonder why she needs such a large army.

23- Queen of Spades

This Queen is working on an underground city. Tunnels are being hacked into the bedrock, caves enlarged and houses built within them. There have been accidents, when cave-ins have happened and methane gas has met a spark, the builders have died in their dozens and many of her subjects wonder if they are really meant to live underground. But the work goes on and slowly the city is taking shape.

24-Queen of Social Workers

This Queen, oddly for a monarch, feels sorry for the beggars and the poor, and has, as a result, ordered free food to be given to them. Opinion in her country is sharply divided about this. The poor love their Queen and would rise up for her if somebody tried to depose her. The rich privately despise her and think that her taxes are too high. The middle class is divided on the matter. Certainly begging and unorganised crime has fallen, but there are a lot of poor flocking to the country from neighbouring countries whose rulers have harder hearts.

25- Queen of Spies

This Queen has a large secret service and 30 Spies within it that have the right of royal access whenever they discover anything of great importance to the security of her Queendom. When rival spies are captured in peacetime, she prefers where possible to exchange them for her own captured spies, rather then executing them, unlike in wartime where she is merciless towards them. Knowing so many of the secrets of other countries has helped her foreign policy considerably.

26-Queen of Spin

This Queen is obsessed with how her country looks to others, and has done all sorts of things designed to make her country look better then it is. These range from the innocuous such as making sure her soldiers keep their armour polished, to the almost funny such as the erection of “Potemkin villages” along the border that look really good, to the downright nasty, such as having death squads to murder beggars, suspected thieves and other undesirables.

27-Queen of Teachers

This Queen thinks that literacy for everyone in her country is the way to go. Schools are mandatory for all children in her country; there are public libraries, scholars and competent teachers are esteemed and the Queen herself reads a lot and has a private royal collection of 30 Manuscripts. Some of the nobles privately fear that educating the common people will lead to sedition and possibly to a revolution, but the Queen shrugs off their fears, convinced that she is doing the best for her country.

28-Queen of Thieves

This Queen decided that since there was no way to destroy the forces of organized crime within her Queendom, she would secretly meet the top gangsters and ally with them, giving them semi-protection from prosecution provided they refrain from plotting against her and don’t do anything outrageously bad. They in return have foiled at least one plot against her, and generally refrain from murdering royal officials and openly defying the law.

Within her court rumours circulate wildly, most of them totally false such as the one that the Queen secretly sneaks out of her palace at night to burgle the houses of her nobles. She does nothing of the sort, but she does take backhanders from those who do. If a crime boss were to go openly against her, he would not only face the full force of royal disapproval, but the underworld would be determined to stop him destroying it’s hidden friendship with the monarchy.

29-Queen of Undertakers

Behind her back, many people think that this Queen is obsessed with the dead. She has set aside a large tract of land for graves, tombs, and sepulchres. Those who wish their dead to be cremated can use several pyres set up in a courtyard, and a section of her moat is set aside for water burial. Why she is so interested in the dead is a mystery to outsiders. There are dark rumours that she has up to 30 Necromancers in her court, but these are almost certainly untrue.

And finally…

30-Queen in her mind

This girl is not a Queen in reality, but believes herself to be one in her mind. She carries an orange for an orb and a large wooden spoon for a sceptre and has been thrown out by her family who are totally fed up with her airs and graces. Unless someone helps her soon, she will probably starve to death. Her crown is a paper hat from the last Sunreturn festival.