Personal Dossier: The Monarchs (Decaying Royals)

Overview

The Monarchs linger at the edge of collapse, their presence a living contradiction, a dynasty of names and bloodlines that should have faded into legend, but which still cast a shadow over every trade, every scandal, every whispered conspiracy in the Decaying world. No longer true rulers, they remain the icons of a lost order, their titles resonating with a poisonous nostalgia that inspires fear and desire in equal measure. To the outside world, the Monarchs are both relic and prize: their flesh forbidden, their capture a scandal that can make or break fortunes. The allure of royal blood is its own currency, intoxicating in its rarity and the taboo that clings to every drop. In a world where nothing is sacred but power, the Monarchs are both target and temptation, their downfall watched as much for pleasure as for profit.

Historical Origins

The Monarchs’ roots burrow deep into the oldest stone of the world, further back than most records can trace. They are the inheritors of the first thrones, the founders of ancient lines whose blood was guarded as jealously as any treasure. In those days, the purity of lineage was more than tradition, it was the cornerstone of authority, the myth that held the world together. Dynasties rose, jealously policing their own blood, sealing alliances and preserving line after line, convinced that a drop of foreign blood could doom an entire realm. For centuries, this myth endured, even as the world beyond their courts began to fracture and decay. Yet over time, even the most sacred lineages proved brittle. Factional power rose from beneath, the old world’s laws crumbled, and the monarchs’ insistence on blood purity became less a shield than a prison, isolating them within echoing halls and sealing their doom in rituals no one else respected.

The Monarchs Today

Now the Monarchs endure, barricaded within their ancestral capitals, palaces of velvet and dust marooned in hostile ruin, their courtiers clinging to hollow ritual while power rots beneath their feet. Obsessed with blood purity and legacy, they shun the world outside, haunted by scandal and the knowledge that titles, Duke, Princess, Sovereign, are little more than brittle shields. Yet it is not merely nostalgia or etiquette that keeps their enemies at bay; every faction eyes these crumbling thrones with suspicion, wary of the whispered arsenals and forgotten superweapons said to slumber in vaults beneath the stone. No would-be conqueror dares be the first to strike, lest a third party pounce on the chaos, or a cataclysm be unleashed for all to share.

Inside, paranoia festers. The courts become gilded cages, every ceremony performed less for faith than for fear, every guest viewed as a potential traitor or spy. For now, this stalemate holds. But with each passing year, as whispers of decay and scandal mount, the sense grows that the age of the Monarchs will end not with a triumphant invasion, but in a chain reaction of betrayals or revolts, one last, **** secret unleashed, and the world forever changed by what spills from the vaults when the final locks are broken.

Methods and Assets

What sets the Monarchs apart in this crumbling world is not any visible might, but the shadowy persistence of knowledge, the secrets jealously hoarded across centuries when their word was law and technology their private domain. Their archives, locked and layered with riddles, contain the blueprints for devices that could change the balance of power overnight, formulas for lost medicines, the hidden workings of pleasure and pain, control and subjugation, all veiled in ancient codes and protocols. Rumor clings to every house: somewhere, deep in the forbidden wings of the palace, lies a room or vault where the last true secrets are still passed from monarch to heir in whispered midnight rituals, methods of genetic manipulation, forgotten weapons, ancestral alliances encoded in gene and cipher alike. It is not only their blood that carries potency, but the encrypted knowledge that flows through family lines, the legacy of a time when the world itself bent to royal command.

Yet this wealth of secrets has become both armor and shackle. The ceremonies and symbols that once projected their dominance now render them ****, making every tradition a breadcrumb trail for spies, thieves, and usurpers. The Monarchs know that every ritual, every guarded text, is a lure for factions hungry for the keys to their vaults. Above all, it is this cache of forbidden lore, much of it lost, some of it pure myth, that keeps their courts shrouded in awe and fear, and ensures that every scheme, every attempted capture, sends tremors through the power-hungry world beyond their locked gates.

• Addendum 5th Dec 2029: It appears that almost all secrets were somehow stolen by Yoko. Sometimes, I give that cute little gremlin too little credit.

Weaknesses and Limitations

For all their lineage and ceremony, the Monarchs have become prisoners of their own legacy, hemmed in not just by tradition, but by vaults of knowledge that now serve as both shield and snare. Their fixation on blood purity and the rigid, predictable cycle of rituals have rendered their courts insular and exposed, increasingly cut off from the shifting realities beyond their walls. No longer do they command armies or move the hearts of nations; instead, their survival hangs on inertia, the hesitation of rivals to risk awakening whatever secrets slumber in their hidden archives, and the hope that their prestige or the threat of scandal might be parlayed for one more season of relevance. But the very rules and protocols that once protected them have grown dangerous—marking them as targets for ****, infiltration, and eventual ruin, their insularity a blindfold against the world’s encroaching hunger.

Personal Reflections

The Monarchs are at once pitiable and dangerous, living ghosts, their pride and isolation the very causes of their undoing. There is a morbid fascination in watching a once-untouchable house collapse, each step of their humiliation recorded and circulated, each noble’s downfall greeted with a mixture of envy, lust, and dread. Yet even now, there is no prize as rare or as fraught as a captured Monarch, no scandal that so perfectly encapsulates the decay and perversity of the age. Their blood may be pure, but the world has turned impure around them, and in the twilight of this decaying world, it is the act of taking, corrupting, and exposing royalty that proves nothing is sacred, and nothing is beyond reach, and everyone can be enslaved.

Personal Notes