>Temporal Authority in D&D
“Kill the dragon, marry the princess, rule the kingdom.”
D&D is set in an essentially Iron Age setting. If your group (or even you personally) are known to be hardcore enough, you actually do rule the lands extending as far as you can reach. This doesn’t mean that you don’t need a bureaucracy, because there’s still relatively little that you can do on your own. That administrative staff is necessary, it’s there to tell people what you want them to do, and to tell you when they aren’t doing it. In fairy tales, as well as D&D, the guy (or girl) who saves the kingdom by slaying the big monster marries the child of the local king. This is usually because the current king is himself a powerful dude with a PC class himself. His children may be aristocrats, and by marrying them off to a powerful adventurer who may well be able to take his kingdom by force, he’s preserved his own position and kept his family from being set on fire. Nominally in this situation the crown is still in the previous king’s family and moving to the next generation normally. You may even get a title like “Prince Consort” or something – but everyone knows that you are running the show because you can slay dragons. No one is going to say it, but the princess’ only real job in this scenario is to. . . keep you happy. And she’s not even the only one that has that job. Surprisingly, the previous king is actually fine with that, because if his daughter has Aristocrat levels, that really is the best he can expect for her.
