Quote:
Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company
There's no historical precedent for this that I know of, but since we're talking about something for a game, I assume completely made-up ideas are OK: don't let the heirs know. Don't let anybody know until it's time. Have a system where the palace is a moderately large community. The extended royal family lives there, along with servants and noblemen, who perhaps circulate in and out periodically to do service to the throne. Every year a potential heir is born, children born at the palace are marked (tattoos or branding, for example), the marks secretly recorded, and the children "farmed out" to be raised by aristocratic families across the nation. They're rotated between spots now and again so they see more of the country. They grow up in positions of moderate power and military responsibility, picking up skills and exposure as they go. When the previous ruler dies, an heir is chosen, and the books are cracked open to see who the chosen heir is. The remaining "palace children" for that year can be folded back neatly into the bureaucracy and military. The children grow up isolated from their real families, but each can dream of becoming supreme ruler some day.
Now, that won't actually work either. Too easy to breach secrecy or to have a faction just pick one and use him as a figurehead. But it makes for nice stories, and that, ultimately, is what roleplaying campaigns are made of.
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what that will cause is a series of very covert assassinations, bargaining, deception, rigging of the deck, and so forth. You will need to have some sort of way of guaranteeing the record can't be easily changed, read, or destroyed. Such a matter would naturally fall into the hands of the local priests. This would give the Priests a HUGE amount of power, but it would take time to build. The priests may be able to keep honest if percautions are made (such as sealing the record in a slab of concrete or something similar, but someone has to make the record, and will remember (unless you kill all of the scribes soon after marking the tattoos, and thats a bad idea). You can also try spreading the information out, but sufficient planning and plotting will get around that.
of course, if you want a game based on intrigue....