A question about heirs.

[Ruideside/OM (RP)]

I was wondering, since the investiture makes an heir inherit your holdings automatically, is it necessary for the investiture ceremony to be public, or can you secretly invest somebody as your heir?

[Silver House/ClDh (Bobby)]

You should be able to make a secret heir.  I imagine magic could be used to try and discover who, if anyone, is invested as your heir, but there's nothing about it that should be apparently to folks otherwise. 

For that matter, I now wonder if there's any reason you couldn't hold a fake ceremony to make someone THINK they were your heir, when you actually invested someone else at a different time.  Do they feel something when invested?  Can they tell if you later take that away?  A whole realm of interesting speculation and connivery!

(That's a word now.  Connivery.  I have created it, and, lo, it is good.)

[Ruideside/OM (RP)]

A good word indeed!

I agree with you, since the investiture is magical, one should be able to do all sorts of conniverous things.

[X-Points East]

I was wondering, since the investiture makes an heir inherit your holdings automatically, is it necessary for the investiture ceremony to be public, or can you secretly invest somebody as your heir?

OoC:

An investiture (designation) action and an espionage action could perhaps be employed concurrently.

[Yggdrasil (DM Andy)]

Be warned, the less "blatant / open / loud" the greater the chance that things will go wrong if the regent dies - the Land's Choice will intervene, or a Great Captain will inherit part of the realm, or your heir will otherwise fail to properly be recognised - your heir is precisely that, the person that your court, people, etc expect to inherit, fawn over, suck up to, undermine, etc, etc - the spell certainly helps but it isn't perfect.

Also it should be noted that any realm without an heir is inherently seen as weak (one lucky blow will leave it leadership) and has weaker morale (people might not like the particular heir but they do like stability and certainty that comes from the role being filled).

heirship from forcible investiture is particularly prone to failure - simply catching an enemy regent is not the same as winning the war - a long way too it yes, but not the end of the matter.

[DM B]

Andy rather neatly sums it up.

Re: Magical vs. non-magical; I rewrote it to make it ambiguous whether the ceremony is magical or not. The investiture SPELL sure is magical, but whether or not the ceremony is is up to the DM (based on how interpretation of the relationship between scions, bloodlines, domains etc.)

[Yggdrasil (DM Andy)]

Andy rather neatly sums it up.

Phew 

[Ruideside/OM (RP)]

OK, that's a nice compromise Andy. You don't have to make it public, but it sure helps if you do - at least among your major courtiers and vassals.

Another question, can you invest somebody as your heir provisionally? By that I mean with a "in the absence of a child of my loins" rider.
So for example, could I designate Taren as my heir pro tem, until I actually have a child come of my own, and have her "investiture" lapse automatically, or would I have to somehow de-heirify her?

[Silver House/ClDh (Bobby)]

That sort of thing has to be DONE, I think.  It's traditional to announce the birth with something along the lines of "the birth of my child AND HEIR, Steve McBaronduke!" even in our world.  I think Divesting the former heir could be part of the same ceremony as Investing the new one, though.  All one action.

[Ruideside/OM (RP)]

What about the secret heir that gets hidden away - it's a rather common theme.

[DM B]

No, no provisional designations.

[Ruideside/OM (RP)]

OK. That's pretty cut and dried.

[Yggdrasil (DM Andy)]

I suspect that even with clerical healing, the actual heirship waits until the child is a teenager in most cases - particularly given that birthright manifestation (one way to truly know parentage) occurs around that time.  Investing a babe given infant mortality is not good sense - people might expect the child to become heir, in the event of surprise death the child might well inherit via the Land's Choice, but the big spend on the spell and ceremony would be saved until later.

In the case of some suspicious parents, much later.