Emphasis mine.
One of the best Arthurian games I've ever been in, ran it completely different. Mordred, as the youngest brother of Gawain, has grown up his entire life hearing stories of Camelot and the Round Table, and is an honest, "goody-good" zealot. He discovers the affair between Lancelot and Guiniverre, and unlike his fellow knights (wise enough not to destroy the Kingdom), he pushes the King to live up to his ideals and commitments. It's Mordred's disillusionment with how the Knights he heard stories about all his life, in the face of "true betrayal", that cause him to rally younger, more idealistic knights to his banner, to oust Arthur and his "old men", seeking to truly create a Kingdom that lives up to the ideal of Camelot.
In a different age, Mordred would have been a hero; the problem was, that by his time, the only villains left were his peers, for the crime of being *slightly* less heroic than he.
So he's the knightly equivalent of an SJW? A chivalric fundamentalist, if you will. Sounds like a particularly frustrating villain to deal with.
And that's the problem. The Blue Rose Kingdom with their newly elected queen, has no guile, no cunning and no willingness to understand that their foes are just waiting to pounce on them. And given just how likely those two factions are described in the old RPG, it's only by Plot Armour that BR hasn't been crushed and divvied up like sandwiches on a platter.
Simply because the enemies are ruthless, murderous bastards that want nothing more than to crush them, and neither of them are of the 'Warlord' variety. Meaning they'll use things like assassinations, sabotage and other tricks to weaken it. There will be no brute force invasions until after their prey has been softened, which would likely end up in a two and half way war that would decimate all three kingdoms.
And the only reason they haven't done it? Because of Plot Armour. Sole reason, and I simply cannot reconcile that in my head. It's either that, or that the other two factions are so 1960's Batman incompetent that they're living jokes, and no country can survive that.
Or their enemies are a lich dictatorship in which no initiative is permitted and everything is micromanaged by the top, and a paranoid theocracy so focused on rooting out internal corruption that anyone with talent is eventually caught up in a purge. Meanwhile in Aldis,
by far the largest and richest of the three, small rapid response special forces units (the PCs) hunt down attempts by shadow to infiltrate, while military units can train and prepare, rewarding initiative and ability, secure in the knowledge their cause it just, their citizenry support them, and they won't be subject to injustice from a paranoid leadership.
Yeah, sounds like an easy nut to crack.
My only issue is two fold. A magical deer gets to select the leader...
I've never really understood this objection. If the objective is good, by which I mean beneficent
and effective, governance, then vesting authority in someone you
know is good, because a divine being has demonstrated they are, gives you both beneficence and the ability to quickly respond to situations.
It's a fantasy system; it's not possible here, where modern* democracy is "the best of bad choices", since it minimizes corruption and arbitrariness, but at the expense of response time and efficiency. Aldis has a good choice, we don't. That's what makes it "utopian".
*Prior to the U.S., democracy was thought to be a particularly warlike and arbitrary system, subject to the whims of a populous led hither and yon by demagogues, e.g. Athens at various times, and the
worst of bad choices.