Lebanel's kind of hot up close.

"So we've got Evil loans, serfdom... what else?"

"I'm going to introduce a motion tomorrow to make it illegal for Taldor nobles- those raised there or those holding office there, to hold office in Cheliax- their culture is too different."

"You'll have to come up with a way to make it so they can still be in the convention even if they're there on title alone, to get it past the President."

"...but what if some of them get replaced with leftover Evil nobles from here? I'm not sure which-all nobles are the Taldan ones but they can't possibly be worse than most of the holdovers." She's not actually sure where Delegate Ventura is from but even he's not worse than a lot of the Asmodean nobles from before.

"If I could get rid of all holdover nobles I certainly would. Cheliax would benefit. But the Taldans- they're doable. I hope."

Alright, interrupting that is half of why Jilia's inside this room instead of in the hallway.

"I understand the temptation more than anyone, all Taldane nobility I've ever had to work with were either useless stuffed shirts or slime, but I do not think it's doable and I expect the trying will backfire, badly, and make the more liberal nobility close ranks with the conservatives. In addition to annoying the President if not worded very carefully. Please don't."

"And... we don't have enough good men to defend the villages and counties. I've tried. I'd love to replace nine in ten of the hold-overs, maybe even nineteen in twenty, but I do not have decent adventurers who can defend their territories from monsters, nor do the other archdukes, and we don't have a Lastwall- or Galtan-style army to do it either." To say nothing of Menador.

"Are there, uh, more things we could try, for recruiting adventurers that don't suck to replace the nobles that do?"

"Ooh, there's a thought, some process for people other than the queen to install a noble."

Is it worth the risk? It might let her lock in some more votes without needing to spend much on it, but having her support might be more toxic than it's worth... best not to stick with anything she can't disclaim later, even if it means it's less good of a sell here.

"The army committee is looking into reforming the chelish military along more Galtan lines, but it will be some time before that sees fruit."

Enric is all for getting rid of evil nobles, though he can’t always tell which ones are from where. They all speak strangely and dress in impractical noble ways. He also has enough sense for the convention to know pushong too hard will fail. The nobles fight with each other, but close ranks when they need to.

”It’d be a start, just making it easier for the queen to make new nobles, once she finds better adventurers. Put in the constitution that nobles can be replaced, or something.”

”I would even go as far as doing it by election. Every few years, a vote on whether to replace the noble with a new one. But I don’t think the hall would vote for that.”

"Besides the other nobles installing them as vassals, you mean, Avenger Pages? The core problem is that you need dangerous men, or occasionally women. In the cities a political creature like me will do; in the country you need a warrior, whether they use steel or spells. And those people can make safer livings in big cities somewhere else, and letting them raise taxes enough to make the money here better is... well, it would probably be nearly as bad for the farms getting taxed as unchecked monster attacks, most places."

"Mr. Porras is right that the hall wouldn't vote for allowing citizens to vote out their lord. But even if it approved, I don't think it would help very much. We're already removing bad lords - Her Majesty picked her archdukes well, they're all in the liberal camp except the Grand Inquisitor, and the dukes and duchesses are mostly quite good or trying fairly hard to become so - whenever we can catch them at anything; most aren't so bad that they're worse than nothing, and so I wait to arrest and remove them until I have a replacement, but if we had six hundred qualified, decent adventurers willing to become counts, we'd get it done for the whole country in... oh, it might take a year or two. No more."

"So the problem is finding the men to do it. And most of the possibilities boil down to 'with what money?', really. Casters can make good reliable livings in Absalom or another city, and a soldier or hunter or burglar strong enough to run with a third-circle can do much the same as a hired guard or something else much safer than securing a barony or county, cleaning out the monsters which have moved in while the old lords were inattentive, and then keeping it secure. And they make a lot of money, or will once they've taken loans and paid to rebuild everything, but they're adventurers, they were already making a lot of money. There's a lot of ways we could make it better - help them with the loans, give them fancy items from old ducal vaults - but we don't actually have that money and those vaults mostly got raided before the new nobility was installed." Not hers, but she's been making use of it.

"So you need to appeal to them some other way to convince them, or else offer them a lot more money, which we haven't got and can't get without ruinous taxes. Someone who wants to be a noble, maybe, which isn't filtering for lovely people. Or who cares that they'll be securing their family and their children with a title and income, which is a good respectable motivation possessed by many good people, but not very common among adventurers of any variety. Politics can work, get men who care about rebuilding Cheliax and spiting Hell by getting people properly free of it, and that got a good many people accepting resurrections and has gotten me a few men from Andoran who are probably bound for Elysium. But there's just not that many of those men, not compared to the ones who look at the book of accounts and say 'Absalom's good for me thanks'."

"And in forty years we'll have another convention, with a good strong Galtan-style army already secure if Archduke de Requena has the least say in the matter. And maybe then we can consider going the way of Andoran and removing everything nobles have but their fortunes and their titles and their pride, and I doubt I'll have a word to say against it even if I'm still on this mortal plane. But we can't do it now, and I promise you, very sincerely, we who the Queen picked have been doing the best we can already."

"Any proposal to effectively remove the nobility will make a quarter of the convention - maybe a third, a lot of the elected are barons - dig in against anyone and everyone associated with whoever said it. They'll see everything else we suggest as a plot to remove them. If we want to win anything else, we have to leave them something. And I'm not actually sure that the elected quarter is better than they are, anyway.

We can place limits on what they can do to people, and we can maybe create some system that passes off some of their responsibilities to other people? Long term, I think we want some way - probably many ways - of growing decent adventurers and administrators here, and some system for giving them meaningful responsibility. But identifying people who know what they're doing and don't suck seems like something of a puzzle. Even if we know what a decent man looks like - and I don't know that that's always easy - we need to come up with a system that does that."

"I think — even if we can't get anything else passed about the bad nobles, I want to try and see if we can pass something that says that nobles should be punished for crimes just the same as anyone else — or more, if we can manage it, like we do in Lastwall, but even if it's just the same that's still better than nothing. And, uh, actually get it enforced, but I don't know how to do that. If there's a nobleman who's going around murdering innocent people or forcing himself on the local women or anything like that, he should die for it, even if it'll be hard to replace him." 

Like Delegate Ventura. Who is a duke, no matter what Delegate Bainilus thinks about the dukes and duchesses.

"And I think maybe there's nobles who'd vote for that, even if they wouldn't vote for anything else, just because they'd think 'well, I'm not going to break the law, so this is fine for me'? But I'm not sure."

Victoria is not very good at talking hypothetically. They should talk before she leaves.

"We can probably get it on paper, but regular law enforcement isn't going to be capable of arresting them. Maybe you could establish some special elite group under the crown that has other responsibilities, and also polices the nobility and other powerful targets? I don't know how you'd keep them honest."

"Maybe you could put them under Abadar's Truthtelling every so often? And then if there's enough of them to watch all the nobles, but not so many that the archmages and the Queen can't keep an eye on them, it could work?"

"Keep them honest in the sense of them not being bought off by the nobility, directly or indirectly. It's difficult to force people to care about the interests of the powerless, and difficult to confirm that they're doing all of their work well and thoroughly investigating all complaints, if the nobility are keeping their crimes secret. If the monarch is invested in the nobles being policed, then you can find some way to keep them loyal to the crown. But if any of the nobles are particularly useful, some later monarch might not want their crimes to come to light."

...said like that, this seems like a bit of a fundamentally unsolvable problem.

"I suppose it's probably still worth trying, even if it only gets people who are both criminal and useless."

"Well, you could use the Truthtelling to ask them about that too — 'did you take any bribes,' 'did you follow whatever their procedure is for all the crimes you heard about,' and a bunch more questions like that to cover all the loopholes. It might only work if the Queen is Good, I don't know how to get around that, but right now she is."

"I don't think truth spells prove that someone isn't working around the edges of the questions you ask. Many bribes are arguable. It helps, of course, I'm not against it. I'm just not confident that it'll be reliable, or easy to maintain."

Nod. "I'm not sure it'll work, but I think it's worth trying.

...Uh, what else do we want to put on the list?"

“I’ve been thinking of something for the virtuous churches committee, now that I think of it, would help with serfdom and indentures too. Give the churches right to take people in as lay members, even people in other contracts.”

"Huh, that could work. You'd need something to handle people who don't have any priests nearby..."

"And rules for which churches qualify," says the Erastilian cleric, who is not making eye contact with the Calistrians right now.

“Virtuous churches committee is avoiding working on a list of which churches to call virtuous, to trust and give special rights to. Rights has mentioned a right to go to church for holy days, we might want to get that, and something to let wandering clerics visit people and send word back to their churches.”