The Kingdom of Roses

Centered around London, the Kingdom of Roses is a realm in transition, and yet struggling to avoid change. As more and more of the population of the UK clusters within its borders, the old boundaries and fiefdoms seem increasingly dated and inappropriate — and yet the Regent, the Troll Lord Edgar Whitestone, sees himself as a caretaker rather than a reformer. In his mind, momentous decisions of this sort should be reserved for the King or Queen who will one day succeed him; for him to make them would seem unnervingly close to claiming the throne for himself.

So change is put off again and again, and tensions continue to grow between the nobility and the commoners. The adjoining Kingdom of Chalk has begun campaigning to have some of the southern portions of London placed under its rule, an idea popular with the commoners thanks to the heavy influence of satyrs and eshu in the neighboring realm, but absolutely unthinkable to the nobility, who have no intention of giving up any of the territory that might fall to one of them should they fail to become the new monarch.

Duchies of the Kingdom of Roses

The Duchy of the Sunrise Road

Named after the Thames itself, the Duchy of the Sunrise Road lays claim to all thirty-two of London’s boroughs, even though that claim has grown steadily more tenuous when it comes to the outlying areas. The old duke, Francis Carroll of House Fiona, held things together for far longer than ought to have been possible — mainly because all sides respected his judgment even when they disagreed with him. Commoners grudgingly admitted that his concern for the welfare of everyone in his fief was clear from his actions, even when he favored his own kind; his fellow sidhe lauded his judgment and dignity and conceded that they had after all made great progress during his time as duke.

The new duke, his son George, is evidently cut from different cloth. Rarely seen in the city, rumor says that he spends most of his time at a country estate in north London, more interested in revelry than ruling and therefore leaving the latter to his advisors. Since he succeeded to the duchy, commoners’ concerns have mostly fallen by the wayside, to the delight of the sidhe and the dismay of almost everyone else. Personal audiences with the duke are few and far between, and as a result, a whole cottage industry of speculation has sprung up as to who’s responsible for this shift in policy.

Some blame his lover, the Eiluned Lord Gareth Richards; others his seneschal Lady Cara Nightsky; others insist that a Shadow Court cabal has seized control and that the real duke is languishing in prison. Still others scoff that no conspiracy theory is needed to explain why a spoiled sidhe isn’t a particularly good ruler. The truth of the matter remains unknown, but the southern and eastern baronies grow more restive by the day.

The Duchy of the White Cliffs (NPC)

Composed of those fiefdoms of the Kingdom of Roses that lie to the southeast of London, White Cliffs borders the Kingdom of Chalk, and there is a long history of antagonism between the two. Duchess Lianna of the Blue Sword has encouraged that, and, although she’s been careful to couch it in terms of friendly rivalry rather than deadly enmity, these things do tend to take on a life of their own, particularly when it’s the traditionalist sidhe of White Cliffs on one side and the more egalitarian and commoner-dominated fae of Chalk on the other. Relations are rapidly trending toward the icy, and that may partly explain why the duchess has been more vocal of late that Havering, Bexley, and Bromley ought to be annexed to her fiefdom rather than remaining part of Sunrise Road. There’s real doubt as to whether these areas would go quietly, though, especially when the commoners fear they’d end up caught in a war they want nothing to do with.

The Duchy of the Fenlands (NPC)

Northeast of London, along the Channel coast, the Fenlands are something of a rustic backwater by the standards of the Kingdom of Roses. Popular opinion has it that the main, and perhaps only, reason that Jewel Buckland, the Eshu duchess, hasn’t been replaced is that all the plausible sidhe candidates have refused the job, seeing this fiefdom as a place of perpetually damp, smelly, cold, and unpleasant wetlands without much to recommend them. And they’re not entirely wrong — the Fenlands certainly don’t compare to London, Oxford, Cambridge, or Dover. But it’s not nearly as bad as it’s sometimes made out to be, even if Jewel’s habit of moving her entire court from one part of her domain to another, sometimes as often as every week or two, has led to an absence of the sort of creature comforts that the more citified changelings have come to expect. It’s also an area of great natural beauty, with an abundance of unspoiled wild places of refuge from Banality.

Counties of the Duchy of Sunrise Road

The County of the Thousand Arches

The Central London area.

The County of Cloudy Hills (NPC)

West London and portions of the Cotswolds.

The County of Gulls (NPC)

East London and the Channel coast.

Baronies of the County of the Thousand Arches

The Barony of Boadicea’s Tomb

Literally under the mound known as “Boadicea’s Tomb” on Hampstead Heath

The Barony of the Fallen Castle

Site where the Crystal Palace formerly stood in southern London, on the border of Southwark, Lewisham and Bromley.