Mad King Westler

There is no greater tragedy than being the right person in the right place at the wrong time. So it was for King Westler of Selestei, a kind and gentle soul who unfortunately became the heir to the Selesteine throne. He spent his childhood appreciating nature instead of fighting it and wrote poetry about the loveliness of things instead of their weak points and arm strength. This made him something of a pariah, but the royal family made no attempts to remove him from the succession, hoping that the mantle of kingship would shape him into a proper Selesteine. Fatefully, when he eventually was coronated in 817, this did not occur.

King Westler's foreign policy was uncharacteristically timid for a Selesteine monarch. When his mother, Queen Titania the Immovable, had ruled, she had sponsored Disputatious Assembly dinner parties for the express purpose of drinking the other sovereigns under the table and laughing at them. Westler, on the other hand, shrunk from public appearances and the pressure of international politics. Because of this, Selesteine psychologists began to murmur among themselves that he was off his rocker, unthinkable as it was to the Selesteines that their king should be such a wimp. This made him a prime target for the Lepazzian sovereign, who had flowers delivered to him weekly by the Esoteric Order of Florists in progressively more unnerving places. When the nerve-wracked king woke up one morning coughing up petals, he finally snapped and went completely off the deep end.

In 830, the final year of his reign, the Mad King was well and truly mad. He launched into a flurry of activity, outlawing and legalizing things at random until he had created a legislative mess unequaled until the Don't Think I Won't Act over a century later. He declared war and made peace weekly, all while breaking and renegotiating nonsensical treaties, often with countries he was at war with, and occasionally declaring war in the treaty. He hired a team of Flandrean propagandists to obfuscate anything and everything he was doing, then hired a team of Lepazzian propagandists to confound the Flandrean propaganda. The Mad King's reign finally ended when he kidnapped several Shastrian machinists and forced them to build him a giant robotic exoskeleton. When it was completed, he declared war on the ocean, boarded the exoskeleton, and jumped into the depths. After this, the Selesteines took a day off to have a drink and recover from the year, then rolled their law and foreign policy back to Queen Titania's.