Xanthea wrote:maybe I'm just missing all this stuff happening, in which case disregard me. It's certainly possible that there's all sorts of exciting stuff going on behind the scenes and that's fine, plots don't need to be visible to everyone to have value.
You're missing stuff going on. I'd like to say "a bunch," but that's probably not a fair assessment. It'd look impressive on a list, though it's distributed over some years. I guess that about half of them require that Ruqel have sovereignty, particularly the sort that would be resolved as matters of state and/or major problems where the highest authority to appeal to is also a PC. The questions like "What do I do with these few hundred paladins during this major conflict?" and "How do I keep this aggressive neighbor state from conquering us and/or turning us into a vassal state?" weren't answered in the hypothetical, at least.
I suppose I could crank out a long list of little dramas the place has made, too. It scuffled with Thay over their red wizards visiting Candlekeep and breaking the laws en route. Stuff like that. Less likely to be able to write a good novella about those.
The trouble is as I've posted earlier: I
really suck at building player groups, so a lot of people only really hear about these struggles in the context that Tess has only unpleasant things to say about the Baldurian council.