One of my vassals assassinated my heir. Stupid bishop. Luckily my wife is very fertile, she's birthing one daughter after another. After the third girl I was wondering if either of us lacked Y chromosomes, but then I got a male heir. And there might be something wrong with her RNG, because the next kid is also male.
Now, you have to know that in CK2 there are
different succession laws, and because my liege lord is lame I am stuck with the worst one: gavelkind. Basically this means that each of your children inherit a title. Now I discovered that having multiple duchies can actually be a bad thing: different children will get a duchy title, so my realm would be split up. Luckily my succession law disinherits girls when there's a proper male heir, so this was manageable. The primary title always goes to the principal heir, so my oldest son would be duke of Saxony, and the other one duke of Brunswick. Unfortunately, Brunswick is much larger, and the periferic counties are still property of Saxony. This came to be after I created Brunswick. Anyway, this is bad news. I explore some of the options, like killing the guy. Then I came across the button "make primary", so I made Brunswick my primary duchy. And then something wonderful occured: all my lands are reappropriated to the duchy of Brunswick, except a (random) county that is made the capital of Saxony. Behold, the de facto duchy of Brunswick:
Anhalt is all that is left of Saxony, but here is de jure Saxony:
What you see are the two counties that are de jure Saxony, but de facto Meissen. And my heir will be duchy of Meissen anyway (my wife is currently holding that title). So I'll loose one county, but since I own two saxon counties I might be able to usurp the title and then I'll have a casus belli against Anhalt.
Speaking of CB, my councillor finally managed to fabricate claims on Friesland. I reassign the councillor to Koln, and he gets killed. He has no children, so I inherit his land
So after a short war against Lower Lorraine I finally own Friesland. This means that I'm over my demesne size though, so I'll have to give away some of my holdings to loyal subjects (or my wife, who knows). My new chancellor immediately fabricates claims on Koln, unfortunately I have to wait 10 years before I can extort more lands from the duke of Lower Lorraine. Or he;ll have to die. He's a midget, so I doubt he'll live long
When I'm ransoming the lorraine lords I captured during the just war to give Friesland it's rightful heir, I noticed that I still have that bishop in jail (the count of Brabant died in my prison, heh). For 8 years, heh. Browsing the options I noticed that I'm able to strip him of his title, and better: because he's a traitor, nobody will be upset about it. Let me get this straight: I get his title, and nothing bad happens? Sign me up!
Then it occured to me that if I made my second son a bishop, he can't inherit anything from me. So I shouldn't even have bothered shuffling my titles around.
Lessons learned:
-having too many titles can actually be A Bad Thing (tm)
-keep a bishop in jail for when you need to get rid of an heir
-you can reorganise your realm by making a duchy your primary title
What's next: I can get Koln and create a new duchy, I own 2/3's of the duchy of Gelre so I can create that duchy as well, which means that I'll have more CB's against lower lorraine than I need. Getting one county for every war is going to be... slow. This whole inheritance law thing is getting me annoyed for being a vassal in the HRE. Perhaps I should try to be HRE myself, or try to get out of the jail called HRE.