How would you create a not-Habsburg empire in a fantasy setting?

How would you create a not-Habsburg empire in a fantasy setting?

By...Studying the Habsburg Empire and emulating it as closely as reasonable through the lens of my chosen setting?

I'm not sure what this question is supposed to mean, man.

Lots of inbreeding. I mean LOTS. We're talking so much the kids are more inbred than if their parents were siblings.

>all that jelly about the fact that no english monarch ever did a barrel roll

Wank your empire away with your legaly retarded offsprings.

They were a regular lawful evil Empire that followed the policy of trying to expand their realm by means of marriage first, war second whenever possible. They also were a pretty damn big family and their family councils were successful enough at putting down binding rules that prevented their realm from fracturing for a very long time.

Just play them like the Adams Family, but german. Also, everyone has a huge gorilla chin.

The way artists try to fix their fuglyness in portraits is pretty hilarious. But then again, there's only so much you can do when somebody´s skull is so deformed that he has both an under- and on overbite.

Yeah, it's like when people use edited photos on tinder or something.

This.

Would have to do a whole bunch of research because I assume there is a massive amount to it that I just don't know, and my passing familiarity with it isn't enough to suitably mirror it on anything but an incredibly superficial level.

Wasn't there this Habsburg emperor a few decades before WW1 who couldn't rule because he had about 20 epileptic attacks per day?

I think OP is just lazy and wants Veeky Forums to do his work for him.

Ruled by a family, basically everything is their property however the people are extremley proud of this.

Also the country is extremley diverse but not mixed.
In a fantasy setting this would mean that the army would have Human, Orc, Ogre, Elf, Lizardmen and whatever troops, however you would probably not see an awfull lot of half orcs running about.

As a result of this the army would be extremley disorganized.
But occasionally deadly.
More savage races and slavs would be denied rigths by the hungarian stand in and stage uprisings every so ofthen however many of them are also fiercly loyal to their lords who dont even speak their language.

Make sure to have it be a split between on one hand beeing extremley rich in culture and art and at the same time be extremley backwards and undeveloped in some areas.

And most importantly: give them fancy uniforms.
The real life equivalent already had leopard skins as part of their uniform, you better come up with something more ridiculous than that.


As for adventurers: You can keep the KuK Grenzers, they were farmers settled on the borders of the Reich to repel the ottomans, the special part about them was that they were free to practice any religion and had a bunch of other privileges for beeing Warrior Farmers.

Could be a good place to start an adventuring party.

I dunno, deformities aside, Charles II seemed like a pretty nice guy for a mutant noble. Then again, maybe that's why he was the last person of the line.

And dont forget about the split in the country.

The Kaiser equivalent should be lawfull neutral or lawfull good while the Hungarian equivalent should be lawfull evil in DnD terms.

One big problem Austria-Hungary had was ´that the hungarians would ruin almost any diplomatic relations they had by demanding outrageous things, beeing ignorant on purpose or generally antagonizing everyone.

At that point the inbred habsburgs had to arrange yet another marriage with some distant cousin.


Also you should make the rulers look extremley degenerated, not only inbred but Part Orc part Elf part Mindflayer for all i care, since they married into whatever realm suits them

Funny you should mention. Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor (House of Hohenstaufen), drowned while marching to join the Third Crusade and his body was put in a barrel of vinegar to try and preserve it.

Take a dump on the map.

>glorious
>habsburg
>empire

The spanish line is a helluva drug.

And somehow, they were considered the senior of the two.

>Also you should make the rulers look extremley degenerated, not only inbred but Part Orc part Elf part Mindflayer for all i care, since they married into whatever realm suits them

The habsburgian face was with the line as far back as the middle ages, user. That's a long time before the English rev'd up the anti-spanish propaganda and noticed that the Spanish line sired a whole lot of fugly retards.

The Austrian line was reasonably inheritable madness-free in comparison.

Voltaire? Who let you out of Veeky Forums? Shouldn't you be shitting on Rousseau based on things he never said without actually understanding his arguments or proposing valid counterarguments?

Someone on Veeky Forums described it best: Voltaire is the smug pepe to Rousseau's Wojak

1- Large progressive and multicultural empire with people of various races in it. It being fantástico it might well be ruled by an half elven Or half orc dinasty and human, elves, orcs and other races as lawfull citizens.
2- The Dinasty itself is however family with basically all The other royal families of The continent and often plays it fast and rough with eugenetics resulting in frequent incest
3- It confines with all The worst scum of the continent and is in a costant state of low level war on all sides.
4- there are many indipendence movements, raging from The civil to The all out civil war like
5- Local nobles are very powerfull compared to the central government this results in either internal conflicts or perfect collaboration depending on how well liked The Emperor is.

I agree with pretty much everything here save for one small nitpick.

>progressive and multicultural

Multicultural, yes. Progressive, no. Especially under a Franz-Joseph type of emperor. While non-German subjects may not have been legally/officially discriminated against, general opinion was all ethnicities within the Empire hated each other at least a little bit. Some more so than others e.g. consider how much trouble the Hungarians caused up to and even after getting their own parliament under the dual monarchy.

Yeah, the KK was pretty damn strictly Roman Catholic and there was a lot of ethnic hatred going around.
They were allegeldy more progressive during the reign of that son of Maria Theresia, but even that was tempered by the guy doubling down on the Absolutism. The dynasty also developed a pretty effective secret police regime after the Viennese Congress.

Shouldn't you be with ol' Fritz?

Good Maria Theresia allowed the peaseants to distill ten liters of moonshine for every living family member.

This.

Easy, have basically the equivalent of gods (Trastamara, not like any proud'n'pleb knows about them) breed with the equivalent of mentally retarded goblins because nobody will ally with them so they just buy allies.

Dragons.

An Empire of Dragons.

They live forever, are autistic where lineage is concerned, and always feel the urge to scheme against their siblings.

This could be funny enough to work.

So they would look something like this?

It's a legitimate empire in my Original the Setting, to the point where every dragon you encounter outside of the Empire is either an exiled noble, a second son trying to get enough money and power to claim his throne, or a dragon so utterly insane and inbred he was thrown out into the wilds.

The Dragon Dukes themselves are focused largely on their own little political games, largely ignorant of the world outside of the Empire, having long-since left most of the day-to-day governance of the Imperial administration in the hands of their human servants.

The megalomania, paranoia and intense greed that are "typical" of dragons largely stem from their pomposity and mental illnesses brought on by all the sibling-sex.

Y'all notice the whole idea of dragon dynasties comes from Chinese emperors having that title yes?

>They live forever, are autistic where lineage is concerned, and always feel the urge to scheme against their siblings.

But the Habsburgs managed to keep a lid on that via family councils and other mechanism of arbitration. If you wanna have scheming and overthrowing, use England. Their foreign royal dynasty got replaced by a completely different foreign royal dynasty every bunch of generations.

Bunch of retarded inbred elves ruled from the shadows by greedy gnomes

make it the von Luxembourg empire

>Luxembourg

I want Middle Francia to leave.

>Hungarians Lawful Evil
Hungarians only wanted independence. Their kingdom had existed as an independent entity since 1000 AD and had controlled the entire Carpathians all the way to the sea. The Kaiser absolutely refused to recognize them as independent under any circumstances, because that was where the empire's true strength always lied.

The Hungarians staged an uprising and beat the Austrians, but they invited the Russians in to fight it off. Knowing they couldn't win against Russia, the Hungarians surrendered, on the terms that the leaders and revolters would be pardoned. The kaiser agreed to this, but executed them all anyways once they laid down their arms.

So you're saying I should play CKII? Good idea.

>and slavs

>And most importantly: give them fancy uniforms.

Second.

A union of an Elven Kingdom with a Human Grand Duchy that slowly created a ruling caste of half-elves who ruled over vast swaths of pure humans, pure elves, halflings, dwarves, gnomes and a few other petty races.

Voltaire is also an interesting study of how much one can talk shit before one gets hit. Turns out the answer is "a lot, provided it's done smartly".

A better question is how you would do the entire french revolutionary wars/napoleonic era in a fantasy setting.

The only reason he fled to England and the first place, and probably the reason why he ended up wanking over it so much (until he decided to shit on Shakespeare and wank over Prussia instead) was because he was literallly that guy who won't shut up in theaters. Some noble told him to shut up, Voltaire roasted him, the noble asked him who the hell he thinks he is, Voltaire kept roasting him and then he was almost arrested for being rude as fuck.

Voltaire is one of those guys whose guts I'd hate if I actually knew him.

It's actually quite simple
>Insert "Roman Empire" disk
>Push fastforward

Voltaire is a very volatile person.