Got back to Roarssabre, to my own Keep. There was an elvish lord standing there with a name I recognized. I greeted and asked him about the local ruler. He said he was, and that he was right in all matters. Hang a sec, he was one of my hearthfolk when I left! The traitor! I reasserted The Righteous Act's claim, but failed to regain control. I repeated the claim to the law-giver standing by, and she said she didn't really care. Well, it's good to know he didn't have her support, but that didn't return control either. I found later that even though she's lawgiver of an empire, she's also a member of my site government. I took that as defacto support for an independent city-state, and I promised her my tribute in gratitude.
I revoked his status as hearthperson and demanded his government pay tribute to mine. He accepted, yet I still didn't regain control. So I exchanged his crossbow for a punch in the gut -- I was trying not to shed any more blood on the floor of my Keep, and didn't appreciate the addition of vomit, either. He shrieked in denial and refused to fight me. I grabbed him by the neck and threw him doorward, and he finally took the hint and excused his scrawny elven ass from my Keep. That returned control of the city and keep to me. No one had made a move either for or against him, but I was informed by the next person I spoke to that an Insurrection against me had begun.
Apparently he found his courage while I was catching up on sleep, as I was awoken by his attack. This time one of the others did engage him, non-lethally, and after slapping him a few times and demanding an end to hostilities, he gave up. I asked him what his trouble was and he accused me of murdering a vampire lord who I killed to take over in the first place. That vampire was declared an enemy of my government and the empire, yet this prick still held a grudge over eliminating him? That makes him not just a traitor to me, but to his own civ, and I realized I would have to assassinate him to put an end to his threat to the peace. I kicked him in the gut until he retreated, and once out the door I targeted his head until he was finally slain. I put a campfire over his remains (after collecting his pouch for the treasury, of course.)
That didn't end the insurrection, though. I had to wait in the Keep for a representative of each of the 40 factions vying for control to appear. Each of the showed up and reverted from their noble title to commoner, again and again until I lost track. I kept hearing reports that I had waited out the Insurrection, but that must have referred to the previous one, because every time I left to tour the city, another asterisk came from out of town straight toward the keep, and I had to race to get there first. When I thought that must have been all of them, I retired in the Keep. Legends didn't show that it had ended, but when I came out of retirement, at the top of my event list was the declaration that it had failed, and I was still Lord. Success!
Retirement wiped out all of the sites from my journal and narrowed the map fov to the region I was in. It also gave me lifelong acquaintance with people I'd just met, and people who died before my adventurer had even begun. It didn't narrow down the spamload of wildlife encounters from my event list
and it didn't give me the ability to brew booze. I still wasn't a member of any civ, so maybe I still have a chance to begin a new one.