Heh, my last Irish game had basically the same Frankenstein going on that ended up with a Karl Karling-ruled Bohemia that covered most of the Carolingian territory. Very strange.
My current game I started as Donella, Queen of Daggerfall. Daggerfall, at the start, is a petty kingdom of 2 counties. Over the course of Donella's lifetime, I made it into a kingdom of 6 counties. Her son went out on pilgrimage and promptly died to bandits (probably wearing full dwarven armor, I mean this is Cyrodiil we're talking), at which point his daughter Fasile took over.
Fasile is by far the biggest badass I've played. In her 66 years of rulership, She singlehandedly (that's no exaggeration, more on that later) took the 6 counties of Daggerfall and made it into the Kingdom of High Rock, the only
de jure areas not under its control being Whitehaven (which I didn't get to before her death, having to fight a stupidly long war against Haafingar for various territories its king Ylbert inherited) and Camlorn (which, through some strange magick I guess, has the largest army in the world by far, starting at over 15k of
real troops (no lame special troops that don't do shit) that I've whittled down to 5.71k over the course of the king's conquests, all of which have been successful but half of which have resulted in a new independent county that will gladly swear fealty to me the instant I ask).
She did this in a process that I've decided to verb after the most famous example--"to
Camoran". Y'see, this woman was
not a warrior; martial was her worst stat, at 8 (I was confident even when she first gained the throne at 15 that she would be great). But she did have one thing:
magick, and a lot of it. To be exact, once a year, she could summon an army of 250 dremora.
That
really adds up. Consider that the biggest retinues I have to offer take a year and a half to go up to 330. Getting 250 dremore every year is
ridiculous. I didn't really notice that she could do that at first, either--I mostly focused on curing gonorrhea and wounds incurred during childbirth and other such things, which costs a lot more magicka. She only spent about the last 30 years of her life conquesting for High Rock. In that time, she managed through edicts and the whole "founded new kingdom which is now her primary title and destroyed the old one since there are no de jure vassals" thing to bring up the crown levy
twice and set up an internal king's peace so that she could set up Tanistry as the inheritance method (it was made absolute cognatic during the reign of Donella--I was planning for Tanistry since the instant I saw it, and absolute cognaticism was much faster to get. Much bigger pool for vassals to choose from, and they tend to choose pretty well who gets to be next king--it's always in the dynasty, too. Best succession, though maybe ultimogeniture if you've got a lineage that happens to be strong and quick or something).
Anyway, now I've got High King Danders, Fasile's great grandson, the tanist at the time of her death (MM LONG REIGN BONUS TANISTRY SO GOOD). Damn kid is content, though, which means he's not going to let me declare war to take over duchies in order to unite the rest of High Rock. Depression doesn't let me kill myself, either, which almost made me a little disappointed that time Fasile became a chicken.