I have a couple of questions for you more knowledgeable gaming folks. However, before I jump into the inquiries, I need to provide a little background.

I run a Birthright game that contains 5 primary PCs. One is a realm regent and the others elected to be guilders, church leaders, and a blooded wizard who supported the realm regent. As the game progressed, it has become more of a “everyman for himself” situation with the realm regent being the most aggressive and gaining the most overall military and political power.

Last week I decided to give the realm regent some new challenges. I really haven’t been as hard I should be on him and he’s quickly gaining some new enemies (NPCs) how aren’t comfortable with him becoming any more powerful. I decided to use an activity that I’d read somewhere in the Birthright literature where a blooded wizard used a Subversion spell to force another regents’ military units to invade a neighboring realm (one that doesn’t like the PC). The blooded wizard controls the source in the province where the PC’s military units (one archer, and one scout) were garrisoned and has a ley line to the source in the neighboring realm. So I had the wizard control the units and attack the neighboring province which has led to a whirlwind of activity by the realm regent PC.

Of course the realm regent wants to find out who is behind the activity, and immediately jumped into an “espionage” action. This has brought up a lot of questions that I want to throw out to the group.

First question: Is it really an espionage activity if everything the realm regent is doing to uncover information is being done using overt means?

Second question: Can the wizard use regency to stop the realm regent from finding out what was done to make the military units attack? The use of regency in an espionage action is not well clarified in the rules. It says that one cannot use regency to hide information, but also contains a note about the
DM may decide if regency can be spent by secret auction.

Third question: Can someone find out who created the original realm spell and what kind of spell was used? I haven’t been able to find any information connected to this question in chapter 7 (Realm Magic) and wondered if it was covered elsewhere.