HARMONIOUS FZORT

Harmonious Fzort, grandson of Gladius Fzort, was the seventh king of the Entharion Dynasty, reigning from Largoneth in the years 451~477 GUE. He came to the throne after Zilbo Throckrod II, and was succeeded by Bozbo Throckrod II. It is worth pausing to note one of the many ironies of history, that Harmonious' reign was the only one in the bulk of the Entharion Dynasty that was in fact anything but harmonious.

In 451, Zilbo Throckrod II finally passed away. His younger brother Bozbo was still alive, and more than willing to take the throne. Matters were complicated somewhat by the existence of Zilbo's daughter and only child, the Princess Arathena. Although no woman had ever ascended to the throne of Quendor, Zilbo himself had made no clear plans for who was to succeed him, and the princess herself had married into the Fzort clan, a powerful family that had been at the center of court intrigues since the time of Zylon the Aged. Harmonious Fzort, himself nothing more than a one-time royal advisor and grandson of Gladius Fzort, proceeded to claim the throne for himself on behalf of his young bride, Arathena. Legend has it that the two claimants to the throne met one day in Largoneth, and, unable to arrive at a mutually agreeable solution, decided to settle the whole affair over a two-person game of Peggleboz. Harmonious, himself already second seed in the all-Quendoran Peggleboz brackets, apparently beat Bozbo in record time. The angry Throckrod stormed out of Largoneth, crying foul play. Harmonious lost no time in proclaiming himself king where he would rule the kingdom for 26 years until 477.

Immediately, Harmonious issued a warrant for his rival’s arrest and immediate execution. Understandably afraid for his life, Bozbo cut a speedy retreat back to his home province of Bozbar, not without pausing to send an irate letter of appeal to the game's creator and guiding spirit in Mareilon. Gustav Peggleboz, it seems, was sympathetic to Bozbo's claims, himself announcing that Harmonious had violated the spirit of the game and seized the throne of the kingdom in violation of the will of the gods and the by-laws of the Peggleboz International Rules Committee. Mareilon itself erupted in riot, Gustav himself orchestrating the seizure of the local Quendoran garrisons and Peggleboz game halls.

Alarmed at the violent turn of events, Harmonious immediately began to take steps to curb the authority of his rivals. An official proclamation from the early spring of 452 GUE announced the unification of Peggleboz and State, expelling the game’s creator from the official league and stripping him of all peggleboz-related rights and naming Harmonious as the sole head of the only legitimate peggleboz league in all of Quendor. The resulting situation quickly deteriorated into a kingdom-wide peggleboz schism, Harmonious receiving recognition as Peggleboz Champion in the northern four provinces, and Peggleboz himself defeating Bozbo year after year to claim the supreme title throughout the 3 1/2 southern provinces through 455.

This awkward schism in the gaming world came to a violent political head in 456 when Gustav was raised, without royal approval, to the governorship of Mareilon Province. He promptly cut all ties with the royal court, announcing his province's secession from the Kingdom of Quendor and the resurrection of the ancient principality. A brief but bloody civil war ended in the execution of Peggleboz and a royal decree from Fzort naming himself as Quendor's Universal One-on-One Peggleboz Speed Champion. By the time news of the disaster reached Bozbo's home province, it was all too clear to the rebel that waging a successful military conflict would prove to be a near impossibility, so the claimant to the throne turned instead to the most powerful weapon in his arsenal for economic warfare, ordering the immediate halt of all zucchini shipments to the capital and the other provinces under Fzort's control.

In response to this outrage, Harmonious sent royal troops into Znurg in 459, ordering seizure of the latest batch of zucchini shipments. It was during this year in which a professor at Galepath University, named Bizboz wrote a lengthy pamphlet entitled “On the Evil of the Zucchini Plant,” a work not well remembered for its insightful intellectual content, but important nevertheless in that it firmly establishes Bizboz’s place right at the center of the Zucchini Controversy. In fact, it has often been suggested that Bizboz’s unquenchable hatred of zucchini led him to direct his first tentative magical experiments towards the unfortunate plant, experiments that supposedly culminated in the horrible zucchini blights of the 460s and 470s. Regardless, the zucchini crop for the next four seasons, from 460 to 463, were ruined by a blight in Bozbar and Vriminax.

In 464, this famine led Quendor to increase shipments of zucchini to those provinces at the expense of the coastal regions. By 465 Mareilon marched against Frobozz to force the freeing of the zucchini route through Znurg to the coast. Harmonious ordered the Galepath militia to provide reinforcements, but Galepath refused to respond. Unbeknown to Harmonious, but the entire city of Galepath was infested by a rebellion of yipples much larger and more powerful than those described in the Sorcerer packaging. (see 'Yipple Rebellion' for more information)

Znurg marched on Quendor in 468 GUE, in order to seize the last remaining zucchini fields. By 470, every non-coastal province was seized by Znurg, before facing military stalemate with the coastal provinces. In attempt to thwart this standstill, Znurg withheld zucchini shipments to the coast. The <ucchini blight spread over the next two years (471-2), destroying the last of Quendor’s crop. The devastating famine that resulted in the east led Fzort to summon a final offensive against the western provinces in 472.

The Zucchini Wars were in a position of continued military stalemate in 473, although along with the blights, riots rained devastation upon the stability of the coastal provinces. Desperate for zucchinis to save his people, Harmonious reluctantly agreed to negotiations in exchange for needed shipments. All those involved were to meet at Znurg the following year.
 
Eyewitness reports note that no provincial delegate had brought with him a retinue of any significant size, the entire conference guarded by a mere half-dozen members of the local militia. The king himself, leaving the security of Largoneth for the first time during the length of the war, came accompanied only by two personal bodyguards, himself having traveled the distance to Znurg on the back of a scraggly and ill-fed pack mule.

Despite the sense of urgency produced by the impact of the continuing famine, the proceedings of the peace conference rapidly degenerated into near anarchy as terms were dictated against Harmonious. The delegates sent to represent the rebel provinces, clearly feeling that they held the upper hand, retreated into a series of private meetings to decide upon their demands. When they emerged from seclusion nearly a week later, the impatient Harmonious and his fellow delegates were ready to accept nearly anything. The result was the immediate ratification of the Peggleboz Declaration, the bulk of which is reprinted below.

A Declaration

by the Representatives of the Free and Unconquered Provinces of

Quendor, Assembled in Congress at Znurg, 16 Augur 473.

We the Frobbers of the United Provinces of Quendor don't even think the following things are really worth mentioning: that all zucchinis are created equal, that they are endowed by the Implementors with certain inalienable rights, and that among these rights are life, liberty, and the possibility of being eaten in any province they damn well please. That, to frobnicate these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the Great Brogmoid and the longest sword they can get their hands on; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends and attempts to unify the powers of peggleboz and state, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to go home as soon as they can.

It is clear from the sarcastic terseness of the declaration that the assembly was already heartily sick of the long war and its unexpected side effects, but they were nevertheless holding true to two chief ideas, the first being that the royal government had no right to dictate zucchini trade routes to the outlying provinces, and the second being that the newly realized Peggleboz League would remain separate and distinct, constituting an authority to which the royal crown could lay no claim.

Bozbo was declared heir apparent while Fzort was to pay reparations to all devastated provinces. On Jam 5th, the Treaty of Znurg was signed, which finally ended the Zucchini Wars. Harmonious on his part spent the next three years adhering to these principles in embarrassed and defeated silence, finally passing away unmourned some time in late 477. With his death, the last vestiges of the crisis that he had caused finally faded into oblivion. In keeping with the terms agreed upon at Znurg, Bozbo became the second Quendoran monarch to bear that name, and Harmonious’ son Thaddium Fzort became the heir apparent to the throne of Entharion.