Yeah, the lineage thing is a crapshoot. I was playing an English/Hard/early game and my king died of illness 8 years before his next of kin matured. After having played the campaign for a week and having LOVED my accomplishments to date, I loaded the last saved game and restarted from that point. The king miraculously lived 12 more years. I had married the bugger off to some foreign bint, but for some reason they didn't have any male heirs (now I know how my father in law felt ). Something in the water I guess. I was going to make a crack about the fact that he was English, but I'm relatively new here and not sure if someone might actually take those comments seriously.