My pretender died for no reason!

[Cainehill]

Also, make sure you don't take too low a starting dominion on your pretender. Until you have enough experience to consider subtleties like horrible scales and stealth dominion, you really shouldn't go any lower than 4 for starting dominion, and 5 or 6 is really a much better minimum. This is because higher dominion is harder to push out, and also because of the way temple checks work : with a starting dominion of 2, your temples will _never_ have more than a 20% chance of increasing/spreading dominion, regardless of your maximum dominion from building temples. With starting dominion 6, each has a 60% chance.