We tried the following for the three player variant and it worked fairly well:

At the start of the round, deal 1 down, 2 up, each player chooses a character, and then the final one goes down.

As per other rules if the king is dealt up, he gets reshuffled in, and another character is picked.

It seems slightly different then what's in the rules, and seemed to play out just fine.

This is an variant to play the standard 8 cards with 3 players

1) Deal 4 cards
2) Randomly set aside 1 card
3) Player 1 looks at the three cards, chooses one, and passes left
4) Player 2 chooses one of the two cards and passes the other left
5) Player 3 takes the card passed and the card set aside in step 2, chooses one of them, and discards the other
6) Repeat steps 1-5 with the other 4 cards

This gets around the main issue of the I have in the 3 player game; that the crown gets a guaranteed assasination / steal from one of the other 2 players in the game.

 I have yet to see a problem with 2/3 play variant issues as we play this regularly.

....sorry; I feel a bit slow right now how does the crown get a guaranteed steal?