v2.0 - Hellenoi Update, 26th Jan 2020
This mod is an attempt to add significantly more flavor and immersion to pagan games through a number of localisation changes.
Features
- New culturally and religiously appropriate localisation for a massive number of pagan-group theocratic titles and holding types. No more bland 'Priest' or 'Temple of...'.
- Improved text for pagan traits and events.
- New for 2020 - Hellenism now throughly overhauled in Greek.
- 'African' religion is now thoroughly overhauled as 'A Tat Roog', a real Senegambian religion.
- The Baltic, Bon, Finnish, Norse, Slavic, Tengri and Zunist (now 'Zunyasna') faiths extensively revamped.
- New flavorful honorary titles for several religions.
- New for 2020 - New religious nicknames..
Future Plans
- Adding new events for honorary title holders, including Volva-inspired event chains for the Ya Bopa (A Tat Roog), Court Ngakpa (Bon), Court Bakhsi (Tengri) and Kunda-e Koor (Zunyasna).
- New Serer culture and courtiers. I can't very well take an entire religion without representing the people it belongs to. This would most benefit HIP games where the Senegambia region and the Wolof culture are already relatively well represented.
- Doing some work on various pagan societies (if I'm not too busy doing my next mod on the 'Banu Sasan' and the medieval Islamic underworld).
Known Issues
- The reformed A Tat Roog religious leader is still showing as 'High Priest' instead of 'Yaal Laman' (or indeed, 'Grand Saltigue' as should have appeared in vanilla). I am unsure of the reason for this.
- The High God of the generic Paganism religion will appear as 'Roog'. This is because it shares the GOD_THE_CREATOR designation with West African Paganism. I figured this probably wouldn't bother anyone.
- As a rule, CK2 should be in American English for the sake of consistency, but I may have inadvertently slipped in British spellings and idioms as my education was all in British English.
Rationale
So ... this started as some minor tweaking and snowballed into a much larger project. As you do.
In Pagan Flavor, I have tried to bring more flavour and immersion to playing a pagan religion without editing any core game files that would make it incompatible with other mods - indeed, I started it with HIP in mind and I recommend playing with that as well as the Expanded Map mod so that the religions otherwise on the edge of the map are more easily playable.
I have tried to increase immersion by overhauling localisation for almost all of the religions in the 'pagan' religious group as well as adding a number of flavorful new minor court titles.
This is not an historically accurate mod any more than Holy Fury was historically 'accurate'. Most of the real-life pantheistic religions we see in CK2 had far more diverse practices and none of the structural rigidity that the game structure (or indeed sources written by medieval historians) enforces upon them, even before we reach such features as the counterfactual conceit of pagan reformation. I have nevertheless tried to make the most plausible adaptations possible because I am a massive geek with access to an enormous university library, some time on my hands and a fancy for something different from my usual Islamic history work.
Holders of theocratic baronies are therefore given actual sacerdotal titless in what I thought was the most appropriate language used by practitioners, with higher ranks receiving either a term actually used for rulers with religious duties or a fictional but at least linguistically appropriate title that references concepts which would have been familiar to at least some of the original practitioners.
For example, king-level Norse theocratic rulers are given the title 'Erilar', a term used in a number of runic inscriptions (and from which the latter Norse 'jarl' and the English 'earl' are derived) which was of a primarily religious significance, likely had an etymological connection with 'jord' (=earth) and has been argued to have been the religious function of several kings found in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, an account of the Kings of Norway to 1177. Hence: earth-priest king. You catch my drift.
A few notes on the various religions:
- African (renamed to 'A Tat Roog') - Paradox decided to represent the dizzying variety and richness of African religions by combining them into one in-game religion. This broke immersion for me when playing in Africa, as although many West African indigenous religions share many similarities, I felt that the vanilla African smorgasbord lacked the religious coherence and texture that for me creates an immersive experience. So I took the opposite approach and selected one real religion - in one language - to represent. (I say that, but I cheated a little bit: a few of the terms are in Wolof, not Serer). This is therefore the most modified religion by far, with edits to everything from titles to the holy order to patron deities and event text, and a bunch of new honorary titles to boot.
- Bon - As 'monastic feudal' is a thing in CK2, although you will immediately notice the new honorary titles many of the holding localisations may not be apparent until you have a character who can culturally only hold theocratic holdings. Nevertheless, this is definitely one religion I enjoyed studying and want to add more to.
- Zun (renamed to 'Zunyasna') - 'Zunism' was essentially a Paradox fantasy religion based on a few references to a sun god whose shrine was located in the region of Zamindawar in Afghanistan. I've therefore taken my own spin on this, inventing some of my own flavor based on the few details we have of the Zunbil dynasty mixed with a few titles and terms poached from Zoroastrianism and Iranian history.
- Tengri - I anticipated that most people who were going to play a Tengri ruler were probably going to go full Mongol. Much of the localisation was done with this in mind, although I have added honorary titles for non-Mongol Tengri rulers.
- Baltic, Slavic and Finnish religions - Localisations considerably expanded in 2.0
- Hellenism - Overhauled in 2.0. I figured that if anyone was going to reform Hellenism, it would be the Byzantines, who were more in touch with their cultural roots than contemporary Italians (see for example the teaching of Homer throughout the period, the use of Attic Greek in literature and the frequent use of archaizing terms, e.g. 'Scythians' for Pechenegs). I therefore used titles and terms from Ancient Greek that would have actually have been quite familiar to medieval Byzantines. This also meant that I dispensed with a lot of the Western Latinness of the Roman pagan state religion: this is not to say you shouldn't restore Rome as a Greek Hellenic ruler, only that you'll be referring to the gods by their more 'pure' Greek names.
Compatibility and Permissions
The mod should be compatible with everything, because (as I mentioned above) it does not edit any core game files. Furthermore, if you don't like my approach to a particular religion (understandable!), removing localisation is easy: just delete the relevant section in the localisation file. At present, it should also be fairly easy to remove honorary titles and nicknames as they are not attached to any events, but be sure to remove the entry from both the relevant file in the 'common folder' as well as the localisation file.
Any help in identifying and resolving issues is always appreciated. I am also very much open to corrections, suggestions, contributions and ideas.
This mod represents quite a few hours of research, so although I am happy to share bits and pieces of this mod for use in other mods please do ask before you use it. I may even give you some of the stuff I didn't use.
I hope you enjoy playing with it.
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