Nothing super-shocking here, I just thought I'd share some stories of my current game (which is still the one from the old pre-Reaper's Due version I may have mentioned in another thread - I'm just about finishing it up, though, since as you can see, my Idrisid Caliphate is pretty well unstoppable already... I thought the game would be more of a challenge but after getting a good opportunity to usurp the Fatimids' caliphate which formed in Africa, I had a pretty easy time and mostly just had fun times cultivating the Shi'ite faith all over the place).
The Knytlings had an interesting fate. They didn't do very well in Denmark - some HRE vassal (Saxony or something) annexed Jylland and Sjaelland just fell to the other Nordic realms after a while. However, one branch of their dynasty managed to build the family's fortunes elsewhere - the Danish had acquired some land around Livonia, and I'm not exactly sure how (my guess is: they got subjugated by Novgorod, maybe by Lithuania before that, and from there they managed to build up a powerbase within the realm), but they managed to take over Novgorod. They were still Nordic Norsemen initially, but eventually assimilated into the Russian Finnic majority of the area and now have a pretty solid grip over Novgorod. A pretty good deal for them.
This is also the game where Iconoclasts took over Byzantium and thus (this being an old version) the Schism didn't fire. Kiev is Iconoclast, Bulgaria disintegrated after religious turmoil, most of Western Europe is either under the thumb of the HRE or is Adoptionist (including Aquitaine and most of the British Isles) and Hungary is still Tengri after some brief flirtations with Chalcedonian Christianity.
Also, the Shi'ite world expanded quite a bit, but unlike how I had thought it would happen, it wasn't just all me. The Kadidu realm in Azerbaijan was created as a result of one of the Jihads I called (the land given to a retainer), but the Elbazid Sultanate (in Mesopotamia, name not visible on the screenshot) was born out of a liberation revolt that gradually expanded to annex all the fractured Sunni and Nestorian realms around it (well, I helped a bit, but they did much of the work). As for Nicaea, the Sunni Caliph (who rules Egypt still - never got around to taking them out) somehow took it in a jihad against the Byzantines, but then, once again - and I was very surprised and pleased to see this - a Greek Shi'a liberation revolt made Nicaea break away while the Egyptians were down at one point. (There was literally one Shi'ite province in the whole realm, it was very lucky that it was the one province out of them all that spawned that revolt.) Of course, I also helped them consolidate a little and take some land from the Paulician Armenians.
Probably gonna wrap this game up soon and then update to the latest version, but this was a really fun game - even when the challenge was more or less over, the world was just interesting overall.
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