Heroic Fantasy mod

[Fornadan]

France/Burgundy: Siegfried/Sigurd with pals. In RL, they were kings living here in the 6th century. With the place they got in Scandinavian & Germanic folklore, they must be in somewhere

It isn't very difficult to limit starting countries to the counties only. (Of course the other countries will show up again if you reload, but you want to cheat...)

I can do scenario setup; haven't done any event scripting yet, but it can't be that hard to learn. If possible to claim an area, I would very much like to do the Scandinavian part.

 

[HolisticGod]

All,

On the other hand, we could write entirely original mythology, folklore and story for it, which would also be a lot of fun.

Traits and so forth are definable, aren't they? Whatever tact we take, I'd like to greatly emphasize their importance through prestige, rename them in keeping with the feel and change what it is they do. If you're a fine lad or lass in some Greco-Roman tribe, chastity is about the greatest offense you can give God or Man, while a schizophrenic or manic daughter would make a perfect Chancellor.

Also, can events be attached to particular CoA's/dyansties/dates a la EU II?

 

[unmerged(20048)]

Dates, titles, regions, specific provinces yes
Dynasties and specifc characters no
Traits are fully moddable
Opionions of traits although moddable are the same to every culture and religion (Although you could script events for a certain trait that only triggers if you have a specific culture or religion)

 

[Fornadan]

We could rename Chaste to Barren and increase the fertility penalty even more.

 

[unmerged(21937)]

Making entirely original mythology is loads of more work, but would offer far more room for imagination and ideas. Of you who have so far shown your interest, which one would interest you more, creating entirely original one for the mod or fitting existing legends into a mod? I am fascinated by both ideas, though more by a new original one.

Traits are fully modifiable, but creating new traits isn't possible unfortunately. So far I have been thinking of taking Crusader trait into new use as "Questing" trait, that would mean that your character is on a quest somewhere and therefore isn't as effective in governing as normally, but would then be able to trigger special quest events.

 

[HolisticGod]

Corvuz,

That's a shame. Johan ought to write a trigger, at least for dynasties.

Nonetheless, it'd still be possible and it would enable us to tell a pretty neat story, if we wanted to come up with one. I'm not a big reader of fantasy-though I still have terrible flashbacks to reading Beowulf in college-but it's my understanding that the "heroic" form requires a battle between clearly defined good and evil forces with individual triumphs and quests at the heart of things. So we could script event chains starting with the Lord of, say, the village of Cursedbutvaliantpeasents in Finland, finding an abandoned infant boy on the battlements of his Keep. He can choose to raise the boy as his own, give the boy to a servant girl but care for his education, give the boy to the local monastery or kill the boy outright, each with immediate consequences and the possibility that the boy could grow up-through other events-to become a great hero, a usurper or a selfish, talentless, boozing skirt-chaser, and that killing him could either spare the realm an age of darkness and despair or bring upon it a great curse. In this particular case, let us say the Lord is wise and compassionate. He is not a great general or a great banker or a great statesman, but rules the county of his fathers with a just and happy hand, his only sadness being that his wife, whom he loves dearly, has given him only girls and now her loins are dried up and she never seems to be in the mood anyway but is completely focused on her career and staying in shape with her burly German personal trainer Heinrich behind closed, soundproof doors in the dungeon where the shackles and whips, unused for the many years of the Lord's goodly rule, appear to be inexplicably wearing out. And so he takes this infant as his son, and his wife in her outrage places a curse on him, for her career is witchcraft or, as the Lord says in his passive-aggressive moments, "turning into her mother," and so he is destined to bring death to his father. The Lord, fearful of this but with no will to murder his beloved son, summons the wise and probably wrinkled and bent and carrying a staff to his meager court, but none can lift the curse. Finally, the most wrinkled and bent with the largest staff, a great wizard from the terrible east, offers to take the boy and the Lord, believing this will provide for his son a life while not depriving him of his own, consents. Many years pass and the boy grows into a great and powerful warrior in one the court of the last Good Kings of the East (who will have his own chain of events), until the evil Emperor, whose favorite color is probably black, finally breaks through the walls and lays his home waste, and so he flees to the southlands and there from the tribes of the Black sea raises a ragtag but noble host that probably thinks of itself more as a family and he leads them to the simmering castle of the Emperor and there learns that he is in fact the Emperor's son, secreted away by his mother in the night and left at the castle of a man whose heart is pure, this she knew for she was a good witch who just happened to have a thing for bad boys, and overjoyed at this revelation, having slew his father, he calls the Lord to his majestic court and the Lord, anxious to praise and honor him and very happy to hear from him after a bad year that saw one of his daughters wed a mule he knew could never make her happy and his wife announce, entirely out of the blue, that she and Heinrich were moving into the dudgeon permanently and could he try to be happy for them and please not cry like that and that's the problem she's always had with him and for chrissake I'm not your mother and be a man and no, I don't want to go to counselling for the last time and won't you please just give me half the county and not drag this into court because it'll be such a scandal and O think of the girls and of course we can still be friends you can even just us down there once in a while and I'm sorry I said it and it wasn't a joke and I really would like to and O things are just too complicated and won't you please stop crying I'm just going to go goodbye. And so he packs up his half of the Royal Train and sets out east and approaching the gates of the imperial capital is accidentally kicked in the head by his son-in-law and dies instantly.

Or something to that effect.

It'd be some work, but it'd also be a lot of fun to create a world from scratch, particularly with the character system. What say you?

 

[Usually_Insane]

can I join?

If I can I'd vote for as much original mythology as possible, perhaps including existant mythology were it's enhances the game and downtoning it were it's not that interesting. for example, include the (somewhat stereotypical) vampires in transylvania, having trolls and goblins in the north and kraken in the ocean.

but perhaps not including king arthur and court or the argonauts...

what I'm trying to say is that we try to have as much of the general mythology but not the specific stories, so that we can make our own.

_HoG_: could you divide your post into more managable pieces, it's quite interesting but I keep losing the tread somewhere in the middle, and I really want to finish it.

an Idea I had, if it's possible to link events to traits, so that you can have a misguided warrior who can unwittingly go on a quest of evil
(Idea: two events, same name, so you can either do a quest for the greater good or be decieved be the unspeakable evil, am I making any kind of sense?)

 

[Fornadan]

Personally I would rather not have too much scripted storyline. I would rather have something Silmarillion like, where some Dark Lord start one province, but during the game the good kingdoms are gobbled up one after another. I've always liked certain doom scenarios where you can only halt and not stop the enemy advance. (Victory should only be possible in, say 1 of 10 games).

 

[unmerged(20048)]

I also cast my vote for original mythology as that gives the game a background most people can relate to.

But the characters, kingdoms etc could be totally new.

And yes there almost has to be evil kingdoms. Maybe each region could have their own playable human kingdoms and their own evil kingdoms where the trolls, goblins, amazons, centaurs etc live. Portraits wouldn't have to be a problem for these monster kingdoms as they could just be ruled by a human elite (Think saruman from lotr or the dragon lords from dragonlance). It might get especially interesting as these monster kingdoms could get events that enable them to lure warriors from the human kingdoms in to fight them or they could demand human sacrifices to keep from attacking their neighbours.

And yeah it is possible to script events spcific for traits and events where your options trigger different events for your neighbour

 

[unmerged(21937)]

Though very clear good / evil distinctions might make things boring. And having evil unplayable would certainly get complaints from those who think that playing evil is cool (like myself sometimes).

Anyway, I got this idea:

Have Mythical Europe as a battleground between various pantheons, which desire to spread their influence all over the world. Cultures would be changed to Religions and spreading pantheon's influence would mean spreading your Religion all over. This would also give good cause empire building, which many CK players seem to like. Each pantheon's followers would be fractured into small statelets at first, from where the heroes-to-be would proceed to create a kingdom for their pantheon and after that would proceed to expand their pantheon's influence from there. On the way heroes-to-be would be questing for their deities and their own glory, gaining magical powers and defeating mythical beasts.

I think we should take most or all of educational traits into better use as various magical powers to be gained. As random courtiers get some educational traits anyway, they could represent wandering magicians coming to serve you. Important thing in having them represent magical powers is that you can have heroes become ever more powerful, while still keeping their base stats the same, so peoples stats would not inflate rapidly into astronomical levels.

What to do with the normal religion? As the most significant thing between the two playable religions (catholic and orthodox) to which we are forced to stick with is that they won't marry each other as AI. Also Crusades Exceptations and Excommunication affect just catholics, but both things can and should be eliminated from a mythic fantasy mod. So we could either have all as members of one or we could use it to signify some difference, like having "darks" as different 'religion' than "pales". Or to use it to signify difference between monotheistic and polytheistic religions or something. I'm not sure yet.

I'm not so fond of "Evil Empire" idea, because it will make scen focused on opposing the "Evil Empire". Somewhat like normal CK, where you tend to plan ahead against mongols. Of course having "Evil Empire" would make things more challenging, but I would think that more challenge could be achieved with events as well, like having a Huge Dragon raid your lands and combatting it would be difficult. Or have mystical Curse strike your family or lands.

Because it's possible to do more than one mod with fantasy in mind, we should start doing something instead of just pondering what can be done. So, how about this idea outlined here?

 

[HolisticGod]

Bya,

Sounds good to me.

How involved would the story be?

 

[unmerged(21937)]

I have to say that I don't fully understand what you mean, but I'll make a guess.

I suppose you mean how the backstory would involve itself in the game. I think it would through piety, which would represent your standing with your own gods. Best way to gain more piety would be converting provinces into your religion, spreading the influence of your pantheon. Other ways to gain it would be building temples, succeeding in quests given by deities and of course by investing in monthly sacrifices.

Then high piety needs to be something desirable. It has the BB reducing effect, but that doesn't sound so heroic, so I thought that high piety will give you divine blessings (again by events) and going low on piety will give bad events instead.

Also, I think that amount of heroic events should depend on your tier. So a lowly count would hardly ever (if ever) find himself doing an epic quest, while king would ride on glory and danger ever so often. Generally leaders of countries should be the most significant heroes around.

If I got your question all wrong, please elaborate.

 

[HolisticGod]

Bya,

That's part of it.

What I mean is, to what degree will event chains be used to script the story? This because at a certain level, even if there are folks available to do the artwork, it's basically just CK with a different map.

As an MP game, perhaps that's workable, but for single-player I think we ought to consider a continuous narrative told through the game.

 

[unmerged(21937)]

Well, it might be hard to get a good and plausible story arc for almost 400 years of available gameplay. Also would it mean having many different narratives for different regions or just a narrative that happens to player? Having even twenty different narratives going around all over the world might be difficult.

 

[HolisticGod]

Bya,

I was thinking an overarching narrative, but with specific trigger provinces known to the player. Essentially, having six or seven points from which to enter the story, all depending on posession of a certain province.

I don't think it's too difficult to stretch it out over four hundred years.

 

[HolisticGod]

Bya,

Unless it's possible to set events to trigger only for the player dynasty. Then we could write a single narrative.

 

[Fornadan]

Have Mythical Europe as a battleground between various pantheons, which desire to spread their influence all over the world. Cultures would be changed to Religions and spreading pantheon's influence would mean spreading your Religion all over. This would also give good cause empire building, which many CK players seem to like. Each pantheon's followers would be fractured into small statelets at first, from where the heroes-to-be would proceed to create a kingdom for their pantheon and after that would proceed to expand their pantheon's influence from there. On the way heroes-to-be would be questing for their deities and their own glory, gaining magical powers and defeating mythical beasts.

Sounds fine by me.

What to do with the normal religion? As the most significant thing between the two playable religions (catholic and orthodox) to which we are forced to stick with is that they won't marry each other as AI. Also Crusades Exceptations and Excommunication affect just catholics, but both things can and should be eliminated from a mythic fantasy mod. So we could either have all as members of one or we could use it to signify some difference, like having "darks" as different 'religion' than "pales". Or to use it to signify difference between monotheistic and polytheistic religions or something. I'm not sure yet.

I think we should let everyone be orthodox, and just rename "Orthodox" to " ". If the cultures are to represent pantheons, we don't really need religion as a difference. If Lancelot marries Nefertiti, that's just more fun.

 

[unmerged(21937)]

HG, it's possible to trigger only for human player, which would not trigger any events for any AI controlled relatives of yours, but would allow player-focused single narrative. Would that be something you are looking after?

Fornadan, I think that renaming orthodox to " " would be such a good idea, as it might give obscure results with province screens and so on. Maybe call it "human" and therefore have room for various monster races, even if we would never add them.

 

[HolisticGod]

Bya,

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking of.

How hard would it be, too, to add an easy option to turn it on and off? So that the campaign can be played in MP or in SP with an open-ended set of events (as you've suggested), or as a (semi-)linear narrative in which the player, whatever dynasty he chooses, follows a fully fleshed out tale.

There would probably have to be three or four "angles," though, depending on region (this could be triggered by religion/race, represented by culture), and the chains should diverge according to a player's moral choices.

 

[Fornadan]

Bya,

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking of.

How hard would it be, too, to add an easy option to turn it on and off? So that the campaign can be played in MP or in SP with an open-ended set of events (as you've suggested), or as a (semi-)linear narrative in which the player, whatever dynasty he chooses, follows a fully fleshed out tale.

I don't think you can do that in-game, but it is not hard at all to change this in the scenario file, since you just add a # before the events file you don't want to load. If most of the data is located in their own files, we could just add an extra MP scenario file.