tl;dr - religion management policy if you control a Holy Site that can influence other religion's opinions and autonomous religious Community development that tie into those opinions/conflicts of religion
With the recent dev diary about hunts and pilgrimages, I've been thinking more about the latter, specifically in forms of inter-religious experiences when other faiths hold your religious sites. It hasn't been specified (or at least my post didn't get a response) how travels are affected when other religions hold site, so I started thinking about what kind of mechanics could be implemented to represent the different policies that affected relations faiths, mainly through the lens of conflicts of the Abrahamic faiths, control over Jerusalem, and the stateless Jewish communities across Europe, and what could be extrapolated into broader mechanics. As such, I've come up with two ideas to try to model historical trends and effects: Holy Contract Rights and Communities.
Unfortunately, like some of my other ideas, this means creating a new kind of holding that's treated in an adjacent space to an existing barony, like Merchant Republic trade buildings or forts in CK2. The main part of this is for creating a 'Caretaker' character to interact with regarding the pilgrimage policy rights, as I think it could be treated as an alternative kind of Vassal Contract. This Caretaker's court is then used to store courtiers from the respective Community, but I'll get to that later.
Gaze upon all of my submenus and despair, for I am not a UI designer.
The most major part of this suggestion is that, by owning a Holy Site, you have control over it, and its influences with the affected religions. With the contract connected to your Caretaker, you can impact how pilgrims going to and from a Holy Site are treated, which impacts your relations with the said religion.
For each living faith (that has active members) that claims the barony as their Holy Site, they are shown in the Holy Contract, organized by Religion, Sub-group, and then by the specific faiths. For ease of use, your sub-group would be open to judge individual faiths, while other sub-groups/religions are collapsed for readability, with the option of allowing you to nitpick if you very so wish; you could set your Holy policy at at the sub-group/religion level for broad policies, and then dive in to make an exception. faith. The hostility of said religion/sub-group/faith to your own would be shown for relevance.
The Rights could be something as follows:
*You cannot harass/ban pilgrims from your own/fellow righteous or astray faiths.
**To add some further risk to these trips, you have to make a specific Danger skill check to enter the Holy Site.
***Opinion bonuses are scaled depending upon the size of a religion (your Glory Hounds will enjoy riding down 100 Catholic pilgrims more than 2 Sabianists). Your Stance preference will appear under/when hovering over the tool tip of the Right.
****Your character's traits and faith hostility will impact if stress is gained/lost by changing the Rights, scaled to the size of a religion.
The main idea is that the AI drivers behind these decisions are: Character traits > Religious relations/tenants > Stances of Vassals.
These contracts would, ideally, only be changed once in a ruler's lifetime, like your capital. You would receive a notification event ~3 months into your new reign (and your majority) reminding you about these rights, so that you can make an impact and then not have to worry about micromanaging them. Still, I want your traits to have an impact on the laws you enact, meaning that different characters will have to change their Contact Rights depending on their opinions, or suffer stress penalties.
Idealistically, these could be altered during your lifetime due to events and other incidents (impacted by a great religious war, a papal bull, a crusade), but I don't think we want to constantly be searching through these tabs for every site you own.
If anything were to be added, I'd prefer just the Holy Rights and this be sidelined. But, since I'm still brainstorming, here's an addendum to my idea for Religious Communities. Before you say "WOAH POPS DON'T WORK IN CK3," I'll say that I agree, and so this is an attempt to generalize things and make them relatively painless, without having to be micromanaged, and only being limited to 176 counties, which has a decent amount of impact around the world. Communities are grouped by Religious Family to make it so you don't need 20 building spots/splitting buildings that are shared between sub-groups, but this could take some rethinking Smarter instead of Harder to be more intuitive [ie, Sunnis and Shia can visit the same mosque that would reject a Qarmatian, Mozarbs could visit a Greek or Catholic church--but would a Cathar and a Bogomil be down to pray with a Lollard and a Waldensian?]
For this, the Caretaker's Holy Site holding gains a unique interface option, either by clicking the holy site icon (A) in the panel, or clicking on your specific temple (B), which displays a few bits and pieces:
If denied, nothing happens, while accepting (which may cost money to set up) will add a Community Temple and a Religious Community to the Holy Site. From here, the Temple works just like any other building, which can be upgraded by the owner for benefits (the vast majority of which require you to be a specific religion). Temples also have a special Tier 0 Ruined level, which is pretty much a placeholder if you want to recover an expelled/banned Community--it will take some time before the Community is willing to return, but having a place they CAN go to is better than a whole new place.
Meanwhile, a Community exists as a self-developing hub that generates effects (3), while also providing courtiers to your Caretaker's (1) court, who can be interacted with in general, Royal Court, or Community-related events. Inspired by Development and how Traits can level up, the community will grow on its own over time, pending events and other factors*, with each tier (5B) unlocking new effects (5A).
If you conquer one of your holy sites that does not have your religious community, you will receive a prompt in ~3 months of the conquest about building a temple and setting up a community, though this comes out of your own pocket.
If your Holy Site is not shared with any other Religion, do not fret: depending on the factors* involved, you might still receive a Community at your doorstep. They won't have any special Temple and might not have the greatest Growth rate, but it'll be a home for people in want, and you'll gain the benefits from sharing with people. Your Caretaker then gains a similar kind of submenu for the Pilgrimage rights for these Community rights, which shows the faiths of those who can go on pilgrimage to your site, and the rights of those communities who have settled there:
*Factors include but are not limited to: the Convert Religion Council task, the religion's rights, the faith's/religion's hostility to your religion, your current Struggle phase, how the Struggle was Ended, a ruined Temple, a Unique Temple, that Temple's level, Fervor, number of landed vs unlanded characters, historical events, terrain type, ocean/river access, expulsions from other realms, recent invasions of Mongols or Almohads, the Erudition/Law/Customs/Metropolitan legacies, etc
Effects include but are not limited to: taxes, levies, development, public order, innovation gain, opinion bonuses with the religion, discount bonuses on certain buildings, etc, though this also usually comes with a conversion malus (making it harder to convert established communities). These could also come with decisions, like taking out loans, employing a learned and professional judge, or recruiting a scientist into your royal court, depending on the faith at hand.
So in summary, the flow of this is: receive an event, gain a Community, let them grow over time for benefit. If a Temple is ruined, you can rebuild it for better odds of attracting a community. Upgrading a Temple will give better Community growth, while reducing it can give a quick influx of cash. Pretty standard 'gardening,' as some call it, albeit with some RNG to start it all up, but it's then relatively self-sustaining.
So why are Communities scaled from 1 to ~5 while Temples have a stage 0? Well, it's because, quite frankly, religions did not get along well at all times and places in the medieval world. Whether its the destruction of temples, the slaughter of innocents after a siege, the invasion of radical purists, forced expulsions, and so on, people did not often play nice with people who were different from them: that's why you can Harass and Ban pilgrims with your Holy Contract Rights, while the majority of religions in-game already have access to a kind of Great Holy War that expel people of different faiths from their lands.
To mirror these historical trends, however abhorrent they might seem to our perspective of the modern day, Players can use the 5C button is to expel a Community from a Holy Site, which required Harassed/Banned pilgrimage/ Discriminated community rights. The resulting event(s) can have several outcomes: the Community is let free with their possessions (a boon to other communities of the religion), debts owed to them are cancelled and their goods are revoked, the community can be enslaved, whether in the field or forced into the armies, or they are forcibly removed--the Lord knows those that are his own. The player can gain benefits in the form of quick cash, approval of your zealots and a stabilization of public order, or even boosts to your Community at the site, via the looting of the other Community/ies and the plunder of their Temples, reducing them to Tier 0, or even destroying them completely, adding their benefits to your own Community in the Holy Site. Or, you could even convert their temples into one of your own.
But, of course, the player is not the only actor in the city: the dangers of the mob can be just as deadly as any royal edict. During times of crises (great plagues, misguided fervor, when the player changes Pilgrimage Rights) the owner might be forced to stand between their Communities and make a decision: do they stand with their people, or do they side with the innocent they have sworn to protect? These more "random" events would be more balanced by reducing Community by one or two tiers instead of outright destruction, to be balanced, though the legacy might impact their growth. Temples can also be reduced to 0, but it is the player's choice if they want to clear the rubble for another slot.
While some might consider this incredibly edgy, I believe context is very important in not only understanding the past, but how individual people (ie, the characters we play in Crusader Kings) could understand their present and react accordingly. These actions must be treated with seriousness and all respect, because they were terrible actions, perpetrated by a vast number of actors across all sides of the world, with horrifying results. They were a reality of the time and there was a rationale behind them, however morally incomprehensible, and I feel they would make a strong impact to a character and the people they rule.
With that serious matter out of the way, I can return to this development document with a little more light-heartedness. In summary, my idea is:
Things I think might be cool, but this is already getting too long, most of which are about
With the recent dev diary about hunts and pilgrimages, I've been thinking more about the latter, specifically in forms of inter-religious experiences when other faiths hold your religious sites. It hasn't been specified (or at least my post didn't get a response) how travels are affected when other religions hold site, so I started thinking about what kind of mechanics could be implemented to represent the different policies that affected relations faiths, mainly through the lens of conflicts of the Abrahamic faiths, control over Jerusalem, and the stateless Jewish communities across Europe, and what could be extrapolated into broader mechanics. As such, I've come up with two ideas to try to model historical trends and effects: Holy Contract Rights and Communities.
Unfortunately, like some of my other ideas, this means creating a new kind of holding that's treated in an adjacent space to an existing barony, like Merchant Republic trade buildings or forts in CK2. The main part of this is for creating a 'Caretaker' character to interact with regarding the pilgrimage policy rights, as I think it could be treated as an alternative kind of Vassal Contract. This Caretaker's court is then used to store courtiers from the respective Community, but I'll get to that later.
Holy Contract Rights
Gaze upon all of my submenus and despair, for I am not a UI designer.
The most major part of this suggestion is that, by owning a Holy Site, you have control over it, and its influences with the affected religions. With the contract connected to your Caretaker, you can impact how pilgrims going to and from a Holy Site are treated, which impacts your relations with the said religion.
For each living faith (that has active members) that claims the barony as their Holy Site, they are shown in the Holy Contract, organized by Religion, Sub-group, and then by the specific faiths. For ease of use, your sub-group would be open to judge individual faiths, while other sub-groups/religions are collapsed for readability, with the option of allowing you to nitpick if you very so wish; you could set your Holy policy at at the sub-group/religion level for broad policies, and then dive in to make an exception. faith. The hostility of said religion/sub-group/faith to your own would be shown for relevance.
The Rights could be something as follows:
Pilgrimage Rights | Protected Pilgrimages | Open Pilgrimages | Extorted Pilgrimages | Harassed Pilgrimages* | Banned Pilgrimages* |
Flavor Text | "Travelers will be granted full protection for their sacred trip" | "Travelers shall make do on their journey" | "The price to visit their holy land is one they are willing to pay" | "They are not welcome here, yet still they come." | "No longer shall they defile our lands with their blasphemous footsteps" |
Holy War Weight | -20 | -10 | +15 | +25 | |
Dangers while traveling in the Pilgrim Destination's Kingdom | Reduced | Increased | Increased | ||
Cost to Travel through Pilgrim Destination's Kingdom | Increased, give a portion to each county passed through, Holy Site owner, and highest liege | Potential to attack/capture, extort, or let pilgrims pass | Potential to attack/capture, extort, or let pilgrims pass. | ||
Skill Checks to enter destination** | Once | Twice | |||
Pilgrim Options | Cannot be Worldly, or slowest level of Fidelity. Cannot have Altruism Intent | Cannot be Worldly, or slowest level of Fidelity. Can't travel with a large Pomp. Has to be Zealotry Intent | |||
Trait Preference for Pilgrims | Greedy suffer a critical break | Brave, Zealous, Stubborn | Brave, Zealous, Stubborn All others suffer stress Cowards and Cynics cannot go | ||
General Opinions/Stances towards Owner*** | +Head of Faith of religion, Vassals of Said religion/ Minority stance -Zealots if negative opinion of said religion | +Parochial - | +Minor Landowners - | +Glory Hounds, Zealots -Minority, vassals of said religion | +Zealot, your clerics/HoF if negative stance of said religion -Minority, vassals of said religion, Head of Faith of Religion |
Stress/AI Owner Weights**** | +Compassion, Honor; Ritual Hospitality/Puja tenet; Esteemed Hospitality, Charismatic/Charitable, African/Steppe Tolerance traditions - | +Rationality; (Faith) Syncretism tenet; Culture Blending, Linguists, Religious Blending traditions - | +Greed; Tax Nonbelievers/Jizya tenet; Maritime Mercantilism tradition -Compassion; Vows of Poverty tenet | +Vengefulness, Bold; Sacred Lies tenet; State Ransoming, Practiced Pirates traditions -Honor, Compassion | +Vengefulness, Zeal; Isolationist, Bound by Faith traditions -Compassion; Pacifism/Dharmic Pacifism Tenet; Pacifists tradition |
Community Interactions | Benefits to Growth/settlement | Can reduce temple levels | Can reduce Temple levels Can expel Community Decreased Growth, even negative | Can reduce Temple levels Can expel Community Decreased Growth, even negative |
**To add some further risk to these trips, you have to make a specific Danger skill check to enter the Holy Site.
***Opinion bonuses are scaled depending upon the size of a religion (your Glory Hounds will enjoy riding down 100 Catholic pilgrims more than 2 Sabianists). Your Stance preference will appear under/when hovering over the tool tip of the Right.
****Your character's traits and faith hostility will impact if stress is gained/lost by changing the Rights, scaled to the size of a religion.
The main idea is that the AI drivers behind these decisions are: Character traits > Religious relations/tenants > Stances of Vassals.
These contracts would, ideally, only be changed once in a ruler's lifetime, like your capital. You would receive a notification event ~3 months into your new reign (and your majority) reminding you about these rights, so that you can make an impact and then not have to worry about micromanaging them. Still, I want your traits to have an impact on the laws you enact, meaning that different characters will have to change their Contact Rights depending on their opinions, or suffer stress penalties.
Idealistically, these could be altered during your lifetime due to events and other incidents (impacted by a great religious war, a papal bull, a crusade), but I don't think we want to constantly be searching through these tabs for every site you own.
Religious Communities
If anything were to be added, I'd prefer just the Holy Rights and this be sidelined. But, since I'm still brainstorming, here's an addendum to my idea for Religious Communities. Before you say "WOAH POPS DON'T WORK IN CK3," I'll say that I agree, and so this is an attempt to generalize things and make them relatively painless, without having to be micromanaged, and only being limited to 176 counties, which has a decent amount of impact around the world. Communities are grouped by Religious Family to make it so you don't need 20 building spots/splitting buildings that are shared between sub-groups, but this could take some rethinking Smarter instead of Harder to be more intuitive [ie, Sunnis and Shia can visit the same mosque that would reject a Qarmatian, Mozarbs could visit a Greek or Catholic church--but would a Cathar and a Bogomil be down to pray with a Lollard and a Waldensian?]
For this, the Caretaker's Holy Site holding gains a unique interface option, either by clicking the holy site icon (A) in the panel, or clicking on your specific temple (B), which displays a few bits and pieces:
- The Caretaker and a relevant piece of artwork
- Who recognizes the holy site (hovering over the religion will show which specific faiths value the site)
- The effects of the community upon the barony/county/holder/sovereign
- The Temples of the communities
- The religious Communities
- Access to the Holy Contract Rights
- A list of Notable Pilgrims (ie, named characters) who have visited in the past 12 months, updated on a monthly basis, just so you can feel good about maintaining a holy place for people to visit
If denied, nothing happens, while accepting (which may cost money to set up) will add a Community Temple and a Religious Community to the Holy Site. From here, the Temple works just like any other building, which can be upgraded by the owner for benefits (the vast majority of which require you to be a specific religion). Temples also have a special Tier 0 Ruined level, which is pretty much a placeholder if you want to recover an expelled/banned Community--it will take some time before the Community is willing to return, but having a place they CAN go to is better than a whole new place.
Meanwhile, a Community exists as a self-developing hub that generates effects (3), while also providing courtiers to your Caretaker's (1) court, who can be interacted with in general, Royal Court, or Community-related events. Inspired by Development and how Traits can level up, the community will grow on its own over time, pending events and other factors*, with each tier (5B) unlocking new effects (5A).
If you conquer one of your holy sites that does not have your religious community, you will receive a prompt in ~3 months of the conquest about building a temple and setting up a community, though this comes out of your own pocket.
If your Holy Site is not shared with any other Religion, do not fret: depending on the factors* involved, you might still receive a Community at your doorstep. They won't have any special Temple and might not have the greatest Growth rate, but it'll be a home for people in want, and you'll gain the benefits from sharing with people. Your Caretaker then gains a similar kind of submenu for the Pilgrimage rights for these Community rights, which shows the faiths of those who can go on pilgrimage to your site, and the rights of those communities who have settled there:
Community Rights | Protected Community | Open Community | Discriminated Community |
Flavor Text | "Those who share our land shall be our people" | "They may not be like us, but they can live with us" | "Who are these strangers that think they have the same rights as us?" |
Character Protection | Treated the same as Religious Rights: Protected | Are treated like regular characters | Characters can be arrested without reason |
Temple | Can build to its highest level | Can reach its penultimate level, and can be reduced in level | Cannot be upgraded, and can be reduced in level |
Growth/chance of re-settlement | Increased | Regular | Decreased, potentially even negative |
Opinion/Stresses | Same as Protected Pilgrimages | Same as Open Pilgrimages | Same as Harassed Pilgrimages |
*Factors include but are not limited to: the Convert Religion Council task, the religion's rights, the faith's/religion's hostility to your religion, your current Struggle phase, how the Struggle was Ended, a ruined Temple, a Unique Temple, that Temple's level, Fervor, number of landed vs unlanded characters, historical events, terrain type, ocean/river access, expulsions from other realms, recent invasions of Mongols or Almohads, the Erudition/Law/Customs/Metropolitan legacies, etc
Effects include but are not limited to: taxes, levies, development, public order, innovation gain, opinion bonuses with the religion, discount bonuses on certain buildings, etc, though this also usually comes with a conversion malus (making it harder to convert established communities). These could also come with decisions, like taking out loans, employing a learned and professional judge, or recruiting a scientist into your royal court, depending on the faith at hand.
So in summary, the flow of this is: receive an event, gain a Community, let them grow over time for benefit. If a Temple is ruined, you can rebuild it for better odds of attracting a community. Upgrading a Temple will give better Community growth, while reducing it can give a quick influx of cash. Pretty standard 'gardening,' as some call it, albeit with some RNG to start it all up, but it's then relatively self-sustaining.
So why are Communities scaled from 1 to ~5 while Temples have a stage 0? Well, it's because, quite frankly, religions did not get along well at all times and places in the medieval world. Whether its the destruction of temples, the slaughter of innocents after a siege, the invasion of radical purists, forced expulsions, and so on, people did not often play nice with people who were different from them: that's why you can Harass and Ban pilgrims with your Holy Contract Rights, while the majority of religions in-game already have access to a kind of Great Holy War that expel people of different faiths from their lands.
To mirror these historical trends, however abhorrent they might seem to our perspective of the modern day, Players can use the 5C button is to expel a Community from a Holy Site, which required Harassed/Banned pilgrimage/ Discriminated community rights. The resulting event(s) can have several outcomes: the Community is let free with their possessions (a boon to other communities of the religion), debts owed to them are cancelled and their goods are revoked, the community can be enslaved, whether in the field or forced into the armies, or they are forcibly removed--the Lord knows those that are his own. The player can gain benefits in the form of quick cash, approval of your zealots and a stabilization of public order, or even boosts to your Community at the site, via the looting of the other Community/ies and the plunder of their Temples, reducing them to Tier 0, or even destroying them completely, adding their benefits to your own Community in the Holy Site. Or, you could even convert their temples into one of your own.
But, of course, the player is not the only actor in the city: the dangers of the mob can be just as deadly as any royal edict. During times of crises (great plagues, misguided fervor, when the player changes Pilgrimage Rights) the owner might be forced to stand between their Communities and make a decision: do they stand with their people, or do they side with the innocent they have sworn to protect? These more "random" events would be more balanced by reducing Community by one or two tiers instead of outright destruction, to be balanced, though the legacy might impact their growth. Temples can also be reduced to 0, but it is the player's choice if they want to clear the rubble for another slot.
While some might consider this incredibly edgy, I believe context is very important in not only understanding the past, but how individual people (ie, the characters we play in Crusader Kings) could understand their present and react accordingly. These actions must be treated with seriousness and all respect, because they were terrible actions, perpetrated by a vast number of actors across all sides of the world, with horrifying results. They were a reality of the time and there was a rationale behind them, however morally incomprehensible, and I feel they would make a strong impact to a character and the people they rule.
All Together
With that serious matter out of the way, I can return to this development document with a little more light-heartedness. In summary, my idea is:
- Controlling a Holy Site gives you Holy Rights, which you can use to impact pilgrims to that Holy Site, managed via interactions with a Caretaker
- Holy Sites holdings are sub-holdings that can contain Temples and Communities of different faiths, which give benefits to the owner/liege depending on what level of Growth and what Religion they are
- Communities are generated by events, and grow on their own, reducing micromanagement, while the player can choose whether to improve their temples, or reduce them for a quick buck. Sharing Holy Sites gives much more increased chances of receiving Community settlers.
- Community characters, in the Caretaker's court, can be used to connect with and identify actions with said community, tying them into events
- Communities are at risk of the tempers of their lord's policies/greed, as well as the trends/tolerance of their neighbors.
Things I think might be cool, but this is already getting too long, most of which are about
- Baronies with Universities (and the House of Wisdom) could have Community sub-holdings, with the added benefit being that their Communities add Exposure to an innovation discovered by a member of that religion
- Baronies with unique buildings (read: not mines) and/or de jure Kingdom Capitals could have Community sub-holdings, as these are generally located in historic places of great population centers that had various religious minorities
- Pending any official word on economic developments or trading systems, trading houses like Venice, Genoa, Pisa, the Hansa, or Ragusa, could set up trading factories in foreign lands to the shared benefit - or expelled for great riches, though they may not like that
- Mercenaries could set up recruitment offices, making them your vassal and reducing their cost of employment
- Holy Orders could set up chapter houses instead of requiring a whole barony that they don't develop, though your sons might want to join them more
- Monastic and Sufi communities could develop nearby places of worship, taking in your extra children but adding to the secular strength of your clerics
- Herds of sacred animals could be maintained, with their takers visiting your caretakers
- All duchy capitals could have Community sub-holdings, but that might just be far too gross and feel like we're trying to inject pops into CK3
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