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CK2 Dev Diary #16: Man's inhumanity to man

Hello and welcome back to another DD about The Reaper's Due! Ha! I can finally use the name! If all is going to plan you should be reading this while I am on my third, and sadly final, week of vacation, so I may or may not show up to answer questions. For this DD we are getting back to the core values of The Reaper's Due: Death and Suffering!

Being a prisoner is never a fun experience, and frankly, with The Reaper's Due it only gets worse. We have added several fairly unpleasant ways to interact with your captives:

  • Humiliate. The prisoner is degraded in some fashion; such as being tarred and feathered, or forced to do a “walk of shame”. This also causes them to lose prestige and be generally looked down on.
  • Torture. The prisoner is caused a certain amount of pain; such as being whipped, or stretched on the rack. May cause them to become Stressed or even Depressed, and can cause you to lose the Kind trait.
  • Mutilate. Only available to rulers with certain traits, such as Cruel or Impaler, this causes the permanent loss of a body part. May lead to you becoming Cruel if you are not already, and can cause them to gain Stressed or even Lunatic.
  • Bad poetry. Rulers with the Poet trait may deploy their very worst poems against a prisoner. While a comparatively mild punishment, it nonetheless has a slight chance to drive them mad.
  • Consume. Rulers who are either Possessed or Lunatic and also have the Cannibal modifier may simply eat their prisoners. If you haven’t disabled fantasy content, this may lead to you “gaining the power” of your victim.

All of these options, besides Consume, release the victim afterwards as they are considered to be their punishment, and while you choose the category you do not choose the exact method. Needless to say, your former prisoner will not think kindly of you after any of these punishments, and in the more extreme cases their close family may also be outraged.

Of course, sometimes a mere punishment is not enough and you simply have to Execute your prisoner. Well, we have added content for this eventuality too! You still simply press the Execute button, as before, but the actual execution method employed is chosen from a list based on your location/culture/religion/traits as well as the imprison reason you have on your prisoner, their religion/gender/traits, and things. Different execution methods come with different death reasons, and as you may have heard in an earlier DD, different death sounds. We have 31 execution methods, including Hanging, Crushing, Sawing, and Bear. It’s all in an easily moddable file too, just in case modders think we have been insufficiently creative.
deaths.jpg


I should also mention that with the 2.6 patch it is no longer possible to escape from House arrest unless someone with the Intrigue focus breaks you out, so if for some reason you want to be nice to your prisoners they are no longer virtually guaranteed to escape.

Since Death is a big theme for The Reaper's Due, we have also added several reactions events to the death of your lovers, friends, and rivals. For the first two, these can result in things like you turning to drink, finding a new friend, taking comfort in the arms of another, or finding a keepsake of them. For the latter, you may miss having a rival and start a new feud, resolve to become a better person, or if you are a particular type of person you might sneak out and desecrate their corpse. We don’t judge!
loss.jpg

skullsfortheskullthrone.jpg

skull2.jpg


That’s all for now. Next week I’ll be back at work and writing these “live” again, so I’ll decide the topic closer to the time. It's quite possible the subject will be cats though.
 
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This is maybe outside the scope of this update/dlc but is there any chance we could have a "forgive crime" option for when someone has apparently slighted you but you have no idea what they did/don't care? Disabling the arrest notification at the top of the screen can hide stuff you do care about and honestly, I don't care if some baron dishonored me, and I don't want to arrest the megaduke with a 5% success chance because he insulted me at a party.
 
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Being a prisoner is never a fun experience
Have you changed the prison bars icon into a button that jumps you from the prisoner to the jailer? I've been hoping for that ever since the skull icon was turned into a button that could jump you to someone's murderer.
 
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Have you changed the prison bars icon into a button that jumps you from the prisoner to the jailer? I've been hoping for that ever since the skull icon was turned into a button that could jump you to someone's murderer.
This would be nice actually so I have to second it, and just add that it can be a pain sometimes to find who jailed the people because they're in some weird county I've never heard of
 
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These would be very useful if they could be used to quell factions or plots.

Currently if you win a faction war, you get a relations bonus with all your vassals afterwards which decreases the likelihood of faction fights in the future. Why not have a system whereby if you execute/torture members of a defeated faction you temporarily decrease the overall likliehood "base reluctance" they'll take part in a faction or the threshold the faction leader must reach before they can give an ultimatum. Similar for plots. Base reluctances could be temporarily increased if the target has a history of arresting, executing or torturing plotters Brave or insane characters would be invulnerable to such. The trade off is that the opinion malus will remain even when the modifier evaporates.
 
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I really like the expansion of the methods of execution. However, given that in the middle ages (and earlier, and also later), there was also a correspondence between the rank, social status and gender of a person and the method of execution he/she was expected to suffer, there should be negative reactions from the family of the recently departed if the method of execution he was made to suffer was beneath his status. For example, nobles were expected to be beheaded with one swift strike of the sword, so, if the Duke of So and So is beheaded with an axe (which requires more strikes), or - even worse - hanged, his family should also lose a lot of prestige and feel quite insulted.
Convicted commoners, on the other hand, could "enjoy" an entire execution cocktail: the statutory penalty for men convicted of high treason in medieval England was "to be hanged, drawn and quartered" - The condemned was hanged till they were half dead, and then taken down, and quartered alive. After that, their members and bowels were cut from their bodies, and thrown into a fire, while they were still alive. They would finally be killed by decapitation. Women were generally burned at the stake for reasons of decency.

More info can be found here: http://www.medieval-life-and-times.info/medieval-torture-and-punishment/execution-methods.htm
and here: http://www.historyrundown.com/10-most-cruel-execution-methods-of-all-time/
 
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Perhaps this dl c needs to be nicknamed the Ramsey Bolton simulator. ;)

Spot on.

While I'm impressed that the devs thought up 31 methods of execution, I look forward to modders making it into the hundreds. I also look forward to peeling bits from my disloyal vassals, or from my liege should his yoke become ... burdensome.
 
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I don't like that the prisoners get released immediatelly if you torture them. At least prisoners of war should stay in your custody until you hit that "Release prisoner"-button or a ransom has been payed. Imagine you fighting against a pagan enemy as a Christian and capture his strongest commander. You would never want to let him go but you could want to cut off his sword hand or break his will by torture.
 
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By the way, will Greek characters get to use Greek fire during executions?


Burn them all...
 
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Why is paradox normalizing the use of torture and treating it as not only acceptable but something fun and entertaining?
It's been possible to do things like castrate prisoners for a long time in this game. This DLC is just expanding on the roleplaying side of that.

It's nothing too out of the ordinary, and especially not when you consider how humans have treated prisoners historically in the middle ages.
 
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When are we going to hear about the Content Pack?
Please be South/West Slavic + Hungarian, please be South/West Slavic + Hungarian, please be South/West Slavic + Hungarian...
 
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People keep talking about how they want improvements to torture (covered), execution (covered), imprisonment (covered), and banishment, but I sure would appreciate if the Devs at least gave a passing look to the opposite side. The better angels of our nature, if you will.

It would be nice if, when you release/forgive a prisoner, you had small chance to gain some piety or a positive virtue trait (kind and charitable come to mind, or lose cruel, or something). Frequently after a big war I end up with some 30 courtier women and children who I would suffer no penalties for mass-executing and can't ransom, but I like to roleplay and, even though I have nothing to gain for it, I let them go.
 
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