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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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I thought this DLC would mostly appease Lord Nurgle but...

SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!

Seriously, this looks great. Sounds a lot like Sons of Abraham, which is one of my favorite expansions.
 
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How about an option to quickly deal with a bunch of prisoners, without having to go through every one of them in detail?
 
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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.
- i hope you finally tweaked "friendly" kidnappings that are frequntly perpetrated by loyal vassals with intrigue focus against lieges with whom they have positive relationships. It would VERY annoying to be kidnapped by your +50 relationship duke and as result miss some important organ or appendage and not being able to retaliate with a full force against that kidnapping joker.
 
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My face after reading this:
ramsay-bolton-game-of-thrones.jpg
 
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Next week I’ll be back at work and writing these “live” again (...)
Given the DLC's subject, I deem this to be a great pun (whether it was intended or not).
 
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"Your poetry is the subject of nightmares!"

Like all this role play stuff, but don't forget to fix the most annoying bugs like the ones mentioned in this thread.
 
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- i hope you finally tweaked "friendly" kidnappings that are frequntly perpetrated by loyal vassals with intrigue focus against lieges with whom they have positive relationships. It would VERY annoying to be kidnapped by your +50 relationship duke and as result miss some important organ or appendage and not being able to retaliate with a full force against that kidnapping joker.

Torturing your liege should bring the same punishment as an outright rebellion, though maybe am exception could be made for the poetry option.

This would be an excellent chance to look at rebalancing the Intrigue focus as a whole though.
 
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It does not look very useful to me. Those treatments and then releasing shouldn't be very useful but to make ennemies instead of keeping them imprisoned for a lifetime where they can't harm or revoking or wathever other means to handle prisoners we already have. I never really used the greek methods for the very same reason.
 
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This was probably asked in the announcement thread, but since I don't see a dev answer in there: Why didn't you go with the name "Dance Macabre" instead?
 
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Consume and gain power from your victims?! :eek:
So we are going to have both zombies and ghouls or maybe even vampires! Cheers! :cool:
 
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Why is paradox normalizing the use of torture and treating it as not only acceptable but something fun and entertaining?
Deliberate Values Dissonance. Torture is not meant to be "fun and entertaining". It happened in ye olden times and was considered to be a justified punishment for certain crimes.
 
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Bad Poetry...

I know my favorite form of punishment :p
 
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