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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 can finally create my very own reek! :)
 
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Skull and other such cruel and twisted trophies?! There were certainly a lot more cruel nobles back then that did this kind of stuff.

Amazing. I love it. There is some great potential for this...

Questions...

1. Do getting these kinds of trophies require you to have the cruel, impaler, lunatic, and/or other such traits? I think this would make sense, and would be proper to limit the prevalence of characters that engaged in this kind of behavior, making it more rare and 'special'.
2. Can you accumulate multiple such trophies?
3. It would also be really fun and interesting and be great for RPing a really twisted character with the right traits if the trophies of these risks had names attached to them, like 'Skull of Emperor Charlemagne 'The Great' of Francia', 'Finger of Basileus x', 'Jawbone of Caliph x', etc. Could add another level of personal goals, etc. Is this or could this be implemented?
4. Could higher prestige characters that you hVe trophies of confer higher monthly prestige? This could be based on either title rank, or based on some formula based on their individual prestige, etc.
5. Have you added a nickname of 'The Collector', etc? :)
 
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Bravo, CK2 needs stuff like this. The game had beocme too monotone. Expand, die, new ruler, rebellion, crush rebellion, expand, die ... Small details like this will make the game a lot more interesting to play. Hoping for the upcoming mod to be similar.
 
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Can we throw dirty Germanic pagans into a pit full of snakes?
 
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"My dearest Solene, my good genius"

Is this the bad poetry? Seems to be a bit of an awkward sentence.

It's the trait based compliment/insult system. In general it's pretty neat, but not all the combinations flow so well.

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.

I know that was on our list of possible improvements, but I am not certain if it was added or not.

So it's not just Ramsey Bolton, it's also Vargo Hoat simulator 2016. Can sufficiently Strong/Brave characters beat the bear?

Nope, they are all fatal. Could have been funny to have them beat the bear and then get shot, I suppose, but we need the death reasons to be reasonably short.

What about wanting revenge or creating a rivalry if a character takes out one of your close family or friends?

There's a fairly big relations penalty to with the family of those you torture.

Can we throw dirty Germanic pagans into a pit full of snakes?

Snakepit is one of the executions, yes.
 
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Is anyone at all disturbed by the direction of this DLC, I loved the Idea finally getting doctors.but some of this is a bit much.

No. We need stuff like this, as it adds more narrative to the game.

Why is paradox normalizing the use of torture and treating it as not only acceptable but something fun and entertaining?

There's always one...
 
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What abour visiting the prisoners' chambers? Impregnating a queen or something? :)
I doubt it. Though being able to force a marrige or seduce a prisoner might be viable.

So looks more oriented towards the roleplaying content. I guess that is some people's cup of tea. I wish there was more work done on internal realm politics though. Game is in a very blobby state...
Well they can't reduce the blobbiness without adding in other stuff.

Why is paradox normalizing the use of torture and treating it as not only acceptable but something fun and entertaining?
Black humor.

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.
True being able to forgive someone for a favour would be nice.

Snakepit is one of the executions, yes.
Can we make blood eagles of the guy who threw out father into a snake pit?
 
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Well they can't reduce the blobbiness without adding in other stuff.

Yes, I would like to see that "other stuff". But the DLC lately are all focused on roleplaying events and mechanics. Plenty of people like that and that's fine, I just would prefer something different.
 
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Yes, I would like to see that "other stuff". But the DLC lately are all focused on roleplaying events and mechanics. Plenty of people like that and that's fine, I just would prefer something different.

Like what? Are specifics possible?

I'm actually curious, because I cannot think of any way they can further improve internal politics without making the game too clunky (overly difficult to wage war against external enemies).
 
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.
You already gain 5 piety when releasing someone of your religion
 
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