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CK2 Dev Diary #89 - Mass Conversion, or how I learned to stop my Pagan ways and love God

Greetings!

Note that this is the last DevDiary before vacations start. Until they are over we will not post any diaries, or post them very sporadically. We will resume the normal schedule on the 10th of August.

Today we’d like to talk about Mass Conversion, the flip side of what we talked about in the last DD (Dynamic Pagan Reformation). While Reforming a Pagan faith is a very epic feat, it’s also a fairly hard one to pull off in many cases. Historically, pagan rulers often turned to their neighbours religions in order to solidify their rule - and now so can you!

It used to be quite a suicidal affair to convert to a non-Pagan religion as a Pagan ruler, your provinces would stay pagan and your vassals would often be upset with you and immediately start a faction to install a pagan claimant. With Holy Fury it’s much more reliable, and carries great benefits to both you and your people. Depending on your strength as a leader, and the respect you have from your subjects, you can now convince your realm to join you in a Mass Conversion. A Mass Conversion will see you, your subjects and your lands adopt a new religion - except for particularly rebellious subjects, of course. Note that only Tribal Pagans will have access to this mechanic.

To Mass Convert your realm you first need to find a so called ‘Sponsor’. You can either look for a sponsor manually, by looking at the interactions menu with landed independent characters, or you can access a list of anyone who would be willing to go through the trouble by clicking a new button in the religious interface:
MassConversionDD_InterfaceValues.png


As said before, this list contains a list of everyone who will accept to convert your realm, and in the bottom right corner you can see that the AI reasoning is now exposed! The acceptance will not just be a bunch of pluses and minuses, instead you’ll be able to see exactly how they reason. If you, for example, want Byzantium to be your sponsor, you can enter the character sheet of the Basileus and check the interaction tooltip to see his reasoning if he says no, which will give you actual hints on what you could do to improve the chances of him accepting.
MassConversionDD_Accepted.png


After you’ve found a sponsor that accepted your offer, the Mass Conversion events will begin!
MassConversionDD_mainEvent.png

Note that the event image is a placeholder.

If you’re a tribe with low organization, you will actually gain a level of organization upon performing a Mass Conversion, in addition to you and your land switching to the new religion. The downside to doing one when you have low organization is, as mentioned earlier, that fewer subjects are likely to go along with it.

It doesn’t end here though, you and your sponsor will continue to keep in touch - and your sponsor will keep on helping your realm by providing you with money, building churches in your realm and many other things. Examples:
MassConversionDD_SponsorEvent.png
MassConversionDD_SponsorEvent2.png


In addition, the priest that your sponsor will send you will also help you out. He will attempt to modernize your realm and ensure that you act in accordance to your new faith. For example:
MassConversionDD_PriestEvent.png


So, as you can clearly see, this system stands in stark contrast to the Dynamic Reformation we talked about in a previous Dev Diary - by reforming you gain absolute control of your future, but it’s a difficult path to walk that also require you to conquer vast territories. A Mass Conversion, on the other hand, is a fairly easy thing to accomplish that also comes with temporal benefits - but you’ll have to submit to a faith that might not represent you or the people you rule...
 
Saints and similar sorts of things are essentially local gods or spirits that got co-opted into the religion either to help convert people or because of polytheistic traditions carrying over. People like the idea that there's something nearby that cares about them and their community/people in particular.
True to an extent, but that elides two really important and relevant points:

1) There are traditional processes for adding dead people to the roll of gods or saints, but someone who's been deified generally doesn't also get sainted. And of course deification and canonisation are verifiable routes for adding to a religion's minor figures with gods/saints who haven't been lifted from an earlier faith. (Exception: the Christian Saint Josaphat turns out to have really been Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha.)
2) The difference between worship and veneration was of great doctrinal importance to Christians and Muslims throughout the CK2 era, and remains so to the present day. Getting it wrong is a really obvious and easily avoided break of immersion.

nd
 
Saints and similar sorts of things are essentially local gods or spirits that got co-opted into the religion either to help convert people or because of polytheistic traditions carrying over. People like the idea that there's something nearby that cares about them and their community/people in particular.


Considering that the mass conversion also converts all your provinces too, trying to go back to paganism would be very hard.
Depends on the saint.
Saint Brigid? Probably a carry over of the Celtic goddess.

Saints Michael and Gabriel, Archangels? Maybe they're carried over from pre-monotheistic Jewish concepts.

Quite a few are of course virtuous humans, or humans killed defending the faith, or great teachers of the faith. Some of these subsumed aspects of local gods into their cultus, some did not.


I have nearly started fights by suggesting saints and angels make Christianity low-level polytheistic, but I was trying to provoke a result in a debate at the time.

Disclaimer : ex-Catholic who had been pushed towards the diaconate by his priest. I left when I moved away from home, and realised faith isn't really my thing.
 
True to an extent, but that elides two really important and relevant points:

1) There are traditional processes for adding dead people to the roll of gods or saints, but someone who's been deified generally doesn't also get sainted. And of course deification and canonisation are verifiable routes for adding to a religion's minor figures with gods/saints who haven't been lifted from an earlier faith. (Exception: the Christian Saint Josaphat turns out to have really been Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha.)
2) The difference between worship and veneration was of great doctrinal importance to Christians and Muslims throughout the CK2 era, and remains so to the present day. Getting it wrong is a really obvious and easily avoided break of immersion.

nd
Depends on the saint.
Saint Brigid? Probably a carry over of the Celtic goddess.

Saints Michael and Gabriel, Archangels? Maybe they're carried over from pre-monotheistic Jewish concepts.

Quite a few are of course virtuous humans, or humans killed defending the faith, or great teachers of the faith. Some of these subsumed aspects of local gods into their cultus, some did not.


I have nearly started fights by suggesting saints and angels make Christianity low-level polytheistic, but I was trying to provoke a result in a debate at the time.

Disclaimer : ex-Catholic who had been pushed towards the diaconate by his priest. I left when I moved away from home, and realised faith isn't really my thing.
I meant that the tradition of having local gods/spirits ended up getting co-opted into saints. Basically, when people were converting away from polytheism they still wanted to have local deities, so the concept of saints came out of that. It's similar to wanting a mother goddess to worship, which the Virgin Mary came to fill the role of. Disputing whether or not there's justification for that in the deeper theology has been a cause of major doctrinal disputes in and out of organized religions ever since.
 
Numbers instead of plus signs and minus signs?!
Yes!
That method was utterly ridiculous.
There were times when there were more plus signs than minus signs and the characters would still reject my proposal!
 
When asking characters to convert, their names should change as well as part of the baptism.

Also mass conversion difficulty should depend on how syncretic the new religion is to the old one based on the new feature of religion traits and such.
 
God wills it.
 
I wonder how the event description will differ when converting to different proselytizing organized faiths. Islam or Zoroastrianism don't really baptize, do they? Or Indian faiths, that would be interesting as well.

For Muslims, saying the declaration of faith would be pretty analogous. For Zoroastrians, the Navjote ceremony should also work, I think.
 
Nothing to see in this DD, fellow pagan comrades, nothing to consider here. Lets move along to the convertee burning stake.

As a devotee of Odin, I find hanging them upside down from trees or blood eagling them to be better entertainment.

Or just tying them up and shooting them with arrows like we did with whathisname from East Anglia.
 
Only one major concern - I hope that when your subjects get the choice to convert along with you to the new religion they don’t secretly keep their old one and thus start one of those secret cults that break your realm eventually.

edit: I mean, it would be an interesting and somewhat plausible thing to see but I’m saying I hope it doesn’t happen OFTEN.
 
Except vessels who don't like you wont convert, so if your heir and others don't like you and your character is depressed you could convert back by commenting suicide.

By that point, these vassals may likely get converted, and most of your provinces will end up getting converted as well. And if you leave your vassals too powerful, you may fail in the first phases of your plan.
 
Can you explain how you can reform your religion as a Tengri ruler ? Do you still need to conquer incredibly vast territories to do so ? (please change the reformation to not be forcing you to blob)
 
Yes, that is really the worst. I once had a teapot which told me off for contemplating a conversion...

Man, if I had a nickel every time I tried to demand religious conversion and there's some goddamn salad bowl with "True Believer" modifier...