Note: You can also listen to today's Dev Diary here on our YouTube channel!
Welcomes back, comrades, to Landless Adventurers Part 2! I’m Wokeg, and last week, we went over the general core gameplay (what we expect you to be doing, where your resources come from, and what you spend them on). This week, we’re gonna be doing uhhh… literally everything else.
Just like last time, everything shown here is a work in progress. Features won’t shift massively but values (and occasionally modifiers or parameters) potentially will. Costs, gains, and some requirements in particular are all undergoing active adjustment at present.
This is going to be quite a disjointed dev diary, so please bear with me whilst I skip around the whole damned feature like a wanderer running from town to town, desperately fleeing the Black Death.
[An adventurer desperately tries to outrun the plague]
We’ve added six Camp Purposes in Roads to Power, specifically:
[The Camp Purposes, replacing crown authority for adventurers]
Each one comes with different weightings on what types of contracts they’re likely to find, different upgrades for their camp buildings, and different flavourisation that controls their title and the types of clothes their followers will wear. Expect a lot more glasses and humble clothing for Scholars, weapons and armour for Swords-for-Hire, animal furs and muted outfits for Freebooters, and so on.
The default purpose is Wanderers, which is what we’d consider the vanilla experience, but each of the five others are slightly tailored to different playstyles.
Wanderers find equal amounts of contracts of every type, and non-historical adventurers will always start as them. Their main special feature is that they can switch to any other purpose type for free, whereas the other types must pay 1k prestige for the privilege.
[The Wanderers Camp Purpose tooltip]
Adventurers with the Swords-for-Hire Camp Purpose are aimed primarily at mercenary work. They find more martial and prowess contracts, as well as many more offers to help out with wars. Their camp upgrades focus on making them better at fighting.
This is very much the Roger de Flor experience, though hopefully you’ll have a happier end.
[The Swords-for-Hire Camp Purpose tooltip]
Scholars specialise in learning and stewardship contracts, and have the most varied camp upgrades. They’re intended to play a bit like the early life of Michael Scot: you roam from place to place, educating the children of nobility, picking up the finest minds you can find, and creating works of learning. An untrustworthy scholar may be found selling fake relics or collecting taxes under false pretences.
As a scholar, you’re unlikely to win any great battles, but you might help create great rulers, and could well earn yourself a solid plot of land somewhere with time.
[The Scholars Camp Purpose tooltip]
Explorers get more transport contracts, diplomacy contracts, and intrigue contracts. AI explorers also roam much further than other AI adventurers, and their upgrades help with schemes, provisions usage, and mountain fighting. A dishonest explorer might defraud a ruler or rob their home of its silverware.
These are typed a bit more after Ibn Battuta or Marco Polo — sadly Crusader Kings III includes no terra incognita, so we can’t give you the full experience of finding new lands, but they’re still a solid pick for characters who want to cross the map with relative ease, and very much the camp purpose for Choose a New Destiny characters in search of a distant land to earn their fortune in.
[The Explorers Camp Purpose tooltip]
Freebooters (as they call themselves), or brigands (as everyone else refers to them), find more prowess and intrigue contracts, as well as criminal contracts of every kind. Their upgrades give bonuses to schemes generally, unlock officers that are especially good at criminal activity, give hefty bonuses for high intrigue, and can help you reduce the cost of lowering your Gallowsbait (which, as you may remember from last time, is the petty criminality negative fame trait you get and level up — making people hate you more — from taking criminal contracts).
With freebooters, we were trying to keep in mind the underclass, the recidivist, and the scum of the Earth; all the types of characters you rarely see make it into the history books — that is, of course, unless such a bandit grows so large that they manage to steal a kingdom. Something that you can, naturally, attempt yourself, but depending on how bad your Gallowsbait is, you may find ruling any lands you gain much more difficult than controlling petty outlaws.
[The Freebooters Camp Purpose tooltip]
Last, but by no means least, we have Legitimists. This Camp Purpose is a bit special, as these are your exiled-king-returns-with-an-army types. They require an adventurer to have at least one pressed claim against a kingdom-tier title of some kind, and so are not open to mere former dukes or counts.
Unlike the rest of the Camp Purposes, they’re also explicitly intended to be for players (and AI!) who don’t want to stay adventuring for any length of time under any circumstances. Legitimists have a goal in mind and they will have it within their lifetime, whether it be a throne they lost or a crown they consider theirs by right.
Legitimists have no weights on what contracts they receive, but instead have a unique contract where other rulers will offer them support in their quest in exchange for gold upon its completion. These benefactors will offer money and troops but always expect a return on their investment, in the form of a payout after your victory.
[The Legitimists Camp Purpose tooltip]
Legitimists may also proactively ask for this aid instead of being offered it — in which case, you’ll need to stump up a hefty sum of prestige for an audience with your prospective sponsor.
After a time limit of between 4 & 8 years (depending on how negotiations go), each backer will start to become antsy and begin requesting their return. This gives you a final chance to launch your invasion with whatever you have readied, try to negotiate a slight delay, or else face the penalties. If you renege, you start losing entire prestige levels per backer, as well as other assorted nasty ill-effects — after all, at that point you are simply an ineffective would-be usurper.
Likewise, taking their money and troops and then changing your Camp Purpose or landing yourself with less than a suitable claim will also be counted as failing to attempt a follow-through. They’re offering support, but it has strings attached.
Of course, you can launch your claim war before the timer has passed; the timer is simply a deadline for doing so.
We expect Legitimists to be for players who treat adventurers as a stepping stone; perhaps you used Choose a New Destiny to come in as a favoured younger child with no lands, flipped them into a legitimist adventurer, and are now trying to go back and reclaim your old kingdom from its AI ruler. Perhaps you started in a tricky position and got wiped by a greater power early on, but won’t let your dream die there.
Aside from paying the associated cost, switching between Camp Purposes can be done at will. Any camp upgrades that aren't valid for the newly chosen purpose are automatically demolished, which (as mentioned last dev diary) gives a partial refund of the cost.
We want to encourage people to try playing different purposes, especially if you’re an adventurer for a long time, rather than picking one and sticking to it. Different characters can mean different things for your camp and encourage slightly different ways to play.
Mercenaries in particular may find it hard to get off the ground without a little seed money, and as such can benefit from time spent as Freebooters or Explorers till they can afford to build an army.
In addition to this, each Camp Purpose has a small handful of events tied to it, plus special options within certain other events. Event-based contracts in particular will sometimes contain entire alternate rewards for specific Camp Purposes, even outside of their specialities.
Lastly, designing Camp Purposes like this gives us a handy means of letting players opt in for the type of adventuring content that you want to engage with, rather than leaving it entirely down to RNG. This is something we’re especially mindful of in these enlightened post-RoCo times, and is partially why we’ve tried to theme the purposes so heavily after different types of playstyle.
This wouldn’t work for veteran players, because who the hell manages to lose Crusader Kings III that hard once they’ve mastered the basics, and it wouldn’t work for newbies, because I’m just trying to figure out what the hell a vassal is and now I’ve not got any and you’ve shunted me into a completely different game mode?
Instead, what we’ve tried to do is provide a broad variety of paths to switch into adventuring. Yes, you can do it if you lose your whole realm (and likewise, you can opt to not become an adventurer, simply switching to a landed player heir if you’ve got one or entering observe mode otherwise), but we’ve also tried to add ways for you to either proactively become one, or else junctions where you might want to consider it.
The one thing that all ways to become an adventurer share is that, like it or not, the would-be wanderer is undergoing an ignoble transition. They lose almost all their stored prestige, as well as 3 full prestige levels. This is both a narrative penalty, a way to guarantee at least some potential for growth, and a way to stop famous characters that become adventurers from simply immediately trying to steamroll the Holy Roman Empire with powerful Casus Bellis.
We’ll let you try to pull off the mother of all coups or invasions, but you’ll need to work for it.
[An adventurer start is offered to a dead player in the Choose a new Destiny screen]
Of course, this is just the player — ambitious, restless, or otherwise-driven AI characters left with no land after a succession will also sometimes spontaneously leave to form their own adventuring companies.
[An adult child who won’t inherit (and is young enough to dream) asks for permission to form his own adventuring company]
[CM’s note: You may recognize this as the artwork for Wandering Nobles. The key-art for that event pack is still being worked on, so the current one is a placeholder.]
Even if you deny them, some will run away anyway. After all, they wouldn’t be asking if they weren’t serious about it. Whether you allow them or forbid them, any that do will give you the option to switch to playing as your renegade child.
[After being denied, a rogue princeling goes off on an adventure anyway]
With the slight exception of Prince Aelfwine in 1066, who was definitely just quietly minding his own business at a church in southern France but who we’ve given an adventuring camp to anyway because someone asked us nicely. We took a lot of the more niche suggestions for these from a forum thread a little while back; of course we couldn’t take everyone suggested there, and I expect we’ll add more post-release when the internet points out the many people we doubtless missed in our initial sweep.
Lest we forget — since I did share a screenshot of it last dev diary — you can create an adventurer directly from the bookmark selection screen with the ruler designer.
[The changes to the bookmark screen, showing Camps and Estates alike, as well as the Create your own Adventurer button]
The following tenets have access:
We’re also currently considering giving access to some or all of Vows of Poverty, Asceticism, and Mendicant Preachers. These are partial tonal fits but not entirely, so we’re still wavering a bit on whether to give them the option too.
As well as them, we’ve also given it to the following cultural traditions:
[A decision for smaller rulers to become an adventurer]
With Roads to Power, Normans now have the new Audacious Cadets tradition. Amongst various other Norman-y things (like making them much more eager warmongers and buffing their heavy cavalry), this both enables the decision to abandon your lands and encourages the younger sons of barons to frequently go off to seek their fortune abroad — like the de Hautevilles and countless others.
The Swords-for-Hire cultural tradition likewise causes otherwise irrelevant young characters to seek their fortunes abroad. These two together means that we now see a distressingly historical flood of Normans adventuring in western Europe and Turks adventuring in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
If a poor character ends up in the pool but they have a particularly interesting personality (or even just claims), then they may also spontaneously become a Landless Adventurer. Just, a somewhat poorer one.
This can be a result of title revocation, conquest, or even exile. If a character’s last title is stripped away, and they’re either a player or a suitably driven individual, then you may see them pop back up as an adventurer.
[A recently-deposed king is given the choice to continue as an adventurer]
If moving out of adventuring is too easy, then it’s got no narrative weight and the difference between landed and landless isn’t so keenly felt. If it’s too difficult to do it ever then adventuring risks becoming a chore rather than a way to vary your play.
What we’ve tried to accomplish with becoming landed again, then, is giving you a sliding scale of options. You probably can find a weak or terrible county somewhere that you can conquer or buy for not that much effort, but you’re moving into a fixer-upper. Especially if you used to be a king or more, it’s not exactly glorious.
If you want something greater, you should have to work for it a little.
As with becoming a Landless Adventurer, there are many paths to leaving a life on the road. Some violent, some not — as a general rule of thumb, the thing most have in common is that the size of the realm you’re trying to acquire is gated by your prestige level. Adventurers with less fame are, at best, upstarts, no matter how many gold or troops they have.
Adventurers inheriting land immediately lose their camp (with the partial refunds we mentioned in Part 1 for demolishing buildings) and shift into their new realm. For the purposes of inheritance, adventurers are counted as landless courtiers, so they aren’t excluded by higher crown authority.
For those of you who don’t want to just inherit back into land, we’ve introduced the gallivanter trait, obtainable via the Reject Inheritance decision. This essentially works like a voluntary disinheritance, when you recuse yourself from inheriting other titles from your dynasty (but can still obtain them via conquest, character interactions, etc).
We’ll go into the gallivanter trait a bit more in the decisions section of the dev diary — with a liiiiiittle something extra for the HRE vassal players who are tired of getting elected emperor against their will too.
Instead, our landless wanderers have access to the new Adventurer Invasion CBs, which work fairrrrly similarly to some of our other invasion CBs. You select an existing target title held by a character or one of their vassals, and conquer or usurp anything with that title. If this is their only top-tier title, you will attempt to conquer the realm as a whole. Naturally, any rule achieved this way is extremely illegitimate.
The caveat here is that, as I’ve mentioned, we gate what you can attack by your prestige level. Targeting a county only requires your fame to be Distinguished, a duchy needs Illustrious, a kingdom requires Exalted Among Men, and an empire mandates you be a Living Legend.
[An adventurer is unable to pursue any of their conquest wars due to lacking prestige levels]
As adventurers don’t have too many prestige outflows (and because they’re operating from a much weaker legal position of Might Makes Right than even a lowly tribal chief), we’ve made these Casus Bellis extremely expensive. You can of course find discounts via lifestyle perks, cultural traditions, all the usual ways, but going from zero to ruler is something we want you to save up for.
Finally, we’re currently testing porting some mechanics from the Seize Realm scheme (more on that below) into the Adventurer Invasion CBs that cause large realms to fragment, with various vassals declaring unilateral independence in response to your assault. We’re not 100% sure whether these’ll make it in for release or not just yet— they were designed to work with a scheme initially after all — but playtesting has shown that we need a little more oomph to our consequences when a dedicated player adventurer inevitably manages to take down a major realm.
This is a king or higher who will pledge either to loan you soldiers or (if they really like you) to fight by your side. Should you win, your legitimacy won’t be quite as cataclysmic either.
[An adventurer seeks support from the Byzantines to become landed, promising vassalship for the Emperor’s support]
In exchange, you’ll become your sponsor’s vassal on success. A small price to pay for security and aid, surely?
Finding a sponsor requires a prestige level of Illustrious but, as you can imagine, most rulers are quite open to the idea of gaining a little land, so it’s not too difficult to find someone willing to take advantage of you. They don’t need your help with lesser realms, so you can only receive sponsorship against a kingdom or an empire.
Purchasing land from a ruler is reasonably circumstantial but still doable. They won’t part with lands for just any reason, especially if those lands are dear to them — the wealthier a county or duchy is, the more closely it aligns with their faith and culture (especially if you do not), and the further away from their capital it is, the more maluses they’ll pack on that even offering double your sum might not help with.
[Even offering a small fortune, an adventurer finds it tough to purchase valuable land from a small ruler]
Of course, if you’re very far from home, you can always try a sway scheme, perhaps adopt the local faith, and/or learn your target’s language, as well as offering more money or picking a less valuable place to buy. Alternatively, find a larger realm or kingdom with less ties to all of its people and see who’ll sell you your plot, or look for a frontier region whose people don’t match their current ruler.
Provided your new business partner’s tier is higher than yours, you’ll buy in as their vassal.
Instead of purchasing a title from an administrative realm directly, you acquire permission to purchase a sizable estate of your own — turning you into another one of the realm’s great families. From here, you enter the influence game and can compete for your own governates (maybe even the empire itself) as usual, albeit as an outsider for some time.
[An adventurer is able to bribe their way into an administrative realm]
This is, overall, actually quite a bit easier than finding someone to sell you a discrete title. You’re simply investing your wealth in property, and no one really believes a foreigner will thrive in the cut-throat world of administerial politics.
Naturally, a requirement for any prospective subject here is to adopt the state faith. If you won’t meet the state’s requirements for a citizen, then you can remain a dirty barbarian.
Shout out to Alratan on the forums for correctly guess-questioning this one a week ahead of time.
This does require that they are either presently camped in your realm, or at war with you. This allows you to both retain an adventurer that may have won a tournament you hosted, and to sabotage an opponent’s mercenary army by rewarding them with territory.
Other than the land you give away, this’ll cost you some legitimacy, but provided you give them a lower title the newly-minted lordling will become your vassal.
[A landed ruler settles a passing adventurer that they’ve befriended]
This is extremely powerful because it allows you to usurp another realm in a high-stakes coup, albeit with difficult requirements. The target’s tier has the same requirement logic as the Adventurer Invasion CB (although it cannot target Administrative realms), so you’ll need to have accrued ample prestige. Actually getting agents to support you will also probably take quite a bit of cash and assorted other resources, but with such prizes on the line…
The major caveat to attempting to Seize Realm is that there will be those who resist. You may seize the throne, but especially in large realms with hefty cultural and religious fault lines, many parts of the realm are likely to splinter away — generally not enough to render all your effort pointless, but certainly enough to provide you with a challenge in the form of reunification.
[After a successful Seize Realm scheme, an adventurer (whose prestige level is at least Exalted) finds that large portions of the realm splinter off from their usurpation]
As noted earlier, we’re looking into cross-porting this to the Adventurer Invasion CBs at the moment.
Because it’s got some fairly powerful bonuses that we didn’t want to reduce or balance around, we’ve made the trait a reward for concluding your journey rather than a welcome prize for merely setting out on it.
Your camp is liquidated, returning a portion of the gold you spent to you, and you keep any followers you had as an adventurer as your new courtiers. Your former comrades all get a simple trait to let you know who was with you in the wilderness.
[When an adventurer receives land, their followers get a trait marking them as former members of their camp]
Edgar the Exile’s children and wife in 1066 now begin with this trait to represent that they functionally lived as his followers adventuring around eastern and central Europe before their recent-ish return to England.
The Swords-for-Hire Camp Purpose obviously specialise in this type of thing, but both Freebooters and (surprisingly) Scholars can make a pretty solid go of it too, at least in smaller conflicts, and any adventurer can try their hand at mercenary work if they’re so inclined.
Mercenaries just getting started will likely want to take a few non-warfare contracts to begin with to help build up these foundations, as well as to grow their Roll of Patrons. Patrons are uniquely useful because you can request they provide you with Men-at-Arms regiments (we’ll go into the Make a Request interaction in a later section), helping you to fill out your company’s basic building blocks.
Additionally (and a bit more exotically) a learning lifestyle perk — Take the Custom Where it Comes — allows adventurers to buy Men-at-Arms from the culture of their current location.
If you want elephants — and who doesn’t want elephants? — you’re gonna need to go and get them.
[Acquiring elephant Men-at-Arms requires some extra hoop jumping]
As with not expending provisions when not travelling, this was something we went with after our early testing: gold can be very feast-or-famine for adventurers, so if they have a steady expense but are having trouble finding even irregular income (or, as is usually the case, simply aren’t getting paid in advance), they rapidly become extremely frustrating to play.
Instead of reinforcing automatically, which would mean drawing from a reserve that they lack, adventurers have a pair of interactions they use to reinforce their armies by paying different sorts of currency.
[Adventurers can access their reinforcement interaction directly from the military view]
Most cost effectively, soldiers can be accrued for gold, but you can also lure in recruits with provisions in a pinch. As the interactions do have a short cooldown of a couple of years, adventurers can generally bounce back fairly well once before they need to start being very careful with their troops.
The costs for either option scale with the amount of troops you’re missing. If you lack sufficient gold or provisions to rebuild your forces, you can partially reinforce with whatever you have available.
[Adventurers can spend gold to reinforce their troops — though powerful, this has a cooldown, and can completely destroy their profit margins]
Of course, if you don’t have any gold or provisions, then you can try to conscript people on the cheap with a Men-at-Arms specific Scrape the Barrel decision.
Here, you can try to use a combined Diplomacy-Prowess check, pay prestige (if in tribal territory — though we are currently considering changing this to paying prestige anywhere but making it just more effective in tribal realms), pay piety (if in a suitable theocracy or holy order leased barony), or expend your dread in order to attract just a few soldiers at a time.
[Impoverished mercenaries can try alternate methods to scrape together soldiers]
A few soldiers are better than none, and some resources (like dread) are much cheaper than others (like… well, gold), so scraping the barrel every now and then can be a good idea. Several lifestyle perks also help make it significantly more useful.
Specifically, this is because sieges attrit armies involved in them over time even if they go well. People get shot full of arrows, they catch cholera, they desert, etc. As a landed ruler with ample reserves, you don’t notice that much that you lost a few dozen peasants because, well… they’ve probably got sons who you can throw in the meat grinder instead. As an adventurer, though, our playtesters really started to notice those losses after a few counties, and that meant they were having to balance the reinforcement interactions vs. their cooldowns constantly a lot more than we’d intended.
To compensate for this, we’ve given adventurers a little mechanic called Siege Replenishment. After they win a siege, they replenish their Men-at-Arms by soldiers equivalent to the holding’s loot value*2; this represents new volunteers, impressed locals, and fresh mercenaries flocking to a victorious banner.
This means that an adventuring army that’s doing well and winning is somewhat self-healing, whereas one that’s abandoning sieges before they’re finished or getting ambushed whilst in hostile lands suffers more over time. It also provides a route for thorough mercenaries to protect their fragile profits if they have a bad battle or two.
Implementing this got the relative levels of micro back under control, so that army reinforcement is something you plan to do occasionally (and may even have some value in putting off, if you can score some easy sieges) rather than something you’re penalised for doing at anything less than complete efficiency.
The Proving Grounds contain numerous upgrades for improving different types of Men-at-Arms, each of which also unlocks a captain officer that can further boost a certain type. It also has several more situational upgrades for improving ancillary parts of the sellsword experience.
[The Proving Grounds camp building and several of its upgrades]
The Roaring Campfire doesn’t contain upgrades for individual types of Men-at-Arms, but it increases the number of knights and Men-at-Arms regiments you can have overall as you level it up.
[The Baggage Train camp building and several of its upgrades]
Both the Baggage Train and the Mess Tent improve your ability to acquire and store provisions (more or less required for larger companies). The Baggage Train has a broad variety of upgrades, some for warfare, some for provisions, some focused entirely elsewhere, whilst the Mess Tent focused significantly more on improving provision acquisition.
The bonuses adventurers can get from their camp do potentially give them a powerful edge in warfare (as they have to, given this is the major thing you spend your gold on outside of travelling), so something we’ve tried to emphasise with them is the idea of being a bit of a glass cannon. Or uhhh, glass longbow, I guess.
Pound for pound, a dedicated, well-built adventuring camp can hit harder than many other armies, but they’ll have trouble recuperating from serious losses. They can accrue many bonuses from camp upgrades, but over time their reinforcement costs really add up. Their troops are powerful and they have excellent access to different types of Men-at-Arms, but they’ll be paying provisions through the nose just to transport them around. Their knights can be deadly, but they don’t have a steady stream of new high-prowess characters.
So it goes in the life of a humble mercenary.
But how do they actually get involved in someone else’s conflict?
Most obviously, they can join on-going wars via the Stand With Us contract. This appears on the map as usual, put out as a passive call for support by the AI without contacting anyone in specific. These wars can be more or less anything.
Not all wars are on-going when a merc gets involved, though: the Press My Claims contract involves a claimant contracting out to you to help them start a war…
… the Support Faction contract sees a faction turn to you for aid before they launch their struggle…
… and especially cruel rulers may offer you a casual contract to Raid for Captives against a rival ruler that they simply want to suffer.
A more esoteric way is to use the Offer Military Assistance interaction from Fate of Iberia (not DLC dependent, so you don’t need FoI to unlock it) to proactively join an on-going war that hasn’t put out a contract yet. This generally pays a fair bit worse than contracts put out to tender otherwise, but does let you help shape the map a little bit more easily, if you want to support this little realm or screw over that snobbish former employer.
[A sellsword offer their services to a ruler who hadn’t put out a contract yet]
Finally, mercenary adventurers can be hired directly from the new Special Mercenaries tab in the Military view. This acts roughly as a Stand With Us contract, but is player-accessible, meaning that you can hire adventurers to wage your wars (though they will, of course, insist on commanding themselves).
[A landed ruler proactively tries to hire out an adventurer mercenary company]
If they feel a war is going especially badly (and it’s not a war they’re leading, a crusade, etc.), they can switch sides. All it’ll cost is their reputation and any semblance of trust with their old employer — but if it’s their precious army at risk, then maybe that’s worth it?
In exchange, their new ally will let themselves be added as a patron, and may well even pay a small bounty for the act of treachery — though the original contract will be failed.
Treacherous and cowardly adventurers may opt to simply leave a war altogether. There’s no real benefit to this and various downsides, but if you’re done with a conflict you have no ties to except business, well, you can just duck out. The nobility might judge you, but they can’t stop you.
Instead, we’ve reflavoured the mechanic from “court positions” to “camp officers”, with the idea being that your officers are actually tasked with doing the jobs you set them day after day rather than boast about the title and collect a little pay. A few court positions do carry over (your physician, your caravan master, and your bodyguards), but others are disabled.
Since adventurers do not have a steady gold income, officers are not paid gold to avoid bankruptcies. It’s assumed their pay comes in provisions and their own deductions from the contracts you take (as well as some limited social cachet at camp).
We’ve tried to tie your officers into event content & into contracts (especially skill based contracts), so making sure you have the best people in as many positions as possible should pay more dividends than just passive modifiers.
Your second gives you a broad range of skill bonuses based on their aptitude, similar to a jacked up spouse. They also substitute in for scheme discovery in place of a spymaster, since adventurers have no council.
The stooge is your equivalent of a court jester — except jesters at least have some interesting privileges and a level of access to a noble figure. A stooge is just the person at camp that everyone hates. The stooge can be humiliated to lose stress, though everyone has their limit with this type of thing.
Courtier wounded your child? Make them the stooge. Officer screwed up a contract? Demoted to stooge. Childhood bully is still at your camp? You’d better believe that’s a stoogin’.
Otherwise, officers are generally unlocked by different camp buildings and upgrades, with a few of them thus being specific to certain Camp Purposes. Rather than explain all these individually, I’m just going to show you each of them in turn.
[A list of all the camp officer effects]
Finally, we also have a selection of officers that improve men-at-arms (discussed a little in the merc sections). These aren’t very heavily integrated into content, but do give mercenary adventurers an extra edge. Each of them is unlocked by a relevant upgrade for the Proving Grounds camp building.
As your captains will likely also be your knights, their powerful bonuses are to be weighed against their possible death in battle.
[A list of all the martial camp officer effects]
We’ve added a slew of new decisions for adventurers, and we’re gonna go over most of them here.
Oh, also we’ve added foldable decision categories. Have we mentioned that yet? I don’t know if we’ve mentioned that yet. They’re pretty great, now you can actually trim the list.
[The decisions menu with all of its categories folded up]
Most will shrug their shoulders and accept that this is just the way things are.
Those who refuse to settle for that can make history.
Become a Great Conqueror allows you to access the great conqueror mechanics detailed in Dev Diary #147. It’s an arduous road to match enough of the requirements, but at the end of it, you’ll be able to become one of the most potent conquerors the Old World has ever seen.
[The decision for becoming a Great Conqueror]
[The decision’s requirements]
With this decision, you can attempt to convert large numbers of counties to your faith, getting a shot at conversion each time you travel to a new one (with sensible limits, of course). Once you’ve started this, you cannot turn it off — that’s not [your god here]’s way — but failure carries the risk of wounding each time. This makes death a likely consequence of over-ambition.
It’s not necessarily easy, but the path of a prophet never is.
[A decision for performing mass missionary work (and likely martyring yourself)]
The ones we remember long after their deaths are, inevitably, the nerds who stopped to write a gods-damned book about it as they went.
This decision lets you be that nerd, creating a powerful lifestyle-XP boosting book artefact for future generations proportional to the number of points of interest that you’ve visited.
[A decision for writing a book artefact about your exploits & travels]
With Found a Holding, you’ll be able to leave your mark on the places you visit, and gain passive income for your trouble, or even steal a county out from under the local ruler.
As this decision is repeatable, characters can found multiple holdings over a run.
[A decision for founding new holdings in other counties]
[The requirements for the Found a Holding decision]
Our thanks to the person who suggested this during playtesting & previewing!
Becoming the Knight of the Swan (or suitable local culture animal) takes a pristine reputation and a lot of prestige, but it’ll net you a custom trait, permanent house modifier, beautiful artefact, and even a legend seed for Legends of the Dead owners.
[A decision for focusing on being a pure & pious knight]
Which, funnily enough, is what you’ll be doing here. Championing Your Culture allows you to break your countrymen free from the rule of foreign despots (so it’s especially good for ruler designed adventurers with an axe to grind) in a war for a single duchy, but one where you’ll have a powerful bonus to siege timing throughout, and ready access to a swathe of event troops at the beginning.
If you’re clever, you can manipulate things so that you don’t even need to fight.
[A decision for launching a popular uprising]
… of course, that’s just the nobility’s POV. For a true legend of the medieval underworld, there’s something to be said for infamy, and plenty of fools throng the ranks of the lost and the damned that can be drawn to serve the right master.
With sufficient ranks of your petty criminal trait, you can take this decision in order to receive small numbers of event troops every time you successfully complete a criminal contract. The higher your various Gallowsbait XP tracks, the more troops you earn.
Amass an army of criminals then find a lovely little island somewhere and take what should have been yours to begin with.
[A decision for gathering a horde of criminal scum to your banners — this says intrigue, but we’ve since broadened it to criminal contracts generally (and taken it away from the non-criminal intrigue contract)]
This decision allows you, your Chief Forager (if you have one), or your Huntsman to make a skill roll to try and acquire fresh provisions at no extra cost. The effectiveness depends heavily on the terrain you’re in, with winter also factoring in slightly.
[An adventurer attempts to harvest provisions from the land, but lacks a Chief Forager or a Huntsman, and so cannot fall back on their aptitudes in lieu of his own skills]
We’ve kept this as separate from the main hunting/poaching activity to indicate tracking smaller, less managed game, using public areas, trapping and snaring rather than hunting larger game, and so on. Legal, questionably legal, and grey-but-unlikely-to-be-caught areas to go hunting vs. the primest, choicest woods to snag a doe, essentially.
Naturally, if you feel this is too mean-spirited or there’s no one at camp who’s wronged you enough to get the job, filling the stooge officer position is entirely optional — using the decision doubly so. It’s there if you want it, it’s not intrinsic if you don’t.
[Stoogery provides an alternative to kicking out a character that has offended you]
It comes at the cost of annoying your family, but that’s a small price to pay for liberty, right?
[Some character can refuse inheritance from abroad, if they wish]
And, of course, if you change your mind, you can choose to remove the trait at virtually any time. Once.
[The Gallivanter trait]
This is largely of use in the Holy Roman Empire, chiefly for fans of Austria and Switzerland, who apparently really don’t like getting elevated to Charlemagne’s throne against their will.
It will lightly offend other vassals in the realm, but nothing too major. Likewise, it’s not an absolute guarantee: the larger you get within the empire, the more likely people are to ignore your wishes and vote for you anyway (though you’ll have to really internally blob to completely nuke the chances).
[Characters inside elective realms (not including administrative) can try to recuse themselves from higher office]
If you change your mind, you can change your position. Folk’ll just think you’re a flipflopper.
One of our producers wanted to try their hand at a bit more detailed scripting during their monthly personal development time. We’ve talked about this a little in previous dev diaries I believe, but it’s one day each month (most months, at least) allocated for developers from any discipline to work on random CK3-related stuff.
PDT exists to let us sidestep the usual red tape and restrictions and just make cool, small things that interest us and don’t have to depend on what’s sellable. Previous items we’ve got out of this include the pet system, a lot of various Jewish content (and many niche regional decisions), a lot of UI & QoL improvements, some of the more specific event backgrounds, that type of thing.
As it happens outside the scope of the development of the game, Design said sure, and now we… have a small decision to go fishing. It’s fairly simple, but it’s an extra way for adventurers to lose stress whilst earning a few provisions.
Again, this didn’t take any time away from development, it’s just a nice little decision you can take if you like. I believe there’s a fair number of types of fish available to catch.
Hello! Lurker @Distantaziq here, for a brief spout of Visit Settlement-talk!
So we had Landless Adventurers. On a map. How do we tie adventurers and the map together? How do we make it feel like you are in any specific place at any given moment?
[An adventurer views on map interactions from their camp]
Well, how about interacting with the locals and Visiting Local Settlements. Expanding on the narrative aspect, this feature focuses on going "into town" to conduct business — be it meeting new people, buying provisions or encountering random happenstances like a disgraced former Bodyguard, looking for redemption.
In this example, we have the deposed King Harold, recently having fled to Devon. He's heading into Exeter to conduct some business with the locals:
[An adventurer and his wife survey the city of Exeter]
Let us find that supply merchant…
[An adventurer goes to purchase supplies in town]
Some factors, like your highest skill or having a skilled friendly companion on your visit may affect how you can interact with certain options — when buying provisions, you can straight up buy the provisions using gold. Or use your highest skill to get some provisions. Alternatively your companion might be thrifty…
[An adventurer attempts to cut a deal on provisions using Stewardship on a local merchant]
[An adventurer provides a distraction for his wife to commit theft]
Inside Visit Settlement, you can move back and forth between the locations. Once we're done with the supply merchant, we can navigate back to the main square to go visit the castle.
[His business concluded at the market, our adventurer returns to Exeter’s main square]
Once in a while, you may encounter skilled or strange characters that you may or may not want to have join your camp. Feel free to approach them at your leisure.
[Walking through town, our adventurer happens across an incident]
Ah, the castle square. Lovely and… what's this? A kerfuffle? Let us approach them and find out!
[Colourful locals will sometimes be available to recruit as followers when Visiting Settlements]
As the former king of England, I am looking for a bodyguard…
Moving us back to the Castle after recruiting my new follower, we are done here for the time being. I just realized I left the stove on fire unbanked back at the camp. We should head back to the main square so that we can leave.
[Not everything in town needs to be done each time, so you can leave once your purpose is satisfied]
Bye, Exeter! Until next time!
Additionally, different types of holdings have different actions:
The Castle is focused on martial options you might need as a landless adventurer — improving prowess, reinforcing Men-at-Arms regiments, recruiting additional military-focused camp members.
[A castle, with martial-focused options]
The Temple is focused on health and religion — partake in local healing cures, donate to the local place of worship or contemplate religion.
[A temple, with spiritually-focused options]
The City is focused on commerce and equipment — buy cheaper provisions, sell artifacts at a higher rate, or buy a weapon, set of armor or trinket to improve your character.
[A city, with economically-focused options]
The tavern is present in all of the holding types, so that you can hang out with the locals at any given location.
[A common Cornish tavern; Wokeg’s note — presumably serving medieval Doombar]
Aaand that's basically it. A brief look at the Visit Settlement feature — though it's best experienced by discovering it yourself, so — enjoy and have fun playing as a landless adventurer!
[Visiting a tavern, an adventurer spots a hooded figure at the rear]
[An adventurer visits the gardens in a temple]
[An adventurer is smitten by a handsome local]
So. There’s an adventurer in your back-realm and you don’t want there to be. What can you do?
Simple enough, as it happens. You can expel any adventurer from your realm (including your domain and any of your vassals’ lands) via a character interaction, which will stop contracts from generating there, force them to leave, and force them out if they ever end up back there. Any contracts they were currently taking or had discovered in your lands are immediately invalidated, criminal or not.
Expulsion is a long-lasting opinion, so it’ll reset if either of you die. If many, many years pass, that’ll reset it too.
They have three months to begin exiting from the date of you sending the letter, and if they have no army, they’re forced to go. If they have even a paltry military force, they can try to stay, but the potential risks are dire.
Refusing an eviction order means you make an imprisonment attempt against them as soon as the three months have expired. If this fails, the adventurer begins an offensive war against you, the evicting ruler; you’re considered the defender because it’s your land, they’re just squatting on it.
[A landed ruler expels an adventurer, giving them a few months to vacate]
If the adventurer wins, they have utterly defeated your realm and usurp it as though it was a conquest.
If the landed ruler wins, they imprison the adventurer and destroy their camp permanently.
Refusing an eviction notice is, no matter how it ends, a very serious affair. You either leave, or accept that — one way or another — your camp is going no further.
Once an eviction has been accepted (or white peaced in the war), any lands controlled by the evicting ruler can no longer be travelled to by the adventurer. They can be travelled through, largely for mechanical reasons, but cannot be used as an end destination and won’t generate contracts till the opinion expires (say, through a convenient assassination). If an adventurer ends up in lands they have been exiled from for any reason, they are automatically re-routed out of them again.
Rulers are much more likely to use evictions on adventurers that they dislike, such as troublesome missionaries or those who’ve offended them via Gallowsbait.
We represent this with the Make a Request character interaction. Usable on patrons, your close or extended family, and your consorts, this allows adventurers to just really aggressively mooch from a target. Just get right in there and blag your heart out, burning opinion with your patron in exchange for resources.
The requests you’ll likely make the most often are for restocking your provisions, or providing you with extra gold (presumably phrased as a ‘loan’ that you’ll totally pay back). These aren’t a substitute for contracts, but they can supplement your income or help you bounce back when times are tough. Many contracts give you bonus opinion with a patron on completion, and a fair few reward a hook upon a critical success that Make a Request will automatically trade in for your rewards.
A more interesting reward is to have them help you recruit a random Men-at-Arms regiment accessible to them, providing another way to build your army laterally, or to loan you a knight for a few years.
Most notably, this is the only way to even access the marriage interaction with landed rulers, either for yourself or your followers.
Finally, if they’re eligible, you can try to wrangle further contracts out of a patron — you can use this to build relations by continuing to do good jobs for the same characters. Perhaps not too relevant if they’re just a count or a baron, but if you manage to get in good with a king…
[An adventurer wheedles provisions out of one of her patrons]
For balance reasons, Make a Request requires you to be in close geographical proximity to the target’s capital (and much, much closer than diplomatic range). This helps to stop you from travelling to India only to teleport in gold reserves from, say, Scotland. If you want a favour from someone, you need to travel closer to them to get it. We’ve actually applied this restriction to a few key interactions, but Make a Request is the main one.
That said, this is currently still a little too easy on our end. It should cost more opinion than it does in these screenshots, and arguably some prestige too, so we’ll very likely be increasing those before Roads to Power releases.
First up is the biggie: raiding. Adventurers cannot raid and, relatedly, their camp is not a siegable thing on the map.
I know this is upsetting, but we just could not make it work. Raiding is by far and away the easiest way to earn gold, with the only drawback being the need to cart your gold back to your capital — but when your capital is, itself, a cart, that becomes uniquely problematic to balance or teach the AI to deal with.
Now, we could put in oodles of edge case handling for things like raising your army inside a realm you’re currently raiding, or moving your capital to follow your raiding army province-to-province so the gold instantly and safely reaches your treasury, but we couldn’t cover every possible exploit. Even one would utterly break the entire economy. It would have still ended up almost certainly absurdly easy to game the system by moving your camp somewhere within easy reach of a border, nipping over it, nabbing loot, then returning before the AI could conceivably even try to catch you.
Siegable camps likewise offered too many headaches for a robust implementation. Any number of camps can be in the same location, and as camps aren’t holdings, we would have had to do a huge amount of work just to support them being basically siegable at all — only to then have to work out what happens and how we display it visually if three adventurers are on different sides in a war in one county, one is in a different war, and two more are in the same county but not involved in anything, and a million other configurations.
That’s before getting into the verisimilitude of why it would ever take anything other than 1 day to siege a camp if you have, say, a single bombard, and consequently how adventurers would ever be able to win a war when reaching full occupation score against them would just be a matter of walking onto their capital once.
Rather than deliver these two aspects in a substandard condition, we’ve elected to avoid them entirely. Adventurers with a martial bent earn their coin from mercenary work and similar contracts, and adventuring camps are treated as not being worthwhile military targets. Neither of these is a reflection of historical reality, only of gameplay necessity.
The other, smaller thing to address — child adventurers. We don’t support this generally (narratively, literally anyone else would be in charge instead) but we haven’t hard-banned it. You can’t start as an adventuring child, but you won’t be game overed if it happens to you in gameplay.
Thank you for your patience.
I hope this has been an illuminating little tour of the feature, and that it’s gotten some of you reasonably excited for the DLC. We’re pretty excited to show it to you, and so soon!
As ever, I’ll be around in the thread’s comments for a couple of hours to take questions, notes, and polite recriminations. Highlights will be passed on to the rest of the team like usual.
P. S.
No, I haven’t seen Berserk. Please stop asking.
Welcomes back, comrades, to Landless Adventurers Part 2! I’m Wokeg, and last week, we went over the general core gameplay (what we expect you to be doing, where your resources come from, and what you spend them on). This week, we’re gonna be doing uhhh… literally everything else.
Just like last time, everything shown here is a work in progress. Features won’t shift massively but values (and occasionally modifiers or parameters) potentially will. Costs, gains, and some requirements in particular are all undergoing active adjustment at present.
This is going to be quite a disjointed dev diary, so please bear with me whilst I skip around the whole damned feature like a wanderer running from town to town, desperately fleeing the Black Death.
[An adventurer desperately tries to outrun the plague]
Camp Purposes
Every adventurer on the map has a reason for being, a thing that unites their group and drives them onwards. This is their Camp Purpose, and it replaces the otherwise redundant crown authority law for Landless Adventurers.We’ve added six Camp Purposes in Roads to Power, specifically:
- Wanderers
- Swords-for-Hire
- Scholars
- Explorers
- Freebooters (Brigands)
- Legitimists
[The Camp Purposes, replacing crown authority for adventurers]
Each one comes with different weightings on what types of contracts they’re likely to find, different upgrades for their camp buildings, and different flavourisation that controls their title and the types of clothes their followers will wear. Expect a lot more glasses and humble clothing for Scholars, weapons and armour for Swords-for-Hire, animal furs and muted outfits for Freebooters, and so on.
The default purpose is Wanderers, which is what we’d consider the vanilla experience, but each of the five others are slightly tailored to different playstyles.
Wanderers find equal amounts of contracts of every type, and non-historical adventurers will always start as them. Their main special feature is that they can switch to any other purpose type for free, whereas the other types must pay 1k prestige for the privilege.
[The Wanderers Camp Purpose tooltip]
Adventurers with the Swords-for-Hire Camp Purpose are aimed primarily at mercenary work. They find more martial and prowess contracts, as well as many more offers to help out with wars. Their camp upgrades focus on making them better at fighting.
This is very much the Roger de Flor experience, though hopefully you’ll have a happier end.
[The Swords-for-Hire Camp Purpose tooltip]
Scholars specialise in learning and stewardship contracts, and have the most varied camp upgrades. They’re intended to play a bit like the early life of Michael Scot: you roam from place to place, educating the children of nobility, picking up the finest minds you can find, and creating works of learning. An untrustworthy scholar may be found selling fake relics or collecting taxes under false pretences.
As a scholar, you’re unlikely to win any great battles, but you might help create great rulers, and could well earn yourself a solid plot of land somewhere with time.
[The Scholars Camp Purpose tooltip]
Explorers get more transport contracts, diplomacy contracts, and intrigue contracts. AI explorers also roam much further than other AI adventurers, and their upgrades help with schemes, provisions usage, and mountain fighting. A dishonest explorer might defraud a ruler or rob their home of its silverware.
These are typed a bit more after Ibn Battuta or Marco Polo — sadly Crusader Kings III includes no terra incognita, so we can’t give you the full experience of finding new lands, but they’re still a solid pick for characters who want to cross the map with relative ease, and very much the camp purpose for Choose a New Destiny characters in search of a distant land to earn their fortune in.
[The Explorers Camp Purpose tooltip]
Freebooters (as they call themselves), or brigands (as everyone else refers to them), find more prowess and intrigue contracts, as well as criminal contracts of every kind. Their upgrades give bonuses to schemes generally, unlock officers that are especially good at criminal activity, give hefty bonuses for high intrigue, and can help you reduce the cost of lowering your Gallowsbait (which, as you may remember from last time, is the petty criminality negative fame trait you get and level up — making people hate you more — from taking criminal contracts).
With freebooters, we were trying to keep in mind the underclass, the recidivist, and the scum of the Earth; all the types of characters you rarely see make it into the history books — that is, of course, unless such a bandit grows so large that they manage to steal a kingdom. Something that you can, naturally, attempt yourself, but depending on how bad your Gallowsbait is, you may find ruling any lands you gain much more difficult than controlling petty outlaws.
[The Freebooters Camp Purpose tooltip]
Last, but by no means least, we have Legitimists. This Camp Purpose is a bit special, as these are your exiled-king-returns-with-an-army types. They require an adventurer to have at least one pressed claim against a kingdom-tier title of some kind, and so are not open to mere former dukes or counts.
Unlike the rest of the Camp Purposes, they’re also explicitly intended to be for players (and AI!) who don’t want to stay adventuring for any length of time under any circumstances. Legitimists have a goal in mind and they will have it within their lifetime, whether it be a throne they lost or a crown they consider theirs by right.
Legitimists have no weights on what contracts they receive, but instead have a unique contract where other rulers will offer them support in their quest in exchange for gold upon its completion. These benefactors will offer money and troops but always expect a return on their investment, in the form of a payout after your victory.
[The Legitimists Camp Purpose tooltip]
Legitimists may also proactively ask for this aid instead of being offered it — in which case, you’ll need to stump up a hefty sum of prestige for an audience with your prospective sponsor.
After a time limit of between 4 & 8 years (depending on how negotiations go), each backer will start to become antsy and begin requesting their return. This gives you a final chance to launch your invasion with whatever you have readied, try to negotiate a slight delay, or else face the penalties. If you renege, you start losing entire prestige levels per backer, as well as other assorted nasty ill-effects — after all, at that point you are simply an ineffective would-be usurper.
Likewise, taking their money and troops and then changing your Camp Purpose or landing yourself with less than a suitable claim will also be counted as failing to attempt a follow-through. They’re offering support, but it has strings attached.
Of course, you can launch your claim war before the timer has passed; the timer is simply a deadline for doing so.
We expect Legitimists to be for players who treat adventurers as a stepping stone; perhaps you used Choose a New Destiny to come in as a favoured younger child with no lands, flipped them into a legitimist adventurer, and are now trying to go back and reclaim your old kingdom from its AI ruler. Perhaps you started in a tricky position and got wiped by a greater power early on, but won’t let your dream die there.
Aside from paying the associated cost, switching between Camp Purposes can be done at will. Any camp upgrades that aren't valid for the newly chosen purpose are automatically demolished, which (as mentioned last dev diary) gives a partial refund of the cost.
We want to encourage people to try playing different purposes, especially if you’re an adventurer for a long time, rather than picking one and sticking to it. Different characters can mean different things for your camp and encourage slightly different ways to play.
Mercenaries in particular may find it hard to get off the ground without a little seed money, and as such can benefit from time spent as Freebooters or Explorers till they can afford to build an army.
In addition to this, each Camp Purpose has a small handful of events tied to it, plus special options within certain other events. Event-based contracts in particular will sometimes contain entire alternate rewards for specific Camp Purposes, even outside of their specialities.
Lastly, designing Camp Purposes like this gives us a handy means of letting players opt in for the type of adventuring content that you want to engage with, rather than leaving it entirely down to RNG. This is something we’re especially mindful of in these enlightened post-RoCo times, and is partially why we’ve tried to theme the purposes so heavily after different types of playstyle.
Landed <-> Landless
Becoming an Adventurer
The key challenge with making Landless Adventurers accessible was giving you diegetic ways to switch into them, without just requiring you to lose your whole realm each time.This wouldn’t work for veteran players, because who the hell manages to lose Crusader Kings III that hard once they’ve mastered the basics, and it wouldn’t work for newbies, because I’m just trying to figure out what the hell a vassal is and now I’ve not got any and you’ve shunted me into a completely different game mode?
Instead, what we’ve tried to do is provide a broad variety of paths to switch into adventuring. Yes, you can do it if you lose your whole realm (and likewise, you can opt to not become an adventurer, simply switching to a landed player heir if you’ve got one or entering observe mode otherwise), but we’ve also tried to add ways for you to either proactively become one, or else junctions where you might want to consider it.
The one thing that all ways to become an adventurer share is that, like it or not, the would-be wanderer is undergoing an ignoble transition. They lose almost all their stored prestige, as well as 3 full prestige levels. This is both a narrative penalty, a way to guarantee at least some potential for growth, and a way to stop famous characters that become adventurers from simply immediately trying to steamroll the Holy Roman Empire with powerful Casus Bellis.
We’ll let you try to pull off the mother of all coups or invasions, but you’ll need to work for it.
Embracing the Road
Succession
The simplest way to become a Landless Adventurer is on succession, via the Choose a New Destiny feature. I believe we’ve talked about this previously, but as a reminder for anyone who might have missed it: this essentially allows you to pick a character within your dynasty to continue as other than your normal player heir. Suitably interesting landless family members will be shown with the option to immediately become adventurers.
[An adventurer start is offered to a dead player in the Choose a new Destiny screen]
Of course, this is just the player — ambitious, restless, or otherwise-driven AI characters left with no land after a succession will also sometimes spontaneously leave to form their own adventuring companies.
Run-Away Princelings
If you have many children, especially several who are far down the line of succession, some of them may ask for your permission to embark as an adventurer. Particularly driven characters would rather seek their fortune in the broader world, rather than sitting back for decade after decade in comfortable irrelevance while waiting for an inheritance that will likely never come.
[An adult child who won’t inherit (and is young enough to dream) asks for permission to form his own adventuring company]
[CM’s note: You may recognize this as the artwork for Wandering Nobles. The key-art for that event pack is still being worked on, so the current one is a placeholder.]
Even if you deny them, some will run away anyway. After all, they wouldn’t be asking if they weren’t serious about it. Whether you allow them or forbid them, any that do will give you the option to switch to playing as your renegade child.
[After being denied, a rogue princeling goes off on an adventure anyway]
Historical Adventurers & Creating Your Own
In all three starting dates, various historical adventurers are pre-scripted and selectable directly from the bookmark screen. For these, we’ve tried not to add every famous person who wasn’t a ruler, instead focusing on the most notable & those who fit one of our Camp Purposes and who we might at least attempt to represent semi-faithfully.With the slight exception of Prince Aelfwine in 1066, who was definitely just quietly minding his own business at a church in southern France but who we’ve given an adventuring camp to anyway because someone asked us nicely. We took a lot of the more niche suggestions for these from a forum thread a little while back; of course we couldn’t take everyone suggested there, and I expect we’ll add more post-release when the internet points out the many people we doubtless missed in our initial sweep.
Lest we forget — since I did share a screenshot of it last dev diary — you can create an adventurer directly from the bookmark selection screen with the ruler designer.
[The changes to the bookmark screen, showing Camps and Estates alike, as well as the Create your own Adventurer button]
Via Decision for Certain Cultures & Faiths
For some peoples, the lure of adventuring is strong even for those who’ve already got land (just as long as they don’t have very much of it), and for these cultures, we’ve added a decision to abandon their small realms and take to the road. Since only small, low-ish tier rulers can take the decision, you’ll never see the High King of the North Sea voluntarily abandoning his empire to go backpacking around the Caucasus.The following tenets have access:
- Struggle & Submission
- Fedayeen (from Legacy of Persia)
We’re also currently considering giving access to some or all of Vows of Poverty, Asceticism, and Mendicant Preachers. These are partial tonal fits but not entirely, so we’re still wavering a bit on whether to give them the option too.
As well as them, we’ve also given it to the following cultural traditions:
- Futuwaa
- Horse Lords
- Hird
- Swords-for-Hire
- Coastal Warriors (from the Northern Lords)
[A decision for smaller rulers to become an adventurer]
With Roads to Power, Normans now have the new Audacious Cadets tradition. Amongst various other Norman-y things (like making them much more eager warmongers and buffing their heavy cavalry), this both enables the decision to abandon your lands and encourages the younger sons of barons to frequently go off to seek their fortune abroad — like the de Hautevilles and countless others.
The Swords-for-Hire cultural tradition likewise causes otherwise irrelevant young characters to seek their fortunes abroad. These two together means that we now see a distressingly historical flood of Normans adventuring in western Europe and Turks adventuring in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
Rich Wanderers & Interesting Wanderers
These two are AI-specific but, occasionally, we end up with pool characters wandering the map as guests that have just… ungodly amounts of gold on them. Now, sometimes, those characters’ll decide that the cash is burning a hole in their pocket and use it to found an adventuring company instead.If a poor character ends up in the pool but they have a particularly interesting personality (or even just claims), then they may also spontaneously become a Landless Adventurer. Just, a somewhat poorer one.
Losing Your Last Title
Lastly you can, of course, always become an adventurer the classic way that I’m sure you were all expecting: if you lose your last county (and you’re not an Administrative family), you’ll be given the option to continue with that character by forming an adventuring band instead of game overing or switching to someone new. The AI will sometimes do this too, if their personality suits it.This can be a result of title revocation, conquest, or even exile. If a character’s last title is stripped away, and they’re either a player or a suitably driven individual, then you may see them pop back up as an adventurer.
[A recently-deposed king is given the choice to continue as an adventurer]
Becoming Landed
The problem with becoming an adventurer was “how do we make this more accessible without requiring people to jump through hoops?”. The problem with moving from being an adventurer to being landed is more like “how do we make this less accessible than just immediately launching a conquest war on the first weak independent duchy you see?”.If moving out of adventuring is too easy, then it’s got no narrative weight and the difference between landed and landless isn’t so keenly felt. If it’s too difficult to do it ever then adventuring risks becoming a chore rather than a way to vary your play.
What we’ve tried to accomplish with becoming landed again, then, is giving you a sliding scale of options. You probably can find a weak or terrible county somewhere that you can conquer or buy for not that much effort, but you’re moving into a fixer-upper. Especially if you used to be a king or more, it’s not exactly glorious.
If you want something greater, you should have to work for it a little.
As with becoming a Landless Adventurer, there are many paths to leaving a life on the road. Some violent, some not — as a general rule of thumb, the thing most have in common is that the size of the realm you’re trying to acquire is gated by your prestige level. Adventurers with less fame are, at best, upstarts, no matter how many gold or troops they have.
Leaving the Road Behind
Inheritance
The first and most obvious way to get out of the adventuring life is the same way almost all characters get land: inheritance.Adventurers inheriting land immediately lose their camp (with the partial refunds we mentioned in Part 1 for demolishing buildings) and shift into their new realm. For the purposes of inheritance, adventurers are counted as landless courtiers, so they aren’t excluded by higher crown authority.
For those of you who don’t want to just inherit back into land, we’ve introduced the gallivanter trait, obtainable via the Reject Inheritance decision. This essentially works like a voluntary disinheritance, when you recuse yourself from inheriting other titles from your dynasty (but can still obtain them via conquest, character interactions, etc).
We’ll go into the gallivanter trait a bit more in the decisions section of the dev diary — with a liiiiiittle something extra for the HRE vassal players who are tired of getting elected emperor against their will too.
Adventurer Invasions
Adventurers cannot access most common Casus Bellis. Legitimists may use the Claim CB, but that’s a bit of a niche case for many (not least because becoming a legitimist requires a kingdom claim or better), and your choice of target is naturally constrained. As you have no realm priest, you cannot fabricate new claims on command (nor would anyone take you seriously if you did).Instead, our landless wanderers have access to the new Adventurer Invasion CBs, which work fairrrrly similarly to some of our other invasion CBs. You select an existing target title held by a character or one of their vassals, and conquer or usurp anything with that title. If this is their only top-tier title, you will attempt to conquer the realm as a whole. Naturally, any rule achieved this way is extremely illegitimate.
The caveat here is that, as I’ve mentioned, we gate what you can attack by your prestige level. Targeting a county only requires your fame to be Distinguished, a duchy needs Illustrious, a kingdom requires Exalted Among Men, and an empire mandates you be a Living Legend.
[An adventurer is unable to pursue any of their conquest wars due to lacking prestige levels]
As adventurers don’t have too many prestige outflows (and because they’re operating from a much weaker legal position of Might Makes Right than even a lowly tribal chief), we’ve made these Casus Bellis extremely expensive. You can of course find discounts via lifestyle perks, cultural traditions, all the usual ways, but going from zero to ruler is something we want you to save up for.
Finally, we’re currently testing porting some mechanics from the Seize Realm scheme (more on that below) into the Adventurer Invasion CBs that cause large realms to fragment, with various vassals declaring unilateral independence in response to your assault. We’re not 100% sure whether these’ll make it in for release or not just yet— they were designed to work with a scheme initially after all — but playtesting has shown that we need a little more oomph to our consequences when a dedicated player adventurer inevitably manages to take down a major realm.
Sponsored Invasions
Of course, not every adventurer is determined to carve out a realm for themselves alone. If you’re smart — and at least a little humble — then you can help your odds by finding a sponsor.This is a king or higher who will pledge either to loan you soldiers or (if they really like you) to fight by your side. Should you win, your legitimacy won’t be quite as cataclysmic either.
[An adventurer seeks support from the Byzantines to become landed, promising vassalship for the Emperor’s support]
In exchange, you’ll become your sponsor’s vassal on success. A small price to pay for security and aid, surely?
Finding a sponsor requires a prestige level of Illustrious but, as you can imagine, most rulers are quite open to the idea of gaining a little land, so it’s not too difficult to find someone willing to take advantage of you. They don’t need your help with lesser realms, so you can only receive sponsorship against a kingdom or an empire.
Direct Purchase
Inside feudal, clan, and even tribal realms, you’ve got the direct route of cold, hard coin. A county is somewhat affordable, but purchasing a duchy will cost you a fortune. No character will sell you a kingdom.Purchasing land from a ruler is reasonably circumstantial but still doable. They won’t part with lands for just any reason, especially if those lands are dear to them — the wealthier a county or duchy is, the more closely it aligns with their faith and culture (especially if you do not), and the further away from their capital it is, the more maluses they’ll pack on that even offering double your sum might not help with.
[Even offering a small fortune, an adventurer finds it tough to purchase valuable land from a small ruler]
Of course, if you’re very far from home, you can always try a sway scheme, perhaps adopt the local faith, and/or learn your target’s language, as well as offering more money or picking a less valuable place to buy. Alternatively, find a larger realm or kingdom with less ties to all of its people and see who’ll sell you your plot, or look for a frontier region whose people don’t match their current ruler.
Provided your new business partner’s tier is higher than yours, you’ll buy in as their vassal.
Setting up an Administrative Family
Inside administrative realms, land works a little differently. The great magnates have their estates, sure, but they don’t directly own entire counties in the same way that other rulers do.Instead of purchasing a title from an administrative realm directly, you acquire permission to purchase a sizable estate of your own — turning you into another one of the realm’s great families. From here, you enter the influence game and can compete for your own governates (maybe even the empire itself) as usual, albeit as an outsider for some time.
[An adventurer is able to bribe their way into an administrative realm]
This is, overall, actually quite a bit easier than finding someone to sell you a discrete title. You’re simply investing your wealth in property, and no one really believes a foreigner will thrive in the cut-throat world of administerial politics.
Naturally, a requirement for any prospective subject here is to adopt the state faith. If you won’t meet the state’s requirements for a citizen, then you can remain a dirty barbarian.
Great Holy War Beneficiaries
Uniquely, adventurers may choose themselves as their beneficiary in a Great Holy War. This means a suitably vicious mercenary company could, under the right circumstances, transition into a very effective Kingdom of Jerusalem.Shout out to Alratan on the forums for correctly guess-questioning this one a week ahead of time.
Offered Settlement
As a landed ruler, you don’t have to wait for an adventurer to approach you about your domain (whether they’re carrying sword or silver) — if you wish, you can try to settle them yourself.This does require that they are either presently camped in your realm, or at war with you. This allows you to both retain an adventurer that may have won a tournament you hosted, and to sabotage an opponent’s mercenary army by rewarding them with territory.
Other than the land you give away, this’ll cost you some legitimacy, but provided you give them a lower title the newly-minted lordling will become your vassal.
[A landed ruler settles a passing adventurer that they’ve befriended]
Seize Realm
Last of all, we have the Seize Realm scheme.This is extremely powerful because it allows you to usurp another realm in a high-stakes coup, albeit with difficult requirements. The target’s tier has the same requirement logic as the Adventurer Invasion CB (although it cannot target Administrative realms), so you’ll need to have accrued ample prestige. Actually getting agents to support you will also probably take quite a bit of cash and assorted other resources, but with such prizes on the line…
The major caveat to attempting to Seize Realm is that there will be those who resist. You may seize the throne, but especially in large realms with hefty cultural and religious fault lines, many parts of the realm are likely to splinter away — generally not enough to render all your effort pointless, but certainly enough to provide you with a challenge in the form of reunification.
[After a successful Seize Realm scheme, an adventurer (whose prestige level is at least Exalted) finds that large portions of the realm splinter off from their usurpation]
As noted earlier, we’re looking into cross-porting this to the Adventurer Invasion CBs at the moment.
The Day After
When you become landed, you gain the newly relocalised veteran adventurer trait — this is the former adventurer trait, and reflects your learnings and life experiences from your time living outside the strictures of landed life.Because it’s got some fairly powerful bonuses that we didn’t want to reduce or balance around, we’ve made the trait a reward for concluding your journey rather than a welcome prize for merely setting out on it.
Your camp is liquidated, returning a portion of the gold you spent to you, and you keep any followers you had as an adventurer as your new courtiers. Your former comrades all get a simple trait to let you know who was with you in the wilderness.
[When an adventurer receives land, their followers get a trait marking them as former members of their camp]
Edgar the Exile’s children and wife in 1066 now begin with this trait to represent that they functionally lived as his followers adventuring around eastern and central Europe before their recent-ish return to England.
Being a Mercenary
Alright, let’s go over the military differences for Landless Adventurers. As with how they earn gold, we’ve tried to emphasise that the composition of an adventuring army is a bit different to normal landed play — their troops are much more likely to be veterans fighting wars and bandits semi-constantly (so they have a greater emphasis on Men-at-Arms), they are able to pick up fighters wherever they go (so they have patchwork formations of many different regiment types), and they don’t have access to levies or lesser nobleman to fill out their units (so they have to take a more active role in recruitment).The Swords-for-Hire Camp Purpose obviously specialise in this type of thing, but both Freebooters and (surprisingly) Scholars can make a pretty solid go of it too, at least in smaller conflicts, and any adventurer can try their hand at mercenary work if they’re so inclined.
Getting Started
As standard, adventurers buy troops in the usual manner from the military screen. Various buildings in their camp increase how many regiments they can have and of what size, so you’ll rarely see an adventurer with just a pavilion and no other camp buildings around it yet.Mercenaries just getting started will likely want to take a few non-warfare contracts to begin with to help build up these foundations, as well as to grow their Roll of Patrons. Patrons are uniquely useful because you can request they provide you with Men-at-Arms regiments (we’ll go into the Make a Request interaction in a later section), helping you to fill out your company’s basic building blocks.
Additionally (and a bit more exotically) a learning lifestyle perk — Take the Custom Where it Comes — allows adventurers to buy Men-at-Arms from the culture of their current location.
Elephants?
Elephantry are recruitable only if you have the Elephantry Reserve upgrade for the Proving Grounds camp building, or are lucky enough to receive them from a patron. This can only be built if you’re in a region with tamable elephants (India or South-East Asia).If you want elephants — and who doesn’t want elephants? — you’re gonna need to go and get them.
[Acquiring elephant Men-at-Arms requires some extra hoop jumping]
Ongoing Expenses
Unlike landed rulers (even tribals), adventurers don’t pay to maintain their troops. It’s assumed that they’re paid partially in provisions, partially in loot they take as you move, and partially in a share of the gold paid by your contract givers.As with not expending provisions when not travelling, this was something we went with after our early testing: gold can be very feast-or-famine for adventurers, so if they have a steady expense but are having trouble finding even irregular income (or, as is usually the case, simply aren’t getting paid in advance), they rapidly become extremely frustrating to play.
Reinforcements Have Arrived
Landless Adventurers are, shockingly, rather lacking in land. They have no vassals, they have no peasants, they have no burghers, nor any other subjects to draw on. When you’re building an army, this is a bit of a problem, because who’s going to soldier for some guy in a tent?Instead of reinforcing automatically, which would mean drawing from a reserve that they lack, adventurers have a pair of interactions they use to reinforce their armies by paying different sorts of currency.
[Adventurers can access their reinforcement interaction directly from the military view]
Most cost effectively, soldiers can be accrued for gold, but you can also lure in recruits with provisions in a pinch. As the interactions do have a short cooldown of a couple of years, adventurers can generally bounce back fairly well once before they need to start being very careful with their troops.
The costs for either option scale with the amount of troops you’re missing. If you lack sufficient gold or provisions to rebuild your forces, you can partially reinforce with whatever you have available.
[Adventurers can spend gold to reinforce their troops — though powerful, this has a cooldown, and can completely destroy their profit margins]
Of course, if you don’t have any gold or provisions, then you can try to conscript people on the cheap with a Men-at-Arms specific Scrape the Barrel decision.
Here, you can try to use a combined Diplomacy-Prowess check, pay prestige (if in tribal territory — though we are currently considering changing this to paying prestige anywhere but making it just more effective in tribal realms), pay piety (if in a suitable theocracy or holy order leased barony), or expend your dread in order to attract just a few soldiers at a time.
[Impoverished mercenaries can try alternate methods to scrape together soldiers]
A few soldiers are better than none, and some resources (like dread) are much cheaper than others (like… well, gold), so scraping the barrel every now and then can be a good idea. Several lifestyle perks also help make it significantly more useful.
Impressment & Wartime Recruiting
This (perhaps unsurprisingly to some of you reading) turned out to be just a smidge more micro than we’d intended, to the point that it became a little too much of a chore rather than a fun strategic choice during playtesting.Specifically, this is because sieges attrit armies involved in them over time even if they go well. People get shot full of arrows, they catch cholera, they desert, etc. As a landed ruler with ample reserves, you don’t notice that much that you lost a few dozen peasants because, well… they’ve probably got sons who you can throw in the meat grinder instead. As an adventurer, though, our playtesters really started to notice those losses after a few counties, and that meant they were having to balance the reinforcement interactions vs. their cooldowns constantly a lot more than we’d intended.
To compensate for this, we’ve given adventurers a little mechanic called Siege Replenishment. After they win a siege, they replenish their Men-at-Arms by soldiers equivalent to the holding’s loot value*2; this represents new volunteers, impressed locals, and fresh mercenaries flocking to a victorious banner.
This means that an adventuring army that’s doing well and winning is somewhat self-healing, whereas one that’s abandoning sieges before they’re finished or getting ambushed whilst in hostile lands suffers more over time. It also provides a route for thorough mercenaries to protect their fragile profits if they have a bad battle or two.
Implementing this got the relative levels of micro back under control, so that army reinforcement is something you plan to do occasionally (and may even have some value in putting off, if you can score some easy sieges) rather than something you’re penalised for doing at anything less than complete efficiency.
Portrait of a Mercenary Camp
The two most valuable buildings that almost any mercenary camp will want to help manage themselves are the Proving Grounds and the Roaring Campfire, as well as likely either the Baggage Train or the Mess Tent (or, for large companies, potentially both).The Proving Grounds contain numerous upgrades for improving different types of Men-at-Arms, each of which also unlocks a captain officer that can further boost a certain type. It also has several more situational upgrades for improving ancillary parts of the sellsword experience.
[The Proving Grounds camp building and several of its upgrades]
The Roaring Campfire doesn’t contain upgrades for individual types of Men-at-Arms, but it increases the number of knights and Men-at-Arms regiments you can have overall as you level it up.
[The Baggage Train camp building and several of its upgrades]
Both the Baggage Train and the Mess Tent improve your ability to acquire and store provisions (more or less required for larger companies). The Baggage Train has a broad variety of upgrades, some for warfare, some for provisions, some focused entirely elsewhere, whilst the Mess Tent focused significantly more on improving provision acquisition.
The bonuses adventurers can get from their camp do potentially give them a powerful edge in warfare (as they have to, given this is the major thing you spend your gold on outside of travelling), so something we’ve tried to emphasise with them is the idea of being a bit of a glass cannon. Or uhhh, glass longbow, I guess.
Pound for pound, a dedicated, well-built adventuring camp can hit harder than many other armies, but they’ll have trouble recuperating from serious losses. They can accrue many bonuses from camp upgrades, but over time their reinforcement costs really add up. Their troops are powerful and they have excellent access to different types of Men-at-Arms, but they’ll be paying provisions through the nose just to transport them around. Their knights can be deadly, but they don’t have a steady stream of new high-prowess characters.
So it goes in the life of a humble mercenary.
How Much Sword Can A Sellsword Sell
When an adventurer joins a war (or wars, for employers engaged on multiple fronts) they are brought in as a war-time ally in control of their own troops. At the end of a war, they are awarded gold based on their contribution score (you can already see how this works in game at the moment).But how do they actually get involved in someone else’s conflict?
Most obviously, they can join on-going wars via the Stand With Us contract. This appears on the map as usual, put out as a passive call for support by the AI without contacting anyone in specific. These wars can be more or less anything.
Not all wars are on-going when a merc gets involved, though: the Press My Claims contract involves a claimant contracting out to you to help them start a war…
… the Support Faction contract sees a faction turn to you for aid before they launch their struggle…
… and especially cruel rulers may offer you a casual contract to Raid for Captives against a rival ruler that they simply want to suffer.
A more esoteric way is to use the Offer Military Assistance interaction from Fate of Iberia (not DLC dependent, so you don’t need FoI to unlock it) to proactively join an on-going war that hasn’t put out a contract yet. This generally pays a fair bit worse than contracts put out to tender otherwise, but does let you help shape the map a little bit more easily, if you want to support this little realm or screw over that snobbish former employer.
[A sellsword offer their services to a ruler who hadn’t put out a contract yet]
Finally, mercenary adventurers can be hired directly from the new Special Mercenaries tab in the Military view. This acts roughly as a Stand With Us contract, but is player-accessible, meaning that you can hire adventurers to wage your wars (though they will, of course, insist on commanding themselves).
[A landed ruler proactively tries to hire out an adventurer mercenary company]
Biting the Hand that Feeds
In addition to being settled out of a war if you so choose (which we discussed earlier), adventurer mercenaries are… mercenaries. Sellswords. Swords which are for sale.If they feel a war is going especially badly (and it’s not a war they’re leading, a crusade, etc.), they can switch sides. All it’ll cost is their reputation and any semblance of trust with their old employer — but if it’s their precious army at risk, then maybe that’s worth it?
In exchange, their new ally will let themselves be added as a patron, and may well even pay a small bounty for the act of treachery — though the original contract will be failed.
Treacherous and cowardly adventurers may opt to simply leave a war altogether. There’s no real benefit to this and various downsides, but if you’re done with a conflict you have no ties to except business, well, you can just duck out. The nobility might judge you, but they can’t stop you.
Officers
Most court positions aren’t suitable for adventurers; even the name doesn’t really work, since you don’t have a court and the jobs you give people mostly aren’t going to be sinecures.Instead, we’ve reflavoured the mechanic from “court positions” to “camp officers”, with the idea being that your officers are actually tasked with doing the jobs you set them day after day rather than boast about the title and collect a little pay. A few court positions do carry over (your physician, your caravan master, and your bodyguards), but others are disabled.
Since adventurers do not have a steady gold income, officers are not paid gold to avoid bankruptcies. It’s assumed their pay comes in provisions and their own deductions from the contracts you take (as well as some limited social cachet at camp).
We’ve tried to tie your officers into event content & into contracts (especially skill based contracts), so making sure you have the best people in as many positions as possible should pay more dividends than just passive modifiers.
Roll Call
Every adventurer has access to at least two officers by default: the Second, your second-in-command, and the stooge.Your second gives you a broad range of skill bonuses based on their aptitude, similar to a jacked up spouse. They also substitute in for scheme discovery in place of a spymaster, since adventurers have no council.
The stooge is your equivalent of a court jester — except jesters at least have some interesting privileges and a level of access to a noble figure. A stooge is just the person at camp that everyone hates. The stooge can be humiliated to lose stress, though everyone has their limit with this type of thing.
Courtier wounded your child? Make them the stooge. Officer screwed up a contract? Demoted to stooge. Childhood bully is still at your camp? You’d better believe that’s a stoogin’.
Otherwise, officers are generally unlocked by different camp buildings and upgrades, with a few of them thus being specific to certain Camp Purposes. Rather than explain all these individually, I’m just going to show you each of them in turn.
[A list of all the camp officer effects]
Finally, we also have a selection of officers that improve men-at-arms (discussed a little in the merc sections). These aren’t very heavily integrated into content, but do give mercenary adventurers an extra edge. Each of them is unlocked by a relevant upgrade for the Proving Grounds camp building.
As your captains will likely also be your knights, their powerful bonuses are to be weighed against their possible death in battle.
[A list of all the martial camp officer effects]
New Decisions
In the comments to Part 1, a few people were asking what type of goals we envisioned for adventurers that don’t want to become landed straight away, and though there’s an easy answer in the act of just roleplaying and vibing your way through medieval life, we’ve got a more mechanics-focused answer too: after all, mechanics without roleplay are dry, and roleplay without mechanics is uninteresting.We’ve added a slew of new decisions for adventurers, and we’re gonna go over most of them here.
Oh, also we’ve added foldable decision categories. Have we mentioned that yet? I don’t know if we’ve mentioned that yet. They’re pretty great, now you can actually trim the list.
[The decisions menu with all of its categories folded up]
Major Decisions
Become A Great Conqueror
Sometimes, a mercenary has to ask themselves a few simple questions — why am I fighting for this bastard noble? Why is my neck on the line for the hundredth time for people who look down on me? Why do I bleed for their glory?Most will shrug their shoulders and accept that this is just the way things are.
Those who refuse to settle for that can make history.
Become a Great Conqueror allows you to access the great conqueror mechanics detailed in Dev Diary #147. It’s an arduous road to match enough of the requirements, but at the end of it, you’ll be able to become one of the most potent conquerors the Old World has ever seen.
[The decision for becoming a Great Conqueror]
[The decision’s requirements]
The [Your Faith Here] Path
Missionaries were, originally, going to be one of our Camp Purposes. We scrapped them for scope extremely early on in development, but… the fantasy just wouldn’t die. People kept bringing them up, little nods to them crept into our other content, and that led us here.With this decision, you can attempt to convert large numbers of counties to your faith, getting a shot at conversion each time you travel to a new one (with sensible limits, of course). Once you’ve started this, you cannot turn it off — that’s not [your god here]’s way — but failure carries the risk of wounding each time. This makes death a likely consequence of over-ambition.
It’s not necessarily easy, but the path of a prophet never is.
[A decision for performing mass missionary work (and likely martyring yourself)]
The Travels of Urist McVenturer
Here’s one for the explorers — innumerable people have trekked from one end of the world to the other throughout history. Most of the time, these great travellers are forgotten with nothing to mark their passing save, perhaps, a few foreign coins found centuries later in an unusual place.The ones we remember long after their deaths are, inevitably, the nerds who stopped to write a gods-damned book about it as they went.
This decision lets you be that nerd, creating a powerful lifestyle-XP boosting book artefact for future generations proportional to the number of points of interest that you’ve visited.
[A decision for writing a book artefact about your exploits & travels]
Found a Holding
Another decision that’s great for an explorer or a wanderer, but could be made to fit especially tonally well with even swords-for-hire or freebooters.With Found a Holding, you’ll be able to leave your mark on the places you visit, and gain passive income for your trouble, or even steal a county out from under the local ruler.
As this decision is repeatable, characters can found multiple holdings over a run.
[A decision for founding new holdings in other counties]
[The requirements for the Found a Holding decision]
Our thanks to the person who suggested this during playtesting & previewing!
The Knight of the Swan
For the chivalrously inclined, you’ll not be left entirely in the cold.Becoming the Knight of the Swan (or suitable local culture animal) takes a pristine reputation and a lot of prestige, but it’ll net you a custom trait, permanent house modifier, beautiful artefact, and even a legend seed for Legends of the Dead owners.
[A decision for focusing on being a pure & pious knight]
Champion Your Culture
Another decision inspired by a Camp Purpose we didn’t get time to make. This one never really had a name, but think… vigilante meets cultural hero, like if Robin Hood led a rebellion.Which, funnily enough, is what you’ll be doing here. Championing Your Culture allows you to break your countrymen free from the rule of foreign despots (so it’s especially good for ruler designed adventurers with an axe to grind) in a war for a single duchy, but one where you’ll have a powerful bonus to siege timing throughout, and ready access to a swathe of event troops at the beginning.
If you’re clever, you can manipulate things so that you don’t even need to fight.
[A decision for launching a popular uprising]
Levy the Outcasts
No one likes Gallowsbait. As you’ll remember from Part 1, these petty criminals are fit for the crows and little else.… of course, that’s just the nobility’s POV. For a true legend of the medieval underworld, there’s something to be said for infamy, and plenty of fools throng the ranks of the lost and the damned that can be drawn to serve the right master.
With sufficient ranks of your petty criminal trait, you can take this decision in order to receive small numbers of event troops every time you successfully complete a criminal contract. The higher your various Gallowsbait XP tracks, the more troops you earn.
Amass an army of criminals then find a lovely little island somewhere and take what should have been yours to begin with.
[A decision for gathering a horde of criminal scum to your banners — this says intrigue, but we’ve since broadened it to criminal contracts generally (and taken it away from the non-criminal intrigue contract)]
Minor Decisions
Gather Provisions
There’s a few ways to acquire more provisions for your party: you can get them as contract rewards, you can visit a local township (more on that shortly), you can go hunting or poaching, but the more frugally minded amongst you will probably make ample time to simply Gather Provisions.This decision allows you, your Chief Forager (if you have one), or your Huntsman to make a skill roll to try and acquire fresh provisions at no extra cost. The effectiveness depends heavily on the terrain you’re in, with winter also factoring in slightly.
[An adventurer attempts to harvest provisions from the land, but lacks a Chief Forager or a Huntsman, and so cannot fall back on their aptitudes in lieu of his own skills]
We’ve kept this as separate from the main hunting/poaching activity to indicate tracking smaller, less managed game, using public areas, trapping and snaring rather than hunting larger game, and so on. Legal, questionably legal, and grey-but-unlikely-to-be-caught areas to go hunting vs. the primest, choicest woods to snag a doe, essentially.
Humiliate the Stooge
The stooge is a person at camp you detest, and if you’re not the most compassionate of people, you can lose a lot of stress and earn a little dread by letting them know it. A slightly more sociopathic alternative to having a camp revel.Naturally, if you feel this is too mean-spirited or there’s no one at camp who’s wronged you enough to get the job, filling the stooge officer position is entirely optional — using the decision doubly so. It’s there if you want it, it’s not intrinsic if you don’t.
[Stoogery provides an alternative to kicking out a character that has offended you]
Reject Inheritance & Embrace Responsibilities
As I mentioned earlier in the dev diary, one of the traits we’ve added to this DLC is Gallivanter. This is essentially a voluntary disinheritance, allowing adventurers to stay as adventurers until they choose to try to change to landed. Content characters and those with the Carefree lifestyle perk can also access the decision, should they wish to.It comes at the cost of annoying your family, but that’s a small price to pay for liberty, right?
[Some character can refuse inheritance from abroad, if they wish]
And, of course, if you change your mind, you can choose to remove the trait at virtually any time. Once.
[The Gallivanter trait]
Change Election Candidacy Status
Whilst we're talking about refusing titles, a while ago I also lobbed in a quick decision for the player to turn down elective titles (after many requests by a small yet understandably vocal group of players).This is largely of use in the Holy Roman Empire, chiefly for fans of Austria and Switzerland, who apparently really don’t like getting elevated to Charlemagne’s throne against their will.
It will lightly offend other vassals in the realm, but nothing too major. Likewise, it’s not an absolute guarantee: the larger you get within the empire, the more likely people are to ignore your wishes and vote for you anyway (though you’ll have to really internally blob to completely nuke the chances).
[Characters inside elective realms (not including administrative) can try to recuse themselves from higher office]
If you change your mind, you can change your position. Folk’ll just think you’re a flipflopper.
Go Fishing
Ok, ok, I can explain. We did not sit down and allocate time to a fishing mini-game, please don’t kill us.One of our producers wanted to try their hand at a bit more detailed scripting during their monthly personal development time. We’ve talked about this a little in previous dev diaries I believe, but it’s one day each month (most months, at least) allocated for developers from any discipline to work on random CK3-related stuff.
PDT exists to let us sidestep the usual red tape and restrictions and just make cool, small things that interest us and don’t have to depend on what’s sellable. Previous items we’ve got out of this include the pet system, a lot of various Jewish content (and many niche regional decisions), a lot of UI & QoL improvements, some of the more specific event backgrounds, that type of thing.
As it happens outside the scope of the development of the game, Design said sure, and now we… have a small decision to go fishing. It’s fairly simple, but it’s an extra way for adventurers to lose stress whilst earning a few provisions.
Again, this didn’t take any time away from development, it’s just a nice little decision you can take if you like. I believe there’s a fair number of types of fish available to catch.
Visit Settlement
Hoooo boi, this is a big one. I’m actually going to hand the writing reins over to a coworker of mine for a moment, back with you shortly, Wokeg out.Hello! Lurker @Distantaziq here, for a brief spout of Visit Settlement-talk!
So we had Landless Adventurers. On a map. How do we tie adventurers and the map together? How do we make it feel like you are in any specific place at any given moment?
[An adventurer views on map interactions from their camp]
Well, how about interacting with the locals and Visiting Local Settlements. Expanding on the narrative aspect, this feature focuses on going "into town" to conduct business — be it meeting new people, buying provisions or encountering random happenstances like a disgraced former Bodyguard, looking for redemption.
In this example, we have the deposed King Harold, recently having fled to Devon. He's heading into Exeter to conduct some business with the locals:
[An adventurer and his wife survey the city of Exeter]
Let us find that supply merchant…
[An adventurer goes to purchase supplies in town]
Some factors, like your highest skill or having a skilled friendly companion on your visit may affect how you can interact with certain options — when buying provisions, you can straight up buy the provisions using gold. Or use your highest skill to get some provisions. Alternatively your companion might be thrifty…
[An adventurer attempts to cut a deal on provisions using Stewardship on a local merchant]
[An adventurer provides a distraction for his wife to commit theft]
Inside Visit Settlement, you can move back and forth between the locations. Once we're done with the supply merchant, we can navigate back to the main square to go visit the castle.
[His business concluded at the market, our adventurer returns to Exeter’s main square]
Once in a while, you may encounter skilled or strange characters that you may or may not want to have join your camp. Feel free to approach them at your leisure.
[Walking through town, our adventurer happens across an incident]
Ah, the castle square. Lovely and… what's this? A kerfuffle? Let us approach them and find out!
[Colourful locals will sometimes be available to recruit as followers when Visiting Settlements]
As the former king of England, I am looking for a bodyguard…
Moving us back to the Castle after recruiting my new follower, we are done here for the time being. I just realized I left the stove on fire unbanked back at the camp. We should head back to the main square so that we can leave.
[Not everything in town needs to be done each time, so you can leave once your purpose is satisfied]
Bye, Exeter! Until next time!
Additionally, different types of holdings have different actions:
The Castle is focused on martial options you might need as a landless adventurer — improving prowess, reinforcing Men-at-Arms regiments, recruiting additional military-focused camp members.
[A castle, with martial-focused options]
The Temple is focused on health and religion — partake in local healing cures, donate to the local place of worship or contemplate religion.
[A temple, with spiritually-focused options]
The City is focused on commerce and equipment — buy cheaper provisions, sell artifacts at a higher rate, or buy a weapon, set of armor or trinket to improve your character.
[A city, with economically-focused options]
The tavern is present in all of the holding types, so that you can hang out with the locals at any given location.
[A common Cornish tavern; Wokeg’s note — presumably serving medieval Doombar]
Aaand that's basically it. A brief look at the Visit Settlement feature — though it's best experienced by discovering it yourself, so — enjoy and have fun playing as a landless adventurer!
[Visiting a tavern, an adventurer spots a hooded figure at the rear]
[An adventurer visits the gardens in a temple]
[An adventurer is smitten by a handsome local]
Expelling Adventurers
… and we’re back!So. There’s an adventurer in your back-realm and you don’t want there to be. What can you do?
Simple enough, as it happens. You can expel any adventurer from your realm (including your domain and any of your vassals’ lands) via a character interaction, which will stop contracts from generating there, force them to leave, and force them out if they ever end up back there. Any contracts they were currently taking or had discovered in your lands are immediately invalidated, criminal or not.
Expulsion is a long-lasting opinion, so it’ll reset if either of you die. If many, many years pass, that’ll reset it too.
They have three months to begin exiting from the date of you sending the letter, and if they have no army, they’re forced to go. If they have even a paltry military force, they can try to stay, but the potential risks are dire.
Refusing an eviction order means you make an imprisonment attempt against them as soon as the three months have expired. If this fails, the adventurer begins an offensive war against you, the evicting ruler; you’re considered the defender because it’s your land, they’re just squatting on it.
[A landed ruler expels an adventurer, giving them a few months to vacate]
If the adventurer wins, they have utterly defeated your realm and usurp it as though it was a conquest.
If the landed ruler wins, they imprison the adventurer and destroy their camp permanently.
Refusing an eviction notice is, no matter how it ends, a very serious affair. You either leave, or accept that — one way or another — your camp is going no further.
Once an eviction has been accepted (or white peaced in the war), any lands controlled by the evicting ruler can no longer be travelled to by the adventurer. They can be travelled through, largely for mechanical reasons, but cannot be used as an end destination and won’t generate contracts till the opinion expires (say, through a convenient assassination). If an adventurer ends up in lands they have been exiled from for any reason, they are automatically re-routed out of them again.
Rulers are much more likely to use evictions on adventurers that they dislike, such as troublesome missionaries or those who’ve offended them via Gallowsbait.
Make a Request
Once you’ve got your foot in the door with a ruler, they’re vulnerable to all sorts of wheeling-and-dealing.We represent this with the Make a Request character interaction. Usable on patrons, your close or extended family, and your consorts, this allows adventurers to just really aggressively mooch from a target. Just get right in there and blag your heart out, burning opinion with your patron in exchange for resources.
The requests you’ll likely make the most often are for restocking your provisions, or providing you with extra gold (presumably phrased as a ‘loan’ that you’ll totally pay back). These aren’t a substitute for contracts, but they can supplement your income or help you bounce back when times are tough. Many contracts give you bonus opinion with a patron on completion, and a fair few reward a hook upon a critical success that Make a Request will automatically trade in for your rewards.
A more interesting reward is to have them help you recruit a random Men-at-Arms regiment accessible to them, providing another way to build your army laterally, or to loan you a knight for a few years.
Most notably, this is the only way to even access the marriage interaction with landed rulers, either for yourself or your followers.
Finally, if they’re eligible, you can try to wrangle further contracts out of a patron — you can use this to build relations by continuing to do good jobs for the same characters. Perhaps not too relevant if they’re just a count or a baron, but if you manage to get in good with a king…
[An adventurer wheedles provisions out of one of her patrons]
For balance reasons, Make a Request requires you to be in close geographical proximity to the target’s capital (and much, much closer than diplomatic range). This helps to stop you from travelling to India only to teleport in gold reserves from, say, Scotland. If you want a favour from someone, you need to travel closer to them to get it. We’ve actually applied this restriction to a few key interactions, but Make a Request is the main one.
That said, this is currently still a little too easy on our end. It should cost more opinion than it does in these screenshots, and arguably some prestige too, so we’ll very likely be increasing those before Roads to Power releases.
Absent Faces
Alright, we’ve got a couple of small elephants in this particular room that I’ve saved for last. Hopefully that means it won’t put you off other stuff in the dev diary, but apologies if this leaves a sour taste in your mouth.First up is the biggie: raiding. Adventurers cannot raid and, relatedly, their camp is not a siegable thing on the map.
I know this is upsetting, but we just could not make it work. Raiding is by far and away the easiest way to earn gold, with the only drawback being the need to cart your gold back to your capital — but when your capital is, itself, a cart, that becomes uniquely problematic to balance or teach the AI to deal with.
Now, we could put in oodles of edge case handling for things like raising your army inside a realm you’re currently raiding, or moving your capital to follow your raiding army province-to-province so the gold instantly and safely reaches your treasury, but we couldn’t cover every possible exploit. Even one would utterly break the entire economy. It would have still ended up almost certainly absurdly easy to game the system by moving your camp somewhere within easy reach of a border, nipping over it, nabbing loot, then returning before the AI could conceivably even try to catch you.
Siegable camps likewise offered too many headaches for a robust implementation. Any number of camps can be in the same location, and as camps aren’t holdings, we would have had to do a huge amount of work just to support them being basically siegable at all — only to then have to work out what happens and how we display it visually if three adventurers are on different sides in a war in one county, one is in a different war, and two more are in the same county but not involved in anything, and a million other configurations.
That’s before getting into the verisimilitude of why it would ever take anything other than 1 day to siege a camp if you have, say, a single bombard, and consequently how adventurers would ever be able to win a war when reaching full occupation score against them would just be a matter of walking onto their capital once.
Rather than deliver these two aspects in a substandard condition, we’ve elected to avoid them entirely. Adventurers with a martial bent earn their coin from mercenary work and similar contracts, and adventuring camps are treated as not being worthwhile military targets. Neither of these is a reflection of historical reality, only of gameplay necessity.
The other, smaller thing to address — child adventurers. We don’t support this generally (narratively, literally anyone else would be in charge instead) but we haven’t hard-banned it. You can’t start as an adventuring child, but you won’t be game overed if it happens to you in gameplay.
Thank you for your patience.
End of Part 2
Right, that brings us to the end of our tour of Landless Adventurers. There is a teensy bit more to talk about with our bookmark characters specifically, but we’ve decided to kick that a little bit into the future. Probably whenever we go over the changes we’ve made to schemes, though the schedule’s semi-flexible.I hope this has been an illuminating little tour of the feature, and that it’s gotten some of you reasonably excited for the DLC. We’re pretty excited to show it to you, and so soon!
As ever, I’ll be around in the thread’s comments for a couple of hours to take questions, notes, and polite recriminations. Highlights will be passed on to the rest of the team like usual.
P. S.
No, I haven’t seen Berserk. Please stop asking.
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