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Dev Diary #21 - Custom Faiths and Pagan Reformation

Oh, hello there! Interested in becoming a heresiarch, are we? Or maybe you just want to organize your ancestor’s ancient spiritual traditions into a true reformed Faith, one that can stand up to the Crescent and Cross? Either way, you’ve come to the right place!

To start us off, I’m going to go into how the process of creating a new Faith or reforming a pagan one works. After that, there will be a teaser of some Tenets and Doctrines that you may be interested in picking for your newly-founded Faiths ;)

Faith Creation
Creating a new Faith is no easy task. Only the most pious rulers will be able to convince the clergy within their realm that they alone know the true will of the divine and, in doing so, take the first steps towards establishing a new Faith. However, with a little bit of devotion and a lot of time, you too will be able to reshape your Faith to suit your dynasty’s needs!

When looking at your own Faith’s tenets and doctrines, you will see a button at the bottom labeled ‘Create New Faith’. Clicking this button will open the Faith Creation window, which can be viewed at any time — even long before you have acquired the means to actually create a new Faith! This will allow you to play around with the different options and get a feel for what is possible, allowing you to set long-term goals for yourself.

DD_CreateAFaith_WM.png
[Screenshot of the Faith Creation window showing modified Tenets and Doctrines]

You can change every single Tenet and Doctrine of your hypothetical new Faith on this screen, though the list of what Tenets are available to pick varies from Religion to Religion. For example, Tenets based on the concept of Dharma are exclusive to Oriental Religions, whereas Monasticism was common practice and is thus available to everyone. This means when creating a new Faith, you must first ensure you are a member of the Religion that you want to base your new Faith off of.

Beyond simple availability, it is also easier for some Religions to accept certain Doctrines than others. For example, Islam is used to polyamory and will happily accept a new Faith espousing it. In contrast, a new Christian faith that claims God intended us to have multiple spouses will be met with a little more skepticism...

The way this plays out in CK3 is that each Tenet and Doctrine has a Piety cost associated with it. The further you deviate from your original Faith, the more Piety you will need in order to convince the priests that yes, you actually have had a vision from the divine and yes, you actually are enforcing their will and not just trying to make some weird personal sex cult.

DD_Cosanguinity_WM.png

[Screenshot of the scaling costs for the Cosanguinity Doctrine]

After you have made all the changes you want, you will be given the total amount of Piety your character needs in order to create their new Faith. This cost can get quite high, meaning that creating a new Faith or reforming a pagan one ends up being a life-long goal for most characters. It is highly recommended to attempt this with characters who have a Learning education and/or who have multiple Virtuous personality traits, and having the ability to go on frequent pilgrimages or donate gold & troops to holy causes helps too! Finally, timing your divine revelation to completely coincidentally occur when your Faith is suffering from low Fervor will make it much easier to get everyone to buy into your new canon (I will talk more about Fervor in our future Dev Diary on heresy outbreaks).

Once you are happy with your Tenets and Doctrines and have accumulated the necessary amount of Piety, you can officially convert to your new Faith. You and your capital county will adopt it immediately, but it won’t be easy for a ruler to convince their vassals and subjects to adopt this strange new Faith — they might be more inclined to stage an uprising and depose their mad king from the throne! After all, if you die before your new Faith gains a foothold in the world, there is a good chance your Faith will die with you…

Pagan Reformation
Pagan Faiths in Crusader Kings III start out with the special ‘Unreformed’ Doctrine.

This Doctrine grants notable bonuses to Tribal rulers early on, but it locks them into the Tribal government type and provides substantial Opinion penalties to any non-Tribal vassals they acquire. Since Tribal realms are notoriously unstable, successful chieftains will eventually want to look into either converting to a reformed religion so they can feudalize, or reforming their pagan religion into a true organized faith.

Like with Faith Creation, rulers must earn a substantial amount of Piety to organize their Faith’s disparate shamans into a coherent clergy. In addition, they must have at least 3 of their Faith’s holy sites located within their realm.

DD_VidilismHolySites_WM.png

[Screenshot showing 3 of the Vidilist Holy Sites]

Once you accomplish this, the process is quite similar to creating a new Faith of an existing reformed Religion. Your vassals may still be reluctant to convert to your newly reformed Faith, but because reformed Faiths gain a bonus to conversion against unreformed Faiths, you will have a much easier time convincing them to go along with your reformation than a heresiarch within in an existing Faith would have with making a new heresy.

DD_ReformationNew_WM.png

[Screenshot showing a Vidilist reformation event]

Tenet and Doctrine teaser

To finish this off, here are a few choice tenets and doctrines which you can pick when creating a new Faith in CK3. Many of these are also used by already existing Faiths, but some are only available to custom Faiths created by players. As you can see, there is a lot of variety in the kinds of custom Faiths you can create — ultimately every kind of playstyle should have some set of Tenets and Doctrines to support it!

DD_Tenet_Showcase_WM.png
[Screenshot of the Tenets Warmonger, Human Sacrifice, Ritual Cannibalism, Christian Syncretism, Dharmic Pacifism, Carnal Exaltation, Divine Marriage, Sacred Childbirth, and the Doctrines Pluralism and Fundamentalist]

That is all I have for you this week, but join us next time as my colleague @Heptopus talks about the diversity across the world in CK3 and the many different ways you can tailor the game experience to match your personal preferences!
 
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Looks good, where would the holy sites be located for newly created faiths?
Holy sites will be inherited from the parent Faith.

You can decide the name of the new faith yourself, I love this very much! Is that for schismatics or can Pagan Reformers also do that though?
For schismatics you must name your new faith. Pagans have the option of picking a new name or keeping the old one (as in CK2 the old faith will be called 'Old [Name]').

Will there be any game rules to disable or limit some of these features so as to have a more historical accurate playthrough?
The AI does not use this feature, and will only spawn historical heresies like Lollardy and Waldensianism. Only players can form historically inaccurate heresies.

What will be the benefits of non-temporal head, considering its created only after controlling 2 holy sites it should bring nice things
As a temporal head you can direct your faith's Great Holy Wars, choosing both the target and personally keeping all of the land after the war.
Spiritual heads cannot be played by players, but will launch undirected Great Holy Wars (similar to crusades) and can grant gold and claims to pious followers.
 
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Can we know how much will the AI try to 'create new faith/heresy'? IMO it can either be a good mechanic or it can become a wild fire. I think new heresies are all over the place in the early medieval ages but became considerably less in the high medieval era...

What are the AI triggers to found a heresy or join one?

Also, could it be possible that when you're creating a new religion, you accidentally used the same set of tenants as an existing religion? What would happen then?
 
To create a custom faith, shouldn't it need some sort of religious sponsor for it to be seen as "intellectually legitimate"? Custom name by default could be based off of that religious sponsor's name. So if the religious sponsor is a Bishop called Wilfred then the default name could be Wilfredianism or if its Teodoro it could be Teodorianism. Additionally the religious sponsor's level of piousness and prestige would determine how much of a kickstart it would get it being accepted and spread around at the local level.
I really like this idea. The different faiths usually had the name of the founder (like Luteranism, Calvinism etc). It will also be more "legitimate". At least, custom faiths which have a sponsor could have an additional bonus, like "it expands quickly during 100 years".

Actually, it would be great if certain faiths/heresies were scripted to form at a certain point. For example, if Lyon is Christian in 1160, Peter Waldo would appear there, and around 1170 he would form the Waldensian faith. I hope that the game is carefull at this point, not like CK2 which had late Medieval heresies or Monastic Orders in the VIII century.

I have a question, if some dev can help me. Are heresies just like additional faiths but with some relation malus towards the "parent" faith, like the custom faiths?
 
Will you get a list of historical heresies etc you can create or will it always be something custom you can do? Custom seems fun and knowing the AI sticks to historics is cool but I just wonder if there's an easy way for players to also take the historic route without having to say look up a wiki to emulate it :p
 
what is avuculate marriage is it some kind of marriage social form or sexual type.
It's marriage allowed with distant family, like cousins.
I'm almost sure "Cousin marriage" is about, well, cousins. Avunculate, according to Google, is uncle-niece and aunt-nephew
 
To create a custom faith, shouldn't it need some sort of religious sponsor for it to be seen as "intellectually legitimate"? Custom name by default could be based off of that religious sponsor's name. So if the religious sponsor is a Bishop called Wilfred then the default name could be Wilfredianism or if its Teodoro it could be Teodorianism. Additionally the religious sponsor's level of piousness and prestige would determine how much of a kickstart it would get it being accepted and spread around at the local level.

By the sounds of it the character creating the faith would need to be quite an authority on religious matters themselves to hit the requirements, so this would lend its own legitimacy.
 
Nice dev diary.
How do the vassals determine if they want to convert with you? I suppose it depends on their opinion, traits (zealous) and how 'absurd' your divine inspiration is? Do the vassals also take into account their personal opinion on the new doctrines (having a close kin lover might make them like your new religion, etc.)?
You mentioned that if you don't manage to get a 'foothold', the faith may die out. Can you elaborate on that?
What are the upsides / downsides of different types of religious head options (temporal vs pope like)? In CK2 I always felt like temporal was much better. Will that change?

I feel like the pluralist tenet might be a bit weak (because of the holy war mechanic). Do these new vassals still get a 'forced me to become his vassal' / 'was at war' opinion modifier? That would make it very unrewarding when compared to the default holy war. Maybe you should add some other benefits. Is interface marriage already a thing? Otherwise pluralist might enable it.
 
Can pagan religions be reformed multiple times? (Someone reforms it first, but I did not convert and later create my own reformed version?
No, but if you convert to the reformed pagan faith you can schism off your own branch as normal .

Neat dev diary some questions though:

1.) Can you choose the Icon and the Name?
2.) Can you name the reformed pagan faith?
3.) Can the tenets be changed through a religious council dynamically?
4.) Is human sacrifice going to be something Pagan faiths start with, looking at the Norse, or are they going to have to reform into it?
1.) Yes
2.) Yes
3.) The codebase can support this, but there will not be any in-game content for this on release. We plan on adding events/mechanics around this in the future (mods, of course, will also have free reign to do whatever they want with this.)
4.) Two pagan faiths start with Human Sacrifice. You've guessed one of them ;)

Will female-dominated, enatic faiths have the ai focus on matrilineal marriage properly this time around (or even restrict marriage to matrilineal only)? In ck2, they did not change marriage tendencies after reforming enatic, and it would lead to all sorts of messy succession due to female heirs being patrilineally married. I'm worried as this is a somewhat niche succession type that doesn't usually get as much care and attention.
Female rulers should always try to arrange matrilineal marriages, yes. This is especially true in female-preference succession realms.

What in-game text will be customizable?

For example, your screenshot shows we can choose the name of a new faith.

But can we choose what the Head of Religion is called? Can we choose clergy titles? What about names of Gods and scriptures?
Just name, adjective, and adherent name. The rest will be inherited from your parent Faith.

Mods can make more extensive changes, but with 50+ localization fields per faith we did not want to expose all of them for direct player modification, it would be too overwhelming.

Is the bonus given to all Vidilists for controlling the Holy Site of Hiiumaa due to a tenet of Vidilism or do all faiths give a unique bonus to their adherents per each unique holy site of that faith controlled?
The latter. You should check out the previous Dev Diary, it explains all of this in detail.

Is it not possible to make it so that the county of origin replaces one of them?
It would be possible, it just currently is not set up that way for balance reasons. Mods could enable that functionality if you desire it, though.
 
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How do the vassals determine if they want to convert with you? I suppose it depends on their opinion, traits (zealous) and how 'absurd' your divine inspiration is? Do the vassals also take into account their personal opinion on the new doctrines (having a close kin lover might make them like your new religion, etc.)?

You mentioned that if you don't manage to get a 'foothold', the faith may die out. Can you elaborate on that?

What are the upsides / downsides of different types of religious head options (temporal vs pope like)? In CK2 I always felt like temporal was much better. Will that change?
Vassal willingness to convert is based on Opinion, difference in Learning score, and their current Faith's Fervor.

If all followers of a Faith die, and all counties of that Faith are converted away, that Faith will become a 'dead' Faith. Dead Faiths are much, much more difficult for characters to convert to. Since only your character and their close family are guaranteed to convert to a new Faith, the time immediately after reformation is when your Faith will be the most vulnerable to this.

The main power that Temporal Heads of Faith have (without Tenets giving them more) is to direct Great Holy Wars. Spiritual Heads have other benefits, such as the ability to bestow gold and title claims upon pious followers.
 
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Seeing that reformation screenshot just makes me wish even more for event art. A character just standing there looking pleased with himself doesn't quite capture the importance of the event.