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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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So "Close kin Taboo" means you are not allowed to marry with close kins
Cousin Marriage Means you can marrie cousins but not closer kin
Avanculate Marriage means you can marry also closekins like sister children or brother children
And Unrestricted means you can marry any closekins included parent, siblings and children.

or i missundrestood something.

Question is thouse marriage are hard restricted or just they are religion wiev about thouse. So close-kin taboo can marry still his siblings but have heavy penaltys on society or game mechanic just dont allow that kind of marriages.
 
Say, I want to make a faith that eats their fallen but doesn't abduct enemies to eat, somewhat like this

See last panel
2008-03-29-wombat403blahblah.gif

Do I just pick Ritual Cannibalism but not Human Sacrifice, or do I do something else?
 
For Tenets like Dharmic Pacifism and Christian Syncretism, they specify Theravada and Christian specifically. Is this hardcoded or will it change based on your religion? Like could Christian syncretism if used by a Hindu give better relations with Dharmic religions? Could Dharmic Pacifism give bonuses to other religions besides Theravada?
 
Hard coded game over or can it be changed through mods?
Only Feudal, Clan, and Tribal governments are playable. Spiritual Heads are locked to the Theocracy government, which is not playable.

Mods could make Theocracies 'playable' in the sense that you could launch the game and start playing as one, but you would soon run into a myriad of issues (such as Game Overing every time your ruler dies) due to the fact that you're breaking the game's internal ruleset and trying to make it do things it was never intended to do.
 
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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.
Yes, to the best of my knowledge prophets and founders of religions don't tend to be a part of the landed aristocracy. Are there many exceptions of this? If the AI forms historical heresies, will this be on the same terms as the player - will Peter Waldo have to be landed and playable to be able to form the Waldensian faith? That wouldn't be ideal.
 
Damn I'm really loving all the religion-specific tenets. One question I have: Can you force the vassals to convert through hooks?
 
Wait so does Coptic have Pluralism as a Doctrine? Last Dev Diary showed it as one of the Doctrines for Coptic, but it would be incorrect to say that considering the whole reason we schismed away from Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy was because of perceived Nestorianism heresy. And we have resisted reunion until recently with the EO because we believed them to be heretics... Not much pluralism going on.

Also how is the relationship between Coptic and Armenian Apostolic going to work concerning Holy Sites and opinion penalties?
 
Can't wait to name my first custom religion "Sex Cult of Unyielding Fervor".

Question:
Can my character be considered as deity or chief god of Sex Cult of Unyielding Fervor?
 
Very nice! Just a couple questions.
1. Will the AI reform pagan faiths like in CK2?
2. Maybe this is a better question for the Heresy DD, but will reformed pagan faiths have any heresies the AI can adopt? I know the player could customize their own "heresy" but given that a reformed pagan faith could potentially be around for ~500 years it would make sense for a heresy or two to pop up dynamically. But since the AI won't make custom faiths I'm not sure how that would work

And one slightly different question I just thought of,
3. Can multiple faiths have the exact same set of tennants/etc. and how will those faiths treat each other? For example if I accidentally set up a Christian heresy that exactly matches the Lollard heresy, what will happen?
 
What the heck is "vidilism"? You cannot just use names for pagan faiths like Baltic, Slavic, Norse instead of using modern, made up neopagan bulls#&t?
 
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For Tenets like Dharmic Pacifism and Christian Syncretism, they specify Theravada and Christian specifically. Is this hardcoded or will it change based on your religion. Like could Christian syncretism if used by a Hindu give better relations with Dharmic religions.
The bonus opinion from Virtues applies to all faiths who consider that trait to be a Virtue. For example, since both Zoroastrianism and Islam consider 'Just' to be a virtue, if you are playing as a Just character both Zoroastrians and Muslims will gain a +10 Opinion bonus with you, regardless of if you are Zoroastrian, Muslim, or neither!

For Christian Syncretism, the 'Mutual Opinion Bonus' is specific to only Christians, though the opinion bonus for being Compassionate will apply to any faith that has Compassionate as a virtue, including Faiths like Hinduism and Jainism.
 
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Why is feudalism interlinked with religion? I mean, I get what the intended purpose is but it seems like there should be better reasons to reform and that tribalism/feudalism shouldn't be tied to religion.
 
1. Will the AI reform pagan faiths like in CK2?
2. Maybe this is a better question for the Heresy DD, but will reformed pagan faiths have any heresies the AI can adopt? I know the player could customize their own "heresy" but given that a reformed pagan faith could potentially be around for ~500 years it would make sense for a heresy or two to pop up dynamically. But since the AI won't make custom faiths I'm not sure how that would work
3. Can multiple faiths have the exact same set of tennants/etc. and how will those faiths treat each other? For example if I accidentally set up a Christian heresy that exactly matches the Lollard heresy, what will happen?
1. Yes, but they will not modify their Faith's Tenets/Doctrines. The only thing they will do is remove the Unreformed Doctrine and create a Head of Faith, if possible.
2. Reformed Paganism can occasionally have heresy outbreaks of 'Old Paganism'. Additional custom heresies do not currently exist (but could potentially be modded in).
3. You cannot form a Faith that has identical Tenets/Doctrines to an already existing one.
 
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It's a good thing that lawful revocation of infidels is tied to religion rather than law, meaning a clear distinction between pluralist & fundamentalist tenants.
In CK2 using Holy Wars with Islam, the vassalization could just be circumvented by revoking everyone after winning as long as you had religious revocation. Which in itself, is simply annoying rather than a layer of difficulty.

Also, has the amount of stillbirths and and other birth related complications been dramatically increased in order to make Sacred Childbirth a viable option?
 
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.

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[Screenshot of the scaling costs for the Cosanguinity Doctrine]
To clarify, the base faith that the custom faith is splitting from in this picture had close-kin taboo, right?

If the faith you're splitting from (like Catholicism, based on a screenshot from last week) allows avunculate marriage, avunculate marriage would be the cheapest option and close-kin taboo would be the most expensive of the four options (with cousin marriage and unrestricted marriage being equally more expensive than avunculate marriage and cheaper than close-kin taboo)?