"Staring as a landless character is basically like being lowborn even if you have a dynastic crest and can gain renown. You don’t have the blank crest of a lowborn, but you functionally are. In some ways, being unlanded is lower than lowborn."
Don’t get me wrong—you did a fantastic job leveraging the landless adventurer angle, and that’s coming from someone who genuinely enjoys that option. But being *landless* isn’t the same as being *lowborn*. In fact, I agree that in some respects, being landless can be worse. Still, I’d like to offer a counterpoint and explain why I specifically prefer starting as a lowborn—or perhaps as a member of a minor noble house with no land, title, or even a camp.
Starting as landless is not equivalent to being lowborn. For one, landless characters still have a dynastic crest and can earn renown. Lowborns, by contrast, are marked by that blank shield—and yes, I could ignore it with a little headcanon, but the difference matters. Even though being unlanded might technically be a lower status than lowborn, lowborns have access to unique interactions. They can become courtiers, gain favor, and benefit from the court system in ways landless characters often cannot. That’s a huge part of why I’m drawn to the lowborn experience.
Here’s why they’re not interchangeable:
1.
**Marriage Prospects**: It’s true that most nobles won’t entertain marriage proposals from low-status characters, especially early on when survival is the priority. Unless you’re lucky—or mods allow ruler creation for lowborns—marriage can be a real challenge. But in a modded playthrough where I made my character lowborn, I had her sway a minor noble into liking her, then seduced him. Once he was hooked and I was already part of his court, he agreed to marry her. In another case, I asked my liege to allow me to marry a random lowborn woman in his court, and because she was unimportant to him, he agreed. So no—I’m not looking for the *challenge* of acquiring a marriage, but rather the kind of social maneuvering that lowborn status enables.
2.
**Renown Limitations**: Lowborns can’t build renown, which means simply surviving within a court doesn’t inherently make your family more valuable over time. By contrast, landless adventurers—though slow to build renown (very slow early game) they *do* gain renown, which carries across generations so long as you simply survive. If you know CK3 well, there are tons of ways to preserve a weak and small dynasty. But again, that’s not the experience I’m after.
3.
**Path to Power**: Landless characters have many surprising paths to become landed—sometimes even unwillingly. One of mine tried to defend peasants and was installed as a lord without ever planning for it. Sure, they get slapped with the “Former Adventurer” trait, which tanks opinion with some nobles but boosts it with certain courtiers. It's a trade-off, and future generations won’t carry the trait anyway. That’s fine, but it’s a very *different* story than what I want to tell.
4.
**Gallowsbait Trait**: I’m glad you brought this up. Gallowsbait is something *only* landless characters can access—lowborns, nobles, and other status groups can’t gain it. It’s a fun trait that adds resistance and a sort of infamy to your dynasty at least for awhile, making things more difficult in interesting ways. But even this can be worked around if your power base is strong enough.
5.
**Thematic Feel**: Ultimately, while both paths involve climbing a social ladder, the *type* of climb is very different. Landless characters carve their way into nobility through conquest, rebellion, or political upheaval. Lowborns, on the other hand, navigate the courts, earn favor, and rise from obscurity in subtler, sometimes more socially grounded ways. That’s the journey I want.
So yes—I appreciate the struggle and the climb, but the landless path offers a different flavor of gameplay. And it’s not the one I’m seeking right now.
