Dev Diary - The Tide of Magic

[blackninja9939]

Hey there everyone as many of you will know the next DLC for CK2 called "Conclave" is coming up and we are all very excited about that, in the meantime however there have been quite a few changes to how magic works in the mod which have not really been changed for quite a few versions now.

R'hllor
In lore sacrifices to R'hllor were a very powerful tool used by red priests and priestesses such as Melisandre, however one things that was key to those sacrifices was the strength of the blood of the person being sacrificed. This is now represented in the mod with those who have the blood of emperor tier characters being worth three, king tier worth two and others only worth one.

Another change is to how resurrection works in the mod. Previously you could use decisions to grant protection from battle or plot to characters. Now however this has been changed so that if a character dies and they worship R'hllor and they either have already been resurrected before or they are chosen/favored by R'hllor and have enough magic as well as the age of dragons having been started again they have a chance of being resurrected. However resurrection takes a tole on a character the person who dies and the person who comes back to life may not be the same person you remember, their personality can change or they may be mentally and physically scarred from their experience.

Some other changes:

• Healing a character is also more delicate, you can now fail to heal a character and doing so can have dire repercussions for their health.
• You can now try to look into the flames to reveal plots
• The Brotherhood without Banners has been added in ACOK and AFFC attacking the Iron Throne to depose them in favour of Stannis. In AFFC you might also notice they have a very unique leader to test out the new resurrection mechanics...

Dragon Dreams
Some characters who possess the blood of the dragon have been known to have prophetic dreams made up of metaphors and imagery in the form of dragons, these individuals are said to suffer from "dragon dreams". Dragon dream were kind of a pain to try and model as predicting the future in a game like ck2 is not really possible, the best solution was to give them a trait with a pretty decent intrigue boost and the ability for them to use a similar decision to reveal plots that the followers of R'hllor will be getting in the update. They also get a bonus to dueling as they can see the future-ish and know what an enemy will do-ish. In the future little misc events to do with them seeing things in the future will be added such as knowing that someone is going to drop a bag of coins in the streets accidentally and they can find it.

This new trait has also been added to the historical dragon dreamers such as Daenys the Dreamer who led the Targaryens to Dragonstone for safety before the Doom of Valyria.

Other changes
As usual there have been plenty of misc bug fixes and other additions some of my favourite ones being:

• A big overhaul of the slavery system under the hood to optimise how it and reduce the spam and clutter with things such as useless slaves being instantly sold (culled) for 5 gold.
• There is now a new war during AFFC between House Forrester and House Whitehill representing the conflict from Telltales game
• Followers of the Old Gods can hold melee tournaments
• The ability to hold a funeral

I hope you all like the looks of these new things and will enjoy burning people as Stannis even more than before!

 

[DarthDanMan]

"There is now a new war during AFFC between House Forrester and House Whitehill representing the conflict from Telltales game."

Thank you. I just started this mod, first mod I've used, on the weekend as the Forresters. Unfortunately the Whitehills soon got deposed by the Boltons which was rather anti-climactic. Currently I'm almost 60 years in and the Aztec Dragon Riders are invading...? I didn't know they were implemented.

 

[Dimension3500]

Nothing better than the smell of roasted Usurpers in the morning.

Amazing Dev Diary, can't wait for the next release!

 

[SgtSmuckers]

Oooo, expanded religion. I cannot wait to see the update for councilors as I would really like to recreate the regency of Aegon III for some little lions who sit the throne

 

[TheTeaMustFlow]

Wait - has there been an engine change so that you can now actually resurrect a character, or do the resurrection events just override death events (preventing the death in the first place, in game terms)?

 

[Wandering Sentinel]

The way R'hllor sacrifices work (or worked before this) is that whenever you execute or sacrifice someone by burning them alive it increased a hidden counter attached to your character by one. So long as your sacrifice counter was above one, you could take decisions that would allow you to make you or someone else immune to death in battle or from plots once, or heal injuries/health conditions on your character or others (other characters need to either be followers of R'hllor or agree to convert in exchange for the healing). Since these causes of death are all in scripted events to begin with, characters are most likely given a combat/plot death immunity flag when they take the respective decision and the events check for the flag. If a character had one of the flags, it was probably removed and a resurrection event or something similar would fire instead of your character dying (never actually died from battle or plots as a R'hllor follower actually, the tournaments that are only followers of the Faith of the Seven can participate in, along with the knighthood and the fact that a number of the other religions don't get access to the temple holding upgrades, makes the religions other than the Seven less attractive to me) and the flag would be removed. This means that in order to gain the benefits, you needed to "spend" sacrifices to give yourself immunity before the event fired. Now it looks like it just looks at the counter instead.

So yeah, TL;DR: they pretty much went into the event files for any event related death carried over from vanilla as well as the ones they made and put an override in.

 

[Rationalsanity]

This looks great but I must say that I cannot wait to see what you guys do with the Conclave council mechanics.

 

[blackninja9939]

Wait - has there been an engine change so that you can now actually resurrect a character, or do the resurrection events just override death events (preventing the death in the first place, in game terms)?

The latter

The way R'hllor sacrifices work (or worked before this) is that whenever you execute or sacrifice someone by burning them alive it increased a hidden counter attached to your character by one. So long as your sacrifice counter was above one, you could take decisions that would allow you to make you or someone else immune to death in battle or from plots once, or heal injuries/health conditions on your character or others (other characters need to either be followers of R'hllor or agree to convert in exchange for the healing). Since these causes of death are all in scripted events to begin with, characters are most likely given a combat/plot death immunity flag when they take the respective decision and the events check for the flag. If a character had one of the flags, it was probably removed and a resurrection event or something similar would fire instead of your character dying (never actually died from battle or plots as a R'hllor follower actually, the tournaments that are only followers of the Faith of the Seven can participate in, along with the knighthood and the fact that a number of the other religions don't get access to the temple holding upgrades, makes the religions other than the Seven less attractive to me) and the flag would be removed. This means that in order to gain the benefits, you needed to "spend" sacrifices to give yourself immunity before the event fired. Now it looks like it just looks at the counter instead.

So yeah, TL;DR: they pretty much went into the event files for any event related death carried over from vanilla as well as the ones they made and put an override in.

That is not how it works any longer, the ability to use the protect from plots and battle are gone so you cannot just grant protection to anyone and everyone now you can survive being killed based on the things I mentioned in the diary with being chosen/favoured etc

 

[Wandering Sentinel]

I know, I was explaining how it probably worked before, but the fact that you need to be favored/chosen by R'hllor to survive or be resurrected is probably a good thing if the AI could have used the decisions before; anyone who was a follower of R'hllor would probably have burned every traitor and then just instantly used the sacrifices to protect anyone and everyone they liked.

 

[Apelstav]

Do Green Dreams give the same plot discovery decision?

 

[Wandering Sentinel]

Unless something's changed since I first downloaded the mod or I'm missing something (which is quite likely), it seems the Green Dreams are tied mainly or entirely to the "animal companion" traits. If a character has Green Dreams, they'll receive one (90%) or more (10% for 2, and after that they have a 50% chance of being able to get another up to six) companion animals that provide various benefits (mainly stat or duel skill bonuses, but the whale animal companion seems to be able to sink the pirate ship that attacks you during the event chain to get a Valyrian Steel Sword). I'm not sure if Green Dreams do anything else.

 

[TMSaxon]

Glad to see that the Northmen will finally be able to get in on the fun of tournaments. Will their tourneys be as vicious and deadly as they are described? From what TWOIAF has said, they sound more like mid 11th century tourneys then the thirteenth century plus model that the Southerners do.

 

[knuckey]

Glad to see that the Northmen will finally be able to get in on the fun of tournaments. Will their tourneys be as vicious and deadly as they are described? From what TWOIAF has said, they sound more like mid 11th century tourneys then the thirteenth century plus model that the Southerners do.

Someone usually dies/gets crippled, so they are fairly bloody yes

 

[Calad]

Im still waiting a proper Valyrian religion.

 

[blackninja9939]

Im still waiting a proper Valyrian religion.

What a wonderful suggestion! I am so glad you clearly laid out the point of what you would like us to change and have given us some amazing examples from the lore so as to emphasise your points to help us improve the mod!
All joking aside, what would you want us to do? We have pretty much no info in lore about the valyrian religion really

 

[Wandering Sentinel]

I have no idea why, but I get the feeling that there could probably be some connection between the Valyrian and R'hllor religions, probably because the Valyrians have their dragons and R'hllor's obvious connection to fire. But in regards to what could be done with the Valyrian religion, I feel that since Aegon has the option to not convert to the Faith of the Seven in Westeros or the R'hllor faith in Essos, perhaps a "revived" form of the Valyrian faith with mechanics based off whichever continent Aegon conquered? For instance, Faith of the Seven mixed with Valyrian could lead to a religion with a head based on the High Septon and knighthood from the Seven and multiple wives and brother-sister marriage from the Valyrian religion?

 

[SgtSmuckers]

What a wonderful suggestion! I am so glad you clearly laid out the point of what you would like us to change and have given us some amazing examples from the lore so as to emphasise your points to help us improve the mod!
All joking aside, what would you want us to do? We have pretty much no info in lore about the valyrian religion really

That satire XD

I'm assuming they want something similar to acprince's Faith+ mod

 

[Pokonic]

That satire XD

I'm assuming they want something similar to acprince's Faith+ mod

The only real mechanics I could think of on the top of my head that would fit the Valyrian religion would probably be a Jain-like modifier for followers of different religions, as the Valyrians were not really proselytizers and tended to leave the religions of their client states be. This could possibly keep Volantis from consistently collapsing, for example.

 

[Wandering Sentinel]

Volantis having a tendency to collapse never seems to happen in my games. Either I'm not paying much attention to that part of the world, or it simply doesn't happen for some reason.

 

[thisistherevolt]

The Valyrian religion could possibly be modeled on Hellenic and Kemetic from the Ancient Religions Revived mod. It kinda seems to me from reading the World Book GRRM had that in mind in the first place. Don't quote me on this as I could be completely wrong, but I think I remember reading somewhere a fan asked GRRM about it, and he said it was inspired by Roman, Greek, and Egyptian mythology. Names for the gods would be difficult though. And actual practices and so forth. But the ACR mod would be a good place to start if you guys (devs) were serious about an overhaul. Just my 2 coppers.