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!

 

[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

 

[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

 

[blackninja9939]

We remain as canon as possible and would rather not completely make stuff up which is problem as we have pretty much no info on the valyrian religion

 

[blackninja9939]

There is a big difference between plausible what if scenarios and completely making something up. Honestly if anything I would like to see the valyrian religion have the ability to be like the tengri religion in eu4 in which rulers can pick a syncretic faith and that nullifies some of the penalties from rulers of that faith. So the volantis rulers could choose to have a syncretic faith with rhllor and have reduced penalties

 

[blackninja9939]

Yeah, I was more hoping that it would get an update in a similar vein to what's mentioned in the OP since it makes sense lore-wise.

Not adding them to the green dreams is more about balancing than anything else, if we gave them the plot seeing ability as well then being old gods would be even better