
The Nubians are Christians whose country is larger and richer than Ethiopia. The Nile of Egypt runs through their cities and regions. Their villages are prosperous and they have fertile land.
- Ibn Hawqal, 10th century Muslim traveler
Today, I want to share with you some info about RICE’s next flagship flavor pack,
Nubia: Heirs of Kush! I officially revealed this update with a
trailer and
showcase video several weeks ago at ModCon 2025, the 4th iteration of a fan-made online event to promote and show off mods for Paradox Games.
This dev diary, the first of at least three for Nubia, will set the stage for this update and touch on one of its two new situations, the Nile River, and the new cultures and faiths in Sudan.
Before I start, I want to give a shout-out to two great mods I’m collaborating with for this update:
- Ibn Battuta’s Legacy (IBL), a map mod by fellow veteran modder Elvain that focuses on careful map changes that keep vanilla’s feel, and includes plenty of improvements to Africa, including in Nubia
- Africa Plus (BAP), an African flavor mod I’ve worked with before, created by BlackEmperor but is currently maintained by iFrunx.
Now, let’s move onto the dev diary!
Credits also to Ethnicities and Portraits Expanded (EPE) and Community Flavor Pack (CFP) for some of the character assets used in the screenshots below.
What are Situations?
Before we dive into the meat of this dev diary, we need to understand what a
Situation is. Situations are a new gameplay system the PI devs added back in Khans of the Steppe. Like struggles, they let devs and modders create special gameplay rules and a stronger narrative thrust in a region, but whereas struggles focus on broader narrative, situations can be more flexible. For instance, struggles require you to have a capital in a region to be involved, but modders can define unique requirements for involvement in a Situation – I could theoretically make a Situation where you need to be a Han culture Zoroastrian faith with the eccentric trait and one adult child to be involved, as an example.
Despite this, I think it’s best to see Situations as similar to Struggles: they’re tools for providing a stronger narrative to a region, to make a player feel like they’re part of a greater whole (rather than the sole driving force of events a la Great Man Theory), and to depict the ebb and flow of history in ways that normal mechanics can’t do as easily.
Nile River
Now, let’s move onto the actual content related to Nubia (and Egypt)!
The Nubia Flavor Pack adds two new situations – the
Nile River and the
Baqt – which cover much of Egypt and Nubia. You’ll get a relevant notification event when involved in either or both, like for struggles and vanilla’s steppe situation; today we’ll mainly talk about the Nile River.

If you’ve played RICE in Egypt before, you may have encountered my old Nile flooding system. If you don’t know what that is, every year, counties along the Nile river in Egypt get a modifier indicating whether the Nile flood is high (good), or too low or too high (bad), which gives corresponding modifier buffs and debuffs. With the right tradition, you can unlock decisions and activities to interact with the flood, some depending on if the flood is good or bad. If you want more info, you can read my old dev diary for
my Upper Egypt flavor pack here; it’s a little outdated but should give you an idea of what the old system is.

The
Nile River situation is an adaptation of this old system. Though it works similarly, instead of receiving new county modifiers each year, the Nile river valley will annually go through phases representing the types of flood which apply the bonuses/maluses automatically.
There is additional content for this system, however. First, and most importantly, the system now extends down the entire Nile – from the delta all the way down south, so many rulers in Egypt, Nubia, and even Ethiopia are involved. Secondly, the bonuses/maluses also account for fertility, which is important if you’ve enabled the game rule for nomads in this region.

Lastly, the chances of each flood type/phase were recalibrated. At the start of each year, one randomly chosen phase gets a catalyst adding “points” to it to make it much likelier next year, represented in-game as the Nile flood forecast. The points vary to simulate forecasts’ reliability; obviously, you might still get a different phase each year than what was “predicted”. The likelihood of each phase getting this boost is 40% for a normal flood, 15% each for a low or high flood, and 10% each for the rest of the flood types.
Agrarian and Agro-Pastoralist Rulers
There is new flavor related to the interactions between the settled farmers of the Nile and their less sedentary neighbors. In fact, rulers involved in the Nile River situation are divided into two groups:
Agrarian Rulers and
Agro-Pastoralist Rulers. The latter consist of those with tribal or nomadic government types, while the former is everyone else.

Agrarian rulers have two decisions to
Welcome or
Ward Off Nile Pastoralists. Both options give county modifiers with bonuses and maluses. The first option lets you get a small, random amount of event troops, including men-at-arms, if you are willing to pay extra money. The first option also improves the opinion of nearby tribal or nomadic rulers, while the latter decreases it.

Agro-Pastoralist rulers, meanwhile, represent a more mixed group; often, pastoralists in this region still engaged in some agriculture, and weren’t always pure nomads. They have two similar decisions: to
Protect or
Plunder Nile Farmers. Both give county modifiers with bonuses and maluses too. The former increases the opinion of nearby sedentary rulers, while the latter decreases it, but gives you a random amount of gold.

In both cases, if you do one decision, you can’t do the other for 20 years, so choose carefully! Also, note the cost of these decisions fluctuate based on what flood type or phases the Nile River situation is currently in.
These decisions represent the complex relationship between more settled and pastoralist communities in this region. While we often think of the Nile in the context of agriculture, and rightly so, pastoralists made great use of the Nile river, and as a result played a major role in Egypt and Sudan’s economy and politics – certain nomadic Arab or Beja tribes subjected Coptic monasteries in Egypt to frequent raiding for example, yet other tribes would staunchly ally to these monasteries and protect them to the death, despite not being Christian oftentimes!
Nubian Culture
Nubian culture has undergone some major changes. First, it now has a unique tradition called
Heirs of Kush to replace Agrarian, as the Nubians’ counterpart to the Egyptians’ Children of the Nile tradition added a while back. Heirs of Kush has several bonuses; one is that decisions to interact with local farmer or pastoralist communities give bonus prestige based on your rank. Another bonus is that it unlocks the decision to
Engage in Nubian Agricultural Practices.

This decision has four options:
- Expand Nile Irrigation Networks
- Maintain Hafirs
- Import Cattle
- Breed Cattle
Each option grants a county modifier on counties you own along the Nile that can counteract specific maluses of bad Nile floods or enhance specific bonuses of good Nile floods. The Hafir option, uniquely, also enhances the positive modifiers of the decision to Protect Nile Farmers or Welcome Nile Pastoralists. Hafirs are a type of reservoir built to conserve water in this region, many of which date to the Meroitic era. Especially in ancient times, the Kushite Empire might have even used them to control or at least politically cooperate with local pastoralist groups.

Besides this, the Nubian culture’s tradition setup has been changed in a few other ways.
- Xenophilic has been replaced with Linguists, representing medieval Nubians’ knowledge of not only their native Nubian language, but also Greek, Coptic, and Arabic.
- Religious Patronage has been added representing the close ties Nubian elites fostered with the Coptic Church. For instance, Nubian royalty feature prominently in church artwork, and Makuria even invaded Egypt in the 8th century, when they heard the Coptic Patriarch was in trouble with Egyptian authorities; the Muslim governor had to release and dispatch the Patriarch to the Nubian army to convince the Nubians to turn back.
- Lastly, Warrior Queens (which enables female preference succession) and equal martial law are removed. It’d work for ancient Nubia which had many queens, but Christian Nubia had no attested female rulers save for maybe one in the 1500s; they had matrilineal succession that went uncle to (maternal) nephew, but it’s debated when this (re-)started in Nubia – and rulers were still male. You can still add Warrior QUeens tradition to your culture later in-game if you wish, of course.

There is a new formable hybrid culture,
Sudanese, to represent either the rise of the Sudanese Arabs in IRL late CK3 timeframe – or an alternate historical culture where another group like the Nubians or Berbers became dominant in Egypt. I am admittedly at this point still working through my ideas, so the preview above is just what the “default” canonical Arabic version of the culture looks like, but ideally I want this culture to appear via a decision (like vanilla's Normans, or RICE’s Tuareg) and have customizable heritage and language and some randomized traditions (like RICE’s Rus or Greenlandic). Hopefully in a future dev diary I’ll have more details!
Nilotic Cultures
There are other new cultures, some from Africa Plus, to better represent the situation in Alodia, the southern Nubian kingdom, and regions even south of that. Unlike the less heterogenous northern kingdom of Makuria centered on the Nile valley, Alodia’s zone of influence stretched into savannas and highlands inhabited by a kaleidoscope of peoples, whose relationship and “border” with Alodia is greatly uncertain to scholarship at the moment.

The
Nuba, from BAP, is a catch-all for the diverse peoples of the Nuba mountains, who speak a variety of languages – despite the name, only some Nuba tribes speak Nubian languages! One of their special traditions is
Passionate Athletes. Historically and even today, many Nuba tribes are renowned for the importance they place on fitness, and the centrality of certain sports and athletic competitions, particularly of wrestling, in their culture. One cool thing about it is that if you have high prowess, people have a higher opinion of you.

The
Dinka, also from BAP, are the main inhabitants of Alodia's southern territories. They, and other tribes speaking the Nilotic languages, like the famous Maasai, would migrate southwards over centuries starting in the medieval era. The proto-Nilotes
might correspond to so-called Damadim tribes (a generic name some medieval Arab sources use to refer to some African peoples) who raided Alodia and may have played a role in the kingdom’s demise in the 1200s.
There are several off-map new cultures to represent other branches of the Nilotic speaking peoples, too. I've tried to represent most major groups, but this list is subject to change:
- Luo
- Ateker
- Kalenjin
- Karo (Bari)
- Maasai
- Sirikwa

The on-map Dinka and most off-map Nilotic cultures have a
Nilotic Cattle Raiders tradition, due to the importance of cattle in their cultures. Among various bonuses, it lets them raid regardless of faith. There are also playable Nuba and Dinka rulers in each start date in and around Alodia.

Courtiers of these off-map African cultures spawn occasionally via events in Nubia and Ethiopia, offering you different bonuses. Once All Under Heaven comes out, these groups might spawn in Swahili lands too.
Other Nubian Faiths
To address a big elephant in the room – there'll be no new faiths for the Kushite religion, as adding faiths to existing vanilla religions requires me to touch vanilla code, which I won't do for compatibility reasons. I also want to focus on the more relevant faiths of the time period, like the Christian and Muslim Nubians, though I won’t rule out adding a bit of flavor for Egyptian/Nubian pagans if I have time. However, mods like Africa Plus already improve Kushitism and add more Egyptian/Nubian pagan faiths to the religion, so I recommend those!

Still, there are some new pagan faiths in the region. A new religion,
Nilotic, for instance, consists of three faiths to represent the beliefs of the various Nilotic and Nuba peoples.
- Nhialacism to represent the beliefs of the Dinka and other related West Nilotic peoples, adapted from Africa Plus.
- Kujurism as a catch-all for the religious traditions of the diverse peoples of the Nuba mountains.
- Akujism for the beliefs of the off-map Nilotes. It is off-map.
Darfur’s Cultures and Faiths
We now move into the Darfur region, which had political and economic ties with medieval Nubia, though the extent has been debated.
The
Daju are an existing culture in vanilla, but their tradition setup has been revamped. The spread of their culture now varies by start date, to reflect their arrival in the Darfur region from Nubia – at least according to oral tradition – by the 12th century; i.e., earlier start dates have Daju counties more in Nubia; in later start dates, there are more in Darfur.

I'm also placing a
Tora culture in Darfur as well, especially in the earlier start dates. In local legends, the Tora were a legendary race of “white giants” who preceded the Daju in Darfur. Older scholarly speculation interpreted the Tora as Berbers, and while not impossible, more recent scholarship suggests a plausible theory that the Tora were indigenous, perhaps even the ancestors of the Fur peoples who later gave Darfur its name (and indeed, some Fur tribes claim descent from the Tora). As such, I’m portraying the Tora as proto-Fur, whose spread in Darfur will retreat with the arrival of the Daju in later start dates.

The Daju and Tora have their own tradition,
Palaces in the Mountains. Despite the recent tragic political situation in Darfur, some archaeological work has been done in the area, proving that Darfur’s ancient inhabitants built rather impressive stone structures throughout its history.

I've also taken the liberty of adapting Africa Plus’
Maba (or Wadai) and Fallen Eagle’s
Toubou cultures to add some variety to the Saharan regions west of Nubia.

The Darfur region has also seen a revamp of its pagan religions. First, I’ve received permission from Oni Guy to adapt their
Cult of Kalge mini-mod to RICE. I've expanded on their original work by adding a new
Darfurian religion with two faiths:
- Kalgeism for the Daju, referring to Kalge, their original supreme deity – even today, the Daju, who are mostly Muslim, sometimes call Allah “Kalge”
- Moluism for the Tora/Fur, centered around the worship of the sky god Molu, attested as late as the 19th century

Another religion I’m adapting from Africa Plus is the
Chadian religion, which has two faiths:
- Idoism for the Zaghawas and other related non-Berber peoples of the central Sahara
- Muneism for the religion of the peoples around Lake Chad
Why Nubia?
I’ve advocated for the potential of Struggles ever since they were first introduced in Fate of Iberia, and I’ve used them before in RICE to tell the stories and complex histories of Greenland, Normandy, Sri Lanka, and Sicily in a way that’s, hopefully, interesting from both a narrative and gameplay POV.
This update will be my first foray into the Situations system, which I hope to use like struggles to provide narrative immersion in history’s complexities. These days, it’s easy to project Sudan’s current state as a country suffering from war, poverty, and genocide into the past, as if it’s always been that way; it also doesn’t help that while Paradox has made great strides in better depicting Africa, there is much to be desired.
Yet in Sudan, diverse societies prospered over the centuries, with great achievements in trade, learning, architecture, politics, and more. It is my hope the content of this update will provide a taste of the vibrant history and culture of Sudan and the surrounding regions like Egypt.
Conclusion
That concludes this first dev diary for RICE’s upcoming Nubia flavor pack! Hopefully, this helped you understand the lay of the land of this update, and whet your appetite for more of Sudan’s history. There will be at least two more dev diaries touching on other aspects of this update, such as the Baqt situation, and other decisions, activities, and flavor for Nubia.
Until then, see you next time!
Selected Sources for Further Reading
Due to the large number of sources I am using, I’ll provide a more complete, extensive list in the final dev diary. For now, I’ll list just a few I believe are a useful introduction.
- Beyond the Nile: Long Term Patterns in Nomad-state Interactions Across Northeast Africa, Julien Cooper
- The Christian Nubia and the Arabs, Małgorzata Martens-Czarnecka
- General History of Africa, III: Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century, UNESCO
- General History of Africa, IV: Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, UNESCO
- History of the Nuba, Nanne op 't Ende
- The Kingdom of Alwa, Mohi el-Din Abdalla Zarroug
- The “Lord of the Mountain:” A Study of the Nubian Eparchos of Nobadia, Benjamin C Hendrickx
- Medieval Christian Nubia and the Islamic World: A Reconsideration of the Baqt Treaty, Jay Spaulding
- The Nubian Past: An Archaeology of the Sudan, David N. Edwards
- Old Dongola: Continuity and Change From the Medieval Period to the 21st Century, Tomomi Fushiya
- Palaces in the Mountains: An Introduction to the Archaeological Heritage of the Sultanate of Darfur, Andrew McGregor
- Short History of the Church of Makuria (Mid-6th–Early 12th Century), Włodzimierz Godlewski