Crusader Kings 3’s New Legends Beautifully Canonise the Weird Stuff
Whenever a new expansion to Crusader Kings 3, one of my favourite games of all times comes out, I try to test out its borders and restrictions by going back and playing one of the rulers from an earlier state of the game, but with the new mechanics. Sure, when I reviewed Legacy of Persia for German website Polyneux, I played through it with an Iranian character, but what interested me much more was how the new Clan form of government integrated into prominent African characters like Daruma Daura. Because that’s what makes the best addons truly great: Not how the focus on one part of the map (although that is nice and often very well realised), but how they tie into the whole of the game and change its feeling. It’s why I loved Northern Lords and Legacy of Persia for their overhauls of the Tribal and Clan rulers respectively, and why I do not particularly like Tours & Tournaments because the travel mechanic is mostly a chore (which Paradox realised soon after, introducing more useful causes in every addon since and promising a massive overhaul within the Season 3 pass).
Make me sick
So with the newest addon, Legends of the Dead, Paradox introduces two new strong mechanics. One: Plagues, and with it an overhaul of the health and resilience systems and several of the funeral and autopsy events introduced in the main game as well as the Royal Court and Legacy of Persia addons. They are a fun, sensible addition to the middle ages setting of Crusader Kings 3, giving several new incentives to weigh between interesting decisions instead of choosing formerly very clear-cut beneficial outcomes. They can also destroy empires, yours and the AI one’s in as much as a few minutes of play. Which might feel unfair to players working towards certain goals, but is exactly the type of thing the character roleplayers that Crusader Kings 3 so perfectly caters to want from their game. And two: Legends, a type of very costly decision a ruler can start, develop, distribute and at one point in their lifetime or their descendants at least, reap the rewards from with new buildings, new ways to wage war and a whole lot of new narrative events.
To test the new systems out, I tried playing a character with an older focus, namely the Seljuk count Suleyman of Samosata that had it’s gameplay-defining special rules defined in the Royal Court addon. Naturally, I chose him because I missed his achievement still, and I have a serious problem with achievements. Anyway — Suleyman wants to eat up the entire Asia Minor peninsula from the weakened Byzantine Empire to form the Sultanate of Rum, a muslim Rome, which would eventually develop into the Ottoman Empire. He does that as a vassal to the Seljuk emperor, his kinsman, thus protected from the Byzantine’s conquering his single county at the start of the game. Normally at least, because when one of the new and inevitable plagues hits early on, the Seljuk empire can easily be dissolved by dissatisfied vassal kings. When this happened to me, I had to think on my feet and swallow a few duchies around me while building up not a strong military, but a network of hospitals and hospices to keep my capital mostly plague-free. I had to consolidate into the kingdom of Armenia before I had any chance of taking a stab at the Basileus dynasty in Constantinople, because each wave of Tajik Shivers, Seljuk Bulbs and Samosata Rashes (each one named after the unfortunate place or culture of emergence) weakened my ruler’s family too much to get back lost duchies fast enough after each partition on succession. My playstyle changed completely, now that I could not focus on bolstering my military with new baronies to station and train them and no space for new barracks, blacksmiths and stables when I now had to build hospitals.
Make them sing
So the plagues in themselves are a worthwhile new mechanic — and a brutally unforgiving one, which can also be disabled before a game start, by the way — but what truly shines for me in Legends of the Dead are said legends. For a hefty sum and after finding a potential legend seed (the core of what could become a great story), a ruler can start spreading their own legend or one about their ancestors. These have to spread from barony to barony, becoming more embellished with details, or outright lies, at certain thresholds. When they have passed far enough, rulers or their descendants can reap the rewards from special building spaces for statues, temples and mausoleums to specific ways of waging war. When my very old Suleyman had successfully formed the Empire of Rum from the ruins of Constantinople, I collected on his legendary deed by leaving the empire in the hands of some distant relative and wage an adventure war against the Holy Roman Empire. Soon, what was once known as Germany would become the Suleyman Sultanate of Central Europe, and chaos ensued.
The gameplay possibilities are great, but what really makes these legends perfect for Crusader Kings 3 is how they fit into the creative, narrative mess the play sessions often develop into. Crusader Kings 3 is always at its best when absurd things start to happen. Like when Northmen viking into Normandy, Sicily or Eastern Europe and fuck shit up there so fundamentally they develop a new culture (Wait, that’s real history, not just the game, but it fits so well). Crusader Kings 3 puts these breaking points of the map order into appealing gameplay targets, narrative decisions and chaotic events. And as a game with several ahistorical possibilities, it makes playable a lot of weird stuff. You know about the short span in history when Canute the Great ruled over not only Denmark and Norway, but significant parts of England, thus forming an unofficial Empire of the North Sea. Wouldn’t it be cool to make that permanent? Of course, says Crusader Kings 3, and let’s you do just that. And Legends of the Dead integrates even more obvious strange stuff from some documents of history into the game, giving you the option to become the weirdest goblin of a ruler of some unconnected counties in the Tibetan highlands, who somehow has a claim on the Arthurian ancestry of the Anglo-Saxons, or a Scottish duke who insists on being a descendant of Egyptian royalty (a real Scottish legend that exists!). Combined with the narrative events that shape your protagonists character and his traits, and all the fortunate or unfortunate things that can happen to them, the legends help canonise all the weird things you do and encounter to fulfill your own goals in the game. Sure, your most successful ancestor died from falling over drunk and drowning in his own vomit, but he also founded Georgia, so who’s to say you shouldn’t make him a saint? Should your Iberan grandmother be remembered for her brief claim over the whole peninsula, or for having been part of a nudist sect?
Crusader Kings 3 has always been at its best when stupid things happened to the game map and its inhabitants, and now I can choose how the rest of the world will remember this stupid stuff as a very intentional and very serious ruler’s decision instead of the weird coincidence it was that the random number generator sent a buddhist character to Wessex and back home in that one match I played. And I think that is beautiful.
