Crusader Kings III

Crusader Kings III

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Old Gods Expanded
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81.024 MB
30 Mar, 2024 @ 8:16am
10 Jun @ 11:49pm
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Old Gods Expanded

Description
New Egyptian faiths added!


Background

One of my favorite aspects of Crusader Kings 3 is the ability to make your own religions. However, I found that the system in the base game was too limiting to fully allow you to make unique religions. Additionally, I felt that the Norse faith was missing a lot of flavour, even after the Northern Lords expansion. This mod was made to address both these problems.

This mod tries to achieve:
1) Adding flavour to various faiths, making them feel more unique and interesting,
and
2) Give the player more freedom when making/reforming faiths, enabling the player to be more creative.

This mod largely draws inspiration from historical and mythological sources as well as folklore. Additionally, inspirations have been taken from pop-culture. I have tried to stay historically accurate whenever possible. The focus on this mod is roleplay, but balancing the gameplay is something that is worked on continuously.

Do you want more flavour for the faiths in the game? Do you want to make your own unique religions? How about a dragon-worshiping cannibal cult? An assassin cult worshipping Loki? A nature-loving faith dedicated to the Vanir gods? Then this mod is for you!

Faiths

Currently the mod covers:

• Ásatrú
• Vidilism
• Slavic paganism
• Taltosism
• Tengriism
• Kemetism
• Mandé

Additionally, these faiths have recieved new content but are not fully expanded on yet:

• Hellenism
• Judaism (Kuzarism, Hellenistic judaism)
• Christianity (Krstjani, Coptic)
• Dualism (Basilideanism)

This mod is constantly expanding, and new faiths are being worked on! Long term goal is to cover all faiths in CK3. Hellenism, Celtic paganism, Taoism and many more faiths are planned down the line, as well as the major religions such as Christianity and Islam.


Features

• New faiths
• Adds over 100 new core tenets for the covered faiths (see more details below)
• Increases the maximum core tenet limit to 20, allowing you to fully make your own religion without compromise.
• New game rule that lets you choose how many tenets faiths start with (7 or 3)
• New doctrines (slavery, monsters)
• More faith icons (for the covered religions)
• More CoA emblems.
• Adds new game rule, allowing you to decide if magic should be treated as superstition or something real. If played with magic as real, witches get access to magic spells (mostly based on myth and folklore).
• Many more smaller changes


Tenets
As mentioned, the mod includes a total of over 100 tenets. Some are visible only for select faiths, others can be seen when hybridizing with the faith (see below) and some can be used by any faith. There are too many tenets to summarize them here but some features include:

Patron Gods – and many variations of it.
Patron Gods in the base game has a limited selection of gods to worship, and is only available for Asatru and Hinduism. The version in this mod increases the list of gods, allowing you to worship more obscure gods. It also adds versions of Patron Gods to other faiths.

To allow for more diverse faiths with unique themes, the mod ads several variations of Patron Gods, dedicated to different group of deities:
- Matron Goddesses
- Patron Vanir
- Patron Jötnar
- Patron Dragons

There are also similar tenets for gods with common theme (gods of war, gods of the sea, hunting, sorcery, etc.) as well as tenets dedicated to specific gods (Thor, Baldr, Freya, Loki…).

Religious celebrations

Various tenets have been added to let the faithful celebrate religious celebrations and rituals. These are taken by decisions. The rule of thumb is that partaking in rituals earns you piety.

Blood of the Gods
Throughout history, several king and heroes claim to be descendants of various deities. This mod adds these bloodlines as traits (e.g. Blood of Odin, blood of Ra, etc.) available in the character creator. In turn these tenets make those traits virtues. This allows you to make your bloodline be considered holy.

Religious syncretism - hybridize faiths
In vanilla CK3, religious syncretism are handled in tenets that group together large groups of faiths, such as Syncretic Folk Traditions and Eastern Syncretism. This mod adds tenets that allows you to be more specific about which faith it is syncretic with. These faiths will have a better opinion bonus compared to the wider vanilla tenets, as well unlocking faith-specific tenets, allowing you to fuse religious ideas between faiths.

Cult
In the base game, the tenet Rite is only allowed for faiths with a spiritual head of faith. Cult removes that criteria, allowing you to maintain your temporal head of faith when creating a new faith. This means that you could play as head of faith of multiple faiths (if you switch character after creating a faith). Additionally, both Cult and Branching faith reduces costs when creating a new faith, and make faiths that share HoF see eachother as Righteous.

Doctrines

Slavery
Determines the faith's attitude towards forced labour. If allowed, you may take prisoners as thralls (slaves). The thralls can then either be put to work or sold for gold. There are various versions of this doctrine, some are unique to different faiths.

Monsters
For Slavic faiths, this doctrine determines the attitude towards monsters. If viewed negatively, ai rulers may offer contracts to adventurers to kill monsters. If the player has the "historical" option for the Magic rule, monsters have a rational explanation, for example werewolves being just wolves. However, if they choose the "mythical" option, monsters are real and much more dangerous.


Scope

As previously mentioned, the long term goal is to cover all faiths in the game, and possibly even more. If you wish to contribute to the project, or help with ideas or feedback, you are welcome to join the discord channel[discord.gg]


Compatibility
*More Bookmarks + patch - A work in progress, please let me know if there still are compatibility issues.
* MB+/MPE Catholic Trinity - Thank you tony_sm!
* Old Gods Expanded - MB+ Catholic Trinity Patch - Also thank you tony_sm!

* Cities of Wonder 3 - The issue where all holdings turn into pyramids have been fixed, and the mods should be compatible now.

Known compatibility issues:
* Most other mods that change religions/religious system

Localization
*Chinese - Thanks to 伊恩 !



Special thanks to:
* När Man Talar om Trollen podcast[www.patreon.com] – for being a great source for information as well as sharing artwork.
* Karax and everyone who worked on the More Tenet Slots mod - which this mod was built on.
* Everyone on the CK3 modding Discord - for helping out and answering questions
* Jonas Lau Markussen[jonaslaumarkussen.com] – for the artwork he has shared online.
* OB-LIX Original Music [pixabay.com] for the music in the trailer
463 Comments
Squidian The BoFish 6 Sep @ 11:25am 
right on, love the mod!
Dr. Knevin  [author] 6 Sep @ 2:05am 
@Squidian the BoFish - definitely in the future! I want to make a Greco-Roman update down the road but I want to wait a bit with it since I expect it to be massive. Meanwhile, hellenism has already been updated with 7 tenets, although it's not exactly the same as the roman religion.
Squidian The BoFish 5 Sep @ 2:50pm 
could you add the roman pantheon to this?
Dr. Knevin  [author] 2 Sep @ 2:21am 
@cat_and_cat_inc - yes! That's the plan.
Cat_and_cat_inc 1 Sep @ 9:30pm 
"dietary law at a very detailed level," will this be applied to other faiths in vanilla?
Dr. Knevin  [author] 1 Sep @ 9:20pm 
@Valasatre, of the Ebon Chalice - For landless adventurers, the mod adds adventurer contracts to hunt monsters from folklore. Currently there are only contracts based on slavic folklore but I plan to add more with the next update.

@Cat_and_cat_inc - I know. The main time-consuming thing I have been working on is doctrines that dictate dress-code and cosmetics. For scythians, this will enable them to wear tattoos. For Egyptians, or any faith that is syncretic with kemetism, it will allow you to make your rulers dress as pharaohs, and so on. Additionally, I have added the ability to customise your dietary law at a very detailed level. I'm also adding a doctrine for animal sacrifice.
Cat_and_cat_inc 1 Sep @ 1:00pm 
Kinda sucks that the update is going to take so long, but what is the updates scope?
@Dr. Knevin Thank you for your response! Forgive my asking further - Vampire Contract?
Dr. Knevin  [author] 1 Sep @ 2:36am 
@Valasatre of the Ebon Chalice - it's a potential outcome of the Vampire contract. Currently that is the only way to gain it in-game.

@Corn Mother - I don't have any plans to add that, but I have been thinking about ways to revive dead/ancient religions a bit easier in-game.

@Cat_and_cat_inc - Sad to say that the next update isn't ready, the primary reason is because the scope of the update grew a lot. That said, I think the new content is really cool and I look forward to share it. I'm hesitant to give any real speculation on when exactly it should be ready, but I am working hard to complete it.
Cat_and_cat_inc 31 Aug @ 4:50pm 
Now that August is ending, how is the update going?