Video Game / Crusader Kings II

"I thought I was a moral person. I was wrong."

— Steam review of Crusader Kings II

Crusader Kings II is a sequel to the historical Grand Strategy game Crusader Kings also by Paradox Interactive. Playing similarly to the first game, with the player controlling the leader of a dynasty rather than acting as an abstract Non-Entity General, this iteration added several more features like character ambitions, an expanded plotting and intrigue mechanic, a revamp of the holy order and mercenary system and the sub-division of provinces into baronies, bishoprics and cities, all ruled by vassals.

It was followed by Crusader Kings III, released in September 1, 2020.

Paradox has released numerous expansion packs for CKII, each focusing on different aspects:

• Sword of Islam, released in June 2012, expands the map, introduces new mechanics, and features playable Muslims, with different rules to reflect their different culture.
• Legacy of Rome, released in October 2012, focuses on the Byzantine Empire and the Eastern Orthodox church.
• Sunset Invasion, released in November 2012, introduces an Alternate History where the Aztec Empire invades Medieval Europe. In no way intended to be taken seriously.
• The Republic, released in January 2013, makes merchant republics playable and adds mechanics to simulate patrician families and republican elections.
• The Old Gods, released in May 2013, makes Pagans and Zoroastrians playable, gives them unique events and mechanics, and adds another start date in 867 AD.
• Sons of Abraham, released in November 2013, which focuses on Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, most notably adding the Jewish Khazar dynasty into the campaign map and including the College of Cardinals for papal elections, as well as finally making it possible to take your character on Pilgrimage.
• Rajas of India, released in March 2014, expands the map eastward to include India and much of Central Asia. It adds three new religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism), Jungle terrain, new events and mechanics to account for Indian cultural and religious beliefs, and war elephants. Some additional content for the East African Miaphysite kingdoms that was originally intended to be part of its own expansion are also included, added with the free update to the base game scheduled to come at the same time as the new DLC.
• Charlemagne, released October 14th 2014, which extends the start date back to 769 with a string of events following Charlemagne's rise to power. And that's just Western and Central Europe. In the Eastern Roman Empire, the Iconoclast controversy had been raging on for some time, and further east, the Abbasid Caliphate was at the zenith of its power. It also introduces a chronicle detailing a dynasty's conquests and actions in the style of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and more customization options for kingdom names and banners.
• Way of Life, released December 16th 2014, which gives the player more control over the roleplaying aspects of the game by adding the option to select a particular area of life for characters to focus on, as well as additional features such as duels and more player control over certain character interactions (such as seducing new lovers or spying on specific people).
• Horse Lords, released July 14th 2015, adds unique mechanics for nomadic steppe tribes such as a horde mechanic, clan politics, and the ability to gain income by taking landed nobles as tributaries and through controlling the ancient Silk Road.
• Conclave, released February 2, 2016, adds additional court intrigue, legal, and diplomatic functionality, which ties with the new council mechanics and favors mechanics, expands education of children, and allows you to rent out your armies as mercenaries.
• The Reaper's Due, released August 25, 2016, adds more depth to the spread and severity of diseases, allows the player to take steps to mitigate them (such as building Royal Hospitals and sending your court into seclusion), and gives players incentives to focus on peaceful development.
• Monks and Mystics, released March 7, 2017, adds increased depth to religion mechanics, allows characters to join societies (including monastic orders, cults, and heretical sects), and gives players new jobs to assign their councilors to.
• Jade Dragon, released November 16, 2017, adds a playable Tibet in the Himalayas and adds China as an offscreen superpower that rulers can negotiate with. China can provide powerful boons to rulers, but it might also decide that the western barbarians need to be civilized through military force. The accompanying patch also expanded Zoroastrian heresies and added new casus belli.
• Holy Fury, released on November 13, 2018, focuses on religion and adds revamped crusade mechanics, pagan warrior lodge societies, legendary bloodlines, sainthood and coronation events, additional succession laws, and options to play on a randomized and/or shattered map.

Since 2019, the base game has been free to play on Steam.

For game mods, see FanWorks.Crusader Kings.

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This video game provides examples of:

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• 419 Scam: You can be contacted by someone claiming to represent an Abyssinian prince. If you have the "Scholar" trait, you can reply by pointing out that the names in the message aren't Abyssinian.
• Abduction Is Love: Subverted. Pagans and tribal Christians may abduct female courtiers when they sack settlements, and the rulers have the option of taking them on as concubines — even if they're already married to someone else. However, this carries hefty opinion penalty, ensuring she will hate her abductor. It's possible for the "Fell in Love" event to happen between a ruler and their stolen concubine, but the event is bugged, and treats that concubine as an illegitimate mistress in related sub-events.
• Abusive Parents: If your character chooses to raise his heirs himself, he may be given the option to beat them in various character-defining events. Sometimes it's the best (or only) way to get rid of a potentially negative trait.
• Action Girl: While it's perfectly possible for women to have high Martial skill and traits of good generals such as "Skilled Tactician", most of the time they're not permitted to command. However, female rulers (that is, queen regnant, not queen consort) can take the field with their troops, as can the character from the Jeanne d'Archétype event. Cathar realms and realms with Conclave's full rights of women law can also freely have female commanders. As of the patch accompanying Reaper's Due, Germanic Pagans can create shieldmaidens, who can also command in battle. As well, Holy Fury lets you make pagan religions gender-equal (the Equality doctrine immediately enacts Full Status of Women) or even matriarchal when you reform them.
• Actually Pretty Funny: One possible event while conducting the Summer Fair event as a Christian ruler is for a jester at the fair to accidentally hit you in the face with one of his baubles to much hilarity from onlookers. From the button text it seems your character thought it was funny, too.
• Adipose Rex: Your ruler can gain the Fat trait if they lead a sedentary lifestyle. You can choose to shape up by going on a diet or continue stuffing your face; if you got the trait by throwing frequent parties and feasts through the Carousing focus, you can choose to embrace it, and get a special “Munificent” bonus to vassal opinion that comes from being a Big Fun.
• Aerith and Bob: Expanded upon from the original game significantly:
  • The second game lets players choose the name of his/her character's newborn children, so one can either avoid this trope or intentionally cause it.
  • In addition, there is a random chance for the child to be named for a parent or grandparent from both sides of the family. This means that if you give a character a silly name, chances are it will spread.
  • Some cultures follow a given name plus fathers name with adjective for their full name (with their dynasty name being left out but considered a part of their longer name). Combined this with the parental name sharing aspect mentioned before and this can result in such things as Bob Johnson with a son named John Bobson or even Bob Bobson. Not that this is unusual in, for instance, Iceland.
• Affably Evil: The game gives bonuses for virtuous traits, such as being kind, humble, or charitable. However, having these traits does nothing to stop you from ordering the murder of children or amassing territory through brutal conquest. The trait-modelling system itself can occasionally cough up a charitable, soft-spoken young man whose chief hobby is impaling people on stakes. Crusader Kings III changes traits to attempt to remove these oddities; a truly kind character will balk at executing people, and doing so will cause them stress, and might cause a mental breakdown if done enough.
• The Ageless: The Reaper's Due includes one supernatural event chain that allows your character to go on a quest for immortality, which will protect them from the effects of aging and illness (though they're still vulnerable to crippling or mortal injuries). There's a large chance (about 80%), however, that the quest-giver will be a fraud, dooming you to mortality no matter what you do. Alternatively, the event chain may end with you dying and being reincarnated as a newborn child.
• A.I. Roulette: The A.I characters make decisions based on random weights. These random weights are based on their traits, and they may make bad decisions if their traits give them a low rationality score (see below).
  Darkrenown: The AI doesn't actually have a plan for prisoners, it just periodically picks something to do to them. It could be torture, release, or it could be torture, torture, torture. [1]
• The Alcoholic: Some characters may become Drunkards, which negatively impacts their Stewardship skills since they spend so much of their waking life under the influence. It also affects their personal combat skills for battles and duels.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: No matter how carefully you choose your plotters, there's always going to be that one plotter who blabs the whole thing while he's in his cups...
• All Jews Are Ashkenazi: Even though the Jews are introduced in Sons of Abraham, this trope is averted when you account for the Khan of Khazaria in 867 or the Duke of Khazars under the Tengri Cumanians in 1066 - both, naturally, have Turkic cultures. Rajas Of India, which expanded East Africa, introduces the very Ethopian Duke of Axum in 867 and the Duke of Axum in 1066 for more variety. Furthermore, Jewish courtiers also come with Sephardim cultures.
• All Myths Are True:
  • Just about every ruler of dubious historicity and every distant dynastic connection only attested in sources written centuries after the fact is given the benefit of the doubt and represented in the game. For example, ninth-century Lithuania is ruled by the Palemonids, most Irish counts are linked to Conn of the Hundred Battles, the future kings of Sweden are said to be descended from the legendary Viking leader Ragnar Lodbrok, and the Arpad kings of Hungary are presented as relatives of the Khans of Old Great Bulgaria. Justified by the fact that the lack of sources in most of these cases means that the alternative is just making people up entirely, and that in the eras covered, the people involved did take such claims seriously. Following the Charlemagne DLC, Ragnar Lodbrok is actually playable.
  • If supernatural events are turned on, it's revealed that mythological characters like Arthur, Cain and a Valkyrie are real in this universe, albeit as biological immortals rather than gods.
• Alien Space Bats: The 'Sunset Invasion' DLC for Crusader Kings 2 involves the Aztecs invading Europe in the 13th century. Yes, really. From a gameplay standpoint, it balances out the fact that Western Europe rarely has to worry about the arrival of the various Hordes in the east which can decimate eastern nations.
• All There in the Manual: Of a sort - if a character has a basis in historical records and has a Wikipedia entry, the game usually allows you to click an external link to go to that entry (some articles use differing names, which breaks this). Which wiki it points to is moddable, so total conversions and Game Mods can have links to the relevant wiki.
• Allowed Internal War: With higher Legalism technology you can pass laws (Crown Authority without Conclave, Vassal War Declaration with) restricting or eliminating the ability of your de jure vassals^note That is, vassals that are (in game terms) traditionally considered part of the lands under your held titles. to declare war either on each other or on foreign lands. This represents the strength of the liege compared to his vassals and the development of codified laws. With Conclave you can also use your council to "Enforce Realm Peace", which blocks all vassal war declarations for a period of time and ends any wars in progress.
• Altar Diplomacy: A huge part of the games is marrying off your children to the right people (while arranging a few deaths on the way) so that your heirs can inherit. A variety of systems of inheritance makes this a bit more complicated than it might seem.
  • Before the 2.5.1 patch concurrent with Conclave marriages were required for alliances, the patch altered this: marriage ties are now a bonus to your ability to negotiate with other rulers for an alliance rather than the sole raison d'etre.
• Alternate History Wank: While the start scenarios are quite historically accurate, the AI characters don't care much about what their real-life counterparts did. The games are driven almost entirely by random events and dynastic politics which means that every game will quickly divert from real-world history, even in regions where the player isn't meddling at all. The one example that takes the cake, however, is the Aztec Empire of the Sunset Invasion DLC, which not only shows up centuries early but also conquers most of the Americas offscreen before suddenly invading the Atlantic coast of Western Europe in the thirteenth century (or thereabouts). Bear in mind that this is meant to be every bit as ridiculous as it sounds and was done to counterbalance the Mongol invasions, which disproportionately affect the eastern side of the map.
• Amazonian Beauty: The "strong" and "brawny" traits grant a bonus to attraction opinion.
• Ambiguously Bi: Characters with the "homosexual" trait can and will still marry and have children. On top of that, a combination of the "homosexual" and "lustful" traits results in a fertility stat higher than that of a character with neither trait. This can be explained one of two ways: either it's a case of them fulfilling their dynastic obligations despite not actually swinging that way, or it represents the outdated idea that homosexuality was something people did rather than an inherent quality of an individual, which leads to people attracted to both genders being considered people who perform homosexual acts.
• Ambition Is Evil: Downplayed. The "Ambitious" trait provides boosts to several stats, but causes the character to -25 dislike anybody getting in the way of said ambition (typically the liege, especially if they control a title you want); you also get a mutual -5 with anybody else who has the trait. Ambitious vassals are therefore more prone to revolt. It's not so much ambition making you evil as it is ambition making you a jerkass.
• Anachronism Stew: Mostly averted except for when game mechanics require the use of anachronistic terms. The most obvious example is the cultures mechanic, which, for example, differentiates between "Castillian" and "Portuguese" cultures. Such distinctions were not so obvious during the game's timeframe (even after the foundation of the Kingdom of Portugal as a separate entity from Spanish Castille and Leon) and cultural-linguistic similarities between the two cultures exist in Galicia until this very day. The fact that the game covers seven centuries, significant portions of three continents, and multiple culture groups means that many things are simplified out of necessity compared to how they worked in the real world.
  • The images for holdings, such as castles and cities, varies only based on culture, not time period or geography. So you have stone castles for Italian rulers in 769 and Norse and Russian rulers still using wooden forts in 1400, as well as Persian castles on desert in the plains of England, Malian castles in a jungle in the Central Asian steppes, and Tibetan mountain castles in the middle of the Sahara if the right culture flips happen.
  • There's an event for yourself as a child that depicts you reading the Bible under a tree. Before the printing press was invented, bibles were extremely rare, and copies had to be made by hand. Usually, they were kept in monasteries, rarely translated into the vernacular language, and even if you were wealthy enough to buy a copy, having one could bring down the wrath of the clergy.
  • Also, Coats of Arms appeared among the noble families of Western Europe during the 12th century; seeing every noble houses in the game (even pagan ones) having their own in 1066 is a bit early, not to mention the Charlemagne (769) and Old Gods (867) bookmarks. There are specific questionable examples here, too:
    • The symbol representing Sunni Islam is the crescent moon and star, which was actually derived from the flag of the Ottoman Empire which didn't exist until the tail end of the game's timeline. However, this makes sense as an interface element as it is a symbol that most modern audiences would associate with Islam (more so than more traditional symbols based on Arabic calligraphy).
    • The coat of arms for the Kingdom of England, three lions rampant, is actually the heraldry of The House of Plantagenet, which didn't take over England until 1154 (over halfway through the playable timeline). Conventionally the symbol of England is St. George's Cross, although that didn't really come into use until Edward I (three generations, four kings, and one century later).
  • The Irish culture's unique unit, Gallowglass heavy infantry, are available to any non-tribal Irish ruler (tribals only being blocked by their low retinue cap). In real life the term Gallowglass (from Irish gall óglaigh, "foreign warriors") originally referred to Scots-Norse aristocrats who emigrated to Ireland after being unlanded for being on the losing side of the Wars of Scottish Independence in the 1200s, offering their services as mercenaries to local rulers.
  • A good one are some of the mercenary companies available in the second game such as the Swiss Band or the Swiss Company; The region today contained in Switzerland wouldn't start exporting armed men as mercenaries until the late 15th century (i.e. the end of the covered timeline), and it would take another three or so centuries before the term "Swiss" would be officially adopted in any way.
  • It is apparently also possible to found settlements that wouldn't exist until the 20th century (f.e. Jewish Moshavim in the Holy Land, complete with Hebrew names).
  • Iceland is inhabited in the second game's 769 start date, despite the fact that Iceland was actually uninhabited at this period in history - the first permanent inhabitants didn't settle there until about a century later. Enforced due to game mechanics not allowing for entirely uninhabited provinces that aren't impassable wastelands or ocean. This was fixed in a later patch where it was changed to a Catholic theocracy- to represent the Papars, a group of Irish monks who are believed to have inhabited the island even before Norse settlement.
  • The manure explosions are a more egregious example than the others- methane explosions like the ones in game happen only on modern pigfarms, and other areas with enormous amounts of fecal waste. They wouldn't have been possible with Medieval tech [2].
  • A downplayed example: Catholic and Orthodox Christianity are always shown as being separate entities, and if you are Orthodox, you can even mend the schism yourself. Even in the 769 bookmark - almost three centuries before the schism occurred in real life. Some extension mods replace this with "Chalcedonian Christianity", but this is debatable, too: while ostensibly the same church, eastern and western Christianity had already developed significant practical differences, which were magnified after the foundation of the Carolingian Empire and Charlemagne's alliance with the Bishop of Rome (the office that became what is now the Catholic Papacy). The problem, in short, is that both portrayals are simplifications of a complex, dynamic, and multifaceted relationship — the question isn't so much "Which one is right?" as "Which one is 'less wrong'?"
    • Some mods arguably do a more accurate version of this: While they have the two Churches start out as a unified Chalcedonian Christianity, each priest of the religion automatically gets a trait indicating which branch (Latin or Greek) they belong to, simulating the fact that they were officially the same church, but that the two branches were already significantly different.
  • The presence of syphilis is in the second game is entirely anachronistic — the disease was first attested more than forty years after the game's end date and is considered most likely to have been brought to Europe from the New World by Columbus's men.
    • In Reaper's Due the game hedges its bets by modelling both theories of syphilis's origins, using two syphilis traits in the game's files, European Great Pox, and the more serious epidemic of Aztec Disease, which occurs if Sunset Invasion is active.
  • When playing as a child, upon coming of age and completing your education, you'll say a line related to the education focus and your level of proficiency. Almost all of the lines are quotes, but several are anachronistic:
    • "Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment." (Diplomacy level 2 - The Godfather Part III, 1990)
    • "Speak softly and carry a big stick." (Diplomacy level 3 - Theodore Roosevelt, 1858-1919)
    • "The best way to keep one's word is not to give it." (Diplomacy level 4 - Napoleon Bonaparte, 1769-1821)
    • "Learning never exhausts the mind." (Learning level 3 - Leonardo Da Vinci, 1452-1519)
    • "Events which cannot be prevented must be directed." (Intrigue level 4 - Klemens von Metternich, 1773-1859)
    • "War is a continuation of politics." (Martial level 4 - Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831)
• Ancestor Veneration: Added an ancestor worship decision in an update to "defensive" pagan faiths (Baltic, Finnish, Slavic, and West African). Once every ten years, pagan rulers can sacrifice either money, their own limbs, or a human life in exchange for Piety, and possibly additional effects.
• Ancient Tomb: The Great Pyramid of Khufu and the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus are both present in the game as Great Works. Additionally, independent rulers can build their own Mausoleums.
• Animalistic Abomination: Immortal and insane rulers who make their horse immortal may have to contend with attempts on their life by Incitatus, Trampler of Nations. A bloodthirsty immortal talking horse whose centuries of existence have made him far more powerful than any mortal horse, and more intelligent than the vast majority of humans. Particularly diplomatic characters have the opportunity to recruit him for his impressive array of skills.
• Anti-Climax: Get a famous historical figure like Charlemagne or Ragnar Loddbrok, or a character with a really good trait like Genius? Be ready to see them either die young, die in their first battle, or catch some kind of deadly disease like cancer.
• The Antichrist: There's an event chain in Sons of Abraham recreating The Omen which may end up in you playing as the spawn of Satan himself and ruling a dark, unholy kingdom, backed up by the forces of The Hecate Sisters of Circe, Morganna and Jezebel.
  • Villainous Lineage: If your son has the demon spawn trait, then he will grow up to be evil. Even if you educate him to be good, his sixteenth birthday will see him lose all his good traits and replace them with evil traits. If you play as the demon child you can try to play him as though he were a good person, possibly subverting his satanic lineage.
• Appeal to Force: The Faction system allows angry vassals to gang up on their ruler and force him to change "The Rules" to their liking if they can beat their liege in a rebellion (or if the ruler is weak enough he'll accept their ultimatum). Usually, the demands will be about either a change in Succession Law or Lower Crown Authority, though some wish to replace the ruler with a claimant.
• Apocalypse Cult: With The Reaper's Due, one of the side effects of the Black Plague epidemic is the rise of a "prophet of doom" who blames the nobility's excesses for the epidemic. If left to his own devices, he'll gather a cult and eventually incite a rebellion against your rule.
• Apocalyptic Log: The title history for unstable kingdoms can come off as this, with the title going from legitimate king to powerful duke to pretender and back again over the course of a few years.
  • The map itself can come across as this, depending on your point of view. It can be very unnerving to see religious enemies or the Mongol hordes painting the map as they advance towards you.
• "Arabian Nights" Days: All of the peoples of North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant are lumped into a single Arabic cultural group with four cultures (Bedouin, Berber, Egyptian and Levantine), which is a significant understatement of the true cultural diversity in the region. However, Berbers have the distinction of being the only culture within this group which can raid, potentially starting the age of the Barbary pirates a few centuries earlier.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Characters are limited to 10 living and legitimate children. After reaching this number, the fertility of any ongoing marriages or relationships the character has is set to 0^note basically, the chance of pregnancy in an active marriage/concubine relationship is rolled for on a monthly basis. There is, however, no limit on the number of illegitimate children, and most pregnancies by affair are rolled for via event using the baseline fertility of the characters involved (in earlier versions, oversights in the code lead to any such event having the chance of pregnancy, with predictable effects).
• Arch-Enemy: Characters can gain rivals, either through random events or after getting caught trying to screw them over in some way. Rivals get a massive mutual opinion malus, making it unlikely they'll ever see one another in a positive light, and are more likely to plot against one another.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: One of the events that fires as a Lunatic ruler has you choose between several new laws to enact in the realm. These are "The Turnip Act," which declares turnips the currency of the realm instead of precious metals; "The Pants Act," which forbids the wearing of pants; "The Hole In The Wall Act," which mandates two man-sized holes be placed in every building to ensure the flow of fresh air; and "The Cessation of Violence Act," which... makes it illegal to torture or execute infidels and foreigners.
• Artifact of Doom: An event chain for Indian rulers in Rajas of India has you create one, in the form of a Hope Diamond expy.
• Artifact Title: Zig-zagged. The DLCs for the second game allow you to play as a heathen, a plutocrat, or centuries before the Crusades began (even with the early Crusade triggers, from the Charlemagne start date, it's still 131 years until the very earliest Crusades can begin in defense of Christianity), and even the original game allowed you to play as a non-royal noble, a non-Crusading Orthodox ruler, or a woman. However, there's plenty of kings going on crusades throughout most of the game, even if you're not one of them. Furthermore, most non-Catholic religions get their own means of waging holy war on unbelievers. Finally, said heathens and plutocrats are only available to the player if they decided to spring for the DLC; those who choose only to play the base game only have access to Christian feudal lords, as was the case in the original game.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • Before the system was reworked, the AI had no clue how to deal with the Decadence system for Muslim rulers in Crusader Kings II. As such, most of the larger Muslim dynasties had a nasty tendency to implode if left in the hands of the AI for too long. After the reworking, male relatives no longer automatically generate decadence (only doing so if they have the Decadent trait), making it much easier for the AI to handle the system. Unfortunately this also makes certain large Muslim realms (e.g. the Umayyads in the Charlemagne 769 AD bookmark) annoyingly hard to eliminate without player intervention. 2.6 managed to find a reasonable middle-ground and the Muslims will now sometimes collapse due to decadence and sometimes not.
  • Because of its Back from the Brink nature, there are very few Zoroastrian nobles in the game. Nobles marrying courtiers get huge hits to Prestige, and the AI tries its best to avoid such marriages. In addition, the Zoroastrian AI prefers to set up marriages to close relatives for the boost to vassal relations. The result: it's difficult to ignore the incest when your landed son constantly asks for betrothals to his eight-year-old sisters (who he may or may not be educating).
  • Similarly, some cultures (most notably the Basques and some of the Celtic and Baltic tribes) only have a few provinces at game start and are usually steamrolled by their more formidable neighbors. In particular the game simply doesn't model the logistical issues that made Asturias not worth the Moors' trouble to conquer, so Al-Andalus usually overruns it in early starts unless West Francia and/or Lombardy (or an interested Player Character) are able to intervene.
  • Generally, if you're playing as a vassal of a realm bordering religious enemies or as a patrician of a merchant republic who cannot hold onto the title of Doge, you need to pray that this trope does not happen.
  • AI armies are known to frequently run off to completely unimportant objectives rather than attaching themselves to allied player forces. Or march all the way around the Mediterranean to get to Africa and lose hundreds or thousands of troops to attrition instead of using their ships.
  • AI rulers are hilariously bad at accounting for potential war targets' allies, particularly in the case of the defensive pacts added in 2.5.
  • In Conclave, the AI has no idea how to use the Heritage and Faith focuses properly, and often educates heirs with event-generated courtiers of different cultures or religions. This can have bizarre results such as random Jewish or pagan kingdoms popping up in the middle of Western Europe.
  • In fact, this game is notable for making Artificial Stupidity an individual character trait. Each NPC has a hidden Rationality stat which influences their decisions. Very rational rulers will try to avoid wars they can't win or murder plots they don't benefit from. Rationality is influenced positively by traits like ''Just'',''Patient'', ''Cynical'' and Genius, and decreased by traits like Arbitrary, ''Wroth'', ''Zealous'', Imbecile and especially Lunatic. This for example means that while on paper the historical Charlemagne's stats are very good, his AI isn't very smart, as he always starts with the Zealous trait and no positive Rationality modifiers to compensate, and he will often fail to create his empire because he prematurely starts a war with the Umayyads he can't win.
  • It's possible for a liege to make a vassal who just rebelled against them their spymaster.
• Artistic License – Chemistry: One possible method of assassinating someone is to fill the basement of an inn they're expected to stay in with manure and wait for it to explode. This is pretty much Rule of Funny, as the conditions for this didn't exist in the Middle Ages: hog manure explosions in real life are a side effect of factory farming practices.
• Artistic License – History: Leaving aside the Alternate History Wank caused by the game's reliance on random events and gameplay options that quickly causes history to leave the 'normal' course, the game is overall pretty good at accurate portrayal of starting dates and rulers (aside from areas where we have little data, such as basically anywhere where literacy and genealogy wasn't a big hit yet). Still:
  • The 'Open' succession rule (which is the only one available to Muslims in the second game) is based entirely on a succession law employed by the Ottoman Empire in the 14th to 16th centuries (mostly outside the game's timeframe), and has no bearing on any historical succession practices by any other major Muslim realm. Historically speaking, the Caliphate practiced Elective Monarchy for much of its early existence (this is one of the main splits between Sunni and Shia Islam), and independent realms usually practised primogeniture or seniority succession (as did the Ottomans, once the repeated Succession Crisis of Open succession had caused too many civil wars).
  • The Byzantine Empire is depicted as being reliant on feudal levies like the rest of Medieval Europe. In reality, the Byzantine Empire was such an economic powerhouse that they could afford to maintain a huge professional standing army (they did use levies, but to a much lesser extent). Justinian I was in fact able to reconquer most of the Western Roman Empire's lost territories, but the expense made it impossible for his successors to hold them.
• Artistic License – Religion: Leaving aside the Alternate History Wank caused by the game's reliance on random events and gameplay options such as pagan reformations and the Jews retaking the holy land, the game is overall pretty good at accurate portrayal of religion (aside from faiths where we have little data, such as Eastern European pagan beliefs). Still:
  • The game's portrayal of European Christianity in starts before 1066 is the source of arguments over whether it's appropriate to have Catholicism and Orthodoxy be separate denominations before the Great Schism (when the Pope and the Ecumenical Patriarch excommunicated each other in 1054). Truth is, it's hazy: while in the earliest starts particularly they were officially considered the same church, there were already differences in practice and doctrine such as autocephalous national Orthodox churches^note Essentially each nation's highest cleric pays homage to the Ecumenical Patriarch but in practice governs his own independent hierarchy. This contrasts with the more centralized Catholic church where everybody obeys the Pope. and giving services in the vernacular^note The Catholics insisted on Latin well into the Renaissance when nobody but educated people spoke it, while the Orthodox church was already teaching in the local tongues. Of particular note is Orthodox characters' ability to mend the Great Schism^note making Catholicism into a heresy of Orthodoxy at earlier dates than it actually took place.
  • Outside of Christianity, the game conflates Germanic paganism with Norse paganism (they were related but distinct, especially at the early start dates), and provides little flavor to distinguish Shi'a and Ibadi Islam compared to Sunni Islam.
  • The Yazidis are considered a Sunni heresy in game, despite being completely distinct and independent of Islam in real life. The same issue is present for Manichaeism, which is implemented as a heresy of Zoroastrianism rather than a separate faith. To mitigate this somewhat, Yazidism gets its own set of holy sites and unique creation conditions for its equivalent to the caliph. Jade Dragon likewise gives Manichaeism and other Zoroastrian heresies its own mechanics.
  • On the flip side, Bön is implemented as an organized, pagan religion distinct from the Dharmic/eastern religious branch and counts Buddhists as heathens. While real-life Bön do claim the religion is older than Buddhism's arrival in Tibet, in practice there is no evidence of its existence prior to the 11th century and its current-day incarnation is so intertwined with Buddhist rituals and thought so as to make it more of a Buddhist sect than a distinct religion.
  • With Jade Dragon, the absence of Confucianism/Neo-Confucianism is somewhat noticeable, especially as the entire system of Chinese Meritocracy (which is present in-game) is based on its precepts. All Chinese characters are instead Taoist. This is most likely because creating two new religions entirely for the purpose of an off-screen faction (neither really caught on outside China) would be excessive.
  • The portrayal of the Messalians as not only allowing, but encouraging incest, and having Lucifer listed as one of their Good gods. These are based on claims made by people who were denouncing the sect, who also claimed that they would then take any child born of incest and offer it to Satan, after which they would eat it. Modern scholars agree that these accusations are false.
  • African Paganism is the in-game representation of the paganistic native beliefs of several ethnic groups living in modern-day Niger and Chad, including the Mandé, Hausa and Songhai people. Its selection of deities as of Holy Fury includes Anansi and Vodun patrons, which are features of native religions from the Gulf of Guinea some ways away. This geographical distance applied to Europe would mean the Bolghars (early-game Tengri pagans in modern-day Romania and Bulgaria) would be able to worship Odin and Ukko.
• Ascended Glitch:
  • Conclave modifies the preexisting Caligula's Horse event with Lunatic rulers to make the horse an actual Non-Player Character with "Horse" culture. Though Glitterhoof's "Horse" trait is supposed to both make him/her infertile and prevent him/her from being granted titles, players quickly discovered exploits to switch their dynasty to Horse culture (along with a whole lot of other nonsensical-in-context oddities, such as Glitterhoof plotting a murder or being made a concubine, that usually end up in the forum's Strange Screenshots thread). Upon realizing how funny the players thought the whole thing was, Paradox first announced they would not patch the bugs around Glitterhoof, then in Reaper's Due they added an additional horse and an event chain where you could make either of them immortal (which may lead to you being attacked by an immortal stallion named Incitatus after Caligula's actual horse). Jade Dragon added cat and bear NPCs with whom you can do many of the same things. Holy Fury has an "Animal Kingdoms" option for random world generation, which prepopulates the world with entire playable realms of horses, cats, dogs, elephants, ducks, bears, hedgehogs, red pandas and even dragons alongside human realms. And in the 3.1 "Great Works" update, one of the ways to unlock the ability to build a statue of a horse as a great work is to be of Horse culture (the others being either Nomadic government, or a Lunatic).
  • Holy Fury's new duel system allowed characters to escape an incoming Curb-Stomp Battle by dropping an artifact from their inventory and making a run for it while the opponent got the artifact. This system forgot to make exceptions for armour. Paradox quickly took note, but instead of fixing it added a unique event text if your opponent decided to strip naked to escape you.
  • A longtime bug with an event where a Mook Commander is killed in battle by another commander when no opposing commander existed led to the game recording the character as having died in battle against himself. Rather than fix it, PDX eventually added an event pop-up that the character mistakenly fell on his own sword.
• Ascended Meme:
  • Sunset Invasion's ahistorical Aztec invasion^note The Aztec Empire didn't exist until the very end of the game's timeline and no First Peoples cultures had shipbuilding technology sufficient to cross the Atlantic. led to wisecracks that the next DLC should include undead Vikings. Come The Old Gods and the Flavor Text for the "Viking" trait (gained by raiding as a Germanic pagan) includes a comment that tales are told of Player Character and his undead warriors.
  • The "secret bears" meme originated as a joke by Paradox's Darkrenown. Jade Dragon added an actual event where a courtier turns out to have been a bear all along, somehow.
• Asian Babymama: It is possible to seduce characters with cultures and even religions different from your own^note If a character is of another religion group you can only seduce them if they are in your court, but the resulting illegitimate children will have the culture and religion of their mother. This can make it problematic to legitimize them, because French Catholic vassals will resent being ruled by a Berber Sunni bastard.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership:
  • Differs from the first game significantly; the "Invasion" casus belli works like this. Essentially, you petition the Pope/Ecumenical Patriarch/Caliph/other relevant religious authority to sanction an ass-kicking to steal someone else's title. If succeeded you will get a strong claim on the target. This is exceptionally powerful because the claim can be a regal or even imperial one and typically you only get a ducal claim at best. This however only works if you're smaller than the target, or you have a corresponding weak claim already. If the invasion is successful you even get a nickname for it!
  • The Adventurer system and Peasant Rebellions also allows for unlanded title claimants to amass their personal army to invade you for land.
  • Pagan rulers from The Old Gods or Holy Fury DLC can invade any single province that borders their lands and claim it without giving a hoot for any of this "legal basis" business. The Norse can do this to any non-Pagan coastal province.
  • This trope can be seen from a different point: when a ruler crushed a rebellion against his rule by a pretender or some disloyal vassals, the other vassals' opinion of him increases significantly. Therefore, these vassals will less likely join factions or rebel against their suzerain. In fact, it's a recurring scenario throughout the game (and real life, occasionally): the old wise king dies after a long reign of prosperity and peace, and his young son faces an obvious choice: show his vassals who is the boss by vehemently crushing any opposition to his rule, or see his kingdom fall into chaos of internal conflicts, being overthrown by his relative or have his land fall apart as the 'Independence' faction win war against him.
  • If a ruler is sufficiently more powerful than their vassals, the vassals will not join a faction against their ruler, even if they dislike their ruler and aren't barred by council laws from joining factions, as they know who is the boss and that revolt against their liege would be a Hopeless War.
  • A powerful vassal can use their asskicking capability to demand that they be installed as liege, even if they don't have a claim, and if the liege doesn't step down, said powerful vassal and anyone who backs them may attempt to seize authority via kicking the ass of the person who currently holds nominal authority.
• Authority in Name Only:
  • The concept of "Crown Authority" measures how much power a king holds over the nobility - A king with little or no crown authority can't even revoke vassal titles or prevent nobles from waging independent wars.
  • Conclave replaces Crown Authority with a set of discrete Council Power laws which determine whether the ruler can take certain actions (declaring wars, handing out titles, executing or releasing prisoners, etc.) without submitting them before the Council for a vote. Trying to rule the realm with an uncooperative council that vetoes everything you want to do is a challenge in and of itself, and while they can be overridden, this incurs a tyranny penalty and makes the council non-content, which allows council members to join factions.
  • Independent dukes and counts can disregard the crown laws of their de jure kingdom if the king of said kingdom is of another religion.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: The Crown Authority mechanic encapsulates this trope. The higher it is, the better a ruler is able to keep his vassals in line, preventing them from launching independent wars, attacking one another (overtly), or passing their titles to another ruler's vassal by inheritance when they die.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Establishing a fief in the Holy Land, even if it is the Kingdom of Jerusalem itself. Not only does it usually require a costly war several thousands of miles from your home province, but the area is throughout history the epicenter of attention from several political and military superpowers with different religions to your own (Egypt, the Byzantine Empire, the Seljuks, and the Mongol Hordes, to name a few), but the conquered provinces need to be converted religiously and defending yourself in case you're attacked is annoyingly difficult because the provinces are relatively sparsely inhabited and not particularly wealthy (which makes raising a sizable army next to impossible). This is even more pronounced in the first game where every province far and wide counts as Desert Terrain and makes establishing a solid infrastructure mechanically impossible unless it already exists.
  • In the second game, creating an empire as a feudal king is surprisingly this. II features a mechanic knows as "de jure shift", which when successful increases the amount of levies you can raise from a vassal whose capital lies in the region which your primary title has just assimilated. However, a kingdom may only assimlate duchies, while an empire may only assimilate kingdoms. Since kingdoms are often larger than duchies, you have to spend more effort conquering in order to secure a kingdom vs a duchy. Also, the bonus from being in the same de jure empire (which assimilated kingdoms count as) is smaller than the bonus from being in the same kingdom (which assimilated duchies count as).
• Awesome Moment of Crowning:
  • Coronation is an important part of every Catholic and Fraticelli king and emperor's reign with Holy Fury enabled. If the king or emperor has not yet been crowned, they get a stacking opinion penalty with all of their Catholic vassals and don't get a crown on their portrait or to equip any crown artifact they may possess. While a ruler can be crowned by a low or high ranking Catholic or Fraticelli bishop for relatively small demands and to quickly remove the uncrowned penalty, to truly have an Awesome Moment of Crowning, getting crowned by the Pope (or Fraticelli Pope) himself is clearly the only way to go, though the Pope may make significant demands of a ruler before deciding that personally crowning them is worthy of the Vicar of Christ's time. The awesomeness of the coronation has long-term effects, as the higher the rank of the priest doing the crowning, the more monthly piety and prestige the ruler gets and the larger the opinion boost they get with their clergy, and potentially even their vassals.
  • There is also an alternate method of crowning that is arguably more awesome, not for how pious or proper it is, but rather, for its brazen defiance of the Pope's divine right to determine rightful rule - with the right traits (possessed, lunatic, ambitious while ruling with imperial authority, or as a member of a satanist cult), it is possible for an emperor to steal their crown from the Pope and crown themself, declaring that they give themselves the right to rule, rather than the Church. This is worth twice as much prestige as a Papal coronation and a significant opinion boost with feudal vassals, but pisses off the Clergy and both the current Pope and future Popes and is the only coronation trait that loses piety. This is based on the historical (albeit anachronistic) crowning of Napoléon Bonaparte as Emperor of the French in 1804.
  • Having a "Become King of [Kingdom]" Ambition, taking control of enough territories to create said kingdom, then doing so, makes you "King by your own hand" as it were, and are your ruler's first steps towards carving their name into the history books.
• Ax-Crazy: Beware keeping "Schizophrenic" or "Crazed" characters in your court for very long. "Possessed" characters frequently plot assassinations that don't benefit them in any obvious way.
• Babies Make Everything Better: Not losing the game literally depends on your character procreating.
• Baby Factory:
  • Surprisingly subverted. Women don't normally get priority in inheritance or lead armies (though female rulers can). However, they can still be given certain titles, and it's particularly common for a ruler to name his wife the realm's spymaster. Naming one's wife as spymaster can be dangerous, usually only worth it if the wife has incredible intrigue and/or is in love, ensuring the loyalty needed in a spymaster. A ruler can also appoint his mother as the spymaster (Charlemagne himself does), and the huge mother-to-child relationship bonus is very beneficial here. Muslim rulers can appoint one of their secondary wives as well. Conclave takes it further by allowing you to enact laws granting expanded rights to women, including allowing them to take council posts other than spymaster.
  • Inverted for any Pagan faith with the Enatic Clans doctrine, which limits inheritance to female-only or female-preference, bans men from the council, disallows granting landed titles to men who don't already hold land, restricts most gender-limited minor titles, such as commanders to women, and allows ruling women to take men as consorts, similar to the concubinage practiced by most Pagan faiths and tribal and nomadic realms. At this point, men have little role in society other than providing genetic material to produce offspring and giving a small stat boost to their wives.
• Back from the Brink:
  • Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Zunism all start the game with a very small selection of independent rulers surrounded on all sides by aggressive religious enemies. Restoring the Kingdom of Israel, becoming the Saoshyant (which involves restoring the Persian Empire to its traditional borders as a Zoroastrian), and reforming the Zunist faith and ruling an "Empire of the Sun," respectively, are considered significant achievements.
  • Depending on your starting date, you can get to play as some of the last Pagan rulers, who are already in the process of losing their last lands to the Christian lords, and depending on your choices, you may be able to restore and reform their respective religions. For example, in the default 1066 start date, Slavic Paganism has been reduced to a pair of independent dukes in Pomerania, Bön is down to a small handful of counties left, and there are no independent Germanic pagans above count rank. One of the most extreme possible cases, however, is the Fourth Crusade start (1204), at which time, there is a single Germanic pagan ruler left in the world, and his (dirt poor) county has been converted to Catholicism.
  • The goal of the "Heathenous Ways" achievement - as Jarl Erik 'the Heathen' af Munso in the Stamford Bridge start (the highest ranking Germanic pagan left at that time), become king of Sweden (overthrowing the Catholic Stenkiling family) and reform the Germanic faith.
• Back from the Dead: Not people-related, but religion. There are zero Hellenic characters alive when the game starts, and the only Hellenic province is found tucked away in a corner of Greece at the 769 start, and usually converts to Orthodoxy within a few turns. However, in the Holy Fury expansion, an Italian or Greek character who rules a Hellenic holy site can delve into the works of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and decide that hey, those gods are pretty cool and I should worship them and maybe bring back their religion! Alternatively, a Greek or Italian ruler who restores the Roman Empire gets a one-time decision to bring back the old gods, fighting a massive civil war against his own realm. If you win, Hellenism will be in a fairly strong position to immediately reform the religion. If you lose the war, you lose your head, and if your heir isn't Christian, you lose the game, period- the Christians who beat you aren't about to crown your Pagan heir, after all.
• Badass Preacher: Like other rulers, holders of religious holdings can lead troops into combat.
• Bad "Bad Acting": The last of the Seven Deadly Sins trailers, intentionally so.
• Balkanize Me:
  • With Jade Dragon, having extremely high favour with the Chinese emperor allows you to ask them to invade a realm of your choice. They will do so with the "Shatter Realm" CB, which on victory destroys ALL Empire and Kingdom level titles in the realm, potentially reducing a continent-spanning Holy Roman Empire into dozens of independent duchies.
  • Also with Jade Dragon, it is possible to declare war on the emperor of China (only when China is stable or better), and if you lose, your realm gets shattered in addition to the other effects of losing.
  • Winning a dynamic Crusade for Thrace against the Byzantine Empire (modeling the Fourth Crusade) destroys the Byzantine Empire, reducing the Byzantine Emperor to their next-highest title, freeing most of their vassals, and creating an independent kingdom of Trebizond, while the victorious Catholics establish the Latin Empire.
• Barbarian Hero:
  • The Old Gods introduces adventurers, who can be both significant threats and potential allies.
  • The Horse Lords expansion added deeper mechanics for steppe hordes (nomads), including a unique mechanic where sons are sent to become wandering mercenaries.
• Bastard Bastard: Bastards cannot inherit unless a parent legitimizes them (the AI rarely does this, as it makes legitimate children and spouses very angry), but do inherit claims to parents' titles (particularly if the father is known) which may lead them to try to overthrow ruling half-siblings by faction or adventure.
• Battle Couple: As a female ruler, part of a Cathar or Messalian (or any form of Paganism that has the Equality or Harmonious doctrine (Enatic Clans, however, doesn't work, as it bars men from being commanders)) realm, or by passing the equal rights for women law in Conclave, women can lead troops in battle. It's also possible to make her husband another Mook Commander and put them on the same battlefield. It's even possible for the wife to become pregnant on the campaign trail and lead troops into battle while pregnant!
• The Beard: An event chain deals with rumors about your character being a closet homosexual. You can then choose to embrace them and become a homosexual, or prove them wrong by visiting several brothels and becoming a "whoremaster".
• Beauty Is Best: In the game if you play as a ruler who is Just, Kind and Diligent (some of the most popular character traits) you are still not as well liked as if you play as a young queen who is simply Attractive. (The young queen herself falling under Attractiveness Discrimination).
• Belief Makes You Stupid: Generally inverted
  • Being Buddhist by default increases Learning stat of all characters by a hefty +4. To put that into perspective, Scholar, a life defining trait gained after decade or so of studying, is +3 and that's already a lot. When this gets paired with Tibetan culture, it offers additional bonus in form of ability to build Gompa Monasteries, directly furthering tech spread and cultural research. Buddhist have far easier time to write books, too, since that action requires by default 8 learning - it's near impossible to be below that value as a Buddhist.
  • A focus on theology increases your Learning stat. The one place where this trope does apply is when you're building an observatory to study astronomy, which is likely to lead to you finding answers about the heavens that don't align with official doctrine.
  • The only situation when this is played straight is AI point of view. Zealous trait is one of the biggest tankers of Rationality rating, making AI characters with it doing 'really stupid things. We are talking about declaring a holy war against continent-spanning empire due to different religions, while being a dirty poor speck on the map.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension:
  • There is one event chain that starts with a neighbour complaining, potentially followed by you sending roses, potentially followed by romance.
  • Additionally the attraction opinion modifiers always have effect. So if you are playing as a male (or a homosexual female) then your opinion of a woman whose traits include strong, brawny, attractive, seductress, gregarious, and socializer will be 110 points higher due to sexual attraction. If said woman is your rival (which gives a -100 opinion malus) then your combined opinion of her will be a net positive 10.
  • If you have a rival is the correct sexual orientation, and you raise their opinion of you, then you can seduce him or her. If you choose to have them as a regular lover then they'll still be your rival at the same time.
• The Berserker: If your character is a Viking, they can become one in battle and gain a trait for it. This gives their martial and personal skill a substantial boost, but reduces their diplomacy.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: Averted, to much hilarity. Events in the Conclave and Reaper's Due expansions add horse characters as Non Player Characters, generated by events connected to Lunatic lieges. Due to a programming oversight, a number of events don't check whether the participating Non Player Characters have the "Horse" trait or culture. Which means characters with the "Lustful" trait may try to seduce the horse, or even make them a concubine if they meet the requirements.
• BFS: As of the 3.1 patch, characters of specific cultures^note Germanic, Latin, Celtic, and Iberian who also have a Great Fortress wonder with an armory can have their smith specially create a two-handed sword for them. It requires both the proper culture and either very high personal combat skill or to be brawny, strong, or a giant, but provides tremendous bonuses as compared to other smithed weapons.
• Big Fancy Castle: The Grand Fortress is a castle large enough to qualify as a Great Work, and which greatly adds to the fort level of whichever county it is in.
• Big Fancy House:
  • Patricians in The Republic get a family palace that is treated as a completely separate holding from those that are on the map. Like any other holding, it can be upgraded to provide bonuses to income, levies, and other areas. It also has unique structures that improve character attributes and, in one case, fertility as well.
  • Since patch 3.1, one of the buildings available to an independent ruler of any government is the Royal Palace. It's highly expensive to build, but it can provide many bonuses to it's owner.
• Big Friendly Dog: If you get the hunting dog from the Hunting focus and then switch to the Family focus, one possible event has the dog becoming best buddies with children in your court.
• Big Fun: Fat characters who lead a Carousing lifestyle can get a special “Munificent” opinion modifier, that improves Diplomacy as well. It’s a great way to make friends with your vassals and courtiers.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: Due to the nature of the gameplay, you'll almost certainly end up like this.
  • The plot mechanic introduced in the sequel means everyone is plotting against everyone. That includes heirs, wives and brothers-in-law all attempting to stab you in the back simultaneously. If you're not the plotting type, your poor king can sometimes come across as the Only Sane Man in a cast of psychopaths.
  • The Sword of Islam expansion compounds on this by allowing up to four marriages for Muslim rulers (and punishing powerful rulers who have less than four marriages), all of which can produce legitimate children. This means a lot of plotting by wives trying to maneuver their own child into becoming heirs. Another notable addition is the decadence mechanic for Muslim dynasties, which can potentially cause problems for dynasties with unlanded males. The only things worse than plotting family members are plotting family members with land and armies...and family members who disgrace their family name by sitting around the palace drinking and chasing servant girls.
  • The Old Gods expansion makes Zoroastrians playable - not only are sibling and parent-child marriages among them permitted, but are highly encouraged, netting a nice piety and vassal opinion boost if your ruler enters such a marriage. Unlike other faiths, children of incestuous Zoroastrian unions are five times less likely to have the "Inbred" trait, but five times more likely to have the "Lunatic" trait.
• Bill... Bill... Junk... Bill...: Played with in the "Sloth" live action trailer for Crusader Kings II.
• Black Comedy: Event and trait descriptions can be pretty tongue in cheek. Even without those, though, the sheer amount of backstabbing and craziness that your Big, Screwed-Up Family will go through Crosses the Line Twice. In fact, many a After-Action Report uses this as a staple of humour.
• Black Dude Dies First: The Kingdom of Nubia returns from the first game, an Orthodox one-province kingdom on the borders of the Fatimid Caliphate. It is incredibly doomed. The sequel extends the map farther south and adds the Duchy of Axum and Kingdom of Abyssinia, which are only slightly less doomed: Axum/Semien has the added problem of being a Jewish state surrounded by heavily armed Christians.
• Black Vikings:
  • The strictest interpretation is technically possible as of The Old Gods. Even in the base game, though, it's possible for a character to inherit his name, culture, and religion from his native-born father but his looks from his exotic-born mother. Displaced courtiers will also try to find a court that's most similar to their own culture and religion, which is usually fairly nearby but can end up being quite far afield indeed. For instance, Abyssinian Miaphysites ending up in Greece or Asia Minor after the Fatimids steamroll their corner of the world. There's also an event in the Republic DLC that has a Merchant Prince acquire an African wife, which can breed black people into Europe, otherwise the game uses Turkic Portraits to portray people of mixed ancestry.
  • The game considers all pagan religions to be a part of the same "religious group" for marriage purposes, so it is possible to wed your Norse prince to a Tengri princess end up with a Turkish-looking Swede leading Viking raids. This used to allow true Black Vikings as well, although the diplomatic range added later makes it harder.
• Bling of War: Kings and emperors leading troops will get special helmets and armor added to their portraits that have crowns worked into them.
• The Bluebeard/Black Widow: One of the people whose death you can consistently plan is that of your spouse. There's even an achievement for doing so named "Till death does us part."
• Bodyguard Crush: With the Seduction focus, a female (or gay male) character can win over a bodyguard, who can either be promoted to The Squire (and thus a named character) or kept on the side as a bodyguard lover (providing a bonus to the character's Martial skill and ability to uncover plots).
• Bond One-Liner: The button text for most successful murder plots consists of your character making a snarky remark regarding the target's fate.
  blown up in manure explosion: [target] went out with a bang.
  poisoned wine: I think I shall celebrate with... beer.

• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Family focus has no active actions you can take or ongoing event chains, and the events in it mostly give small relationship bonuses with close family and do not fire often. However, staying on the path gives you 20% fertility, +2 diplomacy and +1 health, a close to 100% chance you'll fall in love with your spouse (+50% fertility) and the ability to become The Patriarch or The Matriarch for your dynasty, which gives you an additional +1 diplomacy and +20% fertility, making it the perfect option for rulers who want to live long and leave a healthily growing (and landed) dynasty behind. Unlike Rulership and Theology it also has no downsides; the worst Family focus will do to you is cause you to become Proud.
  • Extracting tribute from neighbours. The attacker is spared the trouble of actually managing the defender as a vassal or his lands (if the war was over territory), and strengthens himself at the expense of the defender.
• Born in the Saddle: Horse Lords adds a Nomadic form of government for steppe tribes to reflect their more fluid and less settled way of life. Nomad armies are heavily structured around cavalry (including the infamous Horse Archer), and horses feature prominently in their special mechanics and event chains.
• Born Under the Sail: In Crusader Kings II, any nation with a lot of coastline can become a serious contender at amphibious warfare, and merchant republics require coastal access to build trade routes, but the true sea kings are the Norse. All counties of Norse culture get free level 1 shipbuilding tech when the "Dawn of the Viking Age" event fires around 790 AD (and start with them in the 867 AD start date), while Germanic pagans (also chiefly Norse, though the Saxons follow the same faith) can sail up major rivers to raid inland and portage ships between them, and may declare county conquest wars against any coastal province (instead of merely ones on their own borders as other pagans, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims can). They also have a slew of traits they earn by raiding.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: There is nothing stopping the player from playing odd religion-government type combinations. Muslim merchant republics? No problem. Buddhist nomads? Possible. However, for them to be playable, you would require the corresponding expansions^note Horse Lords allows nomads of all religions to be played, but the relevant religion DLC is needed once the nomadic clan settles down with a change in governement type..
• Brick Joke:
  • There's an event chain which begins with a neighbour boring you and sending envoys asking for money, and you can nail the envoy's hat on his head or send roses to him. If you nail the hat, you become an impaler and makes everyone around mad at you, with an option at the end of the chain saying something along the lines of "Perhaps I should begin planting roses?"
  • In one of the Improve Intrigue event chains, you can frame a nobody for jewellery theft. Thirty years of in-game time later, your ruler will suddenly wake up in the night and realize the man is still in the dungeons for a crime he didn't commit, and will rush to the dungeons to let him out after a nightmare, while your character takes a hit to their piety. After seeing what a foul condition he is in, you tell the guard to close the door.
• Bros Before Hoes: The friendship modifier between two characters gives a massive +100 relationship bonus, more than any other relationship bonus in the game and significantly more than the Lover bonus (+40).
• Brother–Sister Incest:
  • The "You have fallen in love with X character" event does not check if said character is a family member...
  • A popular Game Mod adds a code that does, with the comment "Ick!"
  • As noted below, a patch for the sequel added the "Divine Blood" parameter specifically to model this for the benefit of modders and for characters worshipping Zoroastrianism.
  • The second game's DLC expansion Way of Life finally allows players of all faiths to pick the Seduction focus and try and woo any character they desire - including their siblings (and marry them if you're a Zoroastrian). Mind you, it's a lot harder to pull off, and your sibling *will* call you out on it if you fail. If you are successful, though, you will be able to marry your sibling/lover and nobody will object. The Power of Love, maybe?
  • With Sons of Abraham, Messalianism, an obscure Gnostic Christian heresy, gets the same Divine Blood mechanic that Zoroastrians get, but they don't get concubines unless they're tribal, meaning even higher odds of inbred heirs.
  • With Holy Fury, any Pagan faith can gain the Divine Blood mechanics on reformation, and Zunism gets a special version that combines it with polygamy.
• Bullying a Dragon: Factions gauge their chance of successfully rebelling based on how many soldiers the members of the faction have in relation to how many you have, without taking gold or alliances into account. This mean your vassals might form a faction and revolt against you thinking they have the advantage, only for your mercenaries to crush them all.
• But Liquor Is Quicker: One of the upgrades for the Patrician's palace in The Republic is the Wine Cellar, which provides a boost to your characters' fertility.
• Buy Them Off: Sometimes, the Pope will offer forgiveness of certain sins in exchange for a substantial cash donation to the Catholic Church. In a more general sense, you can buy indulgences to provide small boosts to your character's piety. You can also do this if the Pope demands that you switch to Papal Investiture without angering him further.

C to E

• Cadre of Foreign Bodyguards: You can recruit landless foreign noblemen and use them as Mook Commanders. They usually have to be in your own religious group (otherwise the fact that you're infidels relative to each other tends to put the noble's Relationship Values below the required threshold), and it helps if they have a claim on a title that they think you might help them win, but it's completely possible to be an Irish Catholic duke with a Greek or African general leading your army.
  • Byzantine rulers can create the Varangian guard as a vassalized mercenary company. If you're a Norse ruler, your unlanded sons may ask to serve there, and refusing them causes you to take a prestige penalty.
• Cain and Abel: Really, it's more a question of which brothers won't try to kill you for the inheritance.
• The Caligula: It's perfectly possible to have one of these leading your dynasty, sometimes at your discretion and sometimes... not.
  • In a nod to the historical Caligula, rulers with the "Lunatic" trait in the sequel can, among other things, appoint their horse to important council positions.
  • Taken even further with a particularly rare event chain added in Reaper's Due, which allows you to end up meeting Caligula's actual horse, Incitatus (and yes, that would make him extremely old he is immortal)
• Caligula's Horse: Lunatic event chains in "Conclave" allow you to gain horses as courtiers. Apparently they can be pretty good ones too. If you find a way to make your horse immortal, Caligula's actual horse will show up and challenge you to a duel to the death.
• The Can Kicked Him: The apparent fate of those who die from dysentery, as the tooltip on their character portrait states they died "while attending to 'chamber business'". There's also an assassination plot where you blow someone up with manure.
• Cardboard Prison: You can transfer prisoner to house arrest but they'll have a very high chance to escape.
• Career-Ending Injury: There's a chance that a character leading troops into battle may suffer a particularly bad blow to the head that renders them incapable, meaning they'll need a regent if they happen to be the ruler.
• The Casanova: The Way of Life DLC gives us the Seduction focus, which allows rulers to actively target other characters in order to seduce and sleep with them, and (sometimes) take them on as lovers.
• Cassandra Truth: One of the potential trials of immortality is to steal an item from a shopkeeper. If you get caught, you try to persuade the shopkeeper that you are his liege lord, but the shopkeeper doesn't believe you and has his guards beat you to near death.
• Cast of Snowflakes: Due to a more random generation system, characters in CKII are more individualised as compared to the first game. Furthermore, portraits change in relation to traits (battle scars, boils) or when characters are assigned jobs. Marshals and army leaders wear helmets and armor, dukes wear golden tiaras outside of battle, spymasters wear hoods, blinded characters have dark, ugly voids where their eyes once sat, and so on. DLC content packs expand this further.
• Catchphrase: Characters with the family focus get "Family first!" as a personal motto.
• Catch-22 Dilemma: Due to an Unintentionally Unwinnable bug in Conclave, player characters sometimes end up in a bind where the members of their realm council dislike them because the PC holds too many titles (feudal)/want more land (nomads), then disagree with giving out land because they dislike the PC due to wanting more land. The only reliable solutions are to fire the council altogether (which pisses them off even more) or bribing enough councillors to agree (which can get expensive), though sometimes granting titles to relatives of council members works.
• Category Traitor: Zealous characters take a dim view of their co-religionists having sympathy for other faiths.
• Cats Are Mean: Zigzagged. On the one hand, it's perfectly possible to have a sweet, caring pet cat. On the other, Funny Animal cats in a random world have a bonus to murder plots, and the cat character a mad ruler may make spymaster comes with the Deceitful, Wroth, and Proud traits (while still being a normal cat).
• Celibate Hero: Possible. It will significantly increase your piety, but be careful if you're pressed for offspring. If you were in love with your spouse and s/he dies, you may get an event allowing you to either swear off sex in her memory (granting the trait "Celibate"), or go out partying and try to forget her (granting the overall much better trait "Lustful").
• Challenging the Chief: Attacking a coreligionist most often requires some kind of claim on their title. There's an alternative method in the factions system, which allows vassals to band together against their liege over all manner of grievances.
• Chaotic Stupid: The Arbitrary trait is described as a character that cares little for right and wrong, and choosing things almost at random (it is represented by a six sided die). It also comes with a decent drop in vassal's opinions and stewardship. A lunatic, on the other hand, will do extremely random things (or nods to historical deranged monarchs, such as assigning their horse to the council) and your vassals will LOATHE you for it. Arbitrary can also lead to Stupid Good or Stupid Evil when combined with the Kind or Cruel traits.
• Character Customization: One of the lesser DLCs for the game is a ruler designer that allows you to create and customize your own rulers to replace any of the default ones. Another DLC, released later, allows you to change existing characters names, portraits and dynasty names mid-game.
• The Chessmaster: What truly good players need to be. Nudging a people or two the right way can result in a plan going flawlessly or not. Characters with high Intrigue are also implicitly this.
• Child by Rape: Rulers who follow certain religions can force captive women (and sometimes men) to become their concubines, with all that entails.
• Childhood Friend Romance: Any character who is twelve years old (four years before they count as adults) can fall in love, usually with another minor at the same court. Whether they end up as a Victorious Childhood Friend or not, is another question.
• A Child Shall Lead Them: Especially if the heir of the realm is under 16. Larger realms will feel the pressure especially for younger leaders, as they have low stats (which do grow as the ruler gets older).
  • Furthermore, being subject to an underage ruler is cause for yet another loyalty hit for one's vassals.
  • Not as bad in the sequel, where underage or otherwise incapable-to-rule leaders will be appointed a regent to rule in their stead. However, this introduces new problems.
  • Averted with the merchant republics and nomads in the second game. While children may become heads of their patrician houses or clans, a child can never be elected Doge or become Khagan.
  • A specific example from the second game would be the "Rise of The Shia" event, which triggers if the Shia Caliphate does not exist. It spawns a large doomstack of Shi'ite rebels against a random Sunni ruler, lead by a very young Sayyid who claims to be the Shi'ite Caliph.
• China Takes Over the World: Downplayed. While China will sometimes become expansionist and force other Empires to be tributes, and while it can produce armies far in excess of what most other Empires can field, only realms on the eastern part of the map need worry about this.
• Chokepoint Geography:
  • Patches of no-man's-land are sometimes used to represent impassable peaks on the map, with gaps between them for mountain passes. This is especially evident in the Alps.
  • At a tactical level, commanders may be able to find a chokepoint in battle, limiting how many troops on can face each other on a given flank, helping offset a numerical disadvantage.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Possibly the player, whether it's to advance your power or just because this game provides fertile ground for such behavior. On the NPC side, vassals with the "Ambitious" trait have distinct tendencies this way.
• Church Militant: Crusader Kings II has the various historical holy knightly orders appear as (effectively) mercenaries, whom you hire with Piety instead of Gold and who are only available when fighting infidels. They refuse to attack co-religionists.
  • With the Sons of Abraham expansion, they are once again independent states, and can be a lot more important. Donating money to them gives piety, but you can take a loan as well. Occasionally they make requests for courtiers to join their orders or the rights to build castles in your territory, and it's hard to refuse if you haven't paid the debt. If they get too powerful, banishment is an option, but does NOT reflect well on your character's reputation.
• Churchgoing Villain: Any character who has the Zealous trait on top of any number of interesting combinations of decidedly non-virtuous traits can be this, regardless of what faith they belong to.
• Civil War: Get used to this happening.
• The Clan: Happens more or less by default if a family has upwards from 5 or so members who hold a title (i.e. Gavelkind inheritance will sooner or later result this). All of these family members get a small opinion buff for same dynasty (and were automatic military allies in versions before 2.5), but they also tend to have a design on each other's titles (especially if they're closely related since they'll have claims on their relatives' titles) and frequently send assassins after each other. Some (in)famous historical examples are the Rurikids who collectively rule most or all of Russia divided into half a dozen Grand Duchies and the Karlings who hold most of Central Europe during the 867 start.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Lunatic characters appear to live in their own little bubble of reality, one they share with talking smoked fish and murderous gopher maids. They're also prone to passing laws to ban things like violence and pants for "the salvation of the realm."
• Coitus Uninterruptus: Feast event chains such as pagan religious festivals may lead to one of your guests banging a serving girl in full view of the party. They may get embarrassed and stop, or keep going.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • Crusader Kings II uses different hues of the same colour to indicate similarity in its various map modes. On the political map mode, the Iberian Christian kingdoms for example share similar shades of yellow and red, while their Muslim neighbors are green. Similarly in De Jure Duchies mode, all English, French and German duchies are coloured in different shades of red, blue and white, respectively. The Kingdom of Burgundy is... well, guess.
  • For the Religion map mode, Shi'a and Sunni Muslim are represented by similar but distinct shades of green, while Orthodox Christianity is purple and Catholicism is in white. Heresies have differing shades from their mother religions (e.g. Fraticelli is light brown, while Cathar is light blue). Realms with different religions from their liege have strips across them.
• Comeback Mechanic:
  • Crusades and Jihads can trigger early if core Christian or Islamic lands are threatened, and if this happens, reformed Pagans with religious heads gain their Great Holy War casus belli shortly after in retaliation, and to enforce their use as a Comeback Mechanic, Crusades, Jihads, and Great Holy Wars can be used if their religion has even a paltry 5% Moral Authority and have very high weights for lands that the faith would likely already control if they weren't under threat.
  • Furthermore, when the Crusades begin early, Catholics gain two to four holy orders immediately to help them push back, and the formation of holy orders gives a temporary boost to the religion's Moral Authority. Similarly, when Jihads begin early, Sunni and Ibadi Islam may get their holy orders early depending on which sites were lost to non-Muslims (The Shi'ite holy order, however, only forms after 1089), and if core Indian lands are taken by non-Dharmic faiths, Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism can all get their holy orders without a single ruler controlling all five of their faith's holy sites.
  • Similarly, if one Pagan faith reforms, all Pagan faiths get +5% Moral Authority for several years to encourage a broader Pagan revival and a rallying of all Pagan faiths against the various Abrahamic and Dharmic faiths.
• Comically Inept Healing: Given the state of medieval medicine, some of the treatments (especially the more "experimental" ones) your court physicians can suggest to your sick ruler seem utterly nonsensical or counterproductive. The kicker is, sometimes they work anyway.
• Comically Small Bribe:
  • A random event involves your character selling out someone close to them (permanently denting their relationship) at the behest of one of that character's rivals, in return for a portion of said rival's wealth. If the rival (picked at random) is a courtier with no personal wealth, your character will then sell out their close friend/wife/family member for as much as that courtier can offer... A whole shiny gold piece. And no, you have no option to refuse.
  • Normally, a gift of wealth is scaled to the target's annual income (minimum of 20 ducats). In some versions of the game, giving a gift to someone who newly enters a position is treated as having minimal monthly income and may therefore be subject to a comically small gift that improved relations.
• Composite Character: According to the traditional chronicle narrative, Askold and Dir were two different Varangian princes who co-ruled Kiev together before they were killed by Oleg the Seer. In the Old Gods start, to make things less complicated, the ruler of Konugarðr/Kiev is made into a single person named Dyre the Stranger, a Norse prince of the Oskyldr dynasty.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • The Mongols have giant armies that completely ignore supply limits, thus allowing them to concentrate in unbeatable numbers, while the player cannot counter this due to still being limited by supplies. Ditto the Aztecs in Sunset Invasion, though as their troops are mostly infantry, cavalry-rich realms have an easier time.
  • During peasant/religious/liberator uprisings, the AI is regularly able to levy armies ten to twenty times larger than the player is allowed to get out of those same territories.
  • Possible to outright enable as a game rule - provincial can be boosted to as much as six times their normal strength (or disabled), at which point a peasant revolt in Kola or Targhaza may muster more troops than the entire Byzantine Empire.
• The Computer Is a Lying Bastard: Due to the relatively simple algorithm the game uses to determine the advertised difficulty levels of various starting options, and factors it doesn't consider, what it says is the easiest possible start to the game... isn't. It calculates it as such because you start with a large empire with a strong power base... but neglects to factor in that you're playing an elderly, weak ruler with loyalty issues among his vassals, and at least one costly civil war is effectively inevitable shortly after starting.
• The Conqueror: Any character who presses an Invasion claim can receive this nickname if they wins (and they'll deserve it, since winning an invasion results in conquering at least an entire kingdom in one go (winning an invasion nets the targeted de jure kingdom, plus any and all baronies that the attacker has taken control of during the invasion, regardless of if they're in the targeted kingdom). They may also be a Young Conqueror, depending on their age.
• Contract on the Hitman: Implied by the flavor text for some successful assassinations:
  I must make sure the assassins stay silent...
• Cool Crown:
  • With Monks and Mystics, rulers can have crown jewels smithed, which include a crown or circlet for all Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, and all Pagans except African Pagans (who get bracelets like Muslim rulers do). Even as other faiths, it's possible to inherit or steal a crown from someone who owns one.
  • With Holy Fury, Catholic and Fraticelli kings and emperors aren't allowed to wear their crowns until they've been coronated by a religious official.
  • With Holy Fury, reforming a Pagan faith (except for Bön and Hellenic, which get a scepter instead) with Temporal leadership, the reformer gets a special fancy crown, which is even reflected in the wearer's portrait when equipped.
  • Also with Holy Fury, various unique crowns can be acquired by forming certain titles, such as restoring the Persian Empire as a Zoroastrian.
• Cool Horse: Nomad khagans can buy and name their very own sturdy war horses, which provide a small prestige boost to the character that owns them.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: Rulers who are poets are able to punish prisoners by reading them bad poetry.
• Corrupt Church: Potentially.
  • The "Black Bishop" achievement for the second game encourages players to install their own corrupt pope. This might not be the wisest course of action as far as moral authority is concerned.
• Cosmetically Different Sides: Averted.
  • Sword of Islam, as Muslims have their own mechanics, such as decadence and polygamy;
  • Legacy of Rome, which made the game slightly different for Greek and Orthodox characters;
  • The Republic, which adds special mechanics for Patrician families in merchant republics;
  • The Old Gods, which adds new mechanics for the now playable pagan nations, including raiding;
  • Sons Of Abraham , adding new features to all of the Abrahamic religions and adding Judaism to the mix;
  • Rajas of India, which lets you play as Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains in India, with their own mechanics.
  • Charlemagne, which introduces tribal rulers (as opposed to feudal lords).
  • Horse Lords introduces nomad mechanics for rulers of the steppes, such as clan management, lack of holdings, manpower, etc. (Games without the DLC will have nomad rulers behave like tribal ones instead.)
  • Different culture groups and religions also get different features, such as each culture or culture group having its own unique retinue and certain cultures (mainly Norse and Altaic) having the permanent ability to raid.
• The Coup: Unruly vassals can create or back factions to depose their current liege and install another.
• Court Physician: "The Reaper's Due" DLC allows the player to hire a court physician who can attempt to treat the diseases the DLC also added. Mind you, since it's Middle Ages medicine, any treatments he offers are a crapshoot at best, and if the physician has the mystic trait he might try to treat the patient by rubbing them with the ashes of sacrificed animals or decide they're possessed and attempt to drown them, for example. However, if the physician's learning score is high enough, these madcap treatments can actually work.
• Crazy Cat Lady: The Reaper's Due adds cats and the possibility of adopting one for your own (or, well, having it adopt you, really), followed by the possibility of adopting several more. A large herd of cats provides some measure of protection from the Plague, but cats' association with witches may inspire peasant revolts.
• Creator Provincialism: Sweden-based Paradox Interactive has given much more attention to Germanic pagans, who get a lot of unique events, traits, decisions and other exclusive stuff (Fylkir, Blot, runestones, river sailing), compared to the other pagan religions who have very little to distinguish from each other. This has only gradually been somewhat mitigated in patches in the years since The Old Gods was released - other Pagans have gained quite of bit of content since then, but they've never really fully caught up to Germanic Paganism's level of attention.
• Creepy Cathedral: Any Grand Cathedral with the Gargoyles, spikes, or a torture chamber qualifies as this.
• Crippling Castration: Rulers who belong to the Byzantine culture group (including, naturally, the Byzantine emperors themselves) have the option of castrating rebels, traitors, and other prisoners held in their dungeons. Aside from the obvious effects this has on a character's ability to procreate, eunuchs are also incapable of receiving lands and titles.
• Crutch Character:
  • Certain historical rulers have high predefined stats and positive traits, which makes playing as them easy. However, their ahistorical descendants have their stats and traits determined by the player and Random Number God, which means that the player has to start relying on their own skill at the game after one generation.
  • King Karl of West Francia (the historical Charlemagne) in the 769 start is the most extreme example of this. Not only does he have decent stats and traits, he also has several scripted events that make it easy for him to form the Holy Roman Empire and conquer most of western Europe. However, his descendants don't have this luxury, which means that the player has to rely on their own skill to prevent their massive, culturally diverse empire from disintegrating after Karl dies.
  • Also potentially inverted when stronger player-ruled realms (especially Catholic realms) end up propping up weaker countries across half of Europe against rapacious Norse and Muslim conquistadors.
  • Pagan realms are powerful early game, but weaken as time goes on (or more accurately, everyone else surpasses them and they become comparatively weaker). In addition, several early-game advantages eventually get cancelled out: Pagans can become very wealthy early on with their ability to raid provinces, especially Germanic Pagans given their free ships, ability to navigate rivers, and strategic location, but eventually targets will consolidate and fortify to the point where raiding is no longer practical and rivers are locked off. Passive defensive attrition is brutal for enemies wanting to invade Pagan realms to the point where it's often better to assault Pagan holdings than siege them, but this only applies to a Pagan's homeland territory (on top of the fact that converting provinces to extend their homeland is difficult because of the Pagan religions' low Moral Authority rating) and is eventually negated by technological progress. In addition, Pagans have access to special casus belli (officials reasons to go to war) that allow for fast expansion, but their realms are unstable to due being locked into succession types that split territory among their children, meaning holding a powerful realm together for long periods of time is difficult at best. In addition, Tribalism (the starting government type of most Pagans) is powerful early on because of rulers' large demesne limits and abilities to call vassals to war rather than getting smaller levies, but large tribal realms hit a peak as tribal rulers do not get troops from vassals of vassals unlike feudal rulers.
• Crystal Dragon Jesus: Sufficiently strong pagan rulers can, under the right circumstances, reform their respective faiths, creating an organized religion with a formal priestly hierarchy and written holy texts, and it's implied that these reforms are inspired by contact with and directly patterned after the Christian and Islamic religious bodies.
  • With The Old Gods (but NOT Holy Fury), these reforms are predefined and most pagans adopt a Catholic-like structure with a single strictly spiritual religious head who can call Great Holy Wars. Germanic pagans, however become much more like Muslims: the reformer becomes the head of the religion in a manner similar to the Islamic caliphs and holds both spiritual and temporal power.
  • With Holy Fury, the reforms are much more flexible and can range from very closely following Christianity (Hierocratic leadership for Catholic-like or Autocephalous leadership for Orthodox-like, Proselytizing nature, and Monasticism and Ancestor Veneration doctrines), Islam (Temporal leadership, Dogmatic nature, and any combination of Religious Tax, Polygamy, and Agnatic/Enatic Clans doctrines), or Dharmic faiths (Autonomous leadership, Peaceful (specifically Jain-like) or Cosmopolitan nature (more Hindu/Buddhist/Taoist-like), and any combination of Meritocracy, Stability, and/or Monasticism doctrines), to completely averting the trope and doubling down on their old ways or even becoming something entirely different.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: The law of anti-violence is actually how our modern human rights pretty much work. Alas, the game occurs in the era where people go to war and plunder cities for prestige.
• Dangerous 16th Birthday: Sixteen is the age at which characters become adults. This makes them available for marriage proposals, government positions, and (in the case of males) leadership of armies, as well as when rulers (are supposed to) begin to rule in their own right as opposed to through a regency council.
• Dare to Be Badass: A tagline from the "Seven Deadly Sins" promotional shorts reads: "Many are called; few are chosen."
• Dark Messiah: Schizophrenic characters can become convinced that they are Christ Returned, which leads to them getting labelled as heretics. Heretics tend to get excommunicated one way or another; if they happen to be rulers, this allows other rulers to claim their titles much easier. This (and the inevitable loyalty hit the vassals get) often develops into an ever-worsening cycle of civil war, violence and general mayhem that only ends with the death of the Messiah-King (sometimes).
• Deal with the Devil:
  • If you end up playing as demon spawn, mercenary companies following the same religion as you will still fight for you against the inevitable rebellion if you can afford to hire them. They're willingly helping the literal Son of Satan in exchange for a stack of gold.
  • Joining Lucifer's Own in Monks and Mystics involves a lot of these; pretty much the only ways to gain favor and Dark Power involve bloodshed in Satan's name. The other 'Devil-Worshipper' societies are pretty much the same, just with the dark forces you (think you) make deals with tailored to the faith in question instead of being the Devil.
• Death as Game Mechanic: The game lets you take over playing as you character's heir when you die, as well as changing up the size and wealth of your kingdom depending on if your previous player character or his heir has a better reputation.
• Death by Childbirth: As of Sons of Abraham and Patch 2.0 can happen occasionally. The newborn usually dies along with her.
• Death of a Child: A child has a disproportionately higher chance of coming to death (one way or another), because they do not have yet the developed health or intrigue score to ward off illnesses or assassinations respectively. No doubt Truth in Television.
• Decadent Court: There are events for your courtiers, many of which tend to consist of them bickering about how one of them is more suited for some post than the current holder. You will also likely get complaints from untitled offspring and offers from your Spymaster to "remove" inconvenient bastards. And finally, there's the one courtier who inevitably goes off the deep end and starts either trying to rebuild the Tower of Babel or murdering the rest of your court.
  • The DLC Sword Of Islam, actually turns this trope into a game mechanic - each Muslim dynasty has a decadence score, and having males of your dynasty sitting in your palace being idle, boozing and whoring (and thus having the Decadent trait) makes your entire family look bad and invites more righteous dynasties to overthrow you.
• Decapitated Army:
  • Played straight by peasant revolts and adventurer invasions; kill or capture the leader, it's curtains for the rebel scum.
  • Capturing the enemy ruler automatically gives you 100% warscore, allowing you to demand he surrender and accede to your demands in exchange for his freedom. However if you killed him instead of capturing a new ruler might arise and continue the war.
  • Subverted with noble rebellions. If the faction leader or the claimant to the throne is killed, the rebellion indeed ends, but the situation returns to the status quo ante bellum, and the lords who joined the rebellion still have their armies and the ability to rebel again (which often takes less than a year). By contrast, if the rebellion is defeated or forced to white peace, the defeated lords are unlikely to try again (and can be freely imprisoned if they start forming factions again).
• Defensive Feint Trap: This is the Altaic cultures' signature tactic, "Retreat and Ambush." It's widely considered one of the most powerful tactics in the game. You can also do this on a tabletop in the "war games" event chain, slowly withdrawing troops from the center of your formation to trap your opponent between your flanks and encircle them.
• Defiled Forever: A subtle example — married courtiers are not exempt from pagan concubinage, and being taken as a concubine cancels the marriage automatically.
• Dark Horse Victory: There's an achievement for conquering England as Sweyn II of Denmark, a somewhat more obscure monarch who also had a claim on the throne, rather than William of Normandy or Harald of Norway.
  • It's also possible for the Children's Crusade to actually reach the Holy Land and have their battle for Jerusalem end in a victory—most likely thanks to the help of sympathetic rulers.
• Death by Despair: While characters with depression can commit suicide, this isn't the only way depression can kill. It's possible for a ruler with depression to go to sleep one night and just not wake up the next morning.
• Death of the Old Gods: Unreformed pagans are more easily converted by Abrahamic, Zoroastrian, and Dharmic missionaries, have a harder time of winning converts of their own from those religions, and are very prone to splintering amongst themselves. If no single leader arises to reform a given pagan faith into an organized religion, it's quite likely that that faith will wither away under the pressure of holy wars and missionaries.
• Defeat Means Friendship:
  • The second game kills the first game's "vassal flipping" stone dead; you can't seize a vassal's territory by force without defeating their liege. However, with the Old Gods DLC, if you play as a pagan, you can choose an ambition to become king of X. You can then use the subjugation casus belli to conquer Kingdom X without the time penalty. Every count you defeat gets a +75 opinion modifier for basically having the crap beaten out of them.
  • Crushing a major revolt against your rule gives a (brief) relationship boost to all of your vassals, as they are suitably impressed or cowed into submission.
  • In "Holy Fury", one outcome of a duel is the participants being impressed with one another's skill and becoming close friends.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: These games certainly don't shy away from depicting the more... questionable aspects of the medieval era.
  • Female rulers suffer from opinion penalties with most characters, unless they're part of certain cultures or follow certain religions.
  • Homosexuality is frowned upon, even if the homosexual in question does their dynastic duty.
• Delivery Stork: Used in the trait icon for pregnancy.
• Demonization: With Kali, yes and no. Kali is a perfectly legitimate deity for a Hindu to worship, but one can also be a Kali cultist with the devil-worshipper mechanics. (The latter are, in all likelihood, thuggee magicians rather than mainstream Kali followers.)
• Demonic Possession: Characters in both games can become demonically possessed, which isn't a very good thing if they happen to be in charge. Of course, it could be some form of mental illness that medieval science doesn't recognize yet. Probably.
  • The introduction of artifacts in the second game swings it towards the Magic side, as owning the Seal of Solomon will prevent a character from becoming possessed. Of course, that could just be the placebo effect.
• Department of Redundancy Department: "Sultan" is both a Muslim ruler title and a possible first name for Magrebi Arabs, certain cultures restyle the title name to match the dynasty name under an Islamic ruler, and randomly-generated Muslim dynasties take the name of their founder... which can result in Sultan Sultan I leading the Sultan Sultanate.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Mechanics existed for immortal characters, even before immortality was added to the game.
  • Since the historical archives go back so far, The Prophet Muhammad is listed in the database. If you look at his character sheet, however, his portrait is blocked out, the only portrait in the game to have this property.
  • If you only read the drop down when using the Liege Creator DLC, you would think that being openly (well, as openly as medieval times allow for) homosexual is purely a penalty to the diplomacy stat. Well, it does more than just that. Most people will dislike you for being homosexual... except other homosexuals who will like you better. This opinion bonus also stacks with attractive...
  • The act of offering up Native Americans as human sacrifice during a blót has its own special flavor text, even though it is a rather unlikely event.
  • Also, in the unlikely event that a Norse pagan worms his way into India, some of the rivers there are navigable by longboat.
  • After the release of the Horse Lords DLC, players can now find Marco Polo hanging around Kublai Khan's court if they choose to start at the appropriate date. His father and uncle are also there, and all three are friends with the Khan!
  • The Conclave DLC added different names and graphics for different government types in the kingdom rules tab. Most of these are mundane names like "Noble Republic" or "Elective Aristocratic Empire", but if your ruler has the relatively rare "Spawn of Satan" trait - welcome to the "Kingdom of Terror" (or the Empire of Terror - the first part is based on the primary title's rank).
  • Discovering and publicizing the heliocentric model of the solar system hundreds of years ahead of its time by studying the stars will expose your ruler to ridicule and religious sanctions (unless the religious head is you) — except among Zunist pagans, who worship the sun in the guise of Zun, the Bringer of Justice.
  • By default, Islam is the only polygamous faith in the game, and doesn't allow matrilineal marriage or female inheritance, so normally you cannot enter a polygamous marriage as a female - but flavor text and event data still exists in the game files for a female player character in a polygamous union, including rivalries with your husband's other wives, and attempting to get your son named as your husband's heir.
  • If you export a CK2 game to Europa Universalis IV and had "Sunset Invasion" turned on, you'll find that the cultures of the New World are considerably more advanced technologically than they normally are. Furthermore, if your ruler has become immortal in Crusader Kings II, this will be retained in Europa Universalis IV.
  • The game has text for duels won while wielding every type of weapon—and that includes the one-of-a-kind Hermetic handgun. (The results are predictable.)
• Devil, but No God:
  • Subverted. The Hermetic Society and various monastic orders get relics that could well be pure psychological in benefit, and Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane scrying and attempts to communicate with Divine Beings in trances. Lucifer's Own can conjure demons to possess targets and cast curses that give a very-likely lethal disease to the victim. However, there are also two holy relics with effects that are definitely magical: the first is the Seal of Solomon, which renders you immune to possession, and the second is the Holy Grail^note The holy_grail, not the holy_chalice. The game has two, the chalice is less impressive in terms of health benefits, which gives a +4 to health, which is a massive bonus, while all other holy artifacts that give bonuses to health give +1 at most, with many only giving 0.25-0.75, meaning it is most definitely not psychological.^{Further Examples} A +4 is enough to cancel out almost any disease, with the only diseases that have a higher health reduction being the bubonic plague and rabies (both at -7). The Holy Grail can allow you to easily shrug off cancer(-3 health). Then there's the Holy Prepuce^note Jesus' foreskin, which provides 15% fertility increase. There's also Cthulhu.
  • Also, several Holy Relic weapons give bizarrely high bonuses to the wielder's Personal Combat Skill, usually significantly higher than the 14 given by Tier 4 forged weapons. While one could argue that things like the Lance of Longinus or Axe of Perkunas are simply normal but really well made weapons, and the further increase in skill is psychological, it's a bit hard to argue that there's nothing special about the Staff of Moses, which appears to just be a really fancy staff, but is a more effective weapon than the most expensive craftable weapons in the game, and the Babr-e-Bayan, which appears to be a regular leopard pelt, but is better than any armour in the game, even the Hermetic's Plate Armour. And Mjolnir offers a +20, which is ridiculously high just for someone having psychological benefits, and the second highest bonus to Personal Combat Skill of any in the game, after the Prosthetic Leg^note And that's only that high because it's to partially offset the -30 penalty given by the one-legged trait and the handgun, both of which have a +25. Add onto all of this the fact that they only work for the followers of certain religions, even though some of them are still really nice swords or axes that a non-believer should be able to use without the prestige or piety bonuses. There's several cursed artifacts, some of which can't be destroyed.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • The Rulership focus leaves you entirely at the mercy of the RNG and will either give you an Ambitious, Diligent and Just ruler with +6 stewardship and a +10 to vassal opinions, or a depressed, stressed-out wreck that burns out and dies mere months later.
  • Succeeding as the Byzantine Empire (see Nintendo Hard below). It's hard to play it well, but once you do, not only can you avert the tragic fate of the eastern half of Rome, but you can also turn the table and restore the Roman Empire not only as it once was but stronger than ever.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?:
  • In the Cthulhu Mythos event string, you can choose to ram your ship into the awakening Deep One to stop it from rising again in reference to how "The Call of Cthulhu" ended.
  • One of the possible outcome of the The Masque of the Red Death event string is Death himself gets set aflame on spot.
  • In one event where a traveling pilgrim came to you asking for a place to stay, they reveal themselves later as Death. You can attack them first and may win the fight, or you can stall and defeat them in a game of chess. It's easier to just attack Death than play chess, as Death always come with Game Master trait.
• Digital Piracy Is Evil: This trailer puts Piracy in the Seven Deadly Sins and mentions that pirates don't get the full functionality of the game (multiplayer and DLC). Not quite parodied, but definitely joked about.
• Dirty Old Man: It is common for a duke in his late fifties to be married to a woman half his age, and to be cheating on her with three teenage courtiers.
• Disability Superpower: Averted; where negative congenital character traits, such as being inbred or having dwarfism, generally lack a positive bonus. The same goes for negative Health traits, which will affect either your fertility (ability to make heirs) or stats.
• Disc-One Nuke: Nomads, as in introduced in the Horse Lords, DLC on the earlier starts. Nomads have a relatively stable, easy to game succession system, require much less micromanaging, and have "horde" stacks composed enterely of Cavalry (which gets a ton of buffs from upgrading your main holding) that can positively trounce most of the world's armies (which have to make do with mostly Light Infantry), and you'll be drowning in gold from raiding and controlling silk road posts, many of which are in steppe territory or very close by; revolts become very small nuisances, even the Clan Revolts that spawn disproportionately large stacks can be beaten pretty easily. All that said, nothing is easier in CK2 than conquering the entire world as a nomad, or at the very least playing really wide.
• Disease by Any Other Name: Crusader Kings II uses the period names for various diseases. Two of the more commonly seen are "lover's pox" for herpes and "great pox" for syphilis, as well as "camp fever" for epidemic typhus.
• Dishonored Dead: A pope who dies with the "Wicked Priest" trait will trigger an event where his corpse is put on trial for his crimes. This was inspired by the real-life Cadaver Synod of Pope Formosus by Pope Stephen VI. There's even an achievement for getting a "Wicked Priest" elected Pope in an Ironman game. And another one for getting a Satanist priest elected Pope.
• Disinherited Child: Landed nobles can force their vassals, including their children, to join monastic orders/nunneries which removes them from the line of succession.
• Disney Villain Death: A couple possible resolutions of plots to kill people have them to fall (or be pushed) off of tall places.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Did the next count over look at you funny during the last banquet? Claim his titles, go to war, and strip him of everything he loves!
• Downloadable Content: Crusader Kings II has two types of DLCs:
  • "Bonus" cosmetic additions that add extra portraits, historical dynasty flags, unit sprites and music...
  • ...And mini-expansions like Sword of Islam and Legacy of Rome which make Muslim rulers playable and add new gameplay mechanics for Orthodox rulers, respectively. Paradox kept its promise to add new features to the basic game so players won't be forced to buy the expansions, but this hasn't stopped some fans from accusing Paradox of money-grubbing. The game plus all current DLC can run in excess of two hundred dollars, which is a bit pricey, especially for an older game.
• Driven to Madness: As with "Driven to Suicide" below, stressed characters have a chance of thoroughly cracking, becoming either Schizophrenic or just plain Mad. Sometimes this is funny, sometimes it's tragic. And yes, it can happen to your ruler.
• Driven to Suicide: If you have depression or are an immortal over the age of 100, you can actually invoke this and end it all. It costs 200 prestige. Which is a surprisingly useful option, as the game lacks any abdication mechanics, so this is the only truly reliable way to choose exactly when you want your heir to take over.
  • As of a recent patch, committing suicide will incur an opinion penalty that will be immediately inherited by your next character, so you'll have to deal with that if you use this strategy
• Dropped A Bridget On Him: Michael The Drunkard is made to die in 866, a year earlier than he actually died, so that the player can play as Basil I in the 867 start date.
• Duel to the Death:
  • With the War focus from Way of Life, you can challenge rival characters to duels. It's mostly Awesome, but Impractical: even if you win, if you give a Coup de Grâce to your opponent you'll get a permanent "Merciless" opinion malus (however, this is not incurred if you finish off a defeated opponent in a battlefield duel), whereas otherwise your opponent is likely to just be wounded or maimed, which doesn't help a lot unless you were trying to reduce their health or Martial score so they'd be more likely to die of natural causes.
  • As of version 3.0, there are "Strong Claim Duels" that can only be waged by tribal rulers when one has a strong claim on the other's title(s) and if the claimant wins, they get to take those titles. While normal duels are rarely fatal, Strong Claim Duels are almost always to the death.
• Dueling Scar: It's possible to receive anywhere from one to eighteen in battles and/or duels. It's shown on the character portrait and adds a small monthly prestige bonus.
• Dump Stat:
  • Learning does almost nothing that couldn't be handily compensated for through other means, and even the things it does are of questionable importance at best (small monthly boost to piety and technology growth, as well as being some help in religion-related events). This is somewhat lessened in Monks and Mystics, should you become a Hermetic: they can use Learning for a lot of good things.
  • Certain technologies, such as Religious Customs or Trading Practices if you're inland and not on the Silk Road are very low priority to boost and by having at least one low tech level, you can keep your Spymaster studying technology somewhere, which periodically yields an extra 50 tech points in one category at random, even if you lead in all techs in that category.
• Dung Fu: A possible assassination method involves filling a building's basement with exploding manure. (This is Artistic License – Chemistry: Manure explosions in real life are believed to be due to factory farming practices that didn't exist until the 20th century.)
• Early-Bird Cameo: Several of Europe's later historical dynasties are present in the 1066 start, but are unimportant to the point of irrelevance. For example the Habsburgs start out as Counts of a backwater Swiss province. Recreating their rise to power is... difficult.
  • The 769 start date introduced in the Charlemagne DLC also features the Capetians as the rulers of the Liege and Loon counties. Like their Habsburg rivals, their rise from counts to one of the most powerful dynasty in European history is challenging to say the least.
  • The addition of baronies and several preset courtiers in the sequel introduces even more famous families: the Romanovs begin as High Chiefs of the Samoyeds, the Hohenzollerns begin as the barons of Zollern and the Trastamaras (one of the royal families of Spain before the Habsburgs inherited the lot) begin as lowly courtiers in Galicia. Heck, even the Pushkins appear with a child courtier in Rostov.
• Early Game Hell:
  • This can hold true for a lot of games, especially if you're playing as a kingdom with few provinces (like vulnerable Navarre or Georgia) or a ruler with powerful rivals or nearby religious enemies. But it's especially true if you're starting out as a Zoroastrian ruler (and you're determined not to convert). Basically you start out with no advantages except a large starting army (if you're playing the satrap of Karen) that cannot be replenished, virtually no one to make alliances with because of religious differences, and completely surrounded by hostile pagan and Islamic rulers who can gang up against you and will sooner or later, and probably sooner, attack you - and even if you do survive for a couple of centuries you'll probably be right where you'll have to deal with swarms of Seljuk Turks. Even strategies posted online by veteran players can only recommend the "gamey" strategy of pledging allegiance to a neighboring Muslim monarch and exploiting the game's mechanics to try to seize their territory from within, or at least play aggressively and rely on luck, or just pick a stronger and more secure pagan ruler and convert to Zoroastrianism (which is itself tricky, since it usually means you'll have to capture a Zoroastrian woman and make her a concubine).
  • Most realms in the earlier bookmarks start out with Gavelkind Inheritance. This means that when the ruler dies his realm is divided among his sons. Most players attempt to switch to a less-crippling inheritance system as soon as they can. Pagan realms are stuck with the even-harder-to-control elective gavelkind^note successor to primary title is elected by vassals from among dynasty members, while any available titles are created for junior heirs, who get the option to go independent unless they convert to a non-pagan faith or reform their own.
  • Playing as the Byzantine Empire. Where to even begin with them? First of, it's impossible to have any inheritance law other than the elective imperial autocracy system. This means that the emperor title will go to someone else upon your death unless you can get your heir elected. You are always under extra pressure not to let your ruler die early and to make sure that your heir is at least presentable to your vassals. However, even if your heir is perfect, that's still no guarantee that they will be supported and may end up losing to some talentless hack with good connections. Second of all, it's very easy to rack up a lot of relation maluses with your vassals simply by breathing around them. You get -10 relation simply by being emperor, and that's not going into the maluses you get from your policies. Be ready to fight civil war after civil war as discontent vassals plot to overthrow you at the drop of a hat. Your council is empowered by default, which makes it hard for you to push your policies. Revoking that power is a surefire way to add even more fuel to the civil war dumpster fire. Now, civil wars aren't terribly hard to put down, but they will happen in the most inconvenient of times and mess up your carefully constructed plan. The real kicker is that civil wars don't stop happening even if the empire is in the middle of a foreign invasion, so be ready to lose the game because your vassals have the foresight of a blind frog. Speaking of foreign powers, the Catholics and the Muslims are always at your throats and a few crusades/jihads away from completely destroying you. Mustering an effective defense is usually an exercise in futility as your realm is probably too busy fighting each other to fight the invaders. Retaking your lost territories is equally hopeless as civil wars can occur halfway through or the council will block you from even starting the war in the first place. Unless you are an experienced player, playing as the Byzantine Empire is an endless loop of internal conflicts while external enemies tear the empire apart. Survive long enough though, and you will begin to have enough prestige to create enough kingdom-level titles to consolidate power in the hands of a few loyal viceroys. After this, you can begin to build up an effective defense and eventually a fearsome invasion force.
• Easter Egg:
  • Paradox Development Studio's main staff are in-game as landless Swedish courtiers in the Stamford Bridge start.
  • The code for The Reaper's Due includes commented-out code for death by platypus, apparently meant as a template for creating new methods of execution. (The studio's logo is a platypus skeleton.)
• Easy Communication: Zig-Zagged, the developers added a distance penalty around the time the Rajas of India DLC came out to prevent characters from most of Europe from interacting directly with Africans or Indians. But on the other hand, the king of Poland can still reign in Krakow, marry the Queen of France (residing in Paris) and impregnate her while he's technically leading a Crusade in Jerusalem.
• Easy Evangelism:
  • It's a lot easier for a Christian to convert counties to his faith than it is for members of other religions. Unlike other examples of this trope this is less of an Author Tract and more of a way of representing Christianity's evangelical nature and encouraging the game to simulate the historical conversion of Europe to Christianity. That said, "easier" is a relative term. It can take years to convert one of your own provinces even if you are a Christian, and pagan rulers are likely as not to throw out your missionary the first time one of his courtiers is converted. By contrast, religious conversion to unreformed pagan faiths is next to impossible.
  • Inverted by the Romuva faith practiced by Baltic pagans. Romuvan provinces are much more resistant to conversion, and Romuvan characters require +50 positive opinion to accept a conversion request as opposed to the standard +30. This is meant to model the Baltics as being the last, most robust holdout of paganism in Europe.
  • With Holy Fury, Pagans can accept "Mass Conversions", wherein the liege and most or all of their non-zealous vassals will all adopt an organized faith at once.
  • Also with Holy Fury, on reformation, Pagans can take the Proselytizing nature, which puts them fully on par with Christians for conversion power (otherwise, reformed Pagans are much better than unreformed Pagans at proselytizing, but not as good as Christians) and abilities, including proselytizing in other realms, as well as becoming more interested in sponsoring Mass Conversions.
• Easy Logistics: Averted - Armies are EXPENSIVE, and you're strongly advised not to keep them mobilized when you're not at war. Large armies can also suffer attritional losses which can make entire stacks disappear if you don't manage them well.
  • Played straight by the Mongols, who never take attrition damage. This is a big part of why they're considered Demonic Spiders.
  • Crusader Kings II adds opinion penalties for having vassal levies raised too long.
  • With the 1.10 patch, low-tech pagan lands have very low supply. Therefore, a catholic army of 7000 can get reduced to 2000 or less in less than a year because the supply for the land is 800 with a castle garrison of 1200.
• Elective Monarchy: Elective inheritance, along the lines of the Holy Roman Empire, is one option for succession. It's a good way of keeping your vassals happy, but can be troublesome to have your chosen successor actually be the chosen successor. The 1.09 patch added Tanistry, an alternative style of elective inheritance for Celtic cultures which limits the candidates to the sovereign's dynasty, but greatly expands the criteria for who can vote.
• Elite Army / Zerg Rush: Both and somewhere in between. The time frame covered means that your levies are all conscripts and not professional soldiers (that'd be the mercenaries you can hire). Also comes into play with the Hordes as they can show up with close to a quarter million soldiers (with reinforcements on their heels). The second game allows wealthier and more powerful rulers to create "retinues", professional standing army units.
• Emergent Narrative: Both games simulate hundreds of artificially intelligent characters (mostly nobles and royals) across many generations, with heirs being procedurally generated based on which dynastic marriages occurred, with or without the player's intervention. They also simulate a vast number of environment factors, from geography to religion, ensuring that every playthrough has literal centuries of fresh dynastic drama.
• Emperor Scientist: One possible result of taking on and putting a lot of money and effort into the Learning focus. However, the religious authorities being what they are, the "scientist" part could well lead to the "emperor" part being violently revoked. Joining the Hermetics in Monks & Mystics bolsters this, if with something of a mystical bent — membership gives a learning bonus and an opinion penalty for church lords, and its events includes alchemical experimentation, going on expeditions to find lost knowledge and doing more things with the observatory the Learning focus lets you build.
• The Empire: Some empires already exist at certain start dates, such as the Holy Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire. But how much they truly live up to this trope can differ from game to game. It's not at all uncommon to see other realms rise to become The Empire over time, either.
  • There's also the Fatimid Caliphate and Seljuk Sultanate/Abbasid Caliphate which are comparable in power on the Muslim side.
  • With the release of Legacy of Rome, it's now possible for the Byzantine Empire to reform the original Roman Empire.
  • As of The Old Gods, you can now take direct control over the Mongols, whose leader on their historical appearance holds an Emperor-level title.
  • You can technically establish an empire at any time as long as you control a 80% of its de jure territories and have the money and piety to pay for the title. There are even some "hypothetical" empires like Carpathia (Hungary, Wallachia, & Bulgaria) and the Wendish Empire (Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, parts of Russia) that represent things that did not exist, but could, in theory, have.
  • As of Charlemagne, players with enough holdings can create a custom empire from scratch.
  • Although many Empires may rise and fall over the course of a playthrough, which of them are really The Empire trope with its evil connotations to the player entirely depends on their situation. An Iberian Catholic in an early start might fear the seemingly unstoppable Umayyads, for example, despite the fact that in our history they quickly splintered in the face of the Reconquista.
  • In a more abstract sense, certain religions can start gaining steam and end up completely dominating the map, leading to a hegemonic spiritual authority, even if they aren't necessarily politically united. This most often happens with Catholicism, which already dominates almost all of Europe and has the opportunity to grab tons of land from the Muslims in Crusades.
• The Emperor: "Emperor" is the highest-level title possible and is able to hold "mere" kings as vassals. Most of the empires listed above are led by such a figure, including the co-Trope Naming Byzantines and Holy Romans. Exactly what flavour of Emperor a character is depends on their stats and traits.
• Empty Shell: Characters with the "Incapable" trait are locked in a permanent state of catatonia and unable to function on their own. Incapable rulers get a regent who rules the kingdom on their behalf.
• Enemy Civil War: In addition to revolts potentially screwing with existing war efforts, one of the best times to declare war on somebody is when they're already at war with someone else. In fact, one possible condition under which a weak claim can be pressed (they normally can't be pressed at all) is if the title is already being contested in a claim or succession war. (The other conditions are if the claimant is second or third in line to the title, the title is in a regency, or if the current holder is female.)
• Enemy Mine: Even if you aren't formally allied to another ruler, you can offer to join rulers of the same religion in most types of wars. They'll rarely refuse even if the two of you would otherwise be mortal enemies, though don't expect to become Fire-Forged Friends in the long run.
• Enfant Terrible: A character is never too young to start gaining some very negative traits. The "Child of Satan" event chain takes the cake, though: they'll get huge stats, start murdering their way to the top, and get advice from three mythical witches.
• Eunuchs Are Evil: If a nobleman whose liege is Greek or Chinese decides to rebel and gets imprisoned, then he can find himself castrated. This will make him hate his liege even more, so he is even more likely to do things like rebel or plot to kill the king.
• Eurabia: The earlier the start, the more likely it is for the Umayyads and their successors to just roll over rest of Spain and southern France and then just keep going deeper and deeper every decade or two. If player doesn't get directly involved, AI has the uncanny tendency to conquer as Muslims all of Western Europe by 12th century in about 2 out of 5 games that started at any date prior to 1066 and in all of them control at least all of Spain. Ironically the biggest stop to that expansion is having the Sunset Invasion fantasy DLC enabled. And there is of course nothing preventing the player from picking any given Muslim country and decide to expand into Europe.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Combined with Once Done, Never Forgotten - a character with the Kinslayer trait will never be liked by anybody else ever.
  • Unless, of course, the Pope offers to absolve him for an exorbitant amount of gold.
• Every Man Has His Price: You can send "gifts" of gold to other rulers (and, in the sequel, to any character) to temporarily boost your relationship with them. As the success or failure in certain interactions is heavily dependent on other characters' opinions of you, placing discreet gifts in the right hands (or failure to do so) can often make or break your latest scheme.
• Evil Chancellor: Duke Hunoald Loping of Aquitaine is this to Charlamange. He starts out as your chancellor, and whether or not you replace him it is almost guarinteed that he will join or lead a faction to severely limit your power, break away from your kingdom, or outright usurp your throne.
• Evil Laugh: When a character goes insane, the confirm button on the pop-up reads "Muahahaha!"
• Evil Makes You Ugly: For demon-worshippers, abusing dark magic tends to give them bad physical traits.
• Evil Old Folks: A common player tactic is to wait until the current character is quite old to take all kinds of tyrannical but useful actions. With any luck, the character will die and be replaced before the vassals can get up in arms.
• The Evil Prince: Almost certainly the player. It's that kind of game, really.
  • This tends to happen a lot more often in the sequel - if your ruler gives his heir a title, the heir will occasionally attempt to quicken his ascension. If a ruler has two sons and only one can inherit, expect a lot of murders to happen as both princes try to out-evil each other.
  • This becomes an even bigger problem in Sword of Islam - Before the decadence mechanic was reworked later on, Muslim rulers need to make sure all their male relatives have lots of lands and armies or risk their dynasty appearing corrupt and decadent, which also means gives them much more ammunition for potential throne-stealing shenanigans. After the reworking, male relatives no longer automatically generate decadence (only doing so if they have the Decadent trait).
• Exotic Extended Marriage: Muslims and reformed Pagans with the Polygamy doctrine can have a maximum of four wives. Pagans, Zoroastrians, tribal Christians, and members of the three Indian religions get one wife and the option of multiple concubines, all of whose children are considered legitimate. Women of the Bön and African Pagan faiths, as well as any reformed Pagan faiths that take the Enatic Clans or Equality doctrines can take up to three men as consorts in addition to their husband, and the children of consorts are considered legitimate.
• Expansion Pack World: The patch that comes with Rajas of India extends the game map well to the East, including the entire Indian subcontinent and more of Siberia and the Central Asian steppes. Earlier expansions already extended the map southward into Africa, though on a much smaller scale. Horse Lords has additionally opened up new tracts of the Central Asian steppe, though the map boundaries remain the same.
• Explosive Breeder: Any character who practices polygamy. Also characters with the Lustful trait (especially if they're married to another character with the Lustful trait), but even a normal couple can under the right circumstances have from ten children upwards. And if you have the Way of Life addition in the second game, the master seducer lifestyle will give a dedicated philanderer a shot at topping Ramses II and his 156 children even with the soft cap that kicks in after the first 30 or so kids.
• Eye Scream:
  • Legacy of Rome gives Byzantine emperors the option of putting out the eyes of captured pretenders. This feature also gets extended to all leaders with Greek culture.
  • Holy Fury and Reaper's Due give plenty of other ways to lose one or both eyes, such as in duels, as sacrifices to the gods, and as a potential experimental medical treatment.

F to I

• Facial Horror: One of the possible consequences of a severe injury is disfigurement, which forces the victim to wear a mask due to the extent of the damage. The icon for the trait depicts a man who has had his lower jaw torn off.
• Failed State:
  • Civil wars in a realm can cause it to fragment.
    • A Revolving Door Revolution scenario could occur due to Artificial Stupidity where factions that had just succeeded in overthrowing a prior liege would almost immediately start plotting against the next liege due to "new ruler" penalties to Relationship Values (the 2.7 patch mitigated this by giving usurpers an opinion bonus with their former faction supporters). This tended to end with all parties fighting each other to exhaustion and often getting conquered by other countries.
    • In Muslim lands, a successful decadence revolt against a realm's ruler can cause the uppermost title of the realm to be destroyed, causing all rulers of the next rank down to become independent.
  • With the Jade Dragon DLC, a ruler who has a good relationship with the Emperor of China can ask them to invade another realm with the "Shatter" casus belli. Victory by China with this CB causes the highest title held by the targeted ruler to be destroyed and their vassals made independent.
• Family Extermination: Possible to accomplish by assassinations. In a meta-example for the second game, the Karlings (the family of Charlemagne, who exists in the 769 start) are so hated by players that Paradox Interactive used to sell a promotional t-shirt depicting a player wiping out their family tree.
• Family-Values Villain: A given for many characters, considering that half of the villainous things you'll do in a game will be to ensure your family prospers and stays in power.
• Fantastic Rank System: The game has a dynamic rank system that generates titles based on combinations of characters' rank, culture, religion, and style of government. Some are historical (prince-bishop^note Christian bishop who is also a secular count, lord mayor^note count-level mayor), while others are fictional (wali-emir^note Muslim Merchant Prince, i.e. duke-level mayor, witch-king^note Slavic or Suomenusko pagan priest who is also a secular king).
• Femme Fatale: As a ruling queen, seducing your most powerful and potentially troublesome vassals in order to keep them under your thumb is a perfectly legitimate tactic.
• Feudal Overlord: You and most of the characters you interact with. How closely any given character adheres to the negative stereotype is up to your own actions and those of the game engine.
• Feuding Families:
  • Patrician families in The Republic can start long-running vendettas, complete with Star-Crossed Lovers.
  • Steppe nomad clans in "Horse Lords" can start blood feuds, which can only end when one clan pays a blood price in gold to the other or when one of the clans is wiped out.
• Flowery Insult: The standard kind of insult in the game.
  Tales of your misdeeds are told from Ireland to Cathay!◊
  Your low character is the subject of Greek plays!
• Foe Romance Subtext: With the Way of Life DLC, a landed character can seduce any adult of the appropriate gender and orientation. Even if that character is your rival or otherwise has -100 opinion of you. And after seducing this character you can choose to start a long-term sexual relationship.
• The Food Poisoning Incident: Food Poisoning is one possible ailment your characters can suffer from with The Reaper's Due active.
• Foreign Culture Fetish: Countries within diplomatic range of China can indulge in quite a bit of Sinophilia. They can use grace ^note which represents good relations with the Chinese Imperial Dynasty to hire Chinese Advisors, request Chinese Artifacts, and even marry the Chinese Emperor's daughter. It's possible to gain grace by sending the Emperor artifacts, castrating your courtiers and shipping them off to be the Emperor's courtiers, giving your female relatives to the Emperor's harem, and even traveling thousands of miles to kowtow to the Emperor. This is justified in that China in this time is a superpower and gaining their favor has a lot of benefits.
• Foreign Ruling Class: The game makes a distinction between a province's culture and religion, and that of the character holding the title (who will spawn courtiers, minor nobles, of his own culture). The province will tend to shift to match that of its ruler over time, or the ruler can change cultures to that of their capital province, but in the meantime there's a small increase in revolt risk. Additionally, some cultures, such as English and Russian, are programmed to be created by having a province of one culture be controlled by a ruler of a different culture.
• For Science!: Invoked with the "studying stellar movement" event chain branch from the "building an observatory" decision (requires the Scholarship focus). The chain allows the player character to eventually figure out heliocentrism if pursued to its end. During the discovery phase, you can choose to rebuff your religious head (assuming you're not said head yourself) when he asks you to stop. At the very end, you can choose to publish the results of your research, further snubbing the clergy, but earning considerable prestige at the same time.
• Founder of the Kingdom: Some historical kingdoms (Portugal, Finland, Ireland and Rus, for example) start the game fragmented into several independent duchies and counties or occupied by foreigners. Liberating enough provinces lets a character found their own kingdom.
  • The 867 start date introduced by The Old Gods splits up England, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, among many others, and includes historical kingdom-founders Alfred the Great of England and Haraldr Fairhair of Norway.
  • The Charlemagne DLC for the second game allows both players and the computer to create custom kingdoms and empires by holding enough duchies or kingdoms and having enough money and prestige. So there's nothing stopping you from forming the Kingdom of Badassia by grabbing pieces of Germany, France and Lotharingia. In terms of historical founders, it also allows you to play as the title character and try to replicate his feat of founding what would eventually become the Holy Roman Empire.
• Friend or Foe?: Due to a long-running bug it's possible, though rare, that your troops may accidentally kill their own commander in battle.
• Friends with Benefits: The friend mechanic allows you to become friends with characters in your court, including friends of the opposite sex. If you end up seducing and/or marrying your friend, then it is this trope. Can also go the other way, since most marriages are arranged for political reasons (or just to have someone to put a potential heir into), but certain events can trigger one actually falling in love with one's spouse.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: While challenging, you can choose to start (or, through unkind events, end up as) some nobody vassal serving several tiers of superior lords, and through clever politics and favors, work your way up to top dog.
• Full-Boar Action: One of the potential encounters while out on a hunt is a wild boar. It has a small chance of killing or injuring you if you choose to dispatch it yourself, but bringing it down also gives you a fair bit of prestige.
• Funny Animal: Due to some programming oversights with Glitterhoof and Horse M.D. (both being horses you can acquire as courtiers through Lunatic events in Conclave and The Reaper's Due), it is possible to produce entire dynasties of horses that otherwise act exactly like human characters. The "Horse" trait they both have makes it impossible to impregnate them or grant them titles, but it's possible to educate children with them or nominate them to Catholic bishoprics, which creates literal Horse Lords that will generate horse courtiers. But if you don't try to break the game with them, Glitterhoof can cause a lot of hilarity because, "Horse" trait aside, s/he can do all the same things as a human character.
  • Eventually, Holy Fury introduced this as a semi-hidden rule in random world generation. Said horses, cats, dogs, polar bears, hedgehogs, ducks, elephants, red pandas, and dragons all become fully playable.
• Funny Schizophrenia: Insane characters. Between chasing imaginary gophers, outlawing pants, trying to seduce rose bushes, and occasionally banning ethnic and religious discrimination in their realm, Insanity is mostly Played for Laughs.
• Gambit Pileup: Crusader Kings II introduced the ability for characters to form secret conspiracies to achieve some goal or another, called "Plots." It's pretty much inevitable that at least two are going to crash into each other sooner or later.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • At one point a King-Bishop was allowed to become the predicted next Cardinal, but not allowed to become a Cardinal. Thus, if a King-Bishop became the predicted next cardinal (which was highly likely due to the "secular power" modifier) he would prevent others from becoming Cardinals while himself never becoming a Cardinal, inevitably reducing the College to a tiny number.
  • Rajas of India adds temporary titles for revolts. If you manage to inherit one but not the revolt somehow (for example, a Duchy-level revolt in your Kingdom takes land and all of the eligible heirs die), you will be unable to arrange marriages, give out titles, create retinues, or do countless other very important things.
  • The Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church frequently inherits control of the Byzantine Empire, which converts the government to a theocracy with open elective succession (picks basically at random from courtiers) and makes it extremely difficult for secular rulers to regain control.
• Game-Favored Gender:
  • In keeping with the values of the time, men tend to be have the advantage. CKII allows a male-biased inheritance law that allows women to inherit if no males are available for all non-Muslim religions (agnatic-cognatic), and full female inheritance rights for the Basque culture and Cathar and Messalian heresies (absolute cognatic). Even then, though, female rulers and/or heirs result in opinion penalties without the "full status of women" law enacted, which doesn't affect male rulers and/or heirs, and any males with weak claims on their titles can press them at any time simply because of their gender. Paradox did add female-preference inheritance in a later patch, but only for modders until the Holy Fury DLC added ways for religions to enable it outside of modding. What is not moddable is that the default marriage is patrilineal (the children is of the father's dynasty), with a marriage being matrilineal having to be specifically chosen (and the AI prefers not to accept such marriage offers unless it directly benefits them). Played straight with the merchant republics and Muslim realms. Women from patrician houses can never be elected Doge or become head of their houses. They cannot be married off matrilineally either, nor can they inherit titles.
  • Some of the expansions downplay it, however: in Rajas of India, there is no opinion penalty for having a female heir or being a female ruler as a Dharmic ruler, and with Sons of Abraham, Cathars, Messalians, and Bogomilists similarly have no such penalties, nor do the Bön or African Pagans (though they're only playable with The Old Gods or Holy Fury for both, while Jade Dragon unlocks Bön, but not other Pagans), Conclave adds various options to expand the rights of women by passing laws and at full status of women, nearly all gender bias is removed^note At full status of women, women can hold all council positions regardless of personal relationship to the ruler, opinion penalties for female rulers and heirs are removed, and even Muslims can enact agnatic-cognatic and absolute cognatic succession. What isn't negated is that this still allows male only or male-preference succession, but doesn't enable female only or female-preference, still leaves patrilinneal marriage as the default, and that merchant republics are still strictly agnatic only and still cannot carry out matrilinneal marriages), and Holy Fury allows any Pagan faith to avert it with the Equality doctrine, which also locks in Absolute Cognatic succession.
  • The favored gender can be inverted by the Enatic Clans doctrine in Holy Fury, which blocks Agnatic, Agnatic-Cognatic, and Absolute Cognatic succession, only allowing Enatic and Enatic-Cognatic succession (female-only and female-preference) and barring men from leading armies or holding council titles or receiving landed titles (unless they are already landed). When combined with the Warmongering nature, it also enables the Matriarchal Deposition casus belli, giving a realm with Enatic Clans casus belli on any neighboring realm ruled by a man, with the goal of overthrowing the ruler and installing a woman on the throne (of the same dynasty as the defender if possible, skipping over any women whose religion has the Agnatic Clans doctrine or are incapable, and favoring close relatives of the defender and women of the same religion as the attacker, and generating a new female character to rule if no valid candidates of the defender's dynasty exist) as well as enforcing full status of women and enatic succession (unless the new ruler is of a religion with the Equality doctrine, which enforces absolute cognatic inheritance) and making the realm a tributary of the attacker and counting as a holy war for moral authority purposes^note Combining the Agnatic Clans doctrine and Warmongering nature gives the similar, but gender reversed and understandably less target-rich Patriarchal Deposition CB. Unfortunately, the AI isn't fully aware that Enatic Clans makes women the Game-Favored Gender for the faith and has a bad habit of engaging in dynasty-ending patrilineal marriages.
  • Ensuring that there are enough suitable heirs is also much, much harder for female rulers. Muslim men can have up to four wives, while men of Pagan, Mazdan, and Dharman faiths can have three concubines in addition to their wife (whose children are considered legitimate, and they can be dismissed and replaced at will), so there is basically no way they can ever not have an heir. Women, however, can only ever have one husband to father their heirs - and there is always the off chance that a female ruler, even if she is the player character, will die in childbirth. Even with the addition of male consorts for female rulers of the Bön and African pagan faiths in 3.0, as well as any Pagan faiths that take the Equality or Enatic Clans doctrines, ruling women are still limited by their ability to only carry one (or maybe two, in the very rare event of twins) child at a time, while male rulers can father up to four children with their wives/concubines all at the same time.
  • In Crusader Kings III, every faith that exists at the start of the game is either male-dominated or has gender equality, with male-dominated being far more common. In a male-dominated faith, the most woman-friendly succession law allowed is agnatic-cognatic/male preference (women can only inherit in the absence of a male heir), women cannot be granted land, and knighthood and most council positions can only be held by men and women facing an opinion penalty when ruling. When founding a new faith or reforming a pagan faith, the dominant gender of the new faith may be changed between male dominance, equality, and female dominance, and the clerical gender may be set independently with the options of all-male priesthood, gender-neutral priesthood, and all-female priesthood. A game rule can fully avert this by making all religions have the equality doctrine or may be set to flip the game-favored gender such that all starting religions that would normally be male dominated instead female dominated.
• Game Mod: Like most Paradox games, both games have active modding communities, and CKII even has Steam Workshop support. These range from tweaks to outright total conversions. Some of the more popular ones include:
  • After the End, a mod set long enough After the End in North America that society has rebuilt to a roughly medieval level.
    • New Era - Old World, an After the End fanon spinoff centered around Europe instead of North America.
  • A Game of Thrones, a mod set in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire. There's a version for the first game, too, appropriate considering that Rock, Paper, Shotgun famously described CKII as "the best Game of Thrones game you will probably ever play".
  • Elder Kings, a mod set in the world of The Elder Scrolls.
  • The Four Nations: An Avatar The Last Airbender Mod, a mod set in the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
  • Lux Invicta, an alternate history mod about the Eastern Roman Empire embracing a new religion that worships Sol Invictus instead of converting to Christianity.
  • Middle Earth Project, a mod set in the world of Tolkien's Legendarium.
  • Warhammer: Geheimnisnacht, a full conversion mod set in the world of Warhammer. Grimdark included.
  • Crisis of the Confederation, a mod that transports the setting from Medieval Europe to the distant future.
• Gathering Steam:
  • Adventurers need a year to gather armies and ships, after they started their conquest goals. Only afterwards can they launch the attack, so a smart ruler will try to assassinate them before they can do so.
  • Similarly to adventurers, Viking invaders can state a conquest goal. Afterwards, soldiers and Viking heroes will join their cause over the next two years. They can attack at any time they want, but since their main targets are powerful Christian and Muslim kingdoms, they should better wait the full two years.
  • The army size of nomads is dependent on their clan's population, which in turn is depending on the size of their territory. So a clan that just conquered a large kingdom will have to wait a couple of years so their population can grow so they can make use of their new land.
  • In some way this applies to all conquests in the game. Getting a full duchy through a holy war is nice, but it will be utterly useless for the first few years, as the peasants will simply refuse to pay taxes or train as soldiers.
• Genghis Gambit: If a state is being attacked in a Holy War, Invasion, Crusade or Jihad, its ruler gets a +30 "defending against infidels" relation bonus to all their vassals. Sometimes a well-timed defensive war can really bring quarrelling subjects under a single banner. Also, if a foreign ruler starts a war to claim Vassal X's title to his own realm, Vassal X will get a +100 "defending my title" bonus to his own liege for as long as the war lasts, which more or less ensures they will forsake all their rebellious intentions for that period. This also applies to foreign rulers, who will take a prestige hit for declaring war on a ruler fending off infidels.
• Genocide Backfire:
  • When an enemy ruler raids your lands he becomes hostile to you for a year, so if you can catch the raiders before they escape you can put all of them to the sword. If you are feeling really vengeful, you can sail back to the raiders home and siege down their settlements to take their gold and imprison their courtiers.
  • When nomads pillage settlements in conquered lands, the revolt risk in those settlements greatly increases. On ground level, this translates to people tired of watching their families being butchered and rising up to fight for their survival or at the very least to take as many death squads down as possible.
  • If a peasant/heretic rebellion kills all but one member of your house, then the Sole Survivor can torture the Rebel Leader to death and spend the rest of his life squeezing money out of the peasants.
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: In the event where two of a Muslim lord's wives fall in love, there's an option to "scold them tonight!" that gives the Lustful trait. Apart from that, many players intentionally marry women with the "homosexual" trait to ensure their children is really theirs.
  • If you're playing as a man, have an affair with another man, and the affair is exposed: You lose 500 Prestige and 250 Piety, and get a twenty year -10 opinion penalty with everyone, as well as a further -10 to relations with church officials. Your affair partner also gets the relations penalty. But if you're playing as a woman and your lesbian affair gets exposed, you lose only 100 Prestige and 50 Piety, you don't get the opinion penalty, and your affair partner receives no penalty whatsoever.
• Gladiator Games: Any independent ruler of Roman, Italian, or Greek Culture, or of Hellenic religion, can construct a Grand Amphitheater. In this Great Work gladiators fight animals and each other, and can even do so in navel battles. It's even possible to recruit gladiators to serve in your court.
• Go Mad from the Revelation:
  • The Scholarship focus allows you to research the Cthulhu Mythos. Insanity is a common side-effect.
  • A very rare event can return an Incapable ruler back to life, at the cost of making him/her permanently insane. Depending on the quality of said ruler this is either a small trade-off or a massive annoyance.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: Naturally, a female ruler of kingdoms or empires would invoke this trope if she acts tyrannically. Human players would likely exercise more caution while playing as a female ruler due to lower opinion from male vassals due to her gender.
• Going Native: There is an event in which you can convert to the culture of your capital if the culture is foreign. Highly recommended, if you conquer a large realm with a foreign culture. Bringing them all to speak your language is borderline impossible, so you may as well assimilate yourself to reduce the likeliness of revolts. Otherwise expect to routinely have to deal with the Occupiers Out of Our Country movements.
• Gold-Colored Superiority: Two highest feudal titles, kings and emperors, have golden rings around their portraits, which are also jewelled in emperors' case.
• Gold Fever:
  • Downplayed with the "Greed" trait. While characters with the trait may love gold more, it rarely reaches the levels commonly associated with the tropes.
  • Meta-wise, the Horse Lords expansion allows the waging of war to extract tribute (gold) from neighbours, the Silk Road adding the opportunity for rulers to earn even more gold. Combined with the accompanying patch loosening the requirements for raiding, and the advantages of having lots of cash, it's not surprising for players to develop a love for the yellow metal.
• The Good King: Taking actions that generally give piety, being fair and just, etc. If a ruler has the kind and just traits, he might be known as "the Good"
• Good Shepherd / Sinister Minister: Depending on appointment policies, your bishops can be either, or somewhere in between.
• Gotta Catch Them All: You get a lot of prestige for every Duchy, Kingdom, and Empire title created and inherited, so there's an incentive to collect as many as possible. However, your vassals start to hate you if you have too many high-tier titles, especially Duchy titles.
• Gratuitous Latin:
  • The decision seal reads Audaces Fortuna Juvat, or in English, "Fortune Favors the Bold".
  • The concepts and distinctions between de facto ^Lat. literally, "from fact" and de jure ^Lat. literally, "from law" is important for players to grasp. It is possible for a king who controls an area de jure to set laws which are different from the king who controls the area de facto.
• Great White Hunter: Taking the Hunting focus of Way of Life represents your character aspiring to be this, with multiple event chains representing what can happen to them in their pursuit of worthy prey.
• The Grim Reaper: Several of the supernatural events in the Reaper's Due involve encounters with the Reaper themself, in various guises, male and female alike. Usually it results in a trail of bodies, though it can end well if the character who attracts their interest proves worthy.
• Groin Attack: As of Legacy of Rome, castration is an option for Byzantine emperors to inflict on their captured foes.
• Handicapped Badass:
  • Getting maimed only reduces a general's Martial stat by 2, meaning that your best general will still remain a great asskicker even if they lose a limb or two. This will affect his future health, though.
  • In addition, while losing a limb gives a severe penalty to personal combat skill, a character with many traits that boost personal combat skill won't be too badly affected by this loss, and the penalties for losing an arm or leg can be offset by acquiring a prosthesis like a peg leg or iron hand.
  • Averted in the case of blindness. Characters hoping to be a Blind Weaponmaster will have to contend with a devastating -100 personal combat skill. While it's possible to be a competent fighter with such a penalty with everything else going your way, being a master duelist is pretty much out of the question.
• Hanging Up on the Grim Reaper: One way to become immortal in the DLC The Reaper's Due is to bet your life in a chess game against Death. Win, and you become The Ageless.
• Hearing Voices: This is the chief symptom of Possessed characters. While characters in-universe interpret it as demonic (or, sometimes, angelic) possession, it's entirely possible they're merely mentally ill.
• Heir Club for Men:
  • Enforced in the original, but Crusader Kings II allows you to loosen the restriction a little and even (if your characters belong to the Basque, Sumpa, or Zhangzhung cultures or Cathar, Messalian, or Mazdaki heresies) adopt full gender equality in the succession. Also, the addition of matrilineal marriages means that a woman can inherit a title and pass it on to her children which count as a part of her own dynasty rather then the father's.
  • Even Crusader Kings II, it remains strictly enforced for merchant republics, which can only ever have strictly agnatic (male-only) succession for both the realm as a whole, and the heads of the houses, no matter what their religion, laws, or bloodline would make possible for realms with other governments^note Nomads can adopt absolute cognatic succession.
  • Conclave introduced new realm realm laws that allow you to defy this trope by increasing the legal status of the women, up to point where agnatic-cognatic (male-preference, rather than male-only) and absolute cognatic (no gender preference) succession can be instituted in realms that would not normally be allowed to institute those laws for religious or cultural reasons, and passing these laws allows even religions that cannot normally have matrilineal marriages, such as Islam, to form them. Alternatively, the laws can be lowered to enforce the Heir Club for Men or as close to it as the culture and religion of the realm allow.
  • Holy Fury introduces bloodlines, one of which, the 'Blood of Bayajidda and Magajiva' (carried by the Hausa rulers of central Africa), allows enatic-cognatic (female-preference) succession to be instituted, thus inverting the trope.
  • Defied by the Equality and Harmonious (Bön only) Pagan reformation doctrines, which strictly enforces absolute cognatic succession and a maximized legal status of women.
  • Inverted by the Enatic Clans reformation doctrine, which enforces either female-only or female-preference succession.
• Helicopter Parents: Chances are that you will sooner or later play as one of these yourself, because children are amongst the most easily controllable characters in the game and also of paramount importance for your family's survival. Children that are left to themselves (especially if you give them land to rule) have an annoying tendency to marry spouses that are statistically awful, hostile to you or worse, infertile or murder their siblings. While you do lose prestige over time if you don't grant your adult sons any land, it is still better to keep them under check at your court.
• Hell Gate: One chain of events has an actual Gate to Hell open as a result of an earthquake, complete with wailing and gnashing of teeth. Fortunately, it's not too hard to close. Although it's not made entirely clear whether it's a genuine gate to Hell or just a sinkhole seen through the lens of medieval superstition. (Note, however, that this event chain can still happen if you disable supernatural events in the game settings.)
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: You can name all your children in Crusader Kings II. Since the AI often names children after their parents or grandparents, it is entirely possible to accidentally introduce a branch of the family who all name their children "Poo Pants McTwat".
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Mostly averted: rulers and courtiers assigned to lead troops or as a realm's marshal will don armor in their portraits, helmets included. However, this doesn't include priests or members of societies with special garments: their vestments apparently override this. Granted, there is nothing to indicate that this is what they actually wear into battle.
• Henotheistic Society: Followers of polytheistic religions can select their "patron" deity, paying them far more attention than the rest of the pantheon.
• Hereditary Republic: While all merchant Republics in The Republic DLC are elective, if you're good (and rich) enough, your family can just keep winning election after election with sufficient funding.
• The Heretic:
  • You can convert all of Europe to Catharism (or any heresy, really) if you're up to the task.
  • Sons of Abraham further expands on heresies, both by providing unique game-mechanics (for instance, Catharism can have female bishops, while a Fraticelli Pope is a less-powerful duke-tier ruler which means he can be more easily vassalized) and by allowing a heresy to become the mainstream (turning the old orthodoxy into a heresy) if it becomes dominant enough over the 'parent' — meaning that after a while the 'convert all of Europe to Catharism' game would turn from Cathar heresy spreading in the face of Catholic orthodoxy to Cathar orthodoxy spreading in the face of Catholic heresy...
  • There's even an option to reverse the Great Schism (the split between the Roman Catholic [Western] and Orthodox [Eastern] churches that ended with the Pope and the Byzantine Ecumenical Patriarch excommunicating each other) if you play as an Orthodox ruler and reconquer major holy sites including Rome. This makes all versions of Catholicism into Orthodox heresies.
• Hermetic Magic: The Hermetic Society, naturally, tries its hand at this. Its success is uncertain, but even if it's superstition, it grants some nice bonuses.
• Hermit Guru: Indian princes can seek these out and try to lure them to their court to serve as advisors. It's often worth it, since said gurus often have very good stats. Take care, not every guru is genuine.
• Heroic Bastard: You might end up having one if you cheat on your wife with the courtier, or if your wife cheats on you. The heroic part will be if the child grows up to have enough positive traits, and if he doesn't murder his brother.
• Heroic Lineage: As of Holy Fury, certain accomplishments, both for good and ill, can now establish "Bloodlines," which grant certain bonuses that follow down to your descendants. Whether an ancestor of yours has been declared a saint, or established your dynasty over an empire, or if that's all too complicated, you could also forge an ancestry, like from Alexander the Great, for example.
• Heroic Sacrifice: If you are ill, then your Court Physician will try to cure you with his medical knowledge. However, if your Court Physician studies the Occult then his attempt to cure you will involve shouting "for you my Liege!" before slitting his own throat.
• Hilarity Ensues: The vast majority of event options that aren't either practical or malicious tend to be this. Sometimes, the game comes up with rather hilarious juxtapositions of the former, too (such as the "Ruler Commits an Act of Cruelty" event triggering at the same time that one of your provinces discovers a new weapon... or goats).
• Historical Domain Character: Many, obviously. In addition to the actual playable characters, random events include others such as Thomas the Rhymer and Robin Hood.
• Historical Fantasy: The game is set in medical Europe from 769 to 1412. It had some fantasy elements from the beginning but until The Reaper's Due DLC tended to take the Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane route (in the sense that what the characters believed to be supernatural events may have had perfectly mundane explanations, such as peasants telling tall tales about giants and dragons). The Reaper's Due has a couple of event chains that let characters become immortal, and Monks and Mystics added secret societies that can accomplish blatantly magical feats.
• Hollywood Satanism: Lucifer's Own are shamelessly evil blighters who commit Human Sacrifice and blasphemy for all sorts of dark powers. They also tend to rapidly accumulate sinful traits.
• A Homeowner Is You: Each great house in a merchant republic has its own mansion. The patrician of that family can spend money to build upgrades that provide special bonuses to their house.
• Homosexual Reproduction:
  • The "Way of Life" DLC made it easier to target people for seduction, and if the target was a woman, said woman could easily get pregnant... even if the seducer was female. Obviously a bug, and eventually fixed.
  • Before this, it was possible for a while for men to impregnate their lovers - gender was irrelevant. This bug was fixed.
  • It remains mechanically possible for events or console commands to create children with two mothers, though for mechanical reasons, one of them has to be the "father", though there are no longer any events in the un-modified game that display this behavior.
• Hopeless War:
  • This is what Harold Godwinson's defense of England is set up to look like during the conquest. He faces not only the larger army of William the Conqueror, but also Harald "Hardruler" of Norway. Luckily, Harold has some very loyal vassals and a superb-rated spymaster. The sanest way to keep the throne as Harold is to assassinate William the Bastard, since his claim on the English throne dies with him.
  • Subverted in the early releases of Crusader Kings II, as the AI for Harald Hardruler tended to be overly cautious when it could grind Harold Godwinson's army into the ground. In later releases, the AI becomes much better at fighting this war and is more willing to assault holdings and attack Harold's army directly.
• Hordes from the East:
  • The three Mongol hordes, plus the Seljuk Turks, first appear at the eastern edge of the map. With The Horse Lords DLC they're playable.
  • Inverted with the Aztecs, who come from the west specifically the New World (i.e. Mesoamerica).
• Horny Vikings: The Old Gods lets you take control of a selection of Norse warlords during the height of the Viking invasions of Europe. They don't, however, have horns on their helmets. How well they fit the other aspects of the trope is up to you, though Germanic Pagan rulers suffer Prestige penalties after too long at peace, encouraging a certain amount of raiding and/or conquering.
• Hot Consort: Your spouse can have the "attractive" trait. The actual appearance of the character can sometimes subvert this—they might appear to be very beautiful or handsome, but various traits they possess will make them repulsive to everyone.
• Human Resources: Under certain conditions, nomads can use the corpses of those killed during the razing of cities (not the looting, complete razing only) to fertilise their fields, giving them a significant population growth bonus. This can stack indefinitely. It may however have been patched out in later versions of the game, and it's not particularly clear what allows the option to be selected in the first place^note Having the "diligent" or "gardener" trait seems to be the main condition.
• Human Sacrifice: Employed by all non-Zunist pagans in various forms (especially the Aztecs, though they ironically get little benefit from it) and Hindu followers of Kali. In secret, it's also practiced by all devil-worshippers. In "Holy Fury", reformed pagans with the "Bloodthirsty Gods" doctrine can perform Aztec-style human sacrifices, gaining bonuses with the more infidels sacrificed by the same ruler.
• Hunting "Accident": One of the potential assassination plots involves arranging one to happen to the victim, in good old medieval tradition.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game:
  • Rulers with the Game Master or Hunter traits might execute their prisoners in elaborate hunts.
  • As a warrior lodge interaction in Holy Fury, it's possible to engage in a human sacrifice carried out as a hunt that ends with the sacrifice being brutally torn apart.
• Hurricane of Puns: Alongside many a Shout-Out, everything related to the "Animal Kingdoms" setting in a randomized world with Holy Fury. For instance, there may be a Cat King of Morrisia, with its de jure capital in Qattara, Egypt.
• I Am X, Son of Y: Several cultures in the game use patronymic names. For example, the son of an Irishman will likely be <given name> mac <father's name>, while an Anglo-Saxon will be <given name> <father's name>sson. This can have bizarre results when different cultures intermarry, or if applied to characters who get regnal names.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty: Followers of certain religions are able to force captured women to become their concubines.
• Idle Rich: Pretty much any courtier with no real duties qualifies. With the "Sword of Islam" DLC Muslims need to avoid this so that their family doesn't look corrupt and decadent. If you don't have enough duties for all your relatives, there are other options.
• If It's You, It's Okay: With the Family Focus, you will eventually make your spouse fall in love with you. Even if that spouse is homosexual. Additionally there are some other events that makes your spouse love you regardless of orientation.
• If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!: In Monks & Mystics, if you try to join the Assassins, you will be required to ritually murder your spouse or a relative as proof of your devotion to the sect during your initiation.
• Illegal Religion: Heresies are religious sects that pop up when religious authority is too low, and are usually immediately stamped out by the province's ruler. However, if a heresy gains enough power it can eventually displace the orthodox faith, turning into the legal religion and turning the old orthodoxy into a heresy.
  • Additionally, with high enough Crown Authority, a ruler can force a vassal to convert or revoke his title without any opinion penalty from other vassals.
  • Any character caught worshipping Satan (or his religion's equivalent) can be burned at the stake by his king with no penalty (in fact said liege even gets a small piety boost). If the satanist is independent, then others can wage holy wars against him.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Way of Life introduces an event chain that can end with you accidentally (or "accidentally") eating one of your friends during a party. Devil Worshippers also might have a little snack during a demonic orgy.
• Immortality Seeker: In Reaper's Due, characters approaching middle age can begin contemplating their mortality and seeking various questionable methods to extend their life and achieve immortality. With supernatural events turned on, they might succeed. As long as nobody sticks a sword through their gut or a knife through their backs, always risks in Crusader Kings.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Can happen if you run afoul of a character with the "impaler" trait.
• Improbable Antidote: With The Reaper's Due installed, your Court Physician may offer an experimental cure, which may be amputation, a potion that drives you insane, throwing a jar of live and pissed-off bees at you then legging it, or offering their own life in a ritual sacrifice. Sometimes they actually work.
• Improperly Paranoid: While it's true that plots against your life are common and the paranoid trait is helpful for uncovering legitimate plots, it also provides a lot of false positives, which have been known to induce poor decision-making not just in the AI, but in players. For example, a paranoid husband is likely to suspect his children are actually bastards and that his wife has been sleeping around, even when he really is the biological father.
• Incest Standards Are Relative: What "counts" as incest and is therefore prohibited depends on characters' religious preference. Eastern Orthodoxy outlaws "avunculate" (aunt-nephew or uncle-niece) marriages, but Roman Catholicism doesn't, and religions with the "Divine Blood" doctrine (Zoroastrianism, Messalianism, and reformed pagan religions depending on player or AI choice in Holy Fury) actively encourage marrying sibling to sibling or parent to child.
• Incurable Cough of Death: The Reaper's Due replaces generic illnesses with specific symptoms which may be revealed to be caused by more serious diseases. That cough your ruler has might be a symptom of an oncoming bout of pneumonia... or it might be just a cough.
• Informed Attractiveness: The "Ugly" and "Attractive" character traits in CKII have no effect on the character's portrait, so these tropes can sometimes happen.
• Insane Equals Violent: Schizophrenic and crazed characters are... really dangerous.
• In Spite of a Nail: There aren't many fixed historical events, but those that are tend to happen no matter what else occurs. For instance, The Teutonic Knights will be eventually formed even if the Crusades fail and the Baltic is already converted.
• Inter-Service Rivalry:
  • If one of your idle courtiers has better stats than one of your councilors expect him/her to come forth and demand to be given the position in question. This will happen on a regular basis as young courtiers tend to have all-around better stats than characters of the previous generation.
  • Also a good way (arguably the only one) to keep landed vassals in check. Players have tried various ways of facilitating dealing with disloyal vassals including, but not limited to not having any vassals and holding all counties themselves (despite the penalties this gives), keeping all vassals imprisoned at all time, or ensuring that all vassals are minors. The best way is arguably still giving out holdings cleverly in a way that they will desire each others' titles and not cooperate with each other while keeping Crown authority high enough that they can't wage war to acquire them.
• In the Blood: Characters will pass onto their offspring a tendency to have similar stats. This was strong enough in earlier versions that a form of Darwinian evolution could be observed, where since characters with higher stats were more likely to survive and to succeed as rulers and pass their traits on, everyone in the late game had insanely high stats.
• Intrepid Merchant: The Way of Life DLC allows characters with the Business focus to send caravans to distant lands in order to make a profit.
• Inverted Trope: The achievement "The British Raj" is awarded for controlling Britannia as a Hindu, Buddhist or Jain (the real one was the other way around).
• Involuntary Dance: A rare event can infect rulers with the dancing plague, which can cause those infected to die of exhaustion from dancing too much.
• Istanbul (Not Constantinople): Patch 1.09 for the II introduces this system, with certain provinces and titles being renamed depending on the culture of their ruler. "Suomi" will become "Finland" under Norse or Swedish rule, for example.
  • Individual cities and domains can also be renamed by the player who owns them, who can then invoke this trope, as well as Egopolis.
  • There's also an achievement called "Nobody's Business But the Turks" where you take over Constantinople as the Turks, meaning you can indeed rename it to Istanbul around 500 years earlier than it happened in real life.
• It Will Never Catch On: An event from Sunset Invasion has the player's ruler informed that the Aztecs has brought many strange and new but edible crops with them, such as tomatoes, potatoes, corn, and cocoa, which are becoming delicacies all over Europe. In response, the ruler will scuff at it and call it "a passing fad".

J to O

• Jeanne d'Archétype: An event chain in Sons of Abraham can put one in your court, provided that you're a Christian of any denomination except Cathar or Messalian and don't have Full Status of Women (as these allow women to be commanders anyway, and thus make a martially-inclined woman like Jeanne d'Archétype rather less noteworthy). They even get a special exemption to the prohibition of women being marshals and leading troops.
• Just Friends: Crusader Kings II replaces friends and the loyalty meter with an unilateral (you can like someone who hates the very soil on which you stand) relationship meter. Romantic love remains as a separate modifier applied to the relationship.
• Karma Houdini:
  • A successful (villainous) player character will often be this, especially from a modern perspective. You can smother infants in their cribs to steal their titles, force female prisoners to be your concubines (if you are a pagan, tribal chief or Hindu ruler), murder trusting friends for power and land, have children with a wife who hates you to the core because you killed her father for the throne and still die peacefully in your bed, wealthy, powerful and esteemed by your peers.
  • In particular, the second game has a short eulogy dialogue displayed at succession. It's based on traits and stats, especially the Seven Deadly Sins/Seven Heavenly Virtues traits, rather than the actions you took as ruler, so you can be a total bastard and still be made out to be a saint. Or, you could have been the nicest guy imaginable but be derided as a wicked monster who will pay for his sins in the afterlife because you were Lustful.
  • Prior to version 2.5 of Crusader Kings II, the Depressed trait allowed any character to easily become a Karma Houdini - simply engage in a massive spree of tyranny, then kill yourself, and your heir inherits all the benefits of your tyranny without any of the blame.
  • After version 2.5 of Crusader Kings II, there is now an "opinion of predecessor" modifier that makes suicide after engaging in tyranny less trivial, as your vassals will still be mad at you, with careful manipulation of Elective succession can still avoid the penalty, as the "opinion of predecessor" modifier is not inherited under Elective succession. If you're the only valid elector or one of two, then there's no risk of losing your titles.
• Keystone Army:
  • For many patches, any given Crusade acted as one of these. Many Catholic realms band together to capture the Holy Land or drive the pagans out of Hungary or whatever, but technically, all of those realms are in the war as allies of the Pope, who actually declares the war. The Pope is politically very powerful, but he typically only controls one or two counties in his own right. As such, if the defenders could capture Rome, the Crusade would fall apart immediately. However, it was eventually required that to reach 100% warscore, one side had to fully siege down all enemies, win a major battle in the field in addition to siege warscore, or the war had to have gone on for at least five years.
  • While killing a warleader won't win any wars, capturing them generates 100% warscore in nearly all cases, making it pretty much a guaranteed victory.
• Kicked Upstairs: Most honorary titles can be used to invoke this trope somewhat, as you can give them to a potential troublemaker to grant them an "office of state" for an opinion boost without actually making them more powerful by giving away land or promoting them further up the feudal hierarchy.
  • This is the only possible way to get rid of an unwanted regent. Since only courtiers or direct vessels can be regents, you can give your current unwanted regent a small land title and transfer his vassalage to someone else.
• Kick Them While They Are Down: The most reliable way to win a war is to Zerg Rush the enemy while it is weak (ruled by an underage child/tied down in another war or in a rebellion (preferably with their armies far away). Of course, your realm will experience periods of weakness, too, so be careful.
• King Bob the Nth: The game keeps track of all past rulers of any title that's Duchy-level or higher. If a ruler shares a name with a past ruler, he'll end up with a number next to his name.
• Kingmaker Scenario: Rival claimants to a contested throne don't always have their own landed titles, so they'll often depend on the backing of a powerful noble within the realm to lead Factions to enforce their claims. These nobles frequently end up being Kingmakers both figuratively and literally, at least when their faction wins.
• King on His Deathbed: Rulers who are rendered Incapable get a regent appointed on their behalf, with all the court intrigues and power plays that that implies. They also usually don't last very long.
• Knight Templar: Anyone with the "Zealous" trait. The trope namers also make an appearance.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: In war, the AI will sometimes offer to surrender even if you haven't met warscore requirements to enforce your demands. This is expanded with the 2.8 Jade Dragon patch: the redesigned Tributary casus belli offers the defender a decision to acquiesce peacefully, and a sufficiently high disparity in power may lead to the AI giving in before any battles are fought.
• Lamarck Was Right:
  • A genetic system still exists but there's a greater element of randomisation with regards to congenital/inheritable traits. Still, a eugenics-minded player can implement large-scale extensive breeding projects to produce the perfect heir.
  • Until the 2.5.2 patch, educating children in the Conclave DLC could lead to them developing positive traits like 'strong' or 'genius', or negative ones like 'slow' or 'imbecile', which are inheritable. The patch added a set of non-inheritable equivalent traits to stand in for the congenital ones.
  • Still possible. The new traits are just different levels on the Stupid to Intelligent scale. The event can, based on the intelligence of the educator, potentially raise or lower the ward's innate intelligence, developing Quick or even Genius if they've already got some int boosting traits (like Shrewd or Erudite), though typically only by 1 step. So nothing to Quick, or Quick to Genius. Or getting rid of negative intelligence traits like dull. Of course if the educator has a low intelligence is also possible to downgrade the ward's intelligence.
• La Résistance: Peasant revolts can occur in areas of high revolt risk, particularly if the nominal ruler is of a different culture or religion than the ruler.
• Lethal Diagnosis: A consequence of the way the game is set up to handle diseases. The health penalty for having a particularly severe disease doesn't actually affect a character until the nature of the disease itself fully manifests, most usually after being diagnosed by your Court Physician if you have The Reaper's Due involved. It's still present but less noticeable (though also more randomized) without the DLC, which uses a generic "Ill" trait instead of specific symptoms to model the evolution of a disease.
• Lethal Joke Item: Certain low-quality books aren't really that "low", while can only be created by an incompetent character, too. Examples include things like a "How To Hold a Sword" book, which only a character with low Martial stat can create, but provides a bonus almost as good as the ones written by a character with insanely high Martial and handful of supporting traits. It is generally beneficial to write books with characters unfit for given "genre", due to their unique bonuses, especially when starting from the earliest date. By mid-game, your dynasty will have a library full of both great and lesser books, which offers far more benefits than just collecting the great ones.
• Life Simulation Game: The series focuses on individual characters as the driving force of gameplay. While there's still a fair degree of wiggle room for player input, your ruler's own stats, traits, beliefs, and random impulses will affect which options are available and how effective they are. Uniquely, the game doesn't necessarily end with the death of your first character, as you'll immediately take control of his or her heir so long as the successor is an eligible member of your dynasty.
• Life Will Kill You: Even the most skilled and beloved of characters can drop dead at literally any time for almost any reason; not everyone gets a glorious death in battle or poisoned by a rival to advance some plot. Given the scope of the game, it's almost certain that your first character and everyone in his generation will be dead by the game's end. Unless you find a way to make your protagonist immortal — but even then, they're only immune to aging and disease, not mayhem...
• Locked Away in a Monastery / Taking the Veil: Brought back in the "Sons Of Abraham" expansion.
• Locked in the Dungeon: The fate of prisoners of war, unsuccessful rebels, and miscellaneous miscreants. Sufficiently noble prisoners may petition your ruler to be transferred to a Luxury Prison Suite or be put under house arrest; you can grant their request, ignore them, or lock them in the oubliette for their insolence.
• Low Fantasy: A realistic depiction of the Medieval Era... where your son may be the literal Antichrist, the Seal of Solomon prevents you from being possessed, the Holy Grail can keep you from dying from cancer, you can find magic axes, and you might end up fighting Cthulhu or Death itself. Holy Fury will take this up to eleven, by allowing you to play on a randomised fantasy map rather than on Earth.
• Loved I Not Honor More: Practically enforced. Spouses are nice and all (and necessary if you want to survive to the next generation), but there's a limit to which you'll let them interfere with family politics.
• Love Potion: They do exist, apparently, but it's likely you'll be on the receiving end of it, after a "witch" doles it out to a would-be hunter ruler. Fortunately, she's so interested in you in return that she'll come back to your court, with great stats! Unfortunately, she's also evil. Should have seen that coming when her full name ends with "Of the Wild".
• Love Triangle: If you're married and have another lover on the side, an event can fire where your lover and your wife both want to you to spend time with them for a special occasion. You can choose whether to spend time with one and ignore the other, or arrange a ball and try to discreetly spend time with both there.
• Loyal to the Position: Even if they got their title by literally stabbing the guy in the back, your character usually inherits their benefactor's court along with their fiefdom.
• Littlest Cancer Patient: As of Reaper's Due, your best heir will be this inevitably, at some point.
• Made a Slave: If an unlanded woman is captured by a ruler who follows Zoroastrianism, Paganism or one of the Indian religions, or is tribal or a nomad, he might force her to become his concubine. Bön and African Pagan women, as well as those of any Pagan faith that takes either Enatic Clans or Equality as a reformation doctrine can do the same to any unlanded man she may capture.
• Mad Scientist: The Hermetic Society explores the limits of medieval science, without regard for the opinions of the clergy.
• Magic Realism: With supernatural events turned on, the game takes on the mantle. Some of the supernatural events are unambiguously supernatural, like characters attaining immortality, discovering the Necronomicon, or becoming The Antichrist and regenerating lost limbs through Satan's unholy power. Even these events, though, are mere wrinkles, complications, and details in a fundamentally realistic depiction of Medieval Europe.
• The Magnificent: Characters can gain monikers based on their traits and actions. These range from "The Great" and "The Holy" to "The Cruel" and "The Drunkard".
• Make It Look Like an Accident: The goal of any "Murder Character X" plot.
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Male rulers can choose to disavow any knowledge of their bastards, which effectively leaves said bastard fatherless (and possibly resentful).
• The Many Deaths of You:
  • There are many, many ways your characters can die. One of the more recent patches introduced a "cause of death" mechanic, and these tend to be strangely generic. Suicide is "Death by Depression", heart attacks are "Death by Stress", Out with a Bang is "Died in an Accident", and so on. Deaths caused by plotting can be anything from simple poisoning to driving carriages over cliffs to vorpal pillows to something that can only be described as "death by exploding manure pile."
  • The Reaper's Due adds a little bit of flavor to executions, with the method varying according to culture and circumstances; for instance, Indian rulers can sentence their victims to be crushed to death by elephants and Norse rulers can have their victims made into a blood eagle. The public patch that was released alongside it also overhauls the succession screen to include a small epitaph for your late ruler based on their traits and achievements.
  • A later patch for the second game added new "death screams" and other sound effects that play when a character dies, tailored to fit their specific end.
• Mandatory Motherhood: Enforced; continuing the game means that someone has to bear your ruler's children, whether they want to or not.
• Marriage Before Romance: As most marriages are for political convenience rather than love, it's fairly common for couples to fall in love with one another only after they've been married for some time.
• Marry Them All: If you are playing as a Muslim ruler, then it is possible to marry upwards of four wives. This means that if you are caught in a love triangle, then it is not so much choosing between which to marry as which is the main wife. (Mind you, wives have been known to murder each other over who gets to be the main wife.) However, this is subverted if you happen to be in love with more than four women. Non-Hellenic Pagans, Zoroastrians, Indians and non-Muslim tribal chiefs and nomadic khans can have up to three legal concubines, who have no legal rights, but their children are still considered legitimate, but with Holy Fury, Pagans may take the Polygamy doctrine, which replaces concubinage with secondary wives, much like Islamic rulers have.
• The Marvelous Deer: Your character states his goal to find the fabled White Stag whenever you choose to go on a hunt. There's a small chance of actually encountering one as well, which gives a prestige boost if you manage to bring it down.
• Masking the Deformity: It's possible to gain the trait "disfigured" through a variety of scenarios (i.e., a duel going wrong, being captured and tortured, medical treatment, etc.); upon doing so the character will automatically gain a mask on their portrait covering their entire face. You can upgrade to more decorative masks (for a heavy cost) in certain scenarios, which will help counteract the opinion penalties that come with being disfigured.
• Massively Numbered Siblings: It's quite possible for a fertile ruler to end up with upwards of ten children, legitimate or not. It can be a pretty great asset in that it gives you lots of sons and daughters to marry for political gain, and little chance to run out of heirs in case of accident, but it you happen to be one amongst these children... Well, things can get nasty. And if you've got gavelkind or Islamic succession laws a Succession Crisis is nearly inevitable.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: A number of events in both games are seen by the characters as explicitly supernatural or miraculous, but could have more plausible explanations. Justified from an RP standpoint by the time period: people were MUCH more inclined to believe in the supernatural back then.
• May–December Romance:
  • Incredibly common. Most of the time, it's a ruler in his forties or so deciding he could use some more heirs (or hoping that he could get a son finally) and marries that sixteen-year-old daughter of his neighbor.
  • In the sequel, "May" Muslim rulers (always male) can reap considerable benefits by having such relationships. By having 1 or 2 wives (out of 4) in the "December" age group, young Muslim rulers can reduce the number of sons they have, which help with issues of succession and rivalries come the next generation.
  • Also in the sequel, characters with the Seduction focus can attempt to seduce other characters who are significantly older or younger than themselves. Getting caught in the act gives a slightly greater general opinion hit than other forms of adultery, as the age gap makes the relationship extra-scandalous (though not quite as much as that from seducing a close family member).
• Mechanically Unusual Class:
  • Merchant republics. Unlike the feudal states that (at game start) make up the majority of the game's playable options, they rely mainly on coastal trade posts rather than landed holdings as a source for their wealth and power. They also have a special form of elective inheritance, with control of the republic itself passing to one of five heads of patrician families based on seniority, prestige, and the amount of money they're willing to spend on bribing voters. It's also possible to create a vassal republic under a feudal king by granting a duchy to the mayor of a town within it, a move that will typically provide a nice boost in your tax income.
  • Tribal rulers count as well. Personal valor counts for a lot more than it does in feudal or republican realms, to the point that tribal holdings are typically upgraded with Prestige points rather than gold as is the standard elsewhere. Tribal vassals also don't contribute levies directly to their liege but rather must be called into war as allies. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that tribal powers typically have more options on hand for fighting and raiding than their feudal counterparts, including the fact that all tribals have access to raiding mechanics (whereas normally these are restricted to non-Abrahamic religions).
  • Nomads, introduced in the Horse Lords DLC. They are unusual in the sense that games without House Lords will depict all nomadic rulers as tribal rulers instead. Previous government/religion types locked by DLC will allow the AI to use said government/religion types.
  • Muslims' Iqta government is designed to encourage a far more aggressive playstyle than Christianity, between its increased conquest focus, polygamy ensuring large numbers of children, a "to-the-strongest" succession system, and the Decadence mechanic that's supposed to put a Muslim realm on a constant treadmill to expand or die. It also allows secular temples.
• Mêlée à Trois: Multiple wars for the same realm can occur, and nations with conflicting casus belli automatically become hostile to one another. This can sometimes result in a continent-spanning morass of fighting. Even stranger things can sometimes happen: if multiple wars are being waged against a single kingdom but the casus belli don't conflict, all the wars may end up becoming completely gridlocked for years because nobody can gain enough warscore (the measurement of who's winning a given war) to bring an end to it.
• Mentor Archetype: You can choose wards to educate your children once they reach six years of age. Depending on the mentor's personality, they can run the whole gamut of mentor tropes.
• Mercenary Units: Mercenary companies can be hired for a sizable down payment and a continuing salary, while holy orders take piety.
• Merchant City: The Republic DLC makes merchant republics a playable government type, including making the Player Character a Merchant Prince. Several, including a number of Italian city-states and the Hanseatic League, exist from the beginning, and it is possible to convert a tribal county to a merchant republic by decision.
• Messianic Archetype: If you reforge the Persian Empire as a Zoroastrian ruler in "The Old Gods", you can declare yourself Saoshyant, the Messiah foretold by Zoroaster himself, who will put the world to order before it ends. This will give you a huge relations bonus with Zoroastrian vassals, and a smaller one to your descendants (similar to how Muhammad's descendants get a bonus with Muslims). Actual messianic character may vary.
• The Middle Ages: With DLC covers almost all of the three major divisions all the way up to the generally-accepted end date of 1453. Only the fifth through the middle eighth centuries AD aren't represented at present.
• Military Coup: Fail to pay hired mercenaries and they may declare war on you and try to seize some of your territory to become an independent realm. This can have interesting results if successful.◊
• A Million Is a Statistic: The game mechanics practically encourage this. Keeping your vassals' troops on the field starts to accumulate relationship penalties with them, while getting their armies slaughtered has no negative effects other than having to wait for more troops to be conscripted. Thus, once you get a big enough army to storm castles rather than waiting outside besieging them, you'll want to throw away a few thousand lives to save time.
• Mischief-Making Monkey: A pack of 'em can sometimes show up during the Diwali festival and cause all sorts of mayhem among the guests.
• The Missionary: Court chaplains can minister to heathen or heretic provinces within your realm, as well as to pagan courts in far lands, with a small chance of converting them to the faithful.
• The Mistress: While love affairs are possible for Christians, concubines are common and expected among Pagan, tribal, nomadic, Dharmic, and Zoroastrian rulers.
• Money for Nothing:
  • Prestige is a borderline useless currency for feudal rulers, unlike in Europa Universalis. It provides a small opinion bonus with other rulers and unlocks certain nicknames, but that's it. The unreleased 2.8 DLC has been announced to include additional casus belli that are paid for with Prestige. It's much more important for tribal rulers, who pay for most improvements to their holdings with Prestige.
  • Piety as well, except for Muslims: you use it to pay for several religious casus belli (with the "Invasion" CB costing a whopping 1000 piety) and will need it to order dynasty members to "straighten up" if they become decadent.
• Mook Commander: The traits of your army's commanders positively or negatively influence the effectiveness of any flank they're placed in command of. For example, a commander with Holy Warrior will give your soldiers a 30 percent boost against religious enemies, while a commander with Craven gives penalties to army morale.
• Moral Myopia: In order to attack a coreligionist, even if you're a king and he's a count, you need to have a claim on at least one of his titles. There's no such limitations for attacking heathens, though.
• Mother Makes You King: Even with male-only inheritance laws, daughters get a claim on their father's titles, which they can pass on to their sons to press.
• Multiple Government Polity: In Crusader Kings II it is entirely possible to mix-and-match government forms within a given realm, with some areas controlled by theocracies, others by republics or merchant republics, and others under feudalism. There is a -20 opinion penalty from vassals ranked count or above towards a liege of a different government type. It's particularly common for players with feudal PCs to create a vassal merchant republic, which tends to pay more taxes than feudal vassals do.
• Murder the Hypotenuse: Besides the obvious one where your wife tries to have your mistress killed or vice versa, there's events with Muslim polygamy where secondary wives try to murder the primary wife. This can backfire, as the husband may force the murderess to drink her own poison as punishment.
• My Beloved Smother: In the second game, all female characters automatically get a huge relationship bonus with any of their children that will not diminish over time, which makes mothers some of the most loyal courtiers available in the game. They will even occasionally hatch plots which benefit one of their children rather than themselves.
• Mystical Pregnancy: The Lunatic event where your character has sex with a rosebush (ouch) can actually produce a child — though, in the game's ambiguous style, it could just be the child of a poor yet clever commoner who found the perfect opportunity to deposit a Doorstop Baby.
• Nature Adores a Virgin: Well, the Pope does. If a Catholic nobleman has the celibate trait, then the Pope will sometimes send them a letter applauding their virtue. Even if a celibate lord is non-Catholic, the trait will still give a nice piety boost. Inverted with certain pagan religions (like Germanic), where Chaste rulers can get an event where your prudishness causes your court to lose respect for you.
• Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight: If the Hermetic Society manages to invent an anachronistic firearm, and its owner has the carefully guarded secrets necessary to make the weapon's blackpowder, it provides the largest single bonus to personal combat ability in the game. (Tied with a prosthetic leg, though a prosthetic only serves to incompletely counteract the devastating loss of personal combat ability coming from being one-legged.) With the Hermetic Society being as secretive as it is, there's No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup for this devastating weapon.
• Nintendo Hard: Playing certain factions or families with the highest difficulty penalties count as this by default. Though even running the most powerful realm in the Old World can prove a daunting task if you're not paying attention.
• No Bisexuals: Downplayed. While Homosexual characters can still have children with opposite-sex spouses, they cannot use the Seduction focus on members of the same sex. The third game adds bisexual characters, in addition to asexual characters.
• Nobility Marries Money: Patricians and other members of merchant republics can marry into noble families, but doing so requires paying a significant dowry to their new noble in-laws. It's still worth it if the marriage brings a significant prestige boost or a good alliance to the table.
• Noble Fugitive: You can invite claimants to other titles to your court. If they accept, you then have the option of fighting on their behalf, whether their claim is rightful or otherwise. Succeed, and you've won an ally for life.
  • Alternately, they could serve in your court as one of your advisors, and you can marry them to your sons or daughters (matrilineally) have have their children in your dynasty inherit their claims.
• No Historical Figures Were Harmed: Conclave adds an event for Lunatic rulers where they appoint their horse as realm chancellor, in imitation of Caesar Caligula.
• Nom de Mom: Children from a matrilineal marriage are considered part of their mother's dynasty rather than their father's.
• Non-Entity General: Sort of. You play as the current head of the Dynasty. If your King is overthrown and killed, you may get booted to your very distant cousin, who is a count of a backwater province, but your game WILL continue. The only way for the game to end is to have your dynasty die out in the male line. However, each individual character has his or her own traits and stats, which does affect available responses and events.
  • In the sequel, you can have female heirs as a non-Muslim dynasty (the current head is not-Muslim) - if no males are eligible as heirs. You can, if you wish, choose to exclude females from being heirs, which may or may not be handy. But you can also give females equal rights to being heirs (only for Basques or Cathars by default, though the Conclave DLC allows you to grant inheritance rights to women). With this option, as long as any one in your dynasty is alive, you can continue... though on the flip side, due to this being an era of Arranged Marriages, keeping females in the family without losing prestige can be... challenging.
• Noob Cave: Ireland from the 1066 start until January 1st, 1172^note At which point the island is mostly-to-entirely feudal; the 769 and 867 starts have the island dominated by Tribal chiefs, which are considerably harder for new players to master. If you go to January 1st, 1172 or later, most of the south is controlled by England, while the remainder is primarily independent counts hoping someone keeps the English busy acts like this, at least in the earlier start dates. A bunch of relatively isolated counts (and sometimes a duke who controls two provinces), who are all pretty much equal in strength, nobody outside the island has any major claims on them most of the time, and you don't have a bunch of religious enemies, hordes, or major powers on your borders. It's a fairly good place to learn the basics and get your footing.
  • It's also a fairly good place for those learning to play as Tribal in the earlier start dates, since they're Catholic, and don't border any non-Tribals, so they don't have to worry about groups of angry, well-armed Franks, Germans, Russians, Muslims, or Steppe nomads deciding they want their land, unlike the pagan and Miaphysite tribals. It also helps that the nearest feudal states, England and Wales, are divided into several bickering duchies and counties in the Charlemagne start, or divided into several duchies getting invaded by a horde of Vikings in the Viking Age start, so you don't have to worry all that much about them. It's especially better than the Baltic pagan tribals in the later start dates, since they don't have to deal with a Catholic holy order formed for the specific purpose of invading them.
• Nothing Is Scarier: China is a non-playable country that doesn't appear on the map. And it is a powerful empire that can send out doomstacks of armies at their own will.
• Not What It Looks Like: If you are warding a child, you will get an event where you catch said child emerging from the dungeon with a bloody knife. Obviously your child has been torturing prisoners, right? Not exactly; if you are playing as a child, you get the same event from the other perspective. The child just wandered into the dungeon and picked up a knife.
• Nothing but Skulls: If the ruler of a steppe horde clan manages to pillage every holding in a province, they have the option of erecting a throne made from the skulls of the former residents that gives them a small monthly prestige boost.
• Not the Intended Use:
  • Want to get rid of a troublesome vassal? Make him a commander and send him out at sea. Sooner or later he'll catch scurvy and die.
  • There's an event during which you can choose to either become a falconer or a poet. Picking either options leads to a choice to get depression, which you can intentionally pick to commit suicide and pass the throne to a worthier heir.
• Obligatory Swearing: A probably unintended example happens if you're playing a Finnish pagan. Since all references to divine figures in event flavour texts are replaced by pagan gods, one event has the possible response: "Thank Perkele [my child] isn't shy." Perkele was an alternate name for high god Ukko in pagan Finland, but in modern Finnish it's a swear word, equivalent to the English "fuck". The response becomes very humorous with this added context.
• Obvious Rule Patch: There was a long-running exploit in the alliance system in the game where, to get around the penalties for declining a call to arms from an ally, a Player Character could accept the call to arms but then not actually send troops. The 2.8 patch (the Jade Dragon update) closed the loophole: an AI ally may now break off the alliance if you don't send troops to the war theatre within a reasonable amount of time.
• Obviously Evil: Even if you aren't a member yourself, high-ranking satanist sect members are ridiculously easy to spot. Hint: It's the ones who have all negative character traits, a disturbing number of physical deformities and had most of their children disappear completely without a trace.
• Occupiers Out of Our Country: Failing to convert/assimilate a newly conquered foreign land or cozy up with the local nobles fast enough is a guaranteed way of creating incessant independence movements and a throng of bitter rivals.
• Off the Rails: To the extent that the game has rails, it's more than possible to turn history completely inside out.
  • In the Charlemagne start, Karl of West Francia gets a number of scripted events to allow a player to play as him and follow more or less what historically happened. However, if Karl dies unexpectedly, the Carolingian Empire invariably blows apart in spectacular fashion and the French will spend the next few centuries fighting over the pieces. There's also an achievement for creating the Holy Roman Empire as his younger brother Carloman (who is strongly implied to be assassinated by their mother when playing from Karl's perspective).
  • You can play as King Harold and defeat William The Conqueror's invasion (that it happens is scripted, whether it succeeds is up to the player), or play as either of the two other historical claimants (Harald Hardrade of Norway, who is allied to William, and the little-known Sweyn II of Denmark), and there are achievements for ruling England as any of the three potential invaders.
• Offing the Offspring: Usually averted (characters are blocked from plotting to kill their own children, which forces them to imprison and execute unwanted kids and usually gain the very nasty Kinslayer trait). However, when playing as Charlemagne, your mother will eventually ask you to let her meet with your brother-turned-rival Carloman to end the feud between the two of you in a rather ominous tone. If you let her go, then a few months later Carloman will suddenly die a natural death and you'll inherit all his entire demesne even if you aren't his direct heir.
• Old Save Bonus: For CKII, currently the converter only allows for CKII save games to be ported forward to Europa Universalis IV. However, considering the expanded gameplay of CKII and the earlier bookmark starts in The Old Gods and Charlemagne DLCs, this leads to over 1,000 years worth of gameplay, edging out over the above by about 50 years or so.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: The game's theme tune consists of a men's choir singing to an orchestral march. There is some actual Latin in there but most of it is Canis Latinicus.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Invoked, but Subverted most of the time. Even acquiring thousands of points of tyranny gets forgotten after ten years or so. There are a few exceptions: Blinding, Castrating, Kinslaying and revoking titles.
  • Also, publishing your heliocentric research (Way of Life scholarship focus) invokes a permanent -10 penalty to relations with clergy. The church never forgets...
  • Played straight with nicknames though. While a character can lose bad traits or replace them with good traits, nicknames can almost never be lost (founding a bloodline, restoring the Roman or Persian Empire, and winning a war you started with the 'Invasion' casus belli are some of the very few actions that can change a nickname). This means that a character who becomes known as "the Cruel" will be known by that name forever, even after pulling a Heel–Face Turn.
• One-Man Army: It is possible for a small group or even a single soldier to hold off a massive siege by themselves for days or weeks at a time if they're the last defender.
• Only in It for the Money: Mercenaries. If you can't pay them anymore, dismiss them immediately. At best, they'll stop fighting for you, at worst, they'll change sides or declare war on you to conquer your territory for themselves, sometimes in the middle of a battle!
• Opportunistic Bastard: The AI will often use your wars as a time to have factions present their demands or other rulers press their claims, even if the plan wasn't very powerful before the war started. If the AI is lucky, you're hit with too much of a Trauma Conga Line to deal with all the threats.
• Our Giants Are Bigger: In years where no other significant events occur, the chronicle of your realm will automatically invent something. Such as a giant appearing and trampling villages. It's left as an exercise for the player whether this actually happened, or if it was just peasants telling tall tales.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Sometimes characters can become them. Again, the text leaves it ambiguous as to whether you actually transform or just go berserk on the full moon.
• Outliving One's Offspring: As a counterpart to the above, if you don't keep at least some of your heirs alive, the game ends when your dynasty is extinguished. Watching one of the offspring you want to keep alive get killed through disease, accidental injury, malice, or simply a sudden, unexplained death can hurt like a punch in the gut.
• Outside-Context Problem: Traditionally, the Mongol Golden Horde and Ilkhanate have always filled this role, steam-rolling most of the Eastern Europe and Persia after they show up before they lose momentum. Just in case, Western European players thought world conquest and dynastic dominance was too easy without the incentive of imminent invasion, the minor DLC "Sunset Invasion" for the second game adds a hypothetical super-powerful Aztec Empire to the mix as well.
• Out with a Bang: Possible with ageing characters.

P to S

• Panthera Awesome: Indian rulers can organize tiger hunts. Killing one yourself gives your ruler a nice amount of prestige (and an achievement in Ironman), but beware its claws...
• Parental Favoritism: Practically a necessity for anyone other than merchant republics, up to and including murdering The Unfavorite.
• Passed-Over Inheritance: The second and third in line for a title get strong claims on that title when the heir inherits. Even if they aren't particularly ambitious themselves, other nobles may start factions on their behalf to put them on the throne, even without their express consent. They can even end up backing a different claimant, meaning these factions are occasionaly in spite of their express wishes.
• The Patriarch: Kings of large realms who have ruled their kingdom for a long time usually become this eventually. They usually have so much prestige, money in their pockets and loyal vassals that they can claim entire kingdom titles and decide wars simply by virtue of siding with one or another faction.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: When you only execute prisoners with the "cruel" and "impaler" traits.
• Permanent Elected Official: Doges under the new mechanics for Republics are elected for life, not any set term like in modern representative republics. Ditto elective monarchies.
• Perpetual Beta: The patches accompanying the various expansions often change the game at a fundamental level. In addition, Paradox opens up more areas of the code for modding with each major patch, allowing mods to change the game in greater ways.
• Persecution Flip:
  • It's possible for a heresy to gain enough moral authority to supplant the religion it spun off from, at which point adherents to the original religion are considered heretics and subject to persecution.
  • Sunset Invasion has Native Americans (more specifically, the Aztec Empire) invade the Old World with intent to conquer it.
• Pilgrimage:
  • The Sword of Islam DLC allows Muslim characters to go on the traditional hajj to Mecca, implemented as a chain of Random Event that force a temporary regency while the character is away and may allow the character to gain various traits and stat changes. If they successfully complete the hajj, they gain the Hajjaj trait, which grants a minor opinion bonus with other Muslims and a small increase in monthly Piety gain.
  • The Way of Life DLC allows a Christian or Indian character using the Theology focus to go on a pilgrimage to a holy site of their religion, starting an event chain similar to that of the hajj and ending with the gain of the Pilgrim trait.
• Pintsized Powerhouse: Merchant republics are usually just a single province, rarely two. A single province that has more disposable income than an empire covering third of a continent. And they only snowball from there with improved technology and infrastructure, gaining additional trading ports. This allows to both maintain a huge retinue (further bolstered by special bonus doges have to retinue size) and hire mercenaries without fear of going bankrupt.
• The Plague: The Reaper's Due adds special mechanics for the march of the Black Death, the historical plague that inspired the trope, as well as for lesser (though still quite nasty) epidemics.
• Please Select New City Name: Names of some places change depending on the culture of the owner of the province: for example, Novgorod becomes Holmgard if conquered by the Norse. The player can also change the names of provinces and settlements within them, and with the Customization DLC, they can change the names of titles they either possess or rule over, so long as they aren't a vassal to someone else.
• Point Build System: Used by the Ruler Designer DLC, after a fashion. Different traits either add or subtract years to your characters age, meaning that having only good traits will make the character too old to last long. However, it is possible to create one using a mod which changes the character creator.
• Politically Correct History: Played with. Skin color does not factor into AI calculations for relations, so it is entirely possible to have a full-blooded African as the beloved ruler of, say Sweden. If the king or queen has a culture other than Swedish (or the relevant culture of his vassals), then they get a significant opinion malus as a "foreigner."
• Political Strategy Game: CKII is a political strategy of a very different mold than the typical examples: instead of simulating republican politics, it mostly concerns medieval feudal and dynastic power struggles. Though a Merchant Republic at least has elections.
• Pooled Funds: If a patrician's palace has the hidden vault upgrade, it's implied the vault's owner swims through the treasure in it.
• Pose of Supplication: One of the ways to gain grace with the Chinese Emperor is to travel to the capitol and kowtow to him. If you annoy him then he won't let you kowtow in person and instead demands you kowtow in front of a painting of him.
• Power Born of Madness: Hilariously, if a character has the trait "Possessed" (read: is dangerously insane), they can receive a buff called "Jesus gives military advice." This buff adds a staggering +20 martial skill, when 20 martial skill would by itself make a formidable general. Essentially, you can end up having your armies led by a Napoleon who has to spend all of his off-duty time in a straightjacket.
• Power Creep: Christianity was originally probably the most latently powerful religion in the game, making up for its offensive disadvantage compared to Muslims and Pagans with an impressive edge in defensive game and remarkable stability in peacetime, while its evangelical nature meant it would often spread all on its own across the rest of Europe even in 789 and 867 starting dates. Various updates, however, have buffed Muslims to the point that they're no longer noticeably more susceptible to self-laceration than Christians are, while Pagans received enough of an upgrade that even offensive pagans are no longer a Glass Cannon, while defensive pagans would, when left on their own, often conquer most of Europe. The most recent expansion, Holy Fury is a good example: While Reformation of any pagan religion has become a downright Game-Breaker, Catholics received instead the Baptism mechanic, which would often cause Catholic kings and Emperors to bankrupt themselves in an effort to get all their children baptized by the pope, and the coronation mechanic, which negated realm stability further, because getting a decent coronation is surprisingly difficult, while the Byzantine Empire, formerly one of the most formidable power blocks in the center of the map, lost much of its territory to newly created pagans.
  • This applies even more to feudal government (including Iqta). Originally desirable for everybody for its defensive advantages and offering the only chance of a self-sustaining economy, recent updates have buffed Tribalism and Nomadic Government (in terms of military might in particular) to the point that they're actually arguably stronger than plain old feudalism.
• Praetorian Guard: Certain Mercenary groups start the game at certain dates as the vassals of a king or emperor level ruler, and essentially serve as that particular realm's trump card, given that this makes them unavailable for other realms to hire. Most notable are the Varangian Guard (who can only be hired by the Byzantine Emperor) and the Mamluks who will only fight for the Sultan of Egypt (at least until they take over the country).
• Pragmatic Villainy: The key to succeeding at this game. For varying values of "winning."
• Prayer Is a Last Resort: Some characters (Aztecs, Germanic Pagans, Satanists, etc) can perform human sacrifices of prisoners. Occasionally when you do this the person being sacrificed spends his last moment in prayer. While this won't save his life, the person likely hopes that it will save his soul.
• Pregnant Badass:
  • The "Pregnant" trait surprisingly has no effect on Mook Commander's abilities, so assuming you have access to female commanders (or are female yourself), you can certainly have one of these.
  • Downplayed after the dueling overhaul in 3.0, wherein being pregnant carries significant penalties to personal combat skill and prevents engaging in duels, though the penalty is small enough that a badass woman can still kick most people's asses, even while pregnant. Difficult and troubled pregnancies, however, can be downright debilititating and carry large enough penalties that it's very unlikely that anyone would be capable of badassery during them, and unless pregnancy events are completely off, they're not likely to be in any condition to be leading armies.
• Press X to Die: Depressed characters can commit suicide from the Intrigue menu. This can actually be useful if your current character is iffy but your heir is good. You can also perform any number of tyrannical acts before offing yourself, allowing your heir, who remains blameless, to reap the benefits without the (very severe) penalties that normally follow. (Although if you piss your vassals off too much, the heir will still be hit with a temporary "Negative Opinion of Predecessor" penalty to vassal relations.)
• Pretext for War:
  • Like other Paradox games you're not allowed to just invade for no clear reason if you're Christian, but fortunately finding or creating casus belli isn't hard: Either via fabricated documents or actual de jure territorial disputes. Succession disputes can also occur. Muslims and pagans aren't restricted in this manner, though Muslims lose piety if fighting someone of the same denomination. However, with the exception of the Invasion casus belli, unlike other Paradox games, wars are actually fought exclusively over the wargoal, and the aggressor is at no direct territorial risk (though they bare the indirect risk of becoming more vulnerable to retaliatory or third-party wars).
  • Averted by Pagans and Muslims, who may wage wars for single bordering counties (and any coastal county in diplomatic range for Germanic Pagans once the Viking Age has begun) without any sort of formal casus belli and with only minimal restrictions (Muslims must pay a small amount of piety to use their county conquest, while Pagans cannot use county conquest against co-religionists).
  • With Jade Dragon, rulers who cannot wage a county conquest war against a target can also avert this with the 'Border Dispute' "casus belli", which is an unjust conquest of a single county, which costs prestige for Pagans and money and piety for everyone else.
• Princeling Rivalry: When a king passes on, the new king's brothers usually inherit some sort of claim of their own on the throne, guaranteeing there will be strife if the eldest isn't really cut out for the job. Depending on the succession type they might even inherit chunks of the kingdom as vassals or even independent kingdoms.
• Private Military Contractors: You can hire bands of mercenaries to assist you in your wars, though as this costs money up front plus a monthly salary it can be too expensive for smaller realms. Horse Lords expands the mechanics by making them generated dynamically and increase in size as they earn money, while Conclave allows the Player Character to create a mercenary band of their own from their demesne levies, offering them as hirelings to AI rulers. Holy orders operate similarly to mercenary bands, except the initial down payment is made in Piety instead of Wealth. This makes them marginally cheaper at the cost of only being able to use them against religious enemies.
• The Promised Land: As of Sons of Abraham, it's possible for Jewish kingdoms to return to and restore the Kingdom of Israel.
• Properly Paranoid: Downplayed. Rulers with the Paranoid trait have a tendency to see plots against them and their loved ones everywhere, and frequently suspect, rightly or wrongly, that they weren't responsible for their wife's pregnancy. People do sometimes plot to kill them, and some of their children might not actually be theirs, but most of these plots aren't real. A good rule of thumb for the player is, if you think there's a plot, there probably isn't one, but if your spymaster thinks there's a plot, it's real.
• Protective Charm: In Sons of Abraham, you can buy a holy relic, which gives a major boost to your piety, can be paraded around to help pacify the peasants, and gets passed down to all future rulers. Of course, whether it actually is a relic (or at least whether you're willing to knowingly forge one) depends on how cynical you are.
  • There's also the Seal of Solomon, which does work, preventing the owner from being possessed.
• Proud Merchant Race: Jews. They're heavily involved in banking in Christian and Muslim realms, and the Radhanites are important traders along the Silk Road.
• Proud Warrior Race:
  • Unreformed Norse and Tengri pagan rulers are required to fight wars regularly in order to maintain their stability. The latter group includes the much-feared Mongol hordes (as if they needed incentive enough).
  • Members of the Altaic culture group (including the infamous Mongols) have access to a Tribal Invasion casus belli which allows them to essentially launch wars for entire kingdoms whenever they want to, though they lose access to it if they become Christians.
  • Muslims also fit. They have an Invasion casus belli of their own, and one of the best ways to reduce decadence is to fight and conquer. The original idea for the religion was that it'd be immensely powerful when expanding but quickly weaken and fragment in times of peace; this isn't quite how it worked out.
• Puppet King: Rulers who have powerful vassals under them may find themselves becoming this. Generally, if the player is the ruler, the goal is to avoid becoming the trope; if as the vassal, to encourage and exploit the trope. There is even an achievement for reaching this state of affairs with the Conclave mechanics (requires that every member of the council as well as the king all owe you a favour)
• Puppet State:
  • Very strong element. The player is able to create vassals by giving the aristocrats in his court titles. Assuming relations are good enough he can force these vassals to raise troops for him and even force to them to surrender their title and land (though this is very likely to result in rebellion instead).
  • It's also possible to press the claim of a dynasty member on a neighbouring country, since it takes several years to pacify the conquered regions the family member will then be almost completely dependent on you for support and the +100 relationship bonus means that the ruler will usually be an ally for life.
  • It is also possible to establish more conventional, if less formal puppet states as tributaries, which are not bound by their overlord's laws like vassals and are not called to arms or inherited upon the death of either ruler, but have to pay high tax rates and receive protection.
• Put on a Bus: In Jade Dragon, characters that are sent to China are effectively considered dead by the game mechanics.
• Quarantine with Extreme Prejudice: Whenever an epidemic breaks out in your demesne, you have the option of going into seclusion along with your court in an effort to prevent the disease from reaching you.
• Rags to Royalty: This can happen a few times.
  • Defeat a peasant revolt, release the Rebel Leader from prison, marry him to your daughter, and die. Someone who has a trait describing him as "a jumped up peasant who revolted against his betters" is now royal consort to an Empress and father to her heir.
  • Conversely, if a peasant revolt is sucessful and captures enough land, the leader can potentially declare himself a King.
  • In a new update, there will be a chance for the peasant's crusade to break out. If this happens, there is a slim chance it will succeed and the peasant leader of it will become King of Jerusalem.
• Raising Sim: Both games give you the option of tutoring your heirs directly (or entrusting them to others, but doing it yourself is a somewhat more reliable way to mold them into the sort of character you want). The second game extends this to cover any children, meaning that you can become the mentor and guardian of characters outside your own family as well.
• Rape, Pillage, and Burn: Pagans (except Zunists and Hellenics), Hindus, tribes, nomads, and members of Altaic, Norse, Berber, and Turkic cultures can raise armies in peacetime to raid provinces bordering the realm, or any coastal province if they have access to ships. In addition to being basically the only way tribes can reliably earn money, it can be used to capture concubines (which can be useful for acquiring claims on foreign lands), and sacking a temple raises the moral authority of your faith by one point and decreases the target's faith by one point, making it a reliable way for a pagan to help their faith towards reformation. Nomads can also pillage permanent holdings in conquered lands, destroying buildings in exchange for gold and eventually demolishing the settlement entirely, freeing up territory for grazing.
• Rasputinian Death: It's been patched for a while now, but in early versions of the game, assassinations could become these if you had multiple plots succeed against the same target simultaneously.
  Popup 1: Our squad of bowmen hid in the shadows and pelted (Targeted Character) with dozens of arrows as he/she rode by, killing him/her instantly! They all escaped without a trace, and we've even been spreading a rumor of "A Lone Bowman" to cover our tracks.
  Popup 2: With a little bribery and good timing, we managed to send (Targeted Character)'s carriage sailing over a cliff, with them in it! We also killed the driver, to get rid of a potential witness.
• Readings Are Off the Scale: The Emperor of China has no visible traits, and all of his stats are shown as "?". This makes him as close to a Humanoid Abomination as possible in-game^note Well, besides the Devil Spawn kid and their three generals from ancient mythology, who are literal humanoid abominations, since everyone else, up to and including Saint Peter and the Prophet Muhammad, is represented with stats and traits.
• Realpolitik: This is Realpolitik: The Video Game, even though the term wouldn't be invented for another thousand years from the earliest start date. Every nation, every dynasty, every character is constantly looking to gain an advantage over everyone else, and you can be simultaneously in a marriage alliance with a neighboring realm while trying to assassinate its rightful king so that your grandson from the daughter you married into it will inherit the throne.
• Real-Time with Pause: With adjustable speed settings.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: With "Jade Dragon", you can send your courtiers (including your relatives) to serve in China as commanders and eunuchs in order to get grace from the Chinese Emperor. Since the trip to China is very long and difficult, you can be sure that they'll never come back. In terms of game mechanics, being sent to China isn't different from being dead.
• Rebel Leader:
  • As of The Old Gods, random peasant uprisings are now led by named characters (typically Lowborn) with whom you can interact. If said rebel is a co-religionist in a province led by a heathen, he can become your best friend. He even comes with a trait called "Peasant Leader", which literally reads: "This man is a jumped up peasant who revolted against his betters".
  • Also in The Old Gods, random heretic uprisings are led by named characters, also Lowborn, who can be interacted with. Unlike their peasant counterparts, they get the "Heresiarch" trait.
  • Legacy of Rome introduced a Factions mechanic, allowing vassals to unite against their liege over some common grievance. When the faction finally makes its bid for power, the leader of the faction also leads the rebellion. Rajas of India further refines the Faction system by granting the Rebel Leader a temporary title of equal rank to his liege's, with the other faction members serving as his vassals for the duration of the conflict.
• Regent for Life: Underage rulers have regents, and sometimes regents won't give up on their power so easily.
• Regime Change: You can press the claims of anyone in your court against any other title. If it's a lower-tier title, the claimant is landed, and you win the claim war, the new holder becomes your vassal; if it's the same level as yours or higher and independent / under the same liege, it translates to an automatic alliance.
• Reincarnation: Characters in Dharmic faiths may occasionally seem to recognize places and situations from their "past lives" as one of their ancestors. Like a lot of things, what's really going on inside their heads is left ambiguous, though the characters certainly seem to believe it's actual evidence of reincarnation.
• Related in the Adaptation: There is no indication, that Oleg (Helgi) the Seer, prince of Novgorod and Kiev and regent for Rurik's young son Igor, was a relative of the Rurikids. In the Old Gods, Helgi is a bastard son of Rurik.
• Relationship Values: A significant part of the gameplay. The first game had diplomatic relation scores between rulers, as well as a loyalty score between vassals and their lieges, the latter being essentially binary in practice. In Crusader Kings II, these were scrapped, and now every single character has a relationship value with every other character that is affected by a bewildering array of factors. Managing those scores is vital to both victory and survival.
  • Level-Up at Intimacy 5: If your vassals like you a lot, they'll provide you with far more troops and pay you far more in taxes than they're legally required to, be more likely to approve any legal reforms you want to push, and can even occasionally be persuaded to give up some of their lands to the crown, or even convert to your religion.
  • You Lose at Zero Trust: If your vassals hate you, on the other hand, you're one conspiracy away from the collapse of everything you've worked for. Especially bad if it's a family member or your spy master.
• Religion is Magic: Played with for the most part. In later updates you can adjust the game before you start, meaning you can choose to deactivate Supernatural Events and Devil Worship. Most supernatural events are a case of Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane, but some play this trope straight. Satanic Characters get access to Black Magic, but even characters who follow the lighter side of their faith can get some magical seeming events. Characters with the "Voice of Jesus" trait get events where Jesus gives you virtue traits, Dominican and Benedictine Poetry can cure depression, prayer can cure insanity, and demonic possession can be removed with exorcism.
• Religion of Evil:
  • Aztec Paganism and Germanic Paganism allow such things as human sacrifice and murder.
  • Likewise Satan Worshippers can perform human sacrifice, use black magic, and torture people to death for fun.
  • With Holy Fury, any Pagan faith, even the normally relatively peaceful Bön faith, can be turned into a violent faith with human sacrifice (eg. Bloodthirsty Gods and to a lesser extent, Haruspicy doctrines), a culture of glorified raiding and foreign conquest (Germanic or any other Pagan faith with both Sea-Bound and Daring), and/or glorified incest (Divine Marriage and Dawnbreakers doctrines).
• The Remnant: If the Chinese Imperial dynasty is overthrown, a prince from that dynasty might come west and become an adventurer, raiding provinces until he is wealthy enough to try to create a new empire through conquest.
• Removing the Rival: Really, this is the central trope to understanding how the game works. Every single character has his or her own agenda, and plans clash more often than not. You likely have to flatter, bribe, threaten, or murder an awful lot of people in order to get what you want and keep others from getting their hands on your stuff.
• Repressive, but Efficient: Ruling anything bigger than character's own demesne requires some truly draconian measures and constant, aggressive plotting to just stay afloat. It's also the only way to make your holdings rich and prosperous in early stages of the game.
• The Resenter:
  • Bastards tend to end up like this if not legitimized, though your legitimate offspring may become this if you legitimize a lot of bastards.
  • Anyone who loses their place in the line of succession is likely to become a resenter when you change your succession law.
  • Firstborn children tend to be resentful of succession laws that don't give them the highest priority in succession and all of your children will dislike you for instituting seniority or tanistry.
• Revolving Door Revolution: Since new rulers always get a relationship penalty with their vassals (that gradually wears off as they maintain their hold on the throne), turnover time between rulers can be quite short indeed in kingdoms where no one ruler has enough power to hold out against a large enough faction (until someone eventually does or the kingdom itself splinters).
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Several versions of assassination note that your character has the assassins themselves killed to eliminate potential witnesses.
• Rightly Self-Righteous:
  • Every male character who joins a Catholic Holy Order, whether by choice or by force, gains the celibate trait. In other words, no matter how cynical or lustful a character is he will still honor his Templar Vow of Chastity.
  • It's possible to get a "True Christian Knight" modifier, the text of which has the character proclaiming his embodiment of chivalry and declaring, "I am Galahad!" Only fairly strong Christian men with the Brave, Diligent, and Humble traits and no personality flaws can get it, though, which means they're basically just stating a fact.
• Rightful King Returns: Deposed rulers typically retain claims on their former thrones, which means that, just like any other claim holder, they can usurp it right back if they beat the current holder in a war. Alternately, if your kingdom gets invaded and you get killed, your dynasty may fall to an heir who just happens to be out of the kingdom at the moment (probably leading an army somewhere), or even a remote relative on the other side of the continent. In either case, they'll hold a claim for the recently-seized throne, and may not have the political or military clout to take it back right away - resulting in this trope when they (or their descendants) finally DO return to claim the ancestral lands...
• Ring of Power: Some of the originals - both the Seal of Solomon and Andvaranaut can show up as artifacts with the appropriate modifiers on. Naturally, the one makes you immune to demon possession (real or not) and the other makes you wealthier, but also removes some health to represent its curse, and it's impossible to get rid of.
• "Risk"-Style Map: It's a Paradox Interactive game.
• Risking the King: Your ruler is also the commander of his personal levy. While risky by default, it may turn into even bigger liability when he's also inept with martial skills.
• Rite of Passage: African Pagans (reformed or not) and any reformed Pagan faiths that take the "Animistic" doctrine have a rite of passage that characters can go through upon reaching adulthood.
• The Rival:
  • Via random events characters may acquire rivals, with appropriate relationship penalties depending on your political relationship to each other. If one of your vassals is a rival of you, always be prepared for them turning on you, whatever their other traits or their loyalty. (They also get a nasty -3 to loyalty per month, meaning even quite loyal vassals can start sliding towards rebelllion.)
  • Merchant republics are this to each other by default, their leaders having a hefty opinion penalty to each other.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: In The Old Gods bookmark, there is not one but two of these. Ivar the Boneless and his brother Halfdan Whiteshirt are both Viking warlords invading the lands of King Ella of Northumbria. If you click on either of the brothers, you can see that King Ella executed their father Ragnar Lodbrok.
• Royal Bastard: It is possible through events and use of the Seduction focus for women to become pregnant out of wedlock. Unless legitimized, bastards cannot inherit except in open succession (Muslims and reformed pagans with either Agnatic or Enatic Clans doctrine), but do receive claims from their parents which can be pressed in war or by factions. If an illegitimate bastard has a child or acquires a title, they create a new dynasty. There's also an event added in Holy Fury where a Catholic mother may confess their child to be a bastard, even if their biological father according to the child's character data is in fact her husband. The game features a number of illegitimate Historical Domain Characters such as William the Conqueror.
• Royal Brat: Negative character traits tend to first show up during childhood.
• Royal Harem:
  • Muslim rulers get multiple marriages, while Zoroastrians, Pagans (except Hellenics), tribal Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Taoists get concubines to go along with their one legal wife. All children from a Muslim father are considered legitimate, unlike those produced by mistresses in Christian nations. Children of concubines are equivalent to legitimized bastards, save for not incurring a relations penalty with legitimate children or costing prestige. With Holy Fury, Pagans can take the Polygamy doctrine and have multiple actual wives like Muslims can.
  • Gender-flipped by Bön and African Pagans, as well as any Pagans who take the Equality or Enatic Clans doctrines on reformation, which allows female rulers of the faith to take up to three men as "consorts" in addition to their one legal husband.
• Royal Inbreeding: Both Zoroastrianism and Messalianism allow (and encourage) full-on Brother–Sister Incest and / or Parental Incest. Even in other religions, however, Kissing Cousins are hardly unusual, and consistent intermarriage between dynastic lines is one of only two ways to establish an alliance with a kingdom that lasts more than a generation or two (the other way being to ensure the ruler himself is of your dynasty). The expanded Reformation mechanics in Holy Fury will allow any reformed pagan religion to do this, if the reformer chooses the proper traits.
• Royally Screwed Up: This can happen, and when it does things get very interesting. And by interesting, we mean civil wars and the attention of opportunistic neighbours.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Most rulers generally lead, or at least fight with, their own armies. It's especially important for Muslim rulers to actually do something, or else they risk looking weak and decadent.
• Rugged Scar: Battle wounds can heal into scars, providing the character with a small monthly Prestige bonus. With the 3.0 patch, this has been expanded to up to 18 potential scars and three levels of the "scarred" trait (scarred, grievously scarred, and horrifically scarred), resulting in increasing amounts of prestige, and for the second and third levels, combat bonuses and attraction bonuses.
• Ruling Couple: Can happen when one character has a spouse who is also a ruler in their own right.
• Running Gag: One of the events that a character trying to improve his learning might get involves sighting a comet. "So it's not an ill omen."
• Russia Is Western: A common outcome if the 867 start date is picked. The Rurikids who rule over Rus will often convert to Catholicism due to proximity to, and power of the western catholic realms, and will not convert to the Orthodox church. This will lead to close diplomatic relations with western kingdoms, them joining crusades, etc.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Normally when an enemy army captures a holding, any characters inside are taken prisoner. If your holding is captured by a Peasant rebellion, any characters inside are murdered.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified: If a peasant rebellion somehow succeeds, the leader of the rebellion gains the title "the Liberator".
• Saintly Church: Monastic Orders^note the Benedictine Order, the Dominican Order, the Community of Saint Basil, the Community of Saint Abraham, the Community of Saint Anthony, the Adavita Matha, the Savaka-Sangha, and the Sravaka-Samgha have missions that encourage members to turn away from sin and become virtuous. If you stay in a Monastic Order long enough and make the right decisions then it is likely you'll end up with all the virtue traits. If you have a high enough rank then you even get the ability to cause other characters to gain virtue traits.
• Salt the Earth: Rulers of the various steppe hordes (including the Mongols) can pillage any settled holdings they directly control, which grants them a measure of extra gold, technology points, and population in exchange for destroying improvements and significantly ramping up the province's revolt risk for a time. Destroying every settled holding in a province causes it to revert to a pastoral state, giving the horde more grazing lands to support them.
• Sanity Slippage: If a character stays Stressed for too long, watch out...
• Save-Game Limits: Ironman Mode, which is the only way to earn achievements, only allows you one save per session and periodically overwrites the save file to prevent Save Scumming.
• Say Your Prayers: When a character who can perform ritual human sacrifice as part of their religion sacrifices a Christian or Muslim, the victim may utter a few last prayers from their holy book.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: Even if you're the most powerful ruler in Europe in theory, the power that you actually wield pretty much correlates to how much your vassals like and respect you. A massive, map-spanning empire can crumble away in less than a decade when the underlings decide to take the throne for themselves or jump ship altogether.
• Schrödinger's Question: Basically any event in the first game where different traits can be gained qualifies: The reason for you taking a certain action is determined correlated to your response to it and ultimately decided by the RNG. Thus you refusing to start a rivalry with a neighboring ruler could be because you're very forgiving of insults towards your person... or it could be because you're a spineless coward. The second game features this to a lesser, but still existing extent.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Having a large pile of gold lets you easily shift people's opinions of you around, wrap your religious leader around your finger, hire huge armies of mercenaries to easily win wars against opponents who should otherwise crush you, enact most of the decisions you'd want, buy unrefusable favors and wriggle out of favors you owe others, and build all those nice shiny holdings you want. And unlike Prestige and Piety, you don't lose your gold when your current character dies. Being rich can be an outright Game-Breaker.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Beautiful!: The "attractive" trait gives a pretty big opinion bonus for any character who's sexually attracted to your gender. A beautiful queen can get away with a surprising amount of shit. By becoming a seductress via the Seduction focus, a strong, attractive queen can have +90 opinion with all straight men and lesbian women, which is practically a "get out of jail free" card for all kinds of tyranny and borders on carte blanche to pass whatever laws you like, conscript nearly anyone into any plot you like, and successfully nominate whoever you wish as heir under Elective, Imperial, Tanistry, Eldership, or Elective Gavelkind succession.
• Scullery Maid: With the Seduction focus, a male (or lesbian female) character can win over a maid, who can either be promoted to The Mistress (and thus a named character) or kept on the side as a maidservant lover (providing a bonus to the character's Intrigue skill and ability to uncover plots).
• Second Place Is for Losers: In each of the contests during the tribal festivals added in Holy Fury, whoever comes in second gets an insulting nickname.
• Seduction-Proof Marriage: It isn't impossible to seduce someone who's in love with their partner, but the odds are heavily stacked against it. If the target starts rejecting all seduction attempts, then it becomes impossible to even target them.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: The only game over the condition in the game is dying or losing all titles above baron rank without having an heir of your dynasty to take them up. Coupled with the sandbox nature of the game, this leads to a lot of them.
  • Any of the hardest starts in the game (generally considered to be, in order: Satrap Vandad of the Karen Satrapy in the Old Gods start, Isaac, Duke of Khazars, a Jewish vassal to the Tengri Cumanians, and the Khan of Khazaria in the Old Gods start, who is also Jewish, but even harder to play as due to a lack of a liege to protect him).
  • Also playing as the Jewish Duke of Semien/Axum in Ethiopia and trying to reestablish the Kingdom of Israel, because you're surrounded by heavily armed Christians and have no ability to create marriage alliances with any realm (unless you manage to convert them to Judaism by proselytizing). If you survive long enough as a Jew to break out of Ethiopia, you then have to contend with the Muslims and Christians vying for control of the Holy Land.
  • Upon the release of the Charlemagne DLC, playing as the only Zunist character in the world became another self-imposed challenge for many.
  • Jade Dragon derived an achievement, "The Conqueror", from one player-imposed challenge, the establishment of English culture from a Norse ruler. This requires a Norse ruler to rule a French, Occitan, or Breton province to unlock Norman culture, then the conquest of an Anglo-Saxon province (most of England in Charlemagne and The Old Gods) to unlock English culture. Oh, and to get the achievement you have to also be Christian and hold the Kingdom of England. Oh, and those culture flip events don't happen until roughly the 900s and 1100s, respectively, so prepare for a long game.
• Sent Into Hiding: Characters can go (or be sent) into hiding if there is reasonable evidence for a plot on their lives. This option is available to both the player and the AI; while active, assassination plots cannot trigger. However, going into hiding is not without its drawbacks. Characters will take prestige hits while hidden, and those who are in hiding for an extended period of time may become stressed, depressed, or even go insane.
• Settling the Frontier:
  • With "Sons of Abraham" the Knights Hospitaller and Knights Templar will ask for permission to found a couple of Cult Colonies in the Levant, if the area is owned by a Catholic ruler. Do not discount them, they will be invaluable in defending the area from Muslim counterattacks. The Teutonic Knights will also do something similar in the Baltic.
  • Some of the earliest starts can allow you to conquer Iceland before it was technically inhabited. Though it's treated as inhabited due to the game mechanics.
• Seven Deadly Sins: They have traits for all of them, as well as for the Seven Heavenly Virtues, and characters with these opposing traits will have negative opinions of each other. But the effects in CKII tend to make about half the sins into Cursed with Awesome (though this is arguably balanced out by the fact that (except Lustful) the corresponding virtues are still better traits to have than them):

  • Lust: Overall good. The trait "Lustful" gives +1 Intrigue and a 20% Fertility bonus, in exchange for minor penalties to piety per month and the opinion of Christian clergy.
  • Gluttony: Bad. "Gluttonous" gives -2 Stewardship, -10 clergy opinion.
  • Greed: Good. "Greedy" costs -1 Diplomacy, a minor penalty, in exchange for a 10% bonus to tax income across your realm (without the increase in revolt risk you'd think would result from this).
  • Sloth: Very bad. "Slothful" gives -1 to all stats, -5 to personal combat skill, and -10 vassal opinion, which is much more important than general church opinion. It does make a character less likely to become Stressed however.
  • Wroth: Decent. "Wroth" costs -1 to Diplomacy and Intrigue but grants +3 Martial, +3 to personal combat skill, and, if possessed by a Mook Commander, allows an all-or-nothing charge tactic in battle.
  • Envy: Situational. "Envious" gives -1 Diplomacy, +2 Intrigue, and +3 to personal combat skill, but if held by a vassal they have a -15 opinion of their liege.
  • Pride: Good. "Proud" gives half a point of free Prestige per month with no downsides. Players have also discovered that AI characters with the Proud trait tend to make excellent tutors for children, much better ones than humble characters (which makes sense, from a certain perspective).

  • Crusader Kings II explicitly flags the deadly sins and heavenly virtues with numbered icons in red and green respectively. With the reworking of the Decadence mechanic, Muslim males having any of the deadly sins has an increased chance of getting the Decadent trait.
• Seven Heavenly Virtues: Present alongside the sins, being mutually exclusive. They tend to be a less mixed bag than the sins, being (almost) exclusively positive.

  • Chastity: Situational. -15% fertility is a problem, +1 learning is meh, but bonus piety is very useful to Muslims (who have enough wives to make up the difference and need piety to expand and control their dynasty) and a chaste spouse gives you a Seduction-Proof Marriage.
  • Temperate: Good. +2 Stewardship and +5 religious vassal opinion. Its only downside is that it prevents you from splurging at feasts, which may make your guests complain about the food.
  • Charitable: Good. +3 Diplomacy and +5 religious vassal opinion is a solid bonus for the small downside of -3 personal combat skill, and it's almost as good as Content in a vassal.
  • Diligent: Very good. +1 to all stats and a +5 vassal opinion makes this hands-down one of the best traits in the game.
  • Patient: Very good. +1 to all stats except Martial, +20% defence bonus when leading troops, and +5 to personal combat skill. Ironically, much better trait for a general or duelist than its opposing sin.
  • Kind: Decent. +2 Diplomacy and +5 vassal opinion bonus in return for -2 intrigue and -5 personal combat skill. Also one of the easiest trait in the game to lose.
  • Humble: Good. Where "Proud" gives free Prestige, "Humble" gives free Piety. Again, very useful for Muslims who need every point they can get. Also useful in vassals, as long as you don't make them raise your children.

• Sex in a Shared Room: One possible random event during feasts is for a male guest to get overexcited and bang a serving girl in the middle of the banquet hall. The host may be embarrassed, or potentially impressed with the guest's virility.
• Sex Slave:
  • Pagan (except Hellenic), Zoroastrian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain rulers, as well as all nomadic and tribal rulers, can take captive women as concubines and breed heirs upon them.
  • Women of the Bön and African Pagan faiths, as well any form of Paganism that take the Equality or Enatic Clans doctrines on reformation, can do the same to men, taking up to three as consorts in addition to their lawfully-wedded husband, and much like taking women as concubines, prisoners can be forced to become consorts, and their opinion of the woman who forced them into consortage is not particularly relevant to their ability to (be made to) father children with them.
• Sexual Karma: Spouses with "good" traits like each other and accordingly will produce more offspring.
• She Is the King:
  • While a secular female noble will have normal feminine titles, a female who holds a county or duchy while having the theocratic government (must receive the religious title first and requires Absolute Cognatic succession) will have the title of Prince-Bishop/Prince-Archbishop. If you then make her an Antipope or she otherwise gains a kingdom or even somehow becomes the Pope for real, she'll become King-Bishop. If she makes it all the way to the empire tier, she'll hold the title Emperor-Bishop.
  • If a female Pagan with a theocratic government ever holds an empire-tier title, she will use the title of Emperor.
• Shoot the Dog: The Duke of Wessex may be a charitable churchgoing eighteen year old with a happy marriage and a heart of gold, but there will be times when assassinating him is the only way to prevent that dangerously powerful faction from declaring a civil war to install him as the new king. If killing one person prevents a civil war (which would result in the death of tens or even hundreds of thousands), then it doesn't make you a monster.
• Shown Their Work:
  • The amount of research put into history and genealogy is incredible. One can find lists of Byzantine/Roman, Russian or German rulers dating back centuries to Augustus, Rurik and Charlemagne, including character traits and family relations. Even minor Irish counts can trace their family line all the way back to the fourth century, and the Papacy goes back to St. Peter the Apostle.
  • Sword of Islam expands on this, giving Muslim characters the ability to observe Ramadan and go on pilgrimages to Mecca. Its main feature, the dynastic decadence system, is based on medieval Muslim historiography, especially as described in the Muqaddimah.
  • The Umayyad rulers always have Bedouin culture to begin with, which makes them somewhat unpopular with their vassals in Iberia. Why? Historically, they were always known for strictly observing the etiquette they had in Mecca rather than the local customs, which did indeed make them unpopular.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: Characters of different ranks and cultures wear different clothing in their portraits, and will change clothes accordingly if these change. For example, a Celtic duke wears drab clothing and a brown leather circlet with gold studs, but a Celtic king has brightly colored clothing and a gold circlet. Council members and commanders will also change clothes on duty, such as donning armor and a helmet if acting as marshal or leading troops. Game mods like Better Looking Garbs can add to this, such as making Catholic bishops shift to the famous red robes upon elevation to cardinal.
• Silliness Switch:
  • "Sunset Invasion", where Aztecs invade Europe.
  • To a lesser extent, playing as a Lunatic unlocks unique events to reflect the way the world looks from their quite off-kilter perspective.
  • As of the Holy Fury patch, a rule has been added to allow for absurd events to be turned on or off before starting a new game.
  • Holy Fury also allows for silly results in random world generation, such as realms ruled by sapient animals.
• Silver Fox: Averted for women and downplayed for men - positive sex appeal modifiers stop applying after a certain age (42 for women, 65 for men), which while technically enough time for either to be a grandparent (the youngest a character can become a grandparent is 33), falls short of the trope for women and is decidedly limited for men. Also, if you attempt seduction on anyone old enough to have the "old" portrait (55+), the flavor text treats it as scandalous unless you're similarly old.
• Simulation Game: The focus on dynastic politics means that you'll spend a lot of time tracking personal relationships and trying to groom your heirs to be good leaders.
• Sinister Minister: Clerical rulers are just as prone to realpolitik as anyone else in the game, Muslims in particular due to their special Iqta government allowing feudal rulers, normally restricted to castles, to also own temples. There's also traits for each faith, such as the Abrahamic "Wicked Priest", denoting especially poor and sinful clerics, with special events such as the Cadaver Synod if acquired by a religious head.
• Sketchy Successor: Another big threat. Having a poor leader who nonetheless can keep things stable isn't a big deal. Having a great king who was able to keep everyone in line, and then having him suddenly replaced by some blithering moron who seems to go out of his way to piss off his vassals and neighbors, can swiftly reduce a great empire to a series of warring duchies.
• Soldier vs. Warrior:
  • Most realms rely on levies of warriors for their armies, which are typically dismissed once no longer needed. Tribal governments can also call up large numbers of warriors or raiders with councilor missions or by decision. With the Legacy of Rome DLC, richer, typically kingdom- or empire-tier, realms can afford to create retinues, professional standing army units which are more expensive to create and maintain than levies, but also have higher stats.
  • Also seen in the distinction between "offensive" pagan realms (Germanic, Tengri, and Aztec) and "defensive" pagans (Slavic, Suomenusko, Romuva, and African). Offensive pagans get bonuses to levy size and pay no opinion penalty for raising vassals' levies, but if you're not at war, raiding, or bound by a truce, you lose a considerable amount of prestige each month. Defensive pagans get larger garrisons and a large buff to attrition losses suffered by (non-unreformed pagan) invaders.
• Sorcerous Overlord: Any ruler who's part of a devil-worshipping cult is this, able to murder and heal through magic and blood sacrifice, and maintaining their temporal power in part through cult magic.
• Spare to the Throne: A valid choice for those who don't wish to place all of their eggs in one heir-shaped basket, considering both games' high mortality rates. If the spare does not inherit, you can probably expect them to turn into The Evil Prince if their older brother does inherit, and possibly into an Evil Uncle as they see the throne get further and further away from their own branch of the family.
• Spiteful A.I.: Let it be known that the AI has not only read Machiavelli, but rather swallowed it whole and probably took lessons from Ivan the Terrible and Otto von Bismarck on top that. It has no qualms whatsoever about executing their siblings, murdering their spouses, rob their vassals and militarily inferior neighbors of their land and money, or other things that are best left to the reader's imagination to increase their share of the cake, unless it has traits that specifically prevent such behavior. Spiteful doesn't even begin to describe it. It's SO spiteful that it mostly turns these tendencies against itself, unless YOU happen to be a family member. It's not certain whether it's due to a specific programming influence or a natural occurrence of priorities, but AI characters are either incredibly protective or vindictively aggressive towards blood relatives.
• The Spymaster: You can appoint a vassal or courtier to serve as one, and a skilled one is an asset. You had better make damned sure they stay loyal to you, though, or they might become...
• Staff of Authority:
  • Upon reforming the Bön or Hellenic faiths with temporal authority, the reformer receives a special scepter as a badge of their office.
  • Characters who follow an Abrahamic faith (any denomination of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam) can find the Staff of Moses. Unlike most other staves and scepters, it can be used as a highly effective weapon as well.
  • Christian and Jewish characters who have crown jewels smithed receive a scepter as part of the set, and Zoroastrians and Zunists receive a staff. Characters of other faiths can use them, but they'll have to either steal them or receive them as a gift.
  • Characters who follow Dharmic faiths may find and use a scepter called the Jeweled Danda.
• The Starscream:
  • Disloyal vassals (particularly those with the Ambitious trait) are a bigger threat than almost anything outside your kingdom. Also, if the player character is anything less than a king, chances are the player themselves will be this. Characters with the "Realm Duress" trait will have all their vassals turn into The Starscream. Hilarity inevitably ensues.
  • Legacy Of Rome makes it more severe: disloyal vassals will now form massive alliance chains with the sole objective of deposing you.
• Start My Own: As of Sons of Abraham, if a Fraticelli ruler captures Rome, they can install their own Fraticelli Pope as a religious head totally separate from the Catholic Pope. Likewise with Iconoclasts who hold Constantinople, for an Iconoclast Patriarch.
• State Visit:
  • The Way of Life DLC permits rulers using the Business focus to lead a state visit to another capital to set up a trade relationship.
  • The Jade Dragon expansion allows rulers within diplomacy range of China to make a state visit to kowtow to the Emperor.
  • The Holy Fury expansion has an event where a pagan ruler neighboring one with an organized religion asks for their neighbor's help converting to their religion. You can later make a state visit to their capital to see how things are going.
• STD Immunity: Very averted. Extended use of the Seduction focus almost invariably causes a character to contract "Lover's Pox" (herpes), or more rarely "Great Pox" (syphilis). Great pox can even be passed from parent to child.
• Storming the Beaches: Amphibious assaults, whether from boats or across straits, are possible but extremely risky: Your troops will take serious terrain penalties in battle if enemy troops are present when they land, compounded in the second game by the Morale Mechanic (the morale of each flank is capped at 50% during sea voyages). However, the terrain penalty doesn't apply to troops landed in a friendly or occupied harbor, making it one of the more effective ways to deal with Viking raiders (who have a tendency to run for the longships if approached overland).
• Storming the Castle: An extremely deadly strategy once you gained a numerical advantage (generally around 10-15 times greater than the garrison) which can melt down the garrison in days. Not so much if you do not have said advantage.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Male characters in both games have a tendency to bear more than a passing resemblance to their father while females look suspiciously like their mothers, but both are disproportionately likely to inherit their ethnicity from the party of the marriage whose dynasty is being passed on (father in a normal marriage, mother in a matrilineal marriage). Characters will (almost) never look exactly like their parent, but the similarity is always there.
• Stupid Evil: You can raise your children to be cruel, slothful, envious, wrothful, greedy sons-of-bitches, but your vassals will dislike such a ruler and several of the 'sinful' traits are rather bad stats-wise as compared to their virtuous counterparts.^note Raising someone else's heirs to be cruel, slothful, envious, wrothful, greedy sons-of-bitches can potentially reap windfalls, however. Also, there are several events where you can, for example, choose to torture some of your prisoners, but there's no actual benefit to that (unless you want someone dead or maimed) except For the Evulz.
• Succession Crisis: This and disloyal vassals are probably your greatest threats. Other kingdoms are a distant second, unless you're in the path of the Mongols...
  • Speaking of the Mongols, this is how they're kept in check. Mongols have all sorts of bonuses such as no demesne limit, no attrition, and the incredibly powerful horse archer unit, which allow them to rampage through Europe with impunity. The only thing stopping them is that when the Khan kicks the bucket, his enormous realm is divided among his male children (which tend to be a lot), who promptly start fighting amongst themselves, making them much more manageable. There's a much-hated random event that forces the player to institute a similar system of succession or take severe penalties. (And don't think you can cheat and immediately change it back; you can only change your succession laws every 25 years...)
  • The Imperial and Succession Laws of each Kingdom you rule in the sequel are tracked separately, leading to much potential succession trouble if you don't make their laws similar. There's also the Elective, Gavelkind, and Open succession laws, which are just asking for future wars.
  • Played straight in the sequel, where heirs that are second and third in line gain claims on the throne and become pretenders. If these pretenders are powerful and well-connected landholders, the realm can quickly dissolve into civil war. The myriad of alliances created through marriages can even drag powerful foreign realms into the crisis, creating a full-scale succession war, the likes of which become the stuff of history textbooks.
  • If nothing else, your vassals will often decide to revolt as soon as the new king is crowned, mostly because of the "short reign" relationship penalty, particularly if said ruler is a child/woman/both.
• Suicide is Shameful: Subverted. If a character commits suicide, then that character gets -50 general opinion with everyone and loses 200 prestige. However the succession image that pops up whenever your character dies does not judge that character based on how he or she dies, so the final judgement might say something along the lines of "King Charles has died at age 25. He committed suicide. Known to be Kind, few had a bad word to say about him. A godly man, Charles is with Jesus now". Additionally, if your character commissions a runestone for a parent that committed suicide the stone does not condemn your parent's decision; instead it simply states that your parent committed suicide and that you hope he found the peace in death that was denied to him in life.
• Super Boss: Invading China. There are steep requirements to fulfill before it is even possible^note You must be an Empire-tier ruler, you must have 300 counties in your realm, you must border the eastern edge of the map, and China must not be destabilized, the war itself is difficult (China sends larger doomstacks than even the Aztecs while all your counties have -75% replenishment), and losing the war means your primary title is destroyed. Essentially the only players who can attempt this are ones who have already conquered most of the world.
• Super Breeding Program: The combination of your child being able to get upgraded version inherited trait if both parents have that inheritable trait and the addition of Pure-Blooded trait^note +10% fertility, -50% inbreeding chance, small health boost means that with enough incest, it's possible to get a child with some extremely good traits who are not that likely to be inbred either.
• Surprise Incest: You've denounced the girl your mistress gave birth to because you don't want the stigma of having a bastard. Fast forward sixteen years, long after you've forgotten the incident, and your son married one of the courtiers. He's only a third son so you're not too upset... at least not until the son he fathers has the "inbred" trait.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: One of these can feature on a runestone raised by a Norse character who killed their own parent. "This stone was raised by Hrolfr in memory of Arni, Hrolfr's father and Ragnar's son. He lived a good life and died peacefully in bed. His death was not the result of foul-play, and Hrolfr certainly had nothing to do with it. Ever will stand this memorial."

T to Z

• Take a Third Option: A character with sufficiently high stats or the right traits may have a choice during a random event that wouldn't be available otherwise. Usually these are ways out of events that would otherwise hit you with a penalty no matter what you choose.
• Talking Down the Suicidal: There is an event chain which can improve your diplomacy. A suicidal man is about to jump off a building, and you can either try to talk him down or just pull him back from the edge by force. Talking him down will result in the man jumping off to his death. You still get more diplomacy for it.
• Tangled Family Tree: Any dynasty that doesn't ruthlessly purge its heirs can start looking like this, as the sons and daughters start their own families that link with other families, creating webs of family connections. And that's just for Christians; Muslims add polygamy into the mix, pagans can take concubines whose children may be heirs to titles from anywhere at all, and Zoroastrians can not only take concubines, but there's that whole incest thing to mix everything up.
• Testosterone Poisoning: The EXTREME release trailer for The Old Gods practically runs on this. Witness it yourself here.
• The Theocracy:
  • Any holding administrated by a bishop or other religious figure counts on the small scale, though they're often vassals to another, higher-ranked secular ruler. Popes, caliphs, ecumenical patriarchs, and religious leaders of the reformed pagan faiths are the more obvious high-ranking ones, and are often (but not always) independent. The Norse Fylkir is notable for also being the head of state of the founding nation as well as the head of religion, making that state a good example of this trope and closer to the Islamic caliph than the Catholic pope (unless he decides that he wants more than Rome), whereas the high priests of other reformed pagan faiths are distinct from the state.
  • Averted by Muslims with the Iqta government (all non-republic, non-tribal, non-nomadic Muslims) and Tibetan Buddhists and Bön Pagans who adopt the Monastic Feudal form of government, which blends secular and spiritual power such that there is no distinct theocratic rule and allows holding both castle and temple holdings without penalty and is playable even if the character only holds temples.
• Thicker Than Water: Up until the 2.5 patch rulers who were members of the same dynasty were automatically allies, and they will frequently come to one another's aid when circumstances allow. Of course, this won't always stop them from trying to kill one another when one stands a chance of inheriting the other's titles, but then no family can be perfect.
• A Thicket of Spears: Pikemen levies are available and are at their best in the melee phase of a battle, good for both attacking and defending. The Defense retinue allows a ruler to hire higher-quality pikemen (mixed with archers), and the unique retinues of several cultures, notably the Scots, Italians, and Romans, consist largely of pikes.
• Til Murder Do Us Part: You can murder your spouse (or imprison and execute them on trumped-up charges) if you so choose, usually to ensure a beneficial inheritance or open the way for a (hopefully) more fertile pairing.
• A Threesome Is Hot: If two of a Muslim lord's wives fall in love, one option is to claim them for a little teamwork. This gives the lord in question the Lustful trait.
• Thrown Down a Well: You can throw prisoners into an oubliette if you want them to hurry up and die but can't or won't execute them yourself for whatever reason (for example, to avoid getting the very nasty Kinslayer trait for killing a close relative, which only applies if you ordered their execution).
• Title Drop:
  • There's a possible random event during the summer fair intrigue event where a wandering band of minstrels are playing in your fair. Your options to respond include requesting that they perform the play "The Crusader Kings".
  • There is also a pop-up that shown before the standard crusade pop-up if no earlier crusades have been triggered titled "Crusader Kings"
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • If you can't afford to pay a mercenary company then it might defect to the enemy's side... even if it is in the midst of your much larger and better equipped army of demesne and vassal soldiers.
  • Faction Power is based on the amount and type of soldiers present, with money being unaccounted for. This means a vassal with 1000 soldiers might press a faction demand against you when you can only raise 500 soldiers... even if you have 8000 gold and can hire enough mercenaries to wipe him out several times over.
  • When your kingdom is fighting for its very survival against a rampaging mongol horde, your vassals should put their differences aside and band behind you if for no other reason than that a defeat will mean their heads too. Yet instead Vassals use this distraction to make unreasonable faction demands.
• Took the Wife's Name: In very rare cases, characters can arrange matrilineal marriages, whereby the groom is adopted into the bride's dynasty.
• Top Wife: Muslims can marry up to four wives, with one holding the coveted position of "first wife".
• Torture for Fun and Information: While you mechanically cannot torture prisoners for playable information, random events of torturing prisoners (which doesn't require you to actually have any who exist as separate characters) can give you the very useful "Impaler" trait, representing a horrific reputation that grants bonuses to Intrigue and Learning and increases your troops' damage to enemy morale.
• Treacherous Advisor: If someone both holds a court position under you and doesn't like you very much, that's an almost-guaranteed recipe for trouble, as they'll be much more willing to join Plots against you and have quite a bit of Plot Power. If one of them is your Spymaster, you're basically just hanging a "Please Kill Me Quickly" sign around your neck.
• Trial by Ordeal: Zunist rulers can submit prisoners to the judgement of the Sun, where prisoners are tossed out into the scorching desert without supplies and left to their fate, usually resulting in the death or madness of the prisoner as a result of dehydration and baking under the sun for days.
• Troubled Abuser: Possible with some characters due to the implications of event-driven trait acquisition. Characters can potentially receive negative traits from abusive actions taken by their parents, and these traits may make them more likely to be abusive themselves (at least in AI hands).
• Truce Trickery: Once a war ends, the game imposes a ten-year truce between the two rulers in order to keep the winner from immediately declaring war again on an already defeated foe if they still have a valid casus belli. Breaking the truce imposes a hefty opinion malus on the offender, though there are a few loopholes: the malus is only applied to rulers of the same religion group as the defender (meaning trucebreaking against infidels has little meaningful consequence), and it doesn't prevent participants from warring with each other's allies. Also, it only applies to the specific rulers involved, not their realms: the truce expires early if one of the participants should happen to die in the meantime, and it's meaningless if a participant is unlanded either as a result of the war or by other events afterward, or is absorbed under another ruler.^note Because wars must be declared against the highest-ranked ruler of the target realm: i.e. you can't declare war against the Duke of Cornwall if he's a vassal of the King of England (unless you are also a vassal of the King of England), you have to declare war on the King of England.
• Turbulent Priest:
  • See The Missionary; this is what those characters become if you're one of the pagan rulers in question and you decide you're not going to tolerate them spreading their venomous lies.
  • Catholic bishops are Turbulent as long as they like the Pope more than their secular liege. This, by paying taxes to the Pope and withholding levies from their liege.
  • Provinces with a different religion from your own may occasionally rise against your rule, with the rebellion being led by a zealous holy man of the appropriate faith.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Do not trust your vassals. It doesn't matter if they have 100 opinion of you, they will still form factions for no other reason than to ruin your life. Additionally if you act magnanimous (such as by trusting him with a new title or pressing a claim) the opinion bonus will only last for a few years before he's back to his old tricks.
• Unreliable Narrator: Especially in the case of traits like "Possessed", which might just as well describe an entirely mundane character trait or condition in modern times.
• Unstable Equilibrium:
  • Religious Moral Authority tends to work like this. If Moral Authority is high, there will be few heretic revolts and generally greater internal realm peace and higher conversion power, allowing the faith to spread. Meanwhile, if Moral Authority is low, heretic revolts start happening, and if they win, they further lower Moral Authority, prompting even more heretic revolts. Furthermore, the internal chaos makes realms following religions with low Moral Authority easier targets and even if the realm can hold together, it will have a hard time consolidating its gains due to low moral authority.
  • The big reason why Ending Fatigue happens is how once the ball starts rolling for your holdings, there is very little that can stop it, eventually making things trivial and simply boring. Becoming an "unified" kingdom or setting up even a minor empire means the player has nothing to fear and nobody to really stop or oppose him in any goals, removing any sort of challenge from the game.
• Unwanted Spouse: Because of the way alliance and marriage mechanics work, it's entirely possible to end up with a spouse who, while not exactly unwanted, doesn't really bring much to the table as a person. Fortunately, there are ways to terminate the marriage contract once the desired alliance stops being beneficial - if you feel so inclined, of course.
  • If you land your children or others in your court, they can marry people on their own initiative. These do not come with alliances, and the woman in question may be a dribbling idiot or a raving lunatic with many undesirable traits.
• The Usurper: Usurping titles by pressing claims on them (typically forged by your chancellor) is the single most common way you will expand your realm. Titles of duke tier or above can also be usurped peacefully as long as you control at least 51% of their de jure territory. In the second game, toppling your liege in this manner (or having your claim pressed by your liege) will even trigger an event where you become known as "Player Character the Usurper" for the rest of your life.
• Vestigial Empire:
  • Tends to be averted (for both Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire) in the sequel. A large part of this in the case of the HRE is the abolition of the Realm Duress mechanic (which used to result in the Kingdom of Germany routinely suffering complete implosion in the 1080s).
  • More generally, you don't lose a title until it's taken by a rival claimant, usurped by whoever already holds most of its de jure lands, or you lose all of your lands. Even if the Byzantine Empire is reduced to Constantinople and surrounded by hostile Turks, so long as no one else has enough Byzantine land to declare itself Basileus, then Byzantium will remain an empire.
• Vicariously Ambitious: An important part of the game is setting up plots and plans that may not directly benefit your characters in the short term but can be exploited easily by their heirs.
• Victory Sex: See Battle Couple, above. Probably unintentional, but it can seem like a ruler's wife (or ruler herself) is more likely to get pregnant after a great battle is won.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Much, much more difficult than the alternative.
  • Rebellious vassals mean that you are forced either to tyrannically crush dissidents or face part of your realm breaking away, and opportunistic states are a constant danger, meaning keeping the peace while maintaining order is on its own difficult. However, it is there.
  • Keeping low taxes on your peasants and burghers, stubbornly sticking through thick and thin to popular law, gifting your vassals the money they need to develop their lands, establish high-level hospitals, even at great personal expense, (and even giving money to nobles outside your kingdom if you have provided all that your developing kingdom needs) caring and nurturing your offspring and ensuring they are provided for, and even vassalising a state which has been attacked by a larger one and paying for its preservation via tribute to the attacker, it's possible to be nice. It's just not easy.
  • Entirely possible. Marry your daughter to the poor courtier whom she fell in love with instead of the sixty-year old duke who has been widowed twice, show compassion to your underlings, etc. You will usually see whether you wound up living up to your environment's expectations if you gain the Canonized trait upon passing on.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Pretty intensive. You start playing and then after a few hours of gameplay you realize you've been spending most of your time and effort assassinating six-year-olds so that your literally idiotic inbred nephew can inherit the throne of Bavaria, among other things. This game is essentially to 4X games what Dwarf Fortress is to city management sims, both in complexity and cruelty potential.
  • It is absolutely amazing how much murder, imprisonment, and disinheriting one can find themselves doing in the sequel when trying to get a female successor.
  • The Legacy Of Rome expansion allows Byzantine nobles to have their opponents blinded and castrated in order to remove them from the succession.
    • In the case of castration, there is even a separate message, if the player's victim is a child:
      "You have the boy castrated and turned into a eunuch. You're a real piece of work, aren't you?".
    • "How I engineered a Catholic Papal Invasion CB on the Byzantine Empire." Summarized best by the original poster himself: "When the Pope likes a King too much to let you invade him, manufacture one that he won't."
  • The Old Gods allow you to perform human sacrifices, steal spouses to become your concubine, and in general Rape, Pillage, and Burn villages.
  • Rajas of India is a lot less bloodthirsty, except for one factor. As a patron of Kali, you get to perform a Human Sacrifice during the Kali Puja festival if you're Cruel. Later updates also allow Hindus the same raiding rights as pagans.
  • Enacting dynastic extinction. Bonus points if you hum "The Rains of Castamere" while you're at it.
  • With the Ways of Life DLC, a female ruler can choose a seduction focus and immediately seduce any and every single male in her vicinity despite being already married. Put your husband into hiding due to being the target of assassinations by your numerous flings and let him watch helplessly as you go out and pile on more and more lovers.
  • Horse Lords added nomadic mechanics, making the steppe nomads as fearsome as they were in Real Life (if not more). The accompanying patch also loosened the restrictions on raiding. Yes, the nomads can raid too. And yes, you can sack temples (either belonging to other religions or your own), even potentially burning them to the ground.
  • Monks and Mystics adds the ability to convert to Satanism. And convert other people to Satanism. And perform human sacrifices in order to curse your enemies with Black Magic.
  • Jade Dragon allows you to send certain male courtiers to China as eunuchs. If they aren't eunuchs already, you castrate them. Furthermore, Han culture characters may castrate (but not blind) prisoners like characters in the Byzantine culture group.
  • Holy Fury expands on the options in The Old Gods, allowing for even greater degrees of Human Sacrifice, with Pagan Warrior Lodges allowing members to sacrifice prisoners for fortune in battle, either when taken prisoner, or as part of an elaborate lodge ritual wherein the prisoner is set loose and several lodge members hunt them down and tear them apart as if they were a pack of wolves, Haruspicy allowing for various sacrifices (up to and including human sacrifices) as part of scrying rituals, and the Bloodthisty Gods doctrine allowing any Pagan faith to become as bloodthirsty as the Aztecs, with options for mass sacrifice of prisoners and traits for sacrificing large numbers of people. Furthermore, women can get in on the spouse-stealing as members of the Bön or African faith or with the Equality or Enatic Clans doctrines, and combining the Sea-Bound and Daring doctrines allows non-Germanic Pagans to also become infamous coastal raiders and terrors of the seas.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment:
  • Going overboard with said cruelty, however, can result in serious setbacks, either by directly provoking a revolt against you, by giving your character certain traits that grant significant relationship penalties to all characters (like Kinslayer), or by applying a "Tyranny" vassal relationship penalty.
  • Sacking temples of your religion while raiding will lower your religion's moral authority. While not a direct punishment to the ruler, this can have negative consequences: lower moral authority means religious conversion of provinces and characters is harder, and with particularly with the Abrahamic faiths increases the odds of heresies appearing. A province converting to a heresy ups its revolt risk by 23% initially, though it will reduce if you can survive long enough without one happening. (Of non-Abrahamic faiths, only Zoroastrianism has heresies, barring pagan reformation.)
• Vigilante Man: Normally characters can legally commit a lot of heinous acts with impunity, and it's more likely than not the Pope won't bother to excommunicate him. However, if you have high Intrigue then you can take matters into your own hands and kill evil characters yourself.
• A Villain Named Khan: The Altaic (steppe) cultures all use "khan" where Europeans use "king", so given the game's Video Game Cruelty Potential and realpolitik this is true more often than not. The games also feature event invasions by the Mongol hordes, up to and including Temujin, Genghis Khan, himself. (A Mongol Player Character can even declare themselves Genghis Khan.)
• Villain Protagonist: We call them "successful rulers."
• Villain with Good Publicity: Well-loved rulers can sometimes get away with blatant acts of tyranny if the penalties the acts would incur are outweighed enough by relationship bonuses from other areas. The effects are cumulative, though, so it's still not a good idea to go overboard.
• Virgin Sacrifice: With the Monks and Mystics DLC, members of the Lucifer's Own cult can sacrifice prisoners to Satan for Dark Power. Virgins and Clergymen yield more dark power than normal sacrifices.
• Voluntary Vassal: It's possible for a holder of a lower-tier title (i.e. Count or Duke) to swear fealty to a holder of a higher-tier title (i.e. Duke or King, respectively) without outside prompting. The opposite is also possible: a higher-tier ruler can offer to peacefully vassalize lower-level rulers who are de jure part of his realm. It's rare for it to happen outside of player control, however. This is often how players on "tutorial island" (Ireland) finish conquering the island after taking the half required to declare themselves king.
• Vow of Celibacy:
  • Roman Catholic bishops (including cardinals and the Pope) are supposed to be celibate, though Catholic court chaplains are not. It is possible to appoint a married man to a bishopric, in which case he'll divorce his wife. (It's not possible to play as a Catholic religious ruler without mods, due to the object of the game being to ensure the continuance of your genetic dynasty.)
  • If playing as a Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, or Reformed Pagan with the Monasticism doctrine (which also disallows priests of that faith from marrying) ruler, you can also order courtiers to take the vows, which disqualifies them from succession. Of course, just because they've taken the vows doesn't mean the character will necessarily abide by them: with the Seduction focus from the Way of Life DLC, it's not unheard-of for Catholic clergy up to and including the Pope to end up with mistresses and bastard children. However members of Catholic Holy Orders like the Knights Templar actually do follow their vows all of the time, as they gain the celibacy trait upon entry.
  • Orthodox clergy cannot marry, but they will stay married if they had a wife before their investiture.
  • The Chaste and Celibate traits increase piety and grant opinion bonuses from Christian clergy, at the cost of decreasing fertility (the latter trait decreasing fertility to -5000). Good for Catholic bishops you hope to turn into cardinals, not so much for rulers who need heirs. They also can cause pagan rulers to lose respect from their subjects.
  • Due to a developer's oversight, the Celibate trait provides a piety bonus in all religions, including religions that don't practice religious celibacy.
  • Pagans who take the Monasticism doctrine on reformation have similar vows of priestly celibacy to their Catholic counterparts and rulers can similarly force their vassals to take the vows.
• Warrior Prince: See Royals Who Actually Do Something above. Those with high Martial scores and the right set of traits or acquired skills tend to be particularly good at it, though. The Way of Life DLC in the sequel additionally allows your character to pick the War focus, which basically means that your character orients his (or, rarely, her) lifestyle around becoming one.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Vassals can found factions, demanding stuff like independence, lower Crown Authority, Elective Succession or something similar. It is not uncommon for a large realm to have a dozen different factions, which, however, only have one or two members each and thus do not revolt yet.
• We Have Become Complacent: The decadence mechanic for Muslim dynasties. Unfortunately it doesn't always work.
• We Have Reserves: The AI for some reason thinks its funny to send soldiers that just spent a month marching and retreating back into battle, no matter how many times they have already been smacked down.
  • It does this because there is always a chance that if you are besieging a province, an attacking army will manage to interrupt the siege and set it right back to square one. If you're defending or have beaten off an invading AI opponent they will hang back and let mounting debt and attrition, the first of which they don't suffer from, weaken the player instead.
  • The Mongols both subvert this trope and force the player to use it: Mongols do not suffer attrition, but can't reinforce their units. Therefore, the only way to beat them is to basically send every soldier you have against them until there aren't any Mongols left.
• Weird Currency: Lunatic rulers may randomly declare turnips the new currency of the land. This does nothing other than annoy one's vassals to the tune of -10 opinion ("Enacted insane law").
• Who Shot JFK?: Parodied. The Flavor Text for one version of the "assassination" plot, which comments that the victim was killed with an arrow between a "scrolls depository" (i.e. library) and a grassy knoll. It goes on to say that your co-conspirators are spreading rumors of a "lone bowman" (unless your character was the victim, in which case the button text says "This was no lone bowman!").
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Ordinarily, a character must have the Depressed trait to attempt suicide. Immortal characters, however, can do it at any time after they turn 100.
• Why Won't You Die?: If you are playing an infant ruler who is unfortunate enough to have a regent who hates you, he may make an attempt on your life. You have a small to decent chance of surviving each assassination attempt as your regent encourages you to go for a stroll in the deep forest, chase pigeons off the roof, etc. and if you are so lucky, the final attempt on your life has your regent fail to cut your throat in the dead of night before being dragged away by your guards screaming "WHY WON'T YOU DIE?!"
• The Wise Prince: Entirely possible. Make sure to train you heirs with enough positive virtues and choose the relatively non-evil options and you're set. Choosing the "Rulership" focus in the sequel (with Way of Life active) also helps if you're out to craft your character into a wise and well-respected ruler.
• The Wonka: While "Lunatic" does come with an AI Rationality penalty, some slight opinion penalties, and special events that may come with their own complications, it doesn't affect a character's stat line at all. Just because your ruler is crazy, it doesn't mean he's stupid.
• World of Ham: The 867 start date from The Old Gods, being from a time Shrouded in Myth, inevitably seems like one to modern ears. Try saying "The Sons of Ragnar" in a non-melodramatic fashion. Go on, just try it.
• Worst Aid:
  • Reaper's Due introduces the concept of hiring a Court Physician, a learned man that you use to make sure that you don't fall prey to any deadly diseases... if they don't kill you with their own administrations under the guise of "curing" you. Among other, 'normal' ways (leeches, potions, poultices), treatment can conclude with swarms of bees, putting out an eye, or flat out sawing off a leg due to gout, which has about all the negative effects on your health that you'd imagine.
  • Surprisingly subverted as even the really strange treatments can potentially work. Not only that but they can potentially provide the best healthcare based benefits possible. Who'd have thought a hug of angry Hornets could be so healthy?
  • Brave characters with highly skilled or mystic physicians can request "mystic" or "experimental" treatments, which can involve things like amputation and castration, a potion that drives the drinker insane, or the physician offering themselves as a Human Sacrifice, all of which can actually work, leading to outcomes like being cured of the bubonic plague by having your left eye removed.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • Especially if you are behind said child in the line of succession. A plot to assassinate a child may get special text involving hiring a maid to suffocate the child in their bed.
  • You can execute children captured during sieges. Usually there is no benefit for this other than For the Evulz (unless inheritance is involved), since you can often ransom them off instead.
  • Even if you don't execute children, others will. Peasant Revolts kill children when they capture castles, and and Muslim wives assassinate the children of their rivals to put their own ahead in succession.
  • There is an event where a child climbs up to the top of a broken tower, and the child's guardian has the option to either lecture/congratulate them on their dangerous/brave behavior, or push them off, with a 50/50 chance of maiming them or killing them outright.
• Wretched Hive:
  • Any court of a ruler with low authority and/or stats, but the Byzantine Empire is probably a standout with an average of three murder plots per province per month.
  • If a ruler is bankrupt then Bandits and Smugglers can move into his counties and fill them with crime.
• You Killed My Father: Characters whose parents are murdered become rivals to the murderer and are likely to plot against them.
• Young Conqueror:
  • The fundamental goal of the "Lord of the Flies" achievement - in a Random World start, begin as a 0 year old count, and become a king or emperor before reaching adulthood (within 16 years).
  • A natural result of extended play as steppe nomads or any culture/religion that gets access to the invasion casus belli - at some point, you or an AI are likely to perform and win an invasion at a young age.
• You Owe Me: Conclave introduces a favor mechanic. Picking certain options in events or performing other actions on a character's behalf can give you the option of calling in a favor at a later date, which you can call in to, for instance, force your liege to press claims that you hold, or to override the character's opinion preferences when requesting them to end a plot or join a faction. Favors can even be used to circumvent otherwise-ironclad limitations, such as arranging marriages across religion group boundaries.

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