Team Nessassity Mods - Of Space And Not Space. In Space! (Also a Deep Dive into the Life and Undeath of Duchess Mathilda and her Court of Blood) (Patreon)

IT'S SEPTEMBER! And for once, that doesn't surprise me because I know it's September! I've been very keenly aware of the present Septemberness since it started. That was when CK3 came out and kidnapped me for the past two weeks!

I'm still locked in that particular dungeon but if you're reading this message now, that means my mastery of intrigue has allowed me to establish contact with the outside world again!

Either that or I've swapped out my captivity of playing CK3 for one of modding it. Yah... that sounds more likely. For over a week now I've been in full modding mode, working on Veiled Realms - Court of Blood, or at least doing my best translating the psychotic scribbles constituting my "design documents" into something actually functional, but more on that later!

Speaking of, what's all this ado for, anyways? It should know by now what we think of it! SO WITHOUT ANY FURTHER!

Elves of Stellaris + MEC

While both me and Nessa have been somewhat distracted away from Stellaris, at least one of us (hint: not me) decided to wrap up a bunch of outstanding items on our existing To-Do before diving fully into a new game. Nessa is currently working on a number of Stellaris projects whose fruits, unfortunately, I cannot share any pictures of today, but maybe a little looksie at our YouTrack will give you an idea what's set to happen in the near(ish) future!

So if you were wondering whether the Drow shipset or any of the Jugs would see the light of <insert local star here> within your lifetime, that is some good news for the mortals amongst you!

And for the rest, I have a different treat today...

Veiled Realms - Court of Blood

Because if you're going to live forever, you might as well do it in style. With panache! Or pizzas! Or... MENACE!

Mhm... this doesn't sound as funny in text now that I'm actually reading it, but believe me, it was a great, eminently quotable line I waited a whole week to use. I'm glad it finally paid off.

Ahem... Right, the mod! So, if you've been following me on Twitter, you might have seen a few early-WIP teasers of things to come, specifically, Menace and Lifestyles, the two things I'd like to deep-dive into today!

I introduced the early concept of Menace in August. However, that was before the game was released and I hadn't yet played it, so originally, I wanted to use triggered_opinions to apply the effects of individual factors of Menace to each and every character in the world. Having now explored the capabilities and limitations of CK3's modding, I realised that unfortunately that functionality is gone. Well... it is still possible to replicate via performance-intensive periodic scripts regularly updating thousands of character scopes buuuuut... that would probably go a bit too far. It quickly became apparent that while most of what I was planning was still doable, there are major aspects of the project, including Menace, that I needed to rework so it may perhaps be worth re-explaining it.

Menace

 (I at first wanted to display it on the character sheet alongside Dread, Gold, etc. but eventually changed my mind when I realised that countless other mods would be competing over that area of the UI, so I'm going to win that war by not taking part in it and just moving my resource counter into its own little alert n_n) 

In Veiled Realms, Menace is an abstract measure of how unnatural a character is perceived and how far outside of their court that perception can reach.
With the new iteration of Menace, it is no longer a passive modifier, but rather a sort of... fuel for an engine that drives various events, relationships, secrets and other vampiric mechanics, periodically confronting the character with the consequences of their indiscretions.

For example: Duchess Mathilda has patented the concept of life imprisonment in medieval Europe. Quite an innovation, and she would perhaps be seen as a paragon of progress were it not for the reason she keeps her dungeons filled to the brim with peasants nobody will miss.
Every time the mood strikes her, she picks five of the inmates and invites them to her bathhouse, never to be seen again. Mathilda, you see, is not your typical socially acceptable evil bloodsucker - she is a full-fledged Blood Bather.

For a normal person, such an act would immediately become a Secret, but vampire secrets do not quite work the same way. Their very existence is one in itself, and the things they do on a regular basis to sustain it would cause their Intrigue tab to balloon into space if a secret was generated every time they did something supernatural.
That is not, however, to say that they can get away with those things indefinitely. To handle that, Menace comes into play.

Coming back to our scenario: Duchess Mathilda's special spa resort has been operating with relatively little trouble for over two decades, about as long as she had lived by the time she stopped ageing - and even managed to walk back a few years thanks to her attention to hygiene. While her unending youth has drawn some slanderous accusations of witchcraft her way, that's nothing the Bishop she had wrapped around her little finger couldn't handle - the agitators now enjoy her hospitality as well.
However, the status quo could not last forever. Organising her blood baths more and more frequently over the past few years has made it harder and harder to keep behind closed doors, and eventually something slipped through the cracks - or rather someone, a prisoner who was meant to be Mathilda's shampoo last week. There is little chance that alone can expose her sins to the world... but uncomfortably accurate rumours have sprung up lately and it may be just a matter of time before someone decides to follow up on that and uncover her Secret.

In game terms, Mathilda has relatively low Passive Menace (more on that later), and while she has had events in the past that increased it, her impeccable diplomacy has provided her opportunities to lower it in turn. Unfortunately, blood bathing generates a lot of Menace, and Mathilda wasn't paying attention to how much she had accumulated over the years. The higher the Menace, the higher the risk that supernatural activities can become Secrets that anyone can then uncover. The last time she prepared a blood bath, the dice did not roll in her favour.

At higher levels of Menace, some secrets can fall into the wrong hands or just be exposed outright. Nasty rumours can lower the opinions of courtiers, clergy, vassals and other rulers. In extreme cases, aspiring vampire hunters might even launch Kidnapping or Murder plots to put an end to a vampire's Menace once and for all. Passively, high Menace may actually make the vampire more vulnerable to plots, cause popular unrest within her domain and make vassals more likely to form factions.

Earlier, I pointed out that Mathilda's Passive Menace is quite low. Menace is divided into two main components:

• Passive determines the minimum level of Menace the character can have and is mostly determined by supernatural secrets that are known about the character as well as her Tier and Fame (it's much easier to hide your nature as an Established Count than a Living Legend Emperor).
• Active comes mainly from your character's actions. Feeding, using supernatural powers, making certain choices in vampire events, getting a Stress Break (they can be... messy for vampires) all will generate Menace, even if you aren't caught doing any of those things. And getting caught... well... that's a lot more Menace.

Being a powerful but relatively little-known Duchess usually means that Mathilda can engage in her unsavoury activities in relative secrecy. Most people have no reason to suspect her of being anything more than an eccentric noblewoman. After all, such things as not letting the sun touch her skin and looking down on others as if they were cattle are traits more universally associated with her social status rather than being a nocturnal haemophage.
Actually being a nocturnal haemophage, however, often puts Mathilda in situations where to protect herself from scrutiny, she must use the very unholy powers that could expose her true nature.
And eventually, she will no longer be able to pretend she's an ordinary mortal at all - the clock is ticking, for everyone except her, and if she intends to hold onto her noble titles forever, she'll have to somehow make other people in power tolerate at least that aspect of her vampirism. It will not be a simple affair.

In game terms, we can calculate Mathilda's Menace thusly:
Simply being a Vampire (although most people who examine her character sheet will only see her described as Uncanny instead) would amount to 100 base Menace, and that (along with other supernatural factors if she had any) is then multiplied by 0.6 because her Primary Title is Duchess - tier 3, and the multiplier is 0.2 x Tier - which results in her Vampire factor only counting for 60 Passive Menace. On top of that, her level of Fame is Distinguished, which adds another 80 (each level of Fame counts for 40 and is NOT modified by Tier), resulting in 140 total Passive Menace.
However, eventually the fact that she is Immortal will become common knowledge. That is unavoidable if she lives long enough. The secret will be exposed, and while thankfully it is only Shunned by other Catholics, who look down on dodging the afterlife (at least until someone important decides it's a form of witchcraft after all), the diplomatic ramifications and damage to public opinion might be quite dire... Perhaps if she lived in a Taoist realm, people would see it in a different light?
In either case, that would earn her another 100 base Menace, again modified by Tier down to 60, and bringing her total up to 200.

Hypothetically, if Mathilda were an Empress in the same situation, her Passive Menace would be calculated at full power so it would be 240, and if she were a famous Living Legend on top of that, the total would amount to 400. At that point, being exposed as a Vampire would bring it up to 500. The minimum Menace of God-Empress of Vampirekind Mathilda would be half of the possible maximum (1000). She would have to watch her back as that is the threshold where some of the nastier consequences start to occur.

Ah! But Menace isn't all sunburn and monochromatic rainbows! There are some positives, such as a scaling bonus to Vampirism Lifestyle EXP gain, which in turn allows to pick perks that can offer additional ways to deal with Menace, reduce its impact on certain things, and even open up ways to turn high Menace to one's benefit. And that leads us to our second topic!

Vampirism Lifestyle and Perks

(If you're wondering why Mathilda looks a little different than usual, that's because being a vampire made her a little paler! It's a subtle effect (not as strong as Albino so skin will generally retain its colour) but if you don't want it, it can be turned off in Game Rules.)

The first thing that might jump out at you is the number of entry points in these trees. The second might be how much EXP each perk requires.

Indeed, the main reason for both of these is the fact that the Vampirism Lifestyle is something of a long-term project. You have potentially infinite time to unlock these perks (assuming you play your cards right) so getting through all of the trees will take multiple human lifetimes. To make it far less annoying than it would be normally, each "branch" is short, and generally I avoided gating anything behind anything else without a good reason.

The entry perks are generally weaker but widely applicable or provide powers/decisions/interactions the following perks depend on while those closer to the centre are more situational in powerful ways or build up on their prerequisites.

That way, if you're interested in a specific perk, you will be able to get straight to it in a relatively (compared to mortal lifestyles at least) short time, although if you want to complete a tree and unlock its final perk, you will have to spend a lot of time on it, but each offers a fitting ultimate reward for its associated playstyle - one passive benefit and one Decision.

• Puppeteer's Menace no longer affects Popular Opinion, making those torch-and-pitchfork-bearers nice and docile no matter how obvious your supernatural nature becomes.
  Tabula Rasa (Decision) allows the character to go into hiding for a year, over the course of which her Fame and Devotion will be reset, her Tyranny wiped clean, her relationships quietly ended, and memory of all her Crimes and Secrets erased from public consciousness.
• Queen/King of the Night's passive benefit is actually part of the Decision so it doesn't provide a separate one.
  Shadow Bloodline (Decision) allows the character to turn their mortal House into a Vampire Clan and adopt created Vampires (unlanded and not primary heirs to anything, for balance purposes) into it. It allows vampire members to feed on the mortal members risk-free while all mortal members, including dhampires, gain increased health and longevity.
• Apex Predator gets additional captives upon winning a war (including peasant uprisings, civil wars and such) with good congenital traits that make them excellent candidates for Blood Baths or breeding stock.
  Sanguine Tribute (Decision) allows the character to bypass the usual once-per-lifetime limitation on Subjugation and Invasion wars by resetting it, once every 50 years.

While not all of the perks are as dramatic, I would like to think you won't find one that is useless or boring. Not a single one is just a straight +X Skill bonus and all focus on vampire mechanics in some way so they also don't render regular Lifestyles redundant.

Here's a few of the regular perks you might find fun to play with:

• Bloodbath is exactly what is says on the tin. If you decide you love blood so much that just a nibble isn't enough, you will gain the ability to turn multiple prisoners into your bathwater (just... do the world a favour of not selling it after use, that would be double disgusting). What are the benefits, you might ask? Oh, many! Bloodbathing allows to remove injuries and scars and regrow lost limbs. If the victims fulfil certain prerequisites, it may also cause the vampire to age down (up to a point, children cannot be vampires for technical reasons) and there's even a small chance to gain or upgrade positive congenital traits if any of the victims had them!
• Mesmerize is the perk you see at the top of the Secrecy tree. By itself, successfully mesmerising someone makes them easier to feed and use powers and schemes on, but the real fun starts with Enthrall and Obliviate, the two powers that branch off of it. One is great for turning mortals into your personal playthings (although you can only maintain a limited number at a time) and the latter is a great way of making people forget inconvenient facts about you, such as the one time you fell asleep during a council meeting or when you started nibbling on the Chief Minister's neck during a council meeting...
• Mercurial Mind offers the potential to reduce the tedium of playing the same character potentially forever. Once every 50 years, at the cost of a huge Stress hit, it allows the character to reroll one of her existing personality traits. It's not exact science and the result is semi-random much like when educating a child, but... well... you do have all the time in the world to eventually get the traits you desire.

...and much much more but I won't spoil the rest of it so you can discover and play around with the perks yourself... maybe quite soon, judging by the rate it's been going so far. But maybe I should shush before I jinx myself into the next year!

Until then, thank you eternally for continuing to support and put up with our shenanigans <3 As always, have fun playing Stellaris (and Crusader Kings) and I'll see you next month with MORE of our shenanigans!