Team Nessassity Mods - Vampires Suck, A Psychological And Physiological Study (Patreon)

Hello boys and ghouls! To this spoooky October Monthly Mod Report!

I'm here to haunt you with spoooky news!

About spoooky things!

Spoooky vampires and spoooky necroids!

Okay, okay, I'll stop now!

So without further a... boooooooo!

...

*smack*

Elves of Stellaris + MEC 

In light (or darkness) of the impending Necroids Species Pack, Stellaris will, as always, get a patch. A... pretty big one if the teasers are to be believed. And for us that means... a mad scramble to get all our mods updated!

Although work on our Stellaris projects did slow down while we were distracted by CK3, and unfortunately none of the ship models that are still clogging our backlog are finished yet, the updates will include various bugfixes and adjustments we've implemented over the past couple of months.

Elves of Stellaris will receive improvements to some of the origins, including a major overhaul of the Lhùren, a number of fixes and balancing and... many other things I would like to have remembered to put into one cohesive list before I started writing this! Suffice it to say, if I can't remember most of it, it's probably a lot!
MEC: Asari was supposed to receive its Illium overhaul this update, but I ended up taking a break from Stellaris before finalising it so unfortunately that is still very much a work in progress! So unfortunately that update will have to wait until after my CK3 per project, Veiled Realms: Court of Blood, is released. I promise I'll get back to it as soon as possible orz

Speaking of...

Veiled Realms - Court of Blood

...like, I may have no attention span but you have to admit I'm amazing at segways, right?

Ahem... ANYWAYS! In last month's report, we talked about Menace and the Vampirism Lifestyle. There, I mentioned a few of the perks and how they tie into various systems such as Feeding, which will be our focus this time!

Probably the most central aspect of the vampire concept is their thirst for life, preferably in liquid red form, but in many denominations of the myth, vampires and vampire-like creatures are also said to sup upon different representations of vitality - sometimes it's physical things like breath or even flesh itself, and in other cases it might even be something as abstract as a "soul", "life energy" or "qi".
In the future I would love to play a bit with cultural myths and try to incorporate such things into both flavour and gameplay, but in the interest of releasing Veiled Realms this century, for now I have decided to go with the Hollywood blood-drinker as the base template.

That said, for all the importance that preying on the living has to the vampire fantasy, in Veiled Realms, hunger and feeding are handled perhaps a bit differently from what you might be used to in other vampire mods and games.
For one, there is no explicit "thirst" need or a "blood pool" to be used as a form of mana. Rather, it kinda ties in different ways to many different game mechanics, and is also a potentially useful tool by itself.

Okay, Princess Vague, what does that actually mean? You're saying words but they don't make any sense! Is it time to bring out the pictures? I heard their market value typically oscillates around 1000 words which sounds like a pretty sweet deal! 

To start with, let's find a delicious snack!

When you are a vampire, right-clicking on any regular mortal (as opposed to irregular mortals which... um... perhaps I'll talk about another time!) will grant you easy access to all the vampiric interactions you can subject them to. By default, only Feeding and Turning (not implemented in UI yet) are immediately available; the rest are unlockable via Vampirism Lifestyle Perks.

It is worth noting, however, that given the... personal touch vampiric interactions require, you may only use them on characters who are in the same location as your character. This typically limits their use to your own court... but should you be commanding an army and physically lead it to a different province, you will be able to feed on all characters living there as well. Of course, doing so would forfeit your home advantage - it's significantly harder to hunt in foreign courts.

Aside from the Vampire: Feed interaction, there are other ways to procure blood, but let's focus on it for now. As you can see indicated in the tooltip, the most basic uses of feeding are Stress management and powering abilities. It also says that our meal of choice tonight is particularly palatable, but let's archive that information for now. It will come up later.

For the moment, we'll focus on Stress management. Why is that important?

Being a vampire - some might say a monster, an unnatural abomination, a lifeless corpse that by all rights should not be walking, talking and biting people - is not something the human psyche is well equipped to deal with.
That kind of existence alone makes it difficult to hold on to one's sanity, represented by the -50% reduced effectiveness of conventional coping methods. On top of that, delving even deeper into the unknown and unnatural to tap into otherworldly abilities will inevitably drive one even further away from humanity. Using vampiric Powers produces additional Stress.

Fortunately for vampires, the very unholy thirst that tears at their sanity also offers a recourse - a way to clear the mind, silence the ferocious animal inside, or perhaps to come to terms with it. Steal some life from a human and you might even feel like one again.

With that said, how does one go about it? Humans are notoriously protective of their lives so asking pretty with cherry on top rarely seems to work.

Okay! So there's a lot to unpack here; we might want to take it from the top.

First of all, you might notice all the effects on Mathilda. Menace, Lifestyle Experience and Stress Loss should be self-explanatory at this point, so let's talk about the two modifiers we get:

Quenched indicates that the vampire has fed recently. While the modifier is active, they cannot reduce any more Stress by feeding, making it a soft "cooldown" on the instant stress relief, but at the same time, they will be less affected by Stress for the duration.

Rare Drink is one of possible "blood buffs" the vampire might acquire. The quality of the drink is determined primarily by how many positive congenital Traits the target possesses. Remember the tooltip that said Guigliadore's blood was richer than most? That's because he's Robust, healthier, stronger and generally a cut above most humans. Because of that, drinking from him would grant a level 2 blood buff.

"Blood buffs" have three uses:

• One, which you can see above, is further passive reduction of stress gain.
• Far more important is its active use - it can be expended to activate certain Powers, or to modify them in order to achieve different effects. A good example is Mesmerize, which by itself merely makes the target merely easier to hunt and enact schemes on, but by expending a blood buff, it can be upgraded to Enthrall, a much stronger form of control, or Obliviate, making them forget any secrets they know about you; quite a useful cleanup method should a feeding attempt go awry...
• Whenever a blood buff is used to activate or augment a Power, it will also increase the chances of success, based on quality.

Feeding, obviously, also affects your target. If successful, two things will happen as indicated: one, the victim will fall unconscious and be very confused when they wake up, and two, they will sustain blood loss.

Blood loss is a health penalty that has 4 levels, ranging from Mild to Terminal, and it is upgraded by repeatedly feeding on the same character. Normally, feeding cannot directly kill the target (unless Drain is used, more on that later) but the lingering health complications very much might.

Speaking of complications, feeding attempts can fail, based on a variety of factors. Compare, for example, hunting one's own courtier versus trying to feed on an important landed noble in a foreign province:

Even though the Pope is less physically fit and not as well equipped to deal with deception, simply being a landed King-tier ruler negates most of those disadvantages.
You might also notice that feeding on him would generate far more Menace than in the case of the lowborn courtier, and Mathilda herself isn't particularly thrilled about the idea of snacking on her own Head of Faith, being that she is highly religious. On the other hand, should she succeed, she would earn a lot of Vampirism experience, even though she is not actively pursuing any of its Focuses.

If she wanted to, she could perhaps also try to swing the odds in her favour a little bit, which brings us to the two Options:

Entice is unlocked by the "Succubus/Incubus" lifestyle perk. It allows the vampire to use their Attraction value (gained from sources such as the Seducer perk, Beauty traits or the Temptation focus) instead of Prowess when determining the chances of successful feeding. This also changes how the scenarios play out and may lead to different consequences.
The use of Entice is limited in much the same ways as the regular Seduction scheme, and requires the same Temptation perks to get around preference and incest restrictions. Unlike full-fledged Seduction, however, Enticing is far more superficial, it does not lead to any sort of long-term romance; as such personal compatibility or any pre-existing relationships are not significant factors, although it is particularly effective against lovers. In the context of vampire feeding, it is simply using one's charm to get just close enough to the target to give them a little love bite...

Drain is unlocked by the Trueblood lifestyle perk. It allows, if the hunt is successful, to drain the target dry, instantly killing them. However, attempting to do so also increases the risk that something will go wrong and generates additional Menace.

Should you succeed, you will be rewarded with a yummy meal and your target will remain none the wiser, apart from a nasty hangover the next morning.

Of course, should you fail... well, it wouldn't be a Team Nessassity mod if we didn't counterbalance the fun stuff with... a different kind of fun!

There are actually a LOT of FUN failure outcomes, grouped into 3 broad categories: Safe, Mild and Severe

• Safe failure is typically just status quo - you gain nothing but lose nothing except time and opportunity, but you can usually try again next month. Low Menace increases the probability that a failure will be relatively safe, giving vampires who are good at keeping a low profile a degree of latitude.
• Mild failure outcomes are usually more annoying than threatening, with temporary consequences, such as loss of some prestige, piety or gold, loss of opinion, a minor Stress hit, etc. Inconvenient but ultimately recoverable. Mild outcomes are the most frequent at a moderate level of Menace.
• Severe failure is when things go horribly wrong. Someone might die, you might lose a level of Fame or Devotion, someone might learn of your Vampire secret, you might be branded a Deviant or a Witch, or even implicated in a murder. These consequences are usually permanent or have far-reaching implications. High Menace makes Severe outcomes increasingly more likely to occur.

Your approach may also affect the way in which failure manifests. Hunting through stealth or force will put you in different situations than using seduction.

And with this, I hope your appetite has been sated... for now!

Basic Nessassities - Happy Heraldry

Oh! Which brings us to the dessert! I recently released a tiny mini-mod that sorta created itself while I was experimenting with things!

What it does is address one of my pet peeves about CK3's Coats of Arms - the quartering that Cadet Branches are subjected to, making them ugly and very generic-looking (in my personal opinion), not to mention ahistorical for... I'm pretty sure most of the world. Happy Heraldry addresses at least one of those annoyances by changing the way House CoAs are generated in accordance with configurable Game Rules, in addition to offering an in-game interaction that allows you to manually generate a new CoA on a case-by-case basis.

I hope it provides at least some measure of customisation until CK3 (hopefully) gets a proper CoA designer!

I'll be back with another Monthly Mod Report next month, and perhaps by that time you will have had the opportunity to play Veiled Realms yourselves! I cannot yet estimate a concrete release date, but at the rate the project has been progressing I'm hoping it won't be long! Please keep an eye on my Twitter where I will likely be posting more and more progress reports as features become shippable and Veiled Realms nears completion!

Until then, thank you for continuing to support us and keeping up with Team Nessassity news, it means so much to us! Have fun playing Stellaris and Crusader Kings, and I hope you all have a happy and socially distant Halloween this year! <3