a litille thinge

we wanted to see what would happen if we began in 1066 with our seat in gf's real life hometown, a little corner of ireland very consequential to this household but very small and poor in the scheme of medieval europe. now, if we wanted to be irish, we could have made life simple for ourselves by playing instead as meath, who is so well set up at the start of the game for a pleasant and easy rule that he is literally the tutorial. but that is not how people from deeply beloved but historically insignificant corners of the world think.

so our starting character was a very old man of no good qualities and few holdings. we did our best to work quickly against the clock of his lifetime to shore up the interests of our little county -- to play 'tall' as they say, seeking prosperity and security rather than expansion. the thrill for gf of getting to establish the foundation of a castle whose ruin she knows well as a core feature of her home; the challenge of playing against the game to try to offer good lives to our peasants. but nothing we did could have changed the fact that the game was running little calculations in the backround that, by a cursed coincidence of several layers of random number generation, made our auld fella's firstborn son into a murderer of half a dozen members of our family and court. the devastation to our political situation was immediate; the consequences for our bloodline would be unending. we caught him late because we were too poor and inconsequential to catch him early; he went to prison. we might have easily executed him there, but that would have branded us and all our descendents with the mark of kinslayer.

there was nothing really to be done about it. an old man's late-in-life turn toward trying to do well by his holdings meant nothing to the fact that the man we had begun to call murder son, or murderson, would inherit. and murderson was, inevitably, a terrible ruler. but his heir, a young but already cunning child called siobhán, showed promise. we did everything we could to set her up well. the early failings of an incompetent surgeon maimed her (an indelible debuff in the profoundly ableist world of this game), and her computer-generated genetics predisposed her to cruelty. but we tried to educate her as well as we could, unable as we were to recruit anyone of any skill or capability to our court. we grew our little holdings; we tried to teach siobhán diplomacy. the numbers, you know, the mathematical values that determine personality, those numbers, were simply against her.

i no longer remember what happened to the man we now know as murder dadson, but siobhán took his throne young. she did her best to become a better person than her metadata would seem to allow. she held feasts and hunts to try to develop her court; she went on more than one pilgrimage in search of some semblance of real piety or at least some alms from the pope. still she was universally despised, on account of her murderdad and her genetic sadism and all. except by her cousin the duchess of dublin, who perhaps, we imagine, having been raised in the same hell pit of congenital violence, pitied her. they were allies for a long time. but at some point we realized that our only real move, if we wanted to survive, much less to grow, was to betray that woman and try to take her lands before mr easy mode over in meath became high king. i'd like to say we couldn't bring ourselves to do it, but we did try. the lure of a little more wealth, a little more security, was too great. we simply failed.

siobhán's personal life, at least, we tried to make pleasant. she married a decent plank and had some okay children with him; the game created her gay and her culture encouraged concubinage, so she had many lovers, only some of whom betrayed her, and only some of whom she betrayed. unfortunately due to her upbringing and her genetic predisposition toward villainy, the only real means by which she could ever relieve stress -- arguably the game's most dangerous constraint -- was by, you know, murdering folk. but we tried to make her murders efficacious, and, where possible, deserved. her little county, now a duchy, prospered more than you might imagine under this arrangement. poor siobhán was truly, literally ontologically evil, but she really did do her best.

but even had she been born good and true, she would never have been high anything of anywhere, because meanwhile, well. there is a key piece of this story that i have til now not mentioned, the real bugbear of siobhán's fledgling ambition, the great power ever growing on her borders, the terror of the west and the scourge of the seas: the fucking welsh.

now, the king of gwynedd in any ordinary playthrough of crusader kings 3 is a nobody, destined to be more or less instantly wiped from the map by, usually, the english, themselves freshly conquered by one of the game's few historical inevitabilities. or sometimes by vikings, sometimes scots. very occasionally the easy-mode high king of ireland. but the welsh never matter in their own right. except to us. except to this poor cursed little county in an unfortunate corner of ireland, where the fucking welsh were on the move. for us, some obscure and improbable eventuality spun out from within the generation of our particular instance of this world to make the king of gwynedd an unstoppable monstrosity. now, some part of me which does after all succumb to these fantasies now and then might have been gratified to see the map of england painted in welsh colors. but not the part of me who was siobhán, who had to watch her own and all her family's lands conquered in a few easy gestures by the maniacal, tyrannical welshman from across the way.

if you are 'good' at the game, as in, adept at manipulating its mechanics in favor of making your dynasty as rich and powerful as possible, you can probably do something about an emergence like the welsh derangement. to me, though, good gameplay here is allowing the improbability of the political tragedy to unfold, and responding to it as only the insane gay one-legged daughter of a murderer would.

see, for all we tried to make her a diplomat, siobhán's strongest talent by far was for intrigue -- she was her father's daughter, for one thing, and in the end raised mainly by the mad and incompetent surgeon, who was also, incidentally, for this is the kind of court we had to work with, her spy master. so siobhán spent much of her life trying to exert her one talent to establish one single worthwhile spy in gwynedd's court which she might use to undermine somehow its ever more unbreakable grip on the whole archipelago. in this too she failed.

i do not know how she ended; the game updated since last we played, and i have not yet tried to work out how to safely open her file to see whether we can do anything to save her. or indeed whether the welsh will in the end challenge the mongols for the ultimate destiny of eurasia.

the point of all this is that little that happened in this game, from murder dadson to the king of wales embarking on the empire of the whole world, was in any way under our control. all we could do was look at the story that was unfolding, and make some little inputs to change some little parts of it. and laugh. this was by far the best campaign of this game that i have played, and in the end, on a civilizational scale, we achieved almost nothing.

so, this, more or less, is what i love about crusader kings 3: the way it covers what austin walker termed, in another recent friends at the table production, the 'abstraction gap', the space between pure system and pure narrative where the richest things in games seem to happen. the way it both exposes the mechanics of all its systems, and asks you to take the stories it produces, with all their petty inanity, as fact as weighty as history itself. it's beautiful, it's silly, it's fun, and honest to god it really does have some serious and interesting things to say about power.