Beautiful and terrible randomly generated poetry is coming to the great medieval strategy game Crusader Kings 3 as part of its next update, and players will still be able to torture enemies to submission with the worst of its verses.
Expanding substantially on the Poet trait of Crusader Kings 2, the attempt of Crusader Kings 3 will bring reworked statistics, character interactions and, most importantly, random poetry generation, which means that you can revel in the digital songs conjured up by people who love rhymes all day.
Crusader Kings 3 – Launch trailer.
The poetry will be generated in the game by combining a particular subject with one of five broad themes – romance, legacy, mourning, conflict and incompetence – allowing the characters to influence events with one or two rhyming verses. Here is one of several randomly assembled examples provided as part of the latest Paradox blog post.
Characters with poetic inclinations can send poems to most people at the diplomatic level, and the outcome will depend on the theme. A romantic poem will make your recipient more like the author, for example, and a poem about grieving will also improve relationships, but it will also decrease the recipient’s stress – assuming the content is not overly inflammatory, of course.
Perhaps most importantly, however, the poet characters can summon their inner vogon and torture their prisoners, forcing them to listen to their worst work. “As with any use of the torture interaction,” explains Paradoxo, “it can cause a horrible amount of stress.”
The poetry will reach Crusader Kings 3 in the next patch 1.3 of the game, which also features winter as a game mechanic and brings several other additions – including the ability to wear the pope’s hat – as detailed in Paradox’s last post.
Update 1.3 for Crusader Kings 3 will be accompanied by the game’s first significant DLC drop, which Paradox is expected to reveal as part of this month’s Paradox Insider live broadcast event. It will air on Twitch at 7pm UK time / 11am PT on March 13th.