CKII: Eadfrith the Cathar

Last time, the Mercian empire went through a sequence of short-lived queens until Emperor Eadfrith the Great (1173- took the throne, nominally on the death of his mother in childbirth, and for real when he came of age. He got things started with moving the capital to Damietta.

Once the court was established there, my court chaplain discovered he was really into a heresy called Catharism. Finally, a chance to try running a secret cult! Sadly, as I've understood it, you can only ever belong to one secret society at a time, but then again, the Mercian hermetic tradition was broken during the Interregnum, so what the hell. Besides, Mercia is the largest Catholic realm in the world, so if I could flip at least a large part of it, we might be on our way to supplanting Catholicism altogether. It's a long shot, but hey, we'll see.

Meanwhile, Eadfrith became King of Norway.

Unfortunately, he also became insane and appointed his horse chancellor. It's the syphilis ("Great Pox"), I'm afraid.

**

At this point, I took a longish break from the game, for life reasons, but also because if I'm honest, running a secret cult turned out to be kind of boring. The first problem is that you can only belong to one secret organization at a time, which is a real shame, because it means I had to give up Hermeticism to become a Cathar. The bigger problem is that there's not a whole lot of interesting things to do as a Cathar. Now, I'd love to be able to convert my entire realm to Catharism and achieve full gender equality, but the way you go about it is occasionally sponsoring a secret community in a province, or trying to recruit a character. Neither of these is very interesting in itself, and being a secret cultist gives your character stress. When you combine the stat loss from giving up the hermetic grimoires, it's just a bad deal in pursuit of an outcome that may never happen, and like I said, is boring.

I'm bummed about this because it would have been really awesome to kick out the pope and replace him with a Cathar woman, but unfortunately I'll have to try that some other time. The paradox of a secret cult seems to be that converting a smaller realm is easier, but then that leaves you a potential victim of your more orthodox neighbors; converting a larger realm is just dull and time-consuming.

On a broader note, since I graduated I simply haven't had the time to immerse myself in Crusader Kings any more, and with several new DLCs and lots of minor updates out since I last played, I'm afraid I don't think returning to this game feels like a good idea. I think I need a completely new campaign to figure out how everything works again! I'm fondly dreaming of getting the kind of 9-to-5 job that would let me do some proper gaming, but I'm really not sure if those actually exist any more.

Still, building Mercia on the Nile was great fun, and I'm happy I did it. I'm also vaguely interested in the board game, although the reviews have been kind of mediocre. Anyway, Crusader Kings 2 is an amazing game, and I wish I had more time to play it.