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The death of my maxed-out Crusader Kings 3 ruler has kicked off an apocalyptic witch fightThe vast and the furious.
The vast and the furious.
CK3: Northern Lords - Announcement TeaserWatch on YouTube
CK3: Northern Lords - Announcement Teaser
It is an hour before even the bravest of the royal physicians dares approach the body. When at last she places her head against that hillside chest to listen for a heartbeat, she finds it still hot as a stovepipe from the residual fury of his metabolism. But it is only the memory of a fire; the body is still. Trembling, she turns from the tennis-court-sized bed, and confronts the shadows gathered in a ring around it.
There are maybe two dozen of them, swathed in black wolf pelts, and they are giants. Even the shortest of them towers two heads above her, and they do not so much have facial features, as they havearchitecture. They stare at her, down noses like the prows of the royal triremes, as they wait for the inevitable words. But the terrified physician can only nod, as the truth she bears is too vast to pass to pass mortal lips.
And gathered around his cooling body are twenty-odd massive, superhuman witches, ready to kick the ever-living shit out of each other to get their hands on it. Welcome, friends, to the Age of Witchfights.
King Gigaknight, as he appeared in his prime at the age of 16.
For those of you being introduced to the Gigaknight cinematic universe for the first time, this is a followup to my post from last month, in which I used CK3’s custom character builder to make a ruler with every setting turned up to the max, and then unleashed him on medieval Europe. In fact, this is technically a Gigaknight reboot, as I made the character again and inflicted him on the world in the year 869AD, rather than 1066.
What’s more, thanks to Gigaknight’s unparalleled genius, every territory he conquered was transformed into an economic powerhouse at breakneck speed, packed to the brim with coin-belching temples, castles, and cities teeming with man-fuel for the furnace of his ambition. And he did this all, while simultaneously dragging his empire to the cusp of the high medieval period in the space of a hundred years, and casually replacing Catholicism with the worship of the ancient Greek gods.
In just a single, earthshaking year, he kicked the pope out of the Vatican, conquered the ruins of Carthage from the Tunisians, and grabbed the city of Alexandria with the passionless hunger of an extremely muscular child seizing a fistful of chicken nuggets from a buffet. Then, like a villain from a cartoon who’s assembled the fragments of a haunted pirate map, he turbo-charged the Hellenic faith to focus on precisely three things: conquest, cannibalism, and the idea that he might be reincarnated at any moment following his death.
But while that final act had theoretically secured Gigaknight’s immortality, he was still bound to a corporeal body. And at the age of 129, he came to the sudden, mystical understanding that its limits had been reached.
Most rulers, seeing the reaper’s scythe in the mist ahead, would have focused on securing a stable inheritance for their favoured progeny. Not Gigaknight. The Olympian had sired around forty children in his life, some born well into his thirteenth decade, and each had inherited at least some of his stature, skill, and talent. Also, he had personally inducted each of them into his personal coven of witches. They were all hard as nails. And Gigaknight thought it right that they should fight for his legacy.
Laughing at the very idea of succession laws, Gigaknight spent his deathbed days throwing a gargantuan feast for all his kin, while divvying up his dozens upon dozens of titles as broadly as possible among his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. And then, with a final “good luck chumps”, he suplexed himself off the top ropes of the mortal coil, and left them to battle over the carcass of his achievements.
The contenders are a fascinating bunch. Entertainingly, while most of Gigaknight’s kids inherited the extreme physical properties I’d created him with, they didn’t all inherit his “beautiful” trait, which was what prompted the game to try to hammer his deep-sea features into something resembling classical proportions. As a result, most of the participants in the succession crisis look like they belong somewhere on a spectrum between “goblin” and “statue of a bear made from gone-off ham”.
