Love stories, generally speaking, struggle to work in Europa Universalis IV. A full game can span for nearly 400 ingame years, and Paradox seems determined to make it and future installments stick to a more sandbox style of gameplay. Anbennar changes the formula in a few ways to make character-based narratives possible:
Characters in Anbennar can live forever without it being weird.
Characters in Anbennar that can’t live forever can have their lives extended (reasonably) as long as it serves a narrative purpose.
Character-based storytelling is already an established medium in the setting (albeit to a lesser extent than third-person disembodied narration).
With these things in mind, I set out to create a character-based story that hadn’t really been told in Anbennar before. Vels Fadhecai was a relatively unassuming nation at the edge of the Ynn; a valley of feudal ruinborn elves worshipping a huge river that runs through North Aelantir. Although it ends after you form the Ynnic Empire (formable nations shared by many different tags are often seen as the end goal of a given tag’s narrative), players still experience political intrigue, murder, wendigo hunting, period-typical racism, and gay marriage, all told from the perspective of Varynna Latekyr, eternal companion to Mitrenya Konyrzab: Lady of Vels Fadhecai, blood magician, and half-wendigo.
That is to say: This is a love story.
This time, the player gets an event as soon as they start the game, introducing Lord Celadil. He’s not the best of Lords, and he likes a good romp in the sheets… or thirty.All that romping has consequences. The nobility do whatever they like, and it’s very hard to get a legitimate heir the natural way.Here’s one of those heirs: Mitrenya Konyrzab, the main character of Vels Fadhecai’s story. In this event, the mother of her childhood friend Varynna, the famed general and Water Dancer Nathasadra Latekyr, passes away.Key to Mitrenya and Varynna’s entwined story is a fateful encounter in the forests surrounding Vels Fadhecai. Lord Celadil hires some adventurers to protect the citizens of the country from the forest’s dangers……but they fail. Here, you can also see my first – and to date, only – use of event insights. These give the player something of an overview of what’s about to happen when they complete a mission with an event reward. I, personally, like to avoid them. The surprise is part of the fun!And here’s that encounter, with a rather ironic reward.When Celadil kicks the bucket, a council is convened to pick a new Lord or Lady from one of his many, many, many children. They settle on Mitrenya… as the spare. Because the wendigo attack in her childhood left her unable to bear children, the council opts for her half sister, Ariadne, as the primary heir.Ariadne doesn’t last long. Strange how that happens.Jumping ahead a little – Vels Fadhecai was the first mission tree in Anbennar (and, I believe, in any EUIV conversion mod) to hide event insights if you haven’t unlocked the mission yet. In this instance, Varynna admonishes you for being naughty.Of course, this mission tree is centred on Mitrenya. Since ruinborn elves aren’t immortal, and Mitrenya is your ruler, she can die due to hardcoded game mechanics. To get around this, she has a modifier that extends her lifespan as much as possible, alongside these two events, which feature her and Varynna slaughtering a camp of nomadic tribesmen that enjoy raiding Vels Fadhecai from time to time in order to have a mechanical second chance at life.Jumping ahead to near the end of the mission tree, Mitrenya has finished leading a wendigo hunt in the north of the Ynn (and yes, she finally kills the one that originally attacked her). She’s also taken a dragon captive and become one of the strongest mages in the world. All she needs now is immortality……and someone to spend that immortality with.
Leave a Reply