The links below each image will open them in full size for an easier reading experience. They can also be downloaded using the adjacent button.
Content Warning: Masked Butcher is not a happy story. This writeup discusses the unabstracted violence commited by the Butchers throughout their narrative. To be clear: the titular masks are the literal removed faces of beings killed by the Butchers. This is a key theme of the narrative and cannot be divorced from it. There is no detailed description of murder or this removal, either in this writeup or the mission tree itself, but if you’re not comfortable with reading about that content please do not read further.
The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.
As discussed in Vels Fadhecai’s post, Europa Universalis IV is not primarily a narrative game. Anbennar turns the table on its head in this regard, being notable for its lore and storytelling within the constraints of the game. I aimed to do something unique with Masked Butcher; I wanted to tell a horror story.
Perhaps the biggest question I had to answer going in was that of the narrative perspective. I was already familiar with character-based storytelling and I knew I wanted to do something similar, but I also didn’t want to have a particularly strong, immortal ruler figure to structure the story around. The lore of this tag I had going in was also relatively freeform – they were presented as the bogeymen of the Serpentreach, sneaking around its dark tunnels and surrounding villages in search of beings they could cut the faces off of. As such, I took a very novel approach to the story – it’s told entirely from the perspective of your victims.
My starting themes didn’t really reflect this. It took several rounds of review for me to be truly happy with what I presented. I dramatically increased the conquest scope of the Mission Tree – EUIV is a game that doesn’t lend itself well to “tall” gameplay, so having more lands to conquer is usually a good thing – and honed in on the unique mechanic of the Butchers; the masks they create.
Even these themes don’t quite represent the final product perfectly. There’s a mechanic referenced on the themes, under the “Bloodied Altar” box in the bottom-left, called a trophy pile. This is a mechanic shared by all the Orcish nations that live under the mountains, and although fun, it’s ultimately not particularly interesting. I would later go back and revise this theme to have the mechanic directly tied to the number of masks you can equip, as referenced in the “Arok-Ankash” box on the right. I also removed the “pillaging and raiding grants lump sums of religious power” segment, because it was unnecessary and didn’t have an interesting mechanical equivalent.
Skipping ahead a little, this is the final skeleton for the Mission Tree itself. As you can see, this was before I’d discovered the art of colour-coding according to column – later, when I created Zokka, I would shift to doing so in order to improve readability. This one is instead colour-coded according to the theme of each mission.
I had some significant structural issues when creating this Mission Tree. It was originally much more linear, using more rows than the final product does. I had to substantially move things around, changing objectives and effects accordingly in order to end up with the final product you see here.
You can also see the final design of the mask mechanic in the white boxes on the left. I essentially subverted the existing Vampire Estate and replaced each privilege with a bespoke one, each representing a mask from a different race. This worked extremely well, and created a very memorable mechanic that ties in perfectly with the narrative.
Masked Butcher was also the first nation I wrote a dev diary for! I did it entirely in keeping with its narrative and it acted as a great hook to get players interested. You can check it out at the end of this post!
Although not as grand in scale as Zokka, I would go as far to describe Masked Butcher as my magnum opus in Anbennar. In the 2025 Community Survey, it was rated as the #2 most popular Mission Tree in the entire mod, only behind The Command (which had a full team of developers and writers behind it, so I can hardly be too offended).
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