Just a little sin
I am burning the Bishop while he sleeps.
I’d say it’s nothing personal, but quite a lot in medievalmanagement simNorlandis personal.
He shouldn’t have slept with the Queen’s sister, for example.
This, my holy friend, is how your bed chamber becomes a raging inferno.
In storytelling terms, it is a tragedy.
In terms of fantasy management games?
It is great fun.
The failure cascade as waterslide.
My test for likening a game toDwarf FortressorRimworldis whether the little dramas that unfold are funny.
Are they laced with enough unexpectedness and bitter rivalry to constitute a story generator?
Or are they at least a funny anecdote generator?
I laughed a lot.
If Rimworld is the first big touchstone, thenCrusader Kingsis the second.
The map evolves too.
You see, the Lord creation at the beginning of a game lets you tweak stats and personality quirks.
My Queen is called “Stabbinya”.
She is the reckless and militant caretaker of the improbably polite boy, Pinkcheeks.
On paper she’ll be good at commanding armies, leading troops, and fighting.
In practice, we don’t get that far.
Her sister, “Madam MacDrip”, is an intelligent, pedagogically gifted overseer.
She has terrible manners.
I spent a similarly long time just naming the provinces and neighbouring kings before the game even kicked off.
And I think this is where I understood Norland had some claws.
Progress is quite slow (helped a little by some obligatory fast-forward buttons).
Every few days a holy caravan visits and it sells a much-needed commodity - books.
Once one of your bigwigs has learned a piece of knowledge, the whole community will benefit.
A new hop field, for example, or the basic understanding required to cook meat properly.
Aha, the disaster machine is all coming together now, isn’t it?
In the end, this is not how my personal disaster unfolds.
That begins when the outsiders arrive…
First, a landless Lord called Jula arrives.
That means more help to tell the peasants what to do.
When I hire Jula, I do not know that she completely and utterlyloathesthe Queen.
All I know is that she’s intelligent and can run a good brewery.
As a result, Jula will never really make Nandos feel like her own home.
She works for us, but make no mistake - she hates us.
Ah, little baby Looksmaxx.
He will die horribly.
King No Nose of Pringleton is coming to visit.
I can even see him as he trundles towards the settlement on the world map.
He actually seems lovely.
Unfortunately, he arrives alongside a companion.
A Bishop called Ingo, who triggers some tutorials about the mood-destroying effects of sin.
Mood is important in Norland.
Sin is clearly to be avoided, and his holiness blesses us with his mere presence.
We offer the Bishop a room in one of our unoccupied lordly houses.
Piety is important to the people of Nandos.
We are a holy and modest people.
In the next room Jula is fucking a rutabaga farmer called Oisin.
She pays him when he leaves.
For a minute I think this will not bode well.
I mouse away for a moment.
What will the bishop think?
I hope he hasn’t notic–
But the Bishop is in Madam MacDrip’s room.
They are also having sex.
The good news is that King No Nose has slept through the entire horny fiasco.
That’s when I find out the cost of this ritual: six silver rings.
I see now what is happening.
Who would have thought the church could be so conniving?
I refuse to let Madam MacDrip confess.
Everything that happens afterwards is disaster upon disaster.
One of the visitors starts insulting Jula, forcing her into a deep depression.
The others, wracked with false guilt and stretched thin across field and lumberyard, also become moody.
They are five years old.
The soil grows fallow.
The rutabagas go untended.
The mine we spent so long researching goes unused.
He fills one of our manor houses with his stench every night.
I’ve had a good time with Norland so far.
I gained far more laughter from it than other Rimworld competitors in any case.
Let the wolves come, I decide.
And I remember something else the game lets you do.
I set a task for one of the lords: Attempt to Kill the Bishop.
As he fell asleep, she stood outside his door, and lit his entire building on fire.
And - this is the damnedest thing - he survived.
Not only did he fail to succumb to the burns from this terrible ordeal.
Inspecting the Bishop, I found he gets a mood boost from “religious enjoyment of injuries”.
Of course he does.Of course.
When the wolves of prophecy approached shortly afterwards, I did nothing to stop them.
This place was cursed.
Baby Looksmaxx suffered a gruesome death in the jaws of three slavering beasts.
Madam MacDrip was likewise eaten.
And it still delivers funny anecdotes.
That Bishop Ingo was not among them.
