Why an Email Newsletter About Crusader Kings?
A little backstory on this frivolous pastime.
When it comes to video games, I have three basic modes. I like (a) big flashy brainless shooters, (b) role-playing games with complicated inventory management systems, and (c) strategy games that simulate large-scale development, conflict, and expansion, from the national to the global to the interstellar. In the latter, I can lose myself for many days in what amounts to a very pretty interface for managing a complicated series of spreadsheets.
Sometime in the late 2000s I came across a game called Rome: Total War, an early entry in the extremely popular Total War series. In this case, the player’s goal is to internally cement control of the Roman empire as well as conquer as much of the rest of the world as possible. But what was new to me about this game was that your means of interacting with the world is not simply ordering troops around (though there is plenty of that). You interact with the game world by controlling a specific Roman family.
You must protect and enlarge your family’s faction, fight off other family factions, and navigate Roman politics, all while managing marriages and childrearing with an eye toward the next generation of leadership. It was roleplaying as a family group, which created a satisfying layer of human life over the usual mechanistic gameplay of strategy sims.
Imagine my delight a few years later when I discovered Crusader Kings 2, a hideously complex simulation of managing the fortunes of a full medieval dynasty over hundreds of years. Everybody had a host of traits, predilections, goals, obsessions, and inherited characteristics, which all contributed to how they reacted to the player and one another. And every single castle, town, and church on the map of Europe (and later Africa, and the Middle East, and Asia) had a character in charge and a full court of other characters, all of which you could potentially interact with, all pursuing their own agendas.
Not only that, you had to operate within the arcane system of medieval lineage and inheritance, titles and claims and casus belli and oh, so many wonderful things. I was in love.
Over subsequent years, I played Crusader Kings 2 … well, let’s just say I played it a lot. The game is very flexible in the sense that any long playthrough will certainly end up with a totally ahistorical world, even though the beginning state of nobles and nations and empires is meant to be reasonably accurate. Quite often, my ideas for building my dynasty at the start of the game bore no resemblance to the outcome. For example, in one of my favorite games I started as the head of a minor Scandinavian tribe. By the close of the medieval period when the game ends, my dynasty had conquered about 95% of the known world, and was ruled by a Slavic Sunni Caliph who also happened to be a demonically possessed homosexual hunchback.
By the late 2010s, Crusader Kings 2 had countless expansions (one of which challenged players with an ahistorical invasion of Europe from advanced Aztecs). But the core game engine was creaking under its age. So, in 2020, Crusader Kings 3 was released. The new version incorporated many of the expanded systems of its predecessor, not to mention a much prettier look and feel. Perhaps most importantly, the game is much better at wrapping its deeply intimidating technical system in a much more accessible and easy-to-manage interface.
The family management aspects are still central to Crusader Kings 3, and in my opinion they really are the main event. Yes, there is warfare, and military development, and civilization advances, and machinations among religions and cultures. But the mundane absurdity of the game’s central conceit keeps me engaged in a way I’m not even sure I can properly articulate.
Early in 2021, I had the idea to narrate a game of Crusader Kings 3 via email newsletter, and here we are. It’s very easy to produce, since I can play during downtime when the spirit moves me, then leave it alone for awhile, then return when inspired to do so. I was worried that journaling about my gameplay might drain the play of joy, but in a possibly perverse way it’s made it even more fun. Plus, looking over my play logs while composing Royal Dispatch makes me appreciate the full sweep of the emergent story. It’s all extremely silly. Compels me though.
No doubt the execution of Royal Dispatch will evolve over time, but the basic premise is one week, one ruler. That is, each week will tell the story of one Crusader Kings ruler from coronation to death/abdication. To keep emails from getting overlong or bogged down with images, I’ll split one ruler’s story into multiple installments as appropriate. But generally, a ruler per week will be the rule. I’ll stay a few rulers ahead of publication as time and circumstances allow.
I’m a Crusader Kings enthusiast but by no means an expert. I derive joy from playing the game my way, and I’m sure there are many ways I could play the game more “efficiently.” But that’s not the point, is it. Not for me anyway.
Who knows how long this will take, or what form it will ultimately take. Enjoy, if you care to. I know I will. In fact, I already have.