Funny / Crusader Kings II

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Made by forum member kerannymi in response to this thread.

Trailers and Promotional Material:

• The EXTREME trailer for The Old Gods.
  • PAGANS! VIKINGS! BOATS! MAPS! PILLAGE! LOOT! SACRIFICE! BEARD!^note on a woman!!!!!
• The live action "Seven Deadly Sins" trailer series:
  • Wroth
  • Sloth
  • Lust
  • Greed
  • Envy
  • Pride
  • And finally, Piracy. (which was rendered outdated after the game was made free in 2019)
• The Paradox Interactive Youtube Channel had this to say about the Charlemagne expansion:
  "Charlemagne lives on in the new CK2 Charlemagne expansion. Relive the experience of bringing an empire back from the dead by assembling lesser empires, a "franken-empire" if you will. The expansion will also bring custom kingdoms. What will your first kingdom be called? Mine will be the Kingdom of the Fish People, ALL HAIL FISH PEOPLE!"

In-Game:

• The Way of Life expansion introduces, among other things, the ability to seduce courtiers. One of the event options after your love-making sessions goes "Vidi, Vici, Veni."^*I saw, I conquered, I came.
  • It is not only limited to courtiers. Female rulers can seduce other male rulers too. Your husband will get a -200 opinion penalty because you are a harlot and will confront you while throwing furniture around. The female ruler can then tearfully reassure him of her love and proceed to seduce other guys.
• There can be some rather... odd AI interactions within the game. For example, as an Irish King, it's possible to (through bloodline ties to the throne) become nominated by a Faction to become King of England, or large chunks of it... and actually attain the throne. Granted, it's likely that your dynasty will be kicked off as soon as there's a Succession Crisis, but for that particular King's lifespan, you'll be wondering how the hell it happened.
  • It's always great when you unexpectedly inherit something. You were focusing on keeping your kingdom together, and you unexpectedly inherit a large chunk of France.
• It's more than possible for a wife and husband to be King and Queen Consort of each other's territory (the King of one country is the King Consort of his Queen's country, and vice versa). They can go to war with each other, whilst being lovers and popping out kids.
• There is a line of scripts that cause an old ruler to expire after consummating his marriage with an attractive, young, lustful wife. His wife gets the 'depressed' trait after his death.
• In certain cases, counties, duchies and kingdoms with the same name are seperate from each other due to independence revolts and the like. Behold; the three eastern powers of Perm, Perm & Perm.
• Combining the "Commit Suicide" option and gaining prestige/ducats from marriages with royalty will make for some Black Humor.
• The Lunatic trait is largely implemented as Funny Schizophrenia, so there's a lot of funny events for them (quite apart from the various oddities with horses, detailed below).
  • Commissioning a Runestone with a lunatic character made in Ruler Designer produces an interesting result.
  Kettil, proud son of a holy union between Odin, a wild mare and three forest gnomes, paid Óleifr handsomely to carve these runes. With his flying longship and crew of twelve singing rabbits, Kettil earned his fame by sailing across the Norse lands solving crime. May the Shining Tentacle preserve us all.
  • Another Lunatic event is the passing of insane laws. Such as forcing peasants to put holes in their walls, a total ban on pants, the use of turnips as a standard currency, and... banning violence, promoting conversion by kindness as opposed to threat of force, and just general niceness. All of these give you a -15 opinion penalty with your vassals called 'Passed Insane Law'. Except for the ban on violence, which gives a -20.
  • There's an event where a Lunatic seduces a rosebush. This can actually produce a child.
    • Well, maybe. Either someone took advantage of their insanity and placed their baby under the rosebush for them to find, or the bush actually gave birth to their child.
  • If you hold a feast such as a Germanic blot and one of your guests is a Lunatic, he may start running around naked screaming that he's on fire. Normally, your character will roll their eyes, but if they're a Lunatic themselves, they'll join in.
• With the Charlemagne Expansion, Chronicles were added, listing all your accomplishments. In the event you have a year where nothing particularly interesting happens, the game inserts something about one of your provinces; usually this will be something like "An unusually large number of births in [Province]". Sometimes however you get something like "A three headed goat was born in [Province]."
• Anyone can marry anybody of any age, which makes for some cringeworthy pairings such as a sixty year old ruler having a sixteen year old wife. Or vice-versa...
• The Lustful trait is more of an incredibly useful trait to have rather than a disadvantage due to the fertility boost as it guarantees your dynasty's continuation... even if your ruler is sixty years old and his wife is sixteen.
• The button text for some of the more dastardly actions frequently delves into Black Comedy. After successfully arranging for someone to die by poisoned wine, your character might comment, "I think I will celebrate with... beer."
• A ruler with the Lunatic trait will sometimes randomly appoint their horse Glitterhoof to the post of chancellor, in reference to one of Caesar Caligula's shenanigans. This is funny by itself, but Conclave took it a step further and made Glitterhoof into an actual courtier with "Horse" culture, resulting in no end of silliness:
  • "That Time a Horse Conquered the Ancient World". The short version is, a player exploited a loophole in the rules regarding horses to create an entire dynasty of horses that then restored the Roman Empire.
  • Glitterhoof arranges a murder.
  • If you're immortal, you can also feed Glitterhoof your blood and make the horse immortal. This can in turn trigger an event where an immortal intelligent horse named Incitatus (after Caligula's aforementioned horse chancellor) kills Glitterhoof and challenges you to a Duel to the Death. A high enough Diplomacy skill lets you recruit him as a courtier instead.
  • You can even make your court physician a horse. It gets even funnier when the "treatments" your horse prescribes work better than those of trained human doctors.
• Due to the fact that the game provides little incentive for AI or player rulers to follow history, some bizarre culture/religion/location combinations can occur:
  • Such as Jewish Norse Greece.
  • Aztec Pope. That is all.^{how it works}Due to a shortage of dynasty members, the Aztec Empire is sometimes inherited by a vassal priest of the Emperor. Due to low moral authority from being an unreformed pagan, the Aztecs often convert to Catholicism (since they usually land somewhere in mainland Europe or in Britain). An emperor-tier Catholic priest, an "emperor-bishop", gets an insane bonus to his chances to be elected cardinal and picked as preferatus.
  • The Reaper's Due decision to seek a court physician has a chance of producing a traveling doctor with Game-Breaker stats and a randomly generated culture. Coincidentally or not, these stats and traits, including an obscene Learning score, are also considered favorable in Catholic clerical succession, so AI rulers with free investiture^note the bishopric's liege appoints its bishop, as opposed to the church assigning one frequently appoint them to bishoprics and often have them go on to become cardinals. Resulting in such absurd sights as a Mongol Pope.
• The Ruler Designer DLC offers players a pool of designer points with which to buy Traits, base Skill Points, Age, and Health/Hit Points (which determine lifespan and general vulnerability to disease). When it first came out most players naturally favoured a young ruler with a combination of good congenital traits (attractive, strong, massive geniuses) and a decent reserve of health, putting their remaining designer points into base stats. However, a handful of players - as a joke - took every imaginable negative trait (inbred, insane, incapable psychotics) and the maximum possible age (90 years young) to gain more designer points and dumped everything they had into Health Points. The result? Drooling vegetables who were functionally immortal, universally beloved due to their massive +75 'long reign' bonus, had no problems with rebellion, conquered the entire known world with the 'gavelkind' succession system, and were still going strong after half a millenia of 'rule' and showed no sign of dying anytime soon. Yes, the Ruler Designer allowed players to create their own God-Emperor Of Mankind.
  • Made even more hilarious by the fact that one of the events for improving the martial skill is pretty much your ruler kicking down the door of a hut and playing Warhammer Fantasy Battle with the serial numbers filed off with a bunch of teenage nerds.
• Abusing excommunication for fun and profit. A player discovered he could farm gold by using his 17-year-old daughter to matrilineally marry rich old men (to bring them to his court), and then use his vassal patriarch to excommunicate them so he could imprison and execute them without penalty (causing their funds to revert to him as their liege). So absurdly brokenly villainous it probably wraps around the line half a dozen times. Then somebody made the picture up top in response and sent the whole forum into stitches.
• Low Piety can cause a random event where your vassals and courtiers begin to consider you un-Christian. Even if you're all Muslims.
• If the Mongol Empire refuses to ally with you, the tooltip for the refusal may include the comment "Too busy conquering the world and you're next"◊.
• The new education system in Conclave will often have AI Christian and Muslim rulers educate their children with randomly generated Jewish courtiers (or sometimes even stranger things such as pagan mercenary captains), causing hilarious chaos when their now-Jewish heirs inherit. Oy vey... (This could technically happen pre-Conclave, but the new Heritage and Faith education foci make it much more common.)
• With the release of The Reaper's Due, court physicians will often prescribe nonsensical treatments for symptoms and illnesses. What makes this especially funny is how some of these treatments actually work in spite of their often ridiculous nature. This can lead to some absurd moments, such as castration being an effective treatment for smallpox or ritual suicide of the physician curing cancer.
  • Effectively any time your Court Physician resorts to casual magic in an attempt to heal you. Including but not limited to having you burn a parchment with the names of your enemies on it in an attempt to transfer the illness or rubbing you down with a hand stolen from the local cemetery. Doubly funny if it actually works.
• The system that generates patronymics in many cultures can produce some strange results when cultures intermarry, such as Mael-Sechnaillez (Irish father, Basque daughter). It gets even weirder with characters like the Pope whose name changes upon coronation: the patronymic will be calculated based on their regnal name instead of their birth name. Another player reported having a character father a Spanish king and then be elected Pope, which led to the king's successor being King Honorius I after the Pope's regnal name.
• When you plot to assassinate somebody, one of the ways to carry out the assassination is to use exploding manure.
• Holy Fury added an Easter Egg to let players play as animal cultures, letting you make entire kingdoms and empires of cats, horses, dogs or hedgehogs.
• Alongside ransom, torture, execution, and banishment, one of the punishments you can use on prisoners is...bad poetry for a full hour. Available only if your character has the Poet trait (meaning they are a good poet, and the poems being read are purposefully bad), it has a small chance of driving the victim insane. To make it even better, some of the versions have it be that your character has a priest read extremely raunchy poems, which results in everyone present being extremely uncomfortable. They are released afterwards, meaning that reading them bad poetry is considered on par with torture.
• Some of the nicknames added for those who lose the tribal festivals in Holy Fury are hilarious. One highlight for people who lose the beauty contest is "The Flat Chested"
• One of the possible ways to gain a nickname as a Viking warrior is on the battlefield when you corner an enemy soldier, a surprisingly young one trying to hide, who asks who you are. Among "The Great Bear", "The Wall of [insert kingdom]", and "The Snow-Warrior" is this gem.
  You: I am doing you a kindness, believe me.
  Also you: *stab*
  Game: You will be known as "The Kind-Hearted"
• The secret bears event, even if you aren't familiar with the original joke or its fallout it's just genuinely funny. After a banquet following one of your courtiers goes to retire for the evening only for their cloths to snag on the edge of the table. Before anyone can intervene they tear clean off revealing that this particular courtier is not actually a human but instead is and presumably always has been... a bear that somehow ended up in a courtiers outfit while completely avoiding notice.

Meta:

• Patch Notes: What They Actually Mean is a series of Reddit posts that re-interpret the official notes. For example:
  • 2.5: The Mongol Great Khan should no longer become a paragon of peace and harmony whose mild and tranquil nature is remembered for generations.
  • 2.6: The new epidemic map mode allows you to track how screwed the world is, and which places in particular the Powers That Be are angry with at any given time.
  • 2.7.1 LIVE: Five years later, we’re still trying to figure out how to not bork up the game when you quit to the main menu and load a new file without exiting the application.
• After Sunset Invasion some forumgoerers grumbled that maybe the next DLC should have undead vikings if they're going totally ahistorical. Then in the Old Gods DLC, the message for obtaining the "Viking" trait mentions rumors of <charname> and their armies of undead raiders.
• Victory against impossible odds...or not.
• Paradox Interactive has caught on to players' favourite pastime of killing Karlings with this t-shirt.
• During a QA session, one of the devs revealed that one of the reasons late-game saves tended to run so slowly was because all Greek characters tended to run a "Can I Castrate?" check on each and every other Greek character in the world. The game was literally slowed down by Greeks constantly debating genital mutilation.
• Game portraits from CK2 have begun replacing historical images of rulers in search results on some search engines.
• In general, the game's tendency toward Black Comedy infects most of its media, even the wiki, which suggests one way to disqualify a son as an heir is to make them a priest by nominating them as a successor to an "accident-prone" bishop.
• In the Dev Diary talking about the expanded Reformation mechanics in Holy Fury, they share some of the dev teams favourite choices. One of them chooses Bloodthirsty Gods, which allows for Human Sacrifice, Haruspicy, which allows for reading the entrails of sacrificed animals to attempt to predict the future, and combines with the previous to allow them to use sacrificed humans to do so... and Peaceful.^note By Holy Fury's release, Bloodthirsty Gods was made mutually exclusive with Peaceful.
• In one of the Dev Diaries talking about the changes being made to Holy Orders in the free patch for Holy Fury, they mention that they are putting limits in on vassalizing Holy Orders, so they don't have people changing religions in an attempt to vassalize all the orders.
  This is Crusader Kings, after all, not Pokémon.
  • At the end of the same dev diary, talking about what will be in the next diary:
  Let me take a look at my notes here… "Shepherds, zealous kids and Venetians burning down Byzantium"? Surely that’ll be exciting news!
• One of the things you can do as a member of a secret cult is attempt to secretly convert someone into your religion. You do this by leaving your holy book in their room, open to a passage relevant to the target's interests. However, this remains the same if your religion and the target's religion share the same holy book. Meaning that your target can convert, say, from Catholicism to Catharism, by reading the Bible. Without even being instructed about Catharism.

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