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Blood Mages [Nicelander]

Blood Mages drain Lifeforce from others to extend their own lifespan and cast powerful spells. This power can be used to heal, enhance abilities, absorb traits, and more, at the cost of their own health.

• You love playing a single character
  
• You want your character to live a long time, without being completely immortal
  
• You want your character to gain and level up positive physical traits (intelligent, beautiful, etc) in a way that feels part of the game
  
• You want the AI to have the same abilities as you do
  
• You like mods that don't overwrite any base game files, so are maximum compatible with other mods, even overhaul mods like AGOT / EK2 / PoD / LOTR

The Blood Mage trait features five distinct tracks, each gaining experience as you use related abilities

• Ancient: Gain XP yearly
  
• Enlightenment: Gain XP by casting blood magic on yourself
  
• Bloodline: Gain XP by enhancing your dynasty, or yearly based on dynasty modifiers
  
• Benediction: Gain XP by healing ailments and granting powers to others
  
• Hematurgy: Gain XP by draining Lifeforce and harvesting traits from others

Each track has ten progressive tiers of power. Maxing them all out might take you 100 years, costing tens of thousands of piety, and the benefits reflect that.

Lifeforce is the fundamental resource for Blood Mages, that's primarily gained through draining other characters, such as prisoners or courtiers. Other ways do exist, but you'll have to discover those.

Using magic uses up Lifeforce, and grants a temporary negative Lifeforce modifier.

This means Blood Mages are NOT immortal. They can still be assassinated, killed in combat or by illness.

Managing Lifeforce therfore requires careful balance between health and longevity versus short term power gains.

Both provide increased lifespan, fertility, disease resistance, health and prowess.

• Minor Lifeforce: Smaller bonuses, used for less potent magic
  
• Major Lifeforce: Significant bonuses, required for powerful rituals

Blood Mages can use this Lifeforce to perform various actions:

• Level up a unique Crimson Empowerment trait, for permanent buffs
  
• Get temporary buffs, or buff their dynasty permanently
  
• Improve education trait, or gain new ones
  
• Inscribe their body with runes that passively generate Lifeforce
  
• Heal some wounds and illnesses of varying severity
  
• Make others Blood Mages or convert to The Cult of Blood (religion)
  
• Restore Lifedrained characters
  
• Empower their knights with blood magic
  
• Create Blood Golems, and enhance their traits at the cost of piety
  
• Drain GOOD congenital traits from prisoners (beauty, intelligence, physique, giant, fecund)
  
• Remove their own BAD congenital traits, by draining prisoners (ugly, slow, delicate)
  
• Drain some overhaul traits (currently only Blood of Numenor from LOTR, more WIP)

Blood Mages can follow their own unique faith, The Cult of Quintessence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_(classical_element)

• Holy Sites: Almost 50 locations across Europe
  
• Special Bonuses: A few special ones, but most grant a small bonus to lifespan / health / disease resistance to balance the number of sites
  
• Blood Magic University: Build special duchy buildings to enhance magical study
  
• Christian Syncretism allows Blood Cultists to live their pagan ways without being hated by their Christian neighbours.

Off for AI by default, but can be enabled via game rule or disabled completely. It is disabled for LOTR/EK2/AGOT but works in PoD.

There are various ways to gain the Blood Mage trait

• Select the Blood Mage trait at character creation
  
• Difficult and dangerous decision, if you meet the requirements
  
• Ask a Blood Mage friend/lover/soulmate to grant you the power
  
• Convert from being a witch to a Blood Mage (not AI, so other witches can exist)
  
• Join the Cult and complete the transformation ritual
  
• Consume other Blood Mages you've imprisoned
  
• Small chance the AI is randomly born with it

The mod doesn't overwrite any base game files, so it should be compatible with most other mods. It's save game compatible, so can be added anytime.

Mod has been tested with the following mods on 1.15/1.16: A Game of Thrones (AGOT) / LotR: Realms in Exile / Elder Kings 2 (EK2) / Princes of Darkness (PoD).

Feel free to use all the code for your own work. If you do, then please give me a shoutout :)

• Development plans: https://trello.com/b/1qS7Y4n0/ck3-blood-mage-mod
  
• Github repo: https://github.com/theNicelander/ck3_blood_mage

• Chinese: done by 牛奶大魔王 and this mod . See also See pinned discussion for translation of the mod page. Some missing localizations were translated with pdx-deepl, but most are done by hand
  
• Russian: Done by im-mortal on github [github.com]
  
• French: Done with pdx-deepl for now, but WIP by TesaVonAtti
  
• Spanish/German/Polish/Korean: Machine translation, using pdx-deepl

If you want to help with translations, please let me know! Easiest way is to fork the repo and send me a pull request on github. Or just send me a message and I can add the translation in.

Machine translations done by pdx-deepl tool: https://github.com/kaiser-chris/pdx-deepl

Consider buying me a coffee to support my work 😀

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/TheNicelander