Interview with The Way of Kings Crusader Kings 3 mod creator Tobbzn
In my ongoing series of interviews with mod creators for Crusader Kings 3 I tracked down the creator of The Way of Kings mod, Tobbzn, on his Discord and asked him some questions about the mod and the modding process!
The Way of Kings mod is a total conversion mod that turns Crusader Kings 3 into the world of The Stormlight Archive series of books by Brandon Sanderson.
The universe of the Stormlight Archive series is filled with fantasy elements such as magic, crab people and a storm that slowly decimates the land as is crosses over head.
Tobbzn has packed all of these items into a massive insanely detailed mod that really is unlike any other mod out there.
It has a Darkest Dungeon style Dungeon Delve system.
It has Tetris.
This mod has everything anyone could want from a full conversion mod for CK3, and I was very curious about it and how it was made especially since it is coming from essentially a one-person mod team.
In this day and age, it seems like every mod, game, or even office software has a Discord. How is Discord working out for you/your mod team? Were you on Slack before Discord?
We gradually transitioned to discord over time as the scale of the project grew, and we discovered that the majority of the modding community lived on discord.
I keep my slacks for my day job, as — despite the name — it actually has less casual engagement than discord does. It would serve better as a team-restricted comms server than as an outreach and development hub for the entire project, so if I’d gone for the slack solution, I’d need a separate subreddit or website to manage the community side of things, and I’m already managing far too many of those.
It seems like your team is quite small. How do you find time to make all of the massive changes to Crusader Kings 3?
I’m a PhD student that isn’t being micromanaged by their supervisor, which allows me to make all kinds of bad decisions regarding time management — especially during the COVID home office era. The thousands of hours that I’ve spent modding *should* really have been spent on my thesis, but alas, this won’t really dawn on me until I run out of funding without enough research results to graduate.
In the same vein, how did you get into modding?
It started out with just my friend and I sending files back and forth over Steam to see whether we could make a simple cheat mod for Renown and Lifestyle XP. Then we discovered the map editor, so we set up a shared Dropbox to experiment with it. Once we got team members who lived on other continents and worked in other time zones, we found we needed a better way to prevent clashes and to ensure communication went smoothly, so we transitioned to Discord and GitLab. That has worked very well for what we’ve needed — though we don’t really use Git to its fullest potential, Discord has served as an excellent way to collect feedback and engage with both other modders and our own community.
How does someone get into modding in general?
The details are different for every game, but the motivations are often similar. “Oh, I love most of the game, but I wish this particular thing was slightly different” is probably the easiest justification to get into it. Maybe there’s a small UX issue that’s frustrating you, like a lack of sorting options in a list view. Maybe there’s an immersion-breaking inaccuracy you’d like to correct. Maybe you’re obsessive about a particular fantasy franchise and really wish someone would remake the game you’re playing but contextualized with that franchise. When you feel like the game you’d rather be playing is *just* out of reach, but it’s *mostly* there already, then that game might be rewarding for you to mod.
In practice, you should then look into whether there is a modding community or even official mod support for your game. Paradox games have a healthy dose of both, but there are plenty of games have only one or the other and are still moddable with the right mindset, thanks to modern genericized tools such as CheatEngine, dnSpy, and the ability to edit Unity-based C#-assemblies.
For CK3 specifically, you can watch some tutorials on YouTube or just hop on the CK3 Modding Co-op Discord and ask questions. We’re a very helpful community and would love to point you in the right direction.
Do you accept new people into your team?
I do, though in practice almost everyone who I’ve accepted to the team has disappeared without a trace within a month. I suspect they expected to be modding at an expert level from the get-go and feel demotivated when they don’t understand the pinnacle of jank that goes into some of the files for my more esoteric features. Your first modding task shouldn’t be making Darkest Dungeon inside CK3, it should be a simpler instructive exercise such as making an event or a decision.
You know, something that the devs actually *intended* to support, rather than abusing the scripting language into behaving like a minigame compiler.
If you’re curious about modding, there are a ton of guides, Wikis, and tools out there, and I’d be more than happy to hold your hand through the learning process. However, in practice, it seems that few of the people who wanted to join the team were willing to actually ask questions when they got stuck. It’s a bit sad, because there are a lot of rather simple tasks that I’d love to offload onto someone, which would let me focus on the more difficult and abstract features.
I noticed some of your mod team works on other mods as well, how do they manage their time between the mods?
Most of the people with roles on my Discord aren’t active team members, but rather people I’ve exchanged modding favors with in the past. I might write a feature as a module that can slot into another total conversion (such as the consensual marriage system, which I’m shipping off to Lord of the Rings: Realms in Exile), and in exchange for my assistance in implementing that feature, I get some map work done by another mod’s mappers. That way we get to benefit from each other’s expertise, rather than each team needing a dedicated expert on every single aspect that goes into a total conversion.
Is there competition between the different CK3 mods? Are there any mods you want to trash talk (I am kidding! Unless…)?
There’s *typically* not much competition. But if there was, I’d win.
I’m not sure whether that counts as trash talking, as I think you’d have a hard time finding any modder on the CK3 Modding Co-op who’d disagree with that statement, given my reputation.
I *could* throw some shade by pointing out that my mod came out after 80 days and has received one patch every 5 days since then, while there are some other long-awaited mods with twenty times the team size that still aren’t out yet. *But*, considering that I also am a volunteer contributor for some of those long-awaited projects, that seems like it could backfire.
What is your process for working on the mod? Do you use traditional programming tools like Git, or do you just wing it?
I typically have 3 Visual Studio Code editors open — one for my repo, one for vanilla, and one for the log folder. I use syntax highlighting plugins and I have a python script running in my log folder which filters irrelevant errors out of the error log, as when you’re making a total conversion, you find that a lot of the errors that Paradox logs are actually irrelevant or inapplicable for you. However, error.log is still the single most important tool in your repertoire as a modder, as you *will* eventually make mistakes.
I do use git, but I’m aware that there are features in git that I’m not taking full advantage of. If I had full-fledged team to work with, I would definitely push to use more of those features, but so long as it’s mostly just me working on the repo directly, I make do with a smaller feature subset. One day I might actually set up my feature modules as git-submodules, but that day is not today.
I have a few Trellos I use for tracking tasks, both for myself and for dev requests for the sake of expanding CK3’s mod support, but recently my activity on those has gone down as it doesn’t seem like anyone but me is actually reading the Trellos anyway.
Do you get paid for working on the mod?
Not really. I do have a personal Patreon but it currently has 0 patrons and isn’t directly tied to the mod anyway. Maybe the lack of patrons is tied to how the Patreon page reminds you to be wary of making bad investments and threatens to rename the Stupid Difficulty setting after the top backer.
It’s a bit amusing — we used to be asked about Patreon about once a week back when there was none, but nobody’s brought up the topic on the server since I actually made one.
Are you worried about getting sued by the copyright holders of Brandon Sanderson’s novels?
Not at all — I’ve talked to Brandon via email, and he’s been extremely nice to me. So long as I don’t monetize the mod, there’s no threat to his trademark. That said, it’s not like the mod is officially licensed or anything like that — if he were to sell the actual license to someone, then they’d be fully within their rights to send me a Cease & Desist.
Is there anything Paradox could do better to help the modding community?
Implementing any/all of the tickets listed on their CK3 Modding Feature Request Trello would go a long way. That’s where we put vetted modding requests from the modding community, in the hopes that the devs can get around to it sometime.
The one thing I’m particularly fixated on is fixing the win_combat effect, which would allow me to supplant the warfare system with alternatives, such as the Monkey Island-esque insult battle mechanic which I actually finished implementing for the Reshi Islanders, only to discover in the end that win_combat doesn’t actually do anything.
What is the best thing about being a modder?
Seeing your desires realized, being driven and motivated, and hearing the lamentations of the game developers as you decide to add your own “string manipulation support” based on the definition of a string as being a “List of characters” without being too specific about what “Character” actually means, or casually make a compiler for the “Brainfuck” esoteric programming language inside of CK3’s scripting system. Or run DOOM.
[Tobbzn actually got Doom to run inside CK3 at one point — LH]
What is the worst thing about being a modder?
How addictive it is. By which I mean how damaging it is to my career as a researcher that modding takes up practically all of my waking time.
What made you take such a massive undertaking? Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of the Kings universe is huge!
In terms of cause-and-effect, I was already a huge Brandon Sanderson fan, and I noticed that during one of the pre-release dev streams one of the CK3 artists being interviewed had the Way of Kings showing in the bookshelf behind them. That made me lament how there aren’t really any full-blown games set to this franchise yet and think of how interesting it would be to play a CK3-like geopolitical game set in this franchise. I couldn’t get the idea out of my head even as I got 150 hours played in the first two weeks after vanilla CK3’s release.
Also, at the time I got started, I hadn’t really internalized how massive the undertaking would be. I’d been in a rut for a while, and I initially just wanted to see if I could get started. Then I wanted to see if I could take the next step. Then the next step. Then the next step. Always the next step. And with each step, I could immediately see the fruits of my labor, which felt highly rewarding. Five thousand steps later, this is where we are, and the journey continues on.
Why did you pick CK3 as the game you wanted to adapt The Way of Kings into? Were there any other games out there that you thought about using as a platform instead of CK3?
There’s also Mount & Shardblade for Bannerlord, but that mod is currently on hiatus due to the volatility of the modding support for that game. We’ve shared some assets, but if Bannerlord had managed to settle on how they wanted to support mods, I’d likely have gone down that route instead.
Ultimately, though, I feel like CK3’s mix of narrative and structural world building is a great fit for the Way of Kings, especially as a mod, as the bite-sized systems and flavor events can have emergent effects that immerse you in a way that a more specialized game would need a much larger team to achieve.
What do you think of the Royal Court DLC?
Simultaneously impressive and disappointing, though not for the reasons you’ll find in the Steam Reviews. It’s impressive because I’ve seen the sheer *amount* of content they’ve pushed with this DLC, and it’s honestly quite absurd. The Royal Court 3D environment also opens up a bunch of opportunities by reducing the barrier to entry for modders who want to make their own 3D effects, which is very welcome, and the new Artifact System supplants the Way of Kings Artifact Module I wrote with something that in theory is far more powerful. Overall, the actual content they delivered is super impressive. However, there are a number of technical limitations that are annoying me in ways I hoped to avoid.
The data it uses for 3D rendering is automatically cached when the royal court window is opened, so there’s no good way to pass game state or UI data to make the scene respond in a truly interactive way. I hoped to be able to walk around the court room based on where I click, but that’s exceedingly difficult to achieve, and I may have to resort to long-term incredible janks to make a system like that work.
And the new artifact system is incredibly verbose. In the deprecated Way of Kings Artifact module, you just needed to list the artifact in the list of artifacts that exist, repeat it in any slot or type list you want it to be classified under, add an icon, a modifier, and two pieces of localization. With practice, you could do all of that in less than a minute. Now, there’s a huge flowchart that you have to account for, which means that even a practiced modder will spend a lot longer getting their artifact idea into the game, and there’s more stuff that can go wrong.
What are the biggest challenges of converting The Way of Kings to CK3?
For most people, it would likely be the magic systems — as the magic in the books is very system-driven — but for me, it’s actually just the visual map itself. I’ve spent so much time trying, yet I still can’t seem to make mountain ranges look the way I want them to, which has resulted in the Way of Kings mod being *technically* impressive but possibly the ugliest map among all the popular Total Conversions on the workshop. Recently I’ve been having more success trading modding favors in exchange for mapping help, however, so hopefully I can get a reasonable map sometime soon.
Does Brandon Sanderson know of the mod?
He does since I asked him for permission. Though he said he’s more of a Stellaris guy, so I don’t know whether he’s played it, and I don’t know whether he’s been keeping up with how it’s developed, as I haven’t pestered him more since our initial email exchange.
Even with the huge amount of lore available, was there any lore you had to make up?
Oh, absolutely. There are plenty of locations that aren’t ever shown “on-screen” in the books or are only described with a few throwaway lines, and we don’t really know what’s going on there. In those situations, we need to fill in the blanks with something. Most of the point-of-view characters are also not landed rulers, so their personal lore would not make too much sense to focus on for a game like CK3.
We also made the decision early on that we were not going to follow the *plot* of the books. While we should set it up so that the plot of the books *could* happen, our focus should be on making sure we get a proper game of CK3 happening in the setting. After all, CK3 is a generational game and as of the time of writing the books’ main plot cover like a decade of time. If we followed the books, you’d have a ton of content for the first decade of your first character and then nothing special would happen afterwards. I’d rather have a system in place where you as a player could advance the “plot” in the direction of your choosing without having to worry about the time constraint of doing it on the books’ schedule.
For every major event from the books that *is* portrayed, we also have an option for it to go off the rails. Maybe a war that’s ongoing at the start of the first book has a different outcome — and what happens then?
There are a ton of new mechanics in this mod compared to vanilla CK3. Since getting in to each one would be crazy, what are the top three new players need to know about?
The Radiant magic system, which basically weaponizes therapy after a stress break, the consensual marriage system, that requires you to arrange courtships rather than marriages and there’s always a chance to fail if the characters straight up don’t like each other, and the Dungeon Delving system — just because it’s a really cool mini-game.
What are your long-term goals for the mod?
I want to flesh out more of the areas that aren’t covered in detail in the books. I want to add a way for your brutal warlord to personally pick up their magical sword and go murderhobo on your rival, honor and plausible deniability be damned. I want to add cultural food systems alongside favorite foods and the ingestiture magic system where how well you eat literally feeds your powers.
Oh, and I really want to make it so that you can cut a rope to drop the chandeliers in the court room on top of annoying petitioners. Not because that happens in the books or anything, but because I’ve played enough D&D for my first instinct when I see a chandelier to be “I’m gonna drop that on top of someone”.
What are the differences between the different mod starts?
Depending on the bookmarks, the selection of characters are differentiated in different ways. On the Alethkar bookmark, most characters are Highprince Government Humans, except for Eshonai who’s not only Tribal, but a completely different species. But even among the human characters, each represents a wildly different approach to how they should resolve the conflict. Sadeas is a schemer, Dalinar is a practically a walking weapon of mass destruction, and Sebarial is a war profiteer who’s perfectly happy to let the war drag on while he fuels the war economy.
Other bookmarks highlight completely different ways to play — the boy who accidentally ended up in charge of the Azish Bureaucracy has very different options available to him than the Eldric Kingdom of Babatharnam, a gerontocracy — rule by the elders — where the Most Ancient rules with an iron fist, making sure none of his rival houses have candidates old enough to challenge his house’s claim on succession. And neither plays like the Thaylen merchant monarchy, where the electors decide based on martial and economic strength.
I am a very slow player so when I play multiplayer, I appreciate that Tetris and Wokle is in the game but why did you add those features?
Honestly? I was bored and I wanted to see whether I could do it. Wokle also inspired the admins of the official fandom site to make this , which was a fun side effect.
Incidentally, writing these sub-modules was incredibly instructive and I learned a ton about how to optimize list builder logic. I tried remaking these features in python, and I discovered I am way worse at python than CK3’s script and GUI languages…
There are so many changes to the vanilla version of Crusader Kings 3, that I am wondering if there is a tutorial for The Way of Kings mod?
Alas, there isn’t one really. But you can get a feature overview on our Wiki and a lore primer from Invicta.
I am playing the Kingdom of Rire, why are my people gold?
The Iriali (And the Rirans count as ethnically Iriali) are described in the books as having a slight metallic or bronze tint to their skin. To model that, I simply applied a decal gene which increases the metallicity of the skin texture — and since they were naturally somewhat tan already, that comes across as somewhat golden.
There are plenty of crackpot theories as to *why* they’ve ended up like this over the generations, but officially there’s no canonically confirmed explanation yet.
What is the deal with the naked turtle people?
The Reshi Islanders who live on the backs of the Tai-Na have a somewhat odd society, where they interpret the will of the island-turtles. For example, they don’t wage war through violence, but with boasts and insult battles, and only when there’s a drive-by by another Tai-Na. If I could, I would render the turtles as mobile provinces and replace the entire warfare system with insult battles, but this isn’t supported by the game.
Paradox, please fix the win_combat and lose_combat effects, they currently do nothing :(
What is the one thing I should know about the crab people?
They’re the original inhabitants of Roshar; the humans are an invasive species that almost drove them to extinction and has enslaved most of their population by literally destroying their minds through magical means. The ones who have kept their minds are not happy about it.
What are special about Dawncities?
In the books, the Dawncities are the ancient capital cities of the ten Silver Kingdoms, i.e., de jure Empires. Each Dawncity has an Oathgate, which allows you to teleport to any of the other Dawncities, but this can only be leveraged by a high-level Radiant by using investiture to teleport the armies they lead. Willshapers and Elsecallers, who have access to the surge of Transportation, are able to teleport their armies between Dawncities for free or may spend investiture to teleport to a Dawncity from anywhere.
This is the only way to deploy an army to Urithiru without owning it first, though the AI ruler of Urithiru is also more likely to accept vassalage from a Bondsmith who already lives in a different Dawncity.
In the last Era, there’s an Innovation that allows you to found your own Dawncities, which means you get to construct your own Oathgates, enabling you to rapidly deploy troops from one area to another without having to disband and re-raise your troops.
I know there is a sort of Darkest Dungeon style dungeon exploration, but I haven’t seen it yet. How do I do that?
Depending on your Game Rules, you may need to own the Tower of Urithiru to be able to declare a Dungeon Delve. In the decision widget you can choose your team loadout, and then you will be able to choose how much supplies and investiture to bring into the tunnels. Make sure to bring enough — you definitely don’t want to run out and starve in the darkness!
Investitures are still confusing me. What is the main importance?
Investiture is the generic term for the magic currency. You use it to pay for magical effects, such as Surgebinding, fueling magical artifacts such as Soulcasters, or magical attacks in the Dungeon Delve or Disadvantaged Duels.
A generic person doesn’t have much explicit use for investiture, but almost every magic system requires some to use, be it to heal wounds, restore army supplies, speed up building construction, or simply inflicting stress on your rival.
Besides the books, where is the best place to find out about the lore?
Coppermind has a ton of information, both on the books themselves and their context within the greater Cosmere franchise.
Lastly, I noticed it had recently been 500 days since the mod was first released. How do you keep going?
Life before death.
Strength before weakness.
Journey before destination.
Oh, and a bunch of spite, ADHD medication, and procrastination of the stuff I really should be doing instead…
Thanks to Tobbzn for his time in his busy schedule of testing the limits of the Crusader Kings 3 modding system!
If you want to check out the mod, you can find it on the Stream Workshop.
The Way of Kings mod has a Discord, of course, and they also have Twitter!
If you want to talk to me you can join my Discord, follow me on Twitter, or watch me on Twitch!
