Crusader Kings III has always had poetry—some romance paths would even adjust the quality depending on the skill of your pursuer—but the game is about to go all in on it, adding it as a character trait and even creating a generator that will write your ruler’s musings for you.
The game’s upcoming 1.3 patch is adding a few new features, like a more brutal and impactful winter (at least in certain regions), but this poetry stuff has really captured my heart. If you get the “poet” trait as a ruler, you’ll be able to create your own literary masterpieces, choosing a theme (romance, legacy, strife, etc) before having info fed into a poetry machine:
Once we know the theme and subject (if any), we can feed that into custom localisation functions that randomise a couplet. At present, we have both intro and outro functions for each theme, as well as title generation, allowing us to generate ditties between two and four lines in length plus title, though I hope to expand on these in future.
The results are pretty good! Here are a few examples Paradox provided:
Poetry won’t just be used for idle pursuits, either. Sometimes it can be used in...darker circumstances.
The update should be coming soon.