Thanks to this CK3 mod, I can't stop creating extremely tall rulers with eyepatches
Kings and queens just feel more powerful when they're towering above everyone and glaring through their one good eye.
Crusader Kings 3 hasn't really hooked me yet—I'm still learning to play (re-learning, technically, since I played a bunch of CK2) and I haven't really decided what kind of ruler I want to be, or what part of the world I want to rule in. And despite several trips across the map, I haven't found a current ruler I'm dying to inhabit.
But there's a custom ruler designer mod by SarcFa that lets you, for the most part, tailor a new ruler to your liking. It sets you up as the heir to any current ruler and conveniently kills them off when you're done picking from a massive list of traits and attributes. You can pick your custom ruler's culture, assign points to their skills, and select a number of health attributes (both good and bad). You don't get to see what your ruler looks like until you're done, but that's part of the fun.
While I was nosing through the traits of my custom ruler, I found a negative health option where my character would be missing an eye, thus giving them an eyepatch. I also saw you could choose 'Giant' which is another negative health attribute—gigantism in humans comes with a whole host of related health issues. On the plus side, in Crusader Kings 3, it makes your character much taller than everyone else.
Lo and behold, when I completed my character they looked absolutely imposing, towering over their spouses and wearing a badass eyepatch. And I do mean towering. In that image above, my queen isn't standing next to a couple of kids—those are full-grown men. I still haven't started playing an actual game with any of my extremely tall, one-eyed rulers, I just keep on creating more of them to see how they turn out.
Nicely, when you save and exit to the main menu, CK3 gives you a family portrait to gaze upon, so after I create my ruler and quickly marry them (so there's a spouse and maybe a child in the portrait for scale) I save and quit, take a picture, then dive back in and start creating another tall, one-eyed ruler.
Here's a few I've made so far. I love all of them equally.
You can find SarcFa's Custom Ruler Designer mod here, as well as in the Steam Workshop. Make sure you read the instructions fully—as I said, you're killing off or disinheriting an entire bloodline in order to replace them with your custom ruler.
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For more, here are the best Crusader Kings 3 mods. And if you're interested in modifying your game in more extreme ways, we've got a list of Crusader Kings 3 cheats and console commands here.
Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.