Blood Broads & Bastards
Contents
Overview
Blood Broads and Bastards (generally abbreviated to BBB) is a modification for Medieval II: Total War that aims to provide an experience that includes more elements of role-playing through the use of game mechanics such as titles, traits and religion.
Features
Many of the changes that are present in the modification are implemented through use of the traits and titles system. Each province has a title associated with it that grant certain effects to the character that holds it. Similarly, a system is introduced of tracking 'royal blood' and lineages of royal houses through a complex series of traits.
Many other historical titles and roles are present in the game, such as Privy Council offices, Grandmasters for the knightly orders and the Orthodox Patriarch. Rebellions are also a possibility, depending on the certain traits that your family members and generals possess, and nobles may turn on the player, refuse to move or rebel (taking cities with them) if they become too disloyal.
Princesses are given a major overhaul, with the aim of making them less generic characters and more dynamic. They are also now affected by the genes of their mothers as well as fathers. They are also now subject to a new 'education system' whereby they may receive several types of education which affects the sort of character they will become.
In addition, the modification also fixes many bugs with traits and ancillaries that were present in the vanilla version of Medieval 2: Total War.
Team
History
Dearmad was disappointed that in vanilla M2TW there where no Lordships or Dukedoms to be contested and that the traits package was severely limited and contained many errors. So he set about correcting these faults in what would become the most popular mini-mod for M2TW to date. In the first version of the as yet untitled mod contained fixed vanilla traits, a few new ones of Dearmad's devising and titles for all the vanilla map provinces, however these titles were only Duke of etc, there where no Muslim titles to be seen.
The mod grew in popularity and the 1.1 build contained the long sought after Islamic titles (eg Emir of Aleppo rather than Duke of Aleppo) and again some new traits for us all to enjoy. All this brought it to the attention of Pnutmaster who, with some clever 'vnvs' coding gave the community its first glimpse at his bloodline traits, which only traveled through the male line and had the rather plain name of "Of Royal Blood" However the community ate it up and where in raptures when 1.2 and quickly 1.3 where released with interesting and varied Princesses, no more 1 charm wonders floating about, now there where hot 9 charm babes on the European scene and the new traits continued to be added much to the delight of everyone involved.
BBB became the first choice base traits package for major mods such as Deus lo Vult and The Long Road. Finally the mod, previously under a heavily long name basically listing the major changes a new and exciting name was coined, Blood Broads And Bastards, Blood for the royal blood traits, Broads for the exciting princesses, and Bastards for the new infidelity traits (if your generals dad plays the field, expect a few to crop up. Some now feel that the mod has grown outside of its new name, adding simulated rebellions and disease traits to the game, along with, for version 2.0, vanquisher traits for destroying enemy factions.