While Crusader Kings 3 typically deals in the fantasy of sitting on a big chair in one place and shouting at underlings, roaming its world as a the unlanded leader of a band of travelling adventurers is just as fun and arguably the best way to kick off a custom dynasty. Up to now, the freedom to pursue the life of a ruthless mercenary, valiant knight, or stuffy bureaucrat surviving off of favours for rulers while searching for the ideal title or throne to claim as their own once they're ready has been locked behind 2024's Roads to Power expansion. Thankfully, Paradox plan to whisk it out from behind that curtain and make it a free part of the base game later this year.

"When we first designed landless adventurers, we envisioned them as a transition state, something you'd hop into for a bit and then hop back out of," CK3 game director Alexander Oltner wrote in Paradox's latest dev diary. "A deposed ruler licking their wounds, a dynasty member off making their name before claiming a title, a brief interlude between two different, landed lives. We included them as a tertiary feature in Roads to Power with exactly that in mind.

"Well, we underestimated how powerful the player fantasy of working your way up from nothing ultimately was. The Adventurer playstyle has resonated with players far beyond what we expected, and we've been very pleasantly surprised by it: a custom 867-start Landless Adventurer is now the single most popular campaign starting point, by a significant margin."

So, alongside the release of the merchant-focused Silk and Silver expansion in the final months of this year, the landless adventurer life will become a free part of the base game. That means anyone who owns a copy of CK3 can take to the roads and lead a party of followers from kingdom to duchy doing odd jobs for nobles, gradually expanding both their influence and camp. It's the way I opted to start off a fairly lengthy playthrough late last year, wandering England and continental Europe as a rogueish brigand called Osræd before noticing that the petty kingdom of Northumbria was weak and successfully scheming to replace its ruler. Quickly swearing fealty to the Scottish king in order to avoid being immediately stomped on by his huge army, within a few generations my dynasty's blood was on the Scottish throne and I was deep in the more traditional Crusader Kings experience of trying to expand a fiefdom while fending off usurpers. There's some extra immersion to be had in not simply parachuting your character onto a throne from the get-go, instead forging a unique path to power you can trace back to a commoner with an ambitious dream and the ruthless skill to make it a reality.

While Oltner noted that "some of the more specialised purposes and contracts" tied to landless adventurers might stay locked behind Roads to Power, he asserted that this is a move made with the idea of making it easier to build on the landless adventurer experience going forwards. "Today, anything we build for them has to be thematically tied to Roads to Power," he explained. "Once they live in the base game, that constraint goes away, and we allow ourselves to dedicate far more time and resources to adventurers as a concept; building more content for it and developing the playstyle on its own terms, wherever our ideas (and yours) take it."

We'll see what the specifics of what stays with Roads of Power look like, but for now this is a move I'm a big fan of. Robin Hood-esque roaming for the masses, regardless of how much they've spent on DLC.