Character Biographies – UPDATED – works with patch 1.7.0

Simply put, this mod adds in biographies for the characters in the game (the ones that are not randomly generated generics). You can now truly learn about the history and folk lore/legends of the Three Kingdoms as you play the game in an organic manner. Just picked up Zhao Yun from the recruitment pool? Want to know what’s the big deal about him was? Now you can, in-game. This applies to hundreds of characters, unique or non randomly-generated generics

Currently covers ~70% of historical characters in the game

This mod adds biographies to a lot of the famous characters from historical records and Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel, briefly summarizing their life, accomplishments and legends. Now when you pick up a legendary unique hero, you may be able to read up a little bit about their lives and personalities right inside the game. The biographies can be accessed by hovering over the new "book" icon right below the character’s name and title as seen in the images

Please consider this a beta version as not all the "historical" characters as laid out in Far East Movement have a bio yet. However, pretty much all the important and famous heroes are covered as well as a lot of the lesser-known ones, although their biographies are noticeably shorter in comparisons.

This mod also supports some of the new characters added in Wu Kingdaissance and MTU, but not all of them. These additional biographies will be added on a per update basis

This mod REQUIRES The Gathering: Character to be installed to work properly. Also, please try to put this at the top of your load order if possible, above the Gathering mod

Q: Which mod adds those characters from the screenshots? (Guan Yinping, Lady Trieu, Ma Yunlu, Wang Shuang, etc.)?
A: Wu Kingdaissance, an overhaul mod that adds about 200+ new unique legendary heroes and over 300+ new abilities.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1843445119&searchtext=

Q: What’s with the skill tree?
A: That’s my other mod which expands on the character skill trees with hundreds of new abilities. If you want to give it a try, go to this link here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1901409545

Q: Can you make a Chinese/Korean/*insert language here beside English* version
A: No, please feels free to make your own version of this mod in your preferred language if you want. No need to ask for permission or anything.

Q: Any possible conflict?
A: Possibly, there are a lot of mods out there so maybe there will be a conflict. I think at most, you’ll just get a unique general w/o a biography because they’re not implemented yet, otherwise this mod and Far East movement don’t really interfere much with the others.

Q: Compatible with Wu Kingdaissance or MTU?
A: Kind of. Characters who were former generics given a new unique face by those mods will work out the box (like with Cai Yan for example). However, completely new characters added by Wu or MTU (like Zhu Teng and Zhu Bing) might not have a bio or have the wrong bio assigned to them. This is still a Work in Progress so eventually those characters will be taken care of but just beware that it can happens.

Q: How come *insert generic character here* doesn’t have a biography?
A: There are 2 types of characters in this game.

One is a preset character that CA specifically made that will spawn in the campaign with a set trait, name, class, face and skill tree no matter what. These can be the unique legendary characters or generics. For example, the infamous "Ji Ben" is one of said generic who is not special in his own right (no unique title or skills) but he will always spawn in the game as "Ji Ben" with a specific generic title and generic skill tree

The second type is the randomly generated generics. These are not set by CA to spawn but appear based on the game’s randomized algorithm. These generics have randomized names/faces/equipments/skill trees/titles and class, therefore they cannot be given a biography as their mere existence in the game is not guaranteed. The children that you have in the game are often these kinds, with a few notable exceptions such as the Cao’s famous children (Cao Ang, Cao Pi, Cao Zhang, Cao Zhi) and Sun’s children (Sun Ce, Sun Quan and Sun Ren) but if Cao Cao and Sun Jian have any additional children beside those listed, then they will be randomly generated generics.

The mod can only adds in biographies for the characters in the 1st case, who are mostly taken from a list of characters from Three Kingdoms, although some of them are so obscure that there’s likely won’t be a bio for them, ever. Certain wives of minor warlord are the prime examples of this.

Also, completely new mod-added characters might not have a bio assigned to them yet as those are special cases that require a bit more work to have a bio. Characters like Ma Yunlu, who does not exist even as generics in vanilla will require some additional work to make them compatible. On my part, I have added a few of Wu and MTU characters to the mod, but there are many more who are not ready yet.

Q: Can I make a translation of this mod?
A: Sure, but just fyi, I got most of these biographies from copying Wikipedia entries and Koei’s games, so if you’re going to make a Chinese version of this, it’s best if you just find a good source for ROTK bio in your language and copy from that instead of directly translating what I already have

Any other suggestions/criticisms are welcomed. I also welcome any who would like to help me with this as this is a huge undertaking and there are still a lot of missing biographies or biographies that are too short and vague. If you want to help, please let me know and we’ll find a way to collaborate. Thanks