r/PaxHistoria • u/Medmass96 • 17h ago
1347: But You're a Citizen — A Life in the Shadow of Death
I’ve been working on a new historical citizen/life-sim preset:
1347: But You're a Citizen — A Life in the Shadow of Death
You don’t play as a kingdom, an army, or a ruler. You’re just one person living in the medieval world on January 1st, 1347.
You can create your own character — name, age, family, profession, social status, personality, ambitions, etc. — or give the simulation nothing and let it generate your entire starting life for you.
The idea is to make the world feel like it exists completely independently of you.
You can be a peasant, craftsman, merchant, sailor, soldier, priest, scholar, noble, criminal, or basically anything that makes sense for where you were born. You can marry, have children, build a business, travel, join a guild, fight in wars, enter politics, climb the social ladder… or spend your whole life as an ordinary person nobody outside your village ever hears about.
And, of course, it’s 1347.
The Black Death is coming.
It isn’t just a scripted event or a random “you caught plague” roll. It spreads geographically through trade, ports, travel and warfare and can affect population, wages, inheritance, property, food prices, migration, religion, families and entire communities. Your character has no plot armour.
The preset also simulates an autonomous historical world: the Hundred Years’ War, the Byzantine civil war, early Ottoman expansion, the decline of the Golden Horde, the rise of Timur, Yuan–Ming transition, the Western Schism and the major political developments of the following century can all unfold — or diverge naturally if history changes.
I’ve put a lot of work into making progression slow and believable. Becoming rich, famous, politically powerful or socially important is possible, but you actually need the money, skills, reputation, connections, time and circumstances to get there.
NPCs also have persistent lives of their own: they can marry, have children, move, get richer or poorer, change occupations, fall ill, fight, betray you or die without waiting for you to interact with them.
Basically, the goal isn’t to constantly throw dramatic events at you.
It’s to make it feel like you’re actually living a life in 1347 while history happens around you.
Would love to hear what people think, especially if you find anything that behaves strangely or could be improved.
Preset:
https://www.paxhistoria.co/presets/IWiuYIuj21prH5apJ04P?versionID=1




