A Crusader Kings 3 fan's girlfriend found his old saves named "Kill the Pope" and "Before Incest" – and she had questions

A save folder is more honest than browser history. It doesn't know how to make excuses and has never heard the word "context," so the moment someone peeks at the file list, it turns out your evenings went into planning a pontiff's assassination and running a personal breeding program for your dynasty.

That's exactly the situation one Crusader Kings 3 player found himself in when his girlfriend stumbled across his old saves and, quite reasonably, wanted a few things clarified. At minimum, these two file names probably caught her eye:

• Killing The Pope Emperor Cody (the pope assassination save)

• Emperor Cody Pre Incest Main (the "before incest" save)

The community, though, latched onto something else entirely. The mere presence of manual saves in a Paradox strategy game, where Ironman mode with a single autosave is treated as the norm and a requirement for achievements, sparked far more debate than wiping out the clergy. One commenter asked directly:

"you're a save scummer?"

The reply was disarming: there was too much at stake with the pope assassination. And honestly, that's a fair read of the mechanic. The pope in Crusader Kings 3 hands out claims on other rulers' land to Catholic monarchs, excommunicates people over unwanted marriages and divorces, and can call a crusade against your heir if relations sour enough, so a botched assassination plot can undo three generations of work in one stroke. History doesn't have to invent much here either – Pope John VIII was poisoned and then finished off in 882, and Pope Benedict VI was simply strangled at Castel Sant'Angelo in 974.

A separate thread veered into cannibalism, since ritually eating prisoners is available through a specific faith doctrine in the game, and the pope counts as a perfectly legitimate dish. Someone pointed out that the little popes should really be released to let them grow up a bit, which somehow steered the conversation into actual fisheries biology and size-based selection. The joke's logic holds up: if you only ever catch the big ones for centuries, the population shrinks over time.

The "before incest" save has an equally mundane explanation. The Divine Marriage doctrine allows weddings between brothers and sisters, unlocking a favorite pastime among series veterans – breeding a bloodline for inheritable traits like Genius and Beauty, with the risk of rolling the Inbred trait working against you the whole way. A careful player sets a checkpoint right before the family tree starts looking like a tumbleweed.