Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord – An Outlaw’s Journey

You can do, or be, a lot of things in TaleWorlds Entertainment’s sandbox RPG Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. One of those things is an outlaw hero who can cause all sorts of mayhem, lead bandit troops into battle and eventually, turn them into hardened warriors. And if you’d like to know more about this particular playstyle, you should check out this PC Gamer article that documents the journey of one such hero.

A couple paragraphs to get you started:

There’s an ancient, established tradition of folk tales featuring outlaw heroes. In Britain we have Hereward the Wake and Robin Hood. The US has Davy Crockett and Wyatt Earp. And in China there’s an entire genre of writing, called Youxia (literally ‘wandering vigilante’), devoted to tales about men who travel the land writing wrongs and protecting the weak. But is it possible to live this way in Mount & Blade 2? To eschew the feudal trappings of land and power in favour of a life spent living on the road, fighting injustice? Yes. To roam the forests, waiting to strike out against the rich, lazy, and powerful? Also yes, but to a lesser extent. And only after a lot of preparation.

The first part of our journey begins with the birth of our hero. Bannerlord’s character creation offers a neat twist on the number crunching of standard RPGS. Instead of building a hero, I create a backstory. The first step is choosing your homeland. I pick Battania, a clan-based culture from the heavily-forested northwest corner of the map. I feel like I’ll be spending a significant amount of time chasing bandits—or, equally likely, fleeing lordly retribution—so the woodland terrain buffs the faction provides might prove useful. When things get spicy I can leg it back to the nearest thicket.