Simple Beard Laws 1.0

Some rulers care about taxes. Some care about chins. This mod gives you three decisions to forbid beards, and lets you choose who has to obey: everyone who holds land of you, everyone who carries your house name, or everyone descended from your dynasty's founder.

This simple mod gives you the option to restrict beards and mandate shaving for your subjects.

Requirements

• Crusader Kings III 1.19.x

Nothing else.

The three edicts

Each edict is proclaimed from the decisions panel and can be repealed from the same place. You will only ever see the ones you are actually entitled to proclaim.

• Razor Edict — proclaimed by a landed ruler, bound to their primary title. Covers the ruler, their court, and every vassal down the chain. Costs 200 prestige; your vassals and courtiers like you 10 less for it.
• Razor Edict of the House — proclaimed by a house head, bound to the house. Covers every member of the house, wherever they sit. Costs 100 prestige; house members like you 10 less.
• Razor Edict of the Dynasty — proclaimed by a dynasty head, bound to the dynasty. Covers every member, in every house the dynasty has spawned. Costs 150 prestige; dynasty members like you 10 less.

All three can stand at once, each has a five year cooldown, and each is repealed independently.

When edicts collide

A ban is a ban, so coverage is additive and the strictest authority wins. You are shaven if any authority over you has an edict standing: your dynasty, your house, your own title, any liege above you, or the court you sit in.

That means a house head cannot excuse his branch from the dynast's edict. He can repeal his own, and anyone who was only bound by his edict is free again — but anyone the dynast or a liege also binds stays exactly as bare as before. Repeals never punch holes in somebody else's edict, and overlapping edicts never leave anyone stranded.

What it deliberately does not do

• The AI never proclaims one. These are your edicts. Nobody is going to shave a continent behind your back.
• There is no beard mandate. The edict only forbids; it cannot force a beard onto someone who has none.
• It does not reach into your vassals' households. The realm edict covers your vassals themselves, not the private courtiers of every vassal down the chain — that would mean walking your entire realm every year for a cosmetic effect.
• It does not touch women or children. Obviously.

New courtiers, new vassals, new members and children coming of age are picked up by a yearly sweep, so it can take up to a game year before a newcomer is shaved.

Compatibility

This mod overrides nothing.

CK3 has shipped its own clean-shaven switch since long before this mod existed — the game already honours a character flag that the base game itself uses to keep certain historical figures beardless. Beard Edicts simply sets that flag on the people an edict covers, and lets the vanilla portrait system do the rest. Cultural beard weights, other beard mods, portrait overhauls and body mods all keep working untouched.

Characters the base game shaved on its own are recognised and left alone, so repealing your edict will never hand a beard to a historical figure who was never supposed to have one.

Installation and load order

Drop it in, enable it, done. It has no requirements and no conflicts, so its position in the load order does not matter.

Credits

• Inspired by the beard law from the old More Laws mod. No code from it is used — that version worked by overwriting a vanilla portrait rule, which had the side effect of flattening the cultural beard weights for every character in the game. This is a clean-sheet rebuild for 1.19.

Bug reports

Post in the comments. Please say which edict was standing, who was supposed to be covered, and whether the character had a beard before — and attach your error.log if the game complained.