You can play Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord as a bloodthirsty baby

(Image credit: Taleworlds)

There are a lot of choices to make when starting a new character in Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord. What culture are you from? What did your family do for a living? What do you look like? Are you, in fact, a baby?

Yes, you are indeed a baby. As reported by RPS, if you press the R key during character creation, you can play Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord as a baby. You'll still make all the same choices about your adolescence as you create your character, but when you begin the actual game you'll be there in glorious tiny baby form.

As a baby named Lord Cranky Naptime, I had to skip parts of the tutorial—I couldn't score a block against the sword instructor because he kept swinging over my head. But once in the world, the game played out exactly the same except that I was a very small baby.

And a very bloodthirsty baby.

Unlike the tutorial trainer, no one seemed to have much difficulty hitting me with a sword in the real world. But this is a very sturdy baby! A few boo-boos won't take me out of the fight.

On the overworld map, oddly enough, you look positively huge, a giant baby sitting astride your horse. But from time to time you're reminded of your wee stature, like when your stubby little legs are carrying you across the battlefield or when you're designing your banner.

Peekaboo, I see you!

There's some bad news, though. Time passes and you grow into an adult pretty quickly. Shortly after Baby Lord Cranky Naptime won a combat tournament and sold a few sheep for profit, I was dismayed to see he was now a regular old boring grownup with a deeply unfortunate name.

Behold Adult Lord Cranky Naptime. He's got the same clothing, somehow, and the same hairstyle, but that goatee has gotta go. He may no longer be a baby, but I'll always think of him that way.

Thanks, RPS!

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.