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Mount And Blade 2 Bannerlord conspiracy quest guide: how to declare war

How to thwart Istiana's or Arzagos's plans

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Guide by Dave Irwin Former Guides Writer
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During the main quest in Mount And Blade 2 Bannerlord, you'll meet a couple of influential people who want to steer you in a certain direction. Whichever person you decide to side with out of Arzagos or Istiana, the other person will try to thwart your plans later on. There is a lot of confusion surrounding these quests, so let's talk about what's happening in each one.

Mount And Blade 2 Bannerlord conspiracy quest guide

This Mount And Blade 2 Bannerlord conspiracy quest guide will discuss how "Istiana's Plan" or "Arzagos's Conspiracy" main quests work and what you need to do to complete them. You'll mostly need to declare war on your faction's enemies and further your own cause, but there's a tiny bit more to it than that.

How to complete Istiana's Plan or Arzagos's Conspiracy main quest

After you have set up your own kingdom or joined another faction, you will eventually get a notification to say that someone is plotting against you. If you now look at your quest log, you'll see a quest in the main quest called either "Istiana's Plan" or "Arzagos's Conspiracy". This will happen not too long after receiving the quest to unify the land, which requires two thirds of the settlements to be under your kingdom/faction's control.

Whether you get "Istiana's Plan" or "Arzagos's Conspiracy" is dependent on which person you didn't side with, but it seems to be the exact same quest for each person. When it begins, you'll see a bar that shows how much the conspiracy has progressed, with the bar set at 1000/2000.

You'll occasionally see a quest prompt to try and stop the conspiracy. This is currently impossible and eventually you'll get another notification to say that the quest has failed. This seems to be a rather clunky way of showing that the conspiracy level is increasing. There seems to be no way to stop this going up before it reaches around 1400/2000, because even if you attempt to kill Istiana or Arzagos, they will not take any damage from your attacks.

Declaring war on enemies

Eventually, as the conspiracy bar grows to around 1400, you'll likely already have at least one nation declare war on your kingdom. You can also declare war on enemies by attacking their settlements and people, or even taking over towns.

At this point, you'll be asked to either eliminate enemy kingdoms that have declared war on you or get them to sign peace treaties. Just keep fighting enemy factions, taking over their fiefdoms, and capturing their leaders, and eventually a peace treaty will be able to be signed. If you are a vassal for an established kingdom, your ruler will handle the peace treaties.

It's unclear at the time of writing if there is any more to this, as this quest progresses at quite the snail's pace, but keep checking back as we will be investigating this rather bothersome quest in the future.

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Mount And Blade 2 Bannerlord guide series

With these tips, you should be able to thwart Istiana's or Arzagos's schemes to undermine you. Thank you for reading our Mount And Blade 2 Bannerlord conspiracy guide. There are plenty more guides in the works, but for now you can check out our other guides for the game, including details for character creation, as well as the bugs that are unfortunately in the game. Here are some guides to get you started:

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