Vicious Rumors Origins

[SkiRich]

One of the mechanics of the game has befuddled me since i've ben hit with it.
I dont see vicious rumors all the time, but in one ruler, who could be a saint, has had it for decades.
I'm trying to understand how it starts and how can I protect against or eliminate them.

My understanding is that someone needs to send a spymaster to my capital to sow descent.
Fair enough.
How can I protect against that and can I reverse that or have it decline faster?
I have had my spymaster tell me and I have found myself some vassals that are spreading rumors. I kill those vassals.

Do high intrigue courtiers cause this too?

[galadon3]

Think it can come from somebody using the intrigue-focus and not finding anything. Its what you get then, to drop it or just try to make some story up.

So technically it could be everybody who has a grudge against you, the AI has some patterns for targeting other characters so random courtiers are rather unlikely. And they don't even have to be high intrigue for it, just gives them a better chance that something sticks and that they don't get caught as the instigators.

So best check suspects for intrigue-focus.

Defense is a high intrigue and good spymaster to find the culprit. Tbh I usually ignore them, unless I have nothing better to do^^
In that case I usually deactivate the auto-stop plot system in the intrigue.tab and scan through them each year, to see if I find any of the suspects being caught in a plot.
If so, try to arrest, hope it fails if they are direct vassals so they revolt, giving me an opportunity to beat them, strip them of all their titles and put them on the bottom of a nice dark oubliette.

If I am REALLY miffed I changed to intrigue-focus myself and start to spy on them, but usually I have more important stuff I need the focus for.

[Malus]

characters that try to antagonize you can also spread these rumors.