[llamabeast]

The game is restarted! Yes! I was beginning to superstitiously think it had somehow become cursed, and could never be started.

Somehow, every one of the pretender files had become corrupted in such a way that Dominions would accept them, but would crash if it tried to start a game with them. Leaving one of them in newlords was even enough to make an attempt at a single player game crash. Utterly bizarre, and I have no idea how it could happen. But anyway, having realised they were at fault I just got them down again from the server and restarted. Hopefully all is well now.