Ah right I'm with you now Edi on the unannounced events thing
I was actually doing a pretty good job of catching the unannounced effects for the ~130 events I had so far managed to document. Since experience told me that a lot of the bad events came with extras, so always made sure to double and triple check the province events fired in. Two out of three for pop loss, unrest and gold loss is not uncommon (regardless of what the event text says). Also managed to pick up the scale movements on events such as the Order increase from the "Great harvest".
Did have trouble nailing down accurate and confirmed pop loss events though, just because it was too time consuming to track population levels each turn. Since even though the event text usually gave a value for the pop loss, I was trying to confirm them.
One of the big mysteries I came across though was the few events I couldn't categorise as good or bad. The main problem child being the "Merchants have established themselves and are prospering, but faith is decreasing" event. Since it seems to lower Dominion, but give no benefit, and didn't notice any extra gold at all from the 'merchants prospering' flavour in the text. Did notice this event triggering far more often when testing Misfortune scales though, so concluded it was a bad event in the end.
And finally, do you know (or can you find out from the source) whether or not the events that can trigger are locked by your starting Pretender scales, or whether they fluctuate depending on what the specific scales are in the province at the time an event is checked. I was having trouble confirming this one since whenever I tried testing for it, I couldn't be sure if events weren't triggering because the province scales were wrong (even though the starting Pretender scales were right for the event to trigger), or whether the events just weren't firing due to general random die rolls.
Be good to know if all the talk of pushing Death and/or Misfortune scales as part of nation strategies actually works, or is instead just a tactic that it was wished would work (but which just doesn't due to the game mechanics). And indeed whether or not spells like baleful star can actually cause new events to trigger, rather than just increase the chance of bad events from the pre-set list (pre-set at Pretender scales) of bad events than can trigger.