Rust Prince Kartorda is the head of the Rust Church, yes, but that doesn’t mean he’s in charge of everything. The book explicitly mentions the Iron Guard, the military arm of the Church, and “Rust Brother” is typically used as a shorthand for “the bad guys”. If you flesh this out, this means various flavours of government employees, starting with mundane guards, cops, bureaucrats and other functionaries, backed by scarier troops, and underpinned by a complicated network of spies and special agents.

Kartorda effectively rules over all of these in an operational manner, the Prime Minister to Zytera’s President; that means he can be overruled from time to time, sure, but Zytera is distractable enough that in practice Kartorda gets to do what he wants. But the end of the Blood Mist, and the sudden outbreak of multiple simultaneous challenges to the Harga government, has scuppered any idea of retiring peacefully and handing over to somebody else.

But what if he’s more than just a boring functionary? If he’s Rust Pope, that makes him a charismatic religious leader, and you can break out the incense and gold hats. But note that he has very little in the way of demonic mutation, and that may well be because he doesn’t trust Zytera’s motives. In that context, it’s worth pondering why the term “misgrown” exists at all in Harga: what reason would the Rust Pope have for tacitly encouraging such an insulting term?

Maybe the answer is: Kartorda sees the writing on the wall, and understands what it means that the Rust Brothers no longer have a monopoly on travel (and therefore cannot always outnumber any revolt). This is what’s behind the rumours that he’s the prophet of the god Guard: he seeks to create a new Church that people follow voluntarily, which leads and persuades, rather than trying to coerce.

A number of people will realise that the existing Rust Brother model of government is untenable as the campaign unfolds. What happens when Kartorda and Virelda realise that the same people are courting them both?

Gracenotes: Manderel can’t be a war veteran because nobody’s fought a war for the last 260 years; the Rust Brothers have ruled for hundreds of years not because an ordinary Rust Brother is scary, but because the people they can bring in if someone tries anything very much are scary; the worst of them are probably equal in size to a PC group; deluded citizens think that Zytera doesn’t know what the Rust Brothers do in their name; if Kartorda wears blingy hats, then his extra head wears one too; there’s a demon somewhere in Vond that Zytera grows Rust Pope heads on; whenever Kartorda’s extra head says something, people should interpret that as prophecies; it’s useful to encourage the term “misgrown” because that means potential or actual rebels out themselves through speech; let us never pass up the opportunity to have Arvia behave in a frustrating manner.

Life as a Raven Sister in Harga during the blood mist must have sucked, and it’s hard to explain why they became freedom fighters rather than just leave. Virelda must have known that the Church was pretty evil, and chances are she was from a conservative background and happy with much of it. As such, she should have expected demonic hair, although I would advise you to nerf it and make it creepier. She’s only human, after all, not a monster like Zytera or Krasylla: she doesn’t need a supernatural weakness.

If she’s not nice like most Raven Sisters, then my bet as to why she hates the Rust Church is that she’s a feminist originalist, who swore a solemn oath of vengeance to the ghost of the original Ferrale who walked in the blood mist, whose achievements the Rust Brothers have hushed up and perverted. That’s a much better driving goal than stupid Teramalda.

Her problem now is that she’s been too successful, and she’s too distinctive to do much in the way of field work these days. She mostly concentrates on pep talks and talking to other Key Players these days, which she’s not amazingly happy with. As the campaign progresses and the Rust Brothers look vulnerable, other people will start paying attention to Virelda, wondering whether they can trust her. And the Old Guard might even propose her a deal where she wins and they apparently lose, but not too badly.

Gracenotes: in practice most Raven Sisters were too low-level to be able to travel as animals during the blood mist; any Raven Sisters in the resistance must be supporting freedom fighters rather than fighting the Rust Brothers directly; never pass up opportunities to make two-heads-jokes about Kartorda; Virelda has a magic item of some kind that ties her to the vengeful spirit of ancient Ferrale; Virelda could easily have unnaturally-white skin and hair because she’s reckless enough to have rolled a magic mishap in the past; the Sisters of Heme make Virelda-themed harpies now; of course she occasionally taunts Kartorda dramatically; maybe, if your table is comfortable with this type of thing, she self-harms; she’s not the sort of person to do a political deal for long.

Compared to all the other very human-sounding religions in the book, the Church of Rust and Heme is frankly batshit. It can’t have started off that way: it was almost certainly originally a church about self-reliance and hard work, unusual in rejecting the worship of its Gods (the Goddess is no better).

Talk about the raven and the snake being made of iron and wood was almost certainly tacked-on to make it more palatable to the ruling class of Alderland. Similarly, when Zytera needed a ruling religion, doctrinal changes to make demons Good Actually wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch.

The main change was due to the blood mist: someone who remembered the old faith braved the blood mist, armed only with her faith (and not rusty iron, which makes no sense). Faced with the requirement to make sure only favoured servants realised the truth, Zytera decided to claim that belief in a deliberately-terrible religion was what let people brave the blood mist, making it possible for the Rust Brothers to subdue the villages of Harga.

But now that the blood mist is gone, the Rust Brothers are faced with a crippling crisis of faith, which their opponents will be all-too-willing to exploit. Perhaps the best hope for the Church of Rust and Heme now is to persuade everybody that’s learned its lesson.

Gracenotes: the Church of Rust is deliberately named after a substance which, according to its own doctrines, is necessarily and obviously bad; Heme’s sacred groves are very much to be avoided; saying that it was the raven that was made of iron is a sign that the original leadership of the Church was female; current theology is deliberately engineered to be self-contradictory, so to attract non-thinkers; the Rust Church’s theological weakness calls for scholar adventurers.

Humans are short-lived and hasty, without any kind of shared culture to unite them as a Kin. They’re arguably responsible for most of the bad things to have happend since they turned up, but their fragmented culture and individualist nature means they’re incapable of feeling guilty for other humans’ mistakes.

The humans’ Kin talent means they’re likely to up sticks and decide to do something new at the drop of a hat. They have no respect for institutions, and trying to rule them is likely to end in tears. Humans won’t even accept religion without endlessly questioning it, so it’s not surprising that human societies tend to attract strongmen, as a way of shutting them up.

The lack of inherent respect for the past and humans’ short lives means that human societies will change rapidly; the blood mist means that hasty or ignorant decisions uncorrected by outsider perspectives will result in a lot of weird villages. The end of the blood mist will fix this to some degree, but more importantly will result in humans turning up in the unlikeliest of places.

Regardless of whether you think innovation is a peculiarly human talent or not, it’s undeniable that the fragmentation of the human polity helps them come up with new stuff. If it turns out that we now have to live with demons now, should we not be grateful for having humans around?

Gracenotes:

Consider what it means for an entire Kin to be able to bargain with the GM; the best explanation for the the GM’s Guide saying the kings of Alderland were humans and Raven’s Purge saying they were frailers is that Alvagard probably faked his death; lack of instinctive reverence for institutions + temporary imposition of rule by force = eventual but inevitable revolutions; humans reproducing quickly and spreading means you could easily run a campaign set 100 years after Raven’s Purge.

Yet another primitive warrior race (boring!), saurians as written prefer to eat rotten meat, which seems weirdly inefficient for the apex predator of a swamp. We’re also told they regularly expand their swamp territories, but they clearly haven’t, even though they had more than two hundred years during the blood mist to do so unopposed.

My preferred explanation is that they just hang out in the swamps with crocodile heads because that’s cool, and the entire point is to not care too much about basically anything. Saurians’ interactions with other Kin are mostly based around keeping them out of the swamps, and either creeping out or grossing out any visitors so they go away again.

They’re not a player kin, but they could be a potential occasional vignette of fun, just when your campaign needed one.

Gracenotes:

Their relationship with crocodiles might actually be that the crocodiles are in charge rather than vice-versa; if you look at rainfall patterns, the Elya is a really wide river; people hanging around in swamps all the time may as well feel magically happy all the time; occasionally you might get a weird saurian who likes to bash on metal for fun; they don’t actually need to trade for metal with their neighbours, they just do it to appear normal; saurian swamps should have creepy windchimes.

Divided into hobbits and goblins – matching respectively rural conservatives and angry urban punks – the goblins have a constant need to badger the hobbits, but this never goes too far, as all are conscious to some degree or another that they’re to some degree the same Kin.

A good fantasy explanation of this awkward divide is that A God Did it, but they would say that, wouldn’t they. Still, it’s not actually that weird to say that hobbits don’t like the sun if you look at where they prefer to spend their time, and both hobbits and goblins would really like illusion magic.

If goblin vs hobbit arguments feel like family quabbles, it’s because they basically are; and while hobbits are obviously organised into large families, so are goblins. This doesn’t mean that it’s particularly fun if you’re not at the top, though. If you get creative with ways of naming hobbits, you then need complicated family trees proudly on display, that goblins get to sabotage if you or they want to be subtle.

If halflings don’t breed true, it’s because mothers will protect their babies against demands for racial purity. For the halfling cradle to work purely by organisation, though, you need more halflings than you’ll probably get, which suggests a fallback of some kind of elective fertility (not unreasonable for a Kin that worship a Moon goddess) is on the cards. That only spots outward appearances, though, and there must be plenty of hobbits who feel like goblins, and vice-versa. In fact, maybe a better explanation is that there aren’t two entangled Kin, but one Kin with four genders.

Gracenotes:

Halflings are mostly ignored, so doing better than the humans; stylistically, halflings are circles and goblins are triangles; hobbit names + swearing = excellent vandalism; hobbits deliberately grow too much food so they can feed their goblin kin; if you run the Bloodmarch, please come up with what moon elves look like and why your players should want to become them; when the head of the family or the gang changes, maybe your name does too; maybe e.g. before the Blood Mist, hobbits or goblins did in fact try out infanticide as a crude way of breeding true; sorry Gladys, you need to pop out another sprog because Siouxsie really wants a baby; if you look at the Kin in the Forbidden Lands, human-style two-gender reproduction is actually weird.

Forbidden Lands has two rules that grant extra XP when the players do extra roleplaying, which is really handy: Pride and Dark Secret. Pride is fine, but the problem with Dark Secret is that the PCs are normally too young to have got a dark secret yet, and most of the examples in the book are neither dark not particularly secret.

If you call it “Behavioural Flaw” instead, that can inspire you up to provide detail about a PC or NPC, which you don’t have to ditch if it turns out that everybody knows about it. It’s probably best if a behavioural flaw doesn’t always cause them trouble; whether you decide by GM fiat or by randomly rolling is up to you.

A rogue can’t make a living out of stealing from people in their small village, nor can a pedlar sell stuff to their neighbours. You can still get some milage out of those professions, but it’s a stretch.

It might be that a profession is just who you are; and long-lived kin may decide to keep on teaching the old skills just in case. Or that most people just didn’t min-max and that’s fine; besides, there’s plenty of useful General Talents that don’t imply adventuring.

In truth, PCs are weird, and that’s worth celebrating. It also means they can stumble into a common parlour game of “what kind of adventurer would you be?”, which is an excellent opportunity for roleplaying.

Gracenotes: the crazy village where everyone is a thief or pedlar; the village with just one potential PC who is frustrated but also a really useful recruit; adventures are as fun as giving birth or being ill, i.e. they’re not but you soon forget the bad bits.

PCs get worse at fighting as they take damage, which is great; but monsters have too much Strength to use in rolls, so we end up with separate rules for them. OK, but that means that monsters don’t show signs of weakness until they die, which is unfortunate.

Three demon heads joined together, each of them with a potentially-crippling weakness to ordinary Ravenland materials, but they and their friend who can turn into a protective zorb work together. They joined up when realising how treacherous Ravenland was.

Gracenotes: ether, they live with an ent who’s interested in demon natural history, weaknesses aren’t all-or-nothing.

Gifts of the Sea should be in a sea cave, normally flooded except for rare tides.

Neyd’s staff, and the dwarf legend “the world was perfectly spherical” vs probable fact Neyd was annoyed with dwarves building mountains like engineers. A portal to the sea and all that can go wrong with something like that. Devices that will help you talk to underwater elves. Sacred tablets of Wyrm that don’t rust (heresy!).

Gracenotes: how many moons does your world have?, whiner stone, permanent delegation from Farhaven, don’t salt your neighbours land by accident, rubbish artifacts could have been snuck in.