There needs to be a Key Player opposed to Zytera who also remembers what happened centuries ago, and that may as well be Kalman Rodenfell. The PCs can meet him in a wondrous elf village, which should be a nice change from the mud and guts of the rest of the campaign, and he may as well be able to tell them pretty much everything: he was there right from the start, and he was both the elf who took the initiative in creating Stanengist and its first wielder, responsible for enslaving the orcs.

The trick, though, is that his memory is decidely elective, because he feels guilty about what he’s done and doesn’t know what to do now: close the rift or save the ancient elves? So it’ll take more than one conversation to get the full truth out of him.

There should be evidence of past, failed, plans to resolve the problem: stopping demons coming out of the rift in a variety of ways, or trying to find a way for Zytera to not die, by exploring elf-frailer or elf-demon hybrids.

Gracenotes: he’s called Rodenfell because, like the ancient elves of the Heart of the Sky, he also fell from the Red Wanderer at roughly the same time; his weakness as written is especially stupid because he must have met Merigall already; you should let the players see Rodenfell wrestling / fidgeting with his memories; an elf has been happily breeding huge, cute furry animals who like portals; do you want bad elves? here’s a bad elf.

As written, Stanengist will send demons mad if they place it on their head. Nobody had any reason to know it would do that when Stanengist was first forged, but the players will eventually find out, and when they do there’s every chance they’ll abuse the mechanic as a quick demon-killing trick. The thing is, that mechanism was written to be a weakness for only some key players, and as written can still fail. That’s unfortunate, because moral dilemmas are awesome, but if there’s no way to know what happens if you put more rubies in the crown, the players won’t have that discussion.

So I propose to say that the more rubies you have in Stanengist, the more powerful it is, and to make that discoverable. That means that if the PCs decide just to close the rift, they can do that with a minimum of fuss, but they then need to do a fair bit of extra work to kill Zytera, which turns the campaign into a nice three-act structure, which is always nice. Or, if they decide to rampage through the land killing demons with a crown full of elven rubies, that makes it harder for their allies to trust them, and more likely their enemies will see them coming.

Gracenotes: wide players taking out a flock of harpies with a Stanengist bola; make it possible to put Kalman Rodenfell in the crown as well; magic crowns don’t understand the point of stealth; sneaking around Amber’s Peak trying to work out what the demon you detected was, as Zertorme follows you wondering what magic effect he just felt; Disrupt Demon means Katorda loses his stupid head, and Zygofer or Therania fall off their spider body, and at higher levels the effect cascades.

As players of Raven’s Purge, you’re supposed to eventually know two important things about Stanengist: that it can send demons mad (which a number of major key players reasonably do not know), and that it can seal the protonexus (exactly why the ancient elves and Krasylla know this is not clear).

Rather than being told that by mysterious elves in the crown, the players should be piecing together knowledge of Stanengist like they piece together knowledge about the world, as should be everyone else.

If you accept my theory that the ancient elf circlet wasn’t always called Stanengist, and reforging it into a crown both opened the rift and made enslaving the orcs possible, that means there are many different ways that you could start learning about Stanengist. Elf-friends know about the ancient elves that should be in the crown; forging a powerful magic item like this probably required the help of ancient dwarven sorcerers who will have left records and/or followers; the orcs have conflicting memories and theories about what actually happened that can spur the players into investigating the past; powerful demons have a decent understanding about rifts and crowns; and if all that fails, the ancient elves in the crown remember a few things on top of what all other elves know.

This knowledge will be spreading during the campaign, and people talking to each other: everyone will be talking to elves and elvenspring, Arvia will find out what ancient dwarves have been up to if the PCs don’t, the orcs will be comparing notes and remembering, and if powerful demons decide they like it here now, they’ve got stories to tell to people who are prepared to put down their weapons and talk for a while.

Gracenotes: the constant mantra of “kill the demons, rule the land” from Stanengist should be really annoying to the elves inside and/or the wearer; another reason why Zytera doesn’t know about Stanengist is that it was almost immediately crippled by Iridne storming off in a huff; once the dwarves realised what might have happened, might they have tried to make a replacement Stanengist?; orcs with a culture born from slavery will put spy booby-traps in their epic poems.

Not only should dragons mostly be a threat to e.g. Galdane Aslenes with their large herds, or rich humans with coins of precious metal in cities back in the day, rather than dwarves, dragons should like living next to dwarves. The dwarves can build them a pretty good aerie, and at the point where a dwarf city can think about spending time on kitting out a dragon’s house, they can also spare people to go mining for the metals and jewels the dragon wants if that means they get the prestige of having a dragon advisor.

So what happened? My theory is that one city accidentally lost their dragon, a religious movement rationalised that embarassment into “we meant that”, proceeded to kill everybody else’s dragons, and now it’s commonly accepted that dragons were always bad. Indeed, so complete has been the victory of the anti-dragon forces that the conflict has now mostly been forgotten.

But not by the dwelvers, who still have the young dragonling Scarne in an ancient dragon nursery a kilometre beneath the ground, which Scarne has now outgrown, but the dwarven leaders above prefer to avoid making a decision about what to do with her.

As for Scarnesbane: while it might now be intended as the weapon to kill Scarne, it was probably crafted as a teaching exercise, or maybe even a goblin prank.

Gracenotes: religious sophists using twisted logic to argue that dragons are bad, and your use of perfectly-good logic is in fact use of “dragon words”, which means you can’t be trusted, is exactly the sort of thing that Arvia should say to your players and drive them spare; ancient blinged-out armour as both dragon-bait and propaganda; the path to Pelagia is paved by injured tough guys who tried to wield Scarnesbane; if dragonlings are fed gold and precious jewels by their dwelver teachers, maybe the ancient birthright coins the dwelvers make are effectively made of dragon shit; wherever the Glethra mines were, there should be a dragon squatting there; the PCs’ stronghold needs a dragon; dragons must have a justified instinctive hatred of haflings; put a cave painting of dwarves and dragons in Wailer’s Hold.

Mostly-underground eusocial mammals, whiners can be fascinating once you get past some dubious official factoids. You would expect a small humanoid to favour survivability over brainpower, so with a bias towards cooperation and away from individual excellence, whiners are the closest we can imagine to a communist utopia, all working together for the good of the hive.

A whiner hive should expect to efficiently produce eggs, babies and children, and individual whiners can call on specialists when they need help. All of this, plus their very different mental model, can make it problematic if whiner hives turn up where you don’t want them. The downside of the predictability of whiners means that more-or-less-ethical researchers will be delighted to experiment on them.

Gracenotes: Whiners are eusocial mammals, like smurfs; bodymodding whiners and their subcutaneous rocks; hell, make them archosaurs so they’re really cool; maybe all the Kin are humanoid because so are the Gods; whiner specialists are really amazingly-specialised; an intelligent queen probably won’t sit around laying eggs all day; maybe don’t ask how we get more queens; the weakest part of this whole essay is explaining why they’re called whiners when underground species should have deep voices; an easy way of denoting lesser intelligence is to arbitrarily decide that whiners don’t use articles; dwarf miners look at bodymodding whiners to work out whether there are any valuable minerals nearby.

Living underground is great, except that there’s no food there. If you don’t steal food from aboveground, you’re going to have to pipe light into your caves, and find ways to cooperate with animals. You’ll turn underground rivers into canals, which you’ll eventually end up widening. Stone-singers constantly expanding the mountains might make you move from time to time, but you can move around a lot more than any other Kin, which should have done wonders for your population levels.

Dwarves aren’t happy with just basic living: conquering the undermountains lets them move onto more sophisticated challenges like art and architecture, which must be constantly tested and contested. Their economy rests on a strong safety net and individual entrepreneurialness, backed by spooky-weird coins made by the dwelvers, which you can’t take with you when you die, to encourage generosity.

The official description of clans makes no sense; each city should be inhabited by a mixture of clans. Being King is just a job, which in peace-time consists primarily of organising contests and gaining glory for your city. Mess up and you can be told to go. On top of the usual endemic problems, the end of the Blood Mist is causing dwarves to reconsider what they should be doing with their lives, and how.

Gracenotes:

Mine-cart chase!; uncomfortably-fast boat ride through twisty tunnels; what does dwarven art look like?; you’re going to have to wait to travel, the boat club has booked the river; grinding your bones to make my bread as an act of religious celebration; if comedy elf names are ordinary name + “iel”, then comedy dwarf names must be posh name + “in”.

Rejected ideas: lawlessness on the canals, the dwarves built too ambitiously and too high, cheating the inheritance rules by making a sculpture out of dwarven coins, stabbing people to win the architecture contest.

Wonders: fat quartz fibre-optics that let you do hydroponics and theatre, ancient dwarves peering over their quartz half-moon spectacles, underground-river-powered paternoster!, a fake garden made of stone has to have tiny clockwork butterflies, what’s behind the slightly-artificial underground waterfall?

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.

On the assumption that if one spell specifically says it involves a thing, then all other spells don’t, we can assume that casting spells doesn’t involve somatic or verbal actions. How about material components; how near do you need to be?

Casting a spell from a grimoire is an aide-memoire rather than reading it, its pages have thickened with magic, so it makes sense that you could have ingredients in your grimoire.

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.