Contrary to what Raven’s Purge wants you to believe, Soria must be the true ruler of the orcs, nor her husband; and she must know about Stanengist and the rift. A proudly orcish woman, she surely is proud to wear an elf ruby openly, and cannot afford to give up her trump card, not when she needs to tread carefully if she’s going to continue to rule. This is only a weakness of sorts: for the benefit of her people and herself, Soria needs to be a subtler ruler than past orc Queens.

This is interesting, because it means there are plenty of ways for the PCs to help Soria, which is useful if they want to march large armies right next to her lands on the way to a big battle at Vond. More interestingly, Soria’s interests and personal evolution track what the campaign expects to happen. Or, to put it another way: while most of the Key Players are focused on events in the past – whether to preserve or to reverse them – Soria is unique in being more interested in what the future world should look like. This could bring her into alignment with the PCs, or presage a future conflict after the demons are sent packing.

Gracenotes:

Iridne is a voluntary Viraga heirloom; Soria’s ceremonial armour shows off all eight of her assets; guests prostrate themselves before her, and are then dismayed when they get to their feet and she’s vanished, because she can levitate; she deliberately chooses guile and cunning over brute force because she needs the practice; Soria can point the PCs towards Weatherstone; maybe Soria only becomes Empress part-way through the campaign

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.

Orcs are weird: they have many babies, mostly males, and even after deaths and geldings, that still means there are far more males than females. Even the intact males will mostly be sexually-frustrated, and their relationships will mostly be with fellow gang-members. How do they pull this off? Probably a combination of being able to eat basically anything, and orc males growing quickly rather than bothering with brains. (Your character might be an exception.)

The women are effectively in charge, says the book: no, the women should obviously be in charge, and look like it. (Just because they’re smart doesn’t mean they’re nice, though.) The men probably don’t care because they’ve got more exciting things to do, but it should be clear that they don’t matter most of the time.

Orc villages are typically a collection of crude rough-hewn huts in the mud. Unavoidably shaped by their past as a slave race, they were in turn traumatised by the blood mist. During that time, their only proper moment of release was raiding other orc villages during the summer.

Now that the blood mist is no more, the smarter orcs are conscious that they are in a position of weakness. Properly-exploiting the forests near them is a good first step; since the Alder wars there’s a large amount of metal gear made for orcs and it would be useful to learn how to make more. Orcs’ ferocious breeding makes them quite reasonably unpopular with other Kin, so maybe if they want to make diplomatic inroads, this calls for a different type of orc? This may explain why there are efforts to no longer kill out-of-hand useful weird orcs, or, more controversially, seek to breed orcs that can do sorcery.

Once you’ve exposed your players to the full and frank nature of a typical orc village, maybe it’s time to look at some more weird encounters. A village with few or no women, for instance, or one where all the men are gelded (the King wants them dead, but the Queen disagrees; the players had better find a solution that satisfies both of them). Maybe they can encounter a gang of orc navvies building a road, or orcs trying to learn crafts.

It’s unclear whether orcs are supposed to be terrifying monsters or harmless clowns, and that’s what interests me about them so much.

Gracenotes:

Orc males who end up enslaved cut off their own testicles and eat them, partly for humiliation, but mostly because that’s funny; see also orcs eaten by terrifyingly-large and -vicious pigs, or ill-advised attempts to breed cassowaries.

Unexpected places to find orcs: robbing stagecoaches in the Robin Hood style, pretending to not be orcs and, because of their eye colour, mistaken for Merigall or their children, a village of gelded orcs who can’t breed but want to maintain their community anyway, orcs trying to invent pig cheese or becoming unnervingly good at baking.

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.

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.