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.

Merigall had no reason to encourage Martea to leave and she wouldn’t have asked; Merigall clearly failed to get rid of the Blood Mist; Zytera’s mastery of demon magic is far more interesting than Merigall’s native command of it; they could have got their other secret knowledge from Viridia.

People other than the PCs know about ol’ yellow eyes by now, and the constant shapeshifting and impersonating isn’t amazingly compatible with long-term planning. Merigall’s children must also tax them.

Not being able to foil a Zytera plan to hide your life essence isn’t shameful, but why hasn’t Merigall found Viridia? Maybe Viridia tipped off the Redrunners on how to kill Merigall when she realised who they were exactly, and now whenever Merigall thinks about making an elf-compatible body they stop and reconsider.

Meanwhile, Merigall’s children are in all probability their ambassadors to the major population centres who don’t hate them, and exactly what Merigall’s children are like raises all sorts of intriguing questions, like why should we believe Merigall and their children love each other unconditionally.

All of this makes Merigall more interesting. They still rule Zytera’s court, and are influential at others, have all sorts of things they want to tell the PCs, and of course their life essence is the ultimate MacGuffin. Who knows what will happen when they’re gone?

Gracenotes:

Exactly how Merigall learned about the danger of Stanengist; demons’ code of honour; the logistics of Merigall turning up as the PCs approach an adventure site; does Merigall now fear lakes?; Merigall’s children have yellow eyes because they’re proud of their weakness; has Merigall been planning all sorts of mayhem for when they finally die?

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.

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.

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.

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.