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.

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.

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 Kartorda 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.

Arvia’s purpose in the campaign is to tell the PCs about the doomed plot to kill Krasylla, be a target for Zytera’s ritual, and that’s basically it apart from some unserious soap-opera nonsense and amateur wishful thinking about elven stones. The fix is to lean on her intriguing background as a noble and a roving warrior, ignore the campaign’s tell-don’t-show justification of her being a religious fanatic (the plan to kill Krasylla is neither religious nor fanatic; it’s a perfectly sane plan!), and explore what a firebrand religious conservative dwarf should actually look like.

A leader of many dwarves, and a seasoned traveller of the tunnels under the Ravenlands, of course she heard about the Galdane Aslenes and had them flock to her banner. But her twisted way of thinking doesn’t just lead her to experiment on elven rubies because they’re part of Huge’s domain; she’ll embrace crackpot ideas like trying to enslave the orcs again, being happy about a second demon flood because she thinks the dwarves will be safe and the humans and orcs will die, or going along with Zygofer’s marriage proposal because she’s certain that she’ll be fine and that gets her into Vond.

Apart from increasingly frustrated PCs, her main enemies are likely to be dwarves with more cautious and incremental plans, frustrated with her sway over a sizeable part of the dwarven population. Everyone else just tries to stay out of her way.

Gracenotes: someone wanting to suborn a Ravenlands standing army will find it much easier than in our world because the value of soldiers is in their training, not their gear (and they can take that with them anyway); Arvia is quite possibly demon-agnostic and wouldn’t be sorry to see the Blood Mist back; after a while your players should dread meeting Arvia because she’ll always twist everything and make things worse; if you move Mard to Haggler’s House you can have her get entangled with Merigall, which both of them deserve.

Zytera is in a position of power, can do uncanny and terrible things, and Zygofer has proven capable of breathtaking tactical abilities in the past. They had no reason to care about Stanengist in the past, though, and their plans with female rulers of Ravenland are unavoidably flawed. The good news is that lets you interact with Zytera more often than the campaign expects (you can probably ignore the soap opera bit, though).

Gracenotes: when you’re the King you have to fear other Kings, e.g. from Alderland, why have all of Zytera’s experiments failed?, does Zygofer have a mental hold over all Blood Sorcerers?, best guess at when Zygofer got Merigall back, Zygofer can plausibly threaten that killing him would be bad, the best counter-Stanengist plan is to collect elf rubies, Zytera is already limited by the size of their army in how much they can rule, Zygofer’s plan to be legitimised by ruling with a Queen of Ravenland is really good, Zytera also has some good diplomacy ploys, unless they’re shopping for unusual Kin body parts, the Maligarn sword can’t be with Marga and Martea because they’ve have told Zertorme or Merigall, have another hopeless plan from Kalman Rodenfell.