Make them more interesting: Kartorda

It’s very easy to ignore Kartorda, and in truth in many campaigns you probably should. Kartorda is the man in charge of the Rust Church, sure, but that makes him as interesting as, say, the Mouth of Sauron in the Lord of the Rings: a powerful figure, maybe, but nowhere as immediately concerning as the Nazgûl (scary ghosts with swords who are hunting you down), nor as ultimately important as Sauron (the Big Bad behind it all).

But if your players go anywhere near Harga, I think you should pay at least a bit of attention to the person who’s supposedly the day-to-day boss of about a third of all the people in the entire Ravenlands. Not just because he’s the man in charge, but because if make him the Rust Pope you can do two interesting things: you can add detail about the church of evil that the players are almost certainly determined to overthrow, and you can set the cat among the pigeons by fleshing out his plan to get rid of Zytera before the old fool’s excessive evilness brings everything crashing down.

What do we mean by “Rust Brother”, anyway?

If the one thing we know about Kartorda is that he rules over the Rust Brothers, the first question has to be: who are the Rust Brothers?

I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that

The very first thing the campaign says about Kartorda (Raven’s Purge, p. 48) is “Kartorda is the religious leader of the Rust Brothers”, and that immediately raises questions. Doesn’t Rust Brother just mean the followers of the Church of Rust and Heme (e.g. GM’s Guide, p. 38ff)? How could there be a non-religious leader of a religious order?

It then goes on to say that “General Manderel, who leads the Iron Guard (see page 191), is his confidante [sic]”, and on said page 191 it says that he’s “Grandmaster Manderel, a scarred war veteran as well as an ordained Rust Brother”. (Exactly which war they think Manderel fought in, given that Harga and neighbouring lands have been blanketed by the blood mist for the last 260 years, making it impossible for anyone else to move an army around, is unclear.) The GM’s Guide (p. 40) confirms that “The knightly order known as the Iron Guard is the armed branch of the church, and they answer directly to the Rust Lord Kartorda”. And in the entry for Zytera (Raven’s Purge, p. 29), we learn that “The Rust Brothers in Alderstone propagate the belief that Zytera protects humanity from invading demons as the prophet of the god Rust”. So if it’s all about religion, and Kartorda’s the religious leader, that means he’s in charge, right?

Well. Zytera’s entry goes on to say (p. 32; an Oxford comma would have been useful here) “Zytera is, at the moment, allied with the Rust Brothers, Krasylla and Merigall, but the alliances are fragile”, and Kartorda’s entry (p. 48) confirms this: “Kartorda and Manderel, together with a couple of other trusted higher up officers, began to doubt that Zytera and Krasylla really are the chosen of the god Rust and would prefer to be rid of them.”

And this is the point where it’s worth pointing out that the books tend to use “Rust Brother” as a shorthand for “anyone who works for the bad guys”, and indeed tend to talk about the “Rust Church” rather than the “Church of Rust and Heme”, even though the Sisters of Heme clearly exist (“they are less visible at the temples since the church is patriarchal” says the GM’s Guide p. 40, confusing the writers’ own tendencies with world-building). And that’s often fine! Brevity and accuracy are typically opposing sides of a trade-off in situations like this, and sometimes you want to just say “Rust Brother” to mean “bad guy”, rather than have to bother about the many flavours of bad guy.

But when considering the subtleties of the Harga polity, and what Kartorda is all about, then we do have to bother with the bad guy taxonomy.

There must be loads and loads of different types of bad guy

We should be careful when drawing comparisons to our world, because the tech level (including notably the level of literacy) is significantly different. But roughly speaking, if you consider that when the books talk about “Rust Brothers” they’re talking about anyone directly employed by a theocracy, you won’t be too far wrong.

One thing they all have in common is a feeling that they all ultimately answer to Zytera, and a monopoly of violence. Ordinary people are not allowed weapons beyond a simple knife for cooking or butchery, a scythe for farm workers, a bow for hunting small game like rabbits, or any kind of armour beyond simple helmets for mine workers.

Beyond that, there are all sorts. There are fussy bureaucrats, not particularly physically-imposing, who turn up to collect taxes and adjudicate disputes between neighbours; priests of the Churches of Rust and Heme who deliver sermons to the faithful; guards who patrol the gates of the villages at night and refuse potential unrest or violence during the day. Even the most rubbish of these people will be better fed and at least slightly better-armed and -armoured than the average human, and if you make the mistake of picking a fight with them, you’ll draw the attention of far harder and scarier people.

Obviously this includes the Iron Guard, but note that there’s likely to be at least two types of Iron Guard: the standard troops barracked in every village, and an additional adjunct of elite troops who can be called upon to put down a revolt anywhere in Harga. These guys are proper scary, and probably have the same reputation as riot cops do in our world.

And then there’s the people you can’t see: during the blood mist there must have been a whole network of spies and informants, and when the blood mist went away and people started to fan out, the immediate reaction must have been to dial up the amount of spies even more. Maybe not quite Stasi-esque – if only because there isn’t enough cheap paper to write everything down on – but there will still be at least a handful of full-time researchers in each village in charge of collating information, and a number of plain-clothes spies who look for signs of rebellion, and pay civilian informants to blab about their friends and neighbours.

There may well be additional spies who infiltrate groups they consider to be potential threats; these people will be almost entirely off the books, deep undercover for years at a time. And of course you need the equivalent of a police force’s Internal Affairs section to keep tabs on all of these people.

And now that the blood mist has gone, departments in charge of spying on other countries, and thwarting other countries’ attempts at spying in Harga, will have been resurrected or beefed up.

Oh, and Kartorda and Zytera probably each have a small cadre of skilled people who report to them, for when something needs to be done completely off-the-record and without involving anything like normal procedures. The population of the Ravenlands is such that each of these groups is probably as large as a typical PC group, which makes for great potential rivals.

Is Kartorda just an administrator?

The book presents Kartorda as the “Rust Prince”, which is very much the sort of title you have if you’re only the second-in-command. (Sometimes people who rule small territories decide that they’re not worth the title “King”, and call themselves Princes or Dukes, but Harga is definitely too large for that sort of thing.) This places him as an important ruler in a complex polity, but definitely not the only one with power.

Kartorda is Prime Minister to Zytera’s President

Back to Zytera’s entry in Raven’s Purge (p. 29): “Zytera is essentially offended by the ingratitude of the people, but feels that ‘someone has to do the dirty work so that the rabble can rest easy’”. Zytera “mainly strives to master the demonic substance mog so as to become immortal and to create armies of demon warriors” (p. 32), so it’s pretty clear what Kartorda’s job is: it’s to deal with the boring everyday ruling stuff from Haggler’s House, and let Zytera do evil science at peace in Vond.

The problem here is that we now have two people ostensibly in charge. In our world, if there’s only one person in charge (e.g. the USA just has a President), or there’s a Head of State who’s a non-partisan figurehead who mostly deals with diplomatic pleasantries and meaningless ceremonies, it’s clear where the real power lies. Constitutional Monarchies tap into the inherent respect that people want to feel for an old person wearing a gold hat, and the person ostensibly in charge is well aware of what can happen if you try to actually do anything; European countries with a President and a Prime Minister similarly tend to understand that the post of President is a mostly-honorary position, unless the President decides to get their elbows out.

I said “tend to” because Harga’s political system reminds me of the exception that is France, where the President (directly) and the Prime Minister (indirectly) are both elected. Nearly all of the time they’re from the same political party, though, so the President appoints the Prime Minister, and this should be fine, right?

Zytera is never going to go away

In a sytem where Zytera provides direction, and Kartorda governs, this obviously benefits Zytera the most. They have a functionary who deals with the daily minutiae, and they have the plausible deniability of distance that leads people oppressed by Kartorda to wail “if only Zytera knew what the Rust Brothers were doing in their name!”

If Zytera travels abroad and comes to an agreement with another Key Player, on their return they’ll let Kartorda know “by the way, we agreed to do this”. This can be surprising, awkward, and maybe even stymie some of Kartorda’s plans, but hey, that’s the deal they made.

When there’s a hard decision to make at the high level (which is basically always, because if it was easy, the people bothered by this conundrum would have made it themselves rather than asking the boss for help), the more sophisticated people will inevitably lobby Zytera as well as Kartorda, especially if they think Kartorda isn’t going to be sympathetic to their cause. Even if this is something that Kartorda thinks is a purely-internal matter and should be reserved to him.

Against all of this, of course, is the fact that if Kartorda is involved in day-to-day ruling in a way that Zytera isn’t, he will be much better at knowing who all the people are in the realm who have any amount of power and influence, and will be accustomed to dealing with them in a way that Zytera isn’t. So sure, if someone catches Zytera in a good mood and gets them to agree to a significant policy change, that’s going to be annoying for Kartorda at first. But unless Zytera is dead set on forcing this change through, Kartorda will be able to sandbag, prevaricate and delay, until eventually Zytera stops paying attention to whatever it was, and Kartorda can quietly go back to doing things his own way again.

The Blood Mist is causing trouble just as Kartorda should have retired

“Kartorda is a somewhat obese man in his sixties” (Raven’s Purge, p. 48), and the decision you need to make as a GM is whether he views the end of the blood mist as a calamity or an opportunity.

60 is closer to the typical age that modern-day politicans leave office at than the age they are when they’re elected, so unless Kartorda’s job is a gerontocracy like Saudi Arabia was for a while, or the Catholic Papacy has basically always been, it’s likely that Kartorda has been in the job for a while now. If Kartorda is an administrator at heart, then he was hoping to retire soon, or failing that carry on dealing with current affairs without making much of a splash or making too many enemies. (Any ruler making decisions will make both friends and enemies, and the problem is that people tend to bear grudges longer than they remember favours.)

Alas, the end of the blood mist has meant that all sorts of new troubles are cropping up: the old, quiet ways of keeping people under control are now under significant strain, as people spread out, explore new lands, test how serious the Church is about keeping people cooped up in their old villages. Hell, some people have gone to the moors of all places, which was previously the ideal place to bury bad news or park experiments gone bad. Administrator!Kartorda will be dreading the inevitable reports that some of them have been set free, or worse.

If Kartorda is an ambitious politician, though, he was yearning for a period of disruption like this.

“Rust Prince” is boring. Make Kartorda the Rust Pope instead!

If Kartorda is a religious leader, then why is he called “Rust Prince”? If you call him the Rust Pope instead, this opens up a whole bunch of extra possibilities.

Being Pope means ceremonies and big hats, which is always good

Raven’s Purge (p. 48) says Kartorda is typically “dressed in ochre clothes with draped, rusted chains when he isn’t walking around ritually naked. His face is often painted in patterns of rust.” This isn’t the typical attire of a boring functionary!

Arguably Kartorda’s job is to be the visible figurehead of the Rust Church: the everyday folk fear and respect him, powerful civilians tread carefully around him, the rank and file of the Rust Brothers and Sisters of Heme follow him worshipfully as a leader. The Rust Pope wears rusty iron because they do too; and walks naked in rituals to show humility, understanding but also daring. This is a job that demands cunning, yes, but also performative leadership, and this is where you get to dust off all of your pre-Vatican-II tropes of priests with big jewelled hats and far too much incense. (Knowing what the Rust Brothers and Sisters of Heme get up to, maybe don’t breathe the incense too much if you don’t want to end up with extra limbs or nailed to a tree respectively.)

Talking of hats: Kartorda gets to wear two. His second head gets a smaller one as well, like how on a good day the horse on Glasgow’s statue of Wellington gets a traffic cone of its own.

And note that a Kartorda who’s a big religious Pope guy is going to be really tempted by Stanengist, the World Crown, aka the Best Hat Of All.

The campaign says (also p. 48) that Kartorda has Path of Blood 3 and Path of Death 3, i.e. he’s exactly as powerful magically as Zytera and Merigall in those disciplines, which seems unlikely. If you trust his skills instead, it’s worth noting that having Lore, Insight and Manipulation is compatible with both him being a Sorcerer and him being a Minstrel. And what’s one of the Profession Talents of Minstrels? The Path of the Hymn.

Let’s talk about Kartorda’s second head now

Grandmaster Manderel (ibid., p. 191) glories in demonic mutation: he has two extra arms, an eye in the back of his neck that lets him spot people sneaking up on him, and he has magical silver veins in his face that dispel spells cast on him. It says that he “is capable of wielding magic”; the stat block doesn’t bear that out (it also gives him the fighter’s Path of the Blade), but only one of his skills is a Fighter skill, and his skills are a better match for a Sorcerer. Drop his Strength to 4 because Forbidden Lands authors can’t count, and sub out Path of the Blade 3 for Path of the Blood 2 and Path of Death 2, and you’ve got a combat wizard like an evil Gandalf. That makes sense.

Meanwhile, Kartorda, the Rust Pope, who regularly preaches to all the Rust Brothers and Sisters of Heme that they’re right to have all sorts of weird demonic stuff grafted to them, has… exactly one mostly-non-functional extra body part? This feels like Kartorda doesn’t trust Zytera and his sorcerous ways, and is trying to get away with the minimum amount of misgrowth politically possible.

He might be right, of course. Kartorda can’t have been the first Rust Pope with a mystical extra head, after all; the symbolic impact of linking him with Zytera is obvious and a practice that Zytera must have instituted soon after the third schism. But if you live in a society where there are spies everywhere and you distrust Zytera’s sorcerous arts, maybe you’ll start to wonder whether your extra head is listening in on everything you say, hear and maybe even think, and blabs to Therania when you’re asleep.

“Kartorda’s rather slack extra face has, however, suffered a blood clot and drools down the collar of the Rust Prince, something that he strongly dislikes.” (ibid. p. 48). Uh-huh. Interesting passive voice you’ve got there. What happened to his extra face, and why has nobody fixed it?

The simplest answer is that Kartorda didn’t come to power in a smooth transition: rather than there being a new Rust Pope every 10-20 years, a combination of factors (congenital health problems, diseases, assassinations) meant that there were a number of unusually-short-lived Rust Popes in rapid succession before Kartorda took over. If Kartorda was in his 30s or 40s when he ascended to the Rust Cathedra, then maybe Zytera didn’t have a ripe face to graft onto him, so had to hurry, and botched the transplant.

(I like to think that there’s a slightly-mobile demon with a bunch of Zytera faces growing on it, each in different stages of ripeness, like an icky version of a brussels sprout plant crossed with a hatstand. You can find it in Vond somewhere, quietly eeping. Don’t ask what the servants feed it.)

A related and complementary answer is that Kartorda decided to sabotage his extra face recently: maybe by piercing its eardrums, cutting its vocal chords and/or amputating its tongue. (Blinding it would be too obvious, although that could be explained by “Kartorda’s mystical head doesn’t see in the mundane world, you fools”.)

If Kartorda’s second head rarely speaks, then the times when it does say something should be especially interesting. Do people consider it to be the voice of an oracle, even when it’s apparently speaking gibberish? (Consider the contortions people go through to give Nostradamus’s prophecies relevance to modern-day events.)

What’s with the term “misgrown” anyway?

Talking of misgrowth: that seems like a pretty bad name to use to refer to the heroic Rust Brothers with extra limbs etc.!

Some members of the Rust Church might be happy at being called a bad name (it’s a bad-guy church, after all), and glory in being evil. Those sound like pretty nasty people to me, but Zytera does make a point of hiring psychopaths, so it makes a certain degree of sense. Others might decide that they’ve made a noble sacrifice to protect the innocent villagers, and accept the designation in sadness and pride. These are likely to be the more patrician types, probably from traditionalist backgrounds, and now that the villagers don’t particularly need protection from the dangers of the blood mist they might be having second thoughts.

But that explains why you’d use the term amongst yourselves, like African-Americans can use the N word; it doesn’t explain why you’d accept other people from referring to you as that.

Many a Rust Pope has probably encouraged this from time to time as a way of creating esprit de corps among their troops: it’s easier to make people band together against a common foe (the common people they’re in charge of protecting / policing / thwarting) if those people are calling them a nasty name. “They call us misgrown? We’ll show them!”

And it’s useful as a way of gauging opinions and tendencies towards rebellion among the populace: anyone who mutters “misgrown” under their breath, let alone shouts it defiantly at the troops patrolling the villages, is someone worth paying attention to: have them followed maybe, find out who their friends are and lean on them, or of course just dismember them and stick their limbs on someone else, or nail them to a tree.

But Kartorda potentially has another, riskier reason of encouraging the term. It’s because he’s very carefully undermining his own power base.

Kartorda is planning a coup

If Kartorda has power, charisma, and isn’t ready to hang up his hats and retire, then maybe he’s got his eyes on a bigger prize?

Kartorda seeks a power base of his own

The thing about being the number 2 is that you are very aware that your position is constantly at risk. That’s the point of having two people ostensibly in charge: that you can make the junior person do terrible things to people, then say “my word, I had no idea anything this bad was happening”, fire or execute them dramatically, and now everything that you secretly demanded that they do is forgiven. This is Beast Rabban in Dune, and before him Ramiro d’Orco according to Macchiavelli’s The Prince Chapter 7.

But if you’ve been Rust Pope for 30 years now, and you’ve played the game well enough that you’ve got allies all over the place, then maybe you’ve also been planning a religious coup.

Look at the legend about Kartorda (ibid., p. 48): “Some whisper that the Rust [Pope] is the old god Guard incarnate – the all-seeing guardian of all change, of all that comes and goes, the guide for travel between sleep and waking, between life and death. It is through the agency of Kartorda that the dead are said to live on, and the Rust Brothers have become something between humans and demons.”

There’s no reason to believe that this is true, of course. Kartorda can’t do any of this stuff. It also bears no resemblance to anything else in the theology of the Rust Church. But why is it said (another passive voice alert) that he can do this? Who is spreading stories like this?

Kartorda knows that the Rust Church’s position is untenable

The most obvious answer is the simplest: the person promoting a story that speaks well of Kartorda is Kartorda himself, and a few carefully-chosen agents.

Because now that the Rust Brothers no longer have their monopoly of being able to travel longish distances, now that the populace isn’t locked up at night in their villages but is spreading in an uncontrollable manner over all of Harga and beyond, an increasing number of humans are asking “why should you rule over us, anyway?” and “aren’t you guys, you know, pretty evil?”

In a situation like this, you cannot afford to be a blatantly evil bad-guy church any longer. If you can’t be assured of winning a fight, you can no longer rely on brute force and coercion. Now you need to persuade people to follow you.

So you encourage people to think about how frankly nuts most of the Rust Brothers with extra body parts actually are, and rehearse phrases like “we thank the misgrown Rust Brothers for all the sacrifices they made during the blood mist; but it is now time for a new church”.

“Guard” totally sounds like a traditional Ravenlands God, like Flow, Wail or Huge; and certainly the Rust Brothers have been doing weird stuff with the dead for centuries now. So maybe if you just concentrate on that, dialing down the demon stuff, and focus on promising vague stuff like maybe your followers will live for ever after they die; modestly deny the rumours (that your friends have been spreading) that you somehow are the god Guard, but imply that you have a special connection with Him? Well, that’s the sort of thing that could lead to you still having a significant position of power after Zytera’s régime is overthrown.

Who’s thwarting / helping Kartorda?

At the beginning of the campaign, the answer is clear: restless, impatient and curious humans all over Harga are bothering him, especially if they’ve been talking to Virelda recently. Zytera continues to offer institutional support (i.e. “keep on doing what I told you to and I’ll back you”), although Therania may have an inkling that Kartorda is up to something. Krasylla and Merigall are unlikely to be paying much attention to him: he’s a known commodity, the number two, uninteresting.

As it becomes increasingly impossible to keep a lid on change in Harga, because either humans are just being irrepressibly human or Virelda and/or the PCs are encouraging guerrilla acts of rebellion, the subtler thinkers will start wondering whether the position of the Rust Church in Harga is tenable any more. This probably doesn’t include Zygofer, who’s frustrated that their demonic research isn’t bearing fruits and overly busy trying to be diplomatic, but it will include Therania, who definitely has heard some strange rumours from Haggler’s House. Merigall normally enjoys all sorts of chaos and disruption, but will be at least slightly careful, because they don’t want to bring down Zytera’s rule before they’ve got their life essence back. Krasylla’s concerns are mostly that a mob doesn’t swarm Vond before she’s become sarmog, so will cautiously encourage a kind of palace coup that focuses attention on human institutions and ignores exactly what she’s up to in the fortress built right next to the demon rift.

If it becomes apparent that Kartorda is becoming less enthusiastic about people having extra limbs etc. welded to them, his professional relationship with Manderel will at the very least begin to turn sour.

Further afield, Zertorme will be at least intrigued by anything that diminishes the political power of his father. He also shares with Kartorda a desire to wear Stanengist, and a lack of awareness of how bad that would be for him. Maybe if he realises this he can use that as a bonding / negotiating experience?

As for Arvia: obviously you shouldn’t try to raise dwarves from the dead because that will mess with their resurrection, but she has no real objection to messing with dead humans, and if Kartorda decides that he’s going to declare himself free of Zytera and Krasylla, and has no immediate interest in protecting Vond, well, that’s all the invitation Arvia wanted. If Kartorda provides some troops to aid the attack (or withholds the troops that Zytera was counting on him providing towards the defence of the fortress), this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

What’s more intriguing is Kartorda’s relationship with Virelda. In her write-up, I posited that some people in positions of power or influence might be looking for a middle ground between maintaining Zytera’s increasingly untenable rule and it all coming crashing down in a violent revolution. This sounds awfully like Kartorda’s plan to remake himself as a kinder, gentler Pope. Are these establishment conservatives cynically backing both candidates, or are they genuinely divided into two factions? What do Kartorda and Virelda think of the idea of being the money men’s puppet candidate?