The Icons of Arduin, Blessed Arduin

On the nights I GM, I’ve been running a wild dungeon-crawl centered 13th Age game that attempts to live up to Hargrave’s eclectic grimoires. The players and I started the campaign by inventing our current Arduinian icons, the organizations or archetypes that shape the world and give the 1st level characters a stake in its major conflicts.

Jonathan’s Arduin mastery helped guide a couple of the new icons, as well as the name of the campaign, since I hadn’t realized that ‘blessed’ started out meaning ‘sanctified by being splattered with blood.' As you’ll see from the icon roster, this isn’t a campaign full of heroes, more like a game of agents.

Guild of Mundane Omniscience, aka The Deep State: Gnome engineers and sages who claim that they’re the ones who keep Arduin and its capital Talismonde running smoothly. “There is no record of the Guild ever subverting a client.” Represented in the adventuring party by Olvin, a gnome “combat optimizer,” a clever non-musical reskin of the new 2E bard. Olvin is the only left-handed gnome in the world, which started as important when the party started their adventures in a mirror dungeon and could track which type of reality they were in (Inception-style) by checking Olvin’s handedness.

Old Talismonde: Decadent gothic clan, powerful but frayed thin, hanging on to some of their original power via dark secrets. Represented in the adventuring party by Jonathan’s ”magic-user”, Yenzdillian, whose One Unique Thing is that he is the only magic-user in Old Talismonde to have a pseudodragon familiar, giving Jonathan a chance to talk in one of his funny voices.

The Jester: A forgeborn wizard, an optimistic nihilist. Represented in the adventuring party by Seren, a cleric who is the only forgeborn “who is cool.” Cool, you say? This forgeborn is the only forgeborn who can get high. He (as he presents) is a full-on gleaming robot with multiple augmentations that either get him high or function like what other creatures would call ‘spells.’

The Jade Queen: Insectile druid who created phraints to give humans and elves and dwarves someone from her camp that the humanoid kin could relate to; alien but not an enemy. Pure neutral. The Jade Queen doesn’t figure as any ally in the lives of the adventurers so I’ve made frequent use of phraints and other bugs as agents of the (evil?) mirror version of the next iconic organization.

Multiversal Trading Company: One of the original Arduinian orgs! Several of the heroes/agents have connections with MTC. One of the players wrote, “The kind of capitalists that Ayn Rand imagined, only they’re real.” It’s now clear that a rival multiverse’s version of MTC is attacking through the mirror dungeon, so MTC is accumulating obligations to the mostly successful heroes. I guess that’s what it looks like to the heroes, anyway.

Brother Harrow/Hero: We originally saw Brother Harrow as the mighty arm of righteous vengeance, with the end largely justifying the means. But that’s not how the player who chose the icon saw the icon, so Brother Harrow has pretty much become Brother Hero, and is definitely the closest thing we have to an icon who aims at the good. Represented in the adventuring party by Jatka, a melee ranger who is the Perfect Hobbit. Picture Michelangelo’s David but Hobbitish, perfectly formed and maybe an inch or two shorter than people who think they’re tall.

Luc-Jourez, the Death Master: Vampires! Fashion! Well-dressed cultists! A trend setter for the young and callow. Jonathan’s Yenzdillian has a conflicted relationship with the death cults because of course he does. So far Luc Jourez followers have only shown up long enough to propose a couple small deals that haven’t cost the heroes anything and seriously don’t appear to have any bad consequences. Huh.

The Lector: An ancient, living, powerful tome of demonology and black magic. It finds mortals to temporarily become its “body”, the great demon known as the Lector. Sadly for Arduin, this chaotic evil demon power is growing stronger after the destruction of the Codex of the Great Gold Wyrm.

Sita Rutu Karu Tuleb

That’s one of two Estonian phrases my father taught me in the last few years of his life. He’d been weirdly reinvigorated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tracing the early war news in Estonian and German. Sita rutu karu tuleb functioned as commentary on that invasion: “Shit faster, the bear is coming.”

For Estonians, like those in Ukraine, the bear is Russia.

With the United State throwing its weight around near Venezuela, Putin’s Russia couldn’t be happier. Russia would like the freedom to take whatever/whenever from its neighbors, all of whom it defines as part of its once and future hegemony. The USA, European Union, and NATO have been in Russia’s way, but Trump has accompanied the attack on Venezuela with movement toward Greenland that could bum-rush the US out of NATO. Trump seems to want the US out of NATO as much as Putin wants that, which should be weird for an American president but if you wait long enough and ignore the head-fakes where he talks like he’s standing up to Russia, Trump tends to provide what Putin wants.

Meanwhile in Minnesota we’re seeing what happens when a government classifies people who protest its policies as domestic terrorists. It's always a bad thing when your government lies to you. When it lies that protesters are domestic terrorists, it sets those protesters up to be killed.

Our bear is here, decimating FEMA, promoting racists, weaponizing the law, sending troops into cities that vote for the opposition, and glorifying the age of robber barons by mandating that the EPA will only consider pollution’s costs to industry instead of its costs to human health.

My father’s other favorite phrase was ole tubli. It looks silly in English, but translates as fare forward bravely. We’re gonna need that.

[[and thanks to Rich Longmore for the snippet of bear borrowed from 13th Age]]