i'm obsessing over this screengrab I took of Orym mid-Ludinus speech (and seconds before Imogen shoves the lava on him).

like, look how fucking angry he is. that's the face of a man who is seeing the murderer of his family for the first time up close and personal and is personally plotting exactly how he's going to gut him.

can someone with better art skills than me please redraw this as Orym, I need angry halfling in my life so fucking badly.

Orym is the president of the "I hate Ludinus' guts and I want to spill them on the floor" fan club.

Since multiple people have pointed out that Moppo looks like Ludinus, I propose that we start a new meme format

ludinus would be one of those dudes in the "am i the asshole" subreddit with a title that sounds like a really obviously benign thing but then you open it and it's the most batshit insane thing you've ever read.

When the "protégé" of the wizard you kicked out of your exclusive club decades ago successfully counterspells your 9th level spell.

extremely enamored with the image of ludinus in aeor trying to figure out where the fuck all of the ancient technology he was relying on disappeared to, followed by a smash cut to essek in a cozy demiplane, wrapped in a handmade sweater and casually labeling all the artifacts from his third aeorian honeymoon with caleb

Ludinus Da'leth: Ah Yes! I've completed centuries of machinations and now I've made it to the moon!

Creepy lake portal to the moon:

I love that Ludinus fully does not obfuscate the fact that he's pretty chill with the Volstrucker program and kind of does imply the usefulness of the program for him, but he still thinks Trent sucks. He said "I can excuse the systemic torture and brainwashing of children into child soldiers and assassins, but I draw the line at pretending Trent is bearable to be around."

👎🍅

Genuinely it is so funny that Ludinus could have retained Ira's services (and avoided his revenge) if he'd just paid his contractor and not stolen his designs. Ira is a chaotic fey who was originally helping and had no issue with the purpose of the work freeing Predathos, he literally just wanted credit and payment. Ira is on the force of the Resistance purely out of vicious pettiness.

Orym's argument against Ludinus Da'leth and the Ruby Vanguard is essentially "The purpose of a system is what it does."

This is a systems theory coined by Stafford Beer around 2001. He posited there is "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do." It does not matter what someone tells you a system does if it does not reliably do that. The things it does consistently do are the actual purpose of the system.

Ludinus (and Liliana) claim the purpose of the Ruby Vanguard's violence is to free Exandria of oppression from the gods. Orym's point is that they have not consistently protected anyone from oppression. They consistently murder innocent people, indoctrinate vulnerable people into doing terrible violence (including children), support a ruling class that dominates the population through mind control and eugenics, and seek to release a predator so terrifying that the warring alien gods and native primordials worked together to seal it away as a threat to both of them.

So the logical conclusion is that the purpose of Ludinus' system is not to free anyone from tyranny, it's to install himself as the tyrant. And it does not matter what Ludinus says it's for or even what he believes it's for. The purpose of a system is what it does. And Orym has been personally and repeatedly victimized by what it does. Why wouldn't he keep reminding them of that?

Add onto that, the Ruby Vanguard is a death cult. They lure people in with believable lies. They use propaganda to control how people view them and to convince people to support them. Liliana has been groomed into a true believer who genuinely thinks what she has been told is true and that Ludinus' system does what he says it will. She has been convincing other people of this for years. Not because she's an inherently bad person but because everyone generally tries to convince others that what we believe is true. It is actually dangerous to let a cultist try to talk you into the cult's perspective. That's why Orym shuts it down.

Orym was already on edge but it's fully in a breakdown after FCG's sacrifice. One more iteration of Ludinus' system consistently murdering the people he loves. But he still told Imogen he wants her to have a good relationship with her mom again. He wants Liliana to make it through the other side of this. But that has to involve consistently stating the reality of what's happening against what she believes.

Ludinus believes in the rapture of the revolution. Burn everything to the ground on a fundamental level and a new perfect society will grow, with him to guide it. The reality is that kind of power vacuum consistently leads to horrific violence and conditions often get much, much worse. Especially for vulnerable people, who often do not survive. A lot about the gods' relationships to mortals probably needs to change, but this an incredibly dangerous gamble to fix it.

The purpose of a system is what it does. Any suggestion otherwise is cold comfort to Orym's family in the ground.

I think it’s really funny how clear Ludinus and the Vanguard’s bullshit becomes on Ruidius. The whole “our goal is to free mortals from the oppressive system of the gods” was already less than flimsy on Exandria, but then you get to Ruidius, where they seemingly have a pretty incredible amount of control, and wouldn’t you know it they’re happily enforcing a brand now oppressive power structure up there too. Not only that, but while the relationship Predathos has to the mortals who live under it is somewhat different from the one Exandrian mortals have to the Exandrian gods, it seems just as if not more controlling and oppressive. Predathos isn’t out here running a decentralized anarcho communist commune on the moon that bodes at all well for how it would run Exandria if it ate all the gods and was the only cosmically powerful entity left in charge. Ludinus and his gang are not looking for a way to pull Exandria out from under the oppressive boot of the gods, they just want to become the biggest boot.

A powerful elven mage who distrusted the religion of his home, railed against the religious leaders, locking himself away in his towers while he grew more powerful and obsessed with researching relics, eschewing friends and thought odd and isolated.

Ludinus Da'leth, or Essek Thelyss?

the vibes were rancid <333

Laudna casts counterspell and saves them from a NINTH LEVEL SPELL

I just remembered Ludinus telling Caleb outright that Trent "has his uses", and with regard to the Scourger program, which Trent himself designed and pitched, "desperate requirements might call for unsavory methods."

And given that we know now that Ludinus has been singlemindedly focused on the current goals of the Ruby Vanguard for a lot longer than the program would've been in existence, I'm just imagining a timeline in which Caleb and Beau had not gotten the program shuttered in 836 PD, and that entire force of highly-conditioned, high level arcane assassins was simply at Ludinus's disposal.

“[…]A lot of it speaks of patterns of arcana across cultures, across time, across dates and you can see Exandrian calendar fragments. You can see notes on repetition and the shiftings of magic. You can see fonts of arcana and power that overlap with celestial events. There's a lot of noting where things continue to recur over long and short periods of time. […] With that, as you're doing this, you glance around and you can see there are other parts of this chamber where more of these notes are still somewhat present, haven't been taken entirely. So you begin to cut some of this away. You notice that in elements of these notes, it calls out historical specialists, people to reach out to in the world that might know this.”-Matt

Campaign 3 Episode 57: The Sorrow of Molaesmyr