Vritra¶
[!quote] "I have seen what mercy grows into. I will not water it again."
War-leader of the Mara fleet that comes for Nandana — the antagonist commander of Acts 2 and 3. Named for the old serpent that hoarded the world's waters until it was struck down; a fitting name for one who would deny humanity a whole world.
Dossier¶
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Allegiance | The Mara |
| Role | War-leader / high commander of the siege of Nandana |
| Arrives | Act 2, by fleet |
| Status | Alive; commands from the flagship above the colony |
Want & wound¶
- Want: to scour every new Progenitor seed from the holy world, so the makers can never regrow through their children.
- Wound: Vritra remembers being made — the specific indignity of having been designed for a purpose. That memory is the engine of the crusade; it is also a grief that no victory closes.
The tragic antagonist¶
Vritra is not a monster and should never read as one. Vritra is what humanity might become — if the two peoples share a maker at all, which not even Vritra truly knows. A created being who looked its own makers in the eye, named them slavers, and paid any price to be free of them, Vritra offers the strongest testimony that the Progenitors were monsters — about the Mara's own making, Vritra was there. Whether a word of it applies to humanity, Vritra only presumes. The horror is that to save the colony, the player may have to kill the one witness who remembers the makers at all.
Give the devil the best lines
Vritra's broadcasts are where the game makes its hardest case against the makers — and, by extension, against humanity's comfortable story of itself. Write them to be persuasive, not villainous. A player who never once doubts their own side means the character has failed.