It's a rhetorical question. It's something that came up in my ICON game last Thursday. My players have finally located the bottom of the arkenruin beneath a pumphouse facility and a kelpie-stalked cave. With them were two NPCs who had also come along looking for the depths of the dungeon.
At the bottom of the Arkenruin is a massive Cistern. The players entered the Cistern by opening a valve by turning a massive wheel at the bottom of a strange Pumphouse that lay at the bottom of a lake named Bluehole. Here at the bottom, they stepped out of a pipe and into a cistern, with two story high pillars and a soft blue glow of Dust. And Air, as the water that had been flooding the caverns they explored last session rushed to fill a cistern. Where had the water gone?
There is a sheer drop, ten stories down, like a square-cut cliff into a massive cistern. It is now full. A stone walkway bisects this grander cistern and leads to an Arken shrine. The shrine itself is the base of a massive pillar that extends high up into the dark of an out of sight ceiling. It's very "Jacob Geller doesn't talk about this stuff anymore but I still do."
Ah the two NPCs. So, I the GM introduce them as Lowlanders from the ICON Faction Lowlander, but these two actually introduce themselves as Envoys. There is the Larger Mazo-an who wears a kind of bioshock big daddy suit made of Wicker (and/or Rattan?), and the slighter Jiji-ki who I took the Lowlander Apiarist art for. They're equipped to move underwater and survive in environments with high concentrations of Blight (a kind of magical curse-plague emanating from Arkenruins in the surrounding landscape). The Envoys are here on missive from their leader, a Ruinspeaker named Ba-Aliba. They are here to sabotage a piece of Arkentech so that the Imperials cannot take it.
It's when the players descend that ten-story staircase to the walkway that gives access to the Shrine that this actually matters. Jiji-ki steps ahead of them and turns to face them. Mazo-an begrudgingly allows Jiji-ki to use diplomacy. The player characters are told that as people who are clearly adventurers, it is blasphemous for them to enter the Shrine.
What followed was a big picture explanation of the Lowlander faction in ICON: People who live in the blightlands, having been exiled, ousted, or tragically framed. They form loose clans and try to survive in the blightlands and engage with Ruin Beasts, giant insects, and Demons more than other people in Arden Eld do. Monthly events for Lowlanders might be a once in a decade crisis for someone of the Great Six Cultures of Arden Eld. And yet, the Blight these people live in also serves as a defensive barrier that enables them to raid villages and caravans from a safe position. These exiles return to society to take what they have been excluded from.
And in this game, they now they hold the Arkenruins to be most sacred. Not to be raided or stolen from. They have claimed them as symbol of society and symbol only. There is no material or historical analysis being made. The Arkenruins are like a commodity fetish in this way, and the Envoys are producing a layer of projected symbology over the Arkenruins because they are making meaning. There is not questioning of how the Arkenruins came to be, or what these strange Relict are doing inside.
So, the players are mulling over this tricky roleplay premise. How do you negotiate access to the shrine? They ask some questions and then Jiji-Ki presents one for the players. "Why are you here? What do you seek?"
Thank god ICON had me ask these questions when they first entered the Dungeon. I threw up their original answers in the discord channel and they gave Jiji-Ki the rundown. The players wanted to slay the demon nesting in the shrine and do something to convince the Imperials to pull their attention away from both this Arkenruin and the nearby village of Sutea. Jiji-Ki couldn't give less of a shit about the Demon, which really rankles our career Demonslayer who has lived in the pipe-depths of Tornstadt working to stop daily demon incursions. Jiji-Ki also shares that he had a dream that he would come here to stop and adversary, protected by scores of people praying under a mechanical arm that swung a massive thurible emitting dust. This was a vision of the apparatus that protects Bantia of the Guild of Saints.
It's a standstill, until Mazo-an produces something from a pocket and begins thumbing something from a gloved fist into an open palm. It's too dark to see what is being moved around. "Jiji-Ki, they could take the oath."
"Do not take dust or arkentech from the Arkenruin. Do not disturb those who live in the Arkenruin. That is the basic premise of the oath. Agree to that and we would permit you to enter."
And my players haven't stopped talking about how cool that was since thursday! I shouldn't need to go over what the popular mode of "dungeon engagement" is in ttrpgs, or that often a dungeon is just an aesthetic backdrop to whoever owns or controls it, but I have really enjoyed taking an approach to ICON where a faction must be actively trying to exert power over these Arkenruins that the game revolves around.
