House Mortren

## Aspects

* Situational Aspect: Builders, Craftsmen, Priests
* Situational Aspect: All according to the Plan
* Situational Aspect: All roads lead to House Mortren.

## Overview

The House of the Architect is known as much by that name as their more official collective title of House Mortren. The peculiar 'nickname' arising from the predominate faith within it's elite and housesworn, the Cult of the Architect. A strange faith that seems to draw certainty from the notion that all is preordained according to the meticulous plans and designs of the Architect, a deity, or divine collective, that is claimed to exist in the places between Heaven, Hell and the Demonic Abysses. It comes as little surprise then that so many of the brightest minds of this Great House then are drawn to the essential and detail oriented sciences such as logistics, engineering, alchemy, and such sundry exercises of the mind to predict and mitigate what an ironically uncertain future holds. Their even hand can be felt throughout Sundevalda's eclectic and diverse domains and environs as a consequence... As it's their mind and will that trade flow along ordered paths and between ordered cities like blood in the vein of a healthy body. Their very identity stamped into the stones of countless roadhouses, bulwarks, fastnesses, entrapments and structures of both brutish and elegant design.

It is perhaps the most interesting quirk of House Mortren then that for all their belief in the unerring plans of the Architect, they still believe that there is need, from time to time, for corrective action. After all, there are many beings that act outside the weave of fate and for each step or action they take, the Grand Design must be corrected to account for it. It is this core tenet of their faith then that informs the heart of their Craft. How they achieve as they do has never been determined but when the need arises House Mortren has always found no shortage of champions. Each seeming empowered or pre-ordained to deliver the final censure and will of the Architect to those, mortal or otherwise, who might endanger or deviate from the Grand Design.

## History

Whilst House Mortren played no part in the first founding of Yosthaven and the nation of Sundevalda, they remain one of the first and greatest of the Great Houses that rule over what has come to be. Yet they have always been the tolerated outsider, influential and powerful in their way but distinctly foreign in their origin and ways. Their grip upon trade and the trades persistent from their earliest days of when they first arrived a single year past the setting for the first corner stones of what would grow to be Yosthaven. Their numbers no more than a single legion of men and women clad in armor of forged black metal and replete in weapons of similar, utilitarian make yet burdened further by the tools of seemingly every trade and profession that might be known to a learned man from one coast to the next and in their midst traders, mercenaries, and immigrants to bring blood and life to a city newly formed. At their head a small cadre of craft-folk blessed by the inscrutable divinity of their ancient cult and guided by the Grand Design... and in their shadow long stretches of carefully laid highway and road promising that yet more wealth might find it's way to the coffers and homes.

It was by the shrewd vision and careful hand of Edrin Mortren that they would came, as a whole, to be accepted into the covenant of Yosthaven's great Houses. Since those days in the not so distant past, the Houses fortune's have ebbed and flowed yet always it's power and hold upon the lifeblood of trade has remained constant. Every move and action seeming conducted after lengthy research and consideration with an ever worrying hint of greater foresight than man or woman might rightly claim in the face of the capriciousness of the Dance of Houses and Nations beyond. In the years since, it has come to be known that while others may do and build as readily as House Mortren... There are precious few with the vision and seeming understanding to match the careful orchestrations and plans of the Architects, their prize seeming always to be the eventual fruition of their every design in the sprawling mass of the City.

## Domain

The House of the Architect has long laid claim to the sprawling, disordered chaos of the Open Market. Their every work demanding the constant flow of Craft and Material as they enact the plans of wills both mortal and divine. So they have paid for their iron grasp upon the Merchant Quarter in both blood and craft with precious few forgetting the terrible wrath that might issue forth from within the unknown heart of the Chapter House that rises at the heart of the district. Their influence felt among the varied merchants, comers, and goers of the markets by the roads they maintain, by the permits that must be issued, and by the careful audits that must be provided and accredited to those bound to the House and it's lesser way-stations that spread out throughout the district. From each of these, like clockwork, emerge seemingly endless patrols of house guard in the green and gold of House Mortren and led in kind by the more martial and oft lesser of the Housebound of their order and faith. Their presence a constant reminder of the peace of law enforced upon the Merchant Quarter and an unsubtle reminder of other eyes and precautions worked into the very stone and wood of the district.

## Housebound

**Principle Architect Alegra Mortren**

The death of Principle Architect Thomasin Mortren was not unexpected but it proved to be sooner than initial interpretations of the Grand Design had suggested. It is into this moment of turmoil that Alegra Mortren has come to the fore. A young woman by any stretch of the imagination, she lacks the typical airs of the wise matriarch or patriarch that has always seemed to be the face of the office of the Principle Architect. That contrasts of youth and passion without the physical evidence of experience and wisdom has stirred up whispers and rumours within the hollowed Halls of the Architect. Those same whispers only deepened by the progressive inclinations she has shown in her policies and edicts as she leads House Mortren into the near certain future. Any who have dared to act or conspire against her, however, have learned well and truly of her reputation for wicked ingenuity that was forged in her brief time as the Fabricator General of the work houses hidden within the depths of House Mortrens' alien but ordered sanctums.

**Arbiter Devrin Jatik**

Arbiter Jatik is not a man to be envied. They speak of glorious purpose and the Grand Design but rarely speak of how heavy it can weigh on the body and soul when one is endowed with the fullest breadth of it's scope and power as known to House Mortren. This knowledge alone seems to explain so much about Arbiter Jatik as the man appears as nothing more than a long suffering bureaucrat who is held at the whims of things beyond his paygrade. Yet there is a constant, nagging gravity around the man that makes it impossible to dismiss him as even in so diminished a state as he seems to be, he remains one of the most fearsome champions of the Grand Design to be found within House Mortren. His rod, blade, wit, and uncanny luck all serving as the lynch pin to the unraveling of a plot from beyond the city walls to smuggle tainted craft-wares to weaken the Houses grasp upon their own domain and narrowly averting yet more misfortune upon the shoulders of Sundevalda and it's principle city. That such was done with such care as to delicately adjust the balances of politics within the city has remained an ever present topic of gossip and discussion as wealth and craft continue to pass through the markets preserved and maintained by the Cult of the Architect.

**Oathsworn Amalda**