Father Ignatius/Karl Bergfried (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
obscultator) wrote2017-01-31 10:33 pm
obscultator) wrote2017-01-31 10:33 pm
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PLAYER
YOUR NAME: Spinel
18 ?: Yeppers
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CHARACTERS IN GAME: Nopers
RESERVATION LINK: Rite hurr
YOUR NAME: Spinel
18 ?: Yeppers
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CHARACTERS IN GAME: Nopers
RESERVATION LINK: Rite hurr
CHARACTER: CANON SECTION
NAME: Karl Bergfried, more commonly known as Father Ignatius
AGE: About 24 as of his first appearance in canon, about 28 as of just before the big timeskip in The Given Sacrifice (and the latest memories I currently plan for him to regain,) and about 48 as of the most recently released book in the series.
CANON: The Emberverse book series by S. M. Stirling
NAME: Karl Bergfried, more commonly known as Father Ignatius
AGE: About 24 as of his first appearance in canon, about 28 as of just before the big timeskip in The Given Sacrifice (and the latest memories I currently plan for him to regain,) and about 48 as of the most recently released book in the series.
CANON: The Emberverse book series by S. M. Stirling
CANON HISTORY: Since the Emberverse wiki leaves much to be desired, I'll raise you his tiny blurb on the Actual Wikipedia and his (slightly more substantial) TVTropes character sheet (his is the first entry under "Other"), plus a short blurb of my own:
Ignatius was born Karl Bergfried in the Willamette Valley of Oregon shortly before the Change, a mysterious event which crippled all high-energy technology and caused a global collapse of civilization, ultimately splitting America into numerous of pre-modern and often pseudo-medieval successor states. Karl grew in the territory controlled by the Benedictine monks of Mount Angel Abbey on a farm owned by his parents. He went to the Abbey for school as a child, then became a novice in the Order and eventually a fully trained Knight-Brother and ordained priest.
At the outset of the story he was on a covert intelligence gathering mission for the Order that put him in Brannigan's Inn in Clan MacKenzie territory on the night of the thwarted assassination of a strange traveler from the east named Ingolf Vogler He helped to stabilize Ingolf after the fight, and then redirected his intel gathering to this matter. He discovered that the assassins were sent by the Church Universal and Triumphant, or "CUT," a bizarre cult-cum-nation based in rural Montana. It appeared that Ingolf had traveled to Oregon to relay some sort of supernatural message he had received on the distant island of Nantucket, the suspected original source of the Change, regarding the Clan chief's son Rudi MacKenzie. Knowing the legends surrounding the island and those about Rudi himself, Ignatius deduced that Rudi was likely to attempt a return journey to Nantucket with Ingolf.
After speaking with his superior Abbot-Bishop Dmwoski he was ordered to try and join this quest to keep the Church apprised on this matter, and he did so by intercepting the Princess Mathilda Arminger Rudi's childhood friend, when she left the valley to follow him. Along with Mathilda's knight-retainer Odard and his manservant Alex, Ignatius helped her to sneak away over the mountains before her disapproving mother, Queen Regent Sandra of the Portland Protective Association, realized she was gone. Once in central Oregon the four joined up with the rest of the "questers", which besides Rudi and Ingolf included Rudi's twin half-sisters Mary and Ritva, members of the so-called Dunedain Rangers, and Rudi's friend and fellow clansman Edain. It turned out that Ingolf's vision on Nantucket had been of an otherworldly sword like the one mentioned in several prophecies made by Rudi's high priestess mother, among others, the so-called "Sword of the Lady." Ignatius was initially skeptical of these stories, especially the more overtly pagan elements, but still the nine set off east together towards the Rockies.
After traveling through the wilderness with a friendly rancher's horse trading caravan and then with a group of New Deseret Mormons the party had saved from a bandit raid, the party entered the territory of the United States of Boise and thwarted yet another CUT assassination attempt, this time against Boise's own General-President Lawrence Thurston. The party stayed with the grateful Thurston and his family as Boise mobilized its troops to go to war with the CUT, but during the first battle a second, successful assassination was carried out against Thurston—by his eldest son, Martin, who it turned out was in league with the CUT. Most of the party, along with Thurston's younger son Fred, managed to escape with the help of an Air Force dirigible operator Ignatius had befriended in Boise, but Mathilda, Odard and Ignolf were betrayed by Alex and had to be saved by a night raid on the CUT camp. During the fight one of the Cutters appeared to become possessed and tried to choke Rudi to death, only releasing him when Ignatius and the rest of the party literally hacked his body to pieces.
Continuing their journey east the party encountered some of the same Mormons they had saved previously, who were now fighting a guerrilla war against the combined invading forces of the CUT and Boise. The party tried to help them liberate a New Deseret town from a CUT rancher levy, but the enemy suddenly received backup from a battalion of elite CUT troopers known as the Sword of the Prophet. While retreating into the Rockies Rudi was wounded by an arrow that been handled by one of the Prophet's "Adepts" and he fell gravely ill, forcing the party to stop and overwinter in a small Buddhist enclave in Wyoming. While there Ignatius experienced a visitation from what appeared to him to be the Virgin Mary, who told him to guard and aid the Princess Mathilda.
In spring the party left again for the east and encountered the deposed ranching heiress Virginia Kane, whose family connections to the local Lakota Chief Redleaf helped them to stay one step ahead of the pursuing CUT. By the summer the party arrived in the unimaginably prosperous and powerful Republic of Iowa but they were detained there by the State Police on the orders of Governor Heasleroad, who was the financier of the original salvaging expedition that resulted in Ingolf's encounter on Nantucket. He refused to let the party leave until Rudi brought back the caravan of treasures from Boston from where Ingolf had been forced to abandon it, somewhere in the wild lands just across the Mississippi. Rudi succeeded, while he was gone the CUT upset Iowa's delicate political balance and he returned to pitched battle in which he and Ignatius only barely stopped the preternatural Cutter Adept and his enthralled troops from destroying the highest levels of government. The governor's wife, now ruling as regent for their son, declared war on the CUT and the party continued up the Mississippi River towards the Republic of Richland.
During the whole course of their journey from the Willamette to Iowa the party had been receiving scattered news and rumors about the war going on back home in the west, where the CUT and Boise were trying to overrun the entire region. There had been talk both among the members of the party and among the actual people of the Valley and beyond about how the free realms would need a leader to bind them together and give them a purpose in order to win the war against the CUT, and about how Rudi coming home with his prophesied Sword would do just that. So on the way upriver Rudi's fellow questers, who altogether represented directly or indirectly a good chunk of the future governance of the pacific northwest, decided to preemptively hail him as High King of the lands which were now collectively calling themselves Montival
In the autumn the party arrived in Readstown in the Republic of Richland, allies of Iowa and incidentally Ingolf's homeland. With the help of Ingolf's brother the Sheriff (not to mention a nice big pile of Iowa gold) the party stocked and equipped themselves for a last overland push to the Atlantic on skis by way of Canada. Despite assaults from both the frigid winter weather and the surviving CUT soldiers and their savage allies the Bekwa, the party made it to Maine before Yule and discovered that the region was ruled by a Viking-like people called the Norrheimers. While helping a town of coastal Norrheimers fend off a group of Moorish corsairs, also under the direction of the remnant CUT force, Odard was mortally wounded and Ignatius gave him his last rites before he died.
The party set out on a captured Moorish ship towards Nantucket, and though they faced a last-minute attack by the other escaped ship they managed to make landfall on the otherworldly island. Ignatius held off the Cutter Adept while Rudi and Mathilda retrieved the sword, and as soon as Rudi laid hands on the Sword of the Lady all three of them received religious visions, Rudi's of the Threefold Goddess and Ignatius and Mathilda's both with Christian themes, and holy men and women of all sorts across the continent apparently felt some spiritual presence the moment the Sword was first drawn. The party returned to Norrheim just in time to fend off one last invasion by the CUT-backed Bekwa and then through the Norrheimers' help and Ignatius and Fred's ingenuity they devised a system to use the surviving railroad lines of the "Old Americans" to return to the west as quickly as possible.
As the party passed through they gathered and organized all the allies they had made throughout their travels, including the upper midwestern territories and the entire Lakota Tunwan as well the three friendly Canadian Republics whose rail lines they used on the way. They returned to Montival with great fanfare and Rudi and Mathilda, who had turned from friends to lovers over the course of the journey, were finally married in both a Catholic ceremony officiated by Ignatius and a traditional Pagan one of the Clan MacKenzie.
From this point on Ignatius actually had little to do with the main narrative, though he played a very important supporting role as the new Chancellor of the Kingdom of Montival, organizing the establishment of the pseudo-federal governing machinery that will run this just-declared High Kingdom that had suddenly appeared out of thin air via fiat. However, he did participate in the ultimate field campaign against the heartlands of the Church Universal and Triumphant, and fought right alongside Rudi at the final battle atop the Temple of Corwin where Rudi finally killed the Church's Prophet using the Sword of the Lady, ending the otherworldly portion of their very earthly war.
CANON PERSONALITY:
I would like to begin this personality section by listing without comment a small subset of the many situations in which Ignatius did not lose one iota of his chill.
Being ordered to embark upon a 6000 mile round-trip on horseback across post-apocalyptic North America. Galloping flat out through a field of gopher holes and shortly thereafter being attacked by a pride of lions. Hiding from an all-powerful state police force by living in a whorehouse for a month. Witnessing a 30-something unrepentant diabolist get psychologically reverted to the age of five by a magic sword. Seeing the CN Tower for the first time after having lived his whole life in the architectural equivalent of the 15th century.
Ignatius is, in a word, a man with a lot of chill.
To be fair, we have no reason to believe that this isn't mostly out of natural inclination: even in a postapoc society built around a monastery, there've got to be plenty of other career paths open to a fit and clever young man from a respectable landowning family besides "celibate combat medic." But it is clear both the from descriptions we get of other monks of his Order and from his own occasional internal narration that a major part of his seemingly inexhaustible serenity is due to the discipline and deep charism he has been taught since adolescence as part of his training as a Knight-Brother.
One of the most important cornerstones of his personality is his strong Catholicism and his deep personal faith. He believes in God the same way he believes in gravity, and he knows that Jesus died for his sins the same way he knows that the sun rises in the east on cloudy mornings, and this was true long before the signs and visions he experienced in the course of the Quest. His beliefs are all the stronger for being firmly couched in a rigorous Thomistic philosophical framework supplemented by every scholarly and scientific innovation that the modern world up to March 1998 had to offer. He is more than intelligent enough to fold just about any strange or extraordinary experience into his own apparently-rigid understanding of the ultimate nature of reality. And no matter what, he always (quietly, politely) maintains that his own faith holds primacy and authority over all others, which can get downright annoying to his non-Catholic friends and acquaintances. (Ironically, Ignatius is one of the only characters whose metaphysical concept of the divine probably can't mesh with the all-myths-are-true schema revealed to the reader in the story, since it turns out to be basically incompatible with most of Aquinas's cosmological arguments for God, among others. Not that that'd stop him from trying to mesh it if he knew, mind you.)
That being said, however, he is still a perfectly human guy with plenty of perfectly human habits and quirks. He has his likes (dirigibles) and his dislikes (paperwork), and there are things that he's good at (campfire cooking) and things that he's not (preventing all his friends from converting to paganism.) He can keep his head in the midst of incredible diplomatic and personal tension, but every so often a brilliant pun can send him into a fit of laughter or a new engineering challenge can get him as animated as a kid on Christmas morning. He is one of the most kind and accepting people in the entire series, but he still gets detectably salty sometimes when his majority-pagan friend group gets a little too teasing or presumptive at his expense. He is profoundly self-denying and invincibly celibate, but he still appreciates a good beer and he can recognize a great pair of thighs on a woman when he sees 'em, even if he does immediately try to put them out of his mind.
Most importantly, perhaps, Ignatius's core motivation is to be a productive instrument of those to whom he has devoted his service, starting with God and the Church but extending all the way down to any earthly obligations he might take onto himself. He can will endure incredible personal discomfort, sometimes even when it seems unnecessary, for the sake of his faith and his duties, something which many other characters find kind of weird and borderline-sanctimonious. In fact, the most surefire way to talk him to do something he might not want to do is to convince him that it is his own personal cross to carry up to the gates of Heaven, an angle that's been used successfully on him at least twice.
SKILLS/ABILITIES:
Ignatius is a highly skilled fighter trained since at least his teens in both mounted and unmounted combat. With a shield and longsword he's comparable (though by no means equal) to some of the most skilled fighters in post-Change North America. He also participates in, and occasionally leads, heavy cavalry charges in full plate armor and he can competently shoot a bow from horseback.
He's also a very skilled field medic, able to clean, debride, and stitch open wounds in short order, and he knows exactly how to bandage or brace just about any non-fatal injury someone could get on a battlefield. He is also capable of performing minor-to-medium surgery of the sort to remove arrow fragments or torn cloth from deep within a wound track.
Ignatius has had a decent bit of training in ciphering and light espionage in his capacity as an occasional covert intelligence-gatherer for the Order. He can keep track of a running-key code in his head well enough to cipher into it at normal handwriting speed, and he knows several tricks for detecting and preventing the compromise of secure correspondence. He's also very good at being extremely unassuming and not drawing the eye.
The Order also trains many of its brothers in engineering for the purposes of their humanitarian missions to less-developed areas, where they help maintain rail lines, install well pumps, and, at need, even construct light artillery. Ignatius in particular has a thorough knowledge of (and personal interest in) large machine gearing.
Lastly, while the canon rarely spells it out, it's obvious that at least since his vision of the Virgin Mary he's had some measure of divine patronage and protection. In particular, he can fight toe-to-toe with enemies that function as living brown notes to most normal people in-universe. That said, we've seen greater or (usually) lesser forms of this resistance demonstrated by practically every major character in the series with a strong faith, including characters whose faith was literally and historically recently invented out of whole cloth (i.e. the Dunedain and their worship of the Valar , so this isn't necessarily a Christian-specific Thing in-universe, even if Ignatius himself tends to interpret it as such.
Ignatius was born Karl Bergfried in the Willamette Valley of Oregon shortly before the Change, a mysterious event which crippled all high-energy technology and caused a global collapse of civilization, ultimately splitting America into numerous of pre-modern and often pseudo-medieval successor states. Karl grew in the territory controlled by the Benedictine monks of Mount Angel Abbey on a farm owned by his parents. He went to the Abbey for school as a child, then became a novice in the Order and eventually a fully trained Knight-Brother and ordained priest.
At the outset of the story he was on a covert intelligence gathering mission for the Order that put him in Brannigan's Inn in Clan MacKenzie territory on the night of the thwarted assassination of a strange traveler from the east named Ingolf Vogler He helped to stabilize Ingolf after the fight, and then redirected his intel gathering to this matter. He discovered that the assassins were sent by the Church Universal and Triumphant, or "CUT," a bizarre cult-cum-nation based in rural Montana. It appeared that Ingolf had traveled to Oregon to relay some sort of supernatural message he had received on the distant island of Nantucket, the suspected original source of the Change, regarding the Clan chief's son Rudi MacKenzie. Knowing the legends surrounding the island and those about Rudi himself, Ignatius deduced that Rudi was likely to attempt a return journey to Nantucket with Ingolf.
After speaking with his superior Abbot-Bishop Dmwoski he was ordered to try and join this quest to keep the Church apprised on this matter, and he did so by intercepting the Princess Mathilda Arminger Rudi's childhood friend, when she left the valley to follow him. Along with Mathilda's knight-retainer Odard and his manservant Alex, Ignatius helped her to sneak away over the mountains before her disapproving mother, Queen Regent Sandra of the Portland Protective Association, realized she was gone. Once in central Oregon the four joined up with the rest of the "questers", which besides Rudi and Ingolf included Rudi's twin half-sisters Mary and Ritva, members of the so-called Dunedain Rangers, and Rudi's friend and fellow clansman Edain. It turned out that Ingolf's vision on Nantucket had been of an otherworldly sword like the one mentioned in several prophecies made by Rudi's high priestess mother, among others, the so-called "Sword of the Lady." Ignatius was initially skeptical of these stories, especially the more overtly pagan elements, but still the nine set off east together towards the Rockies.
After traveling through the wilderness with a friendly rancher's horse trading caravan and then with a group of New Deseret Mormons the party had saved from a bandit raid, the party entered the territory of the United States of Boise and thwarted yet another CUT assassination attempt, this time against Boise's own General-President Lawrence Thurston. The party stayed with the grateful Thurston and his family as Boise mobilized its troops to go to war with the CUT, but during the first battle a second, successful assassination was carried out against Thurston—by his eldest son, Martin, who it turned out was in league with the CUT. Most of the party, along with Thurston's younger son Fred, managed to escape with the help of an Air Force dirigible operator Ignatius had befriended in Boise, but Mathilda, Odard and Ignolf were betrayed by Alex and had to be saved by a night raid on the CUT camp. During the fight one of the Cutters appeared to become possessed and tried to choke Rudi to death, only releasing him when Ignatius and the rest of the party literally hacked his body to pieces.
Continuing their journey east the party encountered some of the same Mormons they had saved previously, who were now fighting a guerrilla war against the combined invading forces of the CUT and Boise. The party tried to help them liberate a New Deseret town from a CUT rancher levy, but the enemy suddenly received backup from a battalion of elite CUT troopers known as the Sword of the Prophet. While retreating into the Rockies Rudi was wounded by an arrow that been handled by one of the Prophet's "Adepts" and he fell gravely ill, forcing the party to stop and overwinter in a small Buddhist enclave in Wyoming. While there Ignatius experienced a visitation from what appeared to him to be the Virgin Mary, who told him to guard and aid the Princess Mathilda.
In spring the party left again for the east and encountered the deposed ranching heiress Virginia Kane, whose family connections to the local Lakota Chief Redleaf helped them to stay one step ahead of the pursuing CUT. By the summer the party arrived in the unimaginably prosperous and powerful Republic of Iowa but they were detained there by the State Police on the orders of Governor Heasleroad, who was the financier of the original salvaging expedition that resulted in Ingolf's encounter on Nantucket. He refused to let the party leave until Rudi brought back the caravan of treasures from Boston from where Ingolf had been forced to abandon it, somewhere in the wild lands just across the Mississippi. Rudi succeeded, while he was gone the CUT upset Iowa's delicate political balance and he returned to pitched battle in which he and Ignatius only barely stopped the preternatural Cutter Adept and his enthralled troops from destroying the highest levels of government. The governor's wife, now ruling as regent for their son, declared war on the CUT and the party continued up the Mississippi River towards the Republic of Richland.
During the whole course of their journey from the Willamette to Iowa the party had been receiving scattered news and rumors about the war going on back home in the west, where the CUT and Boise were trying to overrun the entire region. There had been talk both among the members of the party and among the actual people of the Valley and beyond about how the free realms would need a leader to bind them together and give them a purpose in order to win the war against the CUT, and about how Rudi coming home with his prophesied Sword would do just that. So on the way upriver Rudi's fellow questers, who altogether represented directly or indirectly a good chunk of the future governance of the pacific northwest, decided to preemptively hail him as High King of the lands which were now collectively calling themselves Montival
In the autumn the party arrived in Readstown in the Republic of Richland, allies of Iowa and incidentally Ingolf's homeland. With the help of Ingolf's brother the Sheriff (not to mention a nice big pile of Iowa gold) the party stocked and equipped themselves for a last overland push to the Atlantic on skis by way of Canada. Despite assaults from both the frigid winter weather and the surviving CUT soldiers and their savage allies the Bekwa, the party made it to Maine before Yule and discovered that the region was ruled by a Viking-like people called the Norrheimers. While helping a town of coastal Norrheimers fend off a group of Moorish corsairs, also under the direction of the remnant CUT force, Odard was mortally wounded and Ignatius gave him his last rites before he died.
The party set out on a captured Moorish ship towards Nantucket, and though they faced a last-minute attack by the other escaped ship they managed to make landfall on the otherworldly island. Ignatius held off the Cutter Adept while Rudi and Mathilda retrieved the sword, and as soon as Rudi laid hands on the Sword of the Lady all three of them received religious visions, Rudi's of the Threefold Goddess and Ignatius and Mathilda's both with Christian themes, and holy men and women of all sorts across the continent apparently felt some spiritual presence the moment the Sword was first drawn. The party returned to Norrheim just in time to fend off one last invasion by the CUT-backed Bekwa and then through the Norrheimers' help and Ignatius and Fred's ingenuity they devised a system to use the surviving railroad lines of the "Old Americans" to return to the west as quickly as possible.
As the party passed through they gathered and organized all the allies they had made throughout their travels, including the upper midwestern territories and the entire Lakota Tunwan as well the three friendly Canadian Republics whose rail lines they used on the way. They returned to Montival with great fanfare and Rudi and Mathilda, who had turned from friends to lovers over the course of the journey, were finally married in both a Catholic ceremony officiated by Ignatius and a traditional Pagan one of the Clan MacKenzie.
From this point on Ignatius actually had little to do with the main narrative, though he played a very important supporting role as the new Chancellor of the Kingdom of Montival, organizing the establishment of the pseudo-federal governing machinery that will run this just-declared High Kingdom that had suddenly appeared out of thin air via fiat. However, he did participate in the ultimate field campaign against the heartlands of the Church Universal and Triumphant, and fought right alongside Rudi at the final battle atop the Temple of Corwin where Rudi finally killed the Church's Prophet using the Sword of the Lady, ending the otherworldly portion of their very earthly war.
CANON PERSONALITY:
I would like to begin this personality section by listing without comment a small subset of the many situations in which Ignatius did not lose one iota of his chill.
Being ordered to embark upon a 6000 mile round-trip on horseback across post-apocalyptic North America. Galloping flat out through a field of gopher holes and shortly thereafter being attacked by a pride of lions. Hiding from an all-powerful state police force by living in a whorehouse for a month. Witnessing a 30-something unrepentant diabolist get psychologically reverted to the age of five by a magic sword. Seeing the CN Tower for the first time after having lived his whole life in the architectural equivalent of the 15th century.
Ignatius is, in a word, a man with a lot of chill.
To be fair, we have no reason to believe that this isn't mostly out of natural inclination: even in a postapoc society built around a monastery, there've got to be plenty of other career paths open to a fit and clever young man from a respectable landowning family besides "celibate combat medic." But it is clear both the from descriptions we get of other monks of his Order and from his own occasional internal narration that a major part of his seemingly inexhaustible serenity is due to the discipline and deep charism he has been taught since adolescence as part of his training as a Knight-Brother.
One of the most important cornerstones of his personality is his strong Catholicism and his deep personal faith. He believes in God the same way he believes in gravity, and he knows that Jesus died for his sins the same way he knows that the sun rises in the east on cloudy mornings, and this was true long before the signs and visions he experienced in the course of the Quest. His beliefs are all the stronger for being firmly couched in a rigorous Thomistic philosophical framework supplemented by every scholarly and scientific innovation that the modern world up to March 1998 had to offer. He is more than intelligent enough to fold just about any strange or extraordinary experience into his own apparently-rigid understanding of the ultimate nature of reality. And no matter what, he always (quietly, politely) maintains that his own faith holds primacy and authority over all others, which can get downright annoying to his non-Catholic friends and acquaintances. (Ironically, Ignatius is one of the only characters whose metaphysical concept of the divine probably can't mesh with the all-myths-are-true schema revealed to the reader in the story, since it turns out to be basically incompatible with most of Aquinas's cosmological arguments for God, among others. Not that that'd stop him from trying to mesh it if he knew, mind you.)
That being said, however, he is still a perfectly human guy with plenty of perfectly human habits and quirks. He has his likes (dirigibles) and his dislikes (paperwork), and there are things that he's good at (campfire cooking) and things that he's not (preventing all his friends from converting to paganism.) He can keep his head in the midst of incredible diplomatic and personal tension, but every so often a brilliant pun can send him into a fit of laughter or a new engineering challenge can get him as animated as a kid on Christmas morning. He is one of the most kind and accepting people in the entire series, but he still gets detectably salty sometimes when his majority-pagan friend group gets a little too teasing or presumptive at his expense. He is profoundly self-denying and invincibly celibate, but he still appreciates a good beer and he can recognize a great pair of thighs on a woman when he sees 'em, even if he does immediately try to put them out of his mind.
Most importantly, perhaps, Ignatius's core motivation is to be a productive instrument of those to whom he has devoted his service, starting with God and the Church but extending all the way down to any earthly obligations he might take onto himself. He can will endure incredible personal discomfort, sometimes even when it seems unnecessary, for the sake of his faith and his duties, something which many other characters find kind of weird and borderline-sanctimonious. In fact, the most surefire way to talk him to do something he might not want to do is to convince him that it is his own personal cross to carry up to the gates of Heaven, an angle that's been used successfully on him at least twice.
SKILLS/ABILITIES:
Ignatius is a highly skilled fighter trained since at least his teens in both mounted and unmounted combat. With a shield and longsword he's comparable (though by no means equal) to some of the most skilled fighters in post-Change North America. He also participates in, and occasionally leads, heavy cavalry charges in full plate armor and he can competently shoot a bow from horseback.
He's also a very skilled field medic, able to clean, debride, and stitch open wounds in short order, and he knows exactly how to bandage or brace just about any non-fatal injury someone could get on a battlefield. He is also capable of performing minor-to-medium surgery of the sort to remove arrow fragments or torn cloth from deep within a wound track.
Ignatius has had a decent bit of training in ciphering and light espionage in his capacity as an occasional covert intelligence-gatherer for the Order. He can keep track of a running-key code in his head well enough to cipher into it at normal handwriting speed, and he knows several tricks for detecting and preventing the compromise of secure correspondence. He's also very good at being extremely unassuming and not drawing the eye.
The Order also trains many of its brothers in engineering for the purposes of their humanitarian missions to less-developed areas, where they help maintain rail lines, install well pumps, and, at need, even construct light artillery. Ignatius in particular has a thorough knowledge of (and personal interest in) large machine gearing.
Lastly, while the canon rarely spells it out, it's obvious that at least since his vision of the Virgin Mary he's had some measure of divine patronage and protection. In particular, he can fight toe-to-toe with enemies that function as living brown notes to most normal people in-universe. That said, we've seen greater or (usually) lesser forms of this resistance demonstrated by practically every major character in the series with a strong faith, including characters whose faith was literally and historically recently invented out of whole cloth (i.e. the Dunedain and their worship of the Valar , so this isn't necessarily a Christian-specific Thing in-universe, even if Ignatius himself tends to interpret it as such.
CHARACTER: AU SECTION
AU NAME: Karl Bergfried, who did pick Saint Ignatius as his patron at confirmation but who uses confirmation names in this day and age?
AU AGE: 26
PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES: Most notably, no tonsure, but he's also missing several scars, including a conspicuous one along the right side of his jaw. Besides that, he's not quite as buff or calloused on account of not being a literal knight in armor, and he has better teeth on account of modern dentistry still existing.
AU NAME: Karl Bergfried, who did pick Saint Ignatius as his patron at confirmation but who uses confirmation names in this day and age?
AU AGE: 26
PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES: Most notably, no tonsure, but he's also missing several scars, including a conspicuous one along the right side of his jaw. Besides that, he's not quite as buff or calloused on account of not being a literal knight in armor, and he has better teeth on account of modern dentistry still existing.
AU HISTORY:
- Born into a loving and strongly Catholic family in the eastern suburbs of Salem, Oregon.
- Spent many a summer at his grandparents' farm on the south side of Marquam, near the town of Mount Angel
- Grandad was a Vietnam War vet who frequently visited another veteran friend of his, a monk at the Mount Angel Benedictine Abbey, young Karl often tagged along.
- Little Karl thought the whole place was super cool what with the castle and the black robes and the chanting and the museum full of antique weapons and stuff, SO COOL.
- Had plenty of daydreams as a kid about becoming an awesome cool secret shaolin ninja warrior monk but never had any serious thoughts about a vocation until well into high school.
- In the meantime became a moderate-to-huge nerd for medieval engineering and military history; hung out at ren faires built small trebuchets and stuff with his buds, did some LARPing boffing, played a bit of tabletop on the side.
- If you dig (really) deep into the online archives of his local Realm you might find a couple of pictures of a teenaged Karl captioned "Brother Ignatius of the Order of the Shield."
- After high school attended Mount Angel Seminary as a candidate and undergraduate, earned a double B.A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies.
- In the meantime kept up with his high school friends and occasionally visited Portland and Corvallis and other Willamette college towns for various nerdy shenanigans, never anything quite as embarrassing as his high school days though.
- Steadily became more sure of his vocation and entered Major Seminary as well as Mount Angel's graduate degree program, earned his M.A. in Theology.
- Took Holy Orders shortly after turning 26, but was still privately torn over whether to pursue a pastoral career (which felt like his duty given America's perennial shortage of parish priests) or to stay at the Abbey and settle down as a Benedictine religious.
- While he was busy waffling, the Archbishop of Portland got a call from his old pal the Bishop of Recollé saying they were in desperate need of a new curate who was hardworking and good with interfaith relations and well versed in the Tridentine Rite and did the Archdiocese of Portland have any spare ordinates he could borrow for a while.
- The Archbishop obviously suggested Karl, who took the whole thing as a minor sign from God and dutifully accepted the invitation.
AU PERSONALITY:
On the outside and from short acquaintance, Karl wouldn't seem to be very different at all from Ignatius, even allowing for their divergent upbringings (an agrarian smallholder's son vs. a modern middle-class suburbanite.) Karl is kind, intelligent, dependable, tolerant, seemingly unflappable, and by all accounts completely unshakable in his faith. Beneath the surface, though, there are a few marked disconnects.
First off, Karl has a more modern and secular bent to his outlook. While Ignatius is actually a noted rationalist compared to his canonical Changeling cohort, preferring to assume earthly and mundane explanations for most phenomena before invoking the supernatural, he was still raised in a climate in which everyone save for the most stubborn or eccentric believed in some form of the interventionist divine, be they Christian or Wiccan or anything in between In contrast, the west-coast suburbia that Karl grew up in was extremely secular by comparison, and he's more reserved and, at times, almost apologetic about his personal faith.
In a similar vein, Karl has been raised as an American, which means much less cultural emphasis on fealty and self-denial. As much as Mount Angel likes to distance itself from the Portland Protective Association, it still arose out of a very similar stock of medieval European concepts, which means a lot of celebration of absolute devotion to a righteous authority, something which isn't quite so ingrained into the psyche of 21st century America.
But the most important difference between them is probably that Ignatius is a warrior, and Karl is not. Ignatius has been trained since his adolescence in the most rigorous schools discipline and self-mastery, while Karl is merely a fairly unflappable guy with a good head on his shoulders. Ignatius also has had his faith expanded and confirmed by numerous personal experiences with both the divine and the diabolical, while Karl is merely a really good Catholic. In a truly harrowing and soul-testing situation in which Ignatius would never flinch, Karl just might.
- Born into a loving and strongly Catholic family in the eastern suburbs of Salem, Oregon.
- Spent many a summer at his grandparents' farm on the south side of Marquam, near the town of Mount Angel
- Grandad was a Vietnam War vet who frequently visited another veteran friend of his, a monk at the Mount Angel Benedictine Abbey, young Karl often tagged along.
- Little Karl thought the whole place was super cool what with the castle and the black robes and the chanting and the museum full of antique weapons and stuff, SO COOL.
- Had plenty of daydreams as a kid about becoming an awesome cool secret shaolin ninja warrior monk but never had any serious thoughts about a vocation until well into high school.
- In the meantime became a moderate-to-huge nerd for medieval engineering and military history; hung out at ren faires built small trebuchets and stuff with his buds, did some LARPing boffing, played a bit of tabletop on the side.
- If you dig (really) deep into the online archives of his local Realm you might find a couple of pictures of a teenaged Karl captioned "Brother Ignatius of the Order of the Shield."
- After high school attended Mount Angel Seminary as a candidate and undergraduate, earned a double B.A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies.
- In the meantime kept up with his high school friends and occasionally visited Portland and Corvallis and other Willamette college towns for various nerdy shenanigans, never anything quite as embarrassing as his high school days though.
- Steadily became more sure of his vocation and entered Major Seminary as well as Mount Angel's graduate degree program, earned his M.A. in Theology.
- Took Holy Orders shortly after turning 26, but was still privately torn over whether to pursue a pastoral career (which felt like his duty given America's perennial shortage of parish priests) or to stay at the Abbey and settle down as a Benedictine religious.
- While he was busy waffling, the Archbishop of Portland got a call from his old pal the Bishop of Recollé saying they were in desperate need of a new curate who was hardworking and good with interfaith relations and well versed in the Tridentine Rite and did the Archdiocese of Portland have any spare ordinates he could borrow for a while.
- The Archbishop obviously suggested Karl, who took the whole thing as a minor sign from God and dutifully accepted the invitation.
AU PERSONALITY:
On the outside and from short acquaintance, Karl wouldn't seem to be very different at all from Ignatius, even allowing for their divergent upbringings (an agrarian smallholder's son vs. a modern middle-class suburbanite.) Karl is kind, intelligent, dependable, tolerant, seemingly unflappable, and by all accounts completely unshakable in his faith. Beneath the surface, though, there are a few marked disconnects.
First off, Karl has a more modern and secular bent to his outlook. While Ignatius is actually a noted rationalist compared to his canonical Changeling cohort, preferring to assume earthly and mundane explanations for most phenomena before invoking the supernatural, he was still raised in a climate in which everyone save for the most stubborn or eccentric believed in some form of the interventionist divine, be they Christian or Wiccan or anything in between In contrast, the west-coast suburbia that Karl grew up in was extremely secular by comparison, and he's more reserved and, at times, almost apologetic about his personal faith.
In a similar vein, Karl has been raised as an American, which means much less cultural emphasis on fealty and self-denial. As much as Mount Angel likes to distance itself from the Portland Protective Association, it still arose out of a very similar stock of medieval European concepts, which means a lot of celebration of absolute devotion to a righteous authority, something which isn't quite so ingrained into the psyche of 21st century America.
But the most important difference between them is probably that Ignatius is a warrior, and Karl is not. Ignatius has been trained since his adolescence in the most rigorous schools discipline and self-mastery, while Karl is merely a fairly unflappable guy with a good head on his shoulders. Ignatius also has had his faith expanded and confirmed by numerous personal experiences with both the divine and the diabolical, while Karl is merely a really good Catholic. In a truly harrowing and soul-testing situation in which Ignatius would never flinch, Karl just might.