Ivan's four skill runes: a sword, a dart, a bow and a wolf
Ivan fights with what the runes give him, and four of them are his skills. Each is a broken, angular shard of stone with a sign burned into it, and each shows up on screen as a round gold medallion with Ivan's silhouette inside. They are a separate set from the twenty Svarog rune stones you collect across the kingdom.
The Rune of Kladenets
The first rune is the sword. Kladenets is the magic sword of Russian tales, the one that waits hidden until the right hero comes to claim it, and the rune stands for strength, resolve and courage. Activate it and Ivan's next strike is charged with fire, hitting much harder than his normal attacks. The stone is black and cracked, with the sword glowing orange through the middle of it like metal still in the forge.
We wrote more about the sword and the arguments over its name in Ivan's article.
The Rune of Perun's Dart
Perun was the thunder god of the eastern Slavs, and his lightning was thought of as arrows and spears thrown from the sky. Peasants who found old stone axes or fossils in the fields called them thunder arrows and kept them in the house against lightning. Hunters and warriors in the tales strike from a distance, and the rune borrows Perun's name for that kind of fighting.
The use is Ivan's own. He throws an enchanted carrot. It distracts or confuses enemies and buys him time to get away or turn and hit back.
The Rune of the Moonbow
Bows run through the Russian epic songs, the byliny. Dobrynya Nikitich, one of the three bogatyrs, the great warrior heroes of Kievan Rus', shoots a bow as well as he wields a sword, and the hunters of the tales bring down beasts and monsters from far away. The bow belonged to the man who protected the land and the man who fed his family.
The Moonbow rune makes Ivan a better shot. His draw gets faster and his aim gets sharper.
The Rune of Veles
The last rune is the one the whole game turns on. Veles is the Slavic god of the underworld, magic and transformation, and wolves were counted among his animals, creatures that cross between the living and the dead. With this rune Ivan becomes the Grey Wolf. The change wraps him in a protective aura that softens incoming damage or pushes attacks back for a moment, and it opens four new skills that only the Wolf has.
How Ivan and the Wolf came to share that rune is the story of the pact and the three threads of Veles.
How a rune is drawn
All four sheets follow the same order. A base shape first, a broken slab of stone. Then the sign, drawn in line on top. Then the shadows, two passes of them, and the render, where the stone gets its colour and the sign starts to glow. Last comes the final design on its coloured background, and next to it the medallion the player sees in the game. Every step is drawn by hand.
Sources: the Forgotten Eras design sheets for the four skill runes. The byliny of Dobrynya Nikitich, in Kirsha Danilov's collection, eighteenth century. A. N. Afanasyev, The Poetic Views of the Slavs on Nature, Moscow, 1865 to 1869.
