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Varian Intelligence

Varia is a nation built on spycraft, and it has written the taxonomy down. The Varian document Types of Varian Spies enumerates ten archetypes — from the paid neighbour who reports a rumour for a silver, to the agent whose memory has been magically edited so that he does not know he is an agent until his handler wakes him. The apparatus runs through House Bloodworth (Queen Amelia's house, and the crown), fields its recruits through the Varian Spies / House Bloodworth training branch of The Coalition, and has been visible in play since the crossing.

The list is worth taking literally. Nearly every archetype on it has a face the campaign has already met.

The ten types

1. The Commoner

Everyday folk who report to overt Varian spies for gold, favour, or information. Not agents — assets. The purest observed instance is Figueroa in Session 08, set up in Fort Foothold's town square openly buying secrets from a queue of walk-ups ("you know, like so-and-so's having an affair… we buy it"). The Varian embassies work the same seam at scale: file a road-tax form, get your silver's worth of gratitude, and leave your name, route and business in Varia's archive (Session 08).

2. The Common Spy

Conceals identity to clone documents, eavesdrop, and insert themselves. This is Silithane's working role: a Varian covert operative of House Bloodworth under a cover identity as a Reclamation recruit, handler Dominus (Session 30). The tradecraft shows in the small things — the shrouded doublet that reads as commoner clothes, the standing dragon disguise kept up specifically to fool divination spies (Session 25), the forgery-check on Tycho's certificate, and an evening in the Aberforth Speakeasy reduced to reading lips because the room's anti-eavesdropping was better than he was.

3. The Overt

Spies who loudly declare that they are spies — Varia taunting other nations, openly trading information. This is a deliberate policy, not a failure. Figueroa wears his Spycraft Guild and House Bloodworth insignia half-visible from a pocket and is simply not interested in being bothered (Session 05). Timothy Leisten tells Thalia she may drop coded mail with any spy in Gwyndinas, including the public, deliberately-obvious ones in any tavern (Session 39). (Tycho — who sings the national anthem when asked where he is from — looks like this type but is probably not: the table read him as an incompetent Common Spy rather than an intentional Overt, and his handler had scrubbed his training record, which an Overt would have no reason to do.)

4. The Honeypot

Courts or seduces a target, then pilfers their home after the act. No confirmed instance in play. The party has joked around the edges of it — Thalia's date with the "suspiciously inquisitive" lumberjack Pretty Patrick, whose name is genuinely Patrick and therefore not a Varian's — but nothing has been established.

5. The Deep Cover Spy

Spends decades ingratiating themselves into a faction or community. Dominus is the standing exhibit even though his role is Handler: his tannery near All Saints Cathedral is a cover "so flawlessly mundane it gives even trained spies doubt," and the meek shoe-repairman only becomes a spymaster when the code phrase is spoken. Silithane, at 138 years old with a whole scholar's biography behind the Reclamation cover, is built for this profile even if his current placement is months old rather than decades.

6. The Sleeper Agent

Memory magically altered so the agent only awakens during meetings with their handler. No confirmed instance — but see Silithane's debut. In Session 04 he woke in The Urina's jail with no memory beyond falling through an open sewer grate in Port Quaybay. The in-fiction explanation was the Rat King. It has never been re-examined in the light of an archetype that Varia demonstrably fields. Flagged as a question, not a claim.

7. The Handler

Rarely in the field; runs their spies through dead drops and sending stones. The vault knows three:

On the mechanics: the vault's dead drops are real and physical — Silithane identified the pig-head mechanisms in the Gwyndinas Sewers as likely Varian dead-drops and got one to activate (Session 19), Timothy passed a coded 7-number Post-it for drop-off with any Gwyndinas spy (Session 39), and Silithane and Thalia now trade dead-drop locations as a private arrangement (Session 44). The document's sending stones have not been seen; in practice the handlers are reached by the Sending spell.

8. The Bodyguard

A reverse-assassin — keeps a specific target alive and in good standing for Varian interests. Uva Blackheart is the clean match: Queen Amelia Bloodworth's own gilded-plate bodyguard, reassigned to guard Ysolde, the rightful Sovereign of Orathos, on the reasoning that Varia is the safer place for a queen (Session 08). A Varian who exists to keep a foreign monarch breathing and well-regarded is the archetype stated plainly. That the same woman is credited with going toe-to-toe with a god (Session 05) says what tier of asset Varia assigns to it.

9. The Replacement

Varia is rumoured to have people killed and replaced by a doppelganger — the document itself calls this unproven. The vault's evidence sits uncomfortably close:

10. The Shadow

Infiltrates an unusual location — the document's example is an attic crawlspace — and simply exists and observes, then leaves as though never there. No successful instance observed. The only attempt on record is Tycho crouching at the Keep Grow Inn's windows in Session 22, which ended with the stable master caving his skull in: "Only good spy is a dead spy."

How to spot one

Renforth's rule: Varian names are one sound off. The owl-wizard of Ponterford identified the Varian Trio as spies purely from their aliases — Gutricia, Pimothy, Paved for Patricia, Pimothy, and Pavid (Session 35, Session 41). The tell holds elsewhere: Tycho is "an amalgamation of Michael and the wrong letter" per Eldrich the Elder, and Ugo introduces himself as "Hugo but Varian, you know?" Silithane sat through Renforth's confident lecture on this poker-faced, being an actual Varian spy (Session 35).

The second tell is tonal, and the campaign has named it: "everything he says is logically airtight, but you don't quite trust a foreign superpower built on spycraft" — the table's verdict on Timothy Leisten, and Silithane's repeated Insight checks finding him airtight but unreadable (Session 39).

Recruitment and reach

The Varian Spies / House Bloodworth branch is one of The Coalition's nine militia training streams, with the standing objective identify major villains — distinct from the Varian Navy / House Mayfore stream, which hunts pirates — meaning the reclamation force has an official pipeline for putting Varian-trained intelligence assets into adventuring groups, and every group that took that stream contains one by design.

Two consequences the vault has already flagged in Connections & Theories: party intelligence flows to Varia by default through Silithane's real chain of command to House Bloodworth rather than the Coalition (Session 30); and Varia enforces its own secrecy hard when a spy learns too much — Figueroa's "you and me, we both forget what we ever learned… there was no hidden cabin on that boat" (Session 08), and the deliberate erasure of Tycho's training stamp by a handler never identified (Session 21, Session 22).

And the network is not infallible. Whatever vetting Varia applies to reclamation conscripts, Pyrirtras — third mate of The Black Fleet, marked for death on sight over 30,000 dead — slipped straight through it and is serving in Rivalon under the name Latar.