Iron and Rust

[5:32:00 PM] Joseph Collard: Jacob and I both took the "Hermit" background. It has a feature called "Discovery".
[5:32:01 PM] Joseph Collard: https://gyazo.com/8840047244504a00e05bda018b8dd83f
[5:32:26 PM] Joseph Collard: We've decided that our backgrounds converged, and we each made one "half" of the same Discovery
[5:32:44 PM] Joseph Collard: namely, a philosophy of Iron and Rust (our character names)
[5:33:36 PM] Joseph Collard: Iron is persistence, inertia, binding, consequences. Rust is the opposites: freedom, decay, unbinding, a bit of chaos.
[5:34:12 PM] Joseph Collard: These two poles are forces much greater than us, but we have each found enlightenment within that force and sort of dedicated ourselves to Iron and Rust respectively
[5:36:24 PM] Joseph Collard: We met each other on that other continent. Rust was tunnelling upward from the deepest depths to escape his restrictive home, and I was tunneling downward to fulfill a trade bargain whereby my clan took possession of some minerals there. We met each other halfway and got trapped in a cave in. We decided to become blood brothers there. Finally we escaped and went in the directions we liked going.
[5:38:32 PM] Joseph Collard: At a very deep depth, I reached enlightenment, came to understand Iron, and took that name. And  I removed a portion odd mineral I found down there to represent it, to allow the enlightenment to travel with me "in the flesh."

Rust did something similar on the surface.
[5:41:06 PM] Joseph Collard: I traveled back to my homeland, not too far from the Adventurer League, and soon left my job to become a hermit monk. Eventually, I attracted 1d6 followers who joined my order. In accordance with the principles of Iron, the order's home base is wherever I happen to be; I carry that inertia with me. The 1d6+1 of us kept to ourselves and often traveled alone deeper into the woods for long times to meditate.
[5:43:00 PM] Joseph Collard: At one point, I was captured by followers of a sort of opposing philosophy. The details are up to you, Leslie, but the essence is that they believed strongly in a force I call "Measure" (Inflexibility, the way things are, the id)  and a diametrically opposed force called "Memory" (emotions, intense desire, pathos, dreams).
[5:43:21 PM] Joseph Collard: those followers might call it something else, might not even consider it a religion, but that is how it fits into our philosophy personally.
[5:44:19 PM] Joseph Collard: Iron and Rust had been dreaming of each other, in the Primordial language, getting uncontrollable quick glimpses and empathic links. Rust, far away on another continent, dreamed that Iron was trapped and came to the rescue
[5:45:22 PM] Joseph Collard: It took both of them to escape, for Iron was very susceptible to the unflinching demands of Measure, and Rust was easily swept away by the raging passion of Memory. The cultists or whatever had erected some kind of metaphysical walls of strong Memory and Measure force.
[5:47:18 PM] Joseph Collard: Not long after, the boss of the Adventurer's League took an interest in Iron, ostensibly because both were dwarves. Iron suspected the boss might have some other motive. Iron agreed to do some adventuring because it was the ultimate test of the philosophy of a moving abbey, and because combat hones the part of the mind responsible for the Way of Iron.
[5:47:43 PM] Joseph Collard: so as DM, feel free to work any of that into the game
[5:48:15 PM] Joseph Collard: we don't know who those cultist types were, we don't know exactly what these forces we discovered are.
[5:48:34 PM] Joseph Collard: But I use them when I access my ki, and Rust uses them when he does his druidic magic.
[5:48:46 PM] Joseph Collard: I think that's everything from Iron's end.