| God | Unlocks | Grants | Chance | What you must do |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mars The Spear That Opens Armour | level 10 | Sunder: the blow ignores every scrap of the enemy armour. | 25% cap 30% | Win the duel with more than half your health still in you. |
| Diana The Arrow That Is Not Refused | level 20 | True Strike: the blow cannot be evaded, whatever the enemy does. | 30% cap 35% | Land two critical strikes in a single duel. |
| Vulcan The Forge Under the Mountain | level 30 | Ember: your weapon takes light and the burn eats at them for the rest of the fight. | 50% cap 50% | Fall below a quarter of your health and win anyway. |
| Neptune The Tide That Comes Back | level 40 | Tide: the sea returns a share of your full strength to you. | 20% cap 25% | Still be standing and win after eighteen exchanges or more. |
| Minerva The Eye That Reads the Guard | level 50 | Foresight: you read the opening before it comes and their killing blows stop finding it. | 35% cap 40% | Win without a single critical hit landing on you. |
| Pluto The Toll at the Threshold | level 60 | The Toll: the dead god takes their turn from them and gives it to you. | 15% cap 20% | Win without blocking once. Nothing between you and the blade. |
| Fortuna The Second Throw | level 70 | Second Throw: a blow that missed is thrown again before they can breathe. | 40% cap 45% | End the duel with a critical strike as the killing blow. |
| Janus The Door That Turns Both Ways | level 80 | Two Faces: their counter-stroke turns around in the air and answers them instead. | 25% cap 40% | Win having lost less than a quarter of your health in total. |
| Jupiter The Stroke Nothing Refuses | level 90 | The Bolt: a strike that armour, shield and footwork have no answer to. | 10% cap 15% | Put him down inside twelve exchanges. |
Who they are
Mars
Sunder: the blow ignores every scrap of the enemy armour.
Rome did not pray to Mars for peace. It prayed to him in March, before the campaigning season, and again in October when the surviving legions came home and their weapons had to be cleansed of what they had done.
He is not a god of glory. He is a god of the work. He watches your ludus the way a smith watches an apprentice: waiting to see whether the thing you are making will hold when it is struck.
What he wants: He does not care that you can win. He wants to see you win without being touched.
Diana
True Strike: the blow cannot be evaded, whatever the enemy does.
The huntress does not chase. She waits at the place the animal will pass, for as long as that takes, and looses once.
Gladiators who survive long enough stop swinging at everything and start waiting for the opening. She is the goddess of that exact moment, and she does not accept flailing as an offering.
What he wants: Show her you can choose your moment, twice, on purpose.
Vulcan
Ember: your weapon takes light and the burn eats at them for the rest of the fight.
The only god of the Roman twelve who works. Lame, soot-blackened, married to Venus and mocked for it, and every blade in this ludus came out of a fire that is his.
He has no patience for the ones who dance. Metal is proven by being struck, and so is a man.
What he wants: Metal is proven by being struck. He wants to see you nearly break, and hold.
Neptune
Tide: the sea returns a share of your full strength to you.
Sailors gave him a bull. Farmers gave him a horse, because he made those too, and because the ground shakes at his word.
The sea does not win by force. It wins by coming back, and coming back, long after the cliff has stopped counting.
What he wants: Anyone can win fast. Prove you can still be there in the twentieth round.
Minerva
Foresight: you read the opening before it comes and their killing blows stop finding it.
Born out of a headache, fully armed. She holds the war that is planned, as against the war that is merely fought, and Rome kept both gods on purpose.
Every school teaches the strike. Almost none teach the reading of the man opposite. That gap is her whole domain.
What he wants: Not one clean hit on you. She is not testing your courage, she is testing your attention.
Pluto
The Toll: the dead god takes their turn from them and gives it to you.
His name means wealth, because everything that goes into the ground is his and the ground is where everything ends up. Romans avoided saying it out loud.
The porta Libitinaria of every arena opens onto his ledger. He has read your name there for years and has been in no hurry about it.
What he wants: Come to him with no shield between you. He wants to see what you are without one.
Fortuna
Second Throw: a blow that missed is thrown again before they can breathe.
She stands on a wheel, blindfolded, holding a rudder in one hand and a horn of plenty in the other. Every gladiator in the empire has touched her altar on the way to the gate.
She is not kind and she was never claimed to be. She is only the admission that skill decides most of it and something else decides the rest.
What he wants: Anyone can grind a man down. Finish him on the throw that mattered. She counts the last one.
Janus
Two Faces: their counter-stroke turns around in the air and answers them instead.
Rome opened its wars by opening his doors and closed them so rarely that the closing was itself news. He faces forward and backward at once and is the god of every beginning, including the ones nobody wanted.
A gladiator lives on thresholds: the gate, the sand, the moment the thumb turns. He owns all three.
What he wants: Both his faces are watching. Give neither of them anything worth reporting.
Jupiter
The Bolt: a strike that armour, shield and footwork have no answer to.
Best and Greatest, the state god, the one the consuls swore by. He is not interested in the sand and never has been.
The arena is a small and vulgar thing to him. If you want him to look down at all, you will have to be brief.
What he wants: Twelve exchanges. He will not watch a thirteenth.