This is a writing and characterization guide for Iphis based on the one Erinyes did, which was itself based on Atty’s.
The Most Important Things (Short Version)
Personality
- If she's in a situation where she's not dominant or at least isn't certain of it, she's quiet and reserved. If she thinks she would fall at the top of the pecking order, which is often, then she'll act like it.
- She isn’t a sadist or edgelord, but she is a Mean Girl and she grew up around sadists and edgelords and isn’t fazed by them, though she does find it gauche.
- She didn't get where she is by being willing to die. She got there by methodically killing every Force-user she knew.
- Her life is awesome. She's basically immune to physical suffering, she's rich and powerful, and she can do whatever she wants. Most Brotherhood characters in this situation find a way to be miserable but she is just living her best life.
- Getting in her head unsolicited is her berserk button. Suppression is a runner up, but usually people don’t break that out until they’re throwing down.
Combat and Powers
- Combat is all about the sword, and she is very good, very fast, and does not play around unless she really doesn't respect you. The horror show doesn't kick in unless she's outnumbered, which will end much worse for the attackers than if they'd gone one by one and just gotten a sword to the neck
- Several of her Force powers are developed enough to deploy at will:
- Concealment is effortless and effectively always on unless she wants to be sensed.
- Control Self is on a similar level. Her bodily processes aren’t quite voluntary, but she takes considerable pride in controlling them. She doesn’t tire, she doesn’t even really need to breathe except on a timeline that’s not very helpful to anybody trying to kill her.
- Healing is only effortless for small, superficial wounds, but she has options for how to fuel it without overexerting herself.
The Deep Dive
Core Personality Traits
Iphis is all about power.
Whether or not she likes somebody? Power. Relationship dynamics? Power. Goals and motivations? Power.
She treats non-Force-users as somewhere above animals but below real people. Journeymen and Equites are below her in the hierarchy—though she will adjust this slightly if they have power via position—and will show her appropriate deference. Likewise, she is significantly less catty with the relatively few people who can overpower her.
But there’s two sides to power: what you have in theory and what you actually wield. She respects power but holds the disuse of it in contempt. Among her lessers, she’s more appreciative of the ambitious and cunning than the ones who seem set in their weakness. And when it comes to Elders, if you want her respect, you need to act like an Elder of the Brotherhood.
Iphis is not an edgelord.
She’s not a mustache-twirling villainess. She doesn’t do things for the evuls. She doesn’t particularly enjoy watching random people suffer. I think it’s easy for other authors to fall into the trap of making her too sadistic. The way to think of it is that cruelty isn’t a hobby, it’s a tool.
Iphis is not a good person.
Despite the above, she is a bitch. She’s not especially bothered by evil unless it actually impacts something she cares about. She is petty and if she dislikes someone, she will bully them relentlessly just because she can. But most people don’t warrant the effort.
Iphis is in it for the lulz.
Insults are effectively just banter and won't get to her. She'll engage insofar as she just enjoys insulting people, but escalating into a real fight over it is stupid and to be avoided. Likewise, she hits on people she wants to screw, or wants to make uncomfortable, or who react in amusing ways.
There’s some tension between this and the first point, her need for a Darwinian social order. Why does she sometimes put people in their place and other times blow them off as people whose opinions don’t matter? Well, power. If you’re trying to get a rise out of her, or assert some sort of social dominance, or just get her attention, then the way she exerts her power is just to ignore it and remind you that you’re not worth her attention and certainly aren’t going to compel her to give it to you. Whereas if you just don’t seem to understand the pecking order, she’s more likely to instruct you in it.
Iphis is an interstellar woman of mystery
One of my personal rules for the character is to give people as little background on what’s going on in her head as I can manage. I’m bending that rule here, but note the near complete lack of information on her background, her plans, etc. in favor of descriptions of how she behaves. Other characters can make more or less informed guesses about what she’s up to, but she’s not going to tell them, and if she does, she’s not being honest about it.
Iphis is a misandrist.
Iphis treats men the way you’d treat somebody who chews with their mouth open, or who doesn’t bathe often enough, or who has a really annoying laugh. She doesn’t like them. She doesn’t feel any need to pretend that she likes them. They don’t get to come to her birthday party. But she’s not here for Evil Feminism. She’s not going to underestimate men just because they’re men or try to build a matriarchal Brotherhood.
Mannerisms, Voice, and Appearance
- Iphis’ default presentation is slightly bored. When something does catch her attention or provoke a response, the vibe is not unlike you just attracted a predator.
- Iphis is a pretty Hapan princess but there’s are enough things that are slightly off to get different reactions out of people, even accounting for her off-putting personality. Her eyes are oversaturated but the rest of her is undersaturated and very close observers will notice she doesn’t move as much as a living thing should. Some people will thirst over her and won’t understand why you don’t, others will be disgusted and not understand why anybody wants her.
Skills, Force Powers, and Feats
I follow a pretty straightforward approach to the CS pyramids: the higher a character’s level in something, the more important it is to her and the more of her time and energy she invests into it. +3 is about the level where you can make a living with something, which says a lot about how much a character is putting into something to get and keep it at +5.
Most Important
Iphis has two tools to get through life: her mind, and the Force. So Intellect, Resolve, and Investigation are all rated very highly. She may not always act like a stereotypical smart person, but she’s very intellectual, curious, and intentional about her mind being her source of independence, security, and power.
Ok, she also has a third tool: Bladed Weapons with Deflect This. Iphis relies on a physical sword rather than a lightsaber. Make of that what you will. But given that her Force skills lean towards physicality, she’s forced to rely on physical combat over, for lack of a better term, magic damage. And she’s trained with it like her life depends on it, because on several occasions it has, and she’s trained to kill lightsaber-wielding Force-users and blaster-wielding mobs alike.
Iphis moves a lot of energy around. One of the basic assumptions about her life but especially her combat style is that she cannot run out of juice. Per her Channel III Discipline Feat, she’s frighteningly good at sucking up ambient Force energy with little to no ramp up. She’ll suck it out of other people, too, but our system limits that to Healing via Force Drain III and A Soul for a Soul, so it doesn’t come up as often.
With the exception of Healing, most Force-users are limited in how much they can affect the Force energy in a living body. There’s a bunch of powers for moving around their own body with powers like Control Self, Amplification, etc, but only Healing works properly on others. Synergy III is the exception, allowing Defenders to share powers with a group. That’s historically been limited to defensive use. I wrote up a proposed Discipline Feat to let Iphis use it offensively, but Iddy just removed the defensive caveat from the base feat. This was probably a bad idea because it’s incredibly broken from a balance perspective, but as of this writing, Iphis is the only character in the Brotherhood who is running around screwing with other people’s bodily functions for funsies.
Control Self is her primary Force power, though given Synergy, the name is misleading. The current (September 2025) ruling on this power and how it works with Synergy is incredibly nasty.
Healing is high enough that she’s one of the preeminent healers in the Brotherhood, though it’s a power that serves her first and others only when she feels like it. If she can fuel it with Force Drain, she will. Accelerated Healing at her level is fast enough that others can see superficial wounds closing. A Soul for a Soul probably won’t come up often, but it’s important.
Amplification (Escape Artist) is key to her fighting style and she uses it willy-nilly; she can easily manage the physical and mystical fatigue through Control Self and Channel, respectively. Hapan night blindness is something she can turn off with Enhanced Sight II, but it’s still something she has to mindfully turn off.
All that focus on energy doesn’t work if you can’t perceive it, so Sense is another key power for her.
At her skill level, Concealment can be run indefinitely, and that’s generally what Iphis does. If you pick her up with Sense, it’s because she wanted you to.
Besides the Discipline Feat combination, Necromancy is the only thing non-standard in Iphis’ training. But the power itself is pretty weak, basically just Telekinesis but worse. She has it at the level she does because it’s the most practical way to experiment with the energy of a living being after it’s been removed from said being. It’s mildly useful for creeping people out, but if anything this will fall over time.
Important
Deception is her primary social skill, with the Sociopath feat effectively giving her Charm for free. She’s not prone to telling outright lies but you shouldn’t take anything she says at face value.
Medicine represents the non-mystical side of her Force studies. More on that in the Lore topics, below.
Athletics is something she can’t just Amplification away, not entirely, so it’s reasonably well development.
Precognition is just too damn useful for staying alive.
Are you really a Force-user without Telekinesis? Matter Bender II is there specifically to fling blood and other gore at people. Violence should be traumatizing and Iphis is not about this PG-13 life.
Mind Trick (Inceptioned) is admittedly here as a vestige of statting out Ianthe (more on her below).
Hobbies
Iphis develops some Stamina and Might by virtue of her sword training, though less than she should, given her heavy reliance on the Force.
Intimidation is for people who aren’t dangerous enough to intimidate others just by existing. If she wants to intimidate you, she’ll just hurt you. Or herself. Or somebody else.
Perception (Snap Judgment) is one of those Skills that’s lower than it probably should be, because she focuses so much more on her active attention (Investigation) and mystical sensitivity (Sense).
Iphis has some Stealth ability to complement her Concealment, but not enough to get around somebody who’s properly observant.
Iphis has some basic Martial Arts (Teras Kasi) training to supplement her swordwork, as real world sword combat arts incorporated strikes and grapples.
Iphis has rudimentary Crafting and Survival skills leftover from the early days on Phaistos, and Tactics from her role as a decadent aristocrat. But she’s not focused on things or other people and it shows.
Creature Control, Telepathy, Illusion, and Battle Meditation all fall under the heading of manipulating other beings’ minds in different ways. It’s not her specialty, and Mind Trick is the only skill here she’s really developed to the point of comfort. Terror is a bit of a weird case, as it’s written as a mental power but she could, in theory, do it better using Control Self to induce a biochemical fear response.
Farsight never got enough focus to be very useful.
Lore Topics and Languages
Iphis is a native speaker of Hapan. She developed fluency in Ancient Sith and Basic by necessity very early on in her Brotherhood training, prior to her exile. She learned Omwatese, Zelosian, and especially Shani to a very high degree of proficiency during her time on Phaistos. Binary is a recent development driven mostly by her unwillingness to rely on somebody else for translation.
As evidenced by her Feats and Force powers, Iphis is very focused on Force energy in the body, how to move it around, how it interacts with physical systems, and how to preserve, recall, or manipulate that energy once it’s been removed from a living body. She is significantly less interested in the traditional ideas of the Cosmic Force and the Unifying Force. So on the physical side, we have Lore topics in Hematology and Neurochemistry and neuropsychology to cover the ways energy moves around the body (she should probably have Endocrinology, maybe instead of Hematology, but whatever). On the mystical side, she has Essence Transference and Force Spirits and Haunting. And then to bridge the two, there’s Midi-chlorians.
Poetry of Sith-Influenced Cultures is there because every girl needs a hobby.
Inspirations and References
- "God, that little shit shouldn’t be running around in this day and age… would’ve taken Cassiopeia and Cyrus and Ulysses and Cytherea just to keep her in hand. She’s good and she’s imaginative and she’s very frightening, and now there’s no one to stop her."
- ―Pyrrha Dve, Nona the Ninth
Iphis’ starting point is as an homage to Ianthe Tridentarius from the Locked Tomb series. She’s not a copy or just Star Wars Ianthe though, so it’s probably worth digging into what I actually took. There are two underlying inspirations there. The first:
- Q: "How did you come up with Ianthe’s personality? She’s absolutely horrible, terrifying, and uniquely funny at the same time."
- Taz: "I love Ianthe and could write a lot about Ianthe, but one central thing I am doing with Ianthe is playing around with a trope male characters often get to be, and one frequently found in slash but so little for the lesbians: Ianthe is in many ways my gay Draco In Leather Pants. (There’s a reason she calls Harrow Harry!) The Draco In Leather Pants trope—the hyper-privileged, drawling blonde with daddy issues who sulks erotically in a corner—is perpetually male. Here, it’s Ianthe. And Ianthe blows—she’ll never be a true Draco In Leather Pants because although the DILP gets great sassy lines, very few of them are aimed at himself. Ianthe’s humanity—what there is of it—comes from having a sense of humour; it is why she is sympathetic and also why she is dangerous."
- ―Tamsyn Muir interviewed by Reactor[src]
The second is one I’m getting secondhand. I’ve never read Homestuck, but Muir was very prominent in Homestuck fanfic circles and cut her teeth in that community. People who’ve read both frequently point to Ianthe as the series’ version of Vriska Serket. I’ve seen Vriska described as “Andrew Hussie intentionally making a character that was as controversial as possible with the fanbase,” and that’s more or less true of Ianthe. The key here, I think, is making the character simultaneously distinctive and ambiguous.
With Ianthe, once she gets her first moment in the spotlight, she comes off as a fully realized character, a strong personality, a consistent, malevolent force. Every reader comes away feeling like they grok the character, and she’s a popular subject for memes, cosplay, and fanfic. I’m far from the only person obsessed with her.
But then you talk to people about her and you can’t pin very much down at all.
She’s villainous, right? The author herself talks about how horrible she is, how she reaches new heights of awfulness. But looking at the text, she’s certainly not a good person, but she’s not honestly worse than most of the main cast. She’s mean and she murdered somebody. But she’s surrounded by people who are at least as mean and who’ve murdered significantly more people, and when they start down a path that would presumably kill their entire civilization, Ianthe is the only person who seems to actually care, certainly the only one who acts to stop it. Her relationship with Harrow feels like it should be abusive, but it’s hard to find evidence of this—the one frequently cited example relies on the reader assuming Ianthe sees something that she probably doesn’t.
More generally, nobody has any idea what she’s up to despite the overwhelming consensus that she’s up to something. The only clue we have is that it involves keeping her twin sister alive, which is hardly nefarious. But the Tao of Ianthe is that everybody assumes her goals are nefarious because they’re hers, but that’s based far more on vibes than her actual deeds.
And that’s what I wanted to play with: a strong character who’s an inkblot test. So far it’s worked. It’s been very satisfying to see people immediately develop strong reactions to and opinions about her based mostly on DILP vibes and knowing who her primary inspiration was.
Music
Erin had this section and I felt bad deleting it when I do, in fact, have music.