| Text
| - A Journal
- 4.73364E8
- The Tumerok references, at the time of ACDM, weren't intended to be literal truth, but an expression of how they think about the world in mythological terms. The Olthoi filled a biological niche they identified as akin to their spirit of decay, so they considered them to be an expression of Wharu's hand in the world.
- During my time, the Olthoi were considered a completely natural form of life. They were a menace because they the evolutionary product of a far more aggressive insectoid-fungal ecosystem. If there was a later change to that, maybe it was intended to reconcile the absence of direct Nameless intervention in the Third Sending, as I discussed above.
- You'd have to ask a member of the AC2 team to know for sure. I can only offer my post-fact interpretation.
- As with the greater story goals, creation of creatures in AC2 often came down to, "That's the most interesting-looking concept we have. Make up a story for it." Which is great! That's how all the monsters from AC1 were designed. You can get great results when you let artists explore on their own. I remember in particular the wonderfully bizarre creations of Sonny Liew, who's since made a career in comics. I was fascinated by his revolting mucor.
- An infinite amount of weirdness could be swept under the rug of the Fifth Sending between the two AC games. The spawn was a design that looked good, and might have got in on that alone. Are they Slithis? Sure, why not? They look about right. Say they're very young ones , mutated by exposure to the reality-warping powers of the Nameless, like everything else not locked in the shelters by Asheron.
- As a side note, the behind-the-scenes rationalization for Vitae penalty was that Asheron's Lifestones took a tithe of the players' lifeforce to fuel his spells protecting the Empyrean from the Virindi. I'm not sure if that was said anywhere, or if it's even canon anymore.
- Stripped of mystery, the Virindi are science fiction hyperspace aliens who find themselves in a high fantasy world of magic. In the Scrawled Note I tried to describe technological effects from the perspective of a magical culture. Lasers are "focusing electrical blasts to such a fine point that they could be used to slice and cauterize flesh." What the author calls "crawling magic," and the Virindi creation of tools from a "vapor-sea," are descriptions of advanced nanotechnology.
- :Through the shredded mess of the Collector's black cloak, you catch a brief glimpse of a silver-tinged violet light... but it quickly fades, turning to a fine white ash that is torn away by the wind. An echo of entity's hollow voice booms in your mind, "How curious. The vapor-sea burns. Perhaps we should hollow the experiments, and inhabit them.
- And also in the Scrawled Note:
- They started investigating the region around Auberean when the Empyrean starting poking holes through their reality. When Asheron sent the souls of the Empyrean into portalspace for shelter, it was like an explosion, and brought them in haste. But it took them a long time to find a way into our reality, and survive in it.
- The Virindi are an intelligence native to portalspace. In their own realm, and within the safety of the obscuring garments they wear, they resemble three-story tall, luminous jellyfish or squid. I'm afraid I was probably too influenced by the Vorlon of Babylon 5 there . Their bodies can only exist within a vacuum or an environment of pure energy; when they're killed, their protective measures are breached, and they literally burn away in an instant from the air. This is implied in the death message of the Marae Lassel Virindi Collector:
- The fabric of their world - of portalspace - was damaged by the sudden, massive influx of alien and otherworldly energy; the energy of disembodied Empyrean souls. Over time, portalspace has become more frayed. This caused the creation of random portals leading from the worlds visited by the Empyrean to Dereth, where the original damage was done. So far as I recall, this damage to the fabric of portalspace was only directly mentioned in the visions of the Yalaini Woman:
- The Virindi found the Empyrean souls to be a tremendous and utterly unique source of energy. They've been trying to draw on it ever since, fighting with Asheron. He wants to bring the Empyrean back to Auberan; the Virindi want to keep them in portalspace and harvest the energy of their souls. It was a stalemate when I left; Asheron couldn't bring the Empyrean back because of Virindi interference, and the Virindi couldn't obtain the energy they desired because of Asheron's interference.
- :The tunnel does not collapse as it always does. It peels open. You are weightless, formless, tumbling through an empty violet abyss. So tired... Sleep...
:And something, somewhere, tears a little more...
- :"The space around you is not an abeyance, but a vapor-sea. We take the insubstantials and alter arrangements so they assume solidity." The Director added that, "In this, your location is convenient to us."
- The Virindi were more Dave Javier and Ken Troop's creation than mine, though the last things I wrote for the game were about them. The Scrawled Note was a literal handoff by me, from my Fourth Sending undead to Dave's New Singularity Virindi, expanding on concepts created by Ken in his Martine sequence of stories. Kim Payson later asked me to write the dialogue and visions for the Yalaini Man , Yalaini Woman , and Lilitha the Huntress in her Portalspace Dungeon.
- The Gromnatross could travel anywhere in the universe by their own powers, and may have done so. The Kemeroi can exist in any matter within the universe, and may have done so. I imagine that there were battles in many locations before the Gromnatross finished accreting Auberean around the gate to the Nameless' realm, which focused the fighting there.
- Ben Ten was Eri Izawa's character well before I was hired, and she always intended her to be Koji. During the "Fiery End of Beta" event, Eri wandered the world as +Ben Ten carrying an admin-edited tachi she named "Koji's Sword." I don't know if anyone noticed.
- I got the idea for Harlune being Empyrean from fan discussions on the Crossroads of Dereth lore forum. They came up with a great explanation for his lifespan discrepancy, so I used it.
- Koji was an Isparian when I was there. If that later changed, I imagine it was because Koji was a Harlune-like case of a human living abnormally long with no real explanation. In those pre-Live years, there was a vague assumption that Isparians could occasionally gain mastery over death through life magic or philosophical discipline. We moved away from that idea later.
- It's possible and a fun idea. We didn't consider it at the time, so far as I recall.
- Both evolution and forgetting were long processes. I expect there was quite a bit of overlap.
- The Viamontians were always solidly based on Venice. They had been a small merchant realm with lethal internal politics, whose fleet and wealth gave them power out of proportion to their size. I suspect they were cut originally because the Aluvians were a more classical fantasy take on Europe, and how many do you need in one game?
- I alluded to those weapons a few times in things I wrote, but as with the Virindi, I described them using magical language. Because they sounded like thunder and threw off clouds of dark smoke, I had the Aluvians refer to them as "storm staves."
- In the early development of AC2, there was serious talk about adding the Zefir as a playable race, since they were unusual and didn't have any lore to speak of.
- File:0x05000003.png
- I do recall, because it was so unusual, that Viamontian troops had firearms. There's a painting that's been in the game since ship that shows Viamontian arquebusiers/musketeers in their invasion of Aluvia:
- I don't recall anything at all about Rennaj. I'm not even sure I've that name before now. But bear in mind, when I came in AC had already been in development for many years. There were a lot of early ideas that got tossed as the game's vision was refined. To me, that design looks Yalaini Empyrean - a blend of Neydisa Castle up top with the floating Sentinel Spire below.
- The other Ispar nations I remember even less about, and I haven't reread the source material in a dreadfully long time. The Silverans were broadly intended to be "snow elves," sophisticated and rare. The Rouleans were Romans, a militarist empire on their way down. Milantos was supposed to be a dark and gothic realm of blood magic. Maybe the intent for them was something like Tevinter in Dragon Age? The last I recall - barely - is the Souia-Vey. They were a mercenary warrior culture, possibly intended to be Mongol-inspired.
- In the canon as of my departure, the concept of the warding spells never existed. The Olthoi were brought to Auberean deliberately by the power-hungry Kellin II, who planned to harness them for use as an interplanetary army of conquest.
- That's either a canon change after I left, or an error. The Third Sending, as originally described in the old lore documents, was Asheron's discovery of portal magic, and the subsequent release of the Olthoi.
- The logical question to ask here is, what do the Olthoi have to do with the Nameless? In the pre-ship version of the backstory, the portals Asheron experimented with had wards such that they could only connect to "safe" locations. The portal that ended up opening to the Olthoi's world was affected during casting by a portalspace "aftershock" from the entrapment of Bael'Zharon, which ripped those wards away. Asheron and his adepts investigated that portal anyway, were immediately attacked by Olthoi, and ran back without being able to close the portal.
- The second possibility is to interpret Kellin's villainy as indicative of his corruption by the Nameless, or by forces aligned therewith. I don't recall anything in the AC1 story that suggests this - Kellin's evils appear to be due to his own ambition.
- So what qualifies the Olthoi as a "Sending" in the final analysis? I see two possibilities. The first is that portal magic is directly connected to Bael'Zharon's capture. Without that, there would be no portals, and the Olthoi would never have arrived. This isn't a satisfying interpretation to me, but the argument can be made.
- However, in the early iterations of AC2's backstory, the Empyrean returned between games - before the Fifth Sending. Shortly before the Fifth Sending occurred, one of Kellin's closest advisors, "Sa'resh," was revealed to be Black Ferah in disguise. She slew the Emperor, splintering the Empyrean into factions fighting over the throne when they most needed to work together.
- Everything beyond that initial reference is the creation of later Live Team members. Unfortunately, I can't even guess who should be properly credited for that work.
- That's not a question for me, I'm afraid. I invented the Book of Eibhil as a toss-away reference when I wrote "Our Great Work" for Frore. I wanted something that sounded old and ominous, and went with a shabbily disguised reference to the "Book of Eibon" used by H.P. Lovecraft .
- Witch Cave was learning while doing, getting used to tools and processes... and not necessarily by doing it right. I started it the first week I was at Turbine.
- As you went through the cave you'd find notes dropped by Geowulf talking about what he faced and his sketchily-developed relationship with Branwyn. Honestly, Greg Slovacek later worked the same tropes to far better effect in his Frore expedition notes, and by that point I had a grasp of the lore that allowed me to better stitch his superior writing and dungeon design into the greater continuity.
- If you think text that made it in game was dry, you should have seen the draft. You know how most medieval literature seems dull and grammatically overcomplicated to modern readers? I nailed that, unfortunately. Eri Izawa must have wondered if I could write at all after seeing it, because she sat down with me to rewrite it line by line.
- :Using the powers of the ring, a young forester named Bannhorn managed to escape the slaughter, and fled to the woods. Most of his comrades were put to death by Alfrega, though a few, still moldering in the dungeons, were freed when Osric the Wise came to power. With no further use for magical protection in the budding golden age, Bannhorn locked the Rose up in a trunk. Years later, he would, upon being smitten with the daughter of a merchant, use the Rose as an engagement ring. He never told her the true extent of its power, only that it would protect her from harm; neither she nor her family would have approved of his participation in the Alfregan underground.
- As in Xik Minru, you find Geowulf's ring on his corpse and bring it back to Branwen, who gives it to you because she "can't bear to look at it." It was intended from the start to be the Rose of Celdon, as described in "Reign of Alfrega," though at first it was identified to the player as "Branwyn's Tear."
- The Rose of Celdon was passed on in that family through the centuries, becoming a heirloom wedding ring. To find out the ring's true identity, you had to give it to Harlune the Misanthrope - who I invented for Witch Cave, but didn't make it into the game until later. Pretty much the same path as what made it in game, but they made everything a lot clearer in their implementation.
- I don't remember who put those together, but it sounds like the sort of job Chris Pierson would have done. Before I was hired, he actually did the linguistics to figure out what phonics the original tusked Tumeroks would have been able to pronounce, and wrote a doc on that... which to my chagrin I didn't know existed when he came to me slightly irate about our Tumerok names in ACDM.
- I'm not sure what to think of that. Someone took this thing I abandoned in June 1999 to add to the game in September 2005. Did they like the basic ideas? Were they looking to save some implementation time? Was it a test for some new content developer; "here's an old piece of junk, make it work with the modern game?" I'll probably never know.
- I was terribly fond of this kind of obscure "traveler" quest in 1999. You find an item, you read a seemingly unrelated piece of lore / NPC dialogue and realize what the item's for, then go on a long walk to execute on it. Mount Lethe was another relic of that period.
- The only other thing worth noting is that Witch Cave was the first place I suggested the use of translator NPCs at the racial libraries. It made no sense to me that everyone would know these ancient languages, so I thought a "bonus quest" to translate obscure lore at the capital city libraries would be interesting for people who wanted to know the full story. That's a bit of design that probably wouldn't fly these days.
- My plan was that Harlune would start you on a chain of quests taking you hither and yon across Dereth, leveling up the number and power of spells on the ring while you dug up its lost history. My vague goal was to keep adding new quests as time went on, as quest ideas occurred to me, and the power level of players grew. I had a vague idea that it should be an heirloom players could carry throughout their career, that would grow with them.
- From the wiki I see they dumped all the original dialogue and notes, and replaced them. Good. My stuff sucked.
- The good news is, you don't really need me to tell you about it. I was surprised to find that at some point after I left, someone dug up the bones of the quest and put it in game: it's the Temple of Xik Minru.
- :Bannhorn had planned to tell his young son about the ring upon his majority, but, unfortunately, he was set upon by brigands on his way home one day, and the truth was lost.
- Anyway. The general idea was that the cave was a Falatacot temple where they made sacrifices, and as millennia passed a few of them just sort of... hung out down there, sacrificing each other to stay alive until just the one was left, preying on passing Isparians who came hunting Empyrean treasures. I think there may have been Shadows involved somehow too... it's hard to tell from the doc I have. I was just starting to understand the lore when I came up with this, and a lot of the details hadn't been invented yet.
- Anyway . As described in "Reign," the Rose disappeared into history on the night the Orts were betrayed to the Queen. Here was my first draft on what happened, from the Witch Cave design doc :
- I wish they'd changed Geowulf's name too. It amused me at the time, but to English speakers it seems goofy for a dramatic story. I'd pulled it from a doc full of hundreds of possible Aluvian names. We had such a doc for each player heritage group; pages full of hundreds of names that "sounded right." We'd grab them as needed for NPCs, strike through the ones we used in the doc, and move on.
- A bit of trivia about "Reign of Alfrega." When I wrote the first draft, I was obsessed with the idea of using an authentic mediaeval literary voice for that sort of in-world "primary source." So I used an old writer trick and read a bunch of Boccaccio's Decameron, then mimicked its style.
- We decided to pursue volcanic first, then jungle, and ice ended up set aside in favor of other content. Its art was never sufficiently refined to be playable. People who managed to reach it noted that even without spawns, they suffered serious graphics lag. I imagine some of the work for it ended up being used for Halaetan.
- When we started considering land additions for expansion content, the art department pitched three biome-centered experiments in landscape design. The first was "volcanic island," which became Aerlinthe, the second was "jungle island," which became Vesayen, and the last was ice island.
- They were test areas to refine landscape art. We didn't have a separate branch for testing, so experiments with landscaping had to be done someplace remote on the live world map, that people couldn't walk to.
- Millennia later, the Dericost undead Talaagran would unwittingly hint at the Empyrean's origin and purpose in his Scrawled Note. While describing the Virindi surgically implanting organs in Drudges to allow them to manipulate mana, he notes; "This is, naturally, sacrilege, as we all know the ability to wield the subtle energy is a gift from the gods. It is long proven that no particular organ in the Empyrean species circumscribes the ability."
- :We thrash. No. No arms. No legs. What struggles? Only essence, stripped of ego. Who are we? We are….
:Coming apart.
:We do. We are nothing. There is only all. We are the Hand. We grow.
- Soldiers. An army that could seal the breach between the created universe and that of the Nameless.
- The Light touched matter and imposed patterns upon it, creating warrior-entities of tremendous wisdom and power, blessed with wings to travel the void that lay between spinning motes of matter.
- :Although she was behind me, I could sense Kei as a radiant impression of curiosity and wonder, a warmth on my back. Celdiseth, at my side, was a dark, mighty knot of worry, fluttering like a proud old hawk with a broken wing. I could smell the small flowers being crushed beneath my feet, and hear tiny insects frantically digging themselves deeper underground. I could see every leaf on every tree along the shore as they showed their pale undersides in the wind. I saw a miniscule hole in the bark of a sapling on the shore, and knew that it was the abode of a small worm, hibernating until it could be reborn as a tiny winged insect that would live but one day. I could have wept for its tragedy.
:This is not our magic. Our magic doesn’t do this. It was as if I’d spent my life half-asleep, and had only now woken fully.
- The Falatacot survivors fled to Dericost, and you know the story from there.
- Much later, these entities would be known as Gromnatross. They are the archangels of Asheron's Call.
- Then the Light created a second order of "angels." They would not need the ability to fly, but they required a greater facility with manipulating mana-energy. This was built into their pith and essence. They would perform their work on the surfaces of the mass moved around the Nameless' gate by the Gromnatross. They were given legs to move, and hands for detail work.
- To quote an old dev doc, "It is an impression of looming, suffocating darkness; a cold, damp touch that causes flesh to run like water; gibbering madness; the moment of uncomprehending, recoiling horror between a nightmare and full waking."
- The Kemeroi secreted themselves in places of power, and waited.
- They led lives of slow contemplation, growing in knowledge, ignored by the evanescent attentions of animal life. Yet over time, even the plant-intelligences were influenced by what lurked at the world's core.
- The remaining Deru went to sleep, like trees through a long winter.
- The Empyrean were differently gifted. Though also creations of Light, their abilities dealt more with physical matter than the energies of the soul. The Gromnatross could only be corrupted; the Empyrean could be wholly subsumed. The Kemeroi stole the Light from uncounted numbers of them, changing them into Shadows.
- Between them, a third universe containing nothing at all.
- The Kemeroi are extensions of the Nameless' essence extruded into the third universe, given quasi-intellect by the nature of this realm's patterned reality, and trying to reabsorb its stolen matter. They have no form of their own, but possess and adapt the matter of this universe. Thus the translator's note in the text of Aerfalle's Letter:
- The Nameless and its Kemeroi fought these efforts, in their own way.
- In one place, a great outpouring of radiance marked the place the Light had entered the third universe. Uncounted years later, the Lugians would regard this nebular complex, filling one-third of their sky, and come to the understanding that led them to create forges. They now call this astronomical object the Forge of Heaven. Indeed it is.
- This is true for the Empyrean and the Gromnatross, but not necessarily for other species. Mana was part of their nature, an integral part of the whole. Every cell of their bodies naturally affects mana. That's why they don't need to wield a casting foci.
- The Gromnatross and Empyrean completed their great cage. The last portion of the web was a door of sorts, a final gate slammed shut behind the Nameless and its minions. It barred a path straight through the shell of matter, down into its fiery core and beyond, to the maw of the Nameless' realm.
- Then they moved beyond. They opened a path to the Nameless' reality. From that entity, they blessed the third universe with matter, and the capacity for change.
- But there's another universe.
- Everything. Creation.
- File:Stormwaltz Q&A image 1.jpeg
- Why are the Light plural versus the Nameless' singular? I don't remember. I may never have answered that at all. There's a good possibility it came out of my personal belief that what we tend to define as "evil" is ultimately selfishness, and that which we call "good" is ultimately selflessness. To be good, there have to be others to be selfless towards.
- Pour a coffee, this will take a while.
- The Falatacot who worshipped the Slithis were likewise devoured... until the Deru and their witches triggered the Cooling of the World, a mini-ice age.
- The Empyrean.
- This came out of an idea I had, strongly influenced by HP Lovecraft, that "god is a verb." A deity is an entity that causes change to the reality around not due to any conscious effort, but because its very nature causes it. I liked to describe the Nameless as "a virus with the power of god."
- So. At this point we have the Light with their precious new matter/energy universe, and the Nameless trying to reabsorb they matter they stole to make it by sending forth what would become known as Kemeroi. How to stop this?
- In the beginning, there was the Nameless. It was not a creature or god as we would understand it. It had no consciousness and no true form, though it was composed of matter; an infinite sea of matter, non-discriminate, constantly changing form and composition. An entire universe composed of a single entity of pure, unrelenting, reflexive action and change; all-encompassing and all-consuming.
- The Light stretched forth their powers. They passed into the third universe and blessed it with their own essences, transmuting themselves to pattern and light, imposing structure and rules.
- There spun forth clouds of dust and gas, and stars, and worlds uncounted. Drops of teeming matter between empty void, islands of change bound by patterns of natural law.
- The Light are also described in "Brink of the Abyss." When Asheron's steps forward and says, "Zojak Quaau," he's invoking the Light, and Evaen feels their touch:
- The Nameless is a universe of pure matter and pure chaos.
- The world called Auberean spun through the void, confining the maw of hell deep within itself.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)