Let's talk Rularuu (spoilers)
By
Anti_Proton,
Posted on: 2009-10-16 04:49 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Darrin Wade seems to be an aspect of Rularuu, given his strange statements and his weird, misshapen head which is shaped like the many statues of Rularuu throughout the shadow shard.
Dawnslayer on Virtue.
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Hopefully that means AE will finally get some of those Shadow Shard maps I've been asked for since i14 beta.
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Originally Posted by Shadowclone
"However I have a lot on my plate today, including examining a cavern full of lava for its potential uses in the future and a trip into the Shadow Shard. Crazy place that Shard is alright, reminds me a bit of an old movie at one point..."
That was Dr. Aeon in a thread he made. Great now we have Dr. Aeon in the Shard... |
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No, their just putting an AE in the Shadow Shard...|
Originally Posted by Lazarus
Hopefully that means AE will finally get some of those Shadow Shard maps I've been asked for since i14 beta.
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I gotta' admit, it would really suck to get a "Game Over!" screen as you're walking about because a dimension-devouring god appeared in Andromeda and the aliens there were unable to stop him. "Game over, man! A god ate your dimension while you weren't looking! Sucks to be you!" Yeah, that wouldn't be a lot of fun |
Originally Posted by Balanced
See, we're just making assumptions here. Maybe these cosmic-level threats are more common than we realize, and our comics are just the local papers covering local events. Who's to say that Shhhhk'mr'he of Niphrolous IV (for example) haven't defeated half a dozen dimension-devouring demigods? Or that heroes on Kithrak Prime aren't out there responding to calls on the police telepathic amplifier and stopping low-end gangsters from getting their hands on devices that can slice, dice, and julienne the fabric of reality?
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Personally, though, that's one reason I like the Shadow Shard. It's another world, weird and wonderful and so very different from our own. I made a whole thread about outworld characters and locations, and I actually have to say - I enjoy these stories a lot. I may be from Earth, but one of my favourite premises ever is watching ridiculously human aliens living on a strange planet battling even more ridiculous bad guys. This just has a sort of unmatched mystique and novelty that placing an alien invasion in the suburbs of New Jersey just can't match.
(Incidentally, that's exactly what the live-action move of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe does)
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Well, I'm not sure that's wholly true. An awful lot of both the Marvel and DC universes actually regularly spin off into the idea that a lot of high-powered goings on do happen all across the universe/multiverse. A lot of times some problem visiting earth is the result of some distant war, prison break, or other significant event in some other place that happens to have found its way to earth. (Insert presumptions about earthly conditions being favorable for lots of intelligent life elsewhere, making it a likely stop for those that come across it in distress, angry, hungry, what have you.) Some good examples of this are things like Marvel's Shi'ar Empire with their Imperial Guards, and DC's Green Lantern Corps. They don't hang out on earth, but they sometimes come there because there are a lot of either troublemakers or potential allies there.|
Originally Posted by Megajoule
Joking aside, it must be admitted that nearly all comic book universes are Earth-centered to a degree not often seen since Copernicus came along. All those sci-fi planets and alien empires, all those alternate dimensions, but for some reason, the one that the heroes live in/on is the one that everything happens to. This is for a simple, obvious reason - all the readers also live on an Earth, which is improbably similar despite the presence/lack of superpowers - but it can lead to absurd situations as the OP and others have noted.
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I would say there are a couple of common themes that do go along with your description, but they don't always directly suggest earth is central cosmic goings on. The first is the notion that the earth in the stories is an absolute hotbed of demigod-like beings, be they actual godlings, evolutionarily advanced humans, technological/scientific achievements, accidents, etc. The frequent conceit here is that humans in particular have extraordinary potential, far greater than most of the other non-earthly races. As this potential is realized, more and more powerful beings congregate on earth, sometimes including peer beings from other worlds. So even though other races have either their own super heroes or are actually all super by human standards, either earth has more heroes or ours are somehow superior despite smaller numbers.
This actually isn't a theme unique to comics or superbeings. Look at things like Star Trek, where Starfleet High Command is on Earth, and Starfleet membership is seemingly overwhelmingly Human, despite Vulcans providing most of the original technology and early military might. A pretty significant chunk of space sci-fi over the last 50 years assumes that Earth spreads far and wide even in the face of alien opposition. It's often humans that produce the truly extraordinary military or scientific minds. Humanity is shown as extremely good at overcoming ridiculous odds, seemingly on sheer hutspah - human tenacity always seem to surprise non-human foes that face us with slavery or extinction.
Interestingly, Primal Earth in CoH isn't actually clearly an example of this superiority. First, it seems that if you spit through a dimensional portal you probably hit a meta-being on an alternate earth. It comes across that non-superpowered earths (like ours!) aren't the norm. Additionally, there aren't a whole lot of known alien races crawling around, and those that are practically all are on peer power levels with earthly metahumans. Moreover, some of the examples seem to have these levels of power in all members of their race. The Kheldians come to mind. They may not all learn to fight the good fight with their abilities, but they seem to be inherent nonetheless. This goes with the idea mentioned upthread that there may be remote, alien threats to all space-time that powerful, local forces put down. Since alien races seem uncommon and distant, Primal Earth's metas might just never hear about it.
Now, in universes where there are a wider array of known alien races, and they do traffic more with earth, earths concentration of super beings sometimes directly leads to earth being front and center in cosmic events, even from alien perspectives. When you combine this supposedly extraordinary human will and adaptability with access to concentrated power, you open yourself to Earth periodically producing folks like Parallax ("When Green Lanterns Go Bad!"), who end up making a grab for absolutely stupefying amounts of power and escalating themselves to a threat to all space and time. This is a fairly common theme in comics, or at least its incredibly epic scale makes up for the fact that it usually doesn't happen more than once every few years of real world time.
Blue
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Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
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Well, you have a point, but this is related directly to events where Earth's status is somehow relevant. If a god comes to feed on US, then it makes sense he'd come to Earth just as likely as he'd go to some other alien's home world, and because we're a relatively technologically backwards species by sci-fi standards, that actually makes sense. But a sorta-god who wants to devour the entire dimension would have no reason to be on Earth to begin with. He could just as well be in the middle of empty space, on a barren planet, or even in the core of a planet somewhere. He doesn't need to seek us out so we can imprison him. He can just nuke us from orbit where we can't reach him and that would be that.
This is actually different from a sci-fi setting where Earth has spread outwards and colonised space, becoming a big player on the galactic scene. Then, like any super power, it would draw its own level of heat. But in City of Heroes, we aren't. We're just some backwater planet in the middle of nowhere. Why do these supreme evils come seek us out? Our gods are gone and just about anything that comes out of anywhere off-world has more power than our own local heroes, for the most part.
It's like a little armoured bunker in the middle of an open field that gets constantly hit by meteorites which never seem to land anywhere BUT on the heavily armoured, very resistant bunker, so you never see any craters. It's like evil constantly seeks out strong good so that it can be stopped.
You do have a point, though. Toss a rock through a random dimensional portal and you hit a demigod in the eye every time. What's more, there seem to be people just sitting in front of their portals cheering and shouting "Open! Open! Open! Come on! Open!" so that as soon as we form a connection with their dimension, they rush through into ours like a stampede of cattle. Because... That's what they do, I guess. I wonder why the zillions of Nemesis-controlled dimensions don't have that problem.
But we're getting a little off-topic.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Cals random Shadow Shard theory of the day.
Rularuu eats dimentions. He has done so for eternity. The question we should ask is why.
Why does he consume? Why were we the only world to stop him?
I believe that we gained the advantage, in part, due to The Dream Doctor. This fits in well with him once being part of Rularuu, perhaps even an aspect. We read his text as him shaving off a piece, but what if it was the other way. Part of Rularuu, out of a sense of guilt, shaved off one of his aspects that became the Dream Doctor. This created a chain of events that trapped Rularuu in the shard.
As to why he consumes I came up with a random theory for that as well. He is a living universe. Think Marvel, and how planets and stars can gain intelligence. Now put that on a grand scale. He eats to grow, to become the only universe. In this way Rularuu is both an entity and a place. A place that modern portal technology can access.
If this holds any truth then the shard is not just his mind, but him.
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As Faatim rebelled and walled himself into the Chantry and as Lanaru rebelled and broke the world, so before them the Dream Doctor rebelled and trapped Rularuu within his own mind. Not bad. I can go with that. It has precedent, it makes sense and it's a good idea |
Originally Posted by Calash
I believe that we gained the advantage, in part, due to The Dream Doctor. This fits in well with him once being part of Rularuu, perhaps even an aspect. We read his text as him shaving off a piece, but what if it was the other way. Part of Rularuu, out of a sense of guilt, shaved off one of his aspects that became the Dream Doctor. This created a chain of events that trapped Rularuu in the shard.
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I'm not sure how the Dream Doctor is written in fiction, though. He, like Darryn Wayde, seems to have been written as a man with powers first and foremost, rather than the manifestation of a godlike entity. He even says something to that effect in the quote someone provided - how he remembers back to when he was just a man.
I can't really say one way or the other, but I DO like the idea.
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As to why he consumes I came up with a random theory for that as well. He is a living universe. Think Marvel, and how planets and stars can gain intelligence. Now put that on a grand scale. He eats to grow, to become the only universe. In this way Rularuu is both an entity and a place. A place that modern portal technology can access. If this holds any truth then the shard is not just his mind, but him. |
Still, though, I hope at least some of our ideas here make it in. Not so much from a feeling of ownership, I just think we came up with some interesting concept
That's why I love these threads about the Shard. There's always something interesting every time.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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It's a fun debate to be sure.
My biggest want is some story arcs in the shard. I asked myself a couple months ago why I had never really tried the Shadow Shard content, and discovered that there were no real story arcs... the missions basically amount to paper missions.
The TFs are where all the info is at (other than some Midnighter, RWZ, and redside references)... I want some story arcs there, personally. It's a unique and cool zone (though travel is a bit difficult) that should be followed some more. I'd personally rather have more there than some moon zone or something like that.
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Synopsis: Explore the fine line between justice and vengeance as you help a hero of Talos Island bring his friend's murderer to justice.
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By the way, on the whole "Darrin as an aspect" side of things, I looked through the thread and didn't find any mention of how he introduces himself.
He closes with this. "The simple man you see before you is only a single facet of my being."
Eerie.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
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Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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Or he could just be a really good conman with some magic tricks up his sleeves.
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Originally Posted by UberGuy
By the way, on the whole "Darrin as an aspect" side of things, I looked through the thread and didn't find any mention of how he introduces himself.
He closes with this. "The simple man you see before you is only a single facet of my being." Eerie. |
Or just a nutjob.
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/36641/My-Little-Exalt
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Given what he does with the Dead Man's Deck, this sounds very much possible. He promises the deck to a client (in Longbow, no less!) and when the Warriors don't deliver, he casts a minor charm on a fake one and passes that on without batting an eye. The whole "I don't make a habit of selling fake artefacts, but..." bit is very, very telling. He comes off like a glorified Mr. Boccor - someone with considerably power, but who isn't above cheap tricks if that's what works.|
Originally Posted by Lazarus
Or he could just be a really good conman with some magic tricks up his sleeves.
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As for him claiming that "this simple man is but a facet of my being," that's actually quite possible. Someone already mentioned how distorted his face was, and we've seen multiple instances of not-all-that beings occupying human bodies. Hell, every two-bit CoT mystic is more than just the simple man you punch in his glowing green eyes. It doesn't make him a god, it just makes him a wizard, and we have tons of those already.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Which is why I would prefer him to be an aspect of Rularuu. Much more interesting and creepy.
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Given what he does with the Dead Man's Deck, this sounds very much possible. He promises the deck to a client (in Longbow, no less!) and when the Warriors don't deliver, he casts a minor charm on a fake one and passes that on without batting an eye. The whole "I don't make a habit of selling fake artefacts, but..." bit is very, very telling. He comes off like a glorified Mr. Boccor - someone with considerably power, but who isn't above cheap tricks if that's what works.
As for him claiming that "this simple man is but a facet of my being," that's actually quite possible. Someone already mentioned how distorted his face was, and we've seen multiple instances of not-all-that beings occupying human bodies. Hell, every two-bit CoT mystic is more than just the simple man you punch in his glowing green eyes. It doesn't make him a god, it just makes him a wizard, and we have tons of those already. |
Guide: Tanking, Wall of Fire Style (Updated for I19!), and the Four Rules of Tanking
Story Arc: Belated Justice, #88003
Synopsis: Explore the fine line between justice and vengeance as you help a hero of Talos Island bring his friend's murderer to justice.
Grey Pilgrim: Fire/Fire Tanker (50), Victory
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If we go with the idea presented earlier that Rularuu was at some point just a man(mortal) with powers, than it's well within the real of possibility that the Dream Doctor, as an aspect of Rularuu, could make that statement and it be true.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
As Faatim rebelled and walled himself into the Chantry and as Lanaru rebelled and broke the world, so before them the Dream Doctor rebelled and trapped Rularuu within his own mind. Not bad. I can go with that. It has precedent, it makes sense and it's a good idea
I'm not sure how the Dream Doctor is written in fiction, though. He, like Darryn Wayde, seems to have been written as a man with powers first and foremost, rather than the manifestation of a godlike entity. He even says something to that effect in the quote someone provided - how he remembers back to when he was just a man. I can't really say one way or the other, but I DO like the idea. |
Fiction is full of instances of a man(mortal) transcending their small existance to become something far greater.
If anyone's a fan of Magic: The Gathering, probably it's most iconic antagonist, Yawgmoth, started out as a normal man. Yawgmoth gained power thought twisted experiments and black magics, to the point where he was all but a god, in fact he was worshiped as a god by many.
In the end he had grown so immesely powerful that even Planeswalkers (some of the most powerful beings in the multiverse) couldn't rival him. His mere presence slaughtered countless millions, only to reanimate them as his servants.
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Who says we were? We locked him up a few decades ago. That's a blip to him. Even the people involved in keeping him contained don't believe he'll stay that way forever. Who says he hasn't been locked up, escaped, and eaten the people who locked him up countless times in the past?
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Originally Posted by Calash
Cals random Shadow Shard theory of the day.
Rularuu eats dimentions. He has done so for eternity. The question we should ask is why. Why does he consume? Why were we the only world to stop him? |
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Ghaa! Don't even say that! It hurts me terribly just to see that military guy standing in the Storm Palace zone. Before him, humans were mainly in Firebase Zulu with a small molepoint base in the Cascades and Justin Augustine (right next to the exit) in the Chantry. And what does this nameless military guy so deep in the Shadow Shard do? Well, he sells jet packs, of course.|
Originally Posted by Shadowclone
No, their just putting an AE in the Shadow Shard...
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Sorry to be a wet blanket but, honestly, I've been a lot less excited about the Shadow Shard ever since those portals got put in without any change to the molepoint system. The store NPCs are nice and some are fairly interesting NPCs - but why are they all placed right next to the zone exits? That essentially puts them all next to each other. Then the devs go and do the same thing again with the jet pack vendors. Arg. Why not just put ONE vendor in at Firebase Zulu?
All the Midnighter Club stuff was a welcome addition (and my heroes would all be quite happy if somebody were to drop a tactical nuke on Darrin Wade, even if he is standing next to a hospital) but, before they add more in, I really think they need to hit the retcon button and fix the place up a bit. Having Portal Corp and the military working together to slowly punch into each Shard while also having portals to all zones and a guy sitting in each one handing out jetpacks? That's outright nonsense.
Just had a thought. Rularuu really does sound like something Scooby Doo would say.
@craggy see me on Union for TFs, SFs (please!) or just some good ol fashioned teaming.
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Though I have never thought about that before, you are right. It does.
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Originally Posted by craggy
Just had a thought. Rularuu really does sound like something Scooby Doo would say.
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This thread is a very good read and is a though provoking discussion to say the least.|
Originally Posted by Rockpirate
If we go with the idea presented earlier that Rularuu was at some point just a man(mortal) with powers, than it's well within the real of possibility that the Dream Doctor, as an aspect of Rularuu, could make that statement and it be true.
Fiction is full of instances of a man(mortal) transcending their small existance to become something far greater. If anyone's a fan of Magic: The Gathering, probably it's most iconic antagonist, Yawgmoth, started out as a normal man. Yawgmoth gained power thought twisted experiments and black magics, to the point where he was all but a god, in fact he was worshiped as a god by many. In the end he had grown so immesely powerful that even Planeswalkers (some of the most powerful beings in the multiverse) couldn't rival him. His mere presence slaughtered countless millions, only to reanimate them as his servants. |
Yawgmoth was a very fearsome self created god indeed but there is only one I can think of could beat him and survive, unlike the ones who defeated him. Nicol_Bolas is the strongest planeswalker of all and possibly the most powerful being in the magic multiverse. The only thing that was able to tie him was a mirror image of himself(go figure). It's slightly different since he's a dragon but he gained his powers through his own means.
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Yeah, what they did to the Shard was an outright travesty. This is the worst hack-and-slash cop-out kludge I have seen done to this game since the Council takeover, and unlike that takeover which was smoother over, the Shard has only been made WORSE! I've been calling the portals to the different zones the "cop-out teleporters" for a reason. They had their Mole Points, but making more of those would have taken a lot of work. Do you remember how many years it took them to make the Mole Point interior visible again?|
Originally Posted by Zloth
Ghaa! Don't even say that! It hurts me terribly just to see that military guy standing in the Storm Palace zone. Before him, humans were mainly in Firebase Zulu with a small molepoint base in the Cascades and Justin Augustine (right next to the exit) in the Chantry. And what does this nameless military guy so deep in the Shadow Shard do? Well, he sells jet packs, of course.
Sorry to be a wet blanket but, honestly, I've been a lot less excited about the Shadow Shard ever since those portals got put in without any change to the molepoint system. The store NPCs are nice and some are fairly interesting NPCs - but why are they all placed right next to the zone exits? That essentially puts them all next to each other. Then the devs go and do the same thing again with the jet pack vendors. Arg. Why not just put ONE vendor in at Firebase Zulu? All the Midnighter Club stuff was a welcome addition (and my heroes would all be quite happy if somebody were to drop a tactical nuke on Darrin Wade, even if he is standing next to a hospital) but, before they add more in, I really think they need to hit the retcon button and fix the place up a bit. Having Portal Corp and the military working together to slowly punch into each Shard while also having portals to all zones and a guy sitting in each one handing out jetpacks? That's outright nonsense. |
I want to see a remake of the Shard that axes all of those cop-out teleporters and replaces them with mole points hidden in the caves. I want to see the jetpack vendors GONE and replaced with just one in FBZ. I want to see the seller NPCs either gone, moved inside the new Mole Points, or moved AWAY from the zone entrances.
Seriously, the whole thing feels like one of those "private" servers for other MMOs, where all of the big bads of the game stand around your starting point in a neat row, selling you epic gear. It just looks like such an epic kludge it REALLY ruins the atmosphere.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Indeed, the shadow shard could be _fantastic_ a real high-level treat, like the Negative-zone (pre-civil war) in Marvel. But the half-***** changes have made it more and more tacky.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I want to see a remake of the Shard that axes all of those cop-out teleporters and replaces them with mole points hidden in the caves. I want to see the jetpack vendors GONE and replaced with just one in FBZ. I want to see the seller NPCs either gone, moved inside the new Mole Points, or moved AWAY from the zone entrances.
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Still, I'd like to see force field generators at the corners of missions that seal off a part of the city. And machinery around the base entrances, oh and maybe putting them in a place that makes... oh I don't know... any sense whatsoever.
Hell, I'd make the models myself if I though they'd get used, it bugs me _that_ much
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Sorry for the threadjack, but...|
Originally Posted by Boomie
This thread is a very good read and is a though provoking discussion to say the least.
Yawgmoth was a very fearsome self created god indeed but there is only one I can think of could beat him and survive, unlike the ones who defeated him. Nicol_Bolas is the strongest planeswalker of all and possibly the most powerful being in the magic multiverse. The only thing that was able to tie him was a mirror image of himself(go figure). It's slightly different since he's a dragon but he gained his powers through his own means. |
One of Magic's development team actually made a list of what are considered the most powerful characters within the game canon, and you might be surprised. Yawgmoth was ranked very highly, generally above all the planeswalkers (including Bolas), but the top spot actually went to Karona.
She was the embodyment of all magic. It's just that her life was relatively short, and the character never reached her full potential. (as such she got poorly pwnt)(not to mention her game card was TERRIBLE)
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