The ONE thing you want to know...

Small thing, but Lamashtu is actually a historical demon/goddess in Mesopotamian mythology. And I actually haven't encountered her yet so I looked her up on Paragonwiki, and they even made her an animal-headed hybrid thing, haha. Hequat's name MIGHT have been taken from Heqat/Heqet/Heket, but the similarities pretty much end there.

Overall, there are a bunch of deities created whole cloth for the game, but they do draw on some inspirations too. (And sometimes, you run headfirst into their own versions. I have a character, Alecto Nox, who is actually supposed to be Alecto...which is fun given CoH's Furies and how they continue to be fleshed out. I do a lot of selective ignoring.)

I thought that was already the case? I may simply remember wrong.

I do agree with your suggesting, though. It's a good, smart way of solving the problem without breaking too much canon, even if it still leaves the Well as a malevolent entity. It does kind of throw a monkey wrench into the whole "the Well can control you," though. I admit that's one good solution, but I also recognise that Ascendants are another perfectly good solution, and that one has the benefit of not actually rewriting existing fiction. Yes, it's bad fiction, but I've always been a fan of salvaging bad fiction through expanding upon it and turning it into good fiction. Yes, the idea of the Well is terrible as the end-all be-all of powers, but that same idea can be very good as a stepping stone to something bigger.

Besides, aren't Ascendants pretty much exactly what you describe? Or should we wait to actually see them in-game first before we start guessing?

I didn't know that, but that's kind of not what I mean. Even if Lamashtu is a real deity taken into City of Heroes, that's still a made-up entity in City of Heroes canon because the way she's worked into the story ties into the broader City of Heroes universe. She has been established and explored (a little), and is thus something I wouldn't mind using. I would NOT, however, want to mess with Zeus or Tartarus any more than we already are unless I have actual in-game canon to draw on for them. I HATE having to refer to out-of-game non-canon sources of information in order to reference a name-drop in this game. Basically, if it's not on ParagonWiki and I have to go to Wikipedia instead, it's not part of the game.

For instance, take a look at Croatoa. Yes, the Tuatha de Dannan and Fir Bolg of Croatoa fame are actually based on historical or mythological (I'm not quite sure) sources from the real world, but I don't have to know the first thing about either because the game itself sets up all the background for both factions that I need to know. Is it true to the source material? Um... Maybe? Like I said, I don't know the first thing about those guys and I don't have to, because what we have here is NOT a name-drop for the real-world concepts. They are, instead, established fictional characters in the game's own universe, and that's pretty much enough.

Sure, I'd personally prefer that we don't go ahead and introduce our own City of Heroes version of the Greek pantheon of gods because, again, I'd rather use original IP, but if we ARE going to be using those gods, then that will have to happen.

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.

Just to nitpick: The power granted by a pact with powerful dimensional entities are not neccessarily the power of said entity itself.

To take an example, Dr. Strange is clearly Magic origin, he gets (at least occasionally) parts of the power of Eternity. Eternity however isn't Magic (the good doctor is using his own magic to channel part of Eternity's cosmic power) Similarily, even though he is Godlike, Galactus is not a magical being: He transcends magic. (and for that matter, science) basicalyl science and magic are two different ways for mortals to manipulate the fundamental forces of the universe (the "power cosmic") beings like Galactus or Eternity don't have to use such crude means: They can just call upon the power directly, because of what they are.

Try "Hecate". Likewise "Ermeeth", at least before Blueberry showed up in person, was an obvious reference to Prometheus. I was never able to find a fit for Tielekku. A friend's suggestion that it referred to Twi'lek BDSM didnt...seem useful.

This statement is nonsense. If "science and magic are two ways to manipulate power" then either science is really magic or magic is really science. There is no third way.

In any case, godlike beings are not gods.

That seems a lot like the Immaterium of Warhammer 40 000 fame. It's not a bad idea, per se - the Well of the Furies is sentient because it absorbed sentience from people and it is amoral/malicious because "monsters from the id," essentially. Again, I can't really argue that's a bad idea per se, but it still has one problem that even the current implementation has - it's Species-specific. Now, if most of your characters are human or, at the very least, mostly from the same species, that might not present a big problem, but it is a problem for me. My own characters tend to be inhuman and from a wide variety of different "species." Not only does that bring in a lot of different "Wells," each bound to a different species, but it brings a Well for every one character, which is a massive waste of storytelling resources, really.

If we were going with the idea that Well is nothing more than a power enhancer, then we really shouldn't have made it sentient and turned its gift of power into a Faustian deal. Now that it IS sentient, then, the only recourse is to simply supersede it with something even bigger that ISN'T sentient and malicious. So long as the Well remains sentient, then no dancing about exactly what it is will fix the fundamental problem that power granted is invasive on character concept when that's the only way to proceed.

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And yes, gods are Natural. Magic and the power of the Divine are different things. It's in the game's own lore.

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.

Er, what? This is like saying that a car and a teleporter are the same thing, becuase they both get you to the same place.

Or that a hydroelectric power plant and a watermill are the same thing, becuase they both use the motion of water as a source of power.

The cosmic entities of the MU has a whole lot better a claim to Godhood than most of it's gods.

I don't think the current canon is actually aligned with my idea.


If you think of the Well as a thing, a cosmic thing that grants all power is a troublesome idea. But if you think of it as just a personification of human potential, its not that humanity is nothing without the Well and the Well grants power to humanity, its that humanity always had a certain potential and the Well is just a representation of that potential. And as humanity evolves, its potential increases and humanity's Well gets stronger.

In the same way that mobs of people can have a psychology that is distinct from all of its separate individuals, the Well has a psychology that is the sum total of all of humanity that is distinct from any of its separate individuals. Or alternatively an emergent property like the psychology of an ant colony.

As to the Well taking over an individual temporarily, that's a cosmic conceptual representation of something that also happens on a mundane level. When it happens to super powered entities influenced by the personification of the sum total of human potential driven by the emergent psychology of humanity we call it "taken over by the Well." When it happens in high school we call it "peer pressure."

That's what I thought the Well was. So if that's not what it is in-game I must have misread something.

What contradicts this concept of the Well:

1. Unless Prometheus is completely confused, his interest in humanity but animosity towards the Well is illogical if he knows the Well is just an emergent personality from collective humanity.

2. This mechanism for the Well is extremely difficult to reconcile with the Well being connected to different Earths (i.e. Primal, Praetorian) without being connected to all of them equally reachable.

3. Under this concept, its extremely difficult to rationalize how the Well could be unknown or legendary to the Menders through deep time.

4. Under this concept, Tyrant would have been a better champion than we are against the Battalion, and Prometheus' assertion about not putting all his eggs in one basket would be nonsensical.

The only thing I've ever found that comes anywhere close is actually described as an imitation of the word, and quite likely therefore incorrect. Most appropriate usage here:

"Still came that eldritch, mocking cry—“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” And at last we remembered that the daemoniac shoggoths—given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and having no language save that which the dot-groups expressed—had likewise no voice save the imitated accents of their bygone masters."

It's a stretch, but I don't think any more so than "Ermeeth" and "Prometheus". And the Old Ones certainly match the description of "Gods/Not Actually Gods" being extremely powerful beings that either demanded or simply inspired worship. Total conjecture, but it's still the closest thing I've found that can be shoehorned into place without totally shredding plausibility.

This is what I've always assumed but I've never actually delved into the matter at all. I was actually pretty surprised the day I learned that Admastor is a reference to African mythology. I'd assumed he was made up out of whole cloth. Our Adamastor bears little resemblance to the mythical one, of course, but that's par for the course. Pretty much all of our mythologically-inspired content is very loosely coupled to its original source, if it can be said to be coupled to it at all.

My feeling has always been that the Pantheon as a whole is based for the most part upon African mythology. Most of us Westerners just aren't familiar enough with it to recognize it the way we recognize Greco-Roman mythology or something closer to home like Croatoa.

Now, the business with the Coralax is pretty much a dish on the Lovecraft Mythos as far as I can tell from the limited exposure I've had to them.

Absolutely; "The Cult of the Shaper" has some very direct Lovecraft references in it.

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Well, Mot is a semitic God (he actually is the god of Death, son of El.... Which makes him in a weird way Jesus' brother)

I think you're overthinking it, ironic as it is for me to be the one to say that. I don't mean to say the idea is bad - it's actually pretty clever and I don't dislike it in the slightest. I just think it makes things far more complicated than they need to be, and I just don't see the payoff of this complication being worth it. One might think that making the Well more basic would simplify its story, but that's not entirely true. Right now, the Well acts like a person. Most of us grow up around people, so we know how people behave and already come equipped with the apparatus to parse the behaviour of other people. Thus, a Well which acts like a person, nebulous as its motives may be, is "simpler" for us to deal with because we already have the tools needed to comprehend it built into our heads from real life. Posing the Well as an abstract concept governed by non-obvious rules and wrapping all of that up in a system of consciousness that would be alien to most people IS making things more complicated.

Generally speaking, the Well as a person is something I like, with the caveat that this nonsense of it being the one and only source of all powers needs to die a horrible, painful death. I would normally argue against it, but Ascendants provide an "out," and so long as an "out" exists, I'll always pick writing a an actor as a person vs. writing an actor as a thing. I may have spoken before about the difference between a character an a construct (character being a person first and a fictional entity second, construct being an idea that's forced into the shape of a character who acts like no-one actually acts), and the Well as an abstract representation of the sum of human potential, with intelligence driven by the complex interaction of human thoughts and emotions... Is a construct. It's an idea that's round-peg-in-a-square-hole hammered into the shape of a person that it really doesn't need to have.

Personally, I prefer to avoid constructs as much as possible unless there's a very compelling reason for it, and the only reason compelling enough here is "That's what we're stuck with, let's try to explain it." The Well as human potential would be an idea fit for a Well of the Furies which weren't sentient and wilful, not because you can't explain sentience or will, but because I feel the story works better if you don't have. Constructs are, by their very nature, plot devices. They exist to either bridge the gap between two plot points that the overall story structure just happened to leave too far apart, or otherwise to skip straight to the meta side of things and deliver a message from the author straight to the audience. In both cases, I simply find there are better ways to do it, if for no reason other than because whenever you expose your behind-the-scenes moves as an author, you take a big bite out of suspension of disbelief.

Again, what you say makes sense and would make for a logical story... But I still don't agree with it. Purely conceptually speaking, you can explain anything at all. You can explain how Miss Liberty swapped grandfathers overnight, you can explain where Keith Nancy found an army of invincible ninja, you can explain why Reichsman's swearing loyalty to the 5th Column or why Atlas died defending Independence Port from an alien armada (that's still in the game, by the way - IP Security Chief briefing clue). You can explain all of these, but I just don't feel like you should have to, because these should never have been in the game to be explained in the first place. Sometimes, you just have to avoid things you have to explain, and if you're put in the position of facing a done deal, just choose to roll with the simpler explanation and try to lead that to the outcome you want.

Basically, finding out at the end of my journey that the Well was just an abstract construct of human potential all along and all of my interactions with it were just the illusion of a very complex system mimicking real intelligence would be an anime ending. And I don't mean to say that anime is bad or that it always ends bad, just that anime has this tendency to invoke the same tropes in "big finales," usually involving a godchild, a person becoming God, unravelling the fabric of reality or exploding in a ball of bright light thus transcending to another level of existence or some such overwrought metaphysical twist of plot that's so outlandish it robs the story of any grounding it might have had before.

I find that with "godlike" powers, especially in a setting like City of Heroes where these can become commonplace, careful writing is paramount. It's all too easy to lose context of the person behind the powers by just riding the rollercoaster of abstraction too hard, but at the end of the day what brings it all back down to earth is the fact that... There are still real people at the roots of these concepts. To lose that is to lose your sense of orientation in the story. To this effect, I find that going too far and being too adamant about separating the Well of the Furies from EVERYTHING that could ground it in something people can "get" by making it a literal abstract representation would be a mistake, at least if that's going to represent the "ending."

I simply find that an evil intelligence behind great power that can be argued with and appealed to is more compelling than a morality-less, compassion-less, personality-less abstract intelligence. Again, I'm not saying it's a bad idea, I just don't think it would make for a better story with the writing team with have. I know for sure I couldn't make it work, at least.

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.

Is that confirmed anywhere or are you making it up?

Steve Canyon is/was a syndicated newspaper adventure comic strip. He's pulling your leg.

Making it up and being a dork.

Why would it be an illusion? The notions of conceptual personifications separate, do you even believe that group intelligences can exist that are distinct from, but not separate from, individual intelligences?

Put it another way: sand castles are not grains of sand. No grain of sand has a part of a sand castle within it. So when you knock the sand castle over, where does it go? Is the sand castle just an illusion perpetrated by sand grains?

No, I don't believe that group intelligence exists as a "thing." I can believe it in the sense of crowd flow research, but that's not a separate sentient intelligence, that's just a group of individuals behaving in a fairly predictable manner dictated by circumstances and instinct. Yes, you can interpret that as intelligence if you want to argue around the specifics, but what you can't do is present that as a character. At best you can create a construct operating under abstract rules, and this is exactly what I want to avoid.

The sand castle is an illusion in the sense that we give it a name and a meaning, but it is not meaningfully different from any other randomly-assembled pile of sand and water. A sand castle is not a "thing," it's simply an assembly of things that we see as a monolithic concept.

To say that a group has intelligence comparable to that of an actual person is, to me, not terribly different from saying that a sand castle must have a princess living in it because it resembles in our heads the concept of a real castle, despite the similarity only being in the concepts we wrap around the constructs, not in the constructs themselves.

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I'm sure you can argue how human beings themselves are comprised of many cells that seem to form a singular consciousness, so why couldn't many people in a group do the same, but the brain cells inside a human head are system built to work as a system, where the "cognition" of any single element of it is limited to the function it serves in that system. The problem with trying to tie many people together into an "overmind" is that what makes us intelligent in the first place is also the same thing which makes us incompatible in sharing a common intelligence, which is that we have a drive to think for ourselves. In order to create a true intelligence made up of the the brains of many people, you'd have to both change how people's brains operate and still produce something that doesn't resemble a person. And that's the problem.

By doing what you're suggesting, you're creating a construct with intelligence of a completely different type that doesn't necessarily correspond to what people would normally expect of an intelligence. And while that might have scientific merit, or even make for interesting predictionist fiction, it's still something I prefer to avoid whenever possible. That, to me, is what makes James Cameron movies so successful - he takes a wild sci-fi concept, but puts it through the filter of things we're familiar with, so instead of having the movie pause to explain its amazingly high-concept ideas to us, all we need is an off-hand mention of a "thing" to instantly get it.

Aliens is a great example of this. You have recognisbale guns, you have fairly recognisable armour, you have largely conventional architecture, you have people who behave like actual people would, you have a planet that has a breathable atmosphere so you don't have to worry about leaks and punctures (meaning people can get shot and walls exploded) and essentially everything's built such that pretty much anyone who's seen a movie in the 80s will "get" it without almost any need for explanation. It's why that movie was able to be cut down so brutally James Cameron's original cut and still retain a plot that most anyone can follow.

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I'll end by saying this - with your idea, you're treading into territory that relies on people accepting something that not everyone will willingly believe. It may be true, I'm not omnipotent and I'm certainly not a behaviour psychologist, but it's nevertheless hard to accept because it goes contrary to instinct. To me, it's like trying to insert hard concepts from Special Relativity and String Theory that paint a universe that's so different from what we perceive it to be that it's essentially unrecognisable - you're shooting yourself in the foot by having to explain everything at least well enough for people to take you word for it, and any time you spend explaining things us pure upkeep. If I have a choice, I'll always go for the concept that I don't have to explain. Even at the expense of factual truth, if it comes to that.

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.