The ONE thing you want to know...

Oh, I agree, I'm surprised it hasn't been officially done either. And I think there'd be a heck of a fight for control between the Shapers and Hamidon.

>.> Introduce it (with some leaked-through Praetorian DE) in a Crey's Folly revamp. If any zone should get the DE angry (and the coralax going,) it'd be Crey's.

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There's a lot of truth in this. I don't know why this is such a difficult concept to accept, but the people who don't care about the lore will not care about the lore no matter what you do to the lore. The people who do care about the lore will only care about the lore to the extent that they can explore it in a consistent manner. There is no such thing as "good enough consistency" for lore. Targeting lore at the people who don't care about the lore is, well, honestly dumb. That's like targeting your background music at the deaf.

Honestly, the only way I have to resolve the issues with the Origins of Power storyline and its implied continuation in the Well of Furies is to simply assume everyone I talk to in the game about either one are unreliable narrators. Which is not hard: most people mess them up, the paragon writers messed them up, so why wouldn't those people also mess up a lot of this information. And I have no reason to believe Prometheus is telling me anything but what he needs me to know whether its the truth or otherwise. I keep hoping one day Paragon will have a "untangle the origin of powers" contest so I can submit my entry and be done with it.


Prometheus: ... so what I told you was true, from a certain point of view.
Me: From a certain point of view?
Prometheus: You're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on your point of view.
Me: You're right about that. Power Blast is very pretty from a certain point of view. But that point of view is not head-on. <Kaboom>

Crab Spider, Magic Bolero shoulder piece, Tartarus helm. FABULOUS!

Anyone can correct me if I'm wrong here, but as far as I know...

Requiem's back and leading the 5th Column.

Reichsman is now one of his generals, working under Requiem.

Vandal more than likely rejoined the 5th, but we don't know for sure.

Nosferatu hasn't been touched on at all, as far as I know.

Maestro stuck with the Council according to a low level hero Tip mission.

Archon Burkholder's fate is entirely unknown as well, but I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to rejoin the 5th after his failures in Striga. Considering he was one of the first to turn traitor, though, I don't think Requiem would want him back.

Whyyyy? The Praetorians don't need to have a hand in every story in Primal Earth. It's bad enough they were focused on so much in Dark Astoria >:|

Don't worry, the real twist would be when the Praetorian DE turns against the Primal DE.

Also: It's explained that Oranbega is another city deep beneath Paragon City. But what I've never seen explained yet are those other ruin-filled tunnels/caves beneath Paragon. Not the blue/purple caves that appear to be abandoned mines, but the gray/brown sandy-floored caves under Manticore's mansion, and the caves where you hook up with Lady Jane in the first Midnighters arc and that you travel through later in the same arc while investigating the Lost/Rikti connection, and similar identical caves all over the city. The ruins in those caves look more Greco-Roman; no resemblance to Oranbega at all.

Also, some things are glaring in their absence: churches, schools, and obvious, non-high-rise-apartment-style residential areas. The only church I've seen in the entire game is in First Ward. Seriously, all of Paragon City appears to be dedicated to commercial pursuits, and I think Paragon is more thoroughly covered with 200-story skyscrapers than New York City.

Before the fall of the Soviet Union (and the formation of the Valiant Defenders of the Motherland) there was the Soviet Defenders of the Motherland. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to figure that they got their start around WW2.

Oddly enough they're listed under the Historical Heroes section, when even in that listing they're credited with downing a US plane and nearly starting a Nuclear war...

@Oathbound & @Oathbound Too

Specifically to ramp their threat up some and (mechanics/gameplay/bit of lore-wise) to evolve the group and create some new threats besides eminators.

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I'm not sure what you're referring to here-- the Doppelgangers seemed almost exclusively scientific in origin; i.e. the Doppelgangers were clones produced from combat and genetic information taken from your character. Not once on either side of the Doppelganger arcs (blue/red) did I read about an alternate world filled with copies of the player.

i would like a shadow or ghost of merulina to reappear, or perhaps an actuall god-child offspring of heres hidden and raised by the coralax.

i would REALLY like to know more about her and who/what ever killed her. she sounds like she was an incarnate herself of an alien species, or perhaps even a well [read up on the wiki about her and the coralax ]. and what ever "silenced" her would be similar in power and alien. would make for an awesome story.

and yeah the coralax themselves need to be fleshed out. now that we have water blast they need to be updated themselves and some powers added, and maybe a higher level story arc exploring their civilization with a re-skinned oranbega map or something...


...


but i would also LOVE to know more about the Order of the Four Winds and how they are organized as an impartial[?] order training people and where they get said wind powers to bestow from [gods? elementals? wells? what?]. more interaction between Levantera, Borea, Scirocco, Ice Mistral, maybe even Zephyr, Seraphina, the Dark Watcher, and maybe some actual monks from the order.

to be released with Wind Blast and maaaybe Wind Control powersets. XD


...


and maybe more about other alien races that do exist. right now we only have what, two? kheldians/nictus and shivan? the crabs and squids are just echoes of extinct races so those dont count [unless you're a time shifter XD]. battalion makes three buttttttt...

i want more aliens.

I think he means the "other good" you - the one that doesn't wear reversed-color versions of your outfit. The one you initially fight.

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Those races aren't extinct.

As for the rest, it depends on your definition of alien. Are you including other dimensional humans?

We have:
Kheldians (Nictus/Warshades can either be considered a subspecies or their own, given the number of changes.)
Rikti - extradimensional, but mutated far enough from base human to count as "Alien" in any case.
Shivans (all flavors.)
Mefnanim/Hulmanim. (Light/Dark novas)
Kurukt/Ruktur (Light/Dark Dwarf.)
Merulina (deceased) - don't know her "race," addressed as a goddess, but came from outer space, so fitting her here.
Battallion (one or more races)
Whatever Dillo is.
Whatever Grym is. (Not sure if he's "alien" or not - call him a maybe.)
And whatever the players have come up with.

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Wait!

Prometheus is Obi Wan? Holy <Pancake>! I guess that Galaxy wasn't so far away
or so long ago... Hmmmm... Evidently, they joined Ouroboros before we did.

I have to agree with others about the whole "Well" crap... Yuck.

As for Prometheus, he just irks me. If he's so bad@$$, why doesn't he slap
the Battalion silly and be done with it? Oh, that's right, he's "furthering humanity"
with the whole "fire gift" shtick, all the while doing the "Ignore the God behind
the curtain" thing by witholding information or threatening us if we push too much.

Bah!

By and large, I don't believe him, I don't think he's working in our best interests
(or doing anything *useful* at all, in fact), and I'd rather he simply "cease any and all
supernatural activity and return forthwith to his place of origin, or to the next
convenient parallel dimension" to quote a phrase.

Which brings me to my question...

"The ONE thing I want to know": Why do I bother?

The lore is SO screwed up, inconsistent, and sometimes directly conflicting,
that I don't think it's even possible to make coherent sense of it anymore.

I used to enjoy the lore...but it jumped the shark a long time ago.

At best, I find these days that I can only look at small pieces (like a short story),
and deliberately ignore trying to fit them sensibly into the bigger (ripped, torn, and
moth-eaten) tapestry that is the Game's Lore these days...

YMMV.


Regards,
4

I think he's our enemy. Or at the very least, he will be.

Those two sentences don't have any connection.

The incarnate story may very well be an "ad hoc attempt to explain things that didn't need explaining and weren't really connected in the first place", but that doesn't mean that it's inconsistent.

Show me one example of where the incarnate story is outright inconsistent, because no-one's done that yet.
When people complain about stories in CoH, they're often very quick to make claims of inconsistency while only giving examples of 'things they don't like', 'things they can't make sense of' and 'lack of explanations' but, while those things may be examples of bad writing, none of them are examples of a story 'being inconsistent' or a story 'not making sense'.

The Well of the Furies that we have today bears small resemblance to the Well that Marcus and Stefan dipped their hands into back in 2004 (that being the year the game launched, not the literal in-game year that they received their power). The characterization of the Well as a cosmic dimension-spanning entity is inconsistent with the original characterization of it as a passive "battery of human potential". In fact, the Well was originally a dodge and Pandora's Box was the real power source. Later, it turned out that the BOX was the dodge and the real source was the Well after all.

Now, you can wave your hands and say, "That's not inconsistency, it's just that <handwave>we now know more about it than we knew eight years ago</handwave>."

There's no particularly good way to refute that because it says that we players were never given the whole story and so anything the devs decide to toss at us lore-wise is perfectly okay because they're just "expanding" on the old content.

This, of course, is why I tend to go into Standard Lore Rant #3 about how the devs hoard all of the lore they have in order to promote the existence of this very situation where they tell us the smallest amount of history necessary for the current content and so nothing they write is technically a contradiction of existing lore; it's "actually" an expansion of existing lore instead.

It's not that Statesman "realized his potential", it's that he found a magic box and released super powers into the world for the first time since mythological days. Except that it wasn't really the box, it was really The Well, and the potential was actually there all along. Except that the Well actually created this situation and brought Marcus and Stefan to itself because it needed a champion. Except that it's sentient and really wanted to find the person it could use to take over the multiverse.

Let's not even get into the silliness that is Doctor Brainstorm, the Origin of Powers, and Power Proliferation.

You see <handwave>we're just learning more about it is all</handwave>. It's not REALLY inconsistency. It's just that Statesman lied and then lied again and then the Well itself lied and Mender Silos lies when it suits him and Prometheus is almost certainly lieing about many things. That's okay, though, because a lie means that the truth is never an inconsistency.

This is a cheat and a dodge and an excuse for writers and mission programmers to be non-commital and justify whatever they feel like justifying after the fact instead of binding themselves to their established history.

It means that no matter what we players think we know about anything in the game, that we never can really have faith that we know the whole story. It can change at the whim of a writer with a "good idea". That's all well and good for a game about conspiracies where you know up-front that you don't know the whole story and that what you do know probably ought to be questioned. This is a game about super heroes and villains and it's supposed to have a solid history.

It means that we can never know the answer to a simple question like "What year was the Faultline Incident?" because committing themselves to it would be taking away some of their own freedom and laying themselves open to actually be inconsistent.

So, is it inconsistent? No, technically, it's not. The consistency is that we've been lied to repeatedly about the nature of the Well and the Furies and the Gods and we are continuing to be lied to and dodged. The people doing the lieing and the dodging are the writers of the game, and we're supposed to just smile and say "Wow, that's neat! I can't wait to see how the next lie is revealed!"

Pardon me; "I can't wait to see next expansion of the existing content."

You can take your pick about which statement is actually more correct.

1. There seems to be no logic to Praetorian Earth and Primal Earth sharing the same Well, when its stated that other Wells exist for other beings. Different Wells for different planets in the same dimension but the same Well for two different worlds in two different dimensions is an unexplained oddity.

2. Prometheus says that Cole is taking power he receives from the Well and using it to empower his Praetorian lieutenants. If that's the case, it makes more sense to hit him directly when he doesn't possess all of the power he's receiving, rather than taking down each Lt in turn and effectively concentrating that power into Cole. Prometheus' strategy makes more sense for an Ascendent, but not an Incarnate.

3. If the Well is seeking a champion, why would it make it difficult for us to find and directly tap its power in the "fast way" which would then give it much greater control over us than if we are forced to achieve incarnate status the "slow" way?

4. According to the game lore, Mender Silos believed the Well of the Furies was a myth until confirmed by Mender Ramiel. Ramiel implies that our timeline is not the original one Silos is from, which implies that there exists an original alternate timeline in which incarnate power and the well were not generally revealed to Primal Earth. But the confrontation with Praetorian Earth was set in motion by events having nothing to do with Silos, and Prometheus' involvement is contingent on the rise of Cole on Praetorian Earth, his awareness of Primal Earth, and the Coming Storm. We know Silos didn't cause the Coming Storm, or at least it was a certainty before his other time traveling activities because the other Menders are aware of it. Cole's rise as an Incarnate starts decades before the modern intervention of Nemesis and Silos. Interdimensional travel via Portal Corp does not seem to be tied to anachronistic tampering. Furthermore, Mender Ramiel later tells Silos in-game that he (Silos) has only experienced a limited subset of incarnate power, demonstrating that Silos is aware of incarnates in general. So why Silos is unaware of the Well of the Furies before Ramiel comes back to our time is an unexplained inconsistency.

Slick and Arcana have already done a good job here. But just off the top of my head:

Blueberry says that Ascension robs the postulant's race of much of its potential. But if the same source of potential or "Well" as we're calling it applies to all members of a given race across multiple universes then doesn't it have to have infinite potential? There are infinite alternate universes and any finite supply divided across infinity would come to nothing. If it's infinite then why would Ascension matter? You can subtract any amount from infinity, uh, infinitely.

But let's go with the idea that potential is finite. Doesn't that make every one of our characters a selfish jerk? For one to become superhuman, how many others must be consigned to mediocrity or worse because their share of potential has been taken? Ten? Fifty? A hundred? Who, who would call themselves "hero", would accept such power at such a price? And yet, of course, our characters are cast by the Incarnate lore as chomping at the bit to gain MOAR POWER, even making obvious Faustian bargains with a clearly malevolent entity to do so.

It is obvious by any reasonable accounting that the Well and Incarnate lore have been and continue to be cobbled together on the fly to fit the convenience of the moment. There is a term for this. It's also obvious that the implications are considered lightly if at all. Sometimes that's forgivable. This being a roleplaying game, and the material in question being intimately tied to how people conceive and perceive their alternate selves, it isn't. That's over and above that fact that it's a just plain bad story.

N.B. that it's not a question of whether or not the inconsistencies can be reconciled. Of course they can be. I keep trotting this out but only because it's true: there's a thing in philosophy called the Duhem-Quine Thesis which basically states in layman's terms that if you try hard enough you can BS yourself into believing anything. If you're willing to toss anything resembling reason and sanity to the winds you can explain the Well lore using the political structure of the Ottoman Empire. The problem is that you need to come up with these kinds of absurd explanations.

N.B. also: Moff's Law.

In other words,

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To be fair, under that theory the game isn't inconsistent, its just a really really crappy universe.


My interpretation of Duhem-Quine is that the truth of all statements relies on context, and without a firm common consensus context no statement's truth can be determined. Contrawise, almost any statement can be demonstrated to be not provably false given a sufficiently accommodating reinterpretation of the surrounding context.

Or more colloquially: you can undermine any logical conclusion or proof of contradiction by simply calling into question enough premises until no conclusion is possible at all.

I'm sure they wouldn't have put it that way though.


You know, a strong analogy can be made between the Menders and the Hapsburgs. I wonder if that makes Incarnates the uprising Russian empire: is Prometheus Peter the Great? This clearly demands further investigation.

I think each species just has one Well, no matter how many dimensions they're found in.
So the human Well is found in any dimension where humans exist, just like the Kheldian Well is found in any dimension where the Kheldians exist - so the Primal dimension can have a human and a Kheldian Well because both species exist there, but there wouldn't be a Kheldian Well in the Praetorian dimension if Kheldians didn't exist there.

But every well of every possibly infinite iteration of a species across all dimensions is tied together so that if one well is subsumed or destroyed they all are? i mean, that's pretty much the premise of the current Incarnate storyline. That's... PANCAKING stupid. No, wait, i mean it's PANCAKING PANCAKING PANCAKING PANCAKING PANCAKING stupid. Did i mention it's not very good writing?