except she can't have been banished before it was discovered because unleashing Undeath on Norrath was the reason WHY she was banished. the know the Glaufaye worshipped all at least 3 of the old gods. we know they had passionate/sex related rituals that supposedly would make Paxio blush, we know they worship Zou, there's hints they worshipped Pingyuan, and how they talk about the song/cycle of life we might even guess they worshipped Xul'Varien and Anqil as well as facets of nature. we know that Anashti had followers then as well on Norrath, the spirit that gives us the line to break the stasis spell is doing be because he's jealous of the Glaufaye being timeless while he grew old and died. but it might also mean the only Sulites on norrath were a 'strike team' sent to get rid of the potential to preserve Xul'Varien. all but one go in the Spire, the one left outside dies of old age while keeping an eye on the Glaufaye/waiting for the others to get back, the others are killed in the Spire, and the Sorceress' spirit gets stuck there As to Mayong, yes the vampires can be destroyed, EXCEPT Mayong. whatever happened in PoH with the destruction of his race down to himself, it gave him true immortality. we can kill him as much as we want, just like night is destroyed by day, but he always resurrects. Anashti may well have not seen the results in PoH, but saw the 'result' that was Mayong. who is functionally immortal, but Vampirism is definately a form of undeath. so perhaps it's Mayong's presence/creation of other vampires that triggers Anashti getting tossed. the problem we run into is it seems like Theer gets tossed while these other 4 are part of the pantheon, and Anashti gets tossed it seems after some races are on norrath for creating undeath on it. and her tossing is what gets the Claymore and Soulfire sent to norrath. but Mayong is undead, and supposedly here to see the Dragons get deposited, and Anashti is considered a 'lost' or 'forgotten' goddess by the time the first elves find hints of her via the God-King hearing her talk to him. and then we got the whole race of critters in the Void, sent there as a collective. I think a bunch of us should head over to DBG, find Kaitheel and Cronyn, and make them give us a proper timeline.
One of the problems is that a lot of this was layered on after there was anyone properly overseeing lore. God only knows if there's any kind of "lore bible" in-house anymore. What's worse is that the sourcing for this information is...sketchy in places. (At one point I recall a source folks had relied on turned out to be nothing more than fanfic...) Add to this the high likelihood for some of those characters involved just plain lying and the result is utter confusion.
Couple of points. The Nameless created all of the realities and everything within. The Elemental gods may or may not have been involved with the creation of individual planets. The Gods of Influence (like Anashti'Sul) came into being after the initial creation event happened. So yes she is part of the pantheon, but becomes a god way after Norrath is created but also before Norrath is discovered by Veeshan....well. Probably. The Ewer of Sul'dal is indestructible. The taint of the Waters of Life can't be removed from the River of Life. From what I've gathered I think the trail goes from its creation in the hands of Anashti'sul and her corrupting it to create Undeath. Afterward she is captured and banished by the other gods. The Ewer isn't sent into the Void with her but instead ends up in Innoruuk's possession (this is debatable). He uses the Ewer to create the Y'dal (Rainmare wants to push this to before her banishment) Mayong Mistmoor ends up absorbing the essence of his race and becoming a true immortal. Somehow he stumbles to Norrath in time to see Veeshan plant her First Brood there. A cult dedicated to the secret worship of Anashti'Sul is created amongst the Elves. The Curse of Ro is placed on Tunaria. The Phoenix King uses the Ewer to "save" his people. Marconis uses the Ewer to create a new breed of Vampires independent of Mayong. We end up with the Ewer. How the Ewer gets to Norrath? Either Mayong brought it with him, or Innoruuk did. The most likely candidate is Mayong actually. The artifact was part of his race's creation. It would also be much simpler to have Anashti's agents take the Ewer from Mayong's vaults than getting it from the Plane of Hate. It could even have been one of the items stolen by the Shisshar when they were doing their planar plundering. Or it could of ended up in the Rathe Council's possession and been brought to Norrath when they were executed by the first Rallosian Army. As for being different than EQ1, everything upto and including the Planes of Power expansion. Anything added to EQ1 after that isn't necessarily part of our lore until its included in EQ2. Some people take that to mean later in Norrathian years so stuff like the surviving hidden Combine city in EQ1 should exist in EQ2 because it happened in Norrath's past. My personal interpretation is any Expansion introduced after PoP can be ignored until its content is mentioned in EQ2. Likewise, conversely EQ1 can ignore everything introduced by EQ2. Until they include Anashti'Sul in EQ1 she doesn't exist in that universe. She is entirely an EQ2 thing. The same deal with all of our "forgotten" gods. Devs one on team aren't held hostage by devs introducing lore on the other team. And last point, the new deities aren't one-for-one reproductions of the dead gods. The passion god seems to be a combination of Flame and a portion of Love. Flame got its own god without taking up the passion aspect of the old god. Fairly recently Erollisi took up the mantle of Love and Hunters.
I don't think its specifically because she unleashed Undeath on Norrath. It is because she created Undeath period. At that point, anywhere the River of Life touched there would be Undeath as well. By tainting life itself it meant the other gods couldn't undo what Anashti had done. Also Anashti needs to have created Undeath before the Y'dal were created. The reason the Y'dal are Vampires is because they were tainted with Undeath from the Waters of Sul'dal. i.e. the curse of Undeath had already been unleashed. That may of happened in the time between the creation of Undeath and before the other gods turned against Anashti, or it could of happened after she was banished to the Void. If the Ewer were used before the Curse of Undeath was created there is no reason they would be undead. Or at lest Anashti would of been able to push the blame for the creation of Undeath onto Inny since his meddling with the Ewer would of been the reason and he should of been banished instead or along with Anashti. And just to say it one more time, the "forgotten" 5 gods need to be dead before Norrath is populated by the other gods because Tunare is included in the first pact. Sometimes I have a nightmare where we find out that Mayong is a Chronomancer and all of this happened during the Lost Age and he time traveled back to when Norrath was first discovered just to troll Veeshan. The part never recorded is that not only did Mayong witness the First Brood, but he stalked Veeshan, killed her and dumped the body inside of Luclin and that secret is what created the goddess Luclin. Yeah, its a weird nightmare. I hate time travel.
And So.... the elves of Nye'Caelona are not your typical elves & if memory serves they predate Tunar's elves. So.. this opens a whole other realm of questions.. and any speculations welcome. (please mark speculations as such)
this becomes complicated, if they add stuff from before. why would these elves precate other elfs ? why would they be called elfs then ? are they like the first ogres of rallos or the roelliks ?
In the main story board during their time line they hint to an older history. If it predates creation as we know it is a matter of speculation ( my speculation on this matter is they are a creation of Pingyuan Diqu a Nature Deity,) to support this I offer this. They are masters of geomancy, They are gifted the obfuscation spell by a power ( what else causes memory loss) on a massive scale, And their city looks like they lifted the design right off the chelsith stone ( I could be way off base and probably am but hey its speculation right)
Well, as we like to do in the old days in the lore forum, lets call for source? I haven't seen anything that says these elves pre-date Tunaria. What I have seen is they don't come from a known land, they worship Growth, and they know Geomancy. Lets stop right here and ask who else knows Geomancy. The big answer was the founders of the Combine Empire. They discovered that branch of magic, and it was lost when the Combine Empire fell during the lost age. Recently new Geomancers started showing up among the Deepwater Researchers that helped us with the dragons and became part of the New Combine Army. The dragons also apparently retained knowledge of Geomancy and some of the Droag knew it. Now we've run into these Nye'Calona and they've discovered Geomancy in a fashion that is independent from the rest. Probably. Their history hints at them coming from a desert area that we aren't familiar with. That is quite likely either the chain of islands that the GoD expansions in EQ1 were on, or maybe even...the super continent on the other side of Norrath that has never been detailed in EQ1 or 2?
I did a quest in KA and at the end of it was a discovery of some writing that was very odd and appeared to be an old elvish or something like that, but it didn't show up in chat but on my main character window and it faded before I could screenshot it (being interested in lore as I'm a RPer). I don't remember the name of the quest, just know it was near the end of the chain for my item for doing 30 quests in KA, but not sure. If that is of any possible help.
I remember that as well, Look like ill have to make a new Toon to do this on so i can SS those quest lines.
"Geomancy" seems to mean different things in different contexts. At one point it was a sort of basic crafting skill...of course the Combine's Geomancy is another thing...and now the current Ascension class. Confusion on confusion.
Interesting write up on the lore. I really enjoyed reading this thread. Thank you to all who contributed. I have a question though. How can they be God's if they can die? God's are supposed to be immortal beings.
Well, that kind of points out the absolute stupidity of KA's lore. Technically speaking there is no way Lanys can kill Inny. It is possible to trap gods, imprison gods, and even strip them of their powers. Doing these sorts of things has been done several times in the past. Every single case before KA it has been an elaborate trap. Usually with Inny as one of the conspirators. They often involve locking the deity into a battle to weaken them before the trap is sprung. Innoruuk is the foremost expert in trying to get rid of other deities. He is the one that "killed" Erolliis. He is the one that managed to trap Mithanial in a dream prison and steal his gift of life. He was one of the major players when the pantheon took down Anashti'sul. So when Lanys gains the powers of the Chaos stone and immediately punks Inny it just leaves a bad taste in the mouth. If any deity should know how to protect himself, it should be Inny. Instead Ms just gained her divine powers a few seconds ago is suddenly so bad *** she and Terris Thule can overpower a major god. Seems more like the full power of 5 gods were contained in the Chaos stone, not just fragments of their memory. Which is why this story seems so incredibly bad from a lore perspective. It would of been fine if Lanys just drove Inny away, but in her little speech she declared him dead. You'd think since she was his avatar for a long time that she'd know his ability to deceive others. So is Inny faking his own death, or did Lanys really manage it? Either way it would of been a lot more sensible for Terris to boldly claim that Inny is dead with Lanys denying it saying that Inny got away, but instead they are playing Lanys for either a fool or way over powered. Anyways, on the absolute scale of things, there are varying degrees of "dead" for a god. A normal defeat would have Inny reforming on his own plane. If his power was stolen, he'd fall into the Ethernere and mess it up (again). Only if he was killed by Theer would his spirit simply disappear.
Yeah, Geomancy was credited with building all of the Combines major projects including their huge Spires they threw up all over the place. The older pyramids were a pre-combine teleportation system. The geomancy we've seen for ourselves doesn't seem quite so powerful as the Combine Geomancy was reported to be.
Actually the spires predate the combine.."Al'Kabor notes that the 'Combine Spires' are actually a lot older then the combine empire. commenting that he should really start calling them the 'Quadroliths' instead becuase they predate the Combine." But yeah Geomancy is as old as dirt..
These are the sorts of discussions that arise when game lore has been excessively retconned. Two aberrations that never seemed to fit well into the EQ2 version of the cosmology are Veeshan and Mayong Mistmoore. Veeshan being above and separate from the rest of the gods, and Mayong because he, at least originally, predated the Ewer of Sul'dae. It's also been stated by previous lore devs, possibly Vhalen, that Mayong and his bloodline are separate and different from the D'Morte and other vampire lines which were brought forth by the Ewer. It's all very fuzzy. Mayong's history has always been kept deliberately vague. He's been referred to as "older than the ages." At any rate, Mayong has always been alluded to as being something different. I quit caring about the current storyline after the defeat of Kerafyrm, so I'm not up on all of the current lore revisions. Except the EverQuest creation story, which is the foundation for all of this, specifically states that Tunare introduced elves to Norrath and that they were her creations. If they start contradicting this basic foundation then pretty much everything is rendered meaningless.
The thing about the spires, there are clearly two types of spire. There is the squat pyramid type found in South Ro and in the Feerrott. Then there is the huge white pillar type found in North Karana, Greater Feydark, and the Dreadlands. Stylistically they are very different sharing no common features. It would be rather easy to say that the Combine probably didn't create the first set of spires, but just added on to an already existing network. Are the white spires or the stone pyramids the older system? Honestly there are no clues to that. The only clue to that would be the super-spire created in the Dreadlands. That was Greig's creation to get to Luclin. So that seems to indicate that the white spires are also Greig's creation. One thing to say is the pyramid type spire fits very well with Shissar architecture. It is possible they are the ones that created them and used them to raid the planes, considering that the link to the Plane of Sky was via one of the pyramid types. And then you have all of the bronze looking ones the Quellthulians installed everywhere that we use now, in order to create the Great Feedback to launch Odus into Ulteria to create a path for Theer to leave the Void.
The pyramid was also used in the Dreadlands super-spires. The entire device is 4 massive pylons surrounding a configuration of 7(?) pyramids. I always figured that the pyramids are lesser nodes on the greater network. Each continent has one large set of spires and branching off from that system is an intra-continental network of smaller pyramid spires. That's why, originally, the first teleport spells a wizard gained access to were for the three original sets of spires, which would make sense if they were basically the major hubs of the network. I always viewed the wizard spire system in EQ as being similar to a train system. You had the main station in the Nexus with lines operating to the five major regional hub stations, which would then serve as a transfer point to a local line, ending in South Ro or what not. Going with this reasoning, then I'd posit that the spires came first and the pyramids were added as needed at a later point in time. That being said, I'd like to point out that to the best of my recollection, the Dreadlands spire complex is the only place on Norrath that the pyramids exist off of old Antonica. I would suggest that the pyramids are of Combine origin, connected through the spire network via the North Karana spires. Edit: A particular area of frustration for me seems to be the inconsistency with which EQ2 handles the pyramids in terms of art style. Two of the pyramids still exist to my knowledge, the West Karana pyramid off the coast of Thundering Steppes, and the Nektulos Forest pyramid in Darklight Woods. Due to the different eras in which they were added to the game, they look drastically different from one another.
That is good reasoning, except for the whole thing with Greig. Greig's work on the Luclin portal was suppose to be a super secret project hidden from Seru and the rest of the rebels. It is within sight of the Dreadland's Spire. So the implication there is Greig built both the Dreadland's Spire and the Super Spire he used to create a teleport to Kunark. The other alternative is that Greig discovered the Dreadlands portal, and the Super Spire and used already existing spires for his work. Which would indicate the entire Spire network was created by the Shissar and the Dreadlands was most likely the location of Ssraeshza Temple before it was teleported to Luclin. Greig built his own teleportation framework on Luclin in an attempt to get the Emperor's family home. It is absolutely huge, so there is no real doubt that Greig could make the Super Spires. The Mons Lethari spire dwarfs the Super Spire.
I'm still not convinced that the Shissar created the spires themselves. The suggestion that they did so was very early on in the Shadows of Luclin lore before they were fleshed out more as a race. That being said they are probably the most likely candidate out of the known historical powers. The Shissar predated the Combine by a few thousand years I think. Based solely on the known lore, I'd suggest that a plausible scenario is that the Shissar may have made the initial spire network and used that to escape the Greenmist, however the Combine came behind them and built upon it. This would mean that the original spires were of Shissar construction, however the pyramids would be a Combine edition. The pyramid network exists solely on Antonica, the Combine heartland, and on Grieg's super-spire in Dreadlands. Also, I looked it up and I stand corrected. There are six sets of spires that existed on Norrath, not five. An additional set of spires sits at the bottom of the Timorous Deep. That's where the firepot room is. You'll notice that the firepot room also contains the same set of glyphs that the spires themselves do. Damn, I think this is the first decent lore discussion I've seen on these forums since Cusashorn left.
