What is the connection between ethereal weapons and the new expansion

At first glance I would think that the ethereal weapons (being named after the various mobs that we have killed) would mean we were going to ethernere, but in the video, where holly gave us hints into the new expansion, she mentioned it was an area of norrath we had never been to before
So, i do not understand what the connections are between a place and the people of the weapons!
I am certain it is to do with their death, and perhaps their return, but how can this be possible without involvement in ethernere? Are we dealing with chronomagery again?

That's not something we could answer just yet. Okay, well, we CAN, but that would probably best be left to explain a bit later (like, the expansion). :-D

Its stated as a spiritual rift. If it was chronomagic is SHOULD be called a temporal rift. spiritual rifts go to places like shaman and beastlords pockets/dimensions or ethernere. (sf worldevent) had 'ethereal rift', with hostile planar monsters inside (storm, hate, flame, justice), which disrupted ulteran transportation. what we have now are spiritual rifts that cause ethereal weapons. lol! hates envy has sablevein rifts (fire elementals flooding from plane of fire/flame? except they look like earth haha, must be from lava). near non-obelisk entrances to OoLS, there are rift watchers (shadowmen). item clicky effect 'dimensional rift' transports you to Antechamber of Fate. item is reward for doing quest The Rift, learning about naiads and their mirrored world. (TSO worldevent)there are also void storms, which operate like rifts to the void, but needed a potion to make them even work 1 way. like a weaker link that needed stablization. if the naming convention has any ryhme or reason it should refer to afterlife. so portal till yonder(ethernere) or else pockets where lingering spirits hang out. OR portal to source of flow of souls. prenorrathian existence, that would qualify as spiritual. i dont know if this qualifies as a world event tho. no quests, no npcs. maybe quests are coming but will require an ethereal weapon.

I suspect it's connected to what we learned from the new city quest lines, especially the Qeynos mage quests...

Cronyn wrote:

that's ok, 'just wanted to speculate!
ratbast wrote:

but it sounded like holly was saying it was physically on norrath - 'an area' of norrath you know? hmm!

Alluvial@Antonia Bayle wrote:

my interpretation was spiritual rifts and ethereals were not geographically connected to new area.

1 being prelude event relating to other plane (and spread to many many locations to drop), and the other being a specific location on hero plane.

Spoilers....

Hero's Rest
Long ago an ancient Behemoth known only as "The Kraken" survived the Age of Scale by burying itself deep in the area that would MUCH LATER be known as Lake Rathetear. Ages later the being emerged during the Time of Turmoil only to discover Norrath had grown strong again. The Kraken fearing its destruction returned to its burrow and dug deeper into the Underfoot of Norrath and there it summoned to him other powerful beings destroyed by the denizens of Norrath. Most beings stay for only 15-20 minutes, while other more powerful beings like Lady Vox and Lord Nagafen were required 6 days of service for each time they were destroyed. Some beings of slightly lesser strength were released after only 3 days, where they were then equipped with more gear. Adventurers throughout Norrath have always known this to be the case and as a result, the time of death has become more important than any other Lore behind the powerful creatures they destroy week to week. To this day you can still hear silent whispers as you travel through the Rathe areas of Norrath asking: "When do we respawn?" and "Hey, nice armory Mr. Kraken. Where did you find 50,000 Cloak of Flames? No. Don't put that on me, they'll kill me for it!" only to reawaken with no memory of their previous demise.

I think you may be closer than you know. Dialogue from Qeynos mage quests:
Festyana Naestra:Festyana Naestra\/a says to you, "But not mine. Those portals you spoke of in your city... they are held in this plane by two anchors. One in the reality you know, and another in the plane from which the souls who inhabit the undead reside."
You say to Festyana Naestra, "Wait, what plane is that? Are we still speaking of Ethernere?"
Festyana Naestra:Festyana Naestra\/a says to you, "No, though the undead portals do eventually connect there. The intricacies are more subtle than I care to explain, but the short version is that these portals have thinned the veil between our plane and the one on which the undead anchors reside. A skillful mage could exploit this state to step through the veil and detach those anchors."
Combine that with the messing about we see in the Freeport quest lines, and one starts to suspect the Ethereal weapons are a side effect of all this traffic with this sort of 'in-between' plane...

Ethereal weapons are spiritual echoes of heroic encounters from the past. Each weapon is a trophy from a well-known, powerful foe. These spiritual echoes are entering Norrath from a place that has been mentioned in the past, but never explored in any EQ game--a place between the material realm and the planes of power and influence: the Realm of Heroes.

Jait@Venekor wrote:

LOL Very nicely put. I remember the rumors of the Kraken that supposedly existed in Lake Rathetear and the Ocean of Tears. Sites like Allakhazam were the best place to learn rumors about them, but the pictures were ultimately proven to just be fake photoshops.

Wasn't that megalodin or something similar? I remember seeing posts about it in the 98 newsboards

Yeah the Megalodin was real. It was removed very early because it wouldn't path right and ended up being a Land Shark or flying like the ones in Erudin. If I can find a link I'll post it. But Cusa is right, on EQCasters and Alla there was a great photoshop, but it was fake.
Going to try and find a link and edit my post. Pretty sure an EQ1 dev reconfirmed it about the same time the Ancient Cyclops mechanics were explained or was it Pyzjin(sp) Gimme a sec.

For the life of me, I can no longer find it. And since I never personally saw it, it may very well have been a myth. But I coulda sworn....

Anaogi@Permafrost wrote:

(there are atleast 2 ways to interpret this, but my first impression was this: undead are inhabited by souls in alternate plane)

that is some funky lore. implies that undead souls are on different plane, while their animated corpse is in hero plane. similar to lich doctrine (body/spirit separation: instead of soul contained in item, its contained inside another entire plane) and almost an inverse astral projection. like spirits in plane of undead astral project(hero plane project) and possess corpses (restated: astral projection combined with demonic possession and corpse reanimation) although ghosts only possess some out of phase protoplasm, not a corpse.

sounds like a demiplane(s) of ethernere to me.

anchors is reminiscent of djinn from plane of sky. (djinn lamp)

a demiplane of undead, full of spirits who astral project themselves into reanimated remains on norrath would certainly qualify as a spirit realm, hence spiritual rift.

if anyone is running an undead plane it ought to be anashti. she would best fit a hades type figure (and the plane of undead would be like a chinese plat farming sweatshop, with anashti whipping spirits to work harder, while they are connected to projection devices, for the purpose of tormenting, then killing, mortals so they are so tormented when they die that they come to their plane and can slave away as new recruits)

in the end this brings up tons of questions. are undead even aware of whats going on in undead plane? or are they hooked up to device that functions like movie 'the matrix'? are lich really bound to item, or is it merely an anchor for astral projection from undead plane. where is lucans spirit? do all undead operate as protected sentience from another plane, including player races?

are there any known cases of an undead being cured and returning to mortality? if so, what ritual or process restored them? what happened to tserina anyway? her soul got tied up with dracoliche or something... are freeblood really undead?

it sounds like there are a series of undead portals creating alternate passage from hero plane to ethernere. that would be a creepy maze to get lost in. luckily my healers use grey fields to rezz.

i read most of the freeport revamp quest dialogue, but not all. is there any connection between the wraith and the qeynos dialogue?

in ascending reanimated corpse quality? ghost, skeleton, zombie, vampire, lich, i know im forgetting tons of undead too

what kind of undead are necro pets? i am guessing skeletons and zombies. finally we get some clue about their dark rituals. guaraneteed, necros are going to some undead sweatshop when they die to pay off their debt.

before this i thought of necros as summoning plane of influence creatures, mostly from plane of hate/fear. and conjurors summoning from planes of elements, usually fire. apparently there is a plane we had no idea existed. i like the twist. i had thought eq2 universe would become less complex as time went on. this would be significantly more complex.

if this is real lore, and not some sketchy quest narrative, its groundbreaking in the mythology of the eq2 cosmology. destroying this plane could end undeath once and for all. umad anashti?

aparently the ewer made all this possible, atleast on norrath. alternatively, the quote could also just be bad use of present tense. adding a d to reside changes everything.

more then likely, considering that woman was Opal and she uses soiulstones for her illusions...that the 'undead anchors' she's talking about are a subportion to 'Ethernere'.
considering Ethernere is like a trainstation to the other planes as far as spirits go, and run by Drinal, who is the grim reaper of norrath, it's not far fetched to think that it's divided into several 'sections' that are specific to certian things. this may well be that Anashti has a 'demi-plane of Undeath' that she is establishing in her move to eventually take on Rodcet for dominion of Health...that is a section/portioned off from Drinal's Ethernere.
We may find that with Varsoon destroyed in the Void, that Kyle Bayle has become Anashti's new 'right hand'...helping her carve her plane of undeath from Drinal..(hence he considers him and enemy) and thinks he's so powerful.
he might know Anashti from his service with Theer, and took up with her once she escaped the Void.
so we may see something like Kyle rebuilding an undead, anashti worshipping empire in the Dead Hills...with a link to 'ethernere' in it. or at least Anashti's portion.
so as well as fighting Kyle on Norrath, maybe we'll go to Ethernere itself and aid Drinal/his Steward with Anashti.

Back in July I thought Ethernere as well. Still sticking with it... if it's not directly there, it will be related somehow. If we go to a moon I might /ragequit for a while though.

So, more time to think, and a quiet moment...I suspect I see how this works now.
I'm postulating, based upon the recent available lore, that what we're dealing with is sort of a 'hereafter lobby', a place where souls go just before moving on to Ethernere. When a creature that so qualifies dies, its soul goes to this realm for a brief period of time, until its final disposition is decided.
In other words, if you ever wondered where your soul was in between getting beat down by that undercon and either reviving or getting a rez? This is where. How long you can linger there will depend on how powerful you are, among other things; truly powerful entities will leave persistent echoes for extended periods of time. This explains the Ethereal weapons--some of these echos are slipping through here and there...
That's essentially what we've been seeing in the recent lore, I suspect. I need to properly finish the Freeport quests for the right classes to be sure, but it seems that this has a lot to do with how the Wraithguards (and potentially Lucan) work. Something similar also looks to be in play with that necromancer you have to put down in the Qeynos mage timelines.
Conjecture: Kyle's playing a larger game than we've suspected. The Wraithguard are his bridgehead in Freeport, without anyone even realizing...except maybe Opal, whom I suspect is either in on the whole thing or taking advantage of it (or both, this is Opal we're talking about). Combine that with his play for Qeynos, and I sense a truly epic power play in the offing.
And as a result, he's starting to blur the line between the lands of the living and the dead.
And that's never a good thing.

the Wraithguard are made by shoving the soul of one person into another. the soul that gets shoved in basically becomes a 'power source' for the now unliving/phylactery-like body.
the Wraithguard are insanely hard to kill becuase they are undead, but lichlike, in the idea that the other soul in ther body makes them akin to a 'living' phylactery. this process tends to wipe out thier memories save for the most basic information. those that retain thier memories through this process tend to go insane, and both souls conflict in the body.
in fact a Revenant is just that. a souls shoved into a new 'living' body. usually making them little more then a puppet, but a VERY VERY powerful puppet. unlike other undead, they retain all thier former skills and strengths..the living flesh takes on undead like properties. like not feeling pain, mortal wounds not being so mortal anymore, etc.
and Arch-Revenant, as kyle claims Lucan is, would be the same but in lucan's case, he remembers everything about who he is and what has transpired, and retains all his power and skills...and his relative sanity.

I wouldn't be surprised if Kyle Bayle didn't watch and learn about the Wraithguard/Lucan from ethernere, and that's where he got the idea of possessing a living person like he does. while the rituals for a wraithguard force the souls to merge in a manner, he's trying to shove the present soul out to give himself a 'revenant' type occupation.
Ethernere is supposed to be Limbo. it where everyone goes before they move on. you go to Ethernere, then from Ethernere if you've been devout enough to your patron god, you go to thier plane of influence/element. those that don't stay in Ethernere...wher you can 'earn' your way probably be going through or dealing with the Dethknell Tower.
if there is another plane, I suspect it'd be like Ultera. this is the spiritual plane you go through on the way to ethernere..or back to norrath...or from ethernere to your patron's plane. it might be the literal version of the 'Cloak of Drinal' that he's supposed to take you in and usher you to ethernere with.

I just had a horrible thought.. if it is the Ethernere... half of the zones will probably end up looking exactly like this overused zone:

(not lore related but thought about it while reading Rainmare's post)

^ Actually, that's a very good point.

Item drops as lead in to any lore is quite frankly the worst idea ever. You kill random mob x and maybe get item Y with no real lore text or npc to take said item to in which to learn WHY such items are dropping or even giving us a carrot to gnaw on.