in other words, we are raping the lore as we like.
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Nosgoth - F2P multiplayer Legacy of Kain spinoff - CANCELLED
- Thread starter GreyViper
- Start date
in other words, we are raping the lore as we like.
- Joined
- Sep 25, 2012
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- 28,363
And here I thought Dumah was like that because- Oh fuck it.
And Simon Templeman hasn't been mentioned yet, has he?
Dumah hasn't devolved as heavily as Melchiah and Zephon because he was Kain's third "son", which made his dark gift much stronger. It gave him much bigger powers and stability, as opposed to Melchiah, who was the last bloke to get turned, which effectively left him (and his kin) as a jumbled lump of flesh in the long run.
Dumah, on the other hand, was pretty much comparable to Rahab when it comes to animalisation, and his brood were also still pretty humanoid, albeit less brutish than Turel's.
J1M
Arcane
- Joined
- May 14, 2008
- Messages
- 14,628
The answer given by that CM isn't that stupid. He was left impaled by multiple spears by (human?) invaders and thus was in an extended state of coma/torpor when Raziel met him.
Yes, but that's a very very distant secondary reason at best, while he makes it out to be the primary one ("as evidenced" my arse). It is stressed multiple times in both Soul Reavers that all the Lieutenants' forms were a direct result of their spot in the vampirism queue. A shame we never got to see Turel in SR1 to get a full view for comparison, but even still comparing Dumah and his brood to the other broods and brothers gives a good enough view, and I don't think Dumah would mutate much further.
It's kind of cool when you look at the big picture and notice these regularities among the vampires in SR1. It's like every brood and boss are exactly halfway between the weaker and stronger ones.
First we have Melchiah. He is the most degenerated one, reduced to an evershifting, shapeless mound of decomposing flesh, and his brood are falling apart, scavenging ghouls. He is the only exception here because he's not animalistic at all, except maybe for the fact that the ghouls are like insects that hide in the earth and go after carrion, but they are at least humanoid, probably cuz they never really had the conditions to evolve in any way.
Then there's Zephon. Much less deformed than Melchiah, but Zephon himself is still an abomination, and his brood is the most animalistic - are those even still vampires or are they just arachnids? Some of their features are also strange as shit, why would Zephon be laying eggs? It's like some sort of a blind evolution that is meant to simulate the animals as much as possible for no apparent reason.
After that is Rahab, who is kind of perfectly in the middle. He sort of resembles a shark, especially with that tailfin, but still is vaguely humanoid. His brood is the same, they can still walk on land, with fuckhueg gills and with bent legs and backs, but humanoid-ish they are.
Then we have the last leftenant, Dumah. Arguably the least devolved, although he's still a massive motherfucker and kind of looks like an ape. The brood looks normalish, but they have the obvious
Turel is not to be found in his original state, but his kin give a good idea of things. Despite the fuckhueg ears, they actually look the most human because they lack the mindless predatory look of Dumah's children. Hell, one of Turel's folks is the only non-lieutenant vampire with whom Raziel actually talks in SR1, beneath the tomb of the Sarafan, AND they are found all along the way to the Chronoplast, which is a tricky way to go through, so they must have higher thinking processes than their cousins.
TL;DR pr guy is full of shit as always.
DraQ
Arcane
Human. As confirmed by both The Elder God and those weird vampire hunter pattern polearms/stakes/staves scattered around the ruins.
Reference?
It is stated that it corresponds with their level of undeath, but I don't recall it being related to changes.
Dumah *is* found impaled by three huge fucking spears for who knows how long.
He is also more humanoid than the rest of his clan, which is in stark contrast to other lieutenants and their clans:
Melachiahim:
Clearly undead and decaying but fully humanoid walking corpses.
Melchiah:
Barely recognizable mound of stitched together corpses:
Zephonim:
Ok, they are fucked up, but, overall they look like humanoid distorted into spidey shape. They *can* stand upright and look mostly like rather spindly humans too, so overall their stance and joint mobility gives them far more beastly look than their actual anatomy alone would. They do have some freaky features, for example extra eyes on fledglings, admittedly (are they actual eyes, or merely an imitation of spider eyes, though? Zephon did have a thing for spiders even as a human - his Sarafan armour had spider eyes motif in SR2 as well).
Zephon:
Is a fucking alien queen like abomination fused into his fucking cathedral, with splitey-head, fucking egg-sac, seemingly extra ribcage grown around the entire room and shitload of extra appendagesgrowing out of both his primary body and parts fused into walls. You enter the room through his fucking sphincter, and, again, the man has a fucking egg-sac for fuck's sake.
Rahabim:
They look like what you'd get if you tried to make a humanoid into shark, with some cobra mixed in. Legs capable of being used together as a sort of makeshift tail, fins, streamlined shape, toothy maw. They can move in humanoid manner while on land.
Rahab:
Still has traces of humanoid morphology (then again, who doesn't?) - the way his head is set on his neck, chest, arms (albeit webbed), but otherwise has morphed into fully aquatic creature with legs fusing or being replaced by actual tail. Can no longer move on land. Toothy maw not unlike that found in his offspring included.
Turelim:
Bulky, beastly bipeds. They have digitigrade legs, beastly facial features, extreme upper body musculature, and huge ears. Kind of cool in that they move with a sort of predatory grace. Overall they resemble big-eared werewolves with manly chins. Other than that fairly humanoid, but "fairly" here means they would still be harder to disguise as humans with some combination of baggy robes, cloak and poor lighting than their Melchiahim or Zephonim (lololol spiders) brethren (provided the latter would keep upright) despite the latter two being much lower in vampiric pecking order.
Turel:
Ok, he wasn't present in SR1, and while we see him in Defiance, he has had quite a bit of extra time for changes to proceed, plus he is possessed which could fuck him up, so his appearance might not be indicative of how he looked like (or would, timelines are complicated things in LoK) at the time of SR1, but if it is he's fully beast like quadruped, with his clan's trademark beastly features, giant ears and echolocation.
Admittedly, his concept art and even unused resources shown him to be much more humanoid
but then again, the same seems to be the case with Rahab, who *did* appear in SR1:
Dumahim:
Hulking, brutes. Unlike Turelim's predatory shapes their body morphology is just, well, bulky. They are strongly hunched to the point of looking as if their large, toothy heads grew out of their chests. Not really humanlike despite retaining the body plan.
Dumah:
Now this is interesting - despite his giant size and very broad shoulders he looks pretty much fully humanoid, in stark contrast with other, grotesque lieutenants. He also looks much more humanoid than his own clan, despite the opposite being the case with all other clans, and despite his own clan being among the least humanoid (although also devoid of freaky features - other than their tongues - that make other clans seem more strange).
Do note that if "gift dilution" explanation for evolved vampires' monstrous shapes was true, we would observe clan patriarchs retaining much more conservative humanoid morphology than their broods, while the opposite is pretty much the case universal case, the only exception being Dumah who got staked to his chair long time ago after all.
Was it not for that he might as well ended up as a hulking vampiric T-rex in armour, for all that we know.
B-b-but, but Kain!
Whatever changes did, or rather didn't happen to Kain are irrelevant to what did happen to his creations. What he did was apparently different from how Mortanius raised him and definitely very different from how original vampires procreated.
He should be glad his lieutenants didn't sparkle instead.
Butt and Kain - respectively.
Actually I would dismiss the "degenerate mindless beasts" thing as bullshit, or more charitably, an emotionally loaded hyperbole on part of Raziel, who did happen to be dead wrong a lot over the course of the series.
We can see the vampires of pretty much all clans wearing clothes/armour/jewelry, some are also decorating their bodies with tattoos and using symbols of their clans.
Now the clans are reduces to rather sorry state of existence, but I'd rather chalk it up to the sorry state of the world in general. Nosgoth at the time of SR1 is a decaying, post-apoc husk of a world, compared to which Fallout's setting is a huge evergreen meadow filled with flowers, bunnies and butterflies.
Evolved vampires might think in a very inhuman way, but other than that their wits seem intact.
I don't approve of arena shootan, environmental art direction, or the overal style (mainly visual effects) of that new game, I also haven't kept my eye on all the news (because I'm not interested in arena shootans, and also because Tony Jay - *the* voice of Elder God - is
*Yet*.
Edit:
Update on Tony Jay's current state.
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Tony Jay wasn't just the voice of the Elder God, but also Mortanneus in the first one (as well as William the Nemesis).
And Zephon in SR1. I lol'd when I learnt of that. A shame he didn't voice the Sarafan Zephon in SR2, too. It would have been a nice touch, considering that Templeman voiced Dumah in both SRs.
Define "level of undeath".
But even so, I don't recall right now where it was stated, but it was either somewhere in Melchiah's realm, or during the final showdowns with the Sarafan in Soul Reaver 2. Might have been said also in the tomb of the Sarafan. But I am almost totally positive that it was mentioned somewhere that the weaker the dark gift, the more horribru the transformations.
Is he?
Note the hooves and the fuckhueg claws, as well as the... fur? or whatever it is that he's covered with. The Dumahim share none of those, and the only very unnatural feature of theirs is the neck-less head.
DraQ
Arcane
I'm only saying how they look like. Even when you have bat-like characteristics it's hard to look bat-like when you have no wings.
And yeah, like I said, the ears (and Turel's sonar in Defiance) are a bit of a give-away.
How much death has adversely impacted their functioning.
For example Melchiah is rather low-functioning undead compared to Kain's other lieutenants - his flesh is decaying constantly and he needs to regularly flay bodies for skin-grafts for this reason.
In LoK the more powerful the vampire is, the higher functioning undead he is.
Of course the lowest functioning undead are regular dead, but we have those IRL too.
See pichurz.
Which are common features of all fully developed vampires in LoK. Including Kain (at the point of SR1's intro and later) and his lieutenants even when they were all still completely humanoid.
Where?
He has ornate armour, an ornate helmet with "spectacle" guard and pants.
He does seem to have long hair.
All of those you mean. They are lower poly (duh), but they have similar hands and feet to all the vampires in SR - even in the pre-execution period.
Watch the intro or find screens from it if you don't believe me.
Having your giant toothy omnomnom stick forward on roughly chest level is something I would consider rather significant departure from typical humanoid looks.
Which, to be honest, makes this conversation rather tiresome because those textures and details are so vague :/
Vaarna_Aarne
Notorious Internet Vandal
Time to lay down the law! In a quick and clear manner!
Now, the gist is not that devolution is because of the portion of Kain's gift. This is actually reflected in the measure of power. Razielim and Turelim are the strongest vampires, being the firstborn clans. Melchiahim are weakest, as Melchiah received the poorest portion of Kain's gift (direct quote from SR1).
The devolution is uniform and is caused by a different thing, but also due to Kain: It's because Kain has always been corrupted by Numpraptor's attack on the Circle right from the moment he was born. The corruption was passed on and magnified in his progeny. Kain himself is physically immune because he's the Scion of Balance, and the Heart of Darkness was used to create him.
ALL of Nosgoth's vampires outside of Kain have devolved in the time after Raziel's death. They've all devolved by this point in history (though as DraQ pointed out, Raziel is probably being a self-important hyperbole twit when he describes their existence, since it's clear the vampires do have some sort of organized society left as they face the end of the world), and the process is accelerated by the corruption of the Pillars reaching the finale of its course, being the total collapse of Nosgoth.
As for regarding how Kain made his original lieutenants, it was definately nothing like how the original vampires did it (the Sarafan were dead for centuries by that point), and Kain himself was a unique creation by Mortanius by means which is quite unreplicateable.
PS: There's a backstage fact that's not well-known, but Turelim are all blind as bats. They all operate by using sonar, and were supposed to have special weakness against sonic attacks (ie, the Sound glyph).
PPS: The only thing that soothes me is that the LoK storyline was already concluded, so this shit can cause no lasting damage.
EDIT: And yes, the case with Dumah is that his devolution was halted by getting staked (since that makes him effectively dead as long as stakes are in place), which happened a VERY long time ago (given how the lesser Dumahim around his city has wasted away). Dumahim are also technically the weakest clan by the time Raziel resurrects, as they lost their clan territory and their clan founder, having been reduced to scavengers living in areas the other clans don't want, so they haven't developed the kind of extreme adaptation Zephonim or Rahabim have (seeing how they reside in a location they've perfectly adapted for), nor the kind of hulking up Turelim have undergone.
Now, the gist is not that devolution is because of the portion of Kain's gift. This is actually reflected in the measure of power. Razielim and Turelim are the strongest vampires, being the firstborn clans. Melchiahim are weakest, as Melchiah received the poorest portion of Kain's gift (direct quote from SR1).
The devolution is uniform and is caused by a different thing, but also due to Kain: It's because Kain has always been corrupted by Numpraptor's attack on the Circle right from the moment he was born. The corruption was passed on and magnified in his progeny. Kain himself is physically immune because he's the Scion of Balance, and the Heart of Darkness was used to create him.
ALL of Nosgoth's vampires outside of Kain have devolved in the time after Raziel's death. They've all devolved by this point in history (though as DraQ pointed out, Raziel is probably being a self-important hyperbole twit when he describes their existence, since it's clear the vampires do have some sort of organized society left as they face the end of the world), and the process is accelerated by the corruption of the Pillars reaching the finale of its course, being the total collapse of Nosgoth.
As for regarding how Kain made his original lieutenants, it was definately nothing like how the original vampires did it (the Sarafan were dead for centuries by that point), and Kain himself was a unique creation by Mortanius by means which is quite unreplicateable.
PS: There's a backstage fact that's not well-known, but Turelim are all blind as bats. They all operate by using sonar, and were supposed to have special weakness against sonic attacks (ie, the Sound glyph).
PPS: The only thing that soothes me is that the LoK storyline was already concluded, so this shit can cause no lasting damage.
EDIT: And yes, the case with Dumah is that his devolution was halted by getting staked (since that makes him effectively dead as long as stakes are in place), which happened a VERY long time ago (given how the lesser Dumahim around his city has wasted away). Dumahim are also technically the weakest clan by the time Raziel resurrects, as they lost their clan territory and their clan founder, having been reduced to scavengers living in areas the other clans don't want, so they haven't developed the kind of extreme adaptation Zephonim or Rahabim have (seeing how they reside in a location they've perfectly adapted for), nor the kind of hulking up Turelim have undergone.
DraQ
Arcane
Not vague enough to obscure the kind of details we're discussing.
For example hand and feet detail is clear in all cases but Rahabim.
Are they fully blind or do they just have extremely shitty eyesight? They do have neat glowy eyes, after all.
I wonder how evolved Raziel and Razielim would look like at the point corresponding to SR1.
Time travel.
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Just like Garrett's storyline in Thief, amirite
Vaarna_Aarne
Notorious Internet Vandal
I'll also point out again that Raziel's quote about the effects of Kain's picking order for his progeny is at the early part of Melchiahim territory, when Raziel encounters a mural depicting Melchiah. And he states it's like DraQ said, that Melchiah's gift is too weak to fully sustain his body, and thus his skin decays away and rot beneath is evident, and how this has now passed on to his progeny as well (who need to stitch themselves new skin from corpses and victims).
EDIT: Unless American corporate ninjas invade my home and destroy my physical and digital copies of the original games, Nosgoth can do no lasting damage to Nosgoth. If it's a shit game, everyone will forget about it completely by next hype season.
EDIT: Unless American corporate ninjas invade my home and destroy my physical and digital copies of the original games, Nosgoth can do no lasting damage to Nosgoth. If it's a shit game, everyone will forget about it completely by next hype season.
DraQ
Arcane
Indeed. And we know that it has been the case even prior to Raziel's execution.
Sucks to be the last when you're as vain as Melchiah supposedly was.
Kain pulled off an epic troll.
I liked the first one the best, how Hash'Ak'Guk the demon lord was behind Mortannius' possession. He was an old, eldritch horror that was worshiped before the pillars, and so he set out a plan in motion that took years or more, to slowly corrupt them, and allow for his return to the lands and be worshiped.
DraQ
Arcane
Vaarna_Aarne
Notorious Internet Vandal
I'd like to say that by this point I consider 'eldritch' one of the most devalued and overused words in the English language. People should forget it exists.
Anyway, that is incorrect. Hash'ak'gik wasn't worshipped before the Pillars even in Silicon Knights limited version of the story. Pillars were eternal and had always been there, and they were not a religious item. Hash'ak'gik's cult was also small and secretive (its age is also suspect), and his motivations were unclear beyond being very sinister. Given how the Pillars were intrinsically responsible for Nosgoth's wellbeing, Hash's plot was clearly going to plunge the world into ruin and death.
Anyway, that is incorrect. Hash'ak'gik wasn't worshipped before the Pillars even in Silicon Knights limited version of the story. Pillars were eternal and had always been there, and they were not a religious item. Hash'ak'gik's cult was also small and secretive (its age is also suspect), and his motivations were unclear beyond being very sinister. Given how the Pillars were intrinsically responsible for Nosgoth's wellbeing, Hash's plot was clearly going to plunge the world into ruin and death.
The demon was Hash'Ak'Guk in the first one.
He possessed Mortanius, and corrupted the circle little by little.
Then, afterwards, Hash'Ak'Guk was the Hylden overlord in later games.
Athelas
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 24, 2013
- Messages
- 4,502
Yeah, Major_Blackhart is correct. There was a hidden altar dedicated to Hash-what'shisname in the Avernus Cathedral level in Blood Omen. Since that is also where you fight the guardian of dimensions, he must have been summoned there. Mortanius justifying the killing of the other members as necessary to purify the circle was likely the result of Hash mental manipulattion/possession. This was all before the later retcon.
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Zeriel
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2012
- Messages
- 13,455
DraQ
The razielim having wings is pretty much direct lore rape, not sure how to explain it at all. Raziel was specifically exiled for growing wings. He was the first, not his kids. So this takes place after Raziel was thrown off the cliff and before he came back (which seems like their mostly likely explanation), which makes the razielim fighting alongside the other vampires total and utter garbage. They would be in the process of being hunted down and slaughtered. But it's exactly the sort of bullshit "explanation" you'd use if you want to have vampires who fly because all you care about is making an arena shooter with certain gameplay elements.
The razielim having wings is pretty much direct lore rape, not sure how to explain it at all. Raziel was specifically exiled for growing wings. He was the first, not his kids. So this takes place after Raziel was thrown off the cliff and before he came back (which seems like their mostly likely explanation), which makes the razielim fighting alongside the other vampires total and utter garbage. They would be in the process of being hunted down and slaughtered. But it's exactly the sort of bullshit "explanation" you'd use if you want to have vampires who fly because all you care about is making an arena shooter with certain gameplay elements.
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J1M
Arcane
- Joined
- May 14, 2008
- Messages
- 14,628
Except it's not, Turel's brood proves this.
Maybe you were thinking those things, but you didn't say them, which I why I added them to the discussion.
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