What is the story/plot anyways?
I've been cooking up lore and thinking about some plot ideas, and i can put some of my thoughts here for those of you interested.
(Potentially these maybe spoilers, but of the DBZ variety, where knowing whats going to happen doesnt really diminish the fun of the show.)
When you enter the realm of the tempest, black magic has ravaged the realm, sort of like a psuedo-apocolypse where instead of everything being destroyed, everythings just sort of fucked. The black magic came from nine forbidden books that had been kept safe by the upper class elite that rule over seven kingdoms (Rhunia, Etzland, etc.) The books get loose, everyone has access to black magic, and then physically and psychologically everyone and everything is suffering, and all that remains are the people that can cope enough to keep their humanity, now coexisting with the ones that have become monstrous demons. So black magic isnt so much a contagious virus, even tho it spreads that way. Surviving around it is just a matter of your ability to cope with its effects (Like the warrior that takes the soulstone in Diablo 1.) So what you end up with is a world of monsters that either fight you, or try to get in your head. Or maybe both.
There's a history of how the seven kingdoms were built by two clans, and how they structured society to learn and tame the power of magic, but now the structure and reliability of those systems are lost and irrelevant due to the spread of black magic. Which means people have to make decisions, rather than trusting the order of their kingdoms. So the Talonovian council all disagree with each other about shrine use, and magic use, and the player is left with no real "quest giver." It's extremely important to the tone of game to not have an immediate quest giver, because the state of losing structure is something everyone is suffering from, including you.
At some point after magic was discovered, something called a "gatekeeper" fell out of something called the ethereal stream. The ethereal stream is what connects the abstract laws of the universe, to the physical consequence of those laws in reality. Those laws are actually managed by the gatekeepers, and magic is just an "influence" on the gatekeepers of the ethereal stream. Nobody knows why the gatekeepers started falling out from there, but in the physical world they lose their unbiased perspective, and become unpredictable.
As soon as we have 5 of the seven kingdoms implemented, (Rhunia, Etzland, Haxlyn, Valimor, Kalroth), there will be a secluded mountain shrine, hidden in a floating chunk of land on the outskirts of Rhunia. Under the hazy ominous orange pollution of Rhunia's sky, lush red trees (mixed with a few dead ones) grow on the mountain shrine, while peaceful music plays. The atmosphere of the shrine gives an an ambiguous vibe of peaceful, quiet, tension. And in this floating chunk of mountain, a gatekeeper in a black robe can be summoned from an old shrine.
The gatekeeper in the black robe identifies itself as the spirit of the land, fused with the druid sage Drujiva. Being the spirit of the land, it cannot leave the shrine, and asks you to help restore the land from corruption by retrieving five "ornaments of chaos", which are seemingly useless little items that are being held deep in the citadels of Rhunia, Etzland, Haxlyn, Valimor, and Kalroth, by powerful monsters that now rule there (Az'ra Koth The Wicked, Hyrix The Storm Raiser, etc.)
When you collect these little trinkets and return them to the gatekeeper in the black robe, the gatekeeper reveals itself to be corrupt. While it really was Drujiva infused with the land's spirit at one point, several blackened bones of a gatekeeper had been buried there, gradually possessing and corrupting the druid sage. The will of evil, unstoppable in death, now revives itself, and declares its true name, "Dominus", the first gatekeeper to have fallen from the ethereal stream.
A new level of horror is unleashed, and the game mode can now be set to "lesser oblivion" or "greater oblivion" (for pre-Dominus and post-Dominus gameplay). And the player's quest now is to track down Dominus in the 7th kingdom, which was the only kingdom without a citadel. By no coincidence, the beginning of the black magic tragedy originated from this kingdom. Bitter about their kingdom being lesser than the others, the servants of the 7th house release their copies of the forbidden texts from their holy vaults, and thus the realm fell into chaos. Now, Dominus has returned to this place, and has summoned a citadel more mighty than the others combined. (Basically a gatekeepers intense sense of justice serves fine when focused entirely on single gate, separate from reality in the ethereal stream, but it becomes an overwhelming, unstoppable, and extremely myopic force in the real world.)
I'm still marinating on all these ideas, but I can see it in my head, and I think it will be fun lol. Can't wait for update 1.7.0 to drop, winter of 2022, am I right?? lolz
