Sagus Cliffs is known as "the Eternal City" -- a thriving quilt of countless civilizations that has somehow endured a long run of catastrophes, any one of which should have sufficed to wipe it from the face of the Ninth World. Its streets and vaults teem not just with its current inhabitants and their devices but also with relicts and relics of its long past. Among this wildly varied population of men and women, creatures and creations are endless tales of the city's past, present, and future. One myth claims that in each of its crises, the city has been rescued by the same savior: the many-faced and many-natured Changing God. He, or she, has come in every hour of need, and shall continue to do so in order that the Eternal City never meets its end. Most dismiss this theory as fanciful, but for the Cult of the Changing God, it is a matter of faith. Alas, as the Eternal City's wealth and prestige have dwindled, the Cult has dwindled alongside it. Few listen to its prophecy that the ever-advancing and all-devouring Bloom will be halted by a reincarnated Changing God, and fewer still preach that promise. Indeed, even the Cult's youngest priest, a bitter middle-aged man named Aligern, has come to doubt the doctrine.
There is one newcomer to the city who is deeply interested in the myth of the Changing God and the resulting theory for how Sagus Cliffs has survived as the Eternal City: the nano Callistege. Across all the planes where Callistege's "sisters" exist, Sagus Cliffs has been destroyed: sometimes in the distant past, sometimes in recent wars and revolutions. Far from being eternal, it is to them a city condemned to die. And yet that end has mysteriously been averted on this plane, and the Callistegeia are determined to figure out
why. Why, everywhere else, is the city's doom a foregone conclusion? And why here, and here alone, has that fate not run its course? Why have the tides of time not worn
this Sagus Cliffs to dust? It is a question that haunts this world's Callistege, for while the city stands, the lands around it have borne ever more desperate woes, culminating in the coming of the Bloom, which has swallowed up entire civilizations -- not to mention Aligern's village -- en route to Sagus Cliffs.
The answer to Callistege's question lies in an ancient vow sworn by a father to his dying daughter: that he would find a way to save the city she loved, no matter the cost. But the price of his oath has been high. By stripping away Sagus Cliffs' mortality -- by doing what the proverbial King Canute could not, and bending the very Tides to his will -- the Changing God has awakened and empowered an implacable foe, an angel of entropy and the Sorrow of all those who fall in the shadow cast by the city.
The key to the Changing God's power is his ability to perceive the primordial Tides that shape the legacy toward which each living is bound, and to alter the Tides as they pass through him. His mutability is less physical than it is spiritual and psychological: like a metaphysical sociopath, he is able to shift at will from a clear-eyed utilitarian to a loving friend to an airy philosopher to a ferocious brawler to a commanding leader, each with utter sincerity and authenticity. By this skill, he can become at any moment exactly what the situation requires, ensuring that every time Sagus Cliffs' fate hangs in the balance, he can tip the scales toward salvation. His means are not always noble, for a city can be destroyed by good will and reformers no less than by traitors and invaders. Assassinations and plagues, bloody revolutions and harsh despotism have been his tools just as much as have been benevolent guidance, scientific progress, and military genius.
Between these inflection points -- these turnings of the Tides -- the Changing God has retreated to the timeless labyrinth of his own mind by treading a path that only he can walk: one that requires passing through the extremes of each of the five Tides he has identified. This way of sorrows is not for the weak of heart, but the Changing God's heart has petrified long ago, locked in a stony simulacrum of protective paternal love.
The Changing God foresaw, of course, that his actions upon the Tides must cause a reaction, and with each passing cycle of averted disaster the forces against him have grown stronger, and his own growing wisdom and might have barely kept pace. In time he identified this counter-force as a being with vast, inscrutable intelligence all bent on a single goal: to unwork the Changing God's intervention and subject Sagus Cliffs, and the God himself, to the pent up forces of entropy, bringing the City to its inevitable legacy of ruin. Eventually, a blow of Sorrow would fall that he could not turn aside, and the city -- and his vow -- would be forever broken. When the Bloom blossomed upon the Verxullian Wastes and began inching toward Sagus Cliffs, he knew that the death-blow had begun its course.
The Changing God believed that his only hope lay in finding a way to extend his power over the Tides beyond just himself to all things, everywhere. And to control the Tides, he naturally would need a Moon. Yet even as this vast project -- carried out at immeasurable cost to countless beings who lived beyond the bournes of Sagus Cliffs -- drew to completion, the Sorrow struck. The Changing God plummeted from his moon and crashed upon the city he hoped to save, bereft of his memories and most of his powers, ignorant of his identity and his legacy. He has kept only his near-invincible and wonderfully malleable body, and his sociopathic self-control and ability to perceive and manipulate the Tides, though he barely understands the meaning or scope of these gifts.
In this state of holy ignorance he is found by his own priest -- one who hates the very god he worships -- and a woman who recognizes him as somehow being the radical force that has made this one plane different from all others. Callistege and Aligern both seek a "why" from the Changing God: to Callistege, he is a scientific anomaly to be studied; to Aligern, he holds the theodistic explanation for the horror that has consumed Aligern's people and harrowed the world beyond the city walls. But the Fallen One has no answers, only questions, the most pressing of which is why all the city's factions seem driven by some hidden influence to seek his destruction.
To save himself, his friends, and his city, the Fallen One will need to retrace the way of sorrows that the Changing God walked -- wielding his will like a prism that shifts the Tides, thus opening the gates that he himself has locked. He must be, by stages, rational and passionate, kind and cold, bold and humble. But he must also be ever-vigilant, for despite his near-immortality, peril awaits him at every turn.
In the end, with his full Moon risen above him, the prismatic Tides crashing around him, and the brilliant Sorrow shining against the black bulk of the Bloom, the Fallen One -- now changed back to the Changing God -- will have to choose his ultimate legacy: to save the city and usurp the Sorrow's mantle, spending an inhuman eternity ensuring that the Tides do not sweep Sagus Cliffs away, or to let entropy take its course, so that Sagus Cliffs suffers a sea-change, just like the Tides have worked upon the rest of the Ninth World, over and over again, making men from stars, stars from dust, and dust of all man's works.
Of course, this ignores stuff like all the quests, all the companions, all the Crises, all the locations outside of Sagus Cliffs, all the features/factions described in Kickstater, etc., etc. :D It's kind of a fun exercise though to try to random connect the various dots while ignoring all the lines everyone else drew. (I missed a lot of the dots, too, like the castoffs, "what does one life matter," and the Endless Battle. But I can ball my spit however I like, I guess.)
To me, TTON's symbols mostly fall into two categories: (1) the oceanic imagery of Tides, the coastal city of Sagus Cliffs, and the Changing God's moon, which ties to the theme of "change"; (2) the Christian imagery of a labyrinth (which always had both physical and mental dimensions), a God of a single substance with different aspects, retracing the path of a God (
e.g., the Stations of the Cross/"way of sorrows"), a timeless city literally protected at one point by time shields (invoking the Eternal City of Rome and Augustine's distinction between the City of God and the City of Man), a fallen immortal, and the ultimate question whether to sacrifice yourself for the sake of the world. It seemed like they could braided together a little more, which is what my fantasia above attempts to do. The obvious point where these two strands cross is
the story of King Canute and the waves -- the king who commanded the tides to stop -- and thus the obvious way for the story to end is by picking which interpretation of the Canute story is canonical: did he seek to control the Tides out of hubris, or did he lay himself before the Tides out of humility before the powers than man cannot and should not control? (This exercise has made me wonder whether these same themes/this same meaning was behind Colin's and Adam's vision of the game, as both of them are very interested in religion and Adam is a devout Christian.)
The idea of
requiring the player to change his Tidal alignment in order to advance is an effort to duplicate something like PS:T death mechanic: since the Tides are the narrative and gameplay super-power here, it seems like they should have some strategic aspect. Normally RPGs seem to favor a consistent alignment, so it seemed like it might be a neat novelty to force the player to be inconsistent -- seeking out quests that let him behave passionately in order to become more Red to open some Red gate, then finding some way to be calculating in order to open a Purple gate and so on. Part of what I like about it is that it forces the players do something unpleasant. If the player is naturally Gold/Blue (as most will be), it forces them outside their comfort zone for at least some portions of the game. Part of the point of reenacting the Stations of the Cross is to understand the agony that Jesus endured, and by forcing the player to do things that are morally unpleasant to him would force him to reenact the existential sorrow that the Changing God would've endured on his own path.
This was kind of fun, though ultimately a silly exercise because this level of high concept is meaningless -- the challenge is actually creating a game around a high concept, and that's where geniuses like Avellone, George, Colin, Adam, etc. can do stuff that I can't even dream of doing. But since, as with Live-A-Live, I
can dream of doing something like this and I enjoy doing so, I figured what the hell, write it up. At some point I'll play the game and come back and compare my fantasia to reality and see all the ways I fell short and all the blood, sweat, toil, and tears I avoided by confining my idea to a bullshit post on a forum rather than trying to implement it in some way. :D In the meanwhile, this will put to rest any mistaken notions that you should trust my judgment.
Anyway, I will now return to plugging away on Fallen Gods, tone policing, and snarking about ME:A animations....
