mindx2: What kind of tidbits can you share about the game’s story/lore?
Paul: (laughing) Really nothing…
mindx2: I didn’t think that one would be answered very well.
Paul: So what we can say is, we announced just two days ago, I think as I’m losing track of time here, that Tracy Hickman is going to be writing the Underworld novel which is wonderful as he is a great guy and a talented fantasy author. He co-authored with Richard Garriott the Blade of the Avatar novel for Shroud of the Avatar (SotA). So he’s worked with these types of collaborations before. In fact, our universe is connected to SotA universe. We have a fictional trope that has been true of all of the Ultimas of these gates. Usually Moon Gates in the Ultimas, I think we’re calling ours Rune Gates to be a little different. So there’s a magical portal between their world and where the Stygian Abyss is. It’s a nice fictional trope because we can have over the eons characters and things and use that, it’s not a lot as it’s not like a busy subway or anything like that, but time to time people and things have moved between these portals. So there’s been cross-fertilization of interesting aspects. And one of those events is, what we’ve talked about, is a band of Dark Elves who came from SotA sometime ago. In SotA the Dark Elves were essentially constructed by evil, powerful wizards who control them. This particular band found a way to break free from their wizard overlords and escaped to our world, to the Stygian Abyss some time ago and carved out a colony. That’s in essence the story that Tracy is going to tell. The back story until where the player comes in a few generations later. So the novel Tracy is writing will give this back story of events that happened. Tolkien liked to do this in his books where there was all this back story that was there. That will help inform us and we’ll take threads of this so when the player comes in we’ll use that lore and those situations that Tracy will have built up and be part of the game saying, well the reason the Dark Elves are really annoyed when you do this is because this is what happened to them. There’s a good reason why they care about that.
