Writers: What lore do you need to know?

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[Note: If you want to discover the lore of New Britannia as you play the game, you shouldn't be reading this thread. If you haven't read Blade of the Avatar and don't want to know what happens, walk away. ​

Here be spoilers!]

As a writer, one of the more frustrating aspects of thinking up stories connected to the SotA world is that we know so little about the lore of this universe. We have some broad brushstrokes, but very little detail. There are the story sneak peaks, there is the Blade of the Avatar Novel, we have maps-in-progress, and there are dribs and drabs of information from various dev hangouts, and of course whatever we can glean from NPC conversations in the alpha releases. But it is all fragmentary, and in some cases contradictory.

It would be disappointing to write a story involving a trek across a desert in the search for a lost relic, only to find out later there are no deserts in New Britannia. Or to write a story of a battle that hinges on the time it takes a carrier pigeon to get a message from one town to another, only to find that the world has access to instant magical long-distance communication.

It was my understanding that the short-lived Council of Scribes was going to make information available to writers on a wiki, but with the Council's demise and rebirth as the Scholars of Novia that resource doesn’t look like it’s going to materialize.

So, I thought it would be useful to create a list of questions for the lore-powers-that-be. Things that us fan fiction writers need to know. Things that will help inform our writing choices.

I don’t expect we’ll get answers to everything we want to know, but I hope each question will at least get an answer of:
A) “we know this but aren’t telling”,
B) “we haven’t determined this”, or
C) an actual answer with information.

I’ll start off with some questions below, based on something I’m thinking of writing during NaNoWriMo. I hope others will add their own questions. Perhaps we can eventually create some sort of master list organized by logical groupings (e.g. pre-shardfall, shardfall, post-shardfall, or topics like geography, economy, technology, religion, etc.)​

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1) How were years numbered before the shardfall? i.e. were there numbers based on years after some event? e.g. Year 791 of the Third Empire (791 T.E.)

2) What year did the shardfall start on?

3) How are years numbered in current times?

4) We know from BotA that time seems to be measured in the same units as earth (seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months), but what are the names of the days of a week?

5) What are the names of the months of the year?

6) Other than impact damage, was the landscape of Novia changed by the cataclysm? (e.g. Was the Hellfire Rift around before the cataclysm or caused by it? Were the Blackblade Mountains raised during the cataclysm?)

7) What percentage of the population was killed in the shardfall?

8) About how long after the shardfall began did people start re-inhabiting the surface?

9) How long before the shardfall did the avatars leave?

10) What span of time did it take for all the avatars to leave?

11) How many (ballpark figure) avatars were there?

12) In what year or period of years did the Obsidian Empire fall from power?

13) Before the shardfall, were there any sentient races in New Britannia besides humans? If so, what were they and where did they live? Did they get along with humans?

14) We know from BotA that the titans came from another planet, but are the titans humans from a planet other than Earth, or are they not human?

15) Before the shardfall, were there any creatures that we would consider monsters? i.e. something other than wolves, bears, etc.

16) Before the shardfall, were people in Novia aware of other continents besides Novia? If so, what were the names of those other continents?

17) Are people in current times aware of other continents, or are they going to be “discovered” as new episodes are released?

18) Before the shardfall, were there regional currencies or one unified currency?

19) What were the units of currency before the shardfall?

20) What are the units of currency in current times?

21) Before the cataclysm, how many moons were there and what were their names?

22) Is it known (by the devs) exactly what caused the destruction of Daedalus? If so, will it be revealed at some point in the current world story or will it be left open for speculation?

23) What are the names of constellations that can be seen in the night sky?

24) Are there any planets that can be seen in the night sky? If so, what are their names?

25) Was there any sort of organized religion before the shardfall? If so, what god(s) did they worship? How was it impacted or influenced by the avatars?

26) Are there any organized religions currently? If so, what god(s) do they worship?

 

I applaud the creation of this thread. Good thinking Grnarrow!

1- What are the Oracle's origins? And how did she acquire her high tech surveillance systems?(if its known please pm me a link, I am dying to find out)
2- How did the energy barrier technology got into New Britannia?

 

Please put all actual lore and story spoilers in a spoiler tag from the OP and all replies. Thanks!

Example code:

Code:

[spoiler]
What are the oracle's origins?  She came from Asgard... duh!
[/spoiler]

Example:

Spoiler

What are the oracle's origins? She came from Asgard... duh!

I learned that it's best to stop people from seeing things they don't accidentally not want to see... even though I personally skipped your thread based on your warning it is still really easy for someone to miss that warning if they click later on and see someone elses replies or whatnot...

 

Good point. Perhaps a mod could also add [spoilers inside] to the thread title to keep the unwary from entering.

 

Would be so Nice if we could get something from @RichardGariott et al, a brief timeline would suffice.
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/do-we-have-a-timeline.14619/

 

Spoiler alert!

If there is no spoiler button then you can't really expect people to type in code. People are lazy that way.

The Titans are NOT from Earth.. that is made clear by the description of their technology which certainly is not of Earth origin. Also, they built the Oracle which stands as another example of Titan tech.

#21: 2 moons as shown in the SotA intro trailer.. but there are legends that say both one moon and two moons. Can't give their names.. Portalarium would get in trouble.

#23 Yet to be determined.

#24: See 23

Some of those questions will never have specific answers because we can't make any direct link to Ultima. It's been made about as clear as it can be without any official statements from Portalarium that New Britannia is a continuation of Ultima's Britannia with the allusion to events occurring post-U9 but pre-Shard Fall of which we know little or nothing about. We also have no idea how long the time period between U9 and Shard Fall is. If you're talking pre-Shard Fall lore though you're talking Ultima which we need to avoid.

That being said.. the now forgotten gargoyles were a sentient race other than humans who were wiped out completely in U9. Even if the Avatar saves a queen egg we must now assume the race didn't survive after those events.

 

I was going to add a question about units of distance, whether it would be imperial, metric, or some custom distances, but checking BotA I see references to inches, feet, yards, miles, and leagues. So I'm just putting that here for future reference, or in case anyone else wondered.

Also, for units of weight, there is mention of pounds in BotA. No mention of ounces or tons, but that would follow from the use of pounds.

 

The darkstar moondial shows 4 orbits, plus the sun. But who knows if that was built to fit the worldbuilding, or because it was convenient to model and animate, or just because it looked cool.

 

I'm pretty sure the night sky still has a LOT of work to be done. We haven't heard very much about it but as memory serves there are 8 other planets total. I think it was just too much to put them all on the moon dial. I don't remember if they ever had names.

I know there's a push for astronomy on the forums but like most things of a lore nature we just haven't heard much of anything official. It is interesting to note however that before the lawyering of the Council of Scribes there was a story that pointed out constellations that the devs were open to accepting. Which tells me Portalarium may still be open to suggestions on that point.

I suddenly find myself tempted to compile the astronomy related stuff and send that in to FireLotus for consideration. I really doubt we'll have a fully functional and complete night sky for EP1 though. There's just so much potential there. I'd love to see it fleshed out.

 

That is an interesting concept Captain Jack thinks. Submitting ideas directly to FireLotus and bypassing the forum totally! If Captain Jack had known that this would be so effective he would have done it already!

This way, you can be seen as more proactive probably? You send directly to someone on staff, if you make a one on one connection with that person with whatever you send then you are gold and it is a lot better than posting here in the forum for obvious reasons. Like when someone sees a reply in a topic and then rips that idea out and makes it their own post on it... Know what Captain Jack is talking about?

Captain Jack thought that this was going to be more of a community project than it is, where things are taken from community and not from the loudest private messengers and highest donaters of us. But it is not to be so. Captain Jack guesses he will take his 11 page Ship Ideas thread he has been typing for weeks and just send that in one on one like.

 

The moondial's orbitals could reflect any objects that 'appear' to orbit in the night sky, not just actual satellites. So they could refer to some of the other planets within the solar system, as an example.

 

I don't think it's quite that simple. When I sent stuff in.. it was a compilation of everyone's ideas.. not just mine and they were presented as such. There were many posts.. many discussions.

In one case, the content was something the Richard had specifically asked the community for. In the case of books it's an extremely popular subject we've been talking about since kickstarter as well as something to be designed soon. None of it was just my ideas or sent in randomly just because.. and all of it went through discussion here on the forums. In other words.. it all came from the community first.

 

No other writers have lore questions they need answered?

 

Having recently looked at the Wiki I'm thinking of really pushing to have lore added. With the whole lawyering fiasco that put everything on hold well.. I guess it really did put everything on hold.

With the Sister's Grim contest the Scholars are more or less just getting their footing back. So hopefully we'll be seeing some additions to the wiki by R11.

Not having that lore available to authors will only cause everyone problems later on. Not so much for the current contest but if we ever run a call for non-fiction we'll definitely have a need to have as much available as we can.

 

I am torn between wanting background information in order to write stories that fit well, and wanting to discover things for myself when the game goes live.

When I played DDO there was so much information already available on Eberron that it was easy to read up a bit and create characters with suitable backgrounds, and I didn't feel I was depriving myself of any mysteries in doing so. SotA is making such a big deal about the game's storyline (and I don't mean that in a derogatory way) that I don't think I want to spoil it for myself by knowing too much in advance, even though it makes it a lot more difficult to create believable characters. I suppose that's one advantage of being a human recently transported from Earth - we shouldn't be expected to know very much!

However, if one wishes to roleplay or write about/as a native New Britannian, a certain amount of background knowledge would be expected. Definitely things like names for the days, months and seasons; how the calendar is organised; what the current year is and how they're numbered; what the festival days are (and what they celebrate); what goods and services are common to which areas of the country (who makes the best wine? Which areas grow the most wheat? etc.); what popular legends are there about the moon(s), the Oracle, etc. regardless of the actual truth, and so on. In other words, the sort of things that a normal, regular, peasant-about-town could be expected to know about their world if they weren't a scholar or a student of history or mythology. I'd like to know basic things like that which shouldn't be spoileriffic.

 

Can I ask, and not trying to be rude in any way, what is the rush? Why can we not wait until the game is launched and then start writing about the lore. I feel like we are putting the cart before the horse. Is it eagerness or is there some testing that is required that this must be done now?

 

I think people just want to write, and they want to make sure that what they do write, as fan-fiction, fits into the world that Richard, Tracy and the team are creating for us.

As the OP said:

"It would be disappointing to write a story involving a trek across a desert in the search for a lost relic, only to find out later there are no deserts in New Britannia. Or to write a story of a battle that hinges on the time it takes a carrier pigeon to get a message from one town to another, only to find that the world has access to instant magical long-distance communication."

It's true that we could all just wait until we find out stuff in-game but, y'know, sometimes the writing bug just bites and you need to get a story out on paper (or screen).

 

I do like what you said about writing about the basics, I can agree with that and planning for your role play.

 

Is it hard to get information all the way up to the top of the world, Lord, Swiftslay? Go check the Scribes forum. Have your servents read it out for you Lord, and you shall see that they have already begun accepting material to publish in books in game. This would run through a process which includes parsing it for lore inconsistencies and other factors Captain Jack is quite sure.

For example -
"3. We will review the submissions for literary quality and consistency with lore."

Now tell Captain Jack who put the horse before the cart with that in mind? That would be Shroud of the Avatar. Captain Jack just assumes that writers are going to want all available information they can from the lore store to enrich their works specifically in the world of SotA. Not only that, but if you were to write something that doesnt agree with SotA lore, your work is going to be rejected by the overbearing Scholars of Novia and not see the light of day.

If Captain Jack is unable to explain himself to you Lord, perhaps you can seek out and consult other most knowledgeable lords with your Lord+ Palantír?

 

good point there Capt. I have been busy in real life and have not been up to date on many things. I suppose the knowledge in the Blade of the Avatar should be kept silent on because it is still for sale in the add on store. I dunno what exactly is right or wrong and am lost in what can and cant be said.