Ah, Rymrgand, why do you exist?

[Desmodeus]

No, really, what is the purpose of this guy inside Wheel system? After PoE1 

Spoiler

Where we learn that gods are artificial constructs based on existing mythologies

I thought that 

Spoiler

Gods took over pre-existing roles in Eora, basically Berath get control over natural mechanic of Wheel, Rymrgand controlnnatural process of soul entropy 

However

Spoiler

If Wheel is also artificial construct made to streamline and control process of souls reicarnation to eliminate cases of natural hollowborns, why there is even the god whose entire purpose is to dissolute souls?

Seems counterproductive

[xzar_monty]

Fair point, as far as I've understood the lore.

My general sense of the lore in Eora was that it's probably a bit too complex for its own good, i.e. it might not withstand critical scrutiny. I decided just to take everything for granted and not think about it too much.

[Boeroer]

Remember: It's always good enough to scare the kids!

[Desmodeus]

31 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

Remember: It's always good enough to scare the kids!

Good enough to potentially leave Wheel empty? xD

[thelee]

Souls can split, but they can also merge and become more powerful (see: Llengrath loopholing something in the wheel to do this), if you just recycle souls there's no mechanism to counterbalance this, so maybe Rymrgand is a check to make sure there's a natural grinding down of stronger souls?

[Boeroer]

Did I dream this or isn't Rymrgand the guy who's grinding the weak/fractured souls to essence so that the gods can feed off of that? Wasn't the hanged animancer dwarven in PoE say something like this?
And before the wheel was build there were also fractured souls in the cycle but their deterioration served no real purpose - and now since the wheel is running Rymrdude is just in charge of that "new and better" process? 
 

Edited January 15, 2021 by Boeroer

[Desmodeus]

1 hour ago, Boeroer said:

Wasn't the hanged animancer dwarven in PoE say something like this?

Quote:

Quote

Watcher: You said souls break apart over time?
Caldara de Berranzi: Oh yes. Entropy. Rymrgand's work. We know little of why or how. We lose pieces of ourselves when we die and pick up pieces of others when we are born again, but less then what we lost. We tried to stop this with animantic sciences, but with little success, oh no. A very small few resist Rymrgand's influence and stay together though some force of defience, at least for a time. But they all succumb eventually, I think

Not sure where essence idea went from. And even then it doesn't look like that Woedica needed Rymrgand help to grind souls up before consuming them

3 hours ago, thelee said:

Souls can split, but they can also merge and become more powerful (see: Llengrath loopholing something in the wheel to do this), if you just recycle souls there's no mechanism to counterbalance this, so maybe Rymrgand is a check to make sure there's a natural grinding down of stronger souls?

So they just screwed up with deterioration variable? Couse Rymrgand working faster then merging occures. Also I am not sure why Berath can't take this balancing act onto herself. Isn't her entire point is to overlook wheel process?

[etno]

Yeah, he's a cool character and definitely interesting, but the creation of him by engwithans doesn't make much sense, at least to me. Why do you want to create an increadibly powerful being that basically wants to destroy everything.

Edited January 16, 2021 by etno

[Boeroer]

Maybe not everything went exactly as planned.

Do you know the FS book "The man who would be Skaen"?

IT doesn't sound as if Skaen as a god is exactly what the children of the wheel had in mind either. 

[AndreaColombo]

Who's to say soul entropy did not already exist before the Engwithans created their pantheon?

The gods merely incarnate concepts that predate them, in which case it would make sense for Rymrgand to also exist. It's not like the Engwithans purposefully created soul entropy to all but guarantee that one day there would no longer be any souls at all.

[thelee]

On 1/20/2021 at 5:25 AM, AndreaColombo said:

The gods merely incarnate concepts that predate them, in which case it would make sense for Rymrgand to also exist. It's not like the Engwithans purposefully created soul entropy to all but guarantee that one day there would no longer be any souls at all.

but engwithans wanted to improve natural process, not just incarnate them. shouldn't berath and the wheel make sure soul entropy never happens?

[AndreaColombo]

15 minutes ago, thelee said:

but engwithans wanted to improve natural process, not just incarnate them. shouldn't berath and the wheel make sure soul entropy never happens?

Not sure their goal was to improve the natural process per se.

They wanted to create gods that reflected existing beliefs and ideals before the general populace found out none existed. In so doing, they regulated the flow of essence through the Wheel, thus mitigating soul ailments—whether this was part of their plan or just a serendipitous corollary, we do not know.

At the same time, if entropy was something a portion of kith were already revering, then creating a god that governs it would in keeping with the Engwithans' original goals.

Or what if soul entropy was inherent to the process to a point where eliminating was impossible (or outside of the Engwithans' reach at any rate)? Creating a god that controls it rather than keeping unchecked would qualify as an improvement.

Last but not least—people don't always act rationally and plot perfect plans, and the Engwithans certainly have a good track record of bad ideas. Their gods seem to follow suit just as well (which is unsurprising, since they're giant clots of Engwithan souls; the apple never falls far from the tree.)

Besides, removing entropy isn't necessarily an improvement. It depends on your perspective.

 

[thelee]

59 minutes ago, AndreaColombo said:

Not sure their goal was to improve the natural process per se.

Many of the gods in Deadfire are quite explicitly clear that this was their (the Engwithans') goal. Woedica (in the burned book) and Eothas especially.

Edited January 21, 2021 by thelee

[AndreaColombo]

31 minutes ago, thelee said:

Many of the gods in Deadfire are quite explicitly clear that this was their (the Engwithans') goal. Woedica (in the burned book) and Eothas especially.

To make people better so that they wouldn't need gods, yes—chiefly because there weren't any until the Engwithans made them. In the first game it is said that the gods were created specifically because the Engwithans thought as soon as everyone realized there were no gods, chaos and survival of the fittest would ensue across Eora.

They didn't explicitly set out to improving the natural order and/or cycle of the souls itself.

Edited January 21, 2021 by AndreaColombo

[Boeroer]

You guys argue as if this was a thing that really happened and not a story that several designers/directors puzzled together over the course of two game development cycles.  It's quite hard to mantain coherence when multiple writers add stuff to one fictional world. And "one Josh to bring them all and in the darkness bind them" might not be enough.

[thelee]

33 minutes ago, AndreaColombo said:

To make people better so that they wouldn't need gods, yes—chiefly because there weren't any until the Engwithans made them. In the first game it is said that the gods were created specifically because the Engwithans thought as soon as everyone realized there were no gods, chaos and survival of the fittest would ensue across Eora.

They didn't explicitly set out to improving the natural order and/or cycle of the souls itself.

keeping in mind boeroer's apt point [which would also explain why you can't just go around shouting to everyone that the gods aren't real in deadfire], it is definitely the case that at least in deadfire there's a lot of talk about how flawed the natural process was (hollowborn, etc.) and so the engwithans wanted to fix the natural process and also improve humanity in the process (of course they basically genocided so many peoples in the process of stripping away all other competing belief systems and creating the gods in the first place so...). eothas being eothas also takes this to mean that gods become obsolete over time, whereas woedica seems to think it's the constant tyrannical rule of gods that will do this.

 

this might have to be one of those moments where we just "embrace the mystery" and hope in the distant future some retcon clarifies it.

[xzar_monty]

This is interesting to read, and I really enjoy it, but I'm inclined to agree with Boeroer in the sense that I'm not sure at all whether all the pieces are going to fit together. We're not talking about world-building at the Tolkien level.

I enjoyed the lore, certainly, in the games, but it wasn't entirely clear or logical. Skaen, for instance, was a problematic figure through and through.

[xzar_monty]

By the way, the whole PoE / Deadfire saga brilliantly exemplifies something that is often apparent in fantasy, science fiction and mystery writing: extremely interesting starting points are not difficult to create. And here, again, we have a marvelous starting point: the beginning of PoE is incredibly good, there is so much in there that's just superb. But then, it's often extremely difficult to conclude all the storylines that are suggested by or begun at that wonderful starting point. It's like: in the beginning, you can throw all these balls into the air, and it looks great, but being able to juggle them all for a long period of time without resorting to any cop-outs is very, very difficult.

PoE / Deadfire does it well but not without difficult and not entirely convincingly.

Edited January 21, 2021 by xzar_monty

[Desmodeus]

12 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

the beginning of PoE is incredibly good, there is so much in there that's just superb

Define beginning. Prologue? or Prologue + Act 1? Personally I had quite a lot of problem with PoE story that is kinda going "but though must" and beginning that kinda feels less like "here the story goes" and more "pushing plot". I didn't even noticed when we progressed from "learn what happens to you" to "stop Taos". Feels like its missing entire act.

[xzar_monty]

Beginning is up to when you enter Gilded Vale.

[AndreaColombo]

17 hours ago, thelee said:

keeping in mind boeroer's apt point [which would also explain why you can't just go around shouting to everyone that the gods aren't real in deadfire]

I don't see how that would make any sense for the Watcher to do.

At the end of PoE the Watcher has zero hard evidence that the gods are artificial. They know beyond doubt, but have nothing to prove it. If they went around telling everyone that the gods are artificial, their claim would be dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic driven crazy by their Awakening (a common occurrence in Awakened individuals, if PoE is any indication.) That's beside the point that most people would probably not care even if presented with incontrovertible evidence that the gods were, in fact, artificial. A Watcher that wants nothing to do with artificial gods can choose the Wheel at the beginning of Deadfire. A Watcher that chooses to serve Berath is likely rational enough not to alienate everyone they meet with an unlikely tale no one would believe. Besides, Berath would probably snuff the Watcher in a pinch if they tried to reveal the gods' Big Secret (TM).

 

As for improving what already existed, even discarding the possibility that entropy is inevitable or beyond the Engwithans' power to eliminate, eliminating it doesn't necessarily count as an improvement (it certainly doesn't in my book.)

Besides I don't know that we could, or should, consider the Engwithans as a monolithic culture of mindless clones led by an individual who just uploads a single thought to the cloud and the entire Engwithan civilization buys into it like a magic bullet. The creation of artificial gods must have been a hotly debated topic, with contrarians and people with very different ideas as to how the whole thing should go down. How likely is it that nobody would have wanted entropy as part of the whole? I know I would have vociferously protested the notion that entropy should be eliminated, for example.

Edited January 22, 2021 by AndreaColombo

[Boeroer]

Also keep in mind that not only Engwithans were sacrificed but also lots of Huana gave their lives (and souls). Not only are sacrifices of Huana (together with Engwithan "priests" depicted in several of the ruins - but also BoW shines some light on how the Engwithans toppled over one of the biggest empire with all their create-godlike-essence-golems-with-fancy-machines shenanigans. 

[thelee]

3 hours ago, AndreaColombo said:

They know beyond doubt, but have nothing to prove it. If they went around telling everyone that the gods are artificial, their claim would be dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic driven crazy by their Awakening (a common occurrence in Awakened individuals, if PoE is any indication.) That's beside the point that most people would probably not care even if presented with incontrovertible evidence that the gods were, in fact, artificial.

this is all well and good but is not actually a part of the Deadfire narrative, so for all intents and purposes is head-canon.

deadfire's narrative would be so much more cohesive with poe if they even just had one like minor quest in the early crit path where you DID try to say something about the fakeness of the gods (even just to a companion) and what you're talking about happened.

instead, it feels really disjointed from poe1. there are some callbacks about the god artificiality (like two of three of the BoW branches) which makes it all the more baffling that it's a non-factor for the main part of deadfire when it was like THE revelation of poe1.

[AndreaColombo]

4 minutes ago, thelee said:

deadfire's narrative would be so much more cohesive with poe if they even just had one like minor quest in the early crit path where you DID try to say something about the fakeness of the gods (even just to a companion) and what you're talking about happened.

On this, I agree 100%.

[xzar_monty]

4 hours ago, AndreaColombo said:

At the end of PoE the Watcher has zero hard evidence that the gods are artificial.

I don't disagree with this. However, given the nature of the world the game is set in, can you think of any hard evidence, even in theory? What would or could it be like?

Also, I fully agree with thelee: even a small mention of the god fakeness thing would have improved Deadfire quite a lot.