This might take a few words, but hopefully not a lot to describe what I'm talking about.
I've always liked the idea of ancient knowledge. Of finding something and realizing that there was someone or something here a long time ago, and that they were advanced and the like. I've seen some games and TV shows/movies/books that did this well, and some just touch on it or hint at it. To give some examples, I'll start with the most obvious:
Atlantis - The idea that Humans once had a fantastic futuristic city/continent/civilizaion, but it was lost. What if we found it and could rediscover some of their technology or magic? (Assuming that "advanced" in the year 2,000 BC would actually be more advanced than the year 2,000 AD, of course. :)
Final Fantasy Tactics - The world is ancient and in the distant past people even had airships (the late game is played in the Airship Graveyard, which we found out two decades later was the Final Fantasy 12 world, just far in the future from that time). Several other Final Fantasies have played with this idea, like FF4's moon civilization or FFX/X-2 (more X-2) being a technologically DE-evolved world where there are ruins of the ancient civilization around the world, including some robot type of things. FF13 also did this as well with the ancient robots on the planet below (the game starts in the floating city-thing, but the planet below has the older civilization reminants). FF14 also has lots of areas where there are ruins of the more ancient civilizations from the past eras.
Lord of the Rings - The Third Age is the THIRD Age for a reason...which...is that there were two ages before it. :) And, as it turns out, those ages were progressively more mythic. The Second Age having more powerful magics (including relics like the more powerful swords and rings of power), and the First Age being when morals were more like demi-gods and consorted with the angels. Until half the world was destroyed, of course...but that wasn't their fault. Well, okay, it was kinda their fault... :)
World of Warcraft - There were always ancient ruins around from mostly Elven history, but some Troll history, too. Oh, then they found alien stuff...which, as it turns out, were what made the world in the first place. Sort of. Go figure...
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There are many and more examples across all sorts of things - like Trigun's several hundred year "ancient" past or StarGate's many thousands of years of history of the Galaxy and the Four Great Races. And they're found across fiction in fantasy and sci-fi in general, but on rare occasion in real life history too (some ancient tech we still haven't figured out or ruins where we've found not one or two but three or four or five cities built on top of the same place progressively on top of one another over time).
There is also a lot of this in astronomy - there are what we consider "old" surfaces to planets and "new" ones. Planets/moons/etc. that are geologically active have relatively "young" surfaces (the Earth for one, Jupiter's sulfur volcanic moon Io for another) because their cores are active and constantly churning out new continents and stuff. The moon (Luna) is an example of an "old" surface, pitted with meteors over time that hasn't "healed" or smoothed itself because it no longer has an active core.
Anyway, I like the idea of an ancient world of history, of memory...and secrets.
But, from the lore, my initial reading had me thinking that Terminus is sort of a "new" world. But, that's also not EXACTLY right since it's more like it's a sort of chimera/Frankenstein's monster of many other worlds sewn together.
In this sense, while the world as an entity is somewhat young, the history of the lands may be quite ancient. Lost civilizations and ancient ruins could have been transported along with the other parts of those worlds that were brought together to form Terminus.
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...I'm just curious what the official take on all this is, since I wasn't really sure, but I like this idea of ancient and lost knowledge and history. It's why studying history or astronomy are so interesting to me. Granted, we haven't found some ancient colony ship under the desert (like they did in the Homeworld games), but there are a lot of things that we find that make a field of study like archeology - one where you'd THINK it'd be pretty stagnant what with being literally history and all that - so interesting; we don't know everything and we occasionally find new sites or information that force us to rethink what we knew, or even discover new technologies (given, usually ancient curiosities, but still interesting) that the modern world has (or had) lost.
So I like the idea of worlds within worlds, of pasts and history, of secrets and mystery.
Just hoping Terminus has a few secrets and some hsitory to it as well. But was wondering if this is, indeed, true or not. :)
I think you can quite safely assume Terminus is an old world. The name Terminus itself is a "brand new" one in the context of the game world, and that name is already almost 1,000 years old! From the relevant lore:
For most of its existence, this world went by the name of Nhystyrrok and was ruled by an order of Dragonkind known as the Reignborn.
Let's take this at its most literal and say "most" means 50.1% of Terminus's existence as a planet: this means that at minimum the planet would be over 2,000 years old. Of course, the lore again informs our speculation:
Thus began the reign of Rok'Nhilthamos, thousands of years before the arrival of the Sacred Six.
The above passage is in reference to a civil war amongst two Dragon factions. For our purpose this statement is informative in the sense that we learn when the reign Rok'Nhilthamos (the current Dragon King) began, which is important to know because a previous sentence reads:
At the time prior to the arrival of the "Sacred Six" races, the Reignborn and all Dragonkind submitted to the one Dragon King, Rok'Nhilthamos.
In other words, the Dragon civil war happened at some point before the 7th year of the game calendar, i.e. the year the first of the Sacred Six races arrived on Terminus. Thus we can safely surmise that "thousands" from the second quote, if taken in its most conservative form, is an indication that Terminus has existed for at least 2,000 years before 7 IH (Ithosbrun Hjilen, the name of the calendar).
What does this all mean? Well, that the world of Terminus is very conservatively at least 3,000 years old. While that might not seem like a large time frame, remember two things: 1) This world contains magic, and myriad gods and goddesses are real in a grand celestial hierarchy, and 2) in our own world how much the face of culture and society has changed in 3,000 years. I believe I can say with some certainty that the world will have plenty of ancient knowledge to unearth.
I hope that answers your question, I'll look for more information later after work.
One interestng aspect of Terminus' chimeric premise is that while the world is old, the playable races are relatively new to it.
Time on Terminus:
That means that, with the possible exception of the oldest three, the playable races haven't had enough time to really leave a lasting impression on the world. You won't, for example, stumble upon ancient gnomish knowledge, or discover human ruins.
That said, there are, at present, five races known to pre-date the arrival of the eight playable races.
As Jimmayus has noted, the world is pretty old, so I'm sure there will be a lot to discover about these races at least.
To take this in another direction, though YES unearthing arcana (subtle rpg literary reference there) is a great source of joy for many gamers in the MMO multiverse, Terminus is still forming, so WE as the playable races get to set the stage and MAKE the history passed down to those that follow.
Still though, I have my archaeology kit and hiking gear at the ready. :)
Game On!
Shai said:One interestng aspect of Terminus' chimeric premise is that while the world is old, the playable races are relatively new to it.
Time on Terminus:
- Dwarves: 980 years
- Elves: 978 years
- Ogres: 975 years
- Myr: 529 years
- Humans: 528 years
- Halflings: 367 years
- Skar: 366 years
- Gnomes: 365 years
That means that, with the possible exception of the oldest three, the playable races haven't had enough time to really leave a lasting impression on the world. You won't, for example, stumble upon ancient gnomish knowledge, or discover human ruins.
That said, there are, at present, five races known to pre-date the arrival of the eight playable races.
- Dragons - Both Air and Sea
- Tholen
- Elvonnen Giants
- Khägans
- Wos Che
As Jimmayus has noted, the world is pretty old, so I'm sure there will be a lot to discover about these races at least.
Actually, with the exception of Gnomes who came in their spaceship, we would find ruins. Unless I am wrong, it wasn't just the bodies that were brought to Terminus. Parts of their planets were brought as well. So, racial ruins and ancient knowledge could be found.
After reading that, maybe I was wrong. I new the Dark Myr were brought into waters that were not compatible, but I thought part of their area was transported as well. May have just dreamed that part up. I also thought some lands of the other races were brought. But, I guess I dreamt that up also.
So, it seems that only limited parts, like the D'Shoth fragment, were brought.
"Skargol on Reignfall is a jagged geographical feature called "the Dead Shear", which is a piece of D'shoth, the old world of the Skar. It stands to reason that there may be other features from other worlds present throughout the land of Terminus" -Jimmayus from the Collisions thread.
The collisions didn't build the world of Terminus either. It could be that during the collisions that area's were 'lost in translation' and ended up somewhere else. Of course that could just be a theory.
Jimmayus said:I think you can quite safely assume Terminus is an old world. The name Terminus itself is a "brand new" one in the context of the game world, and that name is already almost 1,000 years old! From the relevant lore:
For most of its existence, this world went by the name of Nhystyrrok and was ruled by an order of Dragonkind known as the Reignborn.
Let's take this at its most literal and say "most" means 50.1% of Terminus's existence as a planet: this means that at minimum the planet would be over 2,000 years old. Of course, the lore again informs our speculation:
Thus began the reign of Rok'Nhilthamos, thousands of years before the arrival of the Sacred Six.
The above passage is in reference to a civil war amongst two Dragon factions. For our purpose this statement is informative in the sense that we learn when the reign Rok'Nhilthamos (the current Dragon King) began, which is important to know because a previous sentence reads:
At the time prior to the arrival of the "Sacred Six" races, the Reignborn and all Dragonkind submitted to the one Dragon King, Rok'Nhilthamos.
In other words, the Dragon civil war happened at some point before the 7th year of the game calendar, i.e. the year the first of the Sacred Six races arrived on Terminus. Thus we can safely surmise that "thousands" from the second quote, if taken in its most conservative form, is an indication that Terminus has existed for at least 2,000 years before 7 IH (Ithosbrun Hjilen, the name of the calendar).
What does this all mean? Well, that the world of Terminus is very conservatively at least 3,000 years old. While that might not seem like a large time frame, remember two things: 1) This world contains magic, and myriad gods and goddesses are real in a grand celestial hierarchy, and 2) in our own world how much the face of culture and society has changed in 3,000 years. I believe I can say with some certainty that the world will have plenty of ancient knowledge to unearth.
I hope that answers your question, I'll look for more information later after work.
So, maybe we would not find ruins of our 9 races, but we could definitely find ruins of the earlier inhabitants, which would be much older and potentially more powerful.
I don't think there wouldn't be any ruins of our nine races.
So in our world, sure it might take a few hundred years for the rise and fall of a civilization, but in just about every fantasy universe I've been a part of, things just move faster. New species develop WAY faster than they ever could in the real world. Convergent and Divergent evolution act way faster, and there is significant biological changes in species way faster than what should normally be possible. Usually the explanation is just that it's a vicious fantasy world with magic, or aether, or what-have-you. I think the function of this heightened change is that from a development standpoint, they have to keep shaking it up to give us more content. I mean, I think the expectation in this day and age is that we ought to get a new class or race pretty much every expansion.
Do I think there would be a lot of ruins from the nine playable races? Maybe not, but I really wouldn't be surprised to find some ruins of human outposts that were desecrated and forgotten during the Deicide War. I think the three Sanctums may very well be ruins, as they have no further purpose in this day. I wouldn't expect that vast amounts of resources are being spent on upkeep. I'm sure there are Ogre ruins as they've had a string of lost battles with the Wos Che, after which they likely didn't have a large enough population to occupy every settlement.
What is Amberfaet if not Dwarven ruins?