An unimportant conversation amongst praets drew attention back to Grim Misadventure 106, previewing Port Valbury:
In re-reading this older post, I stumbled on a curious little detail with respect to Aldritch:
This seems to imply many things that are against assumptions I had made in the game, both specific to Valbury and in general. For one thing, by this wording ‘Aldritch’ is the name of the Aetherial that took over the human ‘Councilor Van Aldritch’. I’m curious whether that’s a coincidence or whether, perhaps, the Aetherial named himself after his human host some time after taking hold of him. Thinking on it more, that’s probably more likely.
Secondly, the ‘shed its human form’ line makes me realize that Reanimators - or at the very least, the archetype of Overlord Van Aldritch - are not fleshwarped humans as I had long imagined them to be. Edit: I guess I could have begun to suspect such a thing given the existence of the Fleshworks, even if not all Reanimators come from there.
On a related note, I’ve also begun to wonder about Aldritch’s scepter. Is that…kinda-sorta…him? Or it, rather. The weapon does produce ‘whispers’ that our character is unable to understand (see the lore text for the epic version of the item: https://www.grimtools.com/db/items/7194) (the legendary has different text) which are all but explicitly in the Aetherial tongue.
It makes me wonder whether any of our other foes might be lurking, trapped or otherwise, in some of our weapons or armor…