when they’re killed, their spirits probably just got banished to some special undead realm. but then they’ll always return to cairn in some random place saturated with undead energy.
also, i recall that uroboruuk wished to undo the undead curse he bestowed upon the arkovian people. but then his defiler son anime backstabbed him and stole the collection of arkovian souls to form his defiler undead golem bodyguards.
another note, with all the broken veil between material and immaterial realm on cairn since the grim dawn, lots of spirits and otherworldly beings are attracted or trapped on cairn. one of the digger dudes contracted by the bysmiel cult even find himself trapped as ghost after he’s killed, but funnily he seems kinda enjoying it.
Was this how the game looked during pre-Alpha/Alpha playtesting? If this is real, what was the design philosophy for the game at the time? The map makes it look like the game was going to have a single hub similar to D2 in the form of Devils Crossing.
Are any of those old maps still rattling around on a hard drive somewhere? I think it would be cool to look at how Cairn evolved from its early design concepts into what it is today.
Yes, that was a pre (maybe pre-pre) alpha map. You have to remember that initially GD was going to be a much smaller game than it ended up being. That map was never part of the early access testing though.
Only the devs might have them, but I doubt it. If you want to get a feel for how the game developed over the years then read the Grim Misadventures you’ll find here - yes, all 176 of them (Zantai started at #0) starting in June 2012.
One thing that bugs me is Korvaak? Who is he? Empyrion corrupted? Yet he was a mortal man at one time; he has a physical corpse/grave and we take his eyeball at one point for Kymon’s chosen.
So he’s an ascendant; not a primordial? He gained godhood status, he wasn’t born with those powers and looking like some ancient Babylonian idol. (Honestly, Korvaak is really well-designed, I especially like the stone monuments you find in his tomb and the blood grove).
Ok but…who is he? Just a primordial with bad intentions from the get go? A celestial with an attitude towards all living things?
He didn’t seem to be either as powerful or malignant at one time; his power rose and so did his followers but also he fell to the witch gods some time after (thanks Bysmiel…stupid ho lmao).
no, just a primordial, “bad intentions” would be depending on your viewpoint
one thing that is a common theme throughout GD is that the gods/real gods and “powerful beings” have quite the ego, eg entire War of the Gods +aftermath, witch god’s rise to power+aftermath, even Mogdrogen is not quite rid of a “larger than life” ego.
Whether or not you’d consider Korvaak “malignant” could then be a debate on the meaning of the word, true evil intentions throughout from start to finish, perhaps not. Selfish to the point of doing bad stuff if not getting his way, probably a firm “yes”. Is that a malevolent or benevolent being “throughout”?, you decide, but essentially he’s someone more powerful than you, constantly holding his hand over you, for good or for worse.
Like how you can hold your boot over ants, deciding to put it down for whatever reason at any point, or you could on a whim decide and leave them sugar cubes instead.
ex of an outcome if you decided to stop worshipping and have a crack at life yourself/“atheism”
^assumption here is that the one in question is Korvaak, both because of the “forgotten” reference, but also because the shattered realm being like a mirror of our world of Cairn/parallel dimension/“cairn the multiverse edition”, so it’s probably just a reflection of a different Korvan city (assumption again being because we enter it/SR rift in the Korvan basin)
At least in GD, there are no “good/evil” gods. They all are just powerful selfish scumbags who see humanity as fodder at best. Well, Ch’thon is at least honest - no empty promises/threats, only reunion with what was stolen from him .
the only true benevolent entity in GD is Yugol,
nothing is more “good” and fair than pure neutrality, Yugol loves none, Yugol hates none, only by Yugol can we all be together in purest harmony and blissful peace of the nothingness,
oh may the sweet embrace of Yugol comfort us
And he - or rather, it - is not a god, not even an entity. Mightier than gods. Eternal hunger that will never be satiated. Be its acolyte or not - does not matter. In time, everything will be consumed, sooner or later. Just like Ch’thon but on even higher level .
not really, it’s just a fearful way to describe something someone doesn’t understand, when all they’ve known are Celestials with semi nameable action
“nothingness” doesn’t hunger, just like gravity doesn’t feel heavy, it would imply a conscience, which Yugol doesn’t possess, unlike the other celestials. So yugol “destroying” something, “consuming” it into nothingness, then gets given a human/“relatable” description
much like we don’t have a word for something turning into nothingness, “the universe collapsing in on itself”; easier to call it off as being eaten by the baddie; but we know Yugol isn’t a baddie, so it’s not consuming anything, like gravity, it’s just doing what it does simply by existing
According to Yugol devotion description: “…Yugol’s insatiable hunger threatens to consume all that the primordials had painstakingly crafted…”. At the same time, “…a great darkness sweltered within the nothingness” - not nothingness itself, but darkness within, and it is named Yugol, the Insatiable Night.
yugol is grim dawn’s janitor. you can see yugol working very quickly if you reduce corpse persistence to minimum level in the options.
because clean is the absence of dirty stuff, so too yugol is the emptiness in absence of… stuff…
so… yugol is essentially the cleanest being in the entire grimverse!!! not to mention all those acid corrosive damage… every moptacles of yugol is infused with the best chemical mixing for your daily janitor work!!! the best choice for all assassins out there… we all knew the every janitors are assassins anyway.
the taken would also like to verify that yugol is teh best. every untouched meals they have touched have definitely been blessed by yugol’s untouchy touch… imagine all the horrible dirty hands of aetherian chthonian beastinian humanitarian deadinian ascendians that had touched all those pristine meals!!! thank goodness yugol can turn them touched meals into untouched meals!!!
anyway, thats the lore of untouched meals. canon or not? you decide.
I’m putting together a project compiling the lore I know, in this rough draft I go over the Genesis of the Grim Dawn and why it came to be in my opinion. It’s a lil rp’y for immersion purposes so if you’re not into that, there’s a written version in the descript. I want this to be an immersive way for people to get into the lore and also theorybreak and craft among those that disagree with my interpretations. My knowledge pertains mostly to the things that hooked my attention, but there might be things in content I haven’t yet explored that you lot have. I mostly use the Celestial Tapestry, dialogue, and the essence system as a guideline for my theories for GD.
) starting in June 2012.
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