jtr7 on 24/4/2009 at 06:36

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Cavador was pretty unhappy, he spilled his guts (which usually means told quite a lot) to the pagans without being tortured or killed to get the info, and that's based on Viki's tone when she said "It wasn't necessary," as if it was thankfully easy, and his information provided the clue as to how everything worked, and how the weapons were put in place around The City.

The ancient power can't be the rust-gas, or Cultivators, but it can be the masks to make Servants and probably other things that Cavador was in awe of. The cargo guy knew it was powerful because it was all already in use and giving the Mechanists such a powerful place in society. The final use of the artifacts to wipe out EVERY ORGANIC THING, in and around The City, was the only aspect no one knew about, but the Servants, Cultivators, Necrotic Mutox, the purifying of stone with the rust-gas from the Canisters by destroying any organic matter from it, and possibly improvements to the boiler and the gear, and maybe even something to allow them to build so fast and extract so much ore so quickly. Other than these, we'll never know.

Of interest is the fact that although there are papyruses and scrolls from before the catastrophic events that buried Karath-Din, the Library is completely devoid of any sign of writings or other means of collecting and recording ideas for others to partake of. Who knows how the Library used to look, or function, and what the recorded information conveyed? Perhaps it was the early Keepers, who saw the heights civilization can attain, then saw the ruins, and marked the danger of those heights--and stole the whole library's worth of contents! Also these buildings must've yielded up some awesome artifacts:
http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/6747/villagez.png

The Mechanists uncovered the Palace, which has many rooms on three levels, and they dug pretty deep into Site 3, like a three-level strip mine:
http://i70.photobucket.com/albums/i106/jtr7/Karath-DinMapOldNew.jpg

Another thing...Somehow Gervaisius got ahold of a Precursor Cultivator artifact. We know how he got the Precursor masks. There's no real reason for Karras to want these for himself when he had all the thirty special Servant weapons in place before Precious Cargo, unless he just wanted to have it all for himself, rather than let someone like the unworthy Gervaisius have it. It's possible there are more than one section of the Lost City that may be accessible or excavated, allowing Gervaisius to know of these places to some degree and to collect Precursor artifacts, commissioning Sangar to keep an eye out for them in his "explorations."

(http://www.aeraweb.org/map/index.htm) Nice link! (Got it before you deleted it, heh heh.) Thanks!


The Lost City exit is actually plugged with rock past a pool of lava, making the burricks the least of Garrett's worries for trying to go that way. The area outside the burrick den is lit from the blue crystal lights, but TDP/Gold didn't have coloured lighting. (Oh hey! It's the burricks' fault for tunneling out to the open sky and they got Brother Cavador's attention! They had to be killed off first before the Mechanists could crawl in and explore!):
http://i70.photobucket.com/albums/i106/jtr7/Karath-Din_NoExit.jpg

The Mechanists even decided to move the opening over. I turned up the brightness so the bricks around the entrance to the left and other details would be more visible. The bricks don't appear to be the same colour because TMA has coloured lighting, and in this case, the crystals are lighting the bricks with blue. The cut in the ceiling on the right, with the sliver of light (used to be sky blue before I turned up the brightness) is the new exit. As you can see in comparison, the burrick den was filled with ash-looking mounds, had one chamber, and a much-lower ceiling. In the K-D Site, the mounds are gone, and it's two larger and taller chambers adjoined.
http://i70.photobucket.com/albums/i106/jtr7/K-D_Site_Exit_Site9.jpg


That back exit is not even half the length of a football (soccer) field in distance away, and steeply downhill from the Keeper entrance. If Hightowne is a dormant volcano, then New Market is near the base and has lava caverns that are apparently much too difficult to widen for the Mechanists, possibly because there may be something surrounding the cave entrances that they dare not disturb, so they use the underwater entrance instead.

Markham's Isle seems to serve no purpose other than building and housing the Cetus Amicus, and the Cetus Amicus seems to have no purpose than to go to and from Karath-Din--although, the Captain's Log says, "I feel the time has come to refit the Cetus Amicus as a ship of war, and venture beyond the confines of established routes. I shall propose this change to my superiors upon my return from the KD site." I wonder if he was told it was a future purpose for the vessel, or if he's making a presumption. Who would they go to war against? The spice-smuggling pirates?

The Keeper-sealed entrance (made before the burricks made a new one, eh?) and the Keeper Lock are in red, the center of the image shows the two alternate exit chambers for TDP/Gold (in dark gold) and TMA (blue) superimposed. The white lines show the exact overlap of much of the geometry between the two:
http://i70.photobucket.com/albums/i106/jtr7/Karath-Din_TGTMA_DromEd.gif

jtr7 on 24/4/2009 at 21:09

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I'm willing to pretend the Mechanists took the dirt and rock they removed and plugged that original, more treacherous hole after they channeled the lava away. Maybe the burricks tunneled past the lava, the Mechanists decided to cut in above and next to the treacherous, lava-oozing hole to circumvent it.:p

Here're all the masks, plus the fresco they are based on, plus a Mechanist mask inspired by them. The Golden Sun mask (for the Emperors, called "Son of the Sky"?) looks acid eaten, and the rust-gas wouldn't do that.
http://i70.photobucket.com/albums/i106/jtr7/PrrecursorMasksAll.jpg

jtr7 on 24/4/2009 at 23:53

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Even if Garrett himself said nothing, his loot would scream to the right buyers, including Gervaisius, but they'd still have to find a way in. I like that, too. Thanks.:thumb:

I wonder if anyone could even see that lock and door, though, but that would be funny. BOOOM! SPLASH! SUUUUUUUCKK! And lo, Friend John invented the flushing toilet.

jtr7 on 25/4/2009 at 11:12

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I think Karras's comments were akin to some religious people calling great catastrophes Divine Judgment. But still the Keepers connected the height of their civilisation to their downfall. Perhaps what they meant was the bigger they are, the harder they fall. For all their achievements they were unprepared for nature's greater power.

It used to come up quite often on the forums that the Trickster was connected. Although the discussions almost always ended up with a confident leaning away from that notion, it still fits what the Trickster has been known to do, confirmed flatly by the Kurshok demise. The Trickster was connected by fans to the Cataclysm and The Eye, they both were connected to the fall of the Precursors, and now the Trickster, The Crown, and the Jacknall's Paw are canonically connected to the Kurshok fall.

If we pretend that this is a confirming clue that the fans weren't too far off in their speculation, the Emperor could have asserted his glory over the Trickster, perhaps calling the deity by another name, or by forgetting the Trickster, or even declaring himself divine in private, but most likely that Chthulhu statue is the greatest clue. Idol worship? Emperor worship? Isn't Chthulhu connected with Chaos as well, maybe a divine water element creature to coincide with the divine Woodsie Lord of the earth element? But that discounts the Kurshok somewhat.

The woman tourist who wrote a letter never sent wrote of magical fires floating over the waters below the coliseum. If these are the Fire Elementals, and they were benign, and had no fear of water, that shows a greater mastery of that element than if it were fires such as the Keeper and Kurshok "Blue Flame". I'm tending to believe the magic and mundane resources that were employed to keep the tower from falling (a temple with each floor representing one of the four elements, not too far from the Cthulhu statue), worked amazingly well, but not well enough. I think this is the only explanation we have, like it or not, for how Karath-Din sank into the earth and was covered over--unless it was done by a Trickster-like deity, the same way the Kurshok Citadel was sunk and now rests quite solidly and with few leaks under the ocean, with the Trickster's Rat Beasts in place at the only exit, to keep the Kurshok from venturing out, and to keep their population low by eating their eggs.

If it was a nature guardian god, and the Precursor alchemists made what is effectively worse to nature than the comet that exploded of Siberia, worse to life in the short term than a hundred nuclear explosions over a wide area (short term, no lasting radiation issues, or fallout, etc., though the change in the temperature of the desolate land vs. The City and the forests, and the dust bowl it would be for miles and miles, could easily affect the weather and air-quality of distant realms, change animal migration patterns, and commerce.), then it's possible the nature deities were greatly displeased, and sent them underground, sealing off the threat, and encasing it in lava, until the Mechanists came along and cleared the way.

There was an earthquake at the start of the Cataclysm in the Old Quarter, and the Precursors were sunk underground and covered over, and the Kurshok were sunk under the sea, and so that may be a straight-forward pattern, or not really. Both the Kurshok and Precursors especially have verified or obvious H.P. Lovecraft connections.

Well, there's a bunch of loose ideas to pick and choose from.:)

Stath MIA on 25/4/2009 at 20:21

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Stan_The_Thief- As much as I to wish to disregard TDS, it is, unfortunately, every bit as much canon as the classic games. As for Va-Toraq, I might surmise that after his death the society fell away from its past principles, after all it does seem to be suggested in the readables that his son, Whatshisname, was greedy and didn't have the same respect for the gods that his father did.

As for the cause of their fall, I think it seemed pretty clear that they brought it on themselves, in one way of another. My theory is that, as the Mech-Tech (copyright ;)) runs on steam, the Precursors may have tampered with the ever present lava flows to generate more energy to power their city (it would explain why their lights still work after all this time, the lava never did go away) and then either their tampering messed up the environment and caused an eruption, or some such catastrophe, or their experimentation pissed of the gods and got them a sound smiting!