About the Lost City...

Stath MIA on 28/4/2009 at 22:58

Jtr7- Exactly! No loose ends. Maybe they even dug the shaft up into one of their compounds, to ensure utmost secrecy.

Beleg Cúthalion on 29/4/2009 at 08:47

I just had an idea and even if you were mentioning this pages and ages ago, I still got it on my own. :p Kurshoks and the Lost City connected, eh? Trickster described as one of the "old gods" by Garrett IIRC. Hammerites appearing at large scale probably only after the downfall of the old empire. Rome anyone? There would surely still be a contradiction between the antique urbanisation and modern Pagan nature spirit, but anyway – and maybe urbanisation was just the cause of the downfall. I think that makes everything more tangible.

jtr7 on 29/4/2009 at 09:00

Am I understanding you correctly? Precursor urbanisation the way the Hammerites have urbanised the current City, angering the old gods then like the Hammerites angered the Trickster leading up to TDP?

That's pretty insightful I think.:thumb:

As an aside, because I'm reminded, I wonder if the Keeper scholar in the Lost City was correct when he/she said:

"Their society was remarkable,
stratified like the bedrock, and seemingly as
stable. Above all was the Emperor, a divine
figure, answerable to none but their gods."

Kinda like Gruliac...

Beleg Cúthalion on 29/4/2009 at 13:06

The only thing we'd need to prove it would be a source indicating that Pagans refer to their ancient brothers. I mean, even burried beneath the stones the Lost City still is a home to the elemental powers.

On the other hand it would mean that Karras was interested either in Pagan technology or in what might have been the non-Pagan "technical" development eventually leading to the big crash. When I first read about the "Hammerite Imperium" and saw those monumental artworks I thought it was something about the Hammerites surviving the zero hour and building the City anew.

jtr7 on 29/4/2009 at 21:51

As far as I know, the only connection--a very tenuous one at best--are the theatre masks with the transitional man and humanoid fish, and the Keepers calling the Kurshok a pagan "off-shoot race," after having been down there and studied the Precursor culture archeologically.

Very tenuous.

Stath MIA on 29/4/2009 at 23:06

Quote Posted by jtr7

Precursor urbanisation the way the Hammerites have urbanised the current City, angering the old gods then like the Hammerites angered the Trickster leading up to TDP?

Interesting theory. So the Dark Project might have been the Trickster's attempt to re-cleanse society, after pulling the same trick on the Precursors thousands of years earlier. Lucky for the City that this time they had Garrett to save the day.

Beleg- Nah, I doubt that the two are the same. The Lost City map shows what appear to be human figures (flip back a page to check it out) and also the textures of their civilizations seem different (Precursors= Egyptian and Kurshok=Greek) but this might just be a game to game difference. But, with the masks, I think it is possible that the two coexisted. Or maybe, the Precursors knew of the Kurshok as a beast race, like the ape/rat-men, and after the fall of the Lost City they built their own stronghold on the ruins, maybe the Trickster even destroyed the Lost City to make room for his (then) favored race to prosper.

jtr7 on 29/4/2009 at 23:28

If they had reached a height of civilisation, impressing the Keepers and Mechanists, then it's possible, especially if--as I suggested earlier--the "divine" Emperor had given more glory to himself than to his gods.

I also find it fascinating that what became lava flowing around the coliseum was once water. Unless it was a pool, it's another small connection to The River, the Ocean, and the seafaring and ship-building Kurshok, seeing that the location of their Citadel wasn't so far from Karath-Din. It's possible the Kurshok came from overseas and set up a colony, like the ancestors of the current City with their First Landing Marker and the Fountain at the assumed location of where the first block was laid for the foundation of The City by those early settlers. Cavador calls the Precursors "Ancestors" with a capital "A", which either means he believes the current population are descendants (not out of the question), or it's part of the Karras delusion.

Off-Topic but intersecting the topic at hand, I wonder if Solabusca has any new ideas since he shared this Chronology:
(http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1655760#post1655760)

Beleg Cúthalion on 30/4/2009 at 11:00

@Stath: I didn't mean the Trickster throwing down the old empire but "maybe" (and just as part of my fancy idea) the rise of the Hammerites (and probably other reasons) in the originally Pagan world of the precursors. What concerns the Lost-City-Kurshok connection I just took it from Herrn Garrett but still: Since app. 320 BC Egypt was kind of Greek and close to each other these two countries have always been*, so I wouldn't count it as a contradiction (especially with a computer game design) if their styles were different.

*Is it possible to form a sentence in that way?

Stath MIA on 30/4/2009 at 23:00

Beleg- I was somewhat expounding upon the idea, I'm doubtful that the Trickster was the one who blitzed the Precursors, just offering a possibility. As for the texture differences, I noted in my previous post that it wasn't really conclusive evidence, just supportive info, but the Kurshok seem more aquatic while the Precursors seem more earthen. But I still think it far more likely that the two civilizations coexisted or that the Kurshok built their citadel on the ruins of the Precursors than that they were one and the same.

Bulgarian_Taffer on 2/5/2009 at 10:30

Actually, I am replaying Thief 3 for a fourth time (heh, yeah - this time to explore all the areas I've missed), and I still wonder about the Kurshoks...

What kind of people are these? Looks like they are totally ignorant, because they even don't believe in the "upside world"...