Chewbubba on 27/12/2006 at 21:52
Lo these many years I've had TDP, TMA, and TG, I still have some questions and I'm too lazy to use the search feature. :bored:
1) What caused the undead uprising that forced part of The City to be walled off? The Trickster, maybe?
2) Ok, I forgot the rest. I'll post them if I remember them.
3) Right. I remembered another. Was The Lost City sunken due to the volcanic eruption, or covered by the volcanic stuff? Basically, I'm trying to figure out how it got there.
TTK12G3 on 28/12/2006 at 00:50
1. Probably.
2. Oh, OK then.
3. You know how old cities tend to end up under newer ones after natural catastrophic events involving earthquakes and other volcanic activity bury them, like Pompeii and Herculaneum? Yeah, that's pretty much what apparently happened.
Mortal Monkey on 28/12/2006 at 20:48
No shit?
+effort
Elentari on 28/12/2006 at 22:38
1. If I did not miss something on my multiple playthroughs the explaination for this was never developed in the actual game. As Garrett said 'something' happened a long time ago, but that something was never explained. My guess is you don't really need to know and Garrett probably doesn't care. It doesn't have anything to do with him at this time and he has to deal with things as they are, not as they were.
There have been some fanmissions that have explored various reasons. T2X explores the area and the back story a little more. "What Lies Below" (I think thats it. . .the Water contest mission) had another take on it that was rather interesting. There may be more that I have not found yet.
I am not convinced it had anything to do with the Trickster. . .the documentation in game DID suggest that it *might* have had something to do with the Eye. But that was never really confirmed.
3. Well its fairly clear that there IS volcanic activity down there (duh), but from what I have seen of the area, there's no active volcanos in the area, nor does the damage within the Lost City itself suggest that there was an erruption of any kind. Judging by what we see down there, to me at least, it suggests that the city *sank*. Was partly buried as rock collapsed in on it, but some of it just dropped. Probably some seismic (sp?) event - possibly caused or exacerbated by the volcanic activity. Possibly set off by some sort of magical incidents. And the city sort of just went down. The fact there are mostly in tact buildings down there suggests that whatever it was, it was fast and fairly 'smooth' ride down. Obviously there's lava flows beneath it, and it looks like those are just recently (recent being relative) rising from underneath to claim the city.
The documentation in the city suggests that people were aware of it for a time before it happened. Probably heralded by lesser earthquakes, etc.
I could be wrong, but thats my theory based on what we are shown. :)
Weasel on 28/12/2006 at 23:27
1) I thought there was some definite indication that the undead had arisen because of the Eye, and that they specifically gathered around the Eye. It's been so long since I played TDP that I might be mistaken. I should replay it again some time (all of my recent Thief-ing has been T2 FMs).
Keeper Jonas on 29/12/2006 at 23:32
My two cents:
1.) Based on my read of the game and info I've read at (
www.thief-thecircle.com) the Trickster is nominally attributed as the cause and probably thought it was all his own idea. What you will learn if you ever play Deadly Shadows is that The Eye is far more powerful than TDP would lead you to believe. It might, and I said might, have been older than the Trickster and Constantine's plan might merely have served an agenda of The Eye. There is much precedent in our mythology for Gods and Goddesses being fooled by lesser beings, though after Deadly Shadows, who says The Eye was 'lesser'?
Even if the Eye and Constantine collaborated on the demise of the first Hammer Cathedral, in the chaos of the event, the Keepers sealed the Eye in, cutting Constantine off. Then, when you unseal the eye, it seals itself and you back in to mess with you. Did the Eye simply seal the doors with its own magic that it could undo? Or was it merely pretended to be trapped all those years? The Keepers are perfectly capable of being wrong.
3.) Garrett encounters many written records left by the Precursors on his first trip down there. An Emperor had just died. His son neglected cultural and religious duties for the sake of hoarding wealth. The Priesthood then attributed the destabilizing tectonic conditions that did them in to the God's disfavor. It TMA, Karras professes that the Precursors had come to exactly the same point as he had in bringing forth the Builder's Paradise, but that they had refused to take the necessary final steps. This brought his wrath down upon them. So Karras said.
Thank you for asking two rather complicated questions, this is the stuff my geekiness thrives on.
Muzman on 30/12/2006 at 21:04
for 1) in the Haunted Cathedral mission (the one where you don't quite get inside) you read that The Keepers agreed to help the Hammerites in a pretty big way, saying "if the Trickster is not opposed...!' etc. Then later we get the briefing quote from RTC which talks about Hammerites 'using the enemy's weapons against them' or some such.
My favourite interpretation of this is that the Hammerites found the Eye and caused the disaster by screwing around with it, then told porkie pies like 'Mummy! The Trickster did it!'.
Of course they could have been in the middle of some other conflict at the time. How they actually got the Eye is a mystery. In light of T: DS and the atrifact business we could even speculate wildly that the Keepers gave it to them(!)
2) There's some old discussion about this somewhere. Basically the Lost City being buried by lava flows or ash is physically impossible. You wouldn't have any nicely placed caves with buildings and byways still walkable. It'd be one solid block with the odd bubble.
Burying some other way is preferrable, if not much more likely. The process would have to be pretty slow to leave it so intact. Maybe it subsided and then lava flows gradually grew over the top of it through the eons.
Must have been a very long time ago, given volcanic activity isn't generally discussed in the city and a river now flows over the top!
ie what Elentari said
ionia23 on 31/12/2006 at 11:35
1) What caused the undead uprising that forced part of The City to be walled off? The Trickster, maybe?
The cutscene prior to the mission clarifies it. Yonder hammerites took it upon themselves to try to use a pagan device to 'resolve' the pagan problem. Backfired. In short, they used the Eye. Bad idea. Remember that the Sentients are capable of free will, and are not very nice.
3) Right. I remembered another. Was The Lost City sunken due to the volcanic eruption, or covered by the volcanic stuff? Basically, I'm trying to figure out how it got there.
Current theory states that the Sentients were used (dammit where's my source?). The city sank and was buried. The current City as we know it was built by the survivors on it's ruins. Remember, no one knows how old the City is.
