To taffers that have used the Novice Keeper's Lexicon

The Magpie on 4/1/2008 at 20:14

For posterity: Biohazard split and moved the thread to
(http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=119066)
"Thief Series: Hints and Spoilers > Thief Mobile Discussion" because we were starting to throw really big blue spoiler blocks at each other around here.

I'm still spamming in order to get my PMs unlocked, BTW.

--
Larris

Solabusca on 7/1/2008 at 01:44

I'm away from the computer for a week or two, and the Magpie shows up - well, now that introductions are out of the way, I'd like to thank Larris for replying to my email and rejoining the community - I'm sure jtr7 has already done his duty and started the recruitment process for the Indexing project.

Solabusca - bringing people together for years, now.

.j.

jtr7 on 7/1/2008 at 01:48

We all have our strengths.:cool: Thank you, Sola'!

The Magpie on 16/1/2008 at 03:42

I just now had a flash of recollection regarding Lord Janco:

I believe his was one of the names I drew from the oldest lglass.com Thief site. Either a bit of unique, never repeated prose, or some concept art.

Any details would have been deleted by now, but as they're not at all available to players, one should hesitate calling them canon, as well.

Oh, holy shit. The Wayback Machine just took me back to the 1997 version of (http://web.archive.org/web/19970618121211/www.lglass.com/p_info/dark/index.html) www.lglass.com and I spent far. too. much. time wading through ponds of nostalgia-filled memories of the finest team of developers I can think of.

No Janco this time, but there are several site snapshots to check yet.

--
L.

jtr7 on 16/1/2008 at 03:55

Excellent! It's a lead, which is more than we've had.

It now seems much more possible and less iffy. If it was there. There are faction quotes found only on the promotional sites, which we've grabbed up. TMA emphasises the relationship between Gervaisius and Bafford, and all the games emphasise Bafford's relationship with many around and outside The City. A Lord Janco corresponding with Bafford is no longer out of the question.

Enjoy the trip down Memory Lane! Take some pictures...:p

Hopefully there are items in there that are different than what can be found through (http://www.thief-thecircle.com/darkproj/diarymonth.html) this looking glass.

The Magpie on 16/1/2008 at 06:09

Oh yeah? How about this
(http://web.archive.org/web/19980224022811/www.lglass.com/p_info/dark/v08dkf12.html)

Inline Image:

http://web.archive.org/web/19980224015951/http://www.lglass.com/p_info/dark/v08dkt12.jpg
(http://web.archive.org/web/19980224022811/www.lglass.com/p_info/dark/v08dkf12.html) Two-headed Ogre? :cheeky:

At some point, a /p_info/dark/ogre.gif file could have existed, too, but it hasn't been properly indexed, it seems. Nor did I find any links to it, but it still showed up in the search. Funny. A lot of the archived links date from Oct 9, 2005, when we know the site had been long down. But none of those links actually work, they invariably point to one of several dorky "search engines".

EDIT: Anyway, I'm tilting towards not fitting the Ogre into the Thief setting after all, based on (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?p=476555#post476555) Dan's post here. Kind of a pity. But that still leaves the snake-beast of the concept art.

I would also ask you to lend attention to the two illustrations on the (http://www.thief-thecircle.com/darkproj/keeper.html) Keepers page named orb1.jpg and orb2.jpg in the Circle, but which are named element1.jpg and element2.jpg in the obviously later dated (http://web.archive.org/web/19980224023956/www.lglass.com/p_info/dark/keeper.html) archived snapshot of Feb 24, 1998. What are those? The older versions of the elementalist mages are kind of interesting, too, if you go to (http://web.archive.org/web/19980224020012/http://www.lglass.com/p_info/dark/shotarch.html) the screenshot archive. Here's (http://web.archive.org/web/20000312092456/www.lglass.com/p_info/dark/shotarch.html) a newer version of the screenshot archive.

Oo, and here's a quite nifty hitherto unknown item: (http://web.archive.org/web/20000610163359/http://www.lglass.com/p_info/dark/darkpage2.html) a quote by one Walter Meratian. Philosopher, by the looks of it.

No sign of Janco. I'm starting to think that the .wav sounds in the demo .crf should be compared to the M2 ones (file size check should do it).

--
L.

jtr7 on 16/1/2008 at 06:29

Hey, there's that two-headed ogre! I'd seen the conceptual art, but not the AI. And yeah, not a part of the Thief Universe. Although, a compromise would be that it could be an abomination that has nothing to do with the main factions and/or could come from outside The City. Something all the factions would find horrific. It wouldn't have to be one of the Trickster's beasties, although that was the original intention. As for the CobraBeasts, we do see their heads mounted as trophies in several missions. :ebil:

Orb Element pair and single: What are the chances that these are Keeper versions of something like Wisps, like the one seen in the Trial cutscene of TDS? I was wondering what they were doing with a floating light, and the "camera" follows it down, and the scene transitions to a Keeper's foot activating a glyph on a ring of glyphs, which may have summoned the Enforcers. I'd seen those two images before, but didn't know what to make of them.

(http://imageshack.us)

Inline Image:

http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/7487/elementorbtdsfd9.png

I know I'm stretching again, but...
Here are these orb images associated with Garrett's [rejection of his] initiation ceremony, where he shocked and disappointed the "Brotherhood" when he expressed his disgust with their ways, and their refusal to be more active with their power. Then, in TDS, he's put on trial for his chaotic methods that are pure Garrett, but never by the book of his Keeper naysayers, and there's some kind of orb light floating around. Eh.

Wavefile comparison, yes. The waves keep getting put off.

Awriiiight!

"...so the notions of wealth and poverty, of the rich and the poor, have not changed much in these enlightened days. But a man who has the freedom to think, has the freedom to think he doesn't have enough." - Walter Meratian, Treatise on Modern Philosophy

"And the Trickster did summon his beasts, and sent forth all the foulness of the earth, to topple the works the faithful had made. But the power of the Builder was with them, and they were not conquered..." - The Book of the Hammer

Thanks for all the links, Larris!

The Magpie on 16/1/2008 at 17:16

Re: Ogres
Well. Nice hypothesis. Stretching it further still, in hopes of a compromise, I'd say the confirmation of their presence in the Thief setting would depend on the mission where they originally were planned to be inserted. Both the concept art with nipple chains and their more finalized scar-skinned mesh in the screenshot suggest that they could rather have been intended as abominations created by human mages. I mean, we have verifiably necromancy. (I'm pretty sure the Necromancer has an official certificate. ;) ) Why not vivomancy?

Let's have a look at the file names of the early mage-containing screenshots - screenshots from the same missions tend to be placed close to one another in the lglass.com screenshot archive, since couples of screenshots (from the same missions) were set to be published simultaneously. Ah! Look at this!

The ogre dwells at /p_info/dark/v08dkf12.html.
At both its paired image, v08dkf01.html, and their preceding couple, v07dkf01.html and v07dkf02.html reside Elemental Mages. I'm not very familiar with the Mage Towers mission. Is the architecture in the ogre shot recognizable from there? The skylight?

So. Allow me to extrapolate. From the info provided by DN, I gather that Ogres are apparently not Trickster beings, unlike what I first thought when writing the NKL (At least not as directly as the Trickster's "beasts"* referred to in the recently surfaced quotation from the Book of the Hammer). I feel this is enough evidence that they were always intended to be humanoids, but were ditched from TDP along with the Mage Towers mission (or what it was called). Whether the mages experimented on them, kept them as slave laborers, or outright created/mutated them is open to question.

My personal slant is that they're too horrible to be a "naturally occuring" race (not counting the Trickster beasts as natural in this respect, paradoxally enough, I don't believe the Thief Universe has any other races existing concurrently with humans). Therefore I feel they're created from humans. For all we know, the one in the screenshot might be a unique, one-of-a-kind specimen. Perhaps we could ask the designers credited with Mages' Tower in TG? (Rafael Brown? Sara Verrilli?)

Based on this, I feel that their position in the Thief Universe might be defended a little more strongly.

*)Have you ever noticed how the Trickster's beasts seem to share characteristics with vermin and other icky animals more often than not? Is this coincidental?

Whew.

Now, to the matter of the orb elements. I'm not dismissing your hypothesis, it explains why they're placed on the Keeper page.

But I believe they could be elementals. Here's how I think.

I'm not sure how much one should read into renamed file names - I'm certain I saw them as elements in '99, but the Circle mirror is possibly earlier. Originally I thought they looked like lightning elementals, or at least of the same build as fire elementals - air elementals, perhaps? I never thought the absence of in-game elementals other than the fire types precluded their existence, and I didn't have any reason to believe they would have any vastly different physical appearance.

The fact remains that someone at LGS decided the .jpg files needed to be renamed, and that the html of the Keeper page would need to be updated accordingly. I believe they were "orb"s first, then "element"s. Not elementals, curiously.

But why were their files renamed? Maybe the fire elementals originally were named "fire orbs", for all we know. Perhaps more elemental types were planned, but not implemented. That actually seems likely to me. How many, do you think? One for each of the four elemental crystals/talismans, or one for all seven of the Trickster's controlled "elements"?

There is also the matter of the street lighting of the City. It's both magical and electrical, isn't it? Could that be related?

--
L.

jtr7 on 16/1/2008 at 18:59

Interesting idea that the Element Orbs could be a coalescence of whatever the Collector Towers are collecting. I'm kidding when I say that the glowball of a Tower may have detached and flew off. Another thing about those images is that they seem to have been made to have a solid-looking shell like the glass globe of a plasma ball. It doesn't look to me like a corona.

I'm already leaning towards your idea that the ogre is really a human. Before I went to bed last night, I was thinking it could be a tragic character like Sloth from Goonies, but without the charm. The Mages would be perfect if there was another Azaran-like mage with a "Cruel" streak. The Mages do experiment on animals. The Mages come from outside The City and are mysterious to the Keepers, so that works with my ideas that the ogre is not the Trickster's, it falls outside the factions of The City, it would be abominable to all the factions, and now, it would be enough to cause the Mages concern if another cruel Azaran-like character was experimenting with magic other than Elemental.

The (http://www.thief-thecircle.com/media/concepts/showimage.asp?source=./t1-sketch-ogre.jpg) dual expressions on the two faces remind of the Tragedy/Comedy theatre icon.

I also thought of the "Norwegian-Thing" faces from John Carpenter's remake of The Thing, but I couldn't find a better pic:

Inline Image:

http://www.outpost31.com/movie/images/bottinwfaces.jpg
That's Rob Bottin screwing around. Heh.

One head could be laughing stupidly, while the other is making sounds like wordless curses--sharing the same lungs.
(http://imageshack.us)

Inline Image:

http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/2316/oger2fu1.png

The pentagram on the hands is unique. And what about the matching symbols on the legs and arms?

Looking at the architecture of the MageKeep, I don't see that kind of overhead light or grates in the floor. Those textures aren't used either. It looks like a basement, or some undergound area. Anyway, the Mages have a dungeon area with racks, iron maidens, and wall shackles, not too far from a laboratory.

I think the Trickster's ChaosBeast connection to vermin and ickiness has to do with his intent to horrify people, or disturb, really. Viktoria would represent the opposite.

jtr7 on 21/1/2008 at 03:35

While digging through the OMs in DromEd, I've been finding hidden items, of course. For instance, in Precious Cargo, in the room of the Ice Shed with the pagancicle Lotus, there's another Lotus, invisible, non-solid, and unfrozen. Well...he's labeled "FleshSlug". Besides being a nod to previous games like Ultima and pen & paper RPGs before that, does the label imply anything else? It's not undead.