Underrail Forum
Underrail => General => Topic started by: TΛPETRVE on January 25, 2016, 06:50:50 pm
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I'm surprised we don't have an official, pinned thread for Underrail's plot and lore yet (or maybe there is one, and the search function just refuses to spit it out?). It's been officially out for a month now, with most of us having been familiar with the game for longer, and while I presume that a large number is playing the game for its mechanics more so than for its narrative content, I still think the latter is absolutely worth discussing.
I suppose the anticlimactic reveal of Underrail's origins and the decidedly unmysterious nature of Tchort, the Faceless et al. are not to everyone's taste, but I for one really love the way Underrail handles its buildup, remaining grounded and downright stoic from beginning to end, antithetical to the sweeping epic plots with their contrived twists and turns in many modern RPGs, and even pulling off a bit of a meta commentary on the genre itself, without going all self-aware and ostentatiously ironic unlike e.g. Larian's Divinity games tend to do.
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I was actually never terribly clear on the origins of the Underrail (though I think it's safe to assume Biocorp is somehow involved) - but then I missed the Oculus stuff, anyhow, so maybe it's explained there (for some reason Quicksilver never got back in touch, though I'm fairly sure I performed all his quests to his satisfaction.)
I thought the reveal of Tchort's (implied) origins was cool, as it sheds a suspicious light on Eidein's supposed discovery of a millennia old being. I'd be surprised if Tchort was any older than two hundred years.
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I think what makes the exposition dump in the final third particularly awesome is the serious tonal shift it invokes onto the entire experience; from bleak, but not hopeless, to downright nihilistic.
Ironically, it's not even much of a twist, more like an anti-twist, complete demystification. Love it.
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Yeah, the story stuff at the end (Caerus logs aside, bloated and largely irrelevant as they are,) was undoubtedly the high point of the Deep Caverns for me. Poor Tchortists seriously had the wool pulled over their eyes - I always liked their agenda, even if it did serve a potential eldritch abomination / horrific experiment gone wrong.
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I think the only "poor" ones were the almost childishly naive scientists and other youngsters that worked for the Tchortists. Seeing them mowed down alongside the degenerates that were their superiors when the Faceless came in was actually quite sad. But that's just how it goes. The game generally does a rather good job at mixing up morality without going down the stupid "everyone is blatantly morally ambiguous" route, apart from a few missteps.
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Alright, explain this.
If what the Faceless Commander says is true and Tchort indeed is just an amalgamation of Biocorp scientists made with mutagens (which is probably true given the mutagen tanks during the fight and the fact that Exitus is harmful to it) then it means it's just 100+ years old, 200 tops.
From what it tells you, it wanted the Cube solely to lure Tanner/Six, eat them and gain their knowledge in the proccess. How in the hell does Tchort know anything about the High Ones and the Cube in the first place?
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I'd say the cube had already been in BioCorp's possession for a very long time. The Faceless probably nabbed it when they revolted against their creators and ran off to form their own civilisation.
Since the entirety of Underrail is essentially a massive ant farm run by BioCorp, with both their scattered remainders vying for control, and their countless victims doing their own thing, and Oculus being sort of the resident assassin's guild that operates outside of all affiliations and acts sort of like the Outsider from Dishonored, I'd say that it's not particularly hard for spies to find out whatever they want in Underrail, if they know where to look. Underrail's society in itself is a massive network of information that just needs to be tapped. And since time in Underrail pretty much means nothing anymore thanks to wildly varying life expectancies, it's easy to assume that Tanner had been around for quite a long time, too.
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I'd say the cube had already been in BioCorp's possession for a very long time. The Faceless probably nabbed it when they revolted against their creators and ran off to form their own civilisation.
That is possible, but it still doesn't explain how Tchort knows anything about High Ones. There is only 3 of them left and logs from the residental make it clear that they didn't know anything about the mysterious pillars origins.
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Tanner might have had some prior history with BioCorp, depending on how long he actually had been in Underrail before. He knew about the cube, after all, and had it ordered stolen.
Considering how filled the game is with red herrings and outright lies, I wouldn't even be surprised if part of the game's lore is just blatant misinformation.
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Wait, where did you get that from?
Mainframe.
At least that's how I remember it. Either Mainframe or one of the pillars, but I'm pretty sure it was the Mainframe.
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When you look at it, Tchort is really nothing but a bio-computer that upgrades its wetware through absorption of the DNA of other species, and very likely just so happens to express itself with the personality of a cenobite, because its conscious is a schizophrenic mess of all the individuals it has assimilated. It may well be possible that it does indeed contain a primordial lifeform, but at the end of the day it doesn't even matter, because Tchort is ultimately meaningless; it has no power over anything but its immediate surroundings, and its destruction has changed bugger all besides taking one small fraction out of the equation that is the internal power plays of one single instable corporation.
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Signed up just to say that Ezra was a 10/10 character. Uncovering the tiny bits of information about him scattered throughout the game was one of the highlights of my playthrough. This guy managed to be more interesting than anyone of the core main story cast.
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I was a bit disappointed that you can't confront him about it, so you never really learn about his motivations; I mean, he clearly is a sociopath (and a believable sociopath at that, not some sort of exaggerated stereotype), and he's just both involved and distant enough that you cannot discern if he's interested in the well-being of SGS or just wants to keep a keen eye on everything.
But at the same time it also perfectly hammers home how much of a literal vision of hell Underrail really is.
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At the end of the day you don't have any hard evidence against him, mainly just some conjecture, so it makes some sense that you can never confront him. Sure it would have been nice to walk up to him and say "Hey Anton, sup?", but he could just as easily deny everything.
Problem is, we are still missing some details. We have no idea what happened to his partner in crime Vovin, nor what happened to Dr Slavkovic because apparently he never got himself monolith-cryo'd at Thitonus despite agreeing to check it out. We also never discovered exactly what Ezra and later Otis were doing at Tartarus, only that it was probably important. And Project Ascendance is still a complete mystery.
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Yeah, there are of course a lot of implications and no actual evidence. I do like that a lot, because it gives the game that "make of it what you will" feel that I love so much about Dark Souls, but it also does make the narrative feel a tiny bit inconsistent at times, when some trains of thought are fleshed out more than others.
Ah, speaking of which, I think what I love the most about the game's world building is its sense of scale. Usually in exploration-heavy RPGs you get a map that is supposed to cover an entire continent, dotted with tiny, unconnected settlements, and while the abstract presentation makes suspension of disbelief rather easy, it's still something that bugs me at times. The world of Underrail on the other hand is merely the size of a single real-life city, and as a result everything feels really bloody dense. Awesome.
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Is there a complete script anywhere? I've been fishing it out of the game files, but some of it(such as the ending) is buried in the executable itself so it's not easily searchable. And these make it hard to see the script as a whole.
Who actually stole the mysterious cube? From the description, I had figured it was an Oculite; but Lora said the name was James Steiner. The only mention I can see of a James is that one of the Foundry guards says "I once pushed James, the coroner, into a pit full of corpses during an investigation. Oh boy, was he mad!" Foundry has an Oculus presence, so it might have been him.
I saw Dude mentioned in the residential logs. He knows more than he lets on. He knows about Six:
"Listen, man. Did you know that, like, six is the most common number? Yeah, even more than one... or zero... or seventy-seven. Aaaand, it has a hidden, mysterious meaning... did you know that?"
"Look - flies. How many legs do they have? Six! Go to Foundry, look at the ground. You'll see a lot of sixes! Core City, the pavement... Six! Hexagon, city in North Underrail? Six again! Why is the sixth sense so special? Because six is a special number, therefore... six!"
"Beware of people with six fingers on their hands. They can mess you up real good, man. Yeah..."
He also knows about the creatures that were haunting Foundry, which were associated with Ezra:
"He leans toward you and whispers.:: Ever heard of psychoturners? I thought not. Those creatures are really, really funky. They use their low frequency psi field to absorb any material they find. Then, like, they can turn into anything, using what they absorbed. It's crazy, I'm telling you."
Leo in the DC mentions having a 'brother' who stayed with him. I think Dude was that person, and that he's referring to either Tchort or Iris when he says this:
"I had this annoying neighbor back in, like, the old days, way back when I was a teenager. She lived in the shack close to ours. I never got along, man, never. Every time I'd go near the shack she'd be, like, sitting all fat and ugly like her mother was, and she would start talking so much it felt like a train was trying to pass through my skull. You know, man, like, she rambled about some stuff no one cares about. I felt like her talking was destroying my brain, like it pushed memories out of my head. I couldn't remember things after talking to her, and I often feel like I was, I mean, like I was gonna vomit."
He says he used to live in a cave and next to burrowers, which is consistent with living with Leo:
"A while ago, I drank too many mushroom brews. Yeah, that can happen sometimes. Anyway, I was walking home, when suddenly the ground rose and hit me in the head! I passed out, and when I woke up I noticed I was in an odd looking cave. I don't live in a cave, by the way. Not anymore."
"Did I ever talk about burrowers? They are fascinating, highly social creatures. Dangerous, but still fascinating. I should know, I've lived with them for a month. That's how I got this scar. ::He points at his forehead.::"
He knows the origins of the Faceless. Maybe the Faceless were a cross-breeding experiment with the Godmen 'High Ones' that came down with the mysterious pillars.
"Well, the Faceless are, as a matter of fact, a very sophisticated race of ancient half-men, half-gods, half-rocks. ::He takes another sip of mushroom brew.:: You see, they were created a long time ago in the fiery bowels of the earth."
And he can communicate with higher beings(maybe the "High Ones"):
"Well, I mostly drink mushroom brew, but I also have visions and communicate with higher beings. While we're at it... ::He turns toward the barkeeper and yells.:: Barkeeper! Another one!"
He learned Bilocate by interacting with one of the pillars. This is consistent with the laboratory in DC that had a bunch of bilocations moving about:
"If you see any weird crystals in the caves - don't shoot them, don't touch them, don't lick them, don't kick them, don't punch them, don't feed them, don't jump over them, don't sing to them. It could be disastrous. It could mess up your mind."
Also, Leo mentioned he pictures of some family. Al Fabet mentions his grandad went down to scavenge and never came back. So maybe they're related(or it's Dude):
"I heard there's good stuff there to be found, yeah. My grandad even went there to scavenge, while the elevators were still working. He never came back."
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Today I decided to replay the Institute quests, and this time I tried to pay a bit more attention to their hierarchy.
(http://i.imgur.com/grpznwq.jpg?1)
The ranks in Preservation and Investigation are pretty evident, but Propagation is giving me some trouble as it is the youngest of the departments so there’s less historical information about it, and closed to the player as well. Especially Praepostor as Propagation’s R2 is a guess I’m not too happy with, but I didn’t want to leave it blank.
First, based on how the player and NPCs interact with Efreitors and Investigators, I’m assuming R3 is the magic line for nobility. In that case, Propagation’s R3 has to be Minister, otherwise why would they wear noble robes? That leaves Acolyte for either R1 or R2. If it’s the latter, the only options for R1 I can see are either plain Tchortists, or maybe Missionaries. But since Missionaries never show up in the Institute itself I doubt they are an actual rank.
Mediant Samuel links Praepostor Amelia to Propagation, but also refers to her as nobility, which he does not do when talking about Efreitors. She is also the only Praepostor in the game we hear about, which would be in conflict with how the rest of the hierarchy is built up. If I’m wrong about nobility starting at R3, then Minister and Praepostor can be switched, which looks much better. The only issue then is that Amelia wears regular Tchortist robes.
Another option is that Praepostor is a unique rank not connected to the core hierarchy, similarly to Protonotary and Judicator. And speaking of Judicator, narration describes it to be high in the hierarchy, but the way Azarias addressed Vladan indicates that it is lower than Provost. So I’m guessing Judicator to be R3 and Provost R4.
Aside from this, kitchen staff, etc. are probably of the lowest rank, and Monsignor is a title awarded to anyone from any rank who made outstanding contribution to the Institute, sometimes given posthumously.
And since I love the linguistic diversity of this place, especially the blatant love of Greek they inherited from Biocorp, let’s see some etymology just for fun.
Rassophore: this one is kinda tricky. Probably a combination of ράσο (robe/habit) and –phore (bearer). Since Investigators don’t usually wear robes, maybe before Propagation came around Preservation forces used to be associated with it.
Skopeftophore: σκοπευτής (sniper/marksman)
Ekrixophore: έκρηξη (explosion/burst/blast)
Efreitor: okay, this one has nothing to do with Greek. Comes from the German Gefreiter, spelling possibly taken from Russian. It’s the second military rank a soldier can be promoted to.
Harmost: another rank with historical connections, αρμοστής originally referred to some kind of military governor a long, long time ago in Sparta.
Episkopos: έπίσκοπος (overseer), sort of like harmosts but Athenian, tasked with overseeing subject cities.
I doubt the rest needs explanation. Suggestions, corrections, comments and so on are welcome.
By the by, is it just me, or do Pirophores never use their psi powers?
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Rassophore is a lesser rank of monks in the Eastern Orthodox church. I don't know about the other -phores, though.
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And eposkop is one of the higher ranks in the Orthodox church.
If i remember correctly episkops chose patrirarch, so it is on the same level as catholic bishops.