Island Defense Standalone Lore (New)

[theorchero]

Originally posted (If you want to see it formatted and not just a huge block of text) : http://www.islanddefense.org/forum/inde ... 912.0.html

Alright, so it's been a while and I haven't heard from Matt in a decent time. Does this mean the standalone failed? No, it just means I'm an impatient bastard with little regard for arbitrary rules. That being said, I'm not actually breaking any rules. I never signed any NDA, and by copyright all of this content legally belongs to me. I wrote it. It's mine until I damn well say otherwise.

That being said, it's still going to be used for ID standalone, and it still won't be the final versions implemented into the game, so please keep that in mind, and don't repost this anywhere. Feel free to link to this original post as much as you like.

I am going to put pretty much all the lore I and my assistant Jared wrote here, with a link to the old topic when I can find it lol. When you first read this it might not be on here just yet because it's a lot of copy-paste and formatting I have to do.

Original Thread: http://www.islanddefense.org/forum/inde ... 885.0.html

The text below is going to be unformatted. There will be download links to formatted versions until I format this.
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Work-in-Progress Document v1.1

[This section will contain new work for multiple sections, and may include excerpts from sections to demonstrate changes to them.
I did this so that the writer program can run smoother, without having to load the massive amount of text in the original document.
What is written here will be copied and updated to the original document whenever it is sent for approval.]

LORE: The Guardians, and the origins of the Dark Guardians, and the creation of the Titans.


[This section will most likely be placed before the Titan Section]

[NOTE: The group once referred to as “the Great Masters” have been RENAMED
to DARK GUARDIANS to reflect their philosophical difference compared to the original Guardians]

THE GUARDIANS

"We do not create worlds. We simply populate them." - The Guardians' Collective

The Guardians are a powerful group of immortals that exist in their own vague plane of immortality,
although both its nature and its peculiar connection to other planes is unclear. Their origins are mysterious.
All that is known is that some time after our world was formed, they appeared. And it was from them that we gained our first terrible boon: life.

[Note: Insertion from Prov. Doc. begins here]

The Guardians, a powerful race of benevolent immortals, is a subject of interest for many scholars, from past generations to today -
it is said that they held a particular respect for those of knowledge, and in turn, those of knowledge held them in respect and reverence to this day.

Regardless of such respect, however, little is known about who they are or where they came from. What is known, however,
is that some time after the creation of our world, they arrived here.

Our world was a barren husk, devoid of life. There were no whispers of leaves turning into the wind, no tip-tapping of rain upon damp forests,
or the soft sigh of an ocean breeze riding upon its frothing wave. This was a great itch to them. A waste of what could be, what should be.

And so the Guardians came upon our barren world, and created life. It was, of course, imperfect. Life always is, mortal or no.
It was their desire to create perfect beings. And as such, they first created life in the form of the Elementals.

They forged life in the form of entities composed of the natural elements, present in other worlds. They sought perfection, and
what else besides that that is of a single form could achieve such admirable heights? Their great hands reached out,
and upon the world they instilled that ignoble purity.

These elements they forged into Elementals - their first mistake. While the elementals were "pure" of a sort, they were never the less chaotic.
They were sentient, but without purpose. Their purpose arose from the manner in which they were created - the pursuit of perfection, an urge to create,
to fill a void with that they admired most. For in themselves they perceived perfection, they became instilled with the desire to grow, expand, and influence. To occupy. To control.

The Guardians were both disappointed and alarmed with their creations. They became rabid creatures, powerful in both their strength
and their will to affect their surroundings. Instead of creating a race of beings who would achieve perfection through singular creation and wisdom,
they had created a race that achieved a mockery of such through a grim desire of expansion.

And so the Guardians created the mortal races, incorporating pieces of every element they had previously gathered, to form a varied sortie of creatures.

They first gathered the enigmatic energies of Water. For water was ever changing, and would alter its course or form to what was there or going to be.
This would allow the mortals to adapt, learn, and grow.

Then they harnessed the breath of Wind. For in the wind, the whispers of memories, secrets, and of people could travel the land with ease.

Then they grasped the tumultuous power of Energy. For in its most natural form, lightning, it was both beautiful and terrible.
For in the lives of mortals, short as that may be, shall they live a life as brilliant as a strike of lightning.

They then looked upon the Earth itself. For it was unmoving, and such dedication and strength should be admired by all.
For in this, the mortals shall gain the strength to survive.

And last, they used the essence of Fire. For its ability to create and destroy, they gave it special admiration. As a forest shall survive through a firestorm,
so shall the mortals be reborn from struggle and arise from the ashes to achieve greater heights than ever before.

However, it was the final boon which was rendered unto the creation of mortals which would prove one of their most valuable, and troublesome, trait:
From their own creators, they acquired the will to expand. To develop, to procreate, to achieve their goals, be it with time and effort, or
simply with a stream of blood upon cobblestone.

For these were the mortal races, instilled with the tools to survive, flourish, to fight and die, and so shall their eternal struggles change the mortal world
and the very planes themselves from whence their creators came.

[Note: Insertion from Prov. Doc. Ends here]

The creation of the elementals, and later the mortals, would prove to incur a cost upon all of the Guardians, and would later attribute to their policy of
non-interference and lead to the events that preceded the Great Exile.

The Guardians soon realized that their first creations, the elementals, were becoming problematic – they were inflicting great strife upon the mortal races;
they saw them as impure, for they contained only a piece of an elemental's essence, and sought to reclaim that essence.
They were feeding upon the mortals, and becoming stronger because of it.

It was too late to stop them with conventional means. They had grown too powerful, into far greater creatures than previously imagined.
They had become immortal. They had become Titans.

The Guardians then began an event now only remembered as The Shattering of Planes. They combined their will, and focused all of their power and
shattered their own plane of existence into many, smaller, “shards,” miniature planes of existence which they could control and partially inhabit.
Drawing upon their last reserves of energy, they banished the Titans from the earth, and sealed them within separate shards, never to touch or harm the world again.

The Guardians ability to affect change relied on the energy they could absorb from their own plane. It made them Immortal, and gave them their collective power
to incur changes upon other planes of existence. Once, this power had been exclusive to their own plane. But with the Shattering, this was no longer the case.
The vast power, the energy, that had once been contained within this plane was now freely roaming. It resulted in what is now called by the mortals as the Nether, the home of demons.

The Nether served as a kind of barrier within planes – but also served as a connection between them. Energy flowed between worlds, and could be accessed by some mortals.
Those mortals gained strange abilities: to alter reality itself. To do things previously thought impossible. They called this energy Magic.


THE DARK GUARDIANS

"The Dark Guardians, while it is still considered blasphemy by some to speak of them, have long been a subject of debate among scholars.
Despite the best efforts by those who follow the Old Ways, we have been able to record and study the marks of their presence upon our world.
The most common evidence is that of the various deals their. . . Representatives have made." - The Scholar's Hall, Chief Historian, Sickle City

[WORK HERE – ABOVE IS COMPLETE.]

After the shattering of their own realm to create prisons for the catastrophic elementals, the Guardians partly resided on a shard of their own. Their power was
greatly diminished, because the magic they once controlled solely was now spread among the worlds. The Guardians stared at the brilliant specks of light from within their shard,
a land of misty plains; And as they thought, the mists swirled, and they came unto a realization. They had saved their creations, and In so doing, had achieved a kind of perfection.
The true perfection is the pursuit of such achievement, and the struggles it entailed. So they decided their work was done, even at with its great price, and so our world, in which
they instilled the breath of life, was to be the last. They had no strength left, and had now but to passively observe through the bright lights flickering in the
sky the strife, struggle, and success of their creations.

There were some Guardians, however, who would not be content. Balance, they argued, had best been achieved before they had sealed the Titans away from the world.
They had observed, that while a great many mortals had died, the ones who had survived had become much stronger. They had learned to move quicker, to think more critically,
and to build more sophisticated structures designed to remain hidden. This, they argued, should be the natural way of things. The strong survive. The weak die.

The Guardian's Collective, the ruling council of the immortal race, all gazed at the stars, at the wonder of their creation, and declared it perfect.
No Guardian shall impede upon the now-natural order of things within that plane.

Though the ambitions of some of the Guardians would not die there. While their ability to affect change had been greatly diminished, they still had the ability to observe.
Reaching out through their minds, they found that mortals had begun to absorb the energy that had leaked from the Shattering of their own plane. In small amounts, it had an interesting effect,
it caused the creation of a second mind, an existence without a body, a soul.

They also discovered that while most mortals possessed one of these “souls,” some had absorbed a much larger amount of magic, and had actually encountered very subtle changes.
Others, however, were beginning to learn to wield that power. Mortals, using the power that only Immortals should possess. It was blasphemy.

They attempted to connect to the minds of some of those mortals, as those who have been touched by magic can. They appeared within their dreams, and began to observe their aspirations.
Some were not aware of the potential of their power, using it only at its most basic level. However, they began to notice something astounding. The “souls” that these mortals possessed
was something incredibly unique, a kind of new energy that someone who had the power to could tap into. In life, it was difficult to access, requiring the mortal to trust and believe in
the being completely. However, in death...

Those Guardians then began to observe the exact nature of their accidental creation, the Nether. It was, as it turned out, a kind of conduit for different types of energy.
Most notably, magic, and the newly discovered souls. And they soon realized that they were able to tap into souls at will if those souls were in the Nether.

They took their findings to the Collective, saying that they now had found a new source of power for them to use to instill life in other worlds, even enough to create them,
a previously impossible task. Before, they said, they had to search near eons to find a plane suitable for life. Now, they merely had to will it, and one would appear before them.

The Collective was intrigued. They were very interested in a way for them to restore their power, however, upon learning that the price was the complete draining of mortal souls,
killing them, they decreed that it was evil; They said the others motivations were out of greed for more power, they were corrupt by the magic they had stolen.
They were not Guardians, but uncommon thieves.

As they were immortal, they could not be slain. However, the Guardian's Collective came up with an alternative solution. They gathered the minds of their people and focused it on
those who had abandoned their minds, those who had stolen souls from mortals, and punished them. Their bodies blackened, and shriveled. They smelled of putrid flesh, and their eyes shrunk into
red, bloodied orbs. They were cast from the sight of their former bretheren, and cursed in the form of that which they represented, Evil, to be granted no purchase by any plane.
They were doomed to wallow in the Nether.

Cut off from their former people, their former magic gone, they relied on their new found source of power to enact changes they deemed were necessary. To maintain the true balance;
the balance of war, of conflict, of struggle. The strongest survive, the weak perish, and their souls feed their goals. Now among the source of their new power, the Nether, the conduit of
magic and souls between planes, they would need a way to influence the world directly once more. They found a way to do exactly that: they discovered an ancient city buried far beneath
the ocean waves, and exhausting the last of their captured souls, raised the sunken city. The legendary Isle of Atlantis, its foreboding ruins now seeing the sunlight for the first time in
thousands of years, had risen, and with it, a new age would dawn.

The souls they had stolen had run out, and they needed more. They sent their Ambassadors of Chaos, the Demonologists, their dark enforcers, into the world of mortals.
They would have more souls to complete their goals, willing or not. Their plans would come to fruition, no matter the cost.

They were the enforcers of the true peace, that of the tempest storm, the clash of steel, and the great horn of war.
Their power was great, and surpassed only by their ambition of control. They were known as the Dark Guardians.

THE TITANS

[Note: minor implements from Jared are included. These are not final, and are more for just food for thought than actually being considered permanent.]

"Woe has befallen our world. The very nature of the universe has changed! Our protectors, the Guardians, have abandoned us to the small mercy of their former brethren.
I fear if we cannot awaken our sleeping father, we are doomed. Pray louder children, for we have yet to rouse him." - Ancient Prayer Tome, the Hidden Records, Darox Monastery.

The events that led up to the formation of the Titans were many, but namely, they were the result of the Guardian's folly. It wasn't until the Great Exile and the
formation of the Great Masters that they would transform into the awe inspiring and incredibly powerful Titans that would later shake the world.

They needed to first re-introduce the titans to the world, however. The Dark Guardians, while certainly corrupt, were clever. They knew the Titans were far more powerful
now than they had been originally, and simply letting them loose on the world would most likely completely destroy it. Instead, they would need a way for them to allow a
more controlled amount of influence from the Titans.

It was then they struck upon a dark inspiration. Deep beneath the ocean waves, upon the seabed, lay an ancient and forgotten city, once populated with creatures that
predated morals and littered with ancient shrines to forgotten gods. So it it came to pass that the once great city of Atlantis, who had found its home below the great sea,
by sinister influence would once again rise to the surface. The Hidden Isle of Atlantis once more was sentenced upon the world, and a new dawn would rise.

The Dark Guardians still had to introduce the Titans back into the world, and so they raised their blackened hands towards the celestial heavens, where the mighty Titans writhed within their prisons.
The world wrenched fourth a mighty scream, and a great fireball descended from the heavens, and like the wrath of an angry god, it smashed upon the island, bringing the
very essence of the malevolent Titans down upon the world once more.

[Note: I may add more to this section, but it is more likely that the titan-specific lore takes over from here.]

"So it came to be that the Guardian's folly would strike thrice, and doom the world. Once, they saved us. Twice, they betrayed themselves.
And now thrice, and they have doomed us all." - The Guardian's Folly, last known copy, Dildamesh & Yacapo's Emporium of Antiquities

WORK IN PROGRESS DOCUMENT (Rev. 2)

[This section is the re-written version of excerpts from the WIP document. Elements from both this section, the original, and that of Jared
will be added/modified into one final version to be added to the main document in addition to other corrections due.]

The Guardians and their Creations

The Guardians, a powerful race of benevolent immortals, is a subject of interest for many scholars, from past generations to today -
it is said that they held a particular respect for those of knowledge, and in turn, those of knowledge held them in respect and reverence to this day.

Regardless of such respect, however, little is known about who they are or where they came from. What is known, however, is that some time after the creation of our world, they arrived here.

Our world was a barren husk, devoid of life. There were no whispers of leaves turning into the wind, no taps of rain drops falling on damp grass, nor was there the
soft breathing of the shores edge, the water frothing over rocks and sand. This was a great itch to them. A waste of what could be.

And so the Guardians came upon our barren world, and created life. It was, of course, imperfect. Life always is, mortal or no. It was their desire to create perfect, pure, beings.
And as such, they first created life in the form of the Elementals.

They forged life in the form of entities composed of the natural elements. They sought perfection, and what else besides nature could achieve such admirable heights?
Their great hands reached out, and upon the world they released that which was pure; in the end, pure devastation.

These elements they forged into Elementals - their first mistake. While the elementals were "pure" of a sort, they were never the less chaotic. They were sentient, but without purpose.
Their purpose arose from the manner in which they were created - the pursuit of perfection. For in themselves they perceived perfection, they became instilled with the desire to spread themselves at all costs.

The Guardians were both disappointed and alarmed with their creations. They became rabid creatures, powerful in both their strength and their will to affect their surroundings.
Instead of creating a race of beings who would achieve perfection through creation and wisdom, they had created a race that achieved a mockery of such through grim hunger.

And so the Guardians created the mortal races, incorporating pieces of every element they had previously gathered, to form a unique, grand creation.

They first gathered the enigmatic energies of Water. For water was ever changing, and would alter its course or form to what was there or going to be. This would allow the mortals to adapt, learn, and grow.

Then they harnessed the energy of Wind. For in the wind, the whispers of memories, secrets, and of people could travel the land with ease.

Then they grasped the tumultuous power of Energy. For in its most natural form, lightning, it was both beautiful and terrible. For in the lives of mortals, short as that may be,
shall they live a life as brilliant as a strike of lightning.

They then looked upon the Earth itself. For it was unmoving, and such dedication and strength should be admired by all. For in this, the mortals shall gain the will to do what must be done.

And last, they used the essence of Fire. For its ability to create and destroy, they gave it special admiration. As the embers of a dying fire shall flicker and burn,
so shall those who live and die change the world, until the last spark of their lives go out.

For these were the mortal races, both full of wisdom and folly, and in their short lives shall they change the world and the mortal planes themselves.

- - - - - - -

There is still a good 8-12 pages of content I need to extract from emails, filter, format, and then put here. More is on the way

[nabo.]

I got zero interest in reading this before u tell me wtf this post is about......

[ProfessorOak]

I got zero interest in reading this before u tell me wtf this post is about......

Well with the thread title island defence lore (Island defence being a game hosted by ent) one would assume the story in the thread is infact a story representing the lore behind the game island defence.

[theorchero]

Meh. Anyone whose played this game longer than a year knows what this is about, so I don't feel really bothered to explain considering the first paragraph does that quite explicitly.

[Stealer]

I believe the main question has always been when would something tangible be seen?

You might be interested in this though.

[Burn]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... vR1E#gid=0

I've been wanting to make this doc, but I need to see if " Combat - attack 1 - Animation backswing Point (ubs1) " affects the DPS before going on.

-Burn

[Stealer]

Pretty sure you're forgetting about the dice for your damage numbers.

[Lichard]

wut is this dice math stuffz... someone teachmepls