Stormwaltz Quotes/On Harlune and the Storyline

March 23, 2002 - [No Link]

Chain_LC wrote:

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When they were laying the backstory for the game they probably had Harlune all worked out.

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Ah, you give me too much credit, and assume we had more than we did. ^_^ At ship, we had a few pieces of lore and a handful of overview docs - not much beyond that. The Empyrean development of portalspace, for example, amounted to three line-items: Asheron uses portal magic to trap BZ, Asheron creates a stable portal, Asheron brings in the bugs.

(Confession time - the original vision has it that he was surprised and overwhelmed, unable to close the exploratory portal to the Olthoi world before thousands had already come through. Kellin II, his usurpation of the throne, and his desire to use the Olthoi as weapons are entirely my reworking. I wonder what Toby thinks of it all...)

When I created Harlune, I had no plan in mind beyond "he was a powerful life mage." But I created him early in beta, when I just tossed stuff out without considering the broader ramifications. I hadn't fully familiarized myself with the world yet. In retrospect, it's a good thing Witch Cave never made it in.

It was unquestionably the assertion that Harlune was Asheron that provided the seed of the idea, and it germinated when I started thinking about how portals only appeared in placed the Empyrean had visited.

Out of curiosity, has anyone ever noticed that Harlune's wife, Alia Dunolmad, is the daughter of the farmer Dunol, molested by soldiers and then bravely rescued by Harlune in "The Reign of Alfrega?" The -mad suffix in Aluvian means "daughter of." That's another relic of the time when he was just a real powerful life mage who attained mastery over death. I was always very proud of that unobtrusive detail, but if something is so subtle no one noticed in 2.5 years, it's actually a failure.

Chris "Stormwaltz" L'Etoile