What's the story with the Shadow Shard, in-game?

[Vanden]

According to the CoH Lore Bible written for the game by Rick Dakan, the story of the Shadow Shard is this: One day, Rularuu's tummy was making the rumblies that only dimensions could satisfy, so he headed to Earth's dimension and set up his dimension eater ritual. In response, the Midnight Squad, led by Dream Doctor*, used an artifact called the Dagger of Jocas, which could cut dimensions, to slice an infinitesimally small layer off our reality. They planned to trick Rularuu's ritual into absorbing this tiny layer of reality; it superficially resembled our dimension, but was essentially nothing. If Rularuu absorbed it, he would be absorbing nothingness itself and be destroyed. Rularuu, however, noticed the trickery, and so he infused this shadow shard with an enormous amount of his godlike power in order to make it a real, substantial dimension. The lore bible is pretty vague on how, exactly, this resulted in Rularuu being trapped in it, but the end result is Rularuu's power is greatly diminished and he's stuck there.

 

The thing is, this doesn't really seem to jive with other mentions of the shard in the game. In one of Maria Jenkins's missions, she says Black Swan has a shadow dimension she created using a similar method to what the Midnight Squad did to create the shard. However, it's pretty clear that Rularuu ended up doing most of the work, and I don't think Black Swan has that kind of power. She does, however, have an artifact called the Quills of Jocas, which is likely some Praetorian equivalent to the Dagger with similar capabilities. Also, in Dream Doctor's personal story, it's revealed that Rularuu was trapped in the Shard due to Mender Silos sabotaging the Midnight Squad's plan; however, Dream Doctor claims to have simply stabbed Rularuu with the Dagger of Jocas, intending to destroy him, no mention of using it to create a dimension. So what's the actual story behind it? The old devs had a policy that any lore that hadn't actually been revealed to players could be changed freely if it made for a better story; the lore bible was written in 2003 or so, so the stuff we actually see in the game should trump stuff in the lore bible if the two conflict, but even the stuff in the game seems to contradict itself. What are we to conclude, then?

 

*The lore bible calls this character Gerard the Green, but we know him as Dream Doctor.

[CrudeVileTerror]

 . . . only replying to say . . . 

 

KAAAAAARRRRLLLL!!!

[Lunchmoney]

Hmmm....

Multi dimension, timey wimey, magic.

[Lunchmoney]

 ‘…and that’s why I don’t like magic, captain. ’Cos it’s magic. You can’t ask questions, it’s magic. It doesn’t explain anything, it’s magic. You don’t know where it comes from, it’s magic! That’s what I don’t like about magic, it does everything by magic!’ 

Sam Vimes, Thud.

[tidge]

I also never felt like the Shadow Shard lore/arc came together. I can excuse my poor reading comprehension, but I'm not going to automatically excuse the writing/plan. It felt as if there were at least two different ideas for the Shard dimensions, and I'm not sure that those ideas either ripened or jelled. Maybe that's why we had to collect all that fruit?

 

I never understood:

1. Where the native inhabitants/civilians of the Shadow Shard came from.
2. Where the 'Reflections' came from (considering that there are 'natives')
3. Lord Nemesis: He used the Shadow Shard to launch his attack on the Rikti Homeworld? or not?

...and then there is the conclusion to the "Who Will Die?" SSA.

[Coyotedancer]

The reflections belong to Uuralur the Mirror, keeper of the Garden of Memories... He's one of the aspects of Rularuu that we never actually get to meet in the TFs or Shard missions.

 

The Shard's human survivors are duplicates of primal folks who were made at the same time the dimension itself was.

 

As for Nem, he has a big Shard base, and a definite presence there... But I'm not sure its ever detailed where his portal to the Rikti home world is/was. 

 

 

Edited November 19, 2020 by Coyotedancer

[Yomo Kimyata]

I will never forget the first time I discovered the Shadow Shard on Live.  I spent weeks in there.  I wish, how I wish, that there would be a Rularuu invasion again in dreary old Paragon City.

[Johnny]

22 hours ago, Vanden said:

The lore bible is pretty vague on how, exactly, this resulted in Rularuu being trapped in it, but the end result is Rularuu's power is greatly diminished and he's stuck there.

To offer an interpretation, this suggests that the plan to create a faux slice of Earth dimension worked. Through the sheer activity of Rularuu conceptualizing the slice and deciding that it should be real, he constructed his own prison.

For an equivalent argument, consider the Secret Wars series (Marvel Comics, 1980s). After Doctor Doom has successfully stolen the Beyonder's power, and killed all of the heroes that were allied against him, Klaw (being controlled by the essence of the Beyonder) described an imaginary scenario whereby the heroes actually survived. Though a nonsense imaginary story, Doom conceptualization immediately willed imagination into reality, retroactively enabling the heroes to be in a position to attack, mere moments later.

22 hours ago, Vanden said:

revealed that Rularuu was trapped in the Shard due to Mender Silos sabotaging the Midnight Squad's plan

As soon as time travellers are involved, the direct connection between cause and effect ceases to exist.

As an example of this phenomenon, I cite the series finale episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, All Good Things..., wherein Picard was responsible for creating a spatial phenomenon that manifested itself as a projection that increased in size, though backwards in time. Thus, back in the time of primordial Earth, it had grown large enough to prevent the formation of life on Earth. How was this phenomenon created? It is a paradox because the original cause ceased to exist due to the nature of the phenomenon's relationship to time.

[Vanden]

4 minutes ago, Johnny said:

To offer an interpretation, this suggests that the plan to create a faux slice of Earth dimension worked. Through the sheer activity of Rularuu conceptualizing the slice and deciding that it should be real, he constructed his own prison.

For an equivalent argument, consider the Secret Wars series (Marvel Comics, 1980s). After Doctor Doom has successfully stolen the Beyonder's power, and killed all of the heroes that were allied against him, Klaw (being controlled by the essence of the Beyonder) described an imaginary scenario whereby the heroes actually survived. Though a nonsense imaginary story, Doom conceptualization immediately willed imagination into reality, retroactively enabling the heroes to be in a position to attack, mere moments later.

I was thinking about more practical concerns, like, why did both the Shard and Earth still exist after the ritual went off? The whole reason Rularuu used a massive portion of his power to make the shard real was because it was too late to simply stop the ritual. Also, how did he actually end up in the Shadow Shard? He would've been on Primal Earth to conduct the ritual.

 

I guess the best explanation would be something like this: prior to gaining the power to simply jump dimensions at will, Rularuu could only travel between dimensions by locking onto duplicates of himself in other dimensions and essentially telefragging them, absorbing them and taking their place in the new dimension. Rularuu himself (and particularly clever duplicates of him, like Dream Doctor) has wards in place to prevent this from happening to him, so perhaps when he infused the shard with existence, he had to physically travel there, and by using his own power he extended the protection from being absorbed into the whole shard.

[Eva Destruction]

I like that it's vague.  Some things aren't meant for our puny mortal minds to comprehend, and that's okay.   It gives the zone a Lovecraftian kind of vibe.  A lot of the newer writing in the game had all the subtlety of a sack of bricks, (see: Dark Astoria) which would have made Rularuu into just another overpowered sack of hit points, if they'd expanded on the Shard lore.

 

 

[Vanden]

I don't really think much of writers intentionally being vague. It usually comes across as lazy, like they wanted to get the plot and characters from point A to point B, but couldn't be bothered to explain how that happened. And if the author doesn't care, why should I?

 

If there actually is an explanation, and the author just doesn't write it down, that's a little different, as long as there's a justification for it; for example, the story is written from the perspective of a character who never learns the answer and wouldn't care to find out.

Edited November 20, 2020 by Vanden

[Chaos String]

51 minutes ago, Eva Destruction said:

I like that it's vague.  Some things aren't meant for our puny mortal minds to comprehend, and that's okay.   It gives the zone a Lovecraftian kind of vibe.  A lot of the newer writing in the game had all the subtlety of a sack of bricks, (see: Dark Astoria) which would have made Rularuu into just another overpowered sack of hit points, if they'd expanded on the Shard lore.

 

 

I agree with you, inasmuch as the vagueness of the lore surrounding the Shadow Shard contributes to its mystery.  The fact that there's a lot we don't know about it makes it fertile ground for storytelling, too, though that's a double-edged sword.

 

Really, all you need to know is that the TFs are really long and mundane and involve a lot of jetpacking, the mobs don't care about softcap defense, and there are no rewards to speak of. 

 

That's what you NEED to know.

 

If you WANT to know more, reading the text of the exploration badges, overhearing bits of NPC dialog, paying actual attention to the missions and TFs go a long way.  I've spent a while doing these things, and I don't think the Shadow Shard is exactly the place where Rularuu is imprisoned.

 

It IS Rularuu.  Or what's left of him.

 

If, by some means, the various aspects of Rularuu's shattered mind were somehow reunited, the Shadow Shard would cease to exist, and Rularuu would devour our dimension.

 

Or, to put it another way, if, somehow, the Shadow Shard ceased to exist, the various aspects of Rularuu would be reunited, and he would devour our dimension.

 

Or, if you aren't too insistent on the rules of cause and effect, you might say that if, somehow, Rularuu were to devour our dimension, he would be made whole and the Shadow Shard would never have existed.

 

Someone should make a "RULARUU I HAVE COME TO BARGAIN" arc in AE.

[Vanden]

3 minutes ago, Chaos String said:

If you WANT to know more, reading the text of the exploration badges, overhearing bits of NPC dialog, paying actual attention to the missions and TFs go a long way.  I've spent a while doing these things, and I don't think the Shadow Shard is exactly the place where Rularuu is imprisoned.

I always found the Shard fascinating, and wanted to know as much as I could, but the stuff in-game leaves a whole lot to be desired. The descriptions on the exploration badges read more like it's just your character aimlessly wandering the Shard and gradually losing their mind, and the clues in the TFs just give some basic history on what Rularuu's aspects have been up to while they were in the shard, with no elaboration on their origins beyond they're "Rularuu." There's nothing in there about Rularuu dimension jumping across his duplicates, or the Midnight Squad creating the Shard.

[Chaos String]

1 minute ago, Vanden said:

I always found the Shard fascinating, and wanted to know as much as I could, but the stuff in-game leaves a whole lot to be desired. The descriptions on the exploration badges read more like it's just your character aimlessly wandering the Shard and gradually losing their mind, and the clues in the TFs just give some basic history on what Rularuu's aspects have been up to while they were in the shard, with no elaboration on their origins beyond they're "Rularuu." There's nothing in there about Rularuu dimension jumping across his duplicates, or the Midnight Squad creating the Shard.

Some of it is found in the Midnighters content and even in some Night Ward dialog if memory serves.  Still extremely vague, but as Eva mentioned above, this is highly Lovecraftian type storytelling.  Sometimes less is more.

 

By the way, have you seen the yellow sign?

[Johnny]

On 11/18/2020 at 9:24 PM, Vanden said:

They planned to trick Rularuu's ritual into absorbing this tiny layer of reality; it superficially resembled our dimension, but was essentially nothing. If Rularuu absorbed it, he would be absorbing nothingness itself and be destroyed. Rularuu, however, noticed the trickery, and so he infused this shadow shard with an enormous amount of his godlike power in order to make it a real, substantial dimension

 

19 hours ago, Vanden said:

The whole reason Rularuu used a massive portion of his power to make the shard real was because it was too late to simply stop the ritual. Also, how did he actually end up in the Shadow Shard?

 

Before proceeding, let me clarify between "Rularuu the Ravager" and "Soldiers of Rularuu" (per those links).

 

I believe these two observations of yours are key, with the reasonable interpretation that:

1- Rularuu the Ravager is the god-like being that consumes dimensions.

2- By infusing his being into the Shadow Shard (i.e., the slice of faux Earth dimension), this essentially populated the dimension with physical matter, the various Soldiers of Rularuu, and the Aspects of Rularuu (plural), not to be confused with the Aspect of Rularuu (singular).

3- And the purpose of the infusing was for Rularuu the Ravager to prevent its own destruction in nothingness.

 

I further speculate:

4- The Soldiers of Rularuu, being of the nature of Rularuu the Ravager, tend towards chaos, and their collective desire to consume the Earth dimension.

5- Through manipulations by the Circle of Thorns, some aspect of Rularuu the Ravager was re-awakened, in effect creating a lurking threat that the Ravager could one day be restored.

6- Various criminal organizations have sought to harness, or ally themselves with the awakened form of Rularuu the Ravager (i.e., Crey, Nemesis, and Malta).

7- And should Rularuu the Ravager ever succeed in restoring itself, this would involve reconstituting itself from all the Shadow Shard matter, per (2), plus any immigrants like Sara Moore and her people.

8- The inevitable consequence of Rularuu the Ravager restoring itself would be the annihilation of Earth dimension, though perhaps Praetorian Earth could go unnoticed.

 

Addtional comments:

• Skimming the wiki for Shadow Shard task force info and related articles, there's much explanation of what things are, but not what they represent, nor their meaningful relationships.
• For example, the task force introductions, especially for Sara Moore, read like fan fiction with an extraordinary amount of info dumping.
• Contrast this with Fallout: New Vegas (a game written within the same era as CoH), which has a fleshed out ecosystem of peoples and places to visit, not to mention individual backstories and points-of-view that provide immersion.
• Considering that humans began colonizing the Shadow Shard in the 1960's, I would have expected more business ventures, such as resource extraction, food harvesting, protection services, and human infrastructure to support all of that, essentially human townships, like mining towns, that sort of thing.

Edited November 20, 2020 by Johnny

[Vanden]

2 hours ago, Johnny said:

2- By infusing his being into the Shadow Shard (i.e., the slice of faux Earth dimension), this essentially populated the dimension with physical matter, the various Soldiers of Rularuu, and the Aspects of Rularuu (plural), not to be confused with the Aspect of Rularuu (singular).

Not according to the lore bible; Rularuu's infusion of the shadow shard only made it into a duplicate of what it had been shorn off from. The soldiers and aspects came afterwards, once Rularuu realized he had lost so much power that he was no longer nigh-omnipotent or nigh-omniscient. He needed an army for invasion, and logistical support to make it work, hence the soldiers and the aspects.

 

2 hours ago, Johnny said:

Considering that humans began colonizing the Shadow Shard in the 1960's, I would have expected more business ventures, such as resource extraction, food harvesting, protection services, and human infrastructure to support all of that, essentially human townships, like mining towns, that sort of thing.

I'm not sure what you mean here. According to the backstory, humans from the primal dimension only found the Shadow Shard shortly after the Rikti War (Nemesis possibly sooner, but he'd have kept it to himself if so). If you mean the humans that lived there to begin with, Lanaru's rebellion set them back to essentially tribal times.

 

18 hours ago, Chaos String said:

By the way, have you seen the yellow sign?

I'm afraid I don't know what you're referring to.

Edited November 20, 2020 by Vanden

[Eva Destruction]

17 hours ago, Vanden said:

I don't really think much of writers intentionally being vague. It usually comes across as lazy, like they wanted to get the plot and characters from point A to point B, but couldn't be bothered to explain how that happened. And if the author doesn't care, why should I?

 

If there actually is an explanation, and the author just doesn't write it down, that's a little different, as long as there's a justification for it; for example, the story is written from the perspective of a character who never learns the answer and wouldn't care to find out.

I would rather the writers be lazy than write a bunch of garbage, like the text of the Shard exploration badges or the Who Will Die crap.  If you can't make a zone seem sinister and alien without character hijacking, just stay out of the zone entirely.  If some guy like Darrin Wade can harness the power of Rularuu, then either Rularuu isn't as cool as we thought he was or once again Some Guy is way cooler than we are.

 

And the story is written from the perspective of a character who doesn't know the answer.   I't's us, we're that character, and we don't know.  There are very few people who do know, and they ain't talking; Dream Doctor is off doing mystic guy things and when he comes back he has more pressing matters to attend to, Mender Silos is a jerk and you shouldn't believe anything he says anyway, the other Midnighters involved in sealing Rularuu off are either dead or probably sworn to secrecy because they know there are people crazy enough to try to release Rularuu, the Shard natives would be mostly second- or third- generation (going by the timeline on Paragon Wiki, in which Rularuu was bound in the 60s, and assuming life expectancy in the Shadow Shard isn't very high) and have had their society disrupted on a mass scale at least twice and on a smaller scale constantly, so record-keeping isn't exactly  a priority and oral tradition has gotten muddled, and Faathim is Mysterious and Cryptic and wouldn't want us to know too much either, since he's already had primal Earthers try to bind him to harness the power of Rularuu so you can't blame him for being suspicious.  We have scientists and expeditions exploring the Shard and trying to learn about it, basically starting from scratch, so it makes sense that nobody knows much, even the people who care to find out.

[Vanden]

@Eva Destruction Well, if you'll recall, the thing that started that topic of conversation was the lore bible itself being vague. It's written in 3rd person omniscient view, and its whole purpose is to have all the backstory. If an answer to a lore question exists, it should be in the lore bible.

[Chaos String]

9 minutes ago, Eva Destruction said:

I would rather the writers be lazy than write a bunch of garbage, like the text of the Shard exploration badges or the Who Will Die crap.  If you can't make a zone seem sinister and alien without character hijacking, just stay out of the zone entirely.

I don't approve of character hijacking in MMO writing either, but those exploration badges don't ascribe anything to the player character apart from passing sensations.   I see it as the player vicariously experiencing fragments of Rularuu's emotions by going to the places where those bits of his psyche are located.

[Eva Destruction]

1 minute ago, Vanden said:

@Eva Destruction Well, if you'll recall, the thing that started that topic of conversation was the lore bible itself being vague. It's written in 3rd person omniscient view, and its whole purpose is to have all the backstory. If an answer to a lore question exists, it should be in the lore bible.

Except the later dev teams have admitted that the lore bible is optional, and if it's not actually in the game they're free to ignore it.  The Who Will Die and Dream Doctor's Personal Story content was written under that philosophy.  I'm not sure if the Midnighter Archivist "plaques" or Darrin Wade's arc were, but they don't contradict the lore bible anyway.

[Vanden]

1 minute ago, Eva Destruction said:

Except the later dev teams have admitted that the lore bible is optional, and if it's not actually in the game they're free to ignore it.  The Who Will Die and Dream Doctor's Personal Story content was written under that philosophy.  I'm not sure if the Midnighter Archivist "plaques" or Darrin Wade's arc were, but they don't contradict the lore bible anyway.

Hence this thread. What's still canon from the lore bible? Dream Doctor's letter in the Midnight Club makes it sound like the shaved-off dimension origin is still canon, but then we have Dream Doctor himself talking about just stabbing a dude.

[Eva Destruction]

2 minutes ago, Chaos String said:

I don't approve of character hijacking in MMO writing either, but those exploration badges don't ascribe anything to the player character apart from passing sensations.   I see it as the player vicariously experiencing fragments of Rularuu's emotions by going to the places where those bits of his psyche are located.

Quote

You look upon this pool of red fluid and your mind says "blood." But despite this another part of your mind says "drink." And you do. It tastes like the scent of green grass, of the metallic tang of an adrenaline rush, burnt rubber, your mother's blueberry pie, and on and on. You realize that it is not flavors the liquid is eliciting, but memories, and with each passing second they come on one after another until you become nauseous with the sensation overload. You spit the liquid from your mouth and vow never to taste it again. But...

Telling me my  mom made blueberry pie is ascribing quite a lot to the player character.  What if I'm a robot or a demon or a clone and never had a mom?  What if my mom was a superhero who was too busy fighting evil to bake pies?  What if my mom was brutally murdered in front of me and that's what started me on my path as a cold-blooded vigilante who wears a trenchcoat and hangs around in dark corners and talks like Christian Bale? 

[Chaos String]

2 minutes ago, Eva Destruction said:

Telling me my  mom made blueberry pie is ascribing quite a lot to the player character.  What if I'm a robot or a demon or a clone and never had a mom?  What if my mom was a superhero who was too busy fighting evil to bake pies?  What if my mom was brutally murdered in front of me and that's what started me on my path as a cold-blooded vigilante who wears a trenchcoat and hangs around in dark corners and talks like Christian Bale? 

Again, I see this as vicarious experience of Rularuu's consciousness and our mind's self-imposition of a lens or paradigm to make the sensations more or less comprehensible.  But I take your meaning that the text is off-putting inasmuch as not every human, near-human, or vaguely human-adjacent mind would impose a paradigm like blueberry pie in any case.

[Chaos String]

Given that in this thread alone, one poster said he thought that the text of the exploration badges was just the player wandering around going mad, and another poster saw it as character hijacking, I'm quite prepared to concede that this writing leaves much to be desired in conveying the true nature of the Shadow Shard.

 

But when I toured the shard and collected them, I felt quite moved by the idea that this isn't at all a place where a godlike being was imprisoned, but the shattered and scattered remnants of the being itself.  It was decidedly more surreal than anything else I'd seen in the game, but the intent of the writer seemed clear enough.

 

I may have been mistaken.

[Eva Destruction]

3 hours ago, Chaos String said:

But when I toured the shard and collected them, I felt quite moved by the idea that this isn't at all a place where a godlike being was imprisoned, but the shattered and scattered remnants of the being itself.  It was decidedly more surreal than anything else I'd seen in the game, but the intent of the writer seemed clear enough.

 

I may have been mistaken.

I mean, that's a possible interpretation and is definitely surreal and trippy.  But if that's the intent, the exploration badge text doesn't really convey it, IMO.  The overall impression I got from the badge text is "Rularuu is getting in your head and there's nothing you can do about it"  with a side order of "and this is what the inside of your head looks like."  It's lazy.  No, I am not going to drink the weird bloody water, that is a stupid thing to do.  The game mechanics don't support this godmoding either.

 

And, why does the godlike superbeing have to be psychic?  Is it just because so many defensive sets have a psi hole?  He EATS DIMENSIONS, come on, you can be a little more creative with his actual powers, no?  I realize the mechanics were somewhat limited when the Shadow Shard was first released, and the zones haven't been updated since, but still.