Will Hamidon Eat Rularuu?

[CoeruleumBlue]

To be honest, I'm kind of glad the finale to this game was cancelled, because having Rularuu eat the Battalion sounds kind of like a dumb ending, and having all the player characters ascend to the level of an infinite-dimensional god also seems like a dumb story. Honestly I just think Rularuu is kind of silly in general. It's Shuma-Gorath but it looks like a floating purple dude, and Shuma-Gorath is already silly but at least Shuma-Gorath looks like an actual eldritch abomination instead of a floating purple dude. Like everything in the game lore is super grounded in reality until you get to a floating purple dude who can snap and create and destroy an infinite number of universes. Like no, Marvel's worldbuilding is really silly, let's not import that here, but make it even sillier by turning it into a floating purple dude instead of a tentacle monster.

 

I heard that Praetorian Hamidon was almost going to become an Ascended if it merged with Emperor Cole and I think we should go with that. I read on the Wiki the only reason Emperor Cole even became Emperor Cole was partially because he had the favor of Praetorian Hamidon due to swearing to protect nature, and Emperor Cole already has two Well of the Furies powers, so let's just merge them and they can eat Rularuu and Battalion. Emperor Cole saves the day from Nemesis yet again, praise Emperor Cole, who is secretly the same as Hamidon because of the Well archetypes hijacking everyone's minds who has them or whatever.

 

Honestly Battalion doesn't seem too interesting either. Like literally it's just the Flood from Halo? How is that more interesting than the Rikti time travelling to another dimension, trying to evolve humans into aliens and devolving tons of them into monkeys, trying to kill the gods but becoming the new gods on the Rikti Earth, and then getting destroyed because magic doesn't come from the gods after all, and maybe all of them were secretly just genetically engineered humans who were a Hegelian hivemind all along? The biggest baddest threats need to be something other than some kind of corrupting pathogen that just assimilates random enemies and makes them into a corrupted version and a floating purple guy who lives on a floating rock island and destroys a gazillion universes by pointing his finger at them, so I would be happy if they all got eaten by Hamidon rather than everyone turning into purple infinite-dimensional gods that all shoot purple infinite-dimensional lasers out of their god-fingers at other people. Like the entire rest of the story has been stuff that's actually pretty grounded and nuanced like Mot being a feedback loop that destroys reality or Hamidon being genetic engineering to get rid of humanity or the Lost being like the children from Childhood's End who get assimilated into the Overmind, can we please not have it devolve into god-lasers at the end? That being said I don't want Hamidon to eat all of existence, just the god-lasers because that's so silly. Then maybe people can fight Mender Silos for secretly being Nemesis or something because Nemesis is actually interesting. Battalion could be interesting since it hasn't actually been fleshed out but the pictures I saw made them look super mundane, like you fight through all this actually serious stuff from Arthur C. Clarke and Olaf Stapledon and what have you just to get to the Big Bad and have them be the generic invading aliens Loki gets the Tesseract to beat from the original The Avengers movie. Let's please not. I am glad the story to this game got cancelled if people were just writing silly stuff just to write silly stuff, now that it's un-cancelled could we maybe write something better? 

 

So, will Hamidon eat Rularuu? 

[El D]

Number of issues with that premise for future content. First and most important is that the Homecoming devs have stated they are not bound by nor intend to continue the Lore AMA storyline ideas from Live. Second is that even if there was dev interest in those ideas, they'd also have to want to work on Incarnate stuff and - entirely understandably - they're focused on expanding the game in other ways instead. Thirdly, Praetorian Hamidon is effectively locked in Praetoria. He has no way to reach the Shadow Shard and even if it did, with the dearth of the Well's attention on Praetoria after Tyrant's defeat, it has no reason to back Prae. Hamidon if he tried to go up against Rularuu.

[keyguardactive]

I don't think "grounded" can be used to describe pretty much anything in this game. 

 

But I do think there's interesting stuff to do with Praetorian Hamidon, but I'd want it as a continuation of the First/Night Ward stories. What do Devouring Earth look like on another Earth? 

 

And I'm good with the Battalion being in, if only because they already get a mentioned by name a couple of times. What they are, and how they're implemented, can be whatever, but I would hate to have the plot thread dropped entirely. 

 

But I'm also excited to see where things go from here. I've enjoyed all the content the Homecoming Devs have added so far. 

 

 

[CoeruleumBlue]

1 minute ago, El D said:

Number of issues with that premise for future content. First and most important is that the Homecoming devs have stated they are not bound by nor intend to continue the Lore AMA storyline ideas from Live. Second is that even if there was dev interest in those ideas, they'd also have to want to work on Incarnate stuff and - entirely understandably - they're focused on expanding the game in other ways instead. Thirdly, Praetorian Hamidon is effectively locked in Praetoria. He has no way to reach the Shadow Shard and even if it did, with the dearth of the Well's attention on Praetoria after Tyrant's defeat, it has no reason to back Prae. Hamidon if he tried to go up against Rularuu.

 

Maybe Tyrant's consciousness and two Well powers got eaten by Praetorian Hamidon, which will give it the motivation to become Ascended, and then it can go to the Shadow Shard and eat it? It can also eat Battalion but I hope they make Battalion more interesting than the original design for Battalion. I also don't necessarily mind the idea that Battalion might feature assimilated or reflected or cloned enemies and/or friends in some way or prominently, it just needs to be more interesting than "Battalion is going to eat your soul-essence and turn you into a pale red version of yourself with spikes before fighting against Rularuu to consume the infinite dimensions! Which will win, purple cosmic laser blasts, or red cosmic laser blasts? Stay tuned!" I'm glad they're not obligated to continue the original story, and I know they aren't or I wouldn't have come up with the idea of Praetorian Hamidon Ascending and just eating all the Ascended monsters I think are stupid, but I still want to throw ideas out there.

 

And I also have no problem with the idea of characters getting ultimate power and just totally merging with some archetypal power, I just don't want to see it turn into the whole Marvel and DC cosmic laser blast fight thing, which the whole Rularuu thing is very much turning into. Rularuu also just looks like the Kings of Edom from the Champions Online game that the same people made but the Kings of Edom are more interesting. The floating purple guys are just their Avatars though, the Kings of Edom are not actually floating purple guys, and they actually kind of do something like what I think they want Battalion to do, in that there are basically dark versions of everyone and everything. The problem is they kind of sort of already did that with Praetoria, then they toned down Praetoria, then they made all the Primal Earth people look like scumbags with all the Vigilante morality missions so it kind of looks like Praetorians are nicer than Primal Earth people to me despite their morally questionable decisions at times. There's no "dark mirror" aspect to Battalion at all, it basically just seems like a generic Borg/Flood/etc. "you will be assimilated" thing. That was nice when Star Trek did it because they were opposing the Hegelian strand in science fiction that wants to see everything become a hivemind, but like, we already fought against that with Rikti and Rikti were more interesting, Rikti even look a lot like the Borg and the Thing and take way more serious inspiration from real science fiction.

 

I think probably one of the issues with the whole Rularuu and Battalion thing is it is trying to copy Qliphoth from Champions TTRPG and Champions Online, but like, that's actually a thing from Kabbalah, it's actually real occultism, ditto for Kings of Edom even if the game version isn't the actual Kings of Edom and there aren't even the same number of them. The Champions also end up looking like total scumbags because the Qliphoth realm is actually secretly exactly the same as the regular world, it's just like the shadow side, not a mirror universe like the Star Trek mirror universe or Superman Bizarro World. Also, those facts combined with the fact Champions games and comics also have an enemy group called Purple Gang used to make me wonder if the author was Jewish. Purple Gang isn't just a random color name for a gang like someone who didn't like Champions lore on the Internet once wrote, that's actually the real-life Jewish mafia, and I've seen that reference in other contexts as well. 

 

 

Even if Reddit feels kind of meh to me, I almost had to do a double-take on the comment that was like "I actually don't really like Marvel or DC, I feel like CoH does a better job of envisioning a world where super-stuff is as common as it is," when I saw that and that wasn't a username I ever posted with. A lot of the reason people play this game in general instead of that Marvel game is probably that people don't like Marvel's woldbuilding overall, in addition to people wanting to make their own characters instead of just being the Marvel characters. This game also just happens to be much more popular than the DC MMO game but that one is old now and also actually an MMO. I think CoX does a really good job being really grounded even if there are plenty of plot holes, things I would've done differently, etc. and then the whole finale with Battalion and Rularuu was going totally off the rails and turning it back into Marvel Cosmic Lasers.

 

I also do think Arachnos should be more prominent instead of Nemesis. I think Mender Silos should be fought since Nemesis literally killed an alternate world of dark-skinned people and funded Nazis and other stupid stuff, but like, Lord Recluse is supposed to have the mind of a god to match Statesman having the body of a god, Arachnos being a few people who mostly just cause minor mischief on some Caribbean islands and don't do much anything to move the plot forward (or backward since they're suppoesd to be villains) doesn't really stand up to that. Arachnos tech looks like it's almost the same level as Praetorian, they also literally have Seers, etc. and I tend to wonder if that comes from Tartarus, but apparently Tartarus can't actually do anything except rob some Level 50 banks in-between the Nazi splinter group doing it. Nemesis on the other hand is just an old German guy who used science to live a long time kind of like Crey or something. He has some interesting things but I get kind of bored with the idea that everything is or isn't a Nemesis plot. Like do people just like him because they want to have a German villain? But he doesn't make any sense as an archvillain and his robots and staves look so silly and are easily-beaten. (The fact they look stylistically the same as Ouroboros and the Menders is a nice touch though at least.) Crey also happens to kind of be more interesting in terms of European mad science villains anyway, since I see a lot of origin stories and characters involving Crey and not many involving Nemesis. Honestly Nemesis almost feels like a joke character to me with how much he's played up and how comical some of his stuff looks, but Nemesis can be kind of silly without being a joke if he isn't treated like the great archvillain and then not actually used for much anything. 

[lemming]

1 hour ago, CoeruleumBlue said:

I think probably one of the issues with the whole Rularuu and Battalion thing is it is trying to copy Qliphoth from Champions TTRPG and Champions Online, but like, that's actually a thing from Kabbalah, it's actually real occultism, ditto for Kings of Edom even if the game version isn't the actual Kings of Edom and there aren't even the same number of them. The Champions also end up looking like total scumbags because the Qliphoth realm is actually secretly exactly the same as the regular world, it's just like the shadow side, not a mirror universe like the Star Trek mirror universe or Superman Bizarro World. Also, those facts combined with the fact Champions games and comics also have an enemy group called Purple Gang used to make me wonder if the author was Jewish. Purple Gang isn't just a random color name for a gang like someone who didn't like Champions lore on the Internet once wrote, that's actually the real-life Jewish mafia, and I've seen that reference in other contexts as well.

Well yea, Purple Gang was in Detroit and Millennium City is rebuilt Detroit.  Which was why it was dug out since the original authors do a lot of history dives.

Kings of Edom were just vaguely based on Cthuhlu like stuff, though the authors there did a lot of different things as well.  (Plus iirc, different authors mixed stuff up a bit.   30 year memories, so not sure on recollection, and I haven't followed at all since Champions Online)

[Snarky]

Hami will eat Rularuu.  If they are prepared correctly.  

[Skyhawke]

What side dish does one serve with a Rularuu? Red or white wine? Dessert? So many questions...

[tidge]

8 hours ago, keyguardactive said:

I don't think "grounded" can be used to describe pretty much anything in this game. 

 

But I do think there's interesting stuff to do with Praetorian Hamidon, but I'd want it as a continuation of the First/Night Ward stories. What do Devouring Earth look like on another Earth?

 

I rather liked the idea of creating a gold-side Epic Archetype (a PEAT if you will) that was similar to thw two VEATs, where the paths ended with (essentially) a Seer, a Resistance boss, an IDF boss, a hybridized DE Soldier... and explain the hybrids as either a 'compromise' between Cole and Hamidon and/or a cruel experiment.

 

[Curveball]

I don't have a lot to say about this lore-wise, but I do want to say that to me Rularuu looks like a piece of Jack Kirby art brought to "life" and I don't really consider that a bad thing.

[mistagoat]

It's just a misunderstanding, they had this dusty book,

How to cook HAMIs (wipes away dust)

How to cook for HAMIs (wipes away more dust)

How to cook for forty HAMIs!

It's a buffet! (No Jello!)

[Vedic70]

Maybe alongside fava beans and a nice chianti

[TheZag]

Hamidom om nom nom

[Amp Up]

As I recall the creators of many comic book heroes including the all-American Superman were Jewish and heavily influenced by Jewish culture. Its pretty neat and lead to comic books becoming a melting pot of cultural influences. So if a game wants to go the same route Im ok with that. Now pass me some rularuu leg 🍗 

[golstat2003]

6 hours ago, Skyhawke said:

What side dish does one serve with a Rularuu? Red or white wine? Dessert? So many questions...

 

some fava beans and a nice Chianti . . . 

[BlackSpectre]

Rularuu calimari!!!! YUM! Tempura Hamidon!!! Even yummier!!!