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Home-> Empire of *Stars* - Ancient Aliens in Aranna

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Submitted by Tristan on Sat, 2021-02-06 18:11

bare_elf wrote:

Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna

En route to the town of Arhok for selection of a new Arch Mage, the Shadowjumper, sensing the staff's power, attacked and destroyed the caravan transporting it, and stole it for use on the Great Clock on Utrae. The Hero of Arhok had to fight past various armies of the Shadowjumper, including Zaurask, Hassat, undead, and enslaved Goblins. The Shadowjumper was defeated in the mechanism of the Great Clock, and the staff was secured once more. It was still undecided, however, who became the Arch Mage.

By this time, the staff had been updated. Its trident prongs had been shortened, and its energy field replaced with an orb suggestive of a star. Its combat upgrades were removed, in favor of enhancing the mental capacity of its user. It was also simpler to operate.

Dungeon Siege III
The staff was eventually locked away with Merik's corpse in the Heroes' Crypt, but was unearthed later.

Ah, err. We'd been putting the hours into the lore timeline on the wiki very recently, and are disabused of the idea that the Warding Staff is the Staff of Stars. It isn't that they are explicitly declared to be different; basically you hold to the notion that hoofprints mean horses, not zebras. The models of the staves, the times and places, and the nature of what they actually do in the lore are all different, so there is no good basis for saying it is the same staff moonlighting two jobs for two kingdoms.

Except one thing: A man using Merik's model is killed in the LoA opening cutscene. It is likely he is not Merik but the caravaner referenced by your first partymember Jondar, named Kale Fenster. But it looks like Merik.

Much to Sadowson's frustration (the guy doing the timeline), there are no official dates or timespans given in LoA for the Zaurask rebellion and the destruction of the utraeans' empire, nor the hero of Arhok's expedition. Like it's very purposefully vague. That could have narrowed the possibilities real quick. There is also a beta version of the LoA's in-game overhead map, which has Arhok being part of the Kingdom of Ehb. So Arhok might definitely not be in Ehb, since that idea was discarded before release. In any case, moving Merik's bones from that snowy canyon to the Heroes' Crypt sounds iffy.

...
What did I get out of this? I learned that the Utraean Peninsula map is set 100 years before the Ehb campaign! And I bet the reference in the Jherkal pamphlet is to the peninsula's HUB, which is in dimensional space.
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