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Posted

i mean, that is what the old-timers emphasize about micah and the mages! i'm not gonna go out on a limb and say no one from the early days credits the mages with exile being human-habitable, but nothing about the tower of magi or any of the other mages' abodes or bodies of work screams "agricultural engineering".

except for the, like, 25 different people over the course of the series who talk about how the mages were the ones who developed the fast-growing, little-dying strains of mushrooms the Avernites farm, and the handful of people who talk about their role in having functional cavewood trees. That number might not even be an exaggeration given all the blight talk in A6. The reason there are not random details in the ToM or elsewhere about that is that basically 98% of E1's exposition was presented through keyword-based dialogue, and about 96% of E2's, and Jeff doesn't add much in the way of random area descriptions when he does remakes. Also because of the fact that they did this stuff 30-ish years before E1. It's old news, it happened before the vast majority of living denizens of Exile were exiled, including your own characters who aren't in a line of work it's relevant to anyway... AND there are big current problems that are obviously relevant to your characters. Why the heck would we expect more exposition about botany than all of the above-mentioned comments?

 

the closest any of them get to obvious magical research into apparently mundane things is erika, and i think if we can agree on nothing else it should be that if anyone's lying about their contribution to exile and getting away with it because they're powerful and deranged, it's probably her.

...no, I don't think we can agree with that. Since Erika never says anything that is indisputably a lie (and neither do most other characters) I assume that is a character-based conclusion... and then I have to say it makes no sense. Solberg, Patrick, Micah, and others perform lots of character assassination on Erika. They talk a little about what she did for the people, and then a lot about everything that's wrong with her. In X1, the ToM folks, with all the problems going on, say that it almost makes them wish for her return, but not quite! Yet, despite all this dumping on Erika in X1 and X2, they never say anything in the vein of her being a liar. They say she's bitter and bent on revenge. Erika herself talks about people being ungrateful, but since she undisputedly did a lot for Exile and then was banished, I think that's understandable. I dunno, I guess you could extrapolate to "she's a pompous liar" but I just don't see the evidence for it in the games. You could just as well extrapolate to "she has an overblown sense of justice and a sciencelike devotion to the truth."

 

the long and short of it for me has always been that the party is roughly as capable of surviving in the vahnatai lands, and in their unreclaimed outlands, as they are in exile. erika or the triad sure musta been prescient to fill the dark waters with luminous and edible fungi, eh?

Dark Waters has pretty scarce food (especially in the older versions) despite not having had any real humanoid settlements to use up its food, in hundreds of years... and what scarce food there is is not in places where it would be accessible to most people, thanks to the monsters. In Vahnatai lands, um, the only source of food are the Vahnatai themselves, so I don't even know what you're suggesting there. And the Vahnatai, by the way, talk in many places about how the only way they are able to survive effectively in the caves is... drum roll please... because of their magic!

 

(The glowing fungi is more of an open question since humans contradict each other on what they did there. However, the game does have descriptions that talk about the glowing fungi being somehow different in Vahnatai lands and outlands. That leads me to suspect that the Vahnatai originated it, but the original ToM folks (including Erika) may have modified it in some way.)

Posted

There are garden research areas in the Tower of Magi in A:EFTP and A:CS, in the center north that you have to pass through to get to the center of the tower. In A4 they are funding an agricultural research station near the remains of the tower.

Just to fill this out slightly:

You enter the Tower of Magi gardens. These plants are here for far more than just decoration. Plants are magically altered here, to create hybrids useful in the harsh, dark environment of Avernum.

 

Many of the strange plants which sustain life in Avernum were created here, such as the fungal trees. And the most useful strains of edible mushroom. And the stringy lichen used to create cloth and rope.

 

If the Tower of Magi was nothing more than this room, its value to Avernum would still be incalculable.

It's pretty clear the mages do work on plants a lot. What exactly they created and what exactly was there before may be a little open for discussion, but whether the mages do a bunch of plant stuff isn't.

Posted

...no, I don't think we can agree with that. Since Erika never says anything that is indisputably a lie (and neither do most other characters) I assume that is a character-based conclusion... and then I have to say it makes no sense. Solberg, Patrick, Micah, and others perform lots of character assassination on Erika. They talk a little about what she did for the people, and then a lot about everything that's wrong with her. In X1, the ToM folks, with all the problems going on, say that it almost makes them wish for her return, but not quite! Yet, despite all this dumping on Erika in X1 and X2, they never say anything in the vein of her being a liar. They say she's bitter and bent on revenge. Erika herself talks about people being ungrateful, but since she undisputedly did a lot for Exile and then was banished, I think that's understandable. I dunno, I guess you could extrapolate to "she's a pompous liar" but I just don't see the evidence for it in the games. You could just as well extrapolate to "she has an overblown sense of justice and a sciencelike devotion to the truth."

 

i coulda sworn one of the other mages at some point, maybe in the ToM in Exile 1, says that Erika claims to have created the glowing fungus but she actually only modified it to glow brighter and grow in more places. but maybe i dreamed that

Posted

if i had to headcanon something up to explain the discrepancy you're pointing to, it'd be cultural. humans are still, after generations in exile, pretty squeamish about eating a lot of meat sources that don't seem to be poisonous or vile. humes and nephs also use weapons which are objectively worse for the conditions in exile - swords and bows, not exactly great for a dark and twisty place with little metal.

I'm not sure. At least in X1 they make a big deal out of lack of metal, but Blosk is a giant mining operation and Fort Draco is a giant smelting operation. What they lack more is good hardwood instead of lousy cavewood. I'd chalk it up to not having mining and production up to the task of outfitting everyone who needs outfitting because they're just getting started, but X1 actually isn't the rough beginnings of Avernum. So I don't know.

 

incidentally, it'd be worth thinking about that a common strategy for cold-blooded animals without easy access to consistent temperature conditions within their comfort range is eating more...

I don't think Sliths are cold-blooded, just more cold-intolerant. They're also not native. And reptiles generally eat less, but it's because they're exothermic, so again, who knows. Jeff is not a biologist.

 

Also, i think i was unclear - i didn't mean they sent things down to exile to be killed by the exiles, i meant they sent things down there as a way of leaving them tantamount to killed (much like the exiles themselves), presumably in the hope the caves themselves would kill them. or else the other things they sent down there would. i expect it's not a humanitarian thing but a cost/effort thing.

Sure. It just seems strange that rounding people up and teleporting them en masse is somehow cheaper than execution. Swords and axes are pretty cheap, reusable, and final. Fireballs, too. Why go to the trouble of banishment if not for mercy or the appearance thereof?

 

undead don't breed and hence don't really count, but isn't it interesting that there are no new forms of undead in valorim?

The undead encountered are almost all human. The ones who maybe aren't are the Ancient Crypt near Formello, which is unclear in origin, and the vahnatai crypts, which also have hraithes and vahnavoi.

 

—Alorael, who is fairly sure that Erika modifying the fungus is a bit of forum fanon to reconcile the differing accounts.

Posted
Why go to the trouble of banishment if not for mercy or the appearance thereof?

 

Probably morale. What's worse, "Off with your head", or "Have fun spending the rest of your miserable live choking down nasty mushrooms in a cave, living in constant fear of being eaten by whatever is down there".

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