Chương 119: 4.9 Bela Lugosi's Dead - Bauhaus (9:36)

Malv0lio (Primary) Man, Zeke, I've got so many questions and thoughts about your class and music now. There's a ton of experiments that I'm thinking you can do to tell if different genres of music will create different illusions or thoughts or reactions for your audience. Is your music about intent? And if so, is it your intent or the artist's intent? By that, I mean do people react to what you believe the song represents or what the original artist built into the song?

There's soooo many questions, but I should give you the pdf I've been working on before we get to anything else. Some of the people here have been complaining that I haven't been doing my Primary duties. You are about to head to Emberveil and I should be doing what Null did, which is to tell you what to look out for and what to expect from the setting. Well… here it is. You can grab the pdf <HERE> when you have the chance.

Side Note: I want to thank everyone who messaged me suggestions about Emberveil and where Zeke should be focusing his efforts. You all know who you are. I'm not going to give a big Oscar speech where I thank everyone and their mothers. Just know that you all helped out in a big way. Also, Zeke, this is NOT meant to be an exhaustive list of everything in the setting. It's just a rundown on the factions, quests, and story that I think you should be aware of.

EMBERVEIL AND YOU - BEING A LIST OF THINGS TO DO AND NOT DO IN THE BEST GAME IN THE VERSE. By: Malv0lio (and others) Let me first congratulate you on your decision to head off to Emberveil. The game is fucking awesome and you should feel excited about the fact that your story is going to be dealing with magic, ancient conspiracies, supernatural monsters, and the breaking of reality instead of having to spend another month or two staring at the dust and decay of Frontiers.

When I talk to non-forum people about Emberveil and tell them it's my favorite video game, I always run into the same problem. They all want me to compare it to other games so they know whether they should play it or not. People love doing that whole "if you like Call of Duty, you'll love Battlefield," type of thing, but that's a little difficult to do with Emberveil. Both Battlefield and CoD are the same genre, they serve the same audience, and they give the same experience.

Emberveil is harder to pin down because it's as if Severance Systems smashed a bunch of different genres together and it somehow came out as something that worked instead of a disgusting mess. If pressed, I would say that Emberveil is a weird hodgepodge of Disco Elysium, Fallout: New Vegas, Control, Dishonored, Bloodborne, and that book House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Except none of those are perfect comparisons because they capture only a very small section of what makes Emberveil so awesome.

The Disco Elysium comparison comes primarily from the fact that the game is obsessed with investigations, conversations, and a sheer number of bizarre people that you'll meet.

What I most love about Emberveil is that a gaming session could see you decide to start one side quest - expecting to head into a hotel and speak with a bellhop - and it turns into this winding, twisty scenario where you investigate the death of a mayor, a haunted elevator, and a woman who insists that the moon has been following her for the past year. That is not a joke and that is not hyperbole. It's a legit quest in Emberveil.

It's also one of the quests that I'd suggest you stay away from because my description of it sounds a lot more interesting than it ends up becoming. It's one of the rare missteps from Severance. Oh, also, you should definitely pick up Investigation as a skill if you're heading into Emberveil. It is one of the most useful and OP skills that you can get for the setting, and if you're thinking about training up your skills by reading a bunch of books you should definitely get some murder mystery stuff to help out.

By prioritizing Investigation, you'll be setting yourself up for success because the setting rewards you for being curious and noticing things that everyone else overlooks. Some of the best quests in Emberveil aren't marked on the map; you just stumble into them because your Investigation skill (or History or Puzzle Intuition) pings you and you veer off to check out the weirdness around the next corner. Back to Disco Elysium, Emberveil also doesn't take itself as seriously as maybe the setting suggests.

With Disco Elysium, you're investigating a murder and you meet abandoned people and lives that are complete shit… but at the same time your character gets drunk and sings the Smallest Church in Saint Saens. An actual song by an actual band called Sea Power, but Harry sings it better. Emberveil can be a horrifying setting. I'm not going to tell you that it's nothing like Frontiers. All the Fracture-verse games have at least a bit of maudlin about them.

If you've got a high enough investigation skill, your character does eventually uncover some truly heinous shit. But the game is also filled with strange people, absurd situations, and moments that get you to laugh because it's either laugh or sit there and think about the implications of what you just witnessed. The balance is important because Emberveil can get dark.

There are vampires harvesting victims, people being experimented on, magical creatures forced into fighting pits, corpses turned into batteries, and entire sections of reality that basically don't work anymore. The game knows that if you had to sit and emotionally process every horrible thing you come across, you'd probably lose your mind before the halfway point, so it inserts enough weirdness and humor into the setting to counter some of the disturbing aspects.

Now, how can it be Disco Elysium AND Fallout: New Vegas? Well, that's because Emberveil is ALL about competing factions. Factions have always been a hallmark of the Fallout games, and I think New Vegas was the one where they perfected it. You've got Caesar's Legion, the NCR, Mr. House, the Boomers, the Fiends, the Great Khans, the Powder Gangers, the White Glove Society, and a dozen other groups that all have their own agendas, histories, and reasons for doing what they're doing.

Some of them are obviously horrid - I'm looking at you White Glove Society with your cannibalism and aristocratic undertones - but even then, they're usually very interesting. Caesar's Legion is a great example of how fascinating the factions are because I absolutely hate them. I'm always killing them in every playthrough I run because they are slaver assholes. But at the same time, Caesar has got to be my favorite character in all the Fallout games.

The man is so fascinating and the game is entirely willing to show you why someone in a post-apocalyptic society would join them (no bandits in Caesar's Legion territory) rather than just reduce the whole faction to a cardboard cutout of villainy. Emberveil works the same way. There are a ton of factions and they all have valid reasons for existing.

You've got the Parliament, the Open Hand, the vampires, the Ossuary, the Gilded Menagerie, the Houseborn, religious groups, government agencies, and a ton of smaller factions that you'll encounter throughout the entirety of the game. The important thing is that they are all unique. They aren't just parroting the same ideology, they genuinely disagree with each other about how the world should exist now that magic is coming back.

The Parliament wants regulation, the Open Hand wants democratization, the Department of Continuity wants to preserve the appearance of normalcy, and the vampires are absolutely batshit insane and just want blood. Okay… that last group might not be anything more than a cardboard cutout. I actually screwed myself with my own sentence structure there. But one bad faction out of all of them is still pretty good. What makes Emberveil stand out in the Fracture-verse is that none of the factions are entirely wrong.

If you look at Frontiers and the factions there, you'd be excused if you hated all of them. The Shard Choir is nuts, as are the Black Teeth, and so too, to a slightly lesser degree, are the Pale Regiment. They're all insane and the game is mostly about choosing the lesser of a bunch of evils. But with Emberveil, you don't do that. Each faction has a believable reason for why they are the best for Emberveil. The Parliament has a legit reason to be terrified of unregulated magic.

The Open Hand is correct that hiding magical knowledge from ordinary people is probably impossible and would do more harm than good. The Department of Continuity has a point when it argues that civilization and society depends on people believing the world is predictable. And obviously every teenage girl playing Emberveil is going to be obsessed with the vampires because they are going to think of them as the Twilight vampires or the True Blood Vampires.

By the way Zeke, I would take it as a personal favor if you murk every vampire you come across. Creepy blood sucking bastards. Now, Control. How is Emberveil like a game that was mostly ignored by most of the gaming community? Well, that's actually one of the easiest comparisons because The Hearth - one of the absolute best things Severance Systems ever gave us - was the precursor to The Oldest House in Control.

Control's Oldest House is like The Hearth in that it's a building where the architecture doesn't behave properly. Corridors shift, rooms change, doors don't lead where they're expected to, and the building seems to have both a consciousness and a purpose. The Hearth is similar in that it has its own set rules. It's not just a weird building, it's something that existed throughout human history, appearing under different names and in different cultures thousands of years apart.

I'm actually getting a little off-topic because The Hearth actually fits a later example better. So let's get back to Control and I'll say that it's a game about weird magical events happening in a modern world… just like Emberveil. You've got urban legends and impossible events and dangerous situations all juxtaposed against the normality of life in a brutalist architecture government building. That fits Emberveil to a T.

The whole game is about magic leaking back into the world, causing crazy events that have people and societies scrambling to study it. And when they are studying it, things go horribly awry. With Control you get AWEs (Altered World Events.) With Emberveil, they don't have a name for those kinds of events other than "everything is fucked up now… and dangerous to boot." The Dishonored and Bloodborne correlations are entirely due to the aesthetic and atmosphere of the game.

I already told you that people often get the timeframe of Emberveil wrong. The game is technically set in the modern day, but there's a bunch about it that doesn't feel very modern. There are still cars, electricity, government offices, computers, hospitals, apartments, and all the other things expected from the modern day.

But at the same time, you can wander the city and dip into an alley and find a vampire performing an ancient blood ritual, or you can accidentally find yourself into a ruined mansion, or encounter a monster from the nineteenth century, or discover a secret society that has been operating in the city for hundreds of years. That's where the Dishonored comparison really works for me.

Dishonored creates this strange collision between recognizable civilization and a much older, much dirtier, much more occult hidden world underneath. Emberveil does the same thing, except that collision takes place with the backdrop of the modern day. Bloodborne has you getting the sense that the supernatural world is older and stranger than your character understands, and the further you investigate, the more you realize that the things you've been calling "monsters" are part of a larger world.

The difference is that Emberveil doesn't always lean into the Lovecraftian horror that Bloodborne is known for. Sometimes the monster really is just a monster, sometimes the vampire really does just want to drink your blood, and sometimes the weird guy living in the basement is just a weird guy living in the basement. The game is willing to let the supernatural be weird and mysterious without turning everything into the act of incomprehensible gods.

Now, here's where I might lose you because maybe you haven't read House of Leaves by Danielewski, but it's my favorite comparison because it's got something that none of the other games I've played really do. House of Leaves is, among other things, a story about a house that refuses to obey the rules of physical space. The Hearth is Emberveil's version of that. I said I'd get back to The Hearth and here we are. Before we start, let me tell you that The Hearth is the best thing that Severance Systems ever created.

It's a building… but it's also so much more. Nobody knows who built the original building. It appears in paintings, carvings, journals, maps, and oral histories that are separated by centuries or even millenia, yet the descriptions are remarkably consistent. It has been, at different points throughout history, a palace, a merchant's house, a monastery, an orphanage, a Viking Hall, a colonial estate, a sanctuary, a church, and dozens of other buildings.

Not only does The Hearth change shape based on where and when it shows up, but there is even evidence that The Hearth is a sentient thing. It can't be mapped, its hallways change lengths, staircases lead to different floors, rooms disappear or sometimes they relocate themselves. There are times where a bedroom has a window overlooking the ocean despite The Hearth being hundreds of miles inland. There are times when a closet opens up into a forest that shouldn't exist.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg my friend. We haven't even touched on The Hearth's relationship with other people yet. Player Characters have a unique relationship with The Hearth. A PC can influence the building slightly by manipulating some of its inner workings and eventually exercising a modicum of control over its architecture. But The Hearth isn't some obedient magical mansion. It's alive and not always appreciative of someone telling it what to do.

That last part is important because The Hearth can and absolutely does fuck with people. It's why I don't think you should search it out, despite it being my favorite thing in the setting. Someone could enter The Hearth and think it's nothing but a normal house, and then they walk through a door and end up coming out halfway across the world. Or they can wander through the hallways for an hour and when they finally leave the building they find they've been gone for three years.

The best thing about Emberveil is that The Hearth isn't treated as a simple gimmick. In most games, the developers would just give you a home base which turns into a glorified storage locker where players dump their junk, upgrade their weapons, and occasionally speak with their companions. Not so with The Hearth.

There was one game where I was off finishing a bunch of quests and when I got back to The Hearth I found out that my bedroom had disappeared and Agent Whitestone - an NPC that you can hire in the early game - had been missing for three days. It was an entire extra quest that I could choose to complete or not. That's Emberveil in a nutshell.

It's a modern-day fantasy game where the world is functioning well enough to convince everyone that civilization hasn't collapsed, while underneath the surface all the old rules are changing. And the best part is that nobody actually knows the why of everything going to shit. The governments don't know. The scientists don't know. The conspiracy theorists don't know. The magic users don't know. Even most of the people who'd been studying the supernatural for centuries don't know.

You, the player, eventually get to piece it all together. MAJOR FACTION As I said before, Emberveil is all about the factions. A major plot point in the game is how a bunch of the different factions in the world are adapting to suddenly having magic, and the Player Character gets a ton of opportunities to work with/against those factions. Since factions are important, I'm going to give you a basic rundown on the ones you can expect to deal with.

The first one you should be on the lookout for - and the one most hated by the playerbase - is The Parliament. They are a group of old nobles who survived the Fracture and managed to preserve their wealth, political connections, and social influence in the new world. BUT, they view magic as a major destabilizing force in Emberveil and are doing their best to either control it or keep it out of the hands of others.

There are several different groups in The Parliament that the player can work with, and each of those groups has different views on what is best for magic. For the most part, you can see them as old aristocratic families who don't like magic because it threatens their way of life.

The nicest way to put it is they want to regulate magic, understand the dangers it represents, ensure licensing for magical practitioners, restrict magical research, and place the supernatural under government authority (which they control.) The major criticism of the Parliament is that they are burying their heads in the sand. They knew how power used to work back in the old world, but now that magic exists they are against it.

They see it as something that could disrupt their control and, for the most part, The Parliament just want it to go away. There are a few members who want to control magic, or at least have people who use magic beholden to them. Now, I'm going to piss off a majority of the forum when I say this… The Parliament aren't entirely the bad guys here. In Emberveil there are a bunch of magical disasters, uncontrolled creatures, and inexperienced people who are using magic to accidentally kill everything around them.

The Parliament points to all that as evidence that magical knowledge is dangerous and needs to be restricted. On that point I agree with them. But they would be more understandable if they simply wanted to license magic and make sure everyone was playing by the same rules. They aren't. The problem with The Parliament is they see the return of magic as a way to restore the old aristocratic order, making them the faction that is most interested in control. Think of them like a dickish illuminati.

If they have magic that's good. If other people have magic, that's bad. And if the unwashed poor have magic, that's the absolute worst because the next thing you know they'll be demanding things like food and water and holidays off. To show how despicable The Parliament is, there's a quest where a member is trying to create a rune collar to act as a leash for his guards because he wants those guards to have magic to counter all the poor… but he doesn't want his guards to get any ideas.

Basically, they're the new slave masters who want to control everything. The antithesis to The Parliament are a group called The Open Hand. They're a grassroots organization of volunteer mages, teachers, academics, activists, and ordinary people who believe magical knowledge should belong to everyone rather than simply be controlled by the government, the wealthy, or secret society. They're trying to democratize magic, meaning they're pretty hippy-dippy peace and love and understanding.

But that also makes the chaotic and anarchic and, I for one, believe that society needs some rules. The Open Hand focuses on basic magical safety, they help communities deal with supernatural incidents, and they distribute magical information wherever and whenever they can. At the same time, they're pretty disorganized. They're mostly a collective of people instead of a large organization, which makes them incredibly reckless.

You can look at them as arms dealers, handing out nukes to anyone who wants it, and then they act all shocked-pikachu whenever the neighborhood blows up. The next faction to be on the lookout for might not even be a problem, depending on when you show up in Emberveil. If you end up there at the start of the game (about three years after the Fracture) then they would be around. If you're there after the canonical ending, they probably won't be. That faction is the Department of Continuity.

It's a "secret" government organization whose sole purpose is to maintain the illusion that the world is normal. They try to suppress supernatural incidents, alter records, remove magical evidence from public circulation, and quietly relocate people who've encountered things that the government doesn't want anyone to know is happening. They are basically the Men in Black. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Their whole philosophy is one that I can sort of understand, in that they believe society only works when people believe that things are predictable. By that I mean that if suddenly millions of people realize that buildings can come alive, dead people can return, and the laws of physics stop working, then society would collapse and everything would turn into chaos.

The reason that I say you might not need to deal with them is because, if everything from the games has already happened, there's no real way for the Department of Continuity to actually have a job anymore. Everyone realizes that magic is real, so having a bunch of people in black suits and sunglasses coming around and saying "no, you didn't see what you thought you saw," gets ridiculous.

It's actually a really interesting few quests at the end of the game where the Department needs to figure out what they stand for once their primary purpose has been made moot. Do they join up with The Parliament who is trying to regulate everything? Do they try to help out the Open Hand by ensuring everyone who has magic is using it safely? Frankly, we're not going to know until you give us a little bit more information on when you end up in Emberveil. Next are the Twilight fans: the Veiled Court.

It's a bunch of vampires who are, frankly, just complete assholes in Emberveil. In most games that have Vampires, they are shown as aristocratic nobility who have been around for ages and they've got wealth and power and large mansions. Not so with the Veiled Court. These guys are posers. Think about it.

Magic had just started leaking into the world, so the people who learned how to turn themselves into vampires (they aren't really vampires, just the closest that people can get to it) are only going to have three years of experience on everyone. You don't have ancient patriarchs who are governing the Vampire bloodlines. You just have a bunch of cosplayers who are pretending to be ancient patriarchs. It's like accidentally stumbling into an Anne Rice convention.

Vampires weren't born as vampires and they weren't turned in the way that media tells you people can be turned. Vampires are actually just blood-magic users who are capable of manipulating living blood and turning themselves into blood mist. They abduct people who can use magic and then harvest their blood, using the magical energy contained within it to strengthen themselves. Honestly, the less said about them the better. I loathe the Veiled Court. A more pretentious group of people you'll never find.

You've also got the Ossuary which is… dangerous. The Veiled Court is dangerous in the way that a bunch of cosplayers getting really into their costumes can be dangerous. Have you ever seen the movie The Wild Hunt? Such a good movie. It's about a bunch of LARPers in Canada and… it gets weird. I'm not going to ruin it for you. I'm just going to say that you should watch it. The Ossuary is a group of people who are NOT LARPing.

They're a loose organization of necromancers, occult researchers, and scientists who are investigating the magical properties of dead flesh. They've discovered that magical creatures and mages retain mana in their bodies after death, particularly in their bones and organs, and they're trying to turn that discovery into new forms of magical technology. I think both Null and I have told you about magic, and how everyone has mana in their bodies but for humans it's a very limited amount of mana.

It's barely enough to throw out a single spell. Well… what happens if you start chugging down the bonemeal of fairies? What happens if you start grafting the organs of magical creatures into your body? The most infamous member of the Ossuary is Alan Hush and he lives in the Godsbone Reef. I'm not going to go too in-depth about him because I'm sure that one of your next Primaries is going to send you after the psycho.

I will say that, if I'm your Proctor during that, I would argue that you should stay the hell away from him. Alan Hush is obsessed with the idea that magical creatures and humans can be physically combined. He lives inside a dead whale, has a bunch of dead spellcasters littered around his workshop, and is just completely batshit insane. I'm not saying that he's more dangerous than the Eaters or the Reclaimer or Corva or all the other people that you've fought. But he's more dangerous than all of those people. Yes.

I actually am saying it. The guy is crazy-town banana pants and you should have nothing to do with him. Next is the House of Saint Pariso. This one I'm going to be a little careful with because there is a large chunk of the forum who would push you at them as soon as you get to Emberveil. As you are well-aware, there are several different mysteries scattered through the Fracture-verse that the forum has yet to solve. The House of Saint Pariso is one such mystery.

It's a religious organization that predates the Fracture. They were just like any other religious organization in the world, except slightly more apocalypse focused. When the Fracture hit, a lot of their oldest texts suddenly became disturbingly relevant. Its theologians believe that magic existed in the world before (it did) and that humanity used to have a ton of magical users (it did) and that the return of magic was simply ONE of the many signs that the apocalypse was at hand.

Now, most people would say getting two out of three correct is pretty good for a religion focused on texts written several thousand years ago. Except… the theologians also point to alien invasion, biological plague, and machine intelligence as the other signs that the apocalypse will happen. Can you think of anything in the Fracture-verse that correlates with an alien invasion? Or machines suddenly causing a Fracture? Or a biological plague that changes shit?

That's right, The House of Saint Pariso is, possibly, aware of the other Fractures happening in the Fracture-verse. But how can they be? How can people in Emberveil know about the Rift Scar? How can they know about Null Protocol? It's one of the most enduring mysteries from Emberveil because, try as everyone might, no one can find any real answers from them. I would actually suggest that you delve into that mystery.

Unlike the Ossuary, the House of Saint Pariso isn't completely insane and they won't murder you "for science." The worst you'll have to deal with are people really invested in their religion, and maybe someone calling you a heathen. Oh, now that I think about it, if you do visit them you probably shouldn't bring up the fact that you killed the Second Fracture with a guitar solo. I'm not sure how they would react to that. The next two groups aren't really factions per se.

They're more just groups of individuals that you should be on the lookout for. And if you listen to anything I tell you, listen to this: DO NOT MESS WITH EITHER GROUP. I'm talking about The Houseborn and The Living Stories. They are dangerous and Crush is going to try and get you to chase after them, but you kindly and vigorously tell him to fuck off. The Houseborn are creatures who originated in The Hearth. Or they were just creatures fundamentally altered by it. It's sort of unknown.

Some of them look like monsters, some look like humans, some look like normal animals, and some are so strange they don't fit into any biological classification at all. The two that the player character first meets when they get to The Hearth are Petey and Gardener Jane: two ridiculous names for two ridiculously OP creatures. Petey is a black cat that wanders around The Hearth and can speak with you. It's kind of like that cat from Sabrina the Teenage Witch, except more murderous and more educated.

And then Gardener Jane is… I don't really know how to describe her. If pressed, I would say that she is a Leshen - like from The Witcher or Polish folklore. She's this woodland creature that has a garden of her own and lives in The Hearth and mostly ignores you. That's a good thing because she is ridiculously dangerous. There have been people who have tried to kill her in Emberveil and it rarely ever works out well. Occasionally people run a massacre playthrough where they try and kill everything in the games.

It's incredibly difficult to do because a lot of the Houseborn and Living Stories have to be hunted down and tracked and it can be a time consuming process. Whenever people are doing the massacre playthrough, they always get hung up on Gardener Jane because she never leaves her greenhouse in The Hearth and she disappears in the foliage and completely wrecks people. Since I warned you against trying to take over The Hearth, I will say that you probably won't run into too many Houseborn.

They mostly stay around The Hearth. Mostly. The next group I'd warn you about - and insist that you stay away from - are the Living Stories. They're the game's most important supernatural threats because they demonstrate that magic in Emberveil is completely unknown. Before the Fracture, they were urban legends, campfire stories, local superstitions, and childhood warnings.

Interesting note here, and one that I got from a college class about Japanese monsters, folklore is often meant to be used as a cautionary tale for children. At least, that's one aspect of it. Let's talk about the Kappa and Tengu - and I apologize that I'm going off on a tangent here, but I'm absolutely fascinated by them and there's rarely a chance to actually talk about Japanese folklore. Kappa are Japanese monsters that look like frogs and they've got a divot in their head that holds a bunch of water.

They often hang out around streams and ponds and running bodies of water, and will try to play with children and often trick them into the ponds to drown. Now, why do I bring them up and how do they act as a cautionary tale? Well, pretend that you're a Japanese parent who is talking to your kid. You don't want them hanging out near a pond by themselves because children can do stupid things like accidentally fall in the water and drown.

You know your kid isn't going to listen when you say "don't play by the water by yourself, because you'll fall in and drown and I'll be sad." So you invent a weird frog monster that tricks kids and drags them them into the water. It's the same thing with Tengu. They are bird creatures that live in the mountains and waylay travelers. Obviously we all know that Tengu aren't real. But you know what is real? Bandits who hang out on mountains and waylay travelers.

So you're going to invent a story about weird bird demons that practice martial arts and cut up weary travelers and live out in the mountains, because that sounds so much better than "Ricky is up there with a gang and he kills a bunch of people but he's a normal dood." That's what the Living Stories are. They were often cautionary tales. Don't go out into the woods at night, you'll get lost. Don't swim near this lake because there are crocodiles that will snatch you up.

Don't go to this section of the town because there are a bunch of dangerous gangs. That all turned into "don't go to these places because there are dangerous creatures around." And when magic returned, it glommed onto all those urban legends. Those stories gained enough supernatural weight to become real creatures who were shaped by the stories people told about them. What that means for you, is that the Living Stories might not be able to be killed by simply punching them.

More often than not, in the games you had to understand the actual urban legend, discover what people believed about it, and then determine which parts of that belief became reality. A Living Story might be invulnerable because everyone believes it can't be killed. Another might only appear when someone walks home alone at night, because that's the story that created it. All in all, they are a complete mystery and you would be better off just staying away from them.

Normally, at this point, I would just send this off to you and call it a day. But again, people have been trying to compare me to NullSigil and telling me that I'm not putting in the work, so I'm going to do what he didn't do and tell you a little bit about the different quests that you can come across in Emberveil. QUESTS Blue Collars This is a quest that I'm not entirely sold on you doing. In the game, you eventually hear rumors about magical creatures being held in an illegal underground fighting ring.

It's the quest that introduces you to the Gilded Menagerie. These are people who capture supernatural creatures, place rune-covered collars around their necks, and force them to fight for wealthy spectators who gamble on the outcome. This quest actually opens up a somewhat similar Pokemon-esque type of quest chain where you can go and capture a bunch of the different magical creatures in Emberveil and sell them to the Gilded Menagerie.

I never do it because I hate dog-fighting rings, and it's made all the worse with magical creatures. The Gilded Menagerie is deliberately disgusting… although I will say that there are some complications to them. Most of the members are cruel to the point of comic book villainy, but there are a few who claim that they're a group who are focused on identifying dangerous creatures so that normal people can better protect themselves. Frankly, I think it's a load of horse shit… but I can sort of see what they mean.

Anyway, this quest has the player character deliberately infiltrating the Gilded Menagerie because the creature that is being sent to the fighting pit is intelligent, can speak several human languages, and keeps asking to speak with the Caretaker (the owner of The Hearth.) When you get there, you find out that the collars that the Gilded Menagerie is placing on creatures are supposed to just suppress the magical abilities of these supernatural creatures.

What they actually do is record information about the creature's magical characteristics, and then they sell that information to someone. You can destroy the operation, free the creatures, kill all the Gilded dicks, or investigate the buyer. And if you do the last one, you can find out that the Department of Continuity has been working with the Gilded Menagerie to learn more about the magical creatures of the world.

They're trying to decide which of the creatures is a potential civilization-level threat, and which ones are just intelligent and docile. I bring up this quest because, if you want a relatively moral way to earn a bunch of cash and test out your combat skills, you could do worse than hunt the Gilded Menagerie. The Woman in the Elevator This is what I was talking about before, and I'm just going to spoil this quest for you so that you don't do it. Seriously, it's a bosheet quest that you should just stay away from.

Your character ends up at an apartment building where the residents believe that one of the elevators is haunted. People have been disappearing from it. Someone enters the elevator, the doors close, and when the doors open again the person is gone. Eventually you learn that there is a woman who shows up in the elevator immediately before each disappearance, but she isn't actually killing anyone.

The woman is a Living Story and she takes people to different points in time, which means that some people eventually show up decades into the future while others emerge years before they were born. That sounds interesting but… honestly it was a rare miss from Severance Systems. It's just a bleh quest that you should stay away from. You don't even get good rewards from it.

All that happens is you find the boy that the woman had become enamored with (because apparently that's what happens with a few of the Living Stories) and the boy was frightened when he rode the elevator and never wants to go back to it ever again. Like I said, it was a meh quest that didn't have a great payoff. Moth Season This is something that I'm pretty sure everyone on the forum is going to harp on you to check out. It's a quest in the Between Bazaar and it's one of the most enduring mysteries in the setting.

First up, let me tell you about the Between Bazaar. It's this weird shopping bazaar that sits in a valley. The road that leads down into the valley is unpaved, and it looks a lot like unused farmland. There's a collapsed stone wall, a creek, and a flat expanse of grass, and that's about it. Here's the thing though, if you venture into the valley during the full-moon, you'll find the Between Bazaar.

It shows up out of the mist and it is filled with stores that sell items that you can't get anywhere else in Emberveil. There are shoppers and pilgrims and members of the Department of Continuity that are desperately trying to figure out what the bazaar represents. But you aren't going to care about any of those. No. Your goal is a very specific vendor. He sells only moths. He sells living ones and dead ones. He sells them in glass cases or in picture frames. They vary in size from a thumbnail up to a dinner plate.

And when you go to him, he'll try to give you a quest. He'll ask that you search through the entirety of Emberveil for this single specific moth, and he'll offer to pay you handsomely for it. The problem is: that's the whole quest. You find the moth, go back and sell it to the guy, and he pays you. And that's it. There's nothing else. He thanks you and… you're done. WHICH HAS DRIVEN EVERYONE INSANE! It's not even a magical moth.

It's just a simple moth that the guy is willing to buy from you for an inordinate amount of money. What does it all mean?!?!?! Seriously though, if you can answer that question it would be bigger to the Emberveil crowd than the House of Seasons or Corva. At this point, you're probably thinking that I have put more effort into this than NullSigil did when he was warning you (subtly guiding you) to all the factions and dangerous creatures in Emberveil. And you'd be right. But wait, there's more.

THE STORY OF EMBERVEIL I am going to give you a brief rundown of the MAIN story of the game. There are tons of different side quests - some of them are hidden and some are not so hidden - so I am going to keep myself focused on just the central plot points. Your character starts off in The Hearth. You're just a normal person in a world where The Fracture had happened three years ago and there are incredibly strange incidents going on, but you're only worried about making rent payments and buying food.

So you answer an ad in a newspaper about a temporary caretaker for an apartment. The Hearth. The Hearth serves as your primary base throughout the whole game, but it's also the central mystery of Emberveil. You start off as just a simple person, wandering through this building that you have taken the job of caring for, and you get to meet Petey and Gardener Jane, and you discover that The Hearth was a nexus for magic before the Fracture.

Each new section that you unlock of The Hearth is another clue to the mystery of the Fracture, while its inhabitants introduce you to the factions fighting over the future of the region. The player gradually realizes that magic isn't simply reappearing randomly. Certain places are becoming unstable, certain creatures are appearing in locations connected to old stories, and people who should have no connection to one another are suddenly talking about the same ancient symbols.

You eventually head out beyond The Hearth and into the surrounding region, traveling between cities, rural communities, government facilities, magical hotspots, underground markets, and other places where reality has become unstable. The reason for this is that you are trying to discover the why of the Fracture. What suddenly brought magic back into the world? Why was The Hearth capable of magic before the Fracture? Civilization hasn't collapsed.

People still go to work, governments still issue laws, police still patrol streets, and electricity still works, but all the cracks are slowly becoming impossible to ignore. A neighborhood suddenly sees a spike in gang violence… except these gangbangers are tossing around fireballs instead of shooting guns. A hospital suddenly has a patient come in off the street, but his chart says that he died forty years ago.

A train (the Veilstrider) suddenly appears and drops off orcs and goblins, and the government still insists that everything is under control. Your character slowly becomes increasingly important, not just because you have access to the Hearth and can piece together a lot of the puzzle for why magic returned, but because you can work with multiple factions that are all competing with each other.

Rather than simply choosing a side, you can broker agreements, betray allies, expose secrets, trade magical information, or deliberately strengthen/weaken certain factions. Eventually, you find out that the Fracture wasn't some accidental thing. The official explanation from the Department of Continuity and The Parliament is that magic just poofed into existence and it was caused by atmospheric anomalies.

A bunch of conspiracy theories cite everything from scientists opening up magical portals to the end of days to magic always existing. It was just hidden and now it's not. But what you can learn from The Hearth is that magic is tied to three brothers. They are three beings who have existed since almost the beginning of humanity.

What happened was that the three Brothers eventually discovered something akin to the threads of fate (like those ancient Greek mythology things with the weavers and the sisters cutting threads.) They managed to steal their threads, ensuring that those threads couldn't be cut. Which meant that they were immortal. And immortal beings gather a TON of magic. I'm talking about ALL the magic. They essentially became living reservoirs of all the magic that had existed in the world.

Over the years, they just accumulated more and more and more and more of it, soaking up all the magic that should have existed out in the world but was instead trapped by these three assholes. It's the explanation for why the modern world had no obvious magic despite all the ancient stories of magical beings and sorcery and witchcraft. The three Brothers had spent centuries accumulating all of it, draining the magical energy for the world and keeping it for themselves. Then came the Caretaker.

This was one of the people - much like your player character - who answered an ad and became the caretaker for The Hearth. The Caretaker discovered what the Brothers were doing and decided that they had no right to control the world's magic. He faked his own death, went underground, and then hunted down and killed all three brothers, knowing that their deaths would release all the magic that they'd accumulated. That release was the Fracture.

It's what created all the imps and demons and fairies and blood-magic users and everyone else. The Caretaker knew that civilization would suffer once magic was re-released back into the world, and he did it anyway. And once he killed the three Brothers, he just disappeared and left humanity to deal with the consequences. There are a lot of different views on whether the Caretaker is good or bad.

He's a man who committed an enormous atrocity by releasing magic into an unprepared world, but I also see his point in that the Brothers continuing to horde magic was a shit thing to do. If you head over to the Emberveil side of the forum, there are tons of people arguing about whether or not the Caretaker was right to do what he did. I'm not going to litigate that. I'll let everyone else talk about whether he was right or wrong.

One of the best things about the Fracture-verse games is that there are so many different choices that your player character can make. You can strengthen The Parliament or The Open Hand. You can mess up the animal killers in the Gilded Menagerie. You can be a twinkly vampire lover. You can mess everyone up and just revel in the chaos. But there is a canonical ending to Emberveil. Or at least, what most of the forum believes is a canonical ending.

That's the one where the player doesn't destroy The Hearth and doesn't abandon it. Instead, they accept their connection to the building and become its permanent caretaker. The Hearth fully recognizes you. You're no longer the temporary caretaker, but instead you have a connection to it. The doors open for you, the rooms rearrange themselves at your command, and all the different places that were previously inaccessible become readily available to you. This isn't a traditional victory ending.

You inherit the Caretaker's position, which means that you inherit their responsibilities as well. You're making all the decisions for the different magical societies and factions of the world. The final sequence in the game sees representatives from the major factions arrive to speak with you.

The Parliament wants an alliance, the Open Hand wants access to magical knowledge, the Department of Continuity wants cooperation and your help in deciding what they should do now that everyone knows that magic is real, the vampires want… whatever the hell they want. The Houseborn want rights, the Ossuary want research materials, and various governments want access to the different secrets that The Hearth contains. Everyone needs something from The Hearth.

Everyone needs something from the person who controls it, and the player is now that person. The world hasn't been saved, the Fracture hasn't been undone. Magic has returned to humanity, the old power structures are destabilizing, and the player is the person in the middle of all of it making decisions on what's going to happen. The final implication is that the player is about to play politics with all the supernatural forces of the world while deciding who gets to shape what comes next.

This is actually a really interesting thing because… again, we don't know when you are going to enter Emberveil. Is it going to be at the start of the game when the player character doesn't even know what caused the Fracture? Is it going to be at the end, where they are the most influential figure in the world? Does the player character even exist? I'm incredibly interested in seeing where you take this story.