***DISCLAIMER: This is my best attempt at summarizing and transcribing our episode discussing the evolution of the War of the Magi. There are typos likely throughout, but I did my best… Secondly, this is a casual friendly discussion about lore – so please don’t take offense at anything, but feel free to discuss any differing opinions or possible corrections.***
Hey everyone, Frosty here!
In our most recent MogTalk we discussed the lore leading up to the Occult Crescent. In order to do that, I brought on three community members who spend a large amount of time diving deep into the FFXIV story and lore. We started off the show introducing our guests and discussing the plan for the show. For summary, these are our three guests and please feel free to check them out:
Anonymoose: Long time community member who has helped edit 2 FFXIV lore books for SquareEnix.
Cro: Lore analyst who has been writing about the lore in FFXIV for years and currently working as a lore writer for Heroscape.
EmunArum: Newer player of the group, but has been on multiple panels at conventions and podcasts discussing lore.
A lot of it revolves around the War of the Magi, so Moose gave us a very interesting perspective about the way everything was introduced to us. This is a good portion of the digest, so just be ready! If at any time you want to listen to the episode, just click on the header of the section.
The War of the Magi Origins
Frosty: How were we introduced to the concept of the War of the Magi?
Moose: Actually, believe it or not, it’s one of the things that goes all the way back to 1.0. One thing I want to get into before we get into the War of the Magi is that the cycle of calamities was decided as part of the original story. When you logged in on day one in the game, you could check the dusty tomes and it would tell you kind of the order of the calamities – so it was always going to be the 5th was ice and the 6th was water. War of the Magi is working around that, just one piece of context. But this all goes back to job lore… War of the Magi started because FFXIV didn’t have jobs and people were like “THIS DOESN’T FEEL LIKE FINAL FANTASY”, so [SquareEnix’s team] were like “Alright we are going to add the jobs!” And most of the jobs had lore and it was an easy transition for them. You make up something, 500 years ago we did this, 500 years ago we started doing that. But they ran into a problem with the mages, because they tried to reinvent the wheel. We had Conjurer which was offense based and master of the elements… mostly. Their guild was the harmony with nature, love, and light one. So you have the offense master of the elements, and the harmony, love, and light one with nature already inspired by Shinto guild – so that should probably be the one that’s a healer and dresses like a shrine maiden. So it’s already kind of a little backwards… and then you got Thaumaturge who was more of a support based role, and it was master of the polarities of life and death – their guild was the wealth and sin guild that was run at the funeral home – so like probably that one should be the hot topic job, or what passed for one before Dark Knight.
At this point we ran into a tangent where Moose talked about his goth days and how My Chemical Romance is topping the charts right now… until Em brought us back on track and Moose continued.
Moose: The white mage and the black mage lore needed to be a deeper and a little further back to explain why they were so different and how we got [there], so they came up with a really creative solution – they were banned! 1500 years ago, we just decided those aren’t things anymore, we’re never going to talk about them again. So over 1500 years, shit happens, things change, and we’ve lost touch with those things. So as we are getting them back, maybe it doesn’t look quite like you would expect. And it actually worked really well, the black mage quests back in 1.0 were introducing Shatotto, “death’s handmaiden”, who invented black magic and called down a falling star because she could. That led to a story about black magic, voidsent, hubris, and how maybe some things are banned for a good reason.
I clarify that Shatotto and Shantotto from FF11 are completely different beings, because I’m a dummy – which leads to a tangent on cheeky letter drops in names done by SquareEnix, then we continue on with 1.0 White Mage quests.
Moose: 1.0 White Mage storyline introduces the Age of Endless Frost and the 5th Astral era. I know that sounds normal now… but back then we were told that the Elezen believed 1500 years ago was the beginning of time, when the Twelve were like “Here ya go, Eorzea, it’s yours!” So to be talking about a previous era was like “oh my god this is so special”, so we were [entranced] by this. You have the rediscovery of magic after the Age of Endless Frost, finally helping them emerge from the ice age, and it leads to an Astral era of prosperity, cooperation, and friendly competition… until it wasn’t. Then there was a “MAGE WAR”, and it was an unsustainable burden on the aether, and then a calamity was caused by the elementals because they were so enraged and wrathful about the [war] and the abuse of the aether. Now this is where it gets a little weird in 1.0, [because] you actually talk to the elementals and they back up this story. Then you actually meet the elemental of wrath who says she caused the calamity, and she’s like “YEAH, I DID IT, AND LIKE LOOK AROUND AT WHAT’S GOING ON, I’LL FUCKING DO IT AGAIN”. So the whole 1.0 story is you’re trying to convince the elementals not to cause another calamity, but back then a calamity was on the horizon so that story made sense. That story ends up getting completely changed by 2.0.
I’m scratching my head as I’m trying to keep up with it all…
Cro: The funny thing is, when Moose said we should go over it chronologically, like I don’t know anything from 1.0. A lot of this stuff that he is saying, he’s told me in DMs – we’ve reviewed and researched and it’s like I don’t have the cognitive awareness of it, but I’m still like “yeah, like no, they did all this back then in 2010!” – what? It’s pretty crazy.
Moose: 2010 to 2012 we got the bare basics of it – the invention of black magic, Shatotto, the mage war (it didn’t have name yet – but we knew there was a war), that it created an unsustainable burden on the aether and that a massive flood calamity happened afterwards. The fact that the elementals got blamed for it – might never come up again. So it’s okay if you forget that part.
Em: That’s also one of those things where they largely did end up retaining that for the canon of the game as we understand it today. Because it is still, like the 4th Astral Era was where everyone was burning books and wiping knowledge led to the Age of Frost, and then arcane discovery is what kind of brought us into the 5th Astral Era, which was wiped away by a giant flood. It’s less explicit [as in] this specific elemental is the one who’s taking credit for it, but it is still our understanding that the imbalance in the aether is what a calamity is. But it was still literally wiped away. And this is also kind of the era that laid the foundation for like the grand companies and the following era recovering from this calamity caused by the War of the Magi we start seeing migration to Eorzea. We start seeing the roots of Garlemald. So that is kind of where our story starts.
I then make sure I understand what kind of elementals we were talking about…
Moose: We are talking [about] the fairy ones.
Frosty: So those got angry and killed a bunch of mages?
Moose: In 1.0 the winged elementals were everywhere and sprites didn’t exist.
Cro: If you do Eureka, the buff elementals – the [ones] you run up to and they are singing, you stand next to them and they give you a buff – those models were used in 1.0 for the elementals of Gridania.
Moose: I think in retrospect if you just assume that elementals are sentient aether, their perspective of a mage war that drains the land – of course that would feel like being shackled and abused, right?
Em: It is probably the best way to describe an elemental as well, in terms of sentient aether – sometimes it’s aspected.
Frosty: Technically we are sentient aether too… right? In a way?
Em: We have souls that make us alive in a different way… we aren’t here to discuss aether physics, that’s a whole other show!
Moose: Frosty starts the show with, “I’m not going to get deep here” and I’m here talking about elementals being sentient aether and you are like “Who isn’t? Are we all sentient aether?”
Frosty: Okay, okay – so that’s all we got from 1.0?
Moose: That’s basically the rundown of what we got in 1.0, because scholar didn’t exist yet. I think it kind of makes it doubly funny that Nym is the only nation from the 5th Astral Era that did get name dropped in 1.0. And not even in the context of the war, it was just like “yeah, it was Nym, it was over there”
Cro: They called it Nym because it sounded good.
After wrapping up a bit on 1.0 discussion, we start venturing into how it evolved into 2.0.
Starting in A Realm Reborn
Moose: And now, this may be a little surprising… we get back to A Realm Reborn and the War of the Magi is… job lore… Now in both stories they name it. Black Mage has not been drastically changed. White Mage – Raya-O-Senna reintroduces the war, this time [she calls Amdapor by name]. So we know the name of one of the mage cities that was involved. She says the enemies of Amdapor were called… the enemies of Amdapor – we don’t get a name for that, but Raya-O does start integrating some of this, she says Shatotto’s invention of black magic lead to Amdapor’s invention of white magic, and that rebalanced the realm, and the realm flourished… until it didn’t. Calamity! (not blamed on the elementals this time) And then after the war magicks were banned – the elementals sealed Amdapor away in the Twelveswood, and then from there the white mage story focused on the wandering Padjal, A-Towa-Cant. We got away from that and the elemental Oha-Sok, the elemental of wrath – not brought up again, may never be brought again, but on the off chance she is in [the Occult Crescent story]. For all we know, the final boss of Occult Crescent finally loses when Raya-O-Senna shows up with Nirvana.
2.0 Scholar
Moose: A Realm Reborn this time around we do have Scholar. And that means we get Nym, more than just a name drop. We learn that it was a small city state compared to the other two, but despite its small size it was able to turn back the tide of the invasion EVERY TIME, thanks to brave axe welding marines led by small numbers of fairy welding scholar tacticians. That’s when you first see The Floating City of Nym, which I want to stress was always called The Floating City of Nym, but was not always floating… in the air.
Frosty: Floating on water maybe?
Moose: Yes!
Em: We are so proud of you Frosty…
Moose: It was called the Floating City because it was on a lake and looked like it was floating on the lake, and then “ah-ha-ha” – wind crystal imbalance, now it’s floating in the air. Very funny, very good, very clever.
Em: It was like from a purely objective perspective, we’re taking magic out of the equation of this – you’re looking at city states at war or trying to gain an edge over each other, that kind of city is also kind of incredibly defensible as well. Which you brought up tonberries Frosty, the way that inevitably had to get at Nym was by (the common belief, it’s not 100% certain how this item got put into the city) [putting] a piece of treasure that caused a disease, that turned people into tonberries. My favorite piece of lore about this is that tonberries are actually a mythical creature, but they didn’t have anything else to call what they turned into and tonberries seemed to fit the description, so this mythical creature of a tonberry, that did not exist prior to this is what they started calling the creature that Nymians turned into. And the way that they dealt with that, because they realized too late, was by locking them up in a tomb and burying it.
Moose: The end of what we are learning in the A Realm Reborn story is that you actually meet a former Lalafel tonberry. He tells you that the people of Nym are now tonberries, and that there was a strange sickness that did this to them in the war, and how did they deal with this – they put them all in the palace, and then they sunk it in the lake.
Frosty: Curious derailing question… what in this disease of them being turned into tonberries makes them obsessed with knives and stabbing people in the back?
Cro: That’s the king, his rancor.
Moose: The king is so angry about [their fate] that his rage over this has festered and infected all the others over the ages.
Frosty: Infectious rage, got it. He felt like he was being stabbed in the back… so he made sure everyone else got stabbed in the back?
Cro: That’s why it’s called “Everyone’s Grudge”, the debuff.
Moose: Yeah, the doink’ed becomes the doinker…
Things got a little silly here, so for brevity’s sake we go back to explaining the scholar job quest!
Continuing Scholar Job Quest…
Moose: The scholar job quest actually lead into your first set of level cap’ed dungeons in A Realm Reborn, because this is where [SquareEnix] is starting to realize “The War of the Magi lore is getting a little deeper and cooler than the job lore we used to justify it. Let’s do stuff with it”. So you go into the Wanderer’s Palace, you storm in and take out the rancorous tonberries. Not the happy ending your lalaberry friend was hoping for, but can’t be helped now. Then off to Amdapor Keep, you actually get to go to one of the front line war bastions of Amdapor that was cloaked in the forest until the calamity. Our old friends, the “Lambs of Dalamud” are being conned by voidsent that left over from the destruction of the city basically. Now what’s really interesting about this to me, is that you’re introduced to Amdapor first… you are introduced to the white mage city first… and they are not introduced as good guys. They are introduced as a city whose hubris was their downfall. So we are saving the natural villains of the story for last. We are actually talking about this horrible plague that destroyed Nym and the hubris of Amdapor, and that was their downfall. And now their keep is ruins and voidsent that were summoned by their enemies. Eventually through A Realm Reborn, you get to The Lost City itself, and you start getting a real sense for how messed up this war was. The land is so tainted, the plants, bugs, animals, everything is tainted there.
Cro: Gross, that dungeon makes me want to sneeze.
Moose: The whole dungeon is just mold.
Frosty: The music was so good though…
[Everyone agreeing]
Frosty: And this dungeon ends in Diablos right? Sorry trying to remember.
Moose: Yeah, Diablos was the head voidsent in charge of the last assault on Amdapor. We will get back to him. But for now you find out that Diablos is actually still there. And you tried to take him out, but he turns into a bat and escapes… so A Realm Reborn ends for now with Nym and Amdapor wrapped up, and we don’t even know who the black mages are! They still have no name! And as a goth alumnus… I’m like mad at this point in the story… this is the only city I want to hear about and it’s the only one they’re not talking about. But aside from that, that’s about all A Realm Reborn has to say on it. The relics give a shout out to a book owned by a savior of Nym and a rod stolen from a voidsent queen named Lilith, but we eventually find out that the eternal bonding chapter, the Sanctum of the Twelve was built in the early 5th Astral Era when all the magic cities were still getting along, and we only recently found and restored it. But mostly we get away from it a bit.
Frosty: I appreciate all this so much because it’s starting to jog my memory from everything I did over a decade ago…
Moose: It really gives you sense for how much this has been pieced together over time, bit by bit.
Cro: Real quick, Moose was talking about how the [Amdapor people] were depicted as villains right? I just want to read real quick the dungeon description of the Lost City of Amdapor, because everytime I read it – it blows my mind. In your mind I want you to picture white mage, and when you think white mage the lilies, shiny colors, and brightness, they are there healing people and saving them… – “Born in magic, the ancient city of Amdapor lived in splendor and died in agony. As the 5th Astral Era gave way to the 6th Umbral, an ensuing catastrophe. The agent of Amdapor’s destruction slipped. Now the seal that has held so long is softening, like wind fallen fruit. And what blind worms thrive under the skin of the dead city.” Like that is not white mage-core at all! These are the people who invented white magic?? …Once we get into the Heavensward stuff, we get to learn more about that… Yeah, Amdapor is not great.
Moose: This is a really cool part of the story. This is one of the places where you have a natural good guy and a natural bad guy right? And even though the story is never going to fully subvert that – Mhach is always going to be the evil empire trope of this era. They are never going to let it be that simple… there’s always going to be some kind of context to it. Amdapor had their own problems and not everyone in Mhach sucked.
Heavensward
Moose: Shocking twist – we get our first War of the Magi dump in Heavensward… [it’s] job lore. Just the scholar quests this time. We go back to Nym and learn from our tonberry friend how this sickness actually started. There was this group of merchants who were on the seas and they got caught in a storm, and they were rescued by Nym. And they were so grateful for being rescued by Nym, that they gifted them with this beautiful amphora, this piece of pottery, very ornate. Then everyone started getting sick. As you are hearing this story, you and Alka Zolka think, “Hey wait a minute – did the merchants get sick?? This sounds fishy..” You’re able to find the amphora, it’s still there. Thank god for plot points! It has survived all the ages and you are able to find the amphora, and you bring it back to the tonberry who realizes that there is a voidsent binding sigil on the bottom of the amphora. This is where he realizes it was Mhach. And my little black heart skips a beat because we finally got a name! Mid-Heavensward! This lore has existed to justify black mages existence since 1.0 [or 1.2]. We did not get Mhach’s name until Mid-Heavensward job quests!
Frosty: That’s still a long time ago at this point…
Moose: Again, [as a] goth alumnus who is very upset the black mage city kept getting snubbed, all the sudden we got the name and found out there was going to be a whole ass alliance raid and the introduction to it is a super extra black and purple coffin ship autopiloting the Sea of Clouds, and you’re going to team up with these sky pirates to go check it out. You break in the front door and find out it was designed by HR Giger and Diablos is back?! Like I’m just racking up win after win after win, like everything is coming up Moose. The intro to the Mhach story was so good. What we learned that was relevant to the war – we learned High Void Mage Cessair only summoned Diablos as a deterrent, a bluff. And when she spoke out against using Diablos for those means, they put her under house arrest. Then they used [Diablos] to sack Amdapor and moved on to darker things, about as messed up as you would expect from a late astral era empire, possibly-probably being guided by Emet Selch somehow. People drinking voidsent blood, they got a man-made blackhole that’s supposed to be a fail safe for a voidsent uprising, but they are like eating enemy cities with it. This got dark quick.
Cro: It was wild.
Em: It literally opened the floodgates of potential. I can’t stress enough at this point we know the 5th Astral Era was like a reawakening of arcane magic in general, like a lot of knowledge being refound and discovered for the first time – AND ON TOP OF THAT, we are not also dealing with summoning voidsent and all of this other crap. So if you start putting the two together, you’re going to start getting into the darker territory of what all of this magical science, for the lack of a better term, is capable of.
Moose: You find out while on house arrest, Cessair actually was able to intuit that the flood was coming. And the leaders of the covenant actually had the gall to come back to Cessair and said “Here’s what you are going to do. We’re going to get a whole bunch of voidsent, we’re going to trap them into coffins and then it’s going to power our get-a-way ship, but you’re going to need to handle a lot of that. You’re going to need to do a lot of the lifting there.” Which to her credit, she did – she really tried to do. She tried to get everybody into the ship, they imprisoned a voidsent queen named Scathach and they were going to fly off to their floating city and be happily ever after. And… nope they all died. Voidsent got out.
Em: Imagine you’re on a ship and suddenly something you brought on the ship you know is dangerous, that has the capacity to power said ship – is now loose and actively hunting you for subsistence and sport, and revenge. Imagine there was a nuke that was alive and you were like “Yeah, we’re just going to lightly restrain it”.
Moose: I can’t stress enough that most of the info that Mhach had on voidsent came from… voidsent.
Em: Notoriously [known for] telling the truth about their weaknesses and all of that [/s]…
Moose: Right, they traded blood and vessels and aether, and summoning pacts. They tried to make very well worded contracts that would prevent the voidsent from doing anything unwanted or unexpected. And they had a weapon, the null stone that would obliterate their essence if they didn’t listen. But still, they’re voidsent – they’re sneaky. So if you want to read into it, the implication is kinda that the binding magicks that got for the queen were deliberately flawed from the start… that’s pretty much for Heavensward as far as the War of the Magi goes.
Golems…
Cro: I want to add the Lost City of Amdapor (hard mode) was a really interesting reveal. If you remember, we cleared out the city so the Hyurs and Padjal basically [perform] a ritual process in which they all get together [to purify the land] and the elementals can pre-populate the land and it’ll be safe for them. So they go and do this… and before they even get started the elementals bounce. And they’re like “but we killed the demon thing that was there, what else is here??” So they ask you to go into the Lost City of Amdapor and figure out why the elementals would just bolt, what was scaring them so bad? And what I thought was so interesting was that it wasn’t voidsent scaring them, it was a golem! There was a stone construct at the bottom of the Lost City of Amdapor that terrified the elementals. So again that brings into context that the people of Amdapor weren’t great people. What would cause a golem, because we’ve seen them all the time, to make it so terrifying that it would freak the elementals out on sight. I’ve had all kind of theories, but we can get into all sorts of stuff. Why? Because one, it looks like a sin eater.
Moose: I thought for sure I’d get away with not mentioning it…
Cro: Here’s the problem, “why do you have to mention it?” Because they have the picture of the statue in the lore book – and just casually mentioning it “oh it’s based on a transcendent being”. The statue is able to use the Reverse spell. In Final Fantasy that’s using healing magic… but reversing the heal. You are purposely wielding the magic of healing with the intent to do the exact opposite effect. And this statue is casting it on you constantly, and you are like “What did you guys do? What were you able to achieve with your magic?” For the most part, we ended up learning that white mages are a lot more devastating and scary than we really [give them credit for]… to this day we still don’t know the connection between the sin eaters and the Amdapori.
Em: Raiders will tell you the most dangerous thing is not the boss, but the white mage in your party…
Moose: Letting you drop into the red just to remind you, you need me… but yeah the statue drove me nuts. I don’t like to make leaps on my own. Here’s the thing, we I look at a piece of lore that there seems to be a hole in – I go “huh, that’s weird, I can’t explain that” – what happens is inevitably 500 people line up to go “I CAN EXPLAIN IT!” and I’m like “No, you can make stuff up, I can make stuff up too, I’m saying I can’t make stuff up, I’m saying that I don’t know how to explain it and that’s different. I can also do their job for them and come up with a great excuse, but it could be contradicted tomorrow if they write something. That’s why I get very nervous, I don’t want to make the assumption that anyone at any time can stuff you full of light and you become a sin eater, that’s there no other context involved – because that leads the question “Well, how hasn’t this happened more?” But if you get into Shadowbringers and Endwalker, and you look at some of the stuff that happened, it becomes a little realistic that maybe… that is just what happens when you stuff someone full of light.
Em: I have a theory… the way I conceptualize it is that it has nothing to do with light, [but] it lines up with what we know about Amdapor’s abilities… For context for why this kind of power scaling towards the War of the Magi started in the first place. In the 5th Astral Era there were a plethora of city states. It wasn’t just Nym, Mhach, and Amdapor. Some of them faded out over time, some of them combined together, some of them became a little bit more isolated for one reason or another, that’s the nature of civilizations – you change and grow. Amdapor was actually the strongest and largest of the cities for a very long period of time, and while nothing hostile yet – [it] was kind of the catalyst for Mhach being like “Oh, we kind of need some way to deal with this” – because when you have one superpower and everyone else is just a little bit below [bad stuff happens]. I think there were 6 prominent city states at this time. Mhach starts power scaling, and then Amdapor is like “Oh shit, we got to do something about this too”. Before outright war breaks out, they start experimenting with their magic in their own way. What’s important to know though is when the city was founded as Amdapor, they had actually asked the elementals very politely “Hey, can we use your land [and] aether?” and they said “No, thank you”, which Amdapor said “Great, we respect that – we’ll settle outside of the Shroud” (for the most part) and that was fine. At some point, clearly because we have talked about the dungeons, that stopped being the case. But the elementals took a look at the Amdapori and were like “No we are good, thank you very much – we are politely setting up this boundary”. So when Amdapor starts power scaling, they don’t summon voidsent – they start tunneling further into what their white magic can do and they start building statues, massive stone statues. And not all of them are the same. We’re talking about the ones that look like sin eaters, there’s the lion, the giant lady with the sword (our angel looking creature), but we also have stuff like the demon wall. That’s not really a demon, not a voidsent, it’s also a golem that has been imbued with this magic. All this to say is that this is something that has been carved and then imbued with light. Which is fundamentally different from what sin eaters are… because we’ve seen that transformation in game. That is a person becoming so corrupt by an overabundance of aether that they fully transform. This is where my theory comes in – it’s not just aether that’s being drawn upon for that transformation, it’s the actual soul itself that gets used for a catalyst. Because all Shadowbringers, you’re taking all of this light aether, but it could just as well have been any other type of aether and it starts cracking your soul into pieces. It’s not just your physical form, it’s like the essence of your being that’s being impacted. Ysh’tola talks about it, and that’s why the pivotal moment of Shadowbringers – you perform a mini rejoining with Ardbert and your soul kind of gets a bandaid on it. That’s all canonical. So we’re talking about white magic that is intended to be used for healing, being reversed [and] all of these contradictions with magic. I don’t think it was maybe just aether that the Amdapori were using, because they had a hard line against corrupting the aether of the land. We know that from the 1.0 lore as well and that kind of carried over. But the fact that they lived in harmony and suddenly didn’t, coupled with the ways these statues come to life, I don’t think it was entirely aethereal. I think something else had to be a part of it. [I can’t tell you absolutely for certain], but do I think it’s along the same kind of science? Because it’s the exact same thing we’re seeing in Dawntrail right now. What are robots, if not metal statues imbued with soul power? Could have been doing the same thing…. that’s my theory, it’s not just the light aspect. You could do that with anything, it’s the soul itself aspect.
Moose: The great thing with this kind of speculation is that I have learned over time that there are actually two approaches that might get used when it comes time to expand this lore. There’s the precedent approach where someone goes “Here’s all the stuff we said, what’s the explanation that fits great with everything we said.” The parsimonious occam’s razor, what fits with everything we said so far, how do we lock that in? And that’s how I think, that’s what I always assume is going to happen, but I’m wrong because the other half of the time what happens is someone comes in and goes “What do I want to write that’s going to be real cool and doesn’t contradict that, and how can I get away with it.” And the thing that they think of is often the same really cool thing that a huge group of other fans who were playing this game thought of because it’s the cool thing to do! Like why would you not do that if you could.
Em: The way I like to think about it is what would be the most narratively satisfying.
Moose: Because that should be the goal.
After a few tangents, we end up continuing our history lesson with the lore book!
Lore Book #1
Moose: We have made it to the Encyclopedia Eorzea, vol. 1 – which is where for the first time they take all these little bits and pieces they have been expanding and twisting for a couple of years, and they summarize it as one story and flesh it out. The part that gets me is in the opening of it, they just casually drop – “Oh yea, by the way in the year 550, the 5th Astral Era, there were 12 cities. One for every God”. Like you have only ever really talked about 3 before, and it’s like “by the way – 12″…. …they tell you Amdapor was Nophica and Nym was Oschon. They don’t tell you Mhach was Rhalgr, you might be tempted to think so. They are super into destruction, they’ve got statues of a dude pondering a purple orb. When the floods came, they tried to escape the flood by following a meteor. They invented the levinsteeds that we associate with Rhalgr, and yet there are two or three references to Nald’thal that I can’t fully place or rule out in the vicinity of Mhach. Is this kind of like a nod to the fact that it ended up coming from Ul’dah, and that’s like the Nald’thal city. [Or] is that like a little homage? Should I be on the lookout for that this isn’t Rhalgr? …The first lore book puts all the pieces in order, it fleshes it out, it gives it structure. It gives you years, the 5th astral era starts – they reinvent magic, come out of the ice age, there’s an age of prosperity and gives rise to this place where Amdapor is founded within the first 300 years of that timeline. It’s the oldest city, the first born. By the year 500, Mhach and Nym come about. So Amdapor becomes known as the ancient city. Shatatto invents black magic around 800. As Em said, Amdapor is already a considerable power by this time. So we can speculate about why destruction was a priority for them, why power was a priority for them – and it’s probably a little bit of everything. So we learn that Amdapor creates white magic shortly after, because within the first 100 years of Mhach inventing black magic, it starts taking out its neighbors. And Amdapor creates white magic to balance the scales. By the year 1000, there’s only 6 cities left and the war hasn’t started […] the real war starts 13th century of the era, that’s when you get the void magic. Mhach starts sending demonic horrors after people now. Amdapor is carving their holy horror statues to fight them. Nym’s getting taken out by a plague by 1500. 1510 – Diablos is summoned and after 300 years of war, it’s taken its toll on the land and the floods have come. This is a really cool throw back for the lore book, because the lore book actually remembered when we got the grand companies – it was said [they] were first formed in the last calamity, so we should form them in this calamity. So it takes a couple of paragraphs to talk about how the grand companies of the post war of the magi period were established. I thought that was a really good thing they just kind of remembered and put in there. It really did make it feel “intended all along” and fully integrated. And once again, it feels like the war of the magi has been wrapped up.
Em: But wait – there’s more!
Stormblood
Moose: Technically there is one little bit more. We do get into Stormblood and the 5th astral era storyline does continue on a little bit. And the place it happens might surprise you – job lore! So they introduce red mage, and in classic consistency with the games before this, red magic is a mix of black and white magic. So they actually bring back the 5th astral era lore and reveal that when they followed that meteor away from the flood they made it to Gyr Abania. They believed that Rhalgr sent that meteor that they followed. And Gyr Abania actually has little hits of Mhach language around. When they get there they set aside their differences and invent a type of magic that won’t tax the land, and that’s the beginning of red magic. And that storyline actually ends up with you finding the sealed tome of Lilith who lost her rod back in the A Realm Reborn story […] The only further thing we learn in Stormblood about the War, as far as I know, is the black mage quest where Shatatto was a hero. NOT “Death’s Handmaiden”, the “Black Witch” – she invented that magic to stop a meteor, not summon one. She destroyed a meteor that was headed for her city.
Cro: And then there was Skalla.
Moose: Oh right, how did I [forget] Skalla? We do find the ruins of Skalla when we get out to Loch Seld and we find out that city had actually fallen before the floods even came.
Cro: I think it fell to the War of the Magi?
Moose: If I remember right it was, “the state of war” that led to it not being able to hold its own.
Endwalker
Moose: In Endwalker we had Aloala Island, ancestral home of the plainsfolk and the birthplace of the arcanima. [Found out] that they actually left there and went to Nym, and then the floods came and they were like “No, wait we’re going back”.
Occult Crescent
Moose: If you are only summarizing the stuff that is brand new in Occult Crescent and where else it could go, we don’t need much time.
Em: That’s what makes Occult Crescent so interesting from a lore perspective. Even when we were seeing screenshots and the patch trailer for it, we were like “Oh that’s Nymian architecture”, “Oh that’s Mhach architecture”, “Oh that’s Amdapori structure”. We recognize a lot of enemy types from that. [Then], “Hey what’s that new building”. That’s the scary part, is that we know so much about this, and then they put this new thing in there because we have all of this context to the War of the Magi. So what’s interesting about Occult Crescent is the fact that we know so much about it, it’s a snapshot out of time from the city states. Because you notice a lot of the Nymian architecture is on the water, it’s floating on the water, not floating in the sky right? Couple of things – where are the people, if this is a snapshot in time? What is the new architecture that we don’t recognize? Is it one of the city states? Is it something new? Is it related to this? Is it a Eureka situation? That’s where Occult Crescent gets really interesting, because we recognize so much, that the stuff we didn’t recognize – that stands out in such stark contrast.
Moose: I feel like they did that on purpose because the first section of it was supposed to be your introduction. I wasn’t expecting that much new to be in the introduction. I was expecting it to lay the groundwork to introducing the expanding stuff later on. But they had that little foresight to go “Actually, here’s one thing” and that one thing immediately blew my mind.
Cro: This is the funny part when I got into Occult Crescent, I wanna say it was February technically, so it wasn’t even the instance – we saw the pictures, screenshots, and we were like “Whoa, War of the Magi”. I had several DM’s screaming the word “Nym” at me.
Cro’s Tin Foil Hat and New City
Cro: The most important thing – do you know the story of Dinotopia?
Frosty: No, not a single bit.
Cro: Okay, I will summarize it very quickly. These two people find a hidden island, in the ocean, that was undiscoverable ever able to be found in the past. They crash land on it, all the sudden while walking on this island they find DINOSAURS. When they find the dinosaurs further on in the island, they find cities and people [that are] using the dinosaurs as transportation and they build a whole civilization using the dinosaurs as a form of technology. So what I’m thinking, [tinfoil hat theory] this island it’s supposed to preserve things, and one of the things I saw it preserve was dinosaurs! If the 5th astral era had dinosaurs, city states, and islands – this is the moment where SquareEnix can introduce… Dinotopia.
Em: Is that what you want from the next expansion?
Cro: I’m encouraging SquareEnix to think about it, because this is the perfect reference right? But – I promise, I’ll segway this into the big mind blowing discovery and it comes off what Em what was saying – we know the architecture [and other references], and the stuff that is standing out is really big to us. Because we’ve never seen this before. I didn’t know there were dinosaurs in the 5th astral era, now I do and I’m going to keep talking about it! What else was there? We saw the pyramid, citadels, Nymian architecture – there’s this giant thing and they call it the “brazier”. If I understand the field note that talked about it – it’s supposed to be a giant torch-esque thing, a big flame, they go up to the top of it and set it on fire. And this thing is supposed to be honorary to Nald’thal – who they call God of the Forge. Who’s supposed to be the God of the dead, not God of the forge. This is the first time we’ve seen reference to his mercantile state. The Archive [remembers and calls the area] “Karnak”. About eight years ago is the last time they’ve named a city state for the mages, and they just finally drop one…
Moose: This has left me on edge, I’ve spent a lot of time joking like, “just give me all twelve”. And I’m sitting here looking at this story, and bet they’re thinking they could give me 6.
Memories and Scripts
Em: So one of the final zones inside the Forked Tower is a library with collapsed bookshelves that you kind of read from. […] The text that we get is all indecipherable, you can’t comprehend it – it’s not Eorzean script. And some of the knowledge that we have around the 5th astral era, is around the time towards the end of the 4th era, start of the 5th, we start getting “common script” for writing out Eorzean language, for what the game uses as canonical script. So some of the dialogue you get in the forked tower say “Yeah, you can’t read this, this isn’t a language you recognize” – which gives us a little bit more of a timeframe. Some of what it tells you is that there is magic that is purposely preventing you from reading this information and then a bunch of arcane glyphs that we also don’t understand that is of an undefined type of magic. So it could be white mage, black magic, red magic, scholar stuff, [or something else]. What I’m very invested in is why can’t we read this. Is this a magical enchantment that is preventing us from doing that, and if so – how is it doing it so that the letters become intelligible. We’re dealing with something that is entirely new there. Same thing with the arcanist that can’t remember things, and as you bring him data it starts unlocking a bit more of his memory. There’s a layer in everything we’ve seen in Occult Crescent that does not want to be found or discovered. Even going there is kind of described as entering “Bermuda’s Triangle”… the shade’s triangle. Something is being hidden here.
Moose: I feel like I’m channeling my inner-Frosty here, but what if they could make the other guy forget all that stuff, what if he made me forget how to read??
Frosty: Holy crap, that’s a really good inner-Frosty!
Em: I’ll respond exactly as I would respond to Frosty – which is in good faith. But that’s a scary type of magic, something that can alter memory. Not just can’t comprehend something, what else societal collectively forgetting, purposefully hidden in regards to this – and should we be pursuing this knowledge in case it comes up later? Because that’s scary! And that’s another recurring theme we’ve been having in Dawntrail, is that memory is part of what makes you a person. If you take that away, like the memories of people – does it still even exist? I don’t have a set theory, as much as terrifying speculation to the implications of what we are messing with.
Frosty: [Isn’t this similar to what happened when we were teleported away in A Realm Reborn?]
Em: That’s a good thought, because that’s part of the canonical lore as far as the world reset, “Oh there were heroes involved and we can’t remember who they are?”. A lot of that is to reintroduce the warrior of light from a gameplay perspective, but if they’re bringing that back up – we are back to additive retconning.
Moose: You never know when the retcons are going to hit when they are additive, they can hit any time. Every time one hits I’m like, “You son of a… it’s so good, I hate it so much”
What is going on in Occult Crescent?
Em: The real question is why is the 5th Astral era here? Is it recreations of these [places] or are these actual pieces of the civilizations taken out of time and combined here? You’d think if it’s the latter you’d see more of the dishevelment in the environment, but time is also passing inside of Shade’s Triangle, how is it all preserved this well, and where are the people if it’s a snapshot in time or a recreation. What is the intent behind that, outside of “Hey, here’s the buildings” – those are the kind of things they want you to start speculating on.
Moose: And they’ve given you just enough hints to get started. What energies are coming off what bricks, and it’s shared with the fairy and the blah – they chose the name “The Architect” for a reason and they want you thinking about recreation versus preservation. They’ve given just enough pieces that you can start putting the pieces where they go, but you can’t see the picture yet.
Em: And that’s why the War of the Magi is such an important context and why we spent so much time talking about it. Because that’s the time period and context for not just these civilizations, but also maybe intent. If it’s someone from this era thinking like “Oh I can preserve it by recreating it somewhere”, or maybe it was another arc situation, a failed attempt to save people and civilizations, but then why would they pick city states that were at war with each other to do that.
Moose: For me, that’s the whole fun of a show like this – any of the things that we said could end up being the thing that triggers you to recognize something when it comes up later. Or it could be none of them… at all…. Like there could be a really cool reference that you’re gonna catch because you know stuff now. There could be a really cool piece of context that makes more sense because it fits into the world better because of stuff we just went over, or we could have just gone over all of that in spite of this content…. and we’re not going to know for a little bit.
Em: This is more of the confirmation of the right questions to ask, which is more than we had before. Prior to Occult Crescent, it’s like “Oh that’s 5th Astral era” and that was it! Now we are getting into “why are all of these things happening”, “who is the Architect”, “is the Architect maybe related to the Archivist” – because we are referring to everyone in terms of titles, and historically in FF14 when we start doing that, we start getting into really powerful people manipulating civilizations for the sake of their own gain. So is it another situation like that, because that’s how we got Eureka or is this another city state that had also been getting power in order to do their own thing and just flew under the radar of preserved history in Eorzea – we simply don’t know. But these are the questions that we are actually able to ask now because that’s where the content is leading us to be curious.
Anything else?
Moose: There is another city that might be blue, we don’t know much about [it] I think? They gave a quick reference to how Skalla might have something to do with curses, like cursing might have been part of their history. Which is kind of interesting because the mad king cursed a guy and threw him in the ruins of Skalla. That’s kind of funny right? They were a cursed society and that just happens to be where you throw [him]?? Irony.
Final Thoughts and Expectations
Moose: My perception of this content is that the mere fact that the War of Magi is being addressed in this kind of content, in this place, means there is still room to play with it and no plan with what to do – so anything could happen! This is like in a way [what happened] with Eureka. That was the kind of the wastebasket of a lot of lore topics that weren’t getting addressed, but were still very interesting. And they found a way to kind of pull those into one thing and tie them all together. And in some places it created more questions, [which] we still don’t have answers to in some cases. I assume that is what is happening here, there’s still more room to play with the War of the Magi, but weren’t plans on what to do. And when you allow someone to pick up that content and do something with it, you could get anything.
Em: My expectation is more concrete in terms of information I think we’ll get. I can’t tell you what it is, but I want to learn more about these city states. I expect that now they set us up with the first three from the 5th Astral era that we are familiar with, we’ll start leading into ones didn’t know anything about and get more of that. Retroactively learning more about the 5th Astral era and maybe also the actual narrative of the Occult Crescent, because a big theme in Dawntrail has also been the concept of preservation. What does it mean to preserve something? Is it taking the actual thing out of time, is it recreating it entirely faithfully – both are circumstances that we’ve seen in Final Fantasy 14 in the past. Amaurot was a recreation and Eureka is a place out of time. Is this a third new thing? What kind of new magic are we going to be learning about. I got more concrete [thoughts] of like these are the things that we’ve learned. Can I tell you what they are or speculate on the specifics? I can’t do that at this time. But that’s what I’m looking for.
Moose: Same, I expect more cities and more magicks. And I’m going to be greedy – they gave us a new city state for the first time in years and I’m so grateful for that one city. But I’ve been given an ilm and I’m going to take a malm, [because…] I want all 12… [but] they are going to give us 6 and say the other 6 don’t matter – NOOOO!!
After this we wrapped up the show. There was a lot more we could dive into, but there just wasn’t the time to do it. Maybe on a future show? If you read all the way down here, thanks for absorbing my 40 hours of trying to piece a window of this episode together and please tell me if it was worth the read or not. And I have to do this… until next time, stay Frosty…