I'm in a bad moon tonight so appologies if I'm unduely harsh with anybody.
: Freaking old pseudo Heron?, you REALLY don;t want him to
: be a Heron Gaurd don't you :P
That's a combination of a couple factors:
1) Is Damas was a Heron, he's ALREADY BE IMMORTAL! And the "truely exceptional" qualities probably don't just refer to them being really nice people, as that wouldn't make a lot of sense as far as healing goes. It's got to be something inherant to their soul or body, and hence if Damas was truely exceptional before, he'd still be now, and not have to extend his life by killing people and cutting off parts of himself.
2) The new thoughts on "ancient" versus "turned from the Light". If Bahl'al is "ancient" and he's REALLY old, then so should Damas and the Voiceless One be. Also, if you notice I insinuate that Damas has already begun to utilize... "alternative medicines", if you will, to stay alive so long. Hinting that he's already basically turning evil, even if he's still aligned to the good guys now.
: I Still don't see why we go to so much trouble to line
: pre release with Myth II Canon, but hey whatever.
It's to align prerelease, GURPS, Myth II canon, and Myth III all together. GURPS is the thing that made it the most tricky; if they had just listed The Voiceless One as another name for Shiver instead of an unheardof Fallen Lord whose true name happens to ALSO be Ravana, and maybe listed Culwyeh as another unseen Fallen, then it'd be simple: Shiver is an Ancient and The Voiceless One is yet another name for her, and Culwyeh is someone else. But they DID list it that way, and there's nothing to explicitly contradict it (we know it's not an oversight because GURPS does note that Shiver is called Ravanna), and so we have to deal with it.
(Side note: a guess as to how this whole thing turned out the way it did. Consider if The Voiceless One was the original prerelease name for Shiver, Bungie gave Seabolt any old stuff they had written about her, including her true name Ravanna, and thus Seabolt went and wrote all this up about the Voiceless One. The Culwyeh-Shiver connection comes from the fact that Shiver's forces are the first ones we ever see with Wights, and our men appear to have no clue what they are, thus it could be reasoned that Shiver was the first to weild Wights. Then in Myth II, Myrdred calls Shiver "Ravanna" and Seabolt has to connect these two Fallen Lords somehow, or rather, leave the implication that there is a connection and not explain it; when in fact there is only one Fallen Lord between the two of them. But either way: it's written, it's not contradicted, we deal with it just like we do Mjarin - it may be made up, but it's somewhere in the canon scales and so long as nothing higher contradicts it, it's real).
Anyway... that whole parenthetical aside granted, my revised Shiver is that way for several other reasons. For one, Shiver is a mage! She should have some sort of magical abilities to show for it. In TFL she has the Nightmare dream, a sort of psionic mental projection, and then in M2 she has all these sound and light spells that fit the same general theme. For two, she's supposed to be an Ancient, on the order of Bahl'al and Damas. So making her an original Myrmidon psionic mage with astral projection gives her the Voiceless One connection, gives her a cool spell to use in Myth 3, and also helps explain the difference between her appearance in the three games, and how exactly she "lingered in defeat" after being killed by Rabican.
I figure in a revised M3 solo, her Astral Projection spell would work like this. She's standing there, pretty M3 Ravanna, beautiful 700 year old (or however many, too lazy to remember) that she is, with these fancy glowing eyes. When she astrally projects though, her astral forms projects out from her eyes, and retains it's beautiful appearance, though a little... distorted (think psycho Galadriel from LotR)... and her physical form whithers to show it's true age, more like Shiver from TFL. I figure that Shiver would have astrally projected down to Muirthemne in M3 instead of actually going there herself, too.
Sometime after M3, Shiver has been causing a little too much trouble in her astrally projected form (which I insinuated was already happening by the fact that some know her only in astral form - already turning evil), and so a battle is fought against her and The Voiceless One is cast into "eternal sleep" (that's from GURPS). Shiver is thus stuck with her soul astrally projected frozen in sleep somewhere, and both of them are out of comission. her physical body whithers and no longer appears beautiful even when the soul is there in it, and the soul's form has become twisted and evil looking with snakes for hair and such.
Along comes Balor a long while later, frees the Voiceless One and gains Shiver along with her, as they are really the same person. In TFL then, during the battle with Rabican, Shiver is astrally projecting as part of the Nightmare Dream, and Rabican basically says "By Wyrd, you ugly hag! Just LOOK at yourself!" and Shiver's astral form turns it's attention back on its physical body (really, why would you look at yourself from astral form, unless you like to watch yourself having sex or something?). In disgust it just sort of... breaks the link, rejects it's own body, and so Rabican kills her. But the spirit is still lingering there like a ghost.
Tramist's Mirror, I'd say, is something that basically takes ghosts and gives them a physical form (maybe this is where Soulblighter's Mahir came from?). So Damas in M2 takes Tramist's Mirror, gathers up Shiver's disembodied soul and makes it corporeal, in all it's freakish medusa-hair beauty. Stuck now in permanant psychotic rage, we have Shiver as me met her in M2.
: Close enough to what I said before, cept I never thought
: of adding Bahl'al
Yeah, I like that twist. It takes a necromancer to raise a necromancer :-)
: Like I said, though I like the fake apology idea, though
: I'm not sure if the Connacht's going to be as gullible
: as the Gondorians.
Myrdred can just make a pretty good point - he was only gonna side with Mjarin if he won. It looked like he was about to win, so he tried to side with him there, but now, clearly Connacht's the winner. Myrdred will serve whoever's in power, and the Cath Bruig are clearly in power now, and Connacht knows that will be so, so he trusts Myrdred to be Myrdred and serve the powerful well.
: The searching bit is what I've said before, though I'm
: not too sure about the Animates himself when he feels
: like it, I'm beginning to feel we should just throw
: out MAzz the Shade in Myth III, maybe they search they
: find, and findout it's just a rotting corpse (Though
: not very rotting as a result of his former power.) But
: manage to fend of the Watcher from recovering the
: body.
Ooh... I like this idea. I originally just wanted to write out Mazzarin's shade too, but everybody else offered up excuses so I figured the hell I'll try to keep him. And we'd have to throw out those levels and then how does Connacht know the future and all of that... but now, consider this. They go down to the crypt to find Mazzarin. The Watcher's forces are looking for it too. We fend them off, go into the crypt, and find Mazzarin's well-preserved body, along with all his worldly possessions... including the Total Codex. Connacht opens it, it does it's random-page thing, and he reads about something, not his life neccesarily, but something that clearly illustrates the cycles of light and dark, and it becomes clear to him what will happen to himself...
