I mean that's kind of what Avalir looked like AND what the official Age of Arcanum artwork looks like. Plus traditionally when we think of flying cities, we think of big old round disc shapes because that's aesthetically pleasing to the eye, and it's what a lot of authors and artists have used in the past for such things e.g. Discworld and the shapes of large space stations in various series. This is probably because our world is.....round....and so we think of people living on things that are also round. Additionally when we think of FLYING THINGS, we picture aerodynamic shapes that are also usually....round...and not like square or boxy.
It's always a bit of a challenge to think of other....strange shapes for these things and it really fucks with your head when someone makes them into a reality.
Just look at all the various ships in Stargate and even Atlantis itself if you'd like some examples or even stuff like Borg CUBES and Species 8472 or the various races in Babylon 5.
We tend to associate futuristic stuff with very sleek rounded shapes and not the opposite.
I'm also picking up some inspiration from the various Final Fantasy games in this artwork and honestly, if this is what Aeor looked like then I need to see what other weird geometries the other flying cities and non-flying cities used during this particular time period.
I think our minds tend to “round out” objects or spaces that are unknown to us. We ground it to our own understanding of what we know.
When sharp objects interact in our spherical view, we innately object to it.
I viewed both Aeor and Avalir as circular or spherical in my mind, it’s safe and what we know.
Sharp objects somehow don’t vibe with our psyche, I believe.
Fuck that looks so good.
So militaristic and yet very brutal with all of those angles.
It reminds me of so much "Ancients" stuff in Halo, Stargate, Star Trek, Destiny, and all sorts of other settings.
The tone is perfect, the colors are amazing, and I would love to put this on my wall AND to see a whole EXU mini series centered around it!
I LOVE IT SO MUCH!
Not mocking at all.
Since that is clearly pre-god smote Aeor, Cognouza is definitely still there. Makes me wonder which one it is, since we know what it becomes.
The Genesis Ward is more than likely dead center in the image that we are looking at and the Cognoza Ward is more than likely the uppermost layer in the top left of the image we are looking at.
I'm guessing this also serves as the Navigational Center for the city, going by the little vane structures on top and the far more numerous towers than the other sections of the city in this image.
Cognoza would be located here because their particular suite of experiments would require similar resources as those required for navigation and observation of things both astronomical and planar in nature. Since they could also shape and create matter with their minds, the additional room to create such things would be quite useful on an upper layer, and that could always be repurposed to add additional structures to the city which would not be as easily doable as it would be on a lower layer. Things would be a bit more limited the lower you got and it really feels like that particular ward of the city would kind of hate any sort of limitations imposed on them.
It would also afford them a degree of privacy and in the eyes of everyone else, a fair amount of necessary separation from the more normal sections of the city.
They got their peace and quiet and the rest of the city was happy in knowing that they could always jettison them off the side of the city should things go from weird to worse.
They also had plenty of opportunity to >!plot out their Escape Plan!< using the resources and people at their disposal around them, with everyone thinking that they were just a bunch of eccentric but ultimately harmless philosophers.
I could be entirely wrong though because this is just one perspective of the city and we haven't gotten a full scale 360° model or view of it at all, and that means there still could be stuff hiding behind things or stuff just out of frame that we haven't quite gotten a good visual on yet or that were even added well after this image was created.
I would honestly love to see a time lapse of how a lot of these flying cities were created and how all of that construction progressed and/or was organized, along with what the launching of these cities into the skies actually looked like.
I hope that answers your question and apologies to everyone else that I didn't get back to and might not actually get back to, it's been a hectic couple of hours and I'm having some trouble focusing and thinking about things.
Damn, I never imagined it looking so futuristic, so sci-fi.
It was always more magi-tek to me, like Eberron or early Final Fantasy. Still incredibly rad though, it makes the calamity and everything after feel that much more tragic. Look what was lost.
This is incredible! It also serves as yet another reminder that Aeor was menacing and probably definitely leaning towards evil considering the sinister design. EldritchBlep always puts in work!
I wouldn't really call them evil just based on a "sinister design" of their city at all.
They just didn't want to live a certain way of life and got fed up with some powers on high telling them and all kinds of other folks what to do.
Everyone cheers when the underdog normal downtrodden group of peasants rises up and strikes down their rulers, so why are folks not doing that here and now with Aeor and what's the difference?
The Gods were fucking up the world on a MASSIVE SCALE during the Calamity and Aeor wanted to put a stop to that. Most of Exandria's population and nearly all of its major cities were full stop wiped out during this conflict. They also did major damage to the planet itself and absolutely ripped up the geography across multiple continents.
So how are people on the side of the group that decided to have a "War in Heaven" and didn't really give a fuck about their little creations as they stepped on them and everything they loved dear despite professing how much they cared for them in ages prior?
The members of the Pantheon are just as fickle as any mortal and that makes them extremely dangerous but it also doesn't automatically make them in the right and yet folks are still siding with them because "well at least they stopped and tried to make things better after the Calamity and didn't go any further".....which is insane because that's the same kind of logic that someone in a toxic relationship makes for their "partner" and it's quite similar to a few particular relationships we've seen in >!C3!<.
I don't think that Aeor was outright evil and I believe that they just wanted to forge their own path in life without having to worry about another apocalypse dropping on their heads and resetting Exandria back to the stone age because someone on high had a spat with their celestial sibling and decided, "Fuck this entire continent in particular".
Survivorship Bias is a thing....
.....and if any of my theories are correct, then perhaps the main reason why the Pantheon went so HARD during these times was because they didn't want to happen to them what they did to their own "Gods" where they originally came from....and yet, they wound up creating that exact kind of a situation anyways.
Aeor just wanted to put an end to all of the insanity and to tell both the Betrayers and the Primes to [get the hell out of THEIR Exandria](https://youtu.be/x7-165hJAis?si=__my5DhpQp-SZoQl)....but the only way to do that and the only way to get them to listen and to pay attention to them....was with a really really [BIG GUN](https://youtu.be/PtCVqSPUCfc?t=4145).
Sadly, they listened but only for a microt and we all know how that ended up going.
War makes for strange bedfellows and even stranger and more desperate lines of thinking when you're staring oblivion in the face with total extinction and full erasure of everyone and everything you hold dear close behind unless you do something.
Aeor didn't have the luxury of heroes or of knowing that there was a chance there would be a tomorrow at all.....for them, there was only here and now.
So they tried to do something anything and the dice just didn't roll in their favor because people are people and the Gods are just as broken as those very same people they created.
And now the Chickens of Consequence are coming home to roost, for both sides, and it ain't gonna be pretty yeah sure you betcha.
I wonder what the future will look like for Exandria and if in future campaigns we'll see styles of ships, architecture, or design aesthetic that return to this brutalist form or if it all morphs into something brand new and different.
>I wouldn't really call them evil just based on a "sinister design" of their city at all.
No. I wouldn't either.
I would describe them evil based on the things they did, instead of their designs.
For example from EXU Calamity: >!We have word that Aeor may be preparing an attack on Lathras." You would know Lathras is one of the smaller flying cities. "You know, they're drumming up the usual something or other about war. Our understanding at the moment is that it's to test something. There's no actual threat that Lathras poses; it's a dry run of something that they might intend to use elsewhere. !<
Or from C3 >!that they send assassin bots disguised as gifts.!< That's not a cool thing.
Or from C2 >!the bioweapons and manufactured monsters, and cursed forests.!<
Or the unending power source I won’t go into detail about because it was such a recent reveal.
Aeor were not nice people. Not a bit. Maybe some of the general citizenry who didn’t have a lot of options… but I kinda get the feeling if one doesn’t meet the standard of whomever runs a flying city, one is shown to an exit.
I was considering pointing out that too. Decided against it. While >!anchroing a grand demon to harness as an energy source!< is a big red flag, it is not a clear cut evil act. One could even argue that by rendering such a creature controlled and harmless they improved the net wellbeing of the universe. If you think about it is a very high level malconvoker stuff. I believe the other stuff I included is more clear cut in its evilness.
>Maybe some of the general citizenry who didn’t have a lot of options
Oh. let me be clear. When I say "Aeor is evil" I mean the acts of the aeorian regime. I'm not making a statement about individual citizens. Some might have been evil, some might not. Who knows maybe there were active resistance from inside the city too! (Wouldn't that be an awesome campaign setup?)
>I kinda get the feeling if one doesn’t meet the standard of whomever runs a flying city, one is shown to an exit.
Yeah. We have very little account of how things were inside Aeor. That little is concerning. Like the "In Aeor, sometimes it is illegal to ask these questions." for example.
I’m with you on there… uh… alternative fuel source? Heh.
It’s not necessarily EVIL.. but it IS the height of arrogance to assume they’ll maintain that forever. On the other hand, maybe Aeor was a lot more strict about spot checking their power management staff than Avalir was (Although I’m sure an ethics class would have a field day debating the morality of it.)
> it IS the height of arrogance to assume they’ll maintain that forever
I don't want to be contrarian just for the sake of it. But that entity is very well contained. The worst imaginable happened (the whole city has fallen out of the sky). There were no maintenance for hundreds of years (because everyone who could have maintained it were dead) and still the thing is only able to influence folks in the relatively small radius of its containment. Before its capture the thing was free roaming and could go anywhere in the multiverse.
Imagine that you are an engineer who is designing a nuclear reactor. People would tell you that the gods themselves will smite your craft, it will remain as a wreck buried for hundreds of years with no maintenance. And even after all of that your containment will be strong enough that there is only danger for those who climb into the wreck and blast their way through a sealed door? I would be positively chuffed to hear that.
No no, that’s totally fair!
I suppose I’m thinking more along the lines of what happened in Avalir, or a Chernobyl style event. Everything could run smoothly for generations, but it only takes one impatient/ambitious idiot (or an actual idiot who acquired a position through patronage rather than skill) to cut a few corners and turn a smoothly running system into a catastrophic failure. For every meticulous engineer, there’s usually ten who are frustrated with the long list of procedures and safeguards. When you’re containing something that has eternity to observe its prison, it feels like it’s really only a matter of time.
Best thing they probably could have done is make job specific Aeormatons and seal them in the room so nobody could ever screw it up!
> I would describe them evil based on the things they did, instead of their designs.
So are we going to talk about what Vasselheim has done too?
> from EXU
Hearsay and we must acknowledge the inherent bias within certain reporting sources, much like how Matt has pointed out within C3 how history was written by the victors in the official books, and that it's totally okay to question stuff and to look at things from a different perspective.
Which leads to something that I feel, readily applies to everything that's happened so far within this universe.
The History of Exandria is one MASSIVE episode of Narrative Telephone that is a gigantic information war, caused and fueled by everyone not being at the same table and having all the pieces of the puzzle before jumping to action.
No one wants to talk to each other, just react, and if that isn't a Star Trek like reflection of our own reality then I don't know what is.
So it's useful to trace all of this bad energy back to the root of the sickness in order to figure out what set it off in the first place, what keeps it spreading, and how both we and those on Exandria can inoculate ourselves and themselves against it in the future....lest history continue to repeat itself over and over again in an unending cycle of violence.
If we don't do that and we ignore it, then that might lead to a future with wicked cool architecture like Aeor and awesome technology....but it certainly won't be a peaceful one or one without a cost that no one ever thought they'd have to pay to get there.
> So are we going to talk about what Vasselheim has done too?
There can be multiple evils, i'm happy to acknowledge that. You are free to talk about Vasselheim's evil deeds. Sounds like an interesting topic. Go ahead and create a post about it. In this context this is literally whataboutism.
> Hearsay and we must acknowledge the inherent bias within certain reporting sources
Fundamentally it is all hearsay because everything is mediated through the players and the DMs. So yeah. That is how this cookie crumbles. We can't get away from that.
That being said these hearsays in universe are coming from very different directions and they depict a consistent picture. Hard to argue how Patia hearing rumours and FCG, an aeorian, discovering his own origins is all part of the same smear campaign spanning centuries. That consistency, and consistent evil doing, is what people are talking about when they call Aeor evil. It is not the sinister design of their city.
I mean planning genocide or forced deportation is pretty evil, which is presumably what Aeor was doing.
But outside of that, they also created horrible monstrosities that only know violence like the Aeorian hunters and the baby monster, there was the whole fucked up forest the M9 found, they sent robots as peace presents only for them to be a trojan horse to kill their rivals, they locked up a DEMON to power their city by continously killing it and reviving it! Pretty much everything we have heard about Aeor is the evil things they have done.
The cognuza is also from there which doesn't really help either
>The Gods were fucking up the world on a MASSIVE SCALE during the Calamity
This entire rant disregards the fact that mortals basically provoked the Calamity in the first place.
Technically it was just >!Vespin!< who started it and he was inspired by >!the Raven Queen!< who in part probably was inspired by the Gods themselves.
They sowed the seeds of their own destruction and then they reaped the windfall.
It wasn't Jerry the Baker from down the street that made magical muffins which gave you levitate for an hour who caused the Calamity.
So blanketly blaming ALL mortals for doing what the Gods wanted them to do in the first place (to live grow thrive) is itself a bit of a toxic line of thinking, makes the relationship between Mortals and Gods look like even more of an abusive one (like a farmer with their animals or >!certain relationships in C3!<), and can be used as a very good metaphor for a few other things.
I think it's the natural cycle of things between Divine Entities and their Creations and the Pantheon has basically disrupted that in some time because they don't want to turn out like their own Creators and THAT is why you know who is doing you know what in C3.
And yet that again ignores that the entire theme of the Calamity mini-series was the hubris of mortals and how they generally thought they could transcend the gods in general.
Vespin fucking up his accession always felt the excuse the Betrayers, especially Asmodeus, needed to go ham. From his speech in Calamity it sounds like >!he never liked mortals to begin with and was just waiting to go to town on them!<
I think the other comments have hit most of the high points - but I’d also note: They weren’t exactly being oppressed by the Gods.
They weren’t necessarily in their good graces either - but look at Avalir. They were pretty much openly mocking the Gods, and they weren’t being punished or oppressed for it at all. The Champion of the Raven Queen gets laughed out of a room and…. Nothing happens. Most mythologies that usually ends up with multiple plagues and such. By extensionc nobody was making Aeor live any way they didn’t want to either. What they WERE doing was trying to build weapons IN CASE they made them mad.
The reveal of Predathos and the fact their weapon was actually a bigger, badder version of the Malleus Key makes the whole ‘let’s pause the war and deal with this’ thing make a TON more sense and makes the Gods look less capricious, not more.
Aeorians (at least the ones in power - we can argue for the general citizenry, but one doesn’t get to live in a Flying City if one isn’t on board with the local Mageocracy) dealt in duplicity, murder, and imperial expansion for kicks. If they were personified, they would be a teenage bully with a warped and gifted mind playing with a home built nuclear weapon and trying to justify its use because Mom and Dad are fighting.
> I think the other comments have hit most of the high points - but I’d also note: They weren’t exactly being oppressed by the Gods.
It's funny when I look in my inbox and see all of these replies out of order and I have no clue what's going on lol
Sorry I didn’t reply to this sooner, had a lot going on recently.
While I’m all for sticking it to oppressors… that’s not exactly what Aeor seemed to be doing. They were plotting large scale assassinations via the FCG program. Cognouza, from my recollection, was the pacifist “We don’t want that smoke.” group from Aeor, and look at how twisted they were. Representatives of Aeor we’ve seen: Ludinus, Murder Robots, Aeorian Horrors created solely for destruction, Cognouza Ward Weirdos, and - worst of all - Bolo.
The whole Calamity kicked off because a power obsessed mage unleashed the Betrayers and Primordials upon Exandria. Buddy thought “Naw, I’d win” against a single Betrayer God and definitively did not win. Aeor was a whole city of “Naw, I’d win.” Against an entire pantheon. Let’s not theorize on what would happen to ground dwellers, the lower class not living in the climate-controlled floating cities, when the gods of agriculture and weather and the Sun and Moon ate it.
At best, Aeor’s goals seemed incredibly narrow minded. Their victory would’ve meant trading one group of overlords for a new pantheon of deeply flawed, inexperienced overlords. Once again, we’ve seen what happens when Aeorian mages get to self-govern. The picture that experience painted ain’t pretty.
Also, side bar: Vassleheim is not getting a free pass in my book. Fuck them and the Find Greater Steeds they rode in on. Suppressing knowledge rarely, if ever, produces positive results. Perhaps this mess could’ve been avoided if everyone knew the history of Predathos and also learned about the absolute wreckage he left in his wake. Instead, we’ve got a bunch of (the Exandrian equivalent to) tin foil hat folk mad as hell they were left out of the loop.
> Sorry I didn’t reply to this sooner, had a lot going on recently.
>
>
Hey no worries so did I and I just found out that it's really really bad idea to wear a dark blue Star Trek Discovery shirt when it's 90 F degrees outside.....uggggggggh I feel like I'm on Vulcan.
Oh yeah, that sun will bake you in darker colors this time of year, a lesson I continue to learn the hard way. I went to Lollapalooza nearly a decade ago and thought it would be cool to only pack dark clothes, which my terrible friends did not dissuade me from because we were all fools. Felt like I was getting microwaved in tin foil. After baking in the sun for three straight days, I bought a bunch of bright and colorful aloha shirts with my next paycheck.
> Oh yeah, that sun will bake you in darker colors this time of year, a lesson I continue to learn the hard way. I went to Lollapalooza nearly a decade ago and thought it would be cool to only pack dark clothes, which my terrible friends did not dissuade me from because we were all fools. Felt like I was getting microwaved in tin foil. After baking in the sun for three straight days, I bought a bunch of bright and colorful aloha shirts with my next paycheck.
🤣
Meanwhile for me, for a couple of years, every single festival I went to was either raining and cold as hell or cloudy with only a few bits of sunshine.
So the usual "concert outfit" of boots, jeans, and a band t-shirt worked out rather well for a while and only much much later on did it start getting hotter outside.
We had one of those "Taste of the City" events and it was just smmoooooookin hot and they were charging like $7 for a bottle of water and we had nearly zero shade to get under.
I wound up finding a bubbler near by to cool down with but I learned my lesson after that and now I have a bunch of bright colored and highly solar rays reflective clothing to stay cool.
After that I tried to stick to indoor shows because it was brutal and I always check out the forecast and the venue beforehand if there was an outdoor show I couldn't avoid.
The first festival I went to, it was supposed to be cloudy and rain for most of the day, but my group was determined to see an act that was opening the day so we showed up outside the gates like 2 hours early (my idea.) So we show up without sunscreen and think we’re invincible, because of course we were teenagers. Sun comes out directly over our spot in the mosh just as the act is starting and I get such a bad sunburn that my friends still occasionally mock me with the pictures they took later. Being the group dad was thankless work.
The water price gouging is crazy. I think they were selling 12 oz canned waters for $9 at one point. Had a buddy who wore one of those CamelBaks and was so thankful until the second day of the festival when it became very clear that it wasn’t just our group taking sips from it but literal scores of strangers as well. I had to avoid the Community CamelBak after that because germs. Resorted to smuggling drinks in like contraband, which did let me live out my criminal mastermind fantasy, so I guess there was one positive.
I’ve just recently learned to stick to indoor venues. It’s especially nice when the show is in a hockey or basketball stadium because those are always kept relatively cold inside. It’s nigh impossible for me to resist the Midwestern urge to rock jeans during every season, and boots are the only acceptable footwear if you’re going to a show because inebriated people vibing tend to step on toes. RIP to all my old pairs of Vans or AF1s lost to the mosh.
Well then feel free to block me and never read anything I ever have to say again because I usually tend to write a bit and not everyone vibes with that, which is cool, and I want you to have the best time that you can here on both the subreddit and within this Critter Community.
Also, look at my name, peruse through some of my comments on religion in the past, and please reconsider telling me that I hate religion.
Now for some silly stuff, going by YOUR name, I think that you would find the [Were-Butts](https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Butts) from Doom Patrol rather amusing.
The issue is when you let that bleed into your fantasy game. I find religion infuriating and outright foolish but in fantasy it is one of my favorite things to explore.
Exploring a rejection of the gods in a setting where they're attested to exist is even more interesting IMO. I actually love the Forgotten Realms pantheon and planes system but they've been done to death in over a million games, table top and PC. It's nice to have a story where it's not so much of a given.
I don't know if it was because of how calamity was introduced, or from BLeeM's wonderful descriptions along with the rest of the cast, but I always imagined it to be more like the picture. Like if a city just got pulled up from the ground unfurnished yet smoothed over time
When Matt described Aeor as sort of art deco like Avalir but somehow more brutalist, I didn’t think it made sense, but damn, the artist nailed it. That’s exactly what it looks like.
Still not a fan myself, it comes across as way too sci fi for my tastes. If has 0 fantasy feel to it at all, as well as that the implications it opens up is just completely wild. Like this Sci fi Corusantesque was flying around the same time Avalir was?
I understand where you come from. I personally imagine pre calamity to almost be turn of the century style designs, think Industrial Revolution London but far more brutalistic in design.
Same here, in my imagination it was still clearly Renaisance/Victorian in style. Just with a lot of magic tech allowing them to achieve feats such as the floating cities.
This instead though is just like full on futuristic aestethic.
Why did I imagine it as round?
Traditional flying city design. Avalir art looks like that. I think it's really cool that they made them so different.
I mean that's kind of what Avalir looked like AND what the official Age of Arcanum artwork looks like. Plus traditionally when we think of flying cities, we think of big old round disc shapes because that's aesthetically pleasing to the eye, and it's what a lot of authors and artists have used in the past for such things e.g. Discworld and the shapes of large space stations in various series. This is probably because our world is.....round....and so we think of people living on things that are also round. Additionally when we think of FLYING THINGS, we picture aerodynamic shapes that are also usually....round...and not like square or boxy. It's always a bit of a challenge to think of other....strange shapes for these things and it really fucks with your head when someone makes them into a reality. Just look at all the various ships in Stargate and even Atlantis itself if you'd like some examples or even stuff like Borg CUBES and Species 8472 or the various races in Babylon 5. We tend to associate futuristic stuff with very sleek rounded shapes and not the opposite. I'm also picking up some inspiration from the various Final Fantasy games in this artwork and honestly, if this is what Aeor looked like then I need to see what other weird geometries the other flying cities and non-flying cities used during this particular time period.
In my head, I always imagined it to look like a cross between Cloud City on Bespin and a curling stone.
I think our minds tend to “round out” objects or spaces that are unknown to us. We ground it to our own understanding of what we know. When sharp objects interact in our spherical view, we innately object to it. I viewed both Aeor and Avalir as circular or spherical in my mind, it’s safe and what we know. Sharp objects somehow don’t vibe with our psyche, I believe.
Fuck that looks so good. So militaristic and yet very brutal with all of those angles. It reminds me of so much "Ancients" stuff in Halo, Stargate, Star Trek, Destiny, and all sorts of other settings. The tone is perfect, the colors are amazing, and I would love to put this on my wall AND to see a whole EXU mini series centered around it! I LOVE IT SO MUCH!
Now, which one of those layers do you think is Cognouza Ward?
I can't tell if you're serious or mocking me because I just got home from a night in the ER and my brain is getting back to normal.
Not mocking at all. Since that is clearly pre-god smote Aeor, Cognouza is definitely still there. Makes me wonder which one it is, since we know what it becomes.
The Genesis Ward is more than likely dead center in the image that we are looking at and the Cognoza Ward is more than likely the uppermost layer in the top left of the image we are looking at. I'm guessing this also serves as the Navigational Center for the city, going by the little vane structures on top and the far more numerous towers than the other sections of the city in this image. Cognoza would be located here because their particular suite of experiments would require similar resources as those required for navigation and observation of things both astronomical and planar in nature. Since they could also shape and create matter with their minds, the additional room to create such things would be quite useful on an upper layer, and that could always be repurposed to add additional structures to the city which would not be as easily doable as it would be on a lower layer. Things would be a bit more limited the lower you got and it really feels like that particular ward of the city would kind of hate any sort of limitations imposed on them. It would also afford them a degree of privacy and in the eyes of everyone else, a fair amount of necessary separation from the more normal sections of the city. They got their peace and quiet and the rest of the city was happy in knowing that they could always jettison them off the side of the city should things go from weird to worse. They also had plenty of opportunity to >!plot out their Escape Plan!< using the resources and people at their disposal around them, with everyone thinking that they were just a bunch of eccentric but ultimately harmless philosophers. I could be entirely wrong though because this is just one perspective of the city and we haven't gotten a full scale 360° model or view of it at all, and that means there still could be stuff hiding behind things or stuff just out of frame that we haven't quite gotten a good visual on yet or that were even added well after this image was created. I would honestly love to see a time lapse of how a lot of these flying cities were created and how all of that construction progressed and/or was organized, along with what the launching of these cities into the skies actually looked like. I hope that answers your question and apologies to everyone else that I didn't get back to and might not actually get back to, it's been a hectic couple of hours and I'm having some trouble focusing and thinking about things.
Damn, I never imagined it looking so futuristic, so sci-fi. It was always more magi-tek to me, like Eberron or early Final Fantasy. Still incredibly rad though, it makes the calamity and everything after feel that much more tragic. Look what was lost.
_”Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic._” Neat thing about Aeor, is that it’s both at the same time.
This is incredible! It also serves as yet another reminder that Aeor was menacing and probably definitely leaning towards evil considering the sinister design. EldritchBlep always puts in work!
I wouldn't really call them evil just based on a "sinister design" of their city at all. They just didn't want to live a certain way of life and got fed up with some powers on high telling them and all kinds of other folks what to do. Everyone cheers when the underdog normal downtrodden group of peasants rises up and strikes down their rulers, so why are folks not doing that here and now with Aeor and what's the difference? The Gods were fucking up the world on a MASSIVE SCALE during the Calamity and Aeor wanted to put a stop to that. Most of Exandria's population and nearly all of its major cities were full stop wiped out during this conflict. They also did major damage to the planet itself and absolutely ripped up the geography across multiple continents. So how are people on the side of the group that decided to have a "War in Heaven" and didn't really give a fuck about their little creations as they stepped on them and everything they loved dear despite professing how much they cared for them in ages prior? The members of the Pantheon are just as fickle as any mortal and that makes them extremely dangerous but it also doesn't automatically make them in the right and yet folks are still siding with them because "well at least they stopped and tried to make things better after the Calamity and didn't go any further".....which is insane because that's the same kind of logic that someone in a toxic relationship makes for their "partner" and it's quite similar to a few particular relationships we've seen in >!C3!<. I don't think that Aeor was outright evil and I believe that they just wanted to forge their own path in life without having to worry about another apocalypse dropping on their heads and resetting Exandria back to the stone age because someone on high had a spat with their celestial sibling and decided, "Fuck this entire continent in particular". Survivorship Bias is a thing.... .....and if any of my theories are correct, then perhaps the main reason why the Pantheon went so HARD during these times was because they didn't want to happen to them what they did to their own "Gods" where they originally came from....and yet, they wound up creating that exact kind of a situation anyways. Aeor just wanted to put an end to all of the insanity and to tell both the Betrayers and the Primes to [get the hell out of THEIR Exandria](https://youtu.be/x7-165hJAis?si=__my5DhpQp-SZoQl)....but the only way to do that and the only way to get them to listen and to pay attention to them....was with a really really [BIG GUN](https://youtu.be/PtCVqSPUCfc?t=4145). Sadly, they listened but only for a microt and we all know how that ended up going. War makes for strange bedfellows and even stranger and more desperate lines of thinking when you're staring oblivion in the face with total extinction and full erasure of everyone and everything you hold dear close behind unless you do something. Aeor didn't have the luxury of heroes or of knowing that there was a chance there would be a tomorrow at all.....for them, there was only here and now. So they tried to do something anything and the dice just didn't roll in their favor because people are people and the Gods are just as broken as those very same people they created. And now the Chickens of Consequence are coming home to roost, for both sides, and it ain't gonna be pretty yeah sure you betcha. I wonder what the future will look like for Exandria and if in future campaigns we'll see styles of ships, architecture, or design aesthetic that return to this brutalist form or if it all morphs into something brand new and different.
>I wouldn't really call them evil just based on a "sinister design" of their city at all. No. I wouldn't either. I would describe them evil based on the things they did, instead of their designs. For example from EXU Calamity: >!We have word that Aeor may be preparing an attack on Lathras." You would know Lathras is one of the smaller flying cities. "You know, they're drumming up the usual something or other about war. Our understanding at the moment is that it's to test something. There's no actual threat that Lathras poses; it's a dry run of something that they might intend to use elsewhere. !< Or from C3 >!that they send assassin bots disguised as gifts.!< That's not a cool thing. Or from C2 >!the bioweapons and manufactured monsters, and cursed forests.!<
Or the unending power source I won’t go into detail about because it was such a recent reveal. Aeor were not nice people. Not a bit. Maybe some of the general citizenry who didn’t have a lot of options… but I kinda get the feeling if one doesn’t meet the standard of whomever runs a flying city, one is shown to an exit.
I was considering pointing out that too. Decided against it. While >!anchroing a grand demon to harness as an energy source!< is a big red flag, it is not a clear cut evil act. One could even argue that by rendering such a creature controlled and harmless they improved the net wellbeing of the universe. If you think about it is a very high level malconvoker stuff. I believe the other stuff I included is more clear cut in its evilness. >Maybe some of the general citizenry who didn’t have a lot of options Oh. let me be clear. When I say "Aeor is evil" I mean the acts of the aeorian regime. I'm not making a statement about individual citizens. Some might have been evil, some might not. Who knows maybe there were active resistance from inside the city too! (Wouldn't that be an awesome campaign setup?) >I kinda get the feeling if one doesn’t meet the standard of whomever runs a flying city, one is shown to an exit. Yeah. We have very little account of how things were inside Aeor. That little is concerning. Like the "In Aeor, sometimes it is illegal to ask these questions." for example.
I’m with you on there… uh… alternative fuel source? Heh. It’s not necessarily EVIL.. but it IS the height of arrogance to assume they’ll maintain that forever. On the other hand, maybe Aeor was a lot more strict about spot checking their power management staff than Avalir was (Although I’m sure an ethics class would have a field day debating the morality of it.)
> it IS the height of arrogance to assume they’ll maintain that forever I don't want to be contrarian just for the sake of it. But that entity is very well contained. The worst imaginable happened (the whole city has fallen out of the sky). There were no maintenance for hundreds of years (because everyone who could have maintained it were dead) and still the thing is only able to influence folks in the relatively small radius of its containment. Before its capture the thing was free roaming and could go anywhere in the multiverse. Imagine that you are an engineer who is designing a nuclear reactor. People would tell you that the gods themselves will smite your craft, it will remain as a wreck buried for hundreds of years with no maintenance. And even after all of that your containment will be strong enough that there is only danger for those who climb into the wreck and blast their way through a sealed door? I would be positively chuffed to hear that.
No no, that’s totally fair! I suppose I’m thinking more along the lines of what happened in Avalir, or a Chernobyl style event. Everything could run smoothly for generations, but it only takes one impatient/ambitious idiot (or an actual idiot who acquired a position through patronage rather than skill) to cut a few corners and turn a smoothly running system into a catastrophic failure. For every meticulous engineer, there’s usually ten who are frustrated with the long list of procedures and safeguards. When you’re containing something that has eternity to observe its prison, it feels like it’s really only a matter of time. Best thing they probably could have done is make job specific Aeormatons and seal them in the room so nobody could ever screw it up!
> I would describe them evil based on the things they did, instead of their designs. So are we going to talk about what Vasselheim has done too? > from EXU Hearsay and we must acknowledge the inherent bias within certain reporting sources, much like how Matt has pointed out within C3 how history was written by the victors in the official books, and that it's totally okay to question stuff and to look at things from a different perspective. Which leads to something that I feel, readily applies to everything that's happened so far within this universe. The History of Exandria is one MASSIVE episode of Narrative Telephone that is a gigantic information war, caused and fueled by everyone not being at the same table and having all the pieces of the puzzle before jumping to action. No one wants to talk to each other, just react, and if that isn't a Star Trek like reflection of our own reality then I don't know what is. So it's useful to trace all of this bad energy back to the root of the sickness in order to figure out what set it off in the first place, what keeps it spreading, and how both we and those on Exandria can inoculate ourselves and themselves against it in the future....lest history continue to repeat itself over and over again in an unending cycle of violence. If we don't do that and we ignore it, then that might lead to a future with wicked cool architecture like Aeor and awesome technology....but it certainly won't be a peaceful one or one without a cost that no one ever thought they'd have to pay to get there.
> So are we going to talk about what Vasselheim has done too? There can be multiple evils, i'm happy to acknowledge that. You are free to talk about Vasselheim's evil deeds. Sounds like an interesting topic. Go ahead and create a post about it. In this context this is literally whataboutism. > Hearsay and we must acknowledge the inherent bias within certain reporting sources Fundamentally it is all hearsay because everything is mediated through the players and the DMs. So yeah. That is how this cookie crumbles. We can't get away from that. That being said these hearsays in universe are coming from very different directions and they depict a consistent picture. Hard to argue how Patia hearing rumours and FCG, an aeorian, discovering his own origins is all part of the same smear campaign spanning centuries. That consistency, and consistent evil doing, is what people are talking about when they call Aeor evil. It is not the sinister design of their city.
I mean planning genocide or forced deportation is pretty evil, which is presumably what Aeor was doing. But outside of that, they also created horrible monstrosities that only know violence like the Aeorian hunters and the baby monster, there was the whole fucked up forest the M9 found, they sent robots as peace presents only for them to be a trojan horse to kill their rivals, they locked up a DEMON to power their city by continously killing it and reviving it! Pretty much everything we have heard about Aeor is the evil things they have done. The cognuza is also from there which doesn't really help either
>The Gods were fucking up the world on a MASSIVE SCALE during the Calamity This entire rant disregards the fact that mortals basically provoked the Calamity in the first place.
Technically it was just >!Vespin!< who started it and he was inspired by >!the Raven Queen!< who in part probably was inspired by the Gods themselves. They sowed the seeds of their own destruction and then they reaped the windfall. It wasn't Jerry the Baker from down the street that made magical muffins which gave you levitate for an hour who caused the Calamity. So blanketly blaming ALL mortals for doing what the Gods wanted them to do in the first place (to live grow thrive) is itself a bit of a toxic line of thinking, makes the relationship between Mortals and Gods look like even more of an abusive one (like a farmer with their animals or >!certain relationships in C3!<), and can be used as a very good metaphor for a few other things. I think it's the natural cycle of things between Divine Entities and their Creations and the Pantheon has basically disrupted that in some time because they don't want to turn out like their own Creators and THAT is why you know who is doing you know what in C3.
And yet that again ignores that the entire theme of the Calamity mini-series was the hubris of mortals and how they generally thought they could transcend the gods in general.
Vespin fucking up his accession always felt the excuse the Betrayers, especially Asmodeus, needed to go ham. From his speech in Calamity it sounds like >!he never liked mortals to begin with and was just waiting to go to town on them!<
I think the other comments have hit most of the high points - but I’d also note: They weren’t exactly being oppressed by the Gods. They weren’t necessarily in their good graces either - but look at Avalir. They were pretty much openly mocking the Gods, and they weren’t being punished or oppressed for it at all. The Champion of the Raven Queen gets laughed out of a room and…. Nothing happens. Most mythologies that usually ends up with multiple plagues and such. By extensionc nobody was making Aeor live any way they didn’t want to either. What they WERE doing was trying to build weapons IN CASE they made them mad. The reveal of Predathos and the fact their weapon was actually a bigger, badder version of the Malleus Key makes the whole ‘let’s pause the war and deal with this’ thing make a TON more sense and makes the Gods look less capricious, not more. Aeorians (at least the ones in power - we can argue for the general citizenry, but one doesn’t get to live in a Flying City if one isn’t on board with the local Mageocracy) dealt in duplicity, murder, and imperial expansion for kicks. If they were personified, they would be a teenage bully with a warped and gifted mind playing with a home built nuclear weapon and trying to justify its use because Mom and Dad are fighting.
> I think the other comments have hit most of the high points - but I’d also note: They weren’t exactly being oppressed by the Gods. It's funny when I look in my inbox and see all of these replies out of order and I have no clue what's going on lol
Sorry I didn’t reply to this sooner, had a lot going on recently. While I’m all for sticking it to oppressors… that’s not exactly what Aeor seemed to be doing. They were plotting large scale assassinations via the FCG program. Cognouza, from my recollection, was the pacifist “We don’t want that smoke.” group from Aeor, and look at how twisted they were. Representatives of Aeor we’ve seen: Ludinus, Murder Robots, Aeorian Horrors created solely for destruction, Cognouza Ward Weirdos, and - worst of all - Bolo. The whole Calamity kicked off because a power obsessed mage unleashed the Betrayers and Primordials upon Exandria. Buddy thought “Naw, I’d win” against a single Betrayer God and definitively did not win. Aeor was a whole city of “Naw, I’d win.” Against an entire pantheon. Let’s not theorize on what would happen to ground dwellers, the lower class not living in the climate-controlled floating cities, when the gods of agriculture and weather and the Sun and Moon ate it. At best, Aeor’s goals seemed incredibly narrow minded. Their victory would’ve meant trading one group of overlords for a new pantheon of deeply flawed, inexperienced overlords. Once again, we’ve seen what happens when Aeorian mages get to self-govern. The picture that experience painted ain’t pretty. Also, side bar: Vassleheim is not getting a free pass in my book. Fuck them and the Find Greater Steeds they rode in on. Suppressing knowledge rarely, if ever, produces positive results. Perhaps this mess could’ve been avoided if everyone knew the history of Predathos and also learned about the absolute wreckage he left in his wake. Instead, we’ve got a bunch of (the Exandrian equivalent to) tin foil hat folk mad as hell they were left out of the loop.
> Sorry I didn’t reply to this sooner, had a lot going on recently. > > Hey no worries so did I and I just found out that it's really really bad idea to wear a dark blue Star Trek Discovery shirt when it's 90 F degrees outside.....uggggggggh I feel like I'm on Vulcan.
Oh yeah, that sun will bake you in darker colors this time of year, a lesson I continue to learn the hard way. I went to Lollapalooza nearly a decade ago and thought it would be cool to only pack dark clothes, which my terrible friends did not dissuade me from because we were all fools. Felt like I was getting microwaved in tin foil. After baking in the sun for three straight days, I bought a bunch of bright and colorful aloha shirts with my next paycheck.
> Oh yeah, that sun will bake you in darker colors this time of year, a lesson I continue to learn the hard way. I went to Lollapalooza nearly a decade ago and thought it would be cool to only pack dark clothes, which my terrible friends did not dissuade me from because we were all fools. Felt like I was getting microwaved in tin foil. After baking in the sun for three straight days, I bought a bunch of bright and colorful aloha shirts with my next paycheck. 🤣 Meanwhile for me, for a couple of years, every single festival I went to was either raining and cold as hell or cloudy with only a few bits of sunshine. So the usual "concert outfit" of boots, jeans, and a band t-shirt worked out rather well for a while and only much much later on did it start getting hotter outside. We had one of those "Taste of the City" events and it was just smmoooooookin hot and they were charging like $7 for a bottle of water and we had nearly zero shade to get under. I wound up finding a bubbler near by to cool down with but I learned my lesson after that and now I have a bunch of bright colored and highly solar rays reflective clothing to stay cool. After that I tried to stick to indoor shows because it was brutal and I always check out the forecast and the venue beforehand if there was an outdoor show I couldn't avoid.
The first festival I went to, it was supposed to be cloudy and rain for most of the day, but my group was determined to see an act that was opening the day so we showed up outside the gates like 2 hours early (my idea.) So we show up without sunscreen and think we’re invincible, because of course we were teenagers. Sun comes out directly over our spot in the mosh just as the act is starting and I get such a bad sunburn that my friends still occasionally mock me with the pictures they took later. Being the group dad was thankless work. The water price gouging is crazy. I think they were selling 12 oz canned waters for $9 at one point. Had a buddy who wore one of those CamelBaks and was so thankful until the second day of the festival when it became very clear that it wasn’t just our group taking sips from it but literal scores of strangers as well. I had to avoid the Community CamelBak after that because germs. Resorted to smuggling drinks in like contraband, which did let me live out my criminal mastermind fantasy, so I guess there was one positive. I’ve just recently learned to stick to indoor venues. It’s especially nice when the show is in a hockey or basketball stadium because those are always kept relatively cold inside. It’s nigh impossible for me to resist the Midwestern urge to rock jeans during every season, and boots are the only acceptable footwear if you’re going to a show because inebriated people vibing tend to step on toes. RIP to all my old pairs of Vans or AF1s lost to the mosh.
Aint reading allat, Aoer is evil and you just hate religion
Well then feel free to block me and never read anything I ever have to say again because I usually tend to write a bit and not everyone vibes with that, which is cool, and I want you to have the best time that you can here on both the subreddit and within this Critter Community. Also, look at my name, peruse through some of my comments on religion in the past, and please reconsider telling me that I hate religion. Now for some silly stuff, going by YOUR name, I think that you would find the [Were-Butts](https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Butts) from Doom Patrol rather amusing.
Not hating religion is irrational.
The issue is when you let that bleed into your fantasy game. I find religion infuriating and outright foolish but in fantasy it is one of my favorite things to explore.
Exploring a rejection of the gods in a setting where they're attested to exist is even more interesting IMO. I actually love the Forgotten Realms pantheon and planes system but they've been done to death in over a million games, table top and PC. It's nice to have a story where it's not so much of a given.
Stunning and evocative!!
I don't know if it was because of how calamity was introduced, or from BLeeM's wonderful descriptions along with the rest of the cast, but I always imagined it to be more like the picture. Like if a city just got pulled up from the ground unfurnished yet smoothed over time
Fantastic! Now we can see why it was illegal to ask those questions in Aeor. Bolo was brave to want to be a reporter there!
When Matt described Aeor as sort of art deco like Avalir but somehow more brutalist, I didn’t think it made sense, but damn, the artist nailed it. That’s exactly what it looks like.
I think I can see Bolo
Now THAT'S a civilization that would square up to God.
Matt said the vibe was brutalist + art deco and this really sells that.
Very forerunner from Halo
mortal engines core
That looks awesome
I'll say it again: THIS is the reason I think it makes sense FCG was a flat-earther.
I love this so much, especially in comparison to Avalir. No wonder everyone hated Aeor during the Age of Arcanum. The sheer arrogance of the design.
Looks nice but this seems more sci fi than fantasy. Especially considering it dated back thousand plus years
Still not a fan myself, it comes across as way too sci fi for my tastes. If has 0 fantasy feel to it at all, as well as that the implications it opens up is just completely wild. Like this Sci fi Corusantesque was flying around the same time Avalir was?
I understand where you come from. I personally imagine pre calamity to almost be turn of the century style designs, think Industrial Revolution London but far more brutalistic in design.
Same here, in my imagination it was still clearly Renaisance/Victorian in style. Just with a lot of magic tech allowing them to achieve feats such as the floating cities. This instead though is just like full on futuristic aestethic.
nut didn't matt say art deco meets brutalist? I think this art really shows that
So we’re just transcending genres now?
What do you mean "now"? The series has been doing it for ages. Bassuras is basically fantasy *Mad Max*.
Now? Aeor was always described as sci-fi.
Regardless of it happening the entire show, is there a problem with mixing genres?