World Complete Rework Of Bob's Lore

seeing everyone react so positively to this, it is heartwarming

 

@Aarontti what you do not like?

 

you are a fricking genius

 

make it one letter too. there is no reason to have 10 different letter fragments if you get them all in the same place.

probably shouldn't give people seizures

it already is one




and one question: did you think about anything relating to gateway island? a part of the letter is there, so bob probably went there.

 

We did - the Sealed Letter there will be removed as it wouldnt make sense for Bob to be in Gateway Island in this version

 

that's a fair point, and the effect definently could be changed to something less extreme

 

"I will mark the things that we didn't change with the color red."

Bob is born ......


Best thing I have ever read.

 

@Bart (MC) what would you change?
@Bluescreen what you do not like?

I think this is more about backwards compatibility (from pre-1.19 times where they were obtained from shrines), so that you do not suddenly have 1 or even no item instead of 10

I will add the possibility of it though.

I will remove that part

I will remove it

 

Okay, I have some things to say.

1: I feel it would be more interesting if Nilrem remained canon and either Nilrem is a codename for Martyn or Martyn was his apprentice. Having a thing about Nilrem dying would be interesting after all..

2: Something cool about Martyn could be in the clock mystery, we know almost nothing about the new one yet though so writing lore for that would be hard

3: I think it could be better to expand upon Mehme having Bob's diary than to remove it.. Maybe he found the diary on Gateway Island while doing research? It is quite illogical though...

4: I liked the idea of Bob being a master of the 4 classes because he trained in each of them for like 20 years, so I don't know how to feel about the change made to that. It makes more sense with Mael and stuff, but it just feels wrong to remove 3 of the weapon masters from the lore. Also, I don't feel like Martyn would be the kind of guy to train in combat, more like a dude with a bunch of wisdom

5: You mentioned Bob being a one-dimensional character but didn't really suggest anything to fix that as there is no implication that he ever did anything wrong here. I think it would be interesting to have a Bob questline where we see some things he screwed up and how he ultimately lost the fight against the Eye / Dern beast / whoever else he could possibly have been fighting.

You and the lore discord did a good job but there's some parts I'm not sure about, so I voted that I would make major changes on the poll.

I'd also like to point out that we know pretty much nothing that the official lore team are working on, for all we know they have something better being prepared. Then again that's like replying to a suggestion with ''well actually they could be working on that already''

 

1) Nilrem was just a random and a really old character used in 1 thing.
2) codename could be interesting, but how would you explain it without ruining it?

1) Neither Bob nor Nilrem ever went to Gavel. There is no way for them to appear there
2) Why would he even be there? He has already work in the Time Valley, he cannot just be in Gavel until we decide to get there...

Doesn't really seem right to me, as I don't think it would really make sense.
But I can of course put it on disc. for others to consider.

1) they were just 3 random one-time characters + Mael
2) Martyn didn't teach him just combat magic, as well as Mael didn't teach Bob only spirit stuff (I will take it to Lore disc. to talk about it)

We changed so it is not "Hey Bob, here you have some map you will never know how it works or how you got it, but you need to learn stuff to save the Wynn"
Now it is "Oh no, Momo died, I want to bring her back! What? I can't? Ok, then I have to avenge her death!"
But of course, it would be possible to improve it further.

Do you see the difference?
If Momo didn't die Wynn would be probably screwed, as he would not have a reason to become Wynn's hero.

Also we really did not want to change his fate, as it was a mystery the CT surely wanted to use, so we kept it open.

Yeah.
We hope for the best, but we know that nothing if this might get ever in the game.

 

Well, the idea is that Martyn is an olm who was somehow entrusted with taking care of the valley, so if he did have a master, it would've been hundreds of years ago, most likely. It being a code name could work, but it seems like it would just be unnecessarily confusing to people who don't know/understand they're the same person.

Bob doesn't go to gateway island anymore, the only time he's mentioned to go to the ocean at all is the one time with dead island now. And, since Mehme isn't stated to leave Gavel, I don't see how he could ever find Bob's diary. MAYBE if it was someone else it could work, but it still seems strange that it wouldn't have just been given to Tarod or Martyn or someone.

I see where you're coming from here - it does feel a little less... cool, I guess, to have Bob be trained in the 4 weapons in such a disorganized manner, but the 4 masters never really made sense (why did this random poor woman have a detailed map to the 4 most powerful people in the continent? Why did they (besides Mael) agree to train this random poor boy instead of someone who's already powerful?). It's much more logical now that he would go to Troms for training and that Skien, having been rejected by everyone else, would be able to train him in all non-magical weapons, then Martyn could train him with wands and spells, since no human in Wynn is supposed to have normal magic before the villagers show up. It would be possible, I suppose, to move the bow back to Mael and add another master in/around Troms so they all have one weapon again, but it would be kind of clunky compared to the current setup, I feel.

I think the main point of him being one-dimensional is that he never really felt anything in the old story, which we tried to fix by making him distraught about Momo's death. I agree that having him fail against Dern would be cool, but we didn't really want to touch that part of his story since the CT presumably has something planned there already.

There are a few GMs in the lore discord, and we did ask them about a few aspects of this beforehand, so I'm pretty sure they would have told us at some point if they were already working on a better version of this. (Then again, they didn't tell us about the changes in 1.20.1, so maybe not.)

 

Correction: They would not because CT stuff

 

I don't understand why you guys decided to change it to ''he climbed the mountains'' from ''he sailed to gateway island''

Literally the entire point of that quest is Bob lore as well as a first glimpse at Dern, so it feels like a wasted opportunity. Bob appeared at dead island probably by chance, probably while sailing to Gateway island. Taking that one piece out of the whole puzzle makes the story into one convoluted mess.

________________________________

Also I would just like to expand on what I said about how Bob fell to the darkness (a theory I have about it)

I theorise that the Olm are weak to darkness, which is why they could not defend themselves against the Dern beast. Martyn could not tell that Bob was part Olm, so he told Bob that he could win the fight. Bob, determined to defeat the beast, set off to Dern where he made his way to the manifestation of Darkness. It was the Dern Beast themself that informed Bob of his olmic side, and Bob knew he was doomed. In one final attempt, Bob took his own life to seal away the beast with the sheer power of his vitality, keeping it trapped in Dern until it can free itself. Perhaps Dullahan is collecting souls so that he can free the Dern beast, and not himself.

 

Martyn is presumably too old for Nilrem to be his master, remember he's most likely part-Olm so he certainly lived for a looooong time. Long enough to know of the era in which the Olm built this valley, which was well before 0 AP. Nilrem is most likely just a human and even humans with longer timespans (such as Mael, which in game doesn't have a reason to be that old but here we tried to explain it by saying that spirits gave their lifeforce to him) don't exceed 1000 years of age. I think making Martyn more important than he currently is is pretty nice, and we don't have to stretch Bob to Gavel (since he most likely learnt of the Darkness in Gavel). Also if you put yourself in the shoes of a say, level 15 player, you're exploring around the Time Valley after completing Deja Vu and stumble upon Martyn's house where there's the papers, and you think "Wow, this is interesting" because it shows that there is something about Martyn that remains a secret. It doesn't have the same impact if it's just some random wizard dude who nothing, or nobody, ever mentions EVER besides the Sealed Letters, and he's suddenly Bob's most trusted friend.

How could Martyn have ties to Gavel, though? Especially the Clock Mystery. I think the gods of time (Kronos etc) that were in the Clock Mystery aren't related to the Olm.

How would he go to Gateway Island? How would he know it's more than just a legend? Seaskipper says that not even he was able to find Gateway Island, so it's probably either hidden by magic or in an alternate dimension. We don't know of any time Mehme goes outside of Gavel, and even if he did, him finding Gateway Island would be extremely improbable. Plus, we don't know why or how Bob had ties to the scientist brothers.

And a dude with a bunch of wisdom is capable enough of training others in magic, no? It'd make sense if it was just a random guy walking into the valley and asking Martyn to train him, but Bob is half-Olmic so Martyn would certainly have some interest. He would also be the type of guy who'd want to fight against the Darkness imo, because since he was likely around at the time of the Olm he knows what a dangerous force it is. Plus, Bob trained for 14 years. So, you're not taking too much out of it. Plus, the masters like Chak, Ethe, etc. never actually appear in the lore anywhere else (except Mael) so it feels like a waste to create a bunch of "masters" on the spot and then dump them away after their purpose of training Bob is over. Obviously, he's still the master of the 4 classes.

I specifically edited Reincarnation's dialogue to hint at Bob failing to defeat the Dernic Beast because I felt the same thing that you're feeling right now. He says, "I tried to grasp [the Darkness] but I failed, and my attempt was fatal". If you're saying like, "I want to see a scenario where Bob is forced to do a morally gray decision", trust me I do too but that's entirely up to the CT. We can't make the scope of the suggestion too enormous, doing something like that would require a secret discovery (adding another Wynn Plains secret discovery seems too much imo) or a quest, which we're not here to do. However you could treat him leaving his friends behind and not trusting in his best friend and then leaving on what is basically a suicide mission as a "morally gray" decision imo.

...Have you read Haven Antiquity's new dialogue? It explains how he got to Dead Island. Also we removed Gateway Island from Bob's story because the addition of it turns everything into more of a "convoluted mess" than it would be if he never visited the island in the first place. Him climbing the mountains doesn't contradict any of the lore, compared to Gateway Island (some of the inconsistencies of that island are: How did Bob discover it? How did Bob reach it if it's hidden/in another dimension? Assuming that Bob went to the island for the portal there, how would he know about it? What happened to Bob after he went into the portal?). Removing Bob from the equation doesn't take anything away from Fantastic Voyage because the Sealed Letter there is simply a small easter egg/discovery. Gateway Island still has that portal, we haven't touched anything on that island at all besides Bob's ties to the island. As I said, we changed it to him climbing the mountains near Twain Manor because it doesn't change or interfere any other lore.

 

The Olm created Time Valley as a means of controlling time. The purpose of this is unknown. However, the time thing could relate in some way (it is a stretch though)

 

Sidenote: I dislike being mentioned. If I wanted to say what I did not like, I would have commented instead, but noo you gotta pressure me into doing a comment.
I won't go into full detail of everything I dislike, but I'll point three major things I dislike among others. Just my opinions, though! Alternatively it might just be my hyperactive worldbuilding brain nitpicking on everything.
I'm going to state that you did clearly put effort into this, and some parts are things I agree with (like Bob's Lost Soul requiring a rework. badly. Don't think your version is quite the way to do so though) though I feel like it could have been much better and doesn't work in several aspects.


My first issue - and most major issue - is the general rule that this rework follows. Let's take an example.
Bob's backstory has several undetailed characters. Ethe, Chak, Fier. So, when reworking this, I think it'd be important to detail them-
oh. You just removed them.

This is the big issue I spot: Rather than reworking existing parts of the lore and detailing them, this rework instead chooses to cut those parts entirely. And the replacements aren't always fitting. Let's take an example: Skien's inclusion to Bob's backstory and how this ultimately affects his own story arc.

Right now, Skien's whole thing is that he was a paranoid general who hated the villagers, and eventually fell from grace after being betrayed in the midst of battle, being sent to an island base afterwards where his paranoia turns into full-on madness, before he eventually causes an even greater mistake that is ultimately his undoing.
A classic tragedy - he starts in a prestigeous position, an inciting event sets him in a position where his fatal flaw - paranoia - spirals out of control and it ends with him losing everything.

Your addition to this is: Bob saved Skien from an angry crowd, and then extracted training from him.

Tell me, where exactly does training a hero fit into Skien's arc?

Of course, you could have detailed how Bob saw his mentor was in a fragile mental state after being sent to the island, and had him send one of his pets to remind Skien Bob still cares for him and is thankful for the training, with Skien instead taking it as proof that Bob was betraying him by sending one of his pets to watch him as a spy... and that wouldn't even break the timeline much, assuming that Skien stayed in Troms for a decade or two longer after training Bob.
But that's just an idea from me.

For my second issue, it's kind of nitpicky but I don't really get your issues you listed near the start? Perhaps I'm not that into wynn lore as you are (I'm still pretty into it) but here's my nitpicks on them.

I don't see your Mael issue, really - that's very easy to explain away and has lots of potential explanations. Things like "working with life and death had given him a long life" or "magical life-extension" or "he was already dead, and his ghost trained Bob" (the last of which I support the most: We know Mael's ghost is still around in Alem.)
"Where did he go?" In fear of being nitpicky... that's not inconsistency. That's simply a question that hasn't been answered yet! And given he was half-Olm, as seems to be implied by the lore, I figure we'll get the answers when we reach Dern.
Same for "Why would he trust Mehme with his diary?" We don't know.

...your point here, I feel, is really bad. In the entire game, Bob has twelve lines of dialogue that aren't casting spells. Four in the Wynn Plains Monument and eight in Reincarnation (which are exposition, I feel, and thus don't really count for characterization.)
There's also the sealed letters, which have a little characterization.

It doesn't take a genius to realize that Bob is a one-dimensional good guy because you only get twelve lines and a letter from him.
In your rework, there's twelve lines from him that are somewhat longer and a letter. Granted, that's better. It's still not good enough.

I feel like them having their own story is already enough reason for them to *not* be part of Bob's story - Martyn's simply the guardian of Time Valley: Does training a hero and working with him for the good of all really fit his character that well? Skien I already covered as to why I think it wouldn't fit (and how I think you could make it better).

The third issue I want to point out - for fear of this getting too long is that some of the stuff seems to have only been changed for the sake of being changed.
Why replace the cow and the sheep with the wolf and the ocelot? Because a cow and a sheep aren't normal travelling companions? It's pretty weak as justification.
Why put one of the animals in dead island instead of Maro Peaks? I mean... I guess it's a place Bob had been to?
Why have Tarod give Bob his nickname instead of the people he was around? This I actually have strong opinions about - it characterizes Bob a bit to have his nickname come from the people he worked to protect, and to have him willingly adopt it, rather than having it just be a thing his friend came up with.


Oh, actually, one last nitpick.
...I feel it would have been better to keep Bob as someone who only disappeared sixteen years ago, rather than outright saying he was dead and had died thirty years ago.
For one, it makes it feel like there's only been a short amount of time since major events were happening (16 years as opposed to 29) and for two, it keeps the suspense for longer and makes the player interested in learning of what happened to him - while saying that "hey he died thirty years ago" doesn't really build any suspense nor encourage the player to look into it.

anyways, I don't really want to clog up this thread too much. give me a discord link for wynntheory in a dm or something if you want to continue.

 

This is crazily good and far better than Bob's current lore, but I have a few problems with it. First, the section about Skien seems too much of a stretch in my opinion, as Skien's lore along with his quest would have to be changed up. Second, the names of the Wolf and the Ocelot should probably be changed to something like Ruff and <Insert Ocelot Nam Here> or an animal sound-ish name, to fit in with Cluckles. One suggestion I have is to make Bob's Half-Olm past have more to do with his story, something I think the CT should have done in the 1.19 update.

 

Introducing too many characters in a story eventually comes back to bite. The main four characters in Bob's story that don't get any exposition at all are Chak, Ethe, Fier and Nilrem. Frankly, I don't see a way how these characters could be detailed and given expositions in a satisfying way. For once, the first three are probably dead. Giving a dead character exposition, especially when the only ways to detail those characters in a game such as Wynncraft is either through secrets, secret discoveries or quests (item lores can't build a character), is very difficult. Their only mentions are in Ragni's Library, and I don't see how exploring these characters is possible without feeling shoehorned or underwhelming due to their irrelevance in the lore. Would you explore them with a quest trying to explain their backstories? Enjoy people saying that the quest has too much lore/cutscenes, as is the case with Headless History and its extremely low replay value (gameplay takes priority over lore, sadly), since exploring FOUR characters in one quest is impossible otherwise, and even then, unless you make it longer than A Hunter's Calling, there would still be people saying that their characters would feel underwhelming and unexplored. A Headless History can have so much exposition in so few stages because 1. Lari is already an established character, and 2. Dullahan's story is very strongly tied to Lari's, so giving his character exposition is easy. These four characters, Chak, Ethe, Fier and Nilrem, are all independent from eachother, as far as we know. Would you give one quest to each of these characters? Four quests in total? No way the CT would do something like that just to give some characters exposition, and even still, you'd have people complaining that such a questline would be a waste since frankly the majority of the Wynn playerbase isn't as attached to the lore as we are. Secret discoveries? Every area in the game except the Jungle (which you probably couldn't use to give Bob's masters exposure, except for the guy in Troms) has secret discoveries already, so no way. There's an alternative option that you could use but that I frankly think wouldn't work, and that would be taking the Skien route. The reason Skien is such a beautifully written character is that he gets DOZENS of signs giving him exposition, as well as some items that detail his lore. But this is only because he has an entire ISLAND dedicated to him. The other masters don't get such a luxury, so unless you shoehorn exposition in the worst way possible, exploring these characters in a complete and satisfying way is in my opinion impossible. You know how a character like Theorick, who only actually appears in the gameplay in AHC and Ice Barrows, is such a good and satisfying character? He gets multiple quests and secret discoveries to explore him. Nesaak's story basically revolves around him.
This is why we instead opted to use already-established, well written characters, such as Martyn and again, Skien. Martyn was especially interesting because right now, despite having a lot of potential (he's at least part Olmic, and the Olm tie very heavily into Wynncraft's lore), it kinda falls flat as he only appears in one quest. We tried fixing it by having him train Bob, so it expands upon his character and, having built the Tomb, it gives a more mysterious aura around him. If you put yourself in the shoes of a player who does all the quests as he levels up and likes exploration (which is what we wanted to aim at), the more you level the more you see this character unfold, ending with Reincarnation, the climax of his (and Bob's) story which finally unwraps everything (after 60 levels, mind you).
According to @Blastbasher, there's an around 20 year-long period of time before Skien gets banished to Skien's Island in which he does absolutely nothing. We (well, he) filled this time period by having him train Bob for 7 years to give his character some more "meat".

I have never touched on the Skien part of the project, other people who understood Skien's lore better than me did, but I really like this idea honestly!

"Where did he go?" might have been a little weirdly written, my bad for that. What I meant when I wrote that (I wrote that section, check the credits), was that there's some conflicting information about where Bob went. This isn't just for the sake of mystery, it's flat out inconsistent. We know Bob went to Gateway Island, but then... what? We know Gateway Island's portal leads to somewhere, but it might not be Dern because there's no confirmation? And... The portal breaks when we go through it...? And the portal in the island doesn't look anything like the other portals do right now? And... There's Bob's weapons at the Silent Expanse altar even though in Gateway it was hinted that he wanted to go to Dern? See what I'm getting at? It's far too confusing to just be a "mystery". Don't try to justify incomprehensible conflicting pieces of evidence as being a mystery. With Mehme, you may be right, but since we don't know much about Bob's times in Gavel you can't really justify it yet. For all we know, Mehme is a crazed lunatic and he barely has ties to his brothers anymore since they're all overseas. Could be that Bob met the brothers before they became insane, but we don't know.

Is it? Wut?

Yes, but dialogue isn't the only way to build a character. As I mentioned above, there's quests (Bob is mentioned or straight up appears in plenty), secret discoveries (lmao, Bob is pretty much the main character of the Wynn Plains discoveries), etc. Bob is an extremely important character to Wynn's lore, as he ties into both the Olm and the Darkness, and I don't think that wasting that character to make him a hero archetype is the best use of it. We didn't make him into a fully fleshed out, tragic emotional character, but we gave hints that Bob actually has emotions and a personality. He was heavily distraught over his mother's death, and he recognizes that he failed to save the world when he went to Dern/SE (Honestly, do you think Bob would even stand a chance against the Dernic Beast?) A little bit of characterization doesn't hurt anybody.

For this I feel we need to explore Martyn's character a bit. He's an old guy who protects the Time Valley from strangers and seems to deeply care about people like Asher, to the point where he'd use time magic to save him. Sadly, that's as much characterization as he gets in a quest as short as Deja Vu. So we can extrapolate that he's an altruistic, kind man. So yes, I do think that he'd like to work for the good of everyone, especially since Bob is half-Olmic, similar to Martyn who may be part-Olmic himself.

It symbolizes the places Bob trained in, the places that Bob spent much time in his youth: the jungle and the tundra. Would you care to tell me where ocelots and wolves live in Minecraft and in Wynncraft?
Also yeah, they are better travelling companions.

Yes. Also he knew Old Siwel.

And did Bob not work to protect Tarod? It still has the same effect.

Bob says that him going to Dern/SE was "fatal" (most already know/think that Bob is dead in the current version)... at level 74.
Also the difference between 16 years and 29 isn't much in my opinion, it's not the type of thing to change anyone's perspectives on anything. We did try to keep the suspense as much as possible. In fact, we wanted Bob's story to unwrap as you advanced through the levels. Initially, at the starting levels, you think "Oh, who's this Bob guy? I guess he was a hero or something", then as you level up you learn more and more about his story. You do secret discoveries, you see his backstory and the people he worked to protect. At level 45, it's hinted that Bob's true fate is different than what it's thought to be by the public. Then, finally, at level 74, you fight Bob's Reincarnation and understand what truly happens to him, which in my opinion is a very satisfying "end" to his story. Obviously the CT may have plans for Bob in Dern, but as of right now, Bob's story wraps up at Reincarnation. So, if you think about it, not much actually changed.

Thanks for the reply, though! Also, sorry for the wall of text lol.

 

Well and I dislike someone saying "I don't like this" and not saying why.
Depends on one's pov, I suppose, both are valid points.

I agree with @Matteo_Games's post, he said it well.

Just 2 things:

I think there is quite high probability (if not confirmed) of it being true.

Not confirmed.

Do you want to join the discord just to argue?
But yeah, if this will not solve in 1-3 replies I probably will, if you do not want to join us.

I honestly do not see a problem with the names.

The fact he is half-Olm is like half of his story. His magic capabilities and his end.

 

I think he means like how every one of Bob's pets is named after the sound they make (Cluckles = Cluck, Mooington = Moo, Baab = Baa), but I don't think that's mandatory for all of them.