User blog:An Adventurer/Asheron's Call Early Story Development

As lead designer, Toby Ragaini and a team of designers created the back-story (characters, monsters, history, and timeline of Dereth) for the game as early as the summer of 1995.

An early map of Dereth

It is unclear what the earliest versions of the story looked like. But one old map gives us some ideas. Although Maggie's lists it as the Beta Map of Dereth, there is no date given for its creation or release. And I believe that it is actually much older than beta, which lasted only 8 months My main reason for this is the layout of the map. If you compare it to the map of dereth extracted from the cell.dat at release, numerous details line up perfectly. Aside from coloring, the following things match more or less perfectly: The entire outline of Osteth (from northern LB all the way around to the southern LB, and then from top to bottom of the inner sea), the terrain details of all of southern Osteth, middle Osteth, northern Direlands, and the lost wish mountain range/Olthoi north area, and although the mountains in northern Osteth (from about 0N up and from the river west) on the early map look different than those on the release map, their placement is the same. All of these details lining up tell me that the early map was generated from game files, and is not a hand rendered artist's map.

How does that place the map before beta? Well, if it really was made from game files, it means that at some point all the mountains in northern Osteth were redesigned to their current style and the entire middle and southern Direlands, southern land bridge, and Asheron's Isle were completely redone. Such huge changes were not likely done in beta because AC was placed in code freeze during beta, and only serious bugs were fixed.

Now let’s examine some of the details of the map. It starts off well enough. Its labeled the Island of Dereth, is more or less the same layout, River Prosper is there and labeled, Lake Blessed is called Lake Cragstone - but that is a minor difference, and Tumeroks populate the Direlands. We also see the familiar heritage groups of Sho, Gharu'ndim, and Aluvians are about where they are supposed to be.

However, we have a 4th group present: the Viamontians. Looking closer, you will see that the names are those of the four nations as they appear on Ispar, rather than the names of the misplaced humans on Dereth. And to the south of Gharu'n is the Naquet Desert, an obvious hint at the Naqut Desert found on Ispar. It would appear that, not only were the four heritage groups we know today originally planned to be on Dereth, but that originally, there may have been no Ispar at all, and humans were native to Dereth.

Closer examination and comparison of the early map and the release map with ACExplorer and Photoshop reveals:

• "The High Kingdom of Aluvia", based on the triangle marker, was centered around approximately 25N, 40E - west of Cragstone, about halfway between Tibri's Cave and Fort Witshire.
• "Viamont", based on the triangle marker, was centered around approximately 31N, 15E - fairly close to a tower overrun by banderlings at 31.6N, 16.8E.
• "Gharu'n", based on the triangle marker, was centered around approximately 2N, 19E - just north of Samsur, near what is now a skeleton tent.
• The "Sho Empire", based on the triangle marker, was centered around approximately 26S, 53E - in the middle of the Blackmire swamp, not particularly close to anything.

How much of the story was created during this time? And how much content was added based on this early version of the story? It seems like no coincidence that just like on Ispar today, originally Viamont was west of Aluvia and north of Gharu'n. Was the fact that Aluvia and Viamont had a history of conflict established at that point? Perhaps some points of interest today are leftovers from that time...

Perhaps Fort Witshire, standing out on the hills west of Cragstone, was originally an Aluvian fort used for defense against Viamont. A similar walled fort lies south of Witshire at 17.8N, 39.2E. This fort however, was never finished. There are no doors attached to the structures, and no finishing details at all. It’s possible development of this fort was abandoned when the story had changed and Viamontians were no longer present on Dereth. Could the tower at 31.6N, 16.8E, very close to the triangle marking Viamont, have been a Viamontian watch tower? And likewise for a similar tower deeper in the woods at 38.2N, 7.1E? Edelbar, the Aluvian village west of Holtburg that has long sat in ruins after being attacked by Tumeroks, could have originally been destroyed by Viamontians.

There is also some evidence hinting at Viamont-Gharu'n conflict in early Dereth. Suntik Village, like Edelbar, was a village that according to the story today was attacked by monsters some time prior to PY 10 (release). Suntik also happened to be the Gharu'ndim town that was closest to Viamont. One puzzling and interesting fact about the Suntik quest is the messenger. At 26.9N, 7.7E, along the side of the road is a corpse (unusable) that has in its hand a Letter of Request from the Naqib of Suntik and stuck in its side an arrow. There are also arrows stuck in the tree. Monougas, who according to the story today carried out the attack on Suntik, do not use bows. The only missile weapons they use are throwing clubs. Perhaps these arrows are leftovers from a time when Viamontians were the ones who attacked. There is another destroyed Gharu'ndim settlement at 21.4N, 24.8W along the inner sea. Although fairly far west from Viamont and Gharu'n, this could be another site where Viamontians attacked.

Surely, there couldn't be much information on the Sho hinting at this possible early Dereth. After all, the history of Ispar tells us that the Sho had only a very small amount of contact with the other nations of the Ironsea. And most of the history of Sho on Ispar involves the fact that their nation exists on two islands and the main landmass. The Sho Empire depicted on the early map is in the middle of the swamp, not near the coast or any islands.

Yet, there is still one tiny spec of information hinting at the possibility that originally the Sho (and thus, the other 3 nations) were intended to be the original, natural inhabitants of Dereth. The original text of the Bound Book, the text describing the history of the Mines of Despair, stated that, "Every day, for twelve generations, we picked and cracked those tunnels open forcing them to reveal their wealth." Twelve generations is a long time- much longer than the 10 or so years the Sho had been on Dereth at release. This passage has been removed from the book, but still exists in the copy of the text which made it on the AC:DM CD Lore.

But that chapter of Dereth's history was scrapped. The idea of a 4th heritage group was dropped and we soon started to see a story more like what we know today form.