What
- Ailor Cultures have essentially been content wiped, extrapolated into hyper-concentrated blurbs, and pasted together on the Ailor Page.
Why
(It’s complicated.)
- There was a total of 26 cultures for the Ailor, half of which had less than 4 players in it, a quarter of which half the player base didn’t even know existed. The amount of format/standard/quality updating this amount of content would require, was literally back breaking and impossible, there was a very clear quality difference between cultures staff cared about, and cultures they did not, and with each new rewrite, the pressure to update old Ailor cultures was mounting. It was an unfeasible and unmaintainable standard that would result in severe burnout, particularly on my part.
- Many of these pages often went ignored. It was not a single isolated incident that the infamous line was uttered: “I don’t need to read the Velheim page, I have watched the show Vikings”. Content is valued wildly differently between players, but ultimately the time spent doing research in cultures and trying to extrapolate fun roleplay applications from them, was not proportional to the value derived from players in roleplay. What kinds of cultural distinctions a player wants to express are up to them, so doing the research and deciding what pieces to adopt should incidentally also be up to them.
- The intimidating presence of the lore scared the hell out of new players. What should often be seen as the easiest to play race with the lowest entry threshold, ended up requiring the most amount of reading to decide if you had actually decided on something you wanted to play. There was no easy way to substract for a new player what the “pro Occult” culture was, or whether that culture was okay with slavery, and having to read all culture pages to find out. It was just too much work for what should be the easiest step-in for new players, because Ailor are advertised as such.
But what about all that lost content!
Yes and no. There is such a thing as “Dead Lore”, and a lot of lore was unfortunately dead lore. Example being Balaur, pretty dead lore, didn’t have many long term implications and often needed stuff to be made up for on the spot when someone tried to invest time into it, which is also unfair to the player. That being said, there was also lore that did matter that is now purged from the pages, and that is where the “but” comes into play.
The Velheim page for example lost a lot of cultural nuance that is now nowhere to be seen. With the summary of all the cultures into smaller sample spreads, we will have other Lore Staff going back into the now-deleted pages, and lifting important pieces of the lore out in my purview to rescue onto other pages. What the “Velheim” page for example lost in context to stuff, can be levied over to articles such as the Skagger Wars, Old Gods faith, and the various new geography pages coming up about Nordkskag and the Cairns. Lore that I have always thought was crucial to understanding the context will be rescued by other staff in the coming weeks and levied to relevant pages where it can be secured. In the meantime, players familiar with this lore can continue to roleplay it out, and none will be any the wiser. Optically barely anything changes for the people on the server, but optically, the wiki becomes a lot cleaner, and friendly to new players.
Where are Leutz-Vixe and Dessolini?
The decision was made to merge them into the Regal culture, largely because these cultures all roughly did the same thing. The benefit of removing the Regal culture page is that the extremely rigid clothing protocols now no longer apply, and the more general “centralized intellectuals” theme that it shared with the Leutz and Dressolini takes over. Their naming customs and language continue to survive, they are declared on the https://wiki.massivecraft.com/Ailor_Naming page, but in lore, both Dressolini and Leutz Vixe just slowly merged with Regal and have become one.
Where are the Caeren and Dunbrae and Aontaithe?
This lore was extremely dense. While it made sense for the few Scottish players we had, it made negative sense for everyone else, so it was deemed best to just dumb down their cultural design as “mountain people”; and name them Gallovian. Conceptually they remain, but more-so as extrapolation from the Gallovian Culture. The same thing happened with Aontaithe, though that language and naming customs remain as part of the merged Gallovian Culture. These three cultures suffered from critical “lack of players” syndrome, and a merged clut makes them much easier to maintain.
Where are the Anian and Svala Culture?
Merged into Întuneric. We decided to go in a different direction with this lore because the Aior cultural sphere lacked a very distinct Affliction fanboy culture. These also suffered from clinical lack of player syndrome, but also a lot of projection on what the expectation of the culture should be. By leaning heavier into Wallachian/Romanian and trying to cut loose a bit on the flip flopping between general balkanism, hopefully this one will be easier and have its own niche.
Additional Changes
- New splash art, because the old one was very old.
- Much more simplified Design rules friendly for new players.
- Manifest Familiar was simplified, and allowed duplicate familiars with Point Buy
- Dark Empathy had some of the emotion reading stuff removed.
- Practiced Mockery was just simplified.
- Manifest Destiny is the same.
- Destiny Stressors is new for people who really like white hair.
- Job Opportunities is kind of a meme. But it should be said and clarified to new players.
That was about all, I could have probably said a thing or two more about it, but I hope the underlying reasons and benefits are clear, and that everyone understands that there aren’t optically any real downsides to any of this. But if there are any questions, feel free to send in a ticket, after having a cup of tea and giving some time to think about them.
Discussion
About the Author
Ocularum is a member of the Direction department. They've been a staff member since 2020.
