Its about the Duskwight Elezen.

I recently completed the DRG story and you meet a certain Duskwight guy during the Lancer quests. While I understand his gripes with the Lancers Guild, the story is far less poignant when you're also a Duskwight and he's complaining about how they're stereotyped. I'm standing there like...yo...I'm a Duskwight too...And I'm a Warrior of Light...I wish the game actually made more references that that...

Magnai has unique quotes on your race and gender when you meet him. It's neat.

It's hard to do dynamic text like this and keep the lore consistency so I get why they don't do it much.

They're around if you're looking for them. Most noticably the two researchers at Issom-Har in the South Shroud; also I believe the Redbelly Wasps are all Duskwights. There's at least one NPC in Gridania (getting hassled by some other people outside the Lancers' Guild if I remember correctly) and a Wood Wailer in one of the post-ARR Ramuh quests.

Outside of Gridania, I can think of Quentenain at the Drowning Wench, an unnamed NPC at the Goldsmiths' Guild, and... Jandelaine the aesthetician. (He's actually Ishgardian but that's only brought up in a Lv50 sidequest.) There's also a Sharlayan character in the AST plotline.

While looking at character data, I discovered a few Ishgardian characters have Duskwight models as well - Ysayle, Ser Grinnaux, and surprisingly Count Edmont, but not his sons. (Although by lore the Ishgardians separated from the Gridanians prior to the Wildwood/Duskwight split.)


I also thought Urianger might be a Duskwight, since he has his Sharlayan mark on his cheek, similar to the Duskwight-specific tattoos - though according to the character data, he's a Wildwood.


And yes, they do get blamed fairly often for things - I can also vaguely remember the quest Vidu was talking about (you fight someone at Stonesthrow?) and during that "failed raid on the black marketeer" in the post-ARR quests, you're told it was a group of Duskwight mercenaries and Ilberd's team are pursuing them. Also one of the Gridanian levequest descriptions blames them for vandalism.


I really wish they went into more depth about them. One of my alt characters is a Duskwight just because I liked the design, so now I want to know more about them because I have no real idea what actually defines them beyond "they live in caves, except for the ones that don't". Even the lorebook has very little - a few details without much 'big picture' information. And why is Gelmorra abandoned if they're specifically the ones that chose to stay behind there?


The few bits of useful lore I can remember being given in-game:

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Lv22 MSQ: Druthers House Rules
Buscarron: In case you didn't see, the bloke who caught the brunt of that outburst is a Duskwight Elezen. They're a people who shun cities to live in the wilds, making them no better than brigands in the eyes of many. To be fair, the Duskwights can be an unruly lot, but they ain't so bad once you get to know them. And it don't seem right to bar a whole race of people from the Druthers for the misdeeds of a few.

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Lv22 sidequest: Potsherds for Posterity
Rolandaix: I am all but convinced that we stand in what was once Gelmorra's residential district. Alas, I have yet to recover a sufficiency of domestic objects to confirm my theory. [These artifacts are hundreds of years old.]
[...]
My work here is far from done, but this discovery brings me one tantalizing step closer to realizing my dream: the restoration of these ruins, and their reestablishment as a settlement for the Duskwight Elezen. Gridanians have long perceived my people as outcasts and brigands, yet if we Duskwights can return a measure of prosperity to this fallen city, we would no longer need to resort to common theft or banditry in order to make ends meet. Imagine it!

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So yeah.... what happened to make them abandon the city?

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Originally Posted by Vidu

(yep, a bunch of xenophobic nazis, thats what Gridania is, basically)

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Xenophobic? Yes. Nazis? No. That's not a description you use lightly, and Gridania is not at that point.

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Originally Posted by Stellafreyja

I recently completed the DRG story and you meet a certain Duskwight guy during the Lancer quests. While I understand his gripes with the Lancers Guild, the story is far less poignant when you're also a Duskwight and he's complaining about how they're stereotyped. I'm standing there like...yo...I'm a Duskwight too...And I'm a Warrior of Light...I wish the game actually made more references that that...

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I actually made that quest into backstory for my Duskwight character! (Still in the player's role, not as the other guy.) And yeah, he took the whole thing a bit more personally than the generic WoL....

I'm not sure if ARR had any variable text, but they've gotten better at it in the later games.


Funnily enough, the also written-for-generic-WoL archer quest ended up with a line that worked better as a Duskwight. Silvairre (a Wildwood) has been dismissive of you all along, and then when the guildmaster has him team up with you and another character, he protests that he doesn't want to have to work with "the Miqo'te and...the other one". The other one. Thanks so much.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

So yeah.... what happened to make them abandon the city?

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The Shroud became avaliable again once the Water Calamity settled down, it isn't made clear why but Gelmorra itself wasn't sustainable, its people either collapsed with it or left it. The fall of Dalamud and the current Calamity supposedly destroyed Duskwight caves and residencies.

That being said, Gelmorra fell and Gridania thrived. Duskwights were those that stuck with the latter.

As far as I know, we havn't killed any elementals. In fact, the entire Conjurer and White Mage storylines revolve around making sure the Elementals aren't tainted. Because when Elementals go bad, they go really bad (potentially causing an Umbral Calamity bad). So Grindania is perpetually in an "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" scenario. The reason Gridinia has to take the stance it does towards poachers, illegal logging (Ixal), etc. is because if they don't, they run the risk of the Elementals throwing everyone out of the Twelveswood. And that's if they're "nice" enough to not kill everyone. The reasons why the Gridanians don't want to let the Duskwight and Keepers do certain things isn't necessarily because they don't like the Duskwight and Keepers. It's because letting certain things go unchecked could lead to the Forest Elementals turning on everyone and killing them.

This puts Gridania in a bit of a weird spot when compared with Limsa and Ul'dah. All three city-states are portrayed as having problems with them. However, Limsa's and Ul'dah's problems are very human in origin. This leads to the potential fixes to those problems being human as well. Gridania's problems ultimately have very little to with what people want and everything to do with what a bunch of inhuman energy beings want. And the inhuman energy beings have all the power in the relationship. There's very little mortal humans can do to try to fix Gridania's problems that doesn't amount to "do what the Elementals say".

Edit about Gelmora: From both the Lore Book and various lore interviews, it seems that Gelmora used to be the size of Gridania at least. Having a good half to two-thirds of the entire population leave at once (all the humans and half the elezen let's say) would decimate it. It would simply be physically impossible for 1/3 of the the remaining population to do all the work the entire population once did. Stuff doesn't get repaired, roofs cave in, enough resources can't be gathered, etc. Gelmora would probably have various parts of it cut off as tunnels collapsed and overtime it would get worse and worse as facilities broke down. It would probably also have to deal with people constantly leaving as conditions worsened and word of how the above-ground was now safe to live on trickled down. Eventually the population would be too small to sustain itself and the city would have died out.

There's plenty of real-world versions of this to draw from. Several of which have no known reason for the population to leave the city they were living in behind (Montezuma Castle would be a good example).

Gelmorra was abandoned because, when the Wildwoods and Hyur living with them left to live in the Twelveswood, the Duskwight were unable to maintain the city on their own. It fell into disrepair and ruin before being completely abandoned; one such ruin is the Palace of the Dead.

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Originally Posted by ObsidianFire

As far as I know, we havn't killed any elementals.

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Not in ARR, but in version 1.0 you certainly did (ironically pre-Calamity the elementals were actually much stronger and far more dangerous than they are now - the Calamity definitely seems to have weakened them somewhat). In fact, destroying an elemental was actually a Gridanian main scenario quest in 1.0 (it's a long story, but the short of it is the elemental of a Hedgetree was angered by vandalism of it's tree so much it went berserk and became a danger to not only the Gridanians but the forest itself and thus the other elementals authorized the padjal to take it down, using the player's character and combined forces of the Wood Wailers and God's Quiver to do so with E-Sumi Yan and O-App Pesi providing support - specifically it was a solo boss fight the player had to complete.

Then there was a scene connected to the 7th Umbral Era quests in 1.0 where a group of elementals were slain wholesale by unknown forces (as I never did the 7th Umbral Era quests in 1.0 I'm unsure who or what the context of this particular scene was - I presume Ascians were involved somehow though). And elementals were actually random enemies that patrolled the forest you could attack too (and they spawned not just in 1.0's Black Shroud either, you could find elementals anywhere in Eorzea). These have been replaced in ARR by the generic 'sprite' enemies though which are not the same thing (they're just masses of formless elementally-aspected aether).

Either way, 1.0 definitely showed the elementals could be destroyed, but the implications of such events were particularly dangerous for all concerned.

Ah, that explains why elementals are in the lorebook bestiary with an illustration of a sprite I’ve only seen used in Eureka.

They tend to use races relevant to a region in Lore, much of which is already established. For example, you run into plenty of Sun Seekers in Ala Mhigo and Ul'dah and Keepers of the Moon in Gridania and Limsa. This reflects the enviroments these clans generally favour. Likewise Plainsfolk and Sea Wolves are mostly found in Limsa, their historical home, and Dunesfolk are mostly found in Ul'dah. However you will find little to no Lala's or Miqote in Ishgard or Doma with the exception of Ul'dah merchants for the most part.

Really Duskwights are the main outlier due to the fact their clan is very isolationist and the areas they most inhabit are the areas of the Shroud we haven't gone to.