RP Discussion: Travelling to/from the First

So I am working on this character who is native to the First... I need to get him to the Source before the Flood of Light.

I did some looking around in RP forums active around the time ShB was released so I have a general idea of what is somewhat acceptable, just looking to see if people have come up with new ideas since then, any new loopholes or if I'll just have to make something up and pray it sounds at least a little bit believable.

Time in the First moved quicker if I remember right, and only matched up to the Source once the WoL is able to travel back and forth (from my understanding, please correct me if I got it wrong)
The character is a Viera, so even if the time mismatch was not a thing, I'm not too worried about it. Right now my last resort is pixie shenanigans, potentially, but I need to see how to make it work.

He doesn't need to come back, he just needs to get to the Source once. The crystal tower won't appear until a good while after he is supposed to be gone, so I can't use any Allag stuff in this case.

What do you think?

First of all, this all reads just fine in terms of understanding; you've got all the facts straight. Yes, time flowed at different speeds between the First and the Source; roughly the Flood of Light was in 3.4-ish. Time presumably wasn't always flowing faster on the First, but it was flowing faster in that period; you won't get much pushback if you said that it was moving slower just before then, for example.

As for how to make the trip, the main struggle is that the 'normal method' doesn't work; the equivalent of voidgates don't really function here. However, there are some options, depending on what exactly feels like it fits for your character. Immediately off the top of my head without checking for further ideas...

1. There are the, for want of a better term, 'gate mages' from the caster role quests. We don't have much info on them, but that does plausibly mean you can say that one of them took a WILD shot.
2. Like you said, Fairy Nonsense is always on the table. They weren't at full Il Mheg-level power before the Flood, but according to the Traverse they did exist.
3. If something deliberate is more your speed, I'd say the most likely culprit is probably Ronka; we can tell they had some pretty serious juice, and thanks to the Great Serpent(s) they're already on sort of a 'suspicion list'.
4. Judging by the Pilgrim's Traverse and the good old lineup of wacky hunting logs, you could make a plausible case that SOMETHING out there was capable of that.
5. If all else fails, there is the applicable answer of 'sometimes rifts just happen'. If it's good enough for Clive, Noctis, and even the permanent Omega/Arkveld crossover fights, it's good enough for RP. Hell, it's possibly what happened to cause the Nier raids to happen!

Thanks, Cleretic! Good to know I had the facts straight. I didn't quite remember when the Flood happened exactly, so thank you for clarifying. I'm aiming to get him there before the ARR -> HW patches begin, so this gives me plenty of wiggle room to figure something out.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

1. There are the, for want of a better term, 'gate mages' from the caster role quests. We don't have much info on them, but that does plausibly mean you can say that one of them took a WILD shot.
2. Like you said, Fairy Nonsense is always on the table. They weren't at full Il Mheg-level power before the Flood, but according to the Traverse they did exist.
3. If something deliberate is more your speed, I'd say the most likely culprit is probably Ronka; we can tell they had some pretty serious juice, and thanks to the Great Serpent(s) they're already on sort of a 'suspicion list'.
4. Judging by the Pilgrim's Traverse and the good old lineup of wacky hunting logs, you could make a plausible case that SOMETHING out there was capable of that.
5. If all else fails, there is the applicable answer of 'sometimes rifts just happen'. If it's good enough for Clive, Noctis, and even the permanent Omega/Arkveld crossover fights, it's good enough for RP. Hell, it's possibly what happened to cause the Nier raids to happen!

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Good options, all of them! He's not related to the Viis from Ronka unfortunately so I can't really use the serpent, as fun as that could be.
I do not remember gate mages at all, are they from the DT role quests? If they are unique to the Source, this gives me new ideas to cook with.


About the fae folk, my assumption without looking too far into it yet is that they all ended up in Il Mheg after the Flood, but lived separately before. Is this mentioned somewhere that they were less powerful? I remember the Pixies mentioned they previously lived in a forest that was consumed by the Flood. I do wonder if the original Pixies died then and new ones were born in what would be Il Mheg later on, if they managed to escape the Flood or something else happened...

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Originally Posted by Shistar

I do not remember gate mages at all, are they from the DT role quests? If they are unique to the Source, this gives me new ideas to cook with.

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The 'gate mages' aren't actually named, they're just my attempt to give a term to the school we see in the Shadowbringers caster role quests; their whole thing is opening rifts (not necessarily to anywhere in particular, it seems), which even in that story ends up with someone dodging the entire Flood of Light by chance.

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Originally Posted by Shistar

About the fae folk, my assumption without looking too far into it yet is that they all ended up in Il Mheg after the Flood, but lived separately before. Is this mentioned somewhere that they were less powerful? I remember the Pixies mentioned they previously lived in a forest that was consumed by the Flood. I do wonder if the original Pixies died then and new ones were born in what would be Il Mheg later on, if they managed to escape the Flood or something else happened...

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They definitely existed before the Flood, but it's not especially clear where; that other forest comes up in Titania's history, but we don't really have any further details. The Pilgrim's Traverse at least gives some confirmation that they were around pre-Flood, but no real information on where; it's more focused on the 'why' and 'how', that just aren't really important right now. Suffice to say they are on the table for doing this, it's just not really clear where you'd have had to go to deal with Fairy Nonsense back then.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

If something deliberate is more your speed, I'd say the most likely culprit is probably Ronka; we can tell they had some pretty serious juice, and thanks to the Great Serpent(s) they're already on sort of a 'suspicion list'.

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To add on to this, since it's pretty much confirmed that extremely similar Ronka-analogues exist on other shards (see: Tender Valley), you could just handwave some shenanigans that you got transported between accidental waygates.

Then just say you stowawayed on a Mamool boat on its way to Eorzea before the events of ARR and you're golden.

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Originally Posted by NegativeS

To add on to this, since it's pretty much confirmed that extremely similar Ronka-analogues exist on other shards (see: Tender Valley), you could just handwave some shenanigans that you got transported between accidental waygates.

Then just say you stowawayed on a Mamool boat on its way to Eorzea before the events of ARR and you're golden.

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Yeah, both Tender Valley and the Skydeep Cenote's architecture is extremely Ronkan. I would not be surprised if it turns out they had a form of inter-shard travel and their empire was bigger than we had any inclination of knowing.

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Originally Posted by Remarus

Yeah, both Tender Valley and the Skydeep Cenote's architecture is extremely Ronkan. I would not be surprised if it turns out they had a form of inter-shard travel and their empire was bigger than we had any inclination of knowing.

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You might, perhaps want to involve to Qitari as they appear to have been the recorders of Ronka, maybe they know of a way.

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Originally Posted by Remarus

Yeah, both Tender Valley and the Skydeep Cenote's architecture is extremely Ronkan. I would not be surprised if it turns out they had a form of inter-shard travel and their empire was bigger than we had any inclination of knowing.

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Tender Valley is deliberate and explicit, it's why I brought them up, but because of that I actually don't think the same is true of Skydeep. The middle sections of both are explicitly Yok Huy in origin (the notes in Tender Valley say as much, and you can see their heiroglyphics in Skydeep), but the third section of Tender Valley is both missing their alphabet, and of entirely the wrong scale; the Yok Huy parts of both are clearly meant for giants closer to Gurfurlur's scale, but the final section feels like it's more human-scale, comparable to Ronka, which we know had viera and hrothgar. And the final section of Skydeep is of course angular and brutalist because it's electrope, and electrope is cubes.

Basically, we have solid in-Dawntrail explanations for why Skydeep and the middle of Tender Valley looks like that, but the end of Tender Valley is throwing up questions we don't have answers to.

My theory... the first's equivalent of the Yok Huy were just... the Yok Huy.

At this point, I have the vibe that the Yok Huy and Ronka were basically on the same level if not several levels greater than even Allag with their incredible achievements, but the weakness of these giants is quite literally the same as the tripod aliens from War of the Worlds in that they have an unbelievably awful immune response to diseases and just die off en mass with one bad flu season.

I'll have to see how much I can stretch it so he can interact with Ronka. I originally had him come from a forest village somewhere past Voeburt (whether his village was consumed by the Flood is another topic, but it's probably somewhere past Voeburt) so making Ronka work will be difficult without rewriting the whole thing... thank you for all the cool ideas, though! ^^

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Originally Posted by Shistar

I'll have to see how much I can stretch it so he can interact with Ronka. I originally had him come from a forest village somewhere past Voeburt (whether his village was consumed by the Flood is another topic, but it's probably somewhere past Voeburt) so making Ronka work will be difficult without rewriting the whole thing... thank you for all the cool ideas, though! ^^

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One thing I would warn, given that we're talking about a roleplaying character, is that Ronka's basically the only 'volatile' part of the First lore-wise. Everything else is pretty set, even the fae didn't really get changed up significantly with the Pilgrim's Traverse, but Ronka's the only place that might get more new information that'd go against what you might be laying down, or force that part of the character into the forefront when you might not be interested in that.

It's up to you how much that's a concern. I know some people that really seek out those volatile parts of the setting so that the game's actively giving them new things to play with, while other people basically go 'I'm only gonna touch a part of the setting in my writing when I know the writers are never gonna touch it again'.

Echoing what Cleretic said here. It's also worth noting that, unless you are going to spend significant time exploring this in active storytelling, it may not be worth getting caught up in the weeds around it. Tripped and fell through a rift is as valid and useful as a twelve page treatise on how a Ronkan Mystic opened a portal through the void to slingshot you past the 13th into the Source if it's just going to be a bullet point in your character's background.

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Originally Posted by Remarus

Echoing what Cleretic said here. It's also worth noting that, unless you are going to spend significant time exploring this in active storytelling, it may not be worth getting caught up in the weeds around it. Tripped and fell through a rift is as valid and useful as a twelve page treatise on how a Ronkan Mystic opened a portal through the void to slingshot you past the 13th into the Source if it's just going to be a bullet point in your character's background.

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Yeah, I think we've been treating the question like this is something you want to actively write out and speculate on (because hey, it's the lore subforum, of course we overthink it). It's entirely possible you just want an 'excuse' plot beat, in which case you might actually want something people won't read too far into.

The fae do well for that in the sense that people will just hear that and go 'yeah, that'll happen'. The 'gate mages' I talked about in the ShB caster quests are also a decent example for that, because they already had their whole story. In this case Ronka might actually be a bad pick, because it kinda does beg for more information that might just not be what you want for the character.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

One thing I would warn, given that we're talking about a roleplaying character, is that Ronka's basically the only 'volatile' part of the First lore-wise. Everything else is pretty set, even the fae didn't really get changed up significantly with the Pilgrim's Traverse, but Ronka's the only place that might get more new information that'd go against what you might be laying down, or force that part of the character into the forefront when you might not be interested in that.

It's up to you how much that's a concern. I know some people that really seek out those volatile parts of the setting so that the game's actively giving them new things to play with, while other people basically go 'I'm only gonna touch a part of the setting in my writing when I know the writers are never gonna touch it again'.

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Yeah, you're correct! I'm honestly just not interested in Ronka at all for this character... especially since we already have a male viera perspective from Anden visiting Fanow at the end of his questline. If I make him interact with Ronkan stuff it would be strange if he wasn't related to the Viis of Fanow, and I don't want him to be related to them. I'm cool with either Voeburt or the fae folk for his lore, but not really Ronka I'm afraid. I know this places me in a more complicated spot to figure out how to get him to the Source.

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Originally Posted by Remarus

Echoing what Cleretic said here. It's also worth noting that, unless you are going to spend significant time exploring this in active storytelling, it may not be worth getting caught up in the weeds around it. Tripped and fell through a rift is as valid and useful as a twelve page treatise on how a Ronkan Mystic opened a portal through the void to slingshot you past the 13th into the Source if it's just going to be a bullet point in your character's background.

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Yes, you are right... it's not a major part of his story for a long time, but eventually he has to tell the truth about his origins to the other characters in the story and I'm not willing to go down the amnesia path lol even if he didn't ever say anything, I would like to know how I got him there!
The rift stuff is my strongest pick right now. Thank you for your insight!