The Necrologos

[Anonymoose]

Necrologos means awesome SP, you'll be Physical Level 50 Rank 50 in no t-wait... my thoughts are clouded...

ETYMOLOGY
Necro has an obvious meaning (death). Logos is a little more fluid. My guess is that it's meant to be the word, as in a discourse containing the governing principles of death, as in The Book of the Dead. I'm curious if this is meant to be a throwback to the true title of the Egyptian book of the dead: The Book of Emerging Forth into the Light, as in the Voidsent's emergence from the World of Darkness to our world of aetherial light.

LORE
Written in an ancient Sharlayan hand, in blood, the Necrologos is full of wards allegedly bind fell creatures within its pages, as well as illustrations, diagrams, and information on these entities. Necrologos levequests are worded as if making a copy of a page also copies that entity bound within the page. Possession of the tome is strictly forbidden, which has created a lucrative market in black market trade that often goes awry as the books are stolen, lost, or damaged - leading to many an accidental releasing of the trapped entities. Protected copies are known to be kept by certain guilds and city authorities, though every those are occasionally stolen.

You'd think with all the rumors about this book summoning things from the Seven Hells, it'd contain Voidsent (and maybe Ashkin), but the levequest targets are wildly variable. The system text in Version 1.0 often claimed that mobs as pedestrian as megalocrabs and opo-opos were somehow released from the pages.

Detour for a Nitpick: Even though the Realm Reborn levequests actually do feature Voidsent as the final targets, one of the ones that flat out tells you the target is Voidsent summons gnats. Why are gnats suddenly Voidsent half the time? They were consistently Vilekin in 1.0. Did Eorzeans forget that the gnats were plentiful before the Voidsent started showing up in droves!?

ANYROAD, I've always wanted to track down all the quests and their targets and see what conclusions I could form, and it's about time I stop procrastinating that and get down to business. Let's do it. Fun Fact: The levequest titles (at least the ones in ARR) are the chapters from which the Necrologos pages came for that quest.

1.0 Ul'dah Block
A copy of the Necrologos was stolen from the Forbidden Tomes section of Frondale's Phrontistery's vault. As information came to the guild about pages turning up across Thanalan, vaultkeeper Toppa Patotta took out orders with the Adventurers' Guild to have them tracked down and destroyed, but fears spread that whoever stole the tome had begun to make copies and soon the entire countryside would be littered with entities summoned from the Seven Hells. The Brass Blades hunted down the thief while adventurers took care of the pages, but the thief's identity has not been uncovered.

Nanawa Mines:

• Torn Asunder (Pages summoned yarzon after puks were cleared.)
• Adamantine Wills (Pages summoned megalocrabs after coblyns were cleared.)

Nophica's Wells:

• Levinshower (Pages summoned lightning elementals after billygoats were cleared.)
• The Light's Corrivals (Pages summoned hippogryphs after chigoes were cleared.)
• Amongst Leaves Most Green (Pages summoned opo-opos after bombs were cleared.)

Halatali:

• All Things Must Die (Pages summoned zombies after puks were cleared.)

Camp Broken Water:

• Ranine Reveries (Pages summoned a gigantoad after puks were cleared.)

1.0 Gridania Block
Several copies of the Necrologos were stolen from Stillglade Fane, and an additional went missing when a Conjurer assigned to study the tome went insane and ran through the wood tearing pages and yelling in tongues before turning up a dried husk. Stillglade Fane scribe Lisie Ryder took out orders with the Adventurers' Guild for the tomes to be recovered and destroyed.

Humblehearth:

• In Shadow Bemantled (Pages summoned sheep after gnats were cleared.)
• Thousandfold Agony (Pages summoned cactuar after opo-opos were cleared.)
• Celeritous Impetus (Pages summoned aldgoats after orobon were cleared.)

Mun-Tuy Cellars:

• The Ever-reaching Claw (Pages summoned yarzon after bats were cleared.)
• The Moons' Mistress (Pages summoned hippogryphs after wolves were cleared.)

Camp Nine Ivies:

• The Fallen (Pages summoned a peiste after flytraps were cleared.)

Treespeak:

• Rockbound Mists (Pages summoned a aurelia after antelopes were cleared.)

1.0 Limsa Lominsa Block
No explanation for why pages are turning up all over Vylbrand is given in English, though other languages suggest the book was stolen from the library at the Mizzenmast. Lhai Jomalah of Mealvaan's Gate takes out the orders with the Adventurers' Guild, but was it as a result of the incoming reports of found pages or does she know something!? On one levequest, she slips up and calls it stolen - stolen from where, Lhai, what are you covering up!?

Cedarwood:

• Lords of Skyey Realms (Pages summoned hippogryphs after ice elementals were cleared.)
• Elemental Thralldom (Pages summoned wind and earth elementals after bombs were cleared.)
• Lightsome Verdure (Pages summoned cactuar after gnats were cleared.)

Cassiopeia Hollow:

• Inferno (Pages summoned fire elementals after gnats were cleared.)
• The Boughs Above (Pages summoned antelopes after goats were cleared.)

Camp Iron Lake:

• The Abased (Pages summoned peistes and sheep after slugs were cleared.)

2.0 Block
These pretty much all follow the same premise: The Necrologos has turned up somewhere it shouldn't and either someone's trying to keep it, sell it, or (half-assedly) dispose of it, and you need to go make sure it's thoroughly destroyed in any of those cases. You get there, you clear out the people trying to keep it and/or mobs drawn angrily to it, and you beat up the Voidsent that comes out of it (It pains me to call that gnat a Voidsent before anybody explains to me wtf is up there.)

Here's a list, anyway:

• Brand of the Impure (Morbols and Bogies, book summons a Gnat)
• Cinerary Rite (Sheep, book summons a Pudding)
• Fluid Corruption (Antlings, book summons a Pudding)
• Igneous Moil (Goblins, book summons Bombs)
• Igneous Toil (Mandragora, Wind Sprites, book summons Bombs)
• Olidious Separation (Flytraps, book summons a Pudding)
• Pale Oblation (Peistes, Wolves, book summons an Ogre)
• The Beholders (Boars, book summons an Ahriman)
• The Liminal Ones (Gigantoad, Sprite, book summons an ash dragon/dahak thing)
• The Noctambulist (Brigands, book summons Vodoriga)
• Whisper of the Gem (Gigantoads, Efts, book summons an Ahriman)

CONCLUSIONS
Pretty big difference between the 1.0 and 2.0 quests, huh? If you took the 1.0 quests at their word, the Necrologos is a book filled with imprisoned anything and everything that you can either summon on purpose or let loose by accident, and you can make yourself an army by staying home making copies of the book's pages all day. Now, the system text flat out said pedestrian mobs were coming out of the book, but could it be a case of unreliable narrator on the game's part? Kind of like when the game tells you, "Hey, that's a deepvoid deathmouse!" even though, no, it most certainly probably is not? I mean, look at the 2.0 quests - SOLID VOIDSENT (Ohmygods, wtf is up with the gnat). It's hard not to assume that it's a Voidsent/Ashkin thing when you look at the title, as well, as it invokes both the book of the dead and the Necronomicon.

The more I look at it, the less hesitant I become about getting on my high horse and declaring that 1.0 Eorzeans were kinda dim and that you have to take the claims they made to the Adventurers' Guild when they filed a report with an entire shaker of salt. Pre-Calamity, people seem to have freaked out when pages from a Necrologos copy turned up, assuming that the pages summoned regular old mobs when, in reality, perhaps nothing was summoned at all and the Necrologos' mere presence was making the local fauna freak out (an effect the 2.0 leves confirm). Sure, occasionally they were right and some Voidsent showed up, but most of the time it was just goats. Post-Calamity, the Voidgates are wide, wide open and it's much easier for this book's Voidsent-calling incantations to actually accidentally happen.

I like the theory that the Necrologos is just a Sharlayan tome for studying the magicks behind the willful summoning of Voidsent (and possibly Ashkin) that has been egregiously abused to the point that as many copies as possible are destroyed without risking the loss of the tome's existence, which would limit the ability to study its mechanisms. I posit that, in 1.0, we were mostly dealing with people's superstitions. The book was truly just an encyclopedic grimoire on evil sorcery and the things that can result from it, but laymen became superstitious over time and believed that the book was not only evil and powerful, but literally haunted, even when they couldn't tell the difference between the origins of an Ogre the origins of a Rat, which you'll notice has happened before if you follow the list of mobs whose names start with DEEPVOID. This explains away the wild inconsistency of the 1.0 levequests, where the monsters hanging around the book and the monsters "summoned by" the book were interchangeable.

This theory has a big flaw:
The ARR levequests have Key Items for the pages that specifically refer to them as truly having wards that, if weakened, might release the creatures within. It's just... why would the Sharlayans even bind mobs in the pages? To let them loose and re-bind them later as needed for research? It's not like defeating them is difficult. And why does making a copy of the page also copy the creature trapped within it (as is implied by Torn Asunder)? Perhaps nothing was trapped in the pages, but the written spells are enough to summon Voidsent, so the additional wards are there to negate it by holding them back (0 + 1 - 1 = 0). That'd explain away that flaw; Eorzeans just don't understand how the Sharlayans made the book.

But then there's another issue:
The aforementioned ARR Key Items also tell you that the levequest's name is actually the chapter name from the Necrologos itself. This is all well and fine with ARR quests, as they do summon exclusively Voidsent (GNAAAAT!?). If this is true of the 1.0 levequests, as well, then a lot of the theory falls apart. Take the quest Ranine Reveries, for example. The above theory would assume that the gigantoad was frenzied by the presence of the tome, but wasn't actually summoned out of the ink and paper. Ranine means "relating to frogs," so if that was the chapter name, it's probably a safe freakin' bet that, yes, the book summoned the toad. This is true for most (if not all) of the 1.0 quest names, and, again, the system text blatantly telling you the book summoned the mobs... sooo...

I still like the alternative theory, though, even if it must then assume that the 1.0 names did not reflect chapter names, that Eorzeans were superstitious, and that the book is simply an (evil, thorough, abomination of an) enclyclopedia. It simply explains away more of the questions at the moment (unless someone from SE wants to clear this up and explain with how wrong I am before I actually win anyone over). For instance, we know the ARR pages, which actually summon Voidsent, are written in blood, and blood is a powerful tool for summoning Voidsent. It's how the Succubi use the Wood Wailers to summon demons from the Void in Haukke, it's how Edda got the messy results she did in Tam-Tara HM. It'd also explain how making copies spontaneously generates new trapped mobs - same ritual, but new blood, thus a new summoning, and new sealing wards.

An official explanation is kind of overdue, I guess...