Quote Originally Posted by Alleo View Post
...those dungeons were quite a long time ago so maybe I forgot them but are they even still there if you watch the cutscenes in the book?
I am 99 per cent confident that the cutscenes you see in the Neverending Tale are different from those you watch at the end of every dungeon you complete for the first time. By default, all the replayed cutscenes assume that your character is on his or her own. They would not record who you played with at the time.

That's simply because the variables that put other characters in the cutscenes are undefined in whichever logfiles the videos refer to.

(As a matter of fact, if you were to replay the cutscene of the time you receive the invitation to visit the Waking Sands, the replayed cutscene will always involve Thancred by default, no matter which city-state you start from. That was quite disconcerting, considering that my character Lyland was actually invited by Y'shtola during my actual playthrough.)

I feel that all the discussions and arguments on whether the WoL is alone, or part of a team, stem from a failure in imagination.

There's absolutely nothing to prevent you, the player, from re-imagining relevant scenes in any way you like, if world-building and role-playing are what you're interested in (which I assume to be the case, or we wouldn't be here browsing the lore sub-forum).

And there's absolutely nothing to stop the imaginative player from using the canonical cutscenes as the launchpads for his or her own re-telling of the story.

As someone who has played his fair share of tabletop role-playing games, I can readily attest to the fact that most players expect their Dungeon Masters to adapt official campaign modules to suit each play group's own take on the official story. That's part of the fun of role-playing games: We expect the unexpected. Nothing is set in stone, and every playthrough is potentially a brand new experience.

We are absolutely at liberty to hand-wave away anything that doesn't fit our understanding of the story. The only caveat is that there's no compulsion on other campaign teams to follow the same interpretation.

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Anyway, the TL;DR version of this post is simply that we shouldn't be too anal about what in-game cutscenes show. What matters is how you rationalise your in-game experience. As I said in my earlier post, if you happen to be lucky enough to play this game with a static group of real-life friends, there's really nothing to stop you from imagining you and your friends as the Warriors of Light in this story.

It just happens that, from a design point of view, the game cannot assume that every player has friends (many of us are No-Life Kings in real life ). The only thing the game can be certain about is that one person is definitely playing at any given instance, and that's why the single-player perspective is taken by default.

For everything else, the players can wing it as they see fit.