Let's Talk Lore

To honor the creation of the new lore channel in the Dauntless Discord server, let's take this opportunity to discuss the current lore for the game.

Official Lore from the Dauntless Website

There is a section for lore on the News & Updates page of the Dauntless website. Currently, it features first or third person stories about the characters around Ramsgate and more is released on occasion to go along with new updates. However, there are still some posts from the early days of Dauntless.

One quote from the very first lore post that explains the behemoths, but also bring up questions about aether, the foundation of the Shattered Isles. "Behemoths draw their deadly power from the earth itself, swallowing up latent aether in the ground. This power fuels their hunger and the deadly elemental blaze, shock, and frost energy they unleash in combat. This aetheric power determines their physiology, appearance, sometimes even their behaviour." This quote suggests that not all aether is the same. When playing the game this idea is never brought up. No matter what element a behemoth does (or in the case of nuetral does not) use the aether is blue. And slayers are always healed by 'drinking' it.

In-Game Journal Entries

One relatively new addition to Dauntless are journal entries. They can be found by walking around the updated version of Ramsgate, playing through Hunt Passes, or as rewards for specific quests. Since journal entries are inside the game and meant to be unlocked by players, I won't discuss them at any length here. The Hunt Pass ones tell fully fledged stories often broken up into multiple chapters, but the Ramsgate ones share environmental and character details to give the city more meaning.

Reddit AMAs

Two Ask-Me-Anything sessions have been done by Pheonix Labs on Reddit specifically discussing Dauntless lore. The first one happened about a year ago and the more recent one happened about a month ago. I won't go into detail about what they included, but these are all the points that stood out to me.

The Isle of Trials creates behemoths with special powers. Specifically I find the fact that Lady Luck is churning out behemoths like pieces of armor very interesting. The fact that these behemoths can be altered to have unusual abilities suggests that perhaps the hopefully soon to be released pets will not have their ability directly linked to their appearance. Since using a transmog on an animal sounds impossible.

Ramsgate was destroyed by the Umbral Escalation island. In the animation that came out when Ramsgate was updated, it wasn't exactly clear what had specifically happened since the game focuses on fighting behemoths to keep them from overrunning Ramsgate. I guess since the Umbral Escalation also gave everyone a ticket out it's a fair trade?

Maybe we can revisit the ruins of Ramsgate sometime in the future. It hasn't made it on the roadmap yet so only time will tell.