The World Eater Poe
Posted byPoe has outgrown Trade. 775 84 comments. GGG take bout server issues. 606 109 comments. What exactly does Soul Eater do? (self.pathofexile) submitted 3 years ago by DivinePlague 200+ Latency League. Is there some sort of list of things that get affected by soul eater?
The lore document has been updated. Here is the latest version.
Greetings, fellow exiles! Personally my favorite thing about Path of Exile is the amazing lore. After playing the game for a while I've become more than a little obsessed. To help my own understanding, I put together a document compiling all of the game's lore. This was quite an extensive project, covering all written in-game lore, dialog, item flavor text, and even a few bits from the official website and supporter newsletters to fill in a couple of gaps.
Yes, I know there already exists a wiki page for this, but the truth is that it has become quite outdated and is far from complete. I also didn't like that it was someone's written interpretation of the lore, rather than containing the actual lore itself. My document contains only the actual, verbatim game lore, which when gathered all together and put in the proper order does make a fairly complete story that (along with actually playing through the game, of course) should give a complete understanding of the story. To my knowledge this has not existed anywhere else until now, except for internal GGG documents.
In celebration of the upcoming release of 3.0, I thought I'd make my document available to anyone who is interested. It should explain the entire story to any new players as well as to veterans. IMHO from what I've seen in putting this together, it's not likely a player would completely understand everything unless studied in this way.
As noted above, all text is exactly transcribed official lore either from in-game or official GGG statements. I left out anything that I could not 100% verify as canon. There are no interpretations or explanations given by me, as really the lore is complete enough that they aren't needed.
Not every single bit of lore is included in the document, as some of it was a bit redundant. I only included what I felt was really necessary to tell the full story without getting overly repetitive.
Dates: Imperialus Conceptus = the founding of the Eternal Empire; BIC = years before the Imperialus Conceptus; IC = years since the Imperialus Conceptus.
Order of events: I arranged all the lore in chronological order, with the exception of the exact events of the Purity Rebellion. The four-part graphic novel shows the order of many of the events, some of which happened concurrently. However, arranging these lore pieces in that exact order caused them to make little sense here, since there are a number of gaps only covered in the graphic novel. For example, the lore explaining the reasons leading up to the Purity Rebellion were mostly written by Victario, and per the graphic novel at least some of it was written well after the rebellion had started. To simplify this document and make it flow as a cohesive story, I put these things in sequence before the start of the rebellion to explain the events leading up to it and how it started.
Typos: There certainly may be typos and if you find any feel free to point them out. Some of the text was copied from the wiki rather than re-transcribed by me, and I did find a number of typos in this that I've already corrected (my favorite being the reference to Malachai as 'the Feather of Dreams'). I also found a few typos in the in-game text, which I noted with [sic] but did not correct.
I did find a few things that seem to be legitimate contradictions within the lore, but there are surprisingly few given how extensive the lore is and the fact that it has been added incrementally over a number of years. Specifically:
Timing of the Daresso/Merveil story: The only real indicator of when the Daresso/Merveil story took place is a comment by Dialla that Daresso lived 'before [her] time.' However, the gem Daresso gave Merveil was Kalisa Maas' throat gem, which somehow must've been taken from Kalisa, set into a necklace (the Star of Wraeclast), and obtained by Daresso. Yet Kalisa lived at the same time as Dialla, and in fact Dialla attended Kalisa's final performance (where Kalisa was still alive with her gem in her throat). This contradict's Dialla's statement that Daresso lived (and gave Kalisa's gem to Merveil) before her time.
Identity of Caspiro: The Library lore refers to Caspiro, the second Eternal Emperor, as the first emperor's (Tarcus Veruso's) son. However, this was written before the labyrinth and Izaro's lore were added. Izaro claims that Caspiro was 'a low-born legionnaire' who only became emperor by surviving a previous labyrinth (in which Veruso's only son was killed). Obviously it seems the story was retconned a bit to fit the labyrinth concept into the existing lore, but both contradictory lore pieces still exist in-game. (This could probably be easily fixed since the Library lore has no voice acting yet and is text-only, so likely only the text would have to be changed.)
Creation of the Baleful Gem: Per Helena, Maligaro created the Baleful Gem after Fidelitas, when he was mortally ill, essentially as his final act. However, the graphic novel shows the Baleful Gem already in existence when Maligaro creates Fidelitas, and he appears far from mortally ill at that point.
When exiling prisoners from Oriath began: Per Clarissa, Vinia (Piety) was arrested and was condemned to death (not exile) during Dominius' reign as High Templar, because 'this was before the banishments.' The Letters of Exile in Lioneye's Watch only span three years, also suggesting exiling was a somewhat recent development (of course paper stuck to a billboard outside is probably lucky to last three years). However, the Shaper's lore refers to people being exiled under High Templar Venarius when Zana was only child, suggesting they started much earlier (before Dominus became High Templar).
There are some discrepancies in dates, though I won't go into the full details here.
The Library lore originally stated that Ondar killed Chitus and then fled into the sewers, only later to be kidnapped from Voll's camp and murdered by Coralito (who was hired by the Perandus family). This was later changed to the current version, which says that Ondar and Chitus killed each other and both died on the steps of the Sceptre of God. The reason for this change may have been to make it agree with the graphic novel, which shows the latter version of events.
Outlook app sync settings. I hope you enjoy reading the lore as much as I enjoyed putting it all together! Feel free to give me any feedback in the comments below. If you have any specific and non-obvious lore questions feel free to ask as I probably know the answer!
World Eater Idle Hacked
I'm very much looking forward to the release of 3.0 and being able to fill in a lot of new details to the already amazing story!
Edit: Added link to PDF version