The Subterranean City of Gelmorra - FFXIV Lore Talks

[Music] welcome to lore talks i'm elio forsharam and i'm ninirinui and today we are going to be talking about the early history of well if not gridania then the black shroud as a whole right exactly everything up to up to the founding of gurdani just touching on the very first moments of gridania's life yes and as with all the other things that we've touched on it should be a fascinating dive as well absolutely gridania is a really interesting topic uh just like the other city-states it's got its own moral complexities and it's a really interesting culture you know based on sort of druidism and shintoism really fascinating yeah it's a it's a really interesting time and um there was a recent discussion that's been uh happening with people in our community around the different complexities with the different city-states and uh both galmura and gridania have their own very fascinating legacies oh yeah definitely definitely um it's a it's a discussion worth having as a community both for the channel and wider in the fanbase so hopping into it why don't we talk about the sort of geographic location with the who what where's and wise starting with the what is the black shroud slash the twelves wood right so the black shroud is just this absolutely enormous forest in central aosia it's best known for its really rich plant and animal life uh and the of course the the colossally powerful and very mysterious slightly less mysterious now elementals that seem to have ruled over it for as long as records can really be found yeah and one of the things that i found interesting is that post the seventh thermal calamity those elementals have been weakened so even in modern times the relationship between the woods its peoples and the elementals has become a constant note of fascinating history and as we're going to dive in here that has been true throughout its entire existence oh yeah definitely um they're as much a player in the political landscape of aorzia as any nation there's a location that is the hedge why don't we hit on that real quick so for what i am able to surmise it's not 100 laid out but from what i'm able to smite the hedge is a series of protective trees called hedge trees which are connected in this really potent etheric network as a barrier around the shroud now i'm not 100 sure this is this is like a soft barrier or a hard barrier um if it's like literally a force field or if it keeps out certain malign etheric effects it's hard to tell the fact that things like the autumn war can happen and that there is regular interactions and trade between groups makes me think it's more of a soft barrier but that's a supposition i think that's a fast position though so who occupies the black shroud so at the time that we're talking about so sort of speaking broadly so not specifically about gilmore amdapor itself you know was inhabited mostly by midlanders but then moving on from this in the wake of sort of the fall around the port and the beginning of the um the astral era that we're discussing uh the shroud seems to be inhabited mostly by exile who had the permission of the elementals in this period yeah and uh as we go along we'll find the shure and ellison who come to occupy it and the contentions they're within certainly yeah so why is the black shroud the way it is you know an enormous ford forest as verdant as it is so it's a difficult one to answer but as with all things in this universe it comes back to etheric density we have to assume that the the shroud is very very rich in ether which you know sort of might be signified by the elementals being there as well they are elementals and thus are beings of pure aether and i assume they also have a role to play in just how verdant it is you know they're stopping poachers they're stopping over um deforestation uh they're sort of promoting the the greenery and the verdancy of the black shroud foregoing some specific future knowledge we know from end walker it was always a question of sort of the chicken of the egg do the elementals beget the forest or the forest began the elementals right exactly so why don't we talk about the primary civilization that exists during the first half of the astral era then and go through the who what where and whens of galmora right exactly so who and what is galmura so galamar was predominantly if not solely uh inhabited by midlander hughes and wildwood ellison now wildwood isn't quite the right term here they seem to they would have been closest to wildwood of any of the species they would have been somewhat like a mixture between the coeurthane ellison and the wildwood ellison one one would have to assume yes and inexorably that ends up leading towards the dusk white later on exactly yeah uh so gamara is a subterranean nation so it's entirely built into this huge network of tunnels and chambers beneath the black shroud some of them were natural some of them were man-made they were a monarchy they had an established system of aristocratic houses nobles and that sort of thing um we didn't know a huge amount about their sort of governing structure besides those sort of small nodes so they have they had a monarchy they had a iris an aristocracy and i'm sure we'll get into this later but to get on to the where we can see remnants of their civilization in locations like uh tamtara deepcroft and some of the other tunnels and places around the black shroud right we do know whether the center of their city where their capital for one of a better word is but we can get that into get into that a bit later sounds good so then when did gilmore exist and why did it fall so del mar's founding began in the 7th and 8th centuries of the 6th astral era it fell in the 11th century and and fall is a strong term but it was founded almost exclusively because of the influence of the elementals their extreme violence and it was extreme against the ellison and here that had migrated into the twelves would force them to make peace with each other and move underground well it was the other way around they moved underground and then gradually made peace with each other gail morris journey really begins in 660 of the sixth astral arrow with the arrival of the ellison in the shroud they were driven there by here because all throughout history they hear have migrated on mass into a aussie well into aldonad and destabilized it if nothing i feel like the thing that most defines the hero as a race is their migratory disposition while other races we've seen do such you know between the al ra the roguedin like throughout history they seem the most predisposed to do that and end up just about everywhere they certainly do yeah and they continued to do some fact they followed the allison into the shroud who they just chased there about half a century later and the elementals do not take kindly to this they did not consent either of these groups joining the the black shroud and in 740 they are driven below ground and forced to make peace down there surviving sort of despite the influence of the elementals and there they found gilmore galmura later falls uh but is more really dissolved willingly um by most inhabitants not all because it does quite stay down there but willingly to go and live in peace with the elementals on the surface it's more of a transition really in a sense very much so you know whereas belladier is schismed into two and then becomes ulda and so the gal mars flows pretty smoothly into grenada so while we're sitting in the 8th century having gotten to galmora why don't we hop back for a second to the first century during the time post the 6th umber calamity in the worldwide flood what happened to amdapor which existed in and around the shroud at that time right so amdapor is centered on the south shroud um at this period which was not a part of the black shroud in the sense that it wasn't part of the main forest ruled by the elementals and anderport is one of these city states like like all the cities of alden are that falls to the flood waters of the calamity um it's the last one to do so and when it does fall the elementals expand the black shroud to cover south shroud and they seal the greatest holdings of amdapor in these prisons of wood and magic to keep the the white magics of both ander and mac and the void scent hidden inside the survivors of independent meanwhile have already left by this point that they've fled before the floodwaters arrived mostly and they find themselves in girobania where they go on to sort of integrate with the huron tribes that become alameda and then we end up flowing right back into the first couple of centuries and that also ends up leading to the red mage to bella dia and all sorts of things it's all interconnected yeah it's hugely intercollected yeah definitely so we often hear in the game the term twelves wood and the black shroud and they're used almost interchangeably but what is the defining difference between those terms so they are some they are synonymous they mean the same thing um the 12th word is the gridanian name for the woods and uh the outsiders refer to it as a black shroud so the black child is an international term whereas the 12 word is a local term probably a show of religious devotion when you think about how the sanctum of 12 is hidden within its bounds and the way in which they worship nafka it's not surprising right exactly and the the gridanians actually believe that the elementals of the 12th wood are shards of norfolk makes you wonder if they'll pop back up and miss the realm it certainly does so we know that also predominantly beyond the here right there is the ellison population what is exactly up with the dusk right and wildwood elsin and their relationship with the shroud right so the ellison like we said are when they move into gilmore they seem to be sort of a people that we're not entirely acquainted with at this point but they were probably closer to the wild wood than anything else or you know like i said a fusion between the wild wood and the coercing um alison now they have an extremely tense relationship at first when they move into the the shroud um with the here because of course the here are the ones that have driven the yellows in a way um from their home and some of them into quertis some of them into the twelfth wood however once they get down into gilmore the here and the ellison show a pretty decent amount of racial harmony and in fact there is element to suggest that the just rights and they will deny this apparently in law but they are a fusion both genetically for want of a better word because we don't really know if genetics exists in this universe and uh culturally of huron and ellison sort of culture for example dusk right names are very heavily influenced by huron culture you can sort of see this this fusion and also some hypothesized like i said a biological human ancestry this is detailed in the dusk white uh page on enterprise one unfortunately when the dusk whites are left underground of their own free will they want to remain in gridania there are significant tensions because without the structure of the gilmore and state they're sort of they really struggle to maintain themselves you know economically financially and a lot of them turn to brigandry meanwhile the new gradani nation is a little bit oppressive of them at the same time this results in very tense relationships between the the gradarians and this new subspecies and also they continue to practice ancient gilmour and magics that are supposed to keep elementals out of an area sort of runic magics and their palm unders which are able to ward away elementals and their power which of course is inflammatory to gridania yes and if you've done palace of the dead you will be intimately familiar with such pomanders uh exactly so the other major populace of the shroud both at this time and well technically not in and of it later on is the exali and their what is their whole relationship with shroud both previously during this period and into the future right so the exile have lived in the shroud for a very long time they lived in there even in the early 5th the very early 5th astral era when amdeport arrived when the world when the here that would found amdapor arrived there they were still living in there at that point uh with the blessing of the elementals uh of course they can't have been living in there for much longer than that because they were created in the third astral era but still by 10 20 of the sixth asteroid that population had grown much too large for the forest to sustain and they seem to have over sort of uh deforested the um the shroud by cutting down too many trees clearing too much land to support themselves the elementals very harshly react as they do they're a pretty cruel landlord and evict them on mass where they have to migrate to xelphatol which is up in the mountains of abalastia spine and it's really barren and cold and they even today they're barely surviving up in xelphatol you know they're having to steal wood from the shroud they're going to poach animals from the shroud from coerthus it's a really brutal life for them up there yeah and just for context when you referred to earlier than being created it is revealed in the etherochemical factory hard that the exali were a not them initially but descendants of chimeric creations by alag yes that's right they are um descended from the exallian despite the fact that it's such a hard uh climate to survive in up in zelfatal they still manage to be the first to invent flight via the cerulean gases that they discovered there which is rather interesting yeah they certainly do um and that is born in part of you know a the eurozone powers i would assumed would have um downplayed the the ingenious nature of many of these tribes you know a lot of them are seen when we first arrive as these alien aggressive cultures but they're not of course they're largely the natives of the land that these states live on they have a fixation on flight because they used to be able to fly and their homeland is as asla which is of course up in the sky so they have this fixation on achieving flight so this is sort of what drives them who create these these uh first airships they're called dirigibles they're not it's kind of more of a hot air balloon than it is a uh an airship but yeah their initial versions did not have much in the way of controlled flight right exactly so speaking of the axali and the elementals why don't we go a little bit deeper into what the elementals are precisely the whole idea of them the representations in the twelves wood and ideas like the green wrath right okay so there are several forms of elementals on a theris it is a term sort of um a taxon a taxonomic term a category of beings that are composed of pure ether like sprites and the eggies that summoners can create as well as the specific form of elementals that perhaps are better referred to as 12-wood elementals now these creatures are vastly powerful like i said and are worshipped as aspects of norfolk by the gradani and so they are presumably not when an individual starts to profane the black shroud by abusing its resources or endangering it they start to accrue something called woods in if they accrue enough woods in they will eventually this will result in green wrath um the green wrath is typically an assault on that person by tree ants and beasts and even the elementals themselves it can be extremely dangerous and the gridanians at least are very worried about it snowballing into like something very very fatal yeah and we see it depicted a couple times loosely in game via um the early gradonian starting quests when you attempt to grab the sword and first meet papalinimo and yida um i believe also the white mage quests you have to calm the guardian treat evershade down or uh that's right yes uh you you also see it quite a lot in one point now yeah so yeah it was almost more especially ideas like the green rather than green played a much bigger role in 1.0 contrasted to what we see in a roamer born on yeah they absolutely did uh which is sort of where i think a lot of the relics of what the elementals claim that they were able to do come from where perhaps they're not actually able to such as uh in older law they they claim to be able to bring about calamities they claim to be the one who bought about the great flood which of course we know is not true yeah yeah but the game hasn't mentioned that in some time so maybe they're trying to sort of quieten that down a bit yeah it's always been that question i think meme both of you have contended with is at least ever since i've known you which is was that stuff recontextualized as the the elementals bullshitting or was it always intended to be that it's not entirely clear because of how much shifted from 1.0 to 2.0 right exactly the shift is huge so then the two main questions i have coming from that are why are the elementals only in the shroud and i guess more broadly going off of the idea of green wrath and woodson why is it that they reject the outsiders and why is there such a xenophobia when it comes to people the peoples of more specifically gridania once they have a relationship with the elementals so with respect to why they're only in the shroud it's not 100 easy to say i suspect that they have settled there because it's just so verdant um even devoid of elementals the shroud is hugely densely populated by animals and very forested it also has um the um the sylphs and also of course the selfs live in there now the silves are innately nature respecting spellcasters and they sort of feed back into this etheric richness i think it just seemed a very convenient place for the elementals now with the information that we get from uh from end walker which you know mute if you want to for the next however long um i will put a warning and i will put a time stamp that you can click to we will give you five seconds five four three two one right so when we go to elpis we see a number of little tiny elementals floating around a man now to my immense frustration the man doesn't have dialogue he doesn't tell you what these things are that's all too common in elpis like the amount of times where they like give you a give you a little bit of something but nothing more is like the uh what is it called the 12th place um the 12 wonders the 121 disc yes what's up with the 12 wonders why is it called that is there supposed to be something we're taking away from that who knows i personally suspect that the these are an attempt by the ancients to create essentially a climate control mechanism and that's what the elementals are and they've settled in the 12s wood because you know it's like a perfect climate for them to control and they have indeed been controlling it for many centuries now i'd see i mean they would be effectively doing what they do you know and the fact that you they're found within a relatively forested area upon albus helps even fuel that further yeah definitely uh now as for their xenophobia for one of a better term the elementals have always been protective of the shroud this is not new to gilmore into gridania they denied the amdapori entry now the andapori accepted this and they ended up sort of developing a working relationship with the elementals but didn't we never permitted to live in the shroud they ejected the exile and then they tried to deny entry to the ellison and the here this has resulted in some problems for godanya the gudanians are very proud of them being committed to living there and are absolutely terrified of losing it um and you know just being killed wholesale by the elementals so they've become very stubborn very traditional it's very insular and this was probably only worsened by events like the autumn war with alamigo when when they try to avoid invade gridania so gridania has become in part because of the elementals it's very xenophobic very insular place and that has proved rather difficult for them in the modern era i think it's interesting in contrast to the legacies of limps of lamensa and um uldah and the difficulties they deal with as civilizations i think are more easy to see on the surface level of the history of piratery and marauding for limsa and the uh focus on wealth recruitment and violence of ulda are the disparity of wealth there are very easy to see whereas sometimes it's easy to miss the sheer amount of xenophobic rhetoric and culture that exists in gridania and the struggle it has to deal with because of that right exactly and the authoritarian government that gridania has i mean look at um turtle rack right so so there's a horrible prison that like the worst imaginable prison and you know vast corporal punishment going on in there back when it was still open uh and uh the people that were pres in prison there weren't mass murderers they were poachers there were people who like arsonists if you do any arse and you go in there if you poach you go in there it's it's they are so strict and with reason i will give them on any environmental crime it's simultaneously understandable but also more of a can it's even more condemning the fact that there have a you know complete control the government has complete and utter control because they have an existential fear but at the same time that existential fear is unending right yeah exactly it's um it is understandable but not ideal and the fact that more often than not the punishment for any breaking of the laws is quite often just death outright is uh you know maybe worrying to some degree a little bit i would say so we haven't spoken about one other people that doesn't live singularly in the shroud but is often known to be found there and that's the mughals right exactly so the mughal the mughals as i'm sure all of you know are this sort of very diminutive and vastly magically talented race um they by and large keep to themselves they live in tribal societies headed by a chieftain but with pretty much you know actual government and they they are very reclusive now their existence in grada sort of in the vicinity of gridania has started to open them up they are working as a postal service for candy senna for example um oh well at her best she doesn't run it um they're not native to the shroud though like you said they hail from the sea of clouds uh the mughals of the sea of clouds are actually the most ancient still living society that we know of uh they date back to the the first number of calamity it seems after the sixth number calamity we were able to figure out that the first must have been one of wind because of a process of elimination however the other reason we know that the first humble calamity was one of wind is because the there are records or at least spoken stories by the mughal of tempestuous winds of that period which uh it's very interesting yeah fascinating definitely so why don't we head back on in to galmora a little bit before continuing on in the timeline why don't we talk um about some of the relics of their world that still linger on into the later half of the sixth and the seventh astral era like todd like uh tamtara deepcroft and toto rock and some of the other locales right okay so um let's start with islam ha and the palace of the red so we don't know a huge amount about what the palace itself was but it is inside the area of isam har which was the major residential district for the city of gomorrah it's not known what purpose the palace itself had that's probably not even its true name it could be but it might not be uh it could have been a prison like like the um like that there are some sources that describe it as a dungeon in law not just a dungeon in gaming terms and there is also some suggestion if that is its name its true name that it was a funerary complex because funerary rights and sort of mortuary rights are hugely important in gilmore and culture from what we can see you know we see this in pounds of debt we see this in um in tampa as well much like the other civilizations that we've talked about that no longer exist they are damn near omnipresent in the locales they were in and you have almost certainly experienced them in a number of ways even if you haven't been highly aware that that was what you were dealing with which is one of the reasons i love final fantasy 14 i know you do as well oh yeah definitely so tamtara tamtara as i'm sure you were all painfully acquainted with from your time in uh roulette is a uh one of the countless gamora ruins are still accessible from the surface it was in fact not solely gilmore but was and pseudo still was until the calamity used by gridania it was used as a crypt for gomorrah and gridania's dead mostly the kings and the nobles and the priests of these states of course in the wake of the fall of dalamud it was taken over by the lambs of dalamud a dangerous cult but before that it was still in use by gridania yeah and it housed the grave of um great rulers of gilmore like king uh galvanth which is coming back up in the total rock dungeon itself it certainly does and i'm sure that we'll discuss galvant at some point as well um total wreck now so here's my little disclaimer i don't think totoraq has gone on um at face value it seems it seems to go on it's never mentioned as being girl martin though and it is named specifically for pad child stories which did not exist in the time of gomorrah i suspect that it is in fact a successor a gridironian successor to the spirit hold which was a gel prison it may have been built by gilmore but in the iteration we know it as now i think is almost entirely gridanian yeah i uh totally agree i think the fact that it has a pagil name alone says at the very least it has been repurposed by gridania to what extent could be quibbled over perhaps but i think there's no question that the structure to my mind is likely built by them because of the use of stone and how rare that is for gridania even in its early period that we know of but i i am with you 100 yeah that's certainly true uh so as we mentioned uh turtle rack is it's a prison for the most heinous crimes of gridania now that was like i said poachers and arsonists not what we would consider the most heinous crimes imaginable it's not the only prison of the uh the area that the spirit hold was a gilmore in prison first ran by a warden named warren that name speaks to be here but we don't have any confirmation of that we don't know much about it but by the time of guidance it was considered either useless enough or dangerous enough that they wanted to magically magically consign it to be destroyed by the elementals you know they conduct this ritual to try and give it back to the elementals so they can destroy it with overgrowth and all of that sort of stuff so there's also the gilmore and ruins in the north shroud what's up with those so that's interesting right they have this super generic name so you might not look at them twice you might think oh it's just some some section gum art actually the game uh and in secondary tell us that the gamora and romans are the capital of gamora they tell us that they are directly on top of what the true capital the true heart of gomorrah was it's almost crazy that such an important place is almost treated so backhandedly at the same time i can understand one with the north shroud being as wrecked as it was from dalamud but on top of that that would have been a lot of content and or locale to create so i can kind of respect not having wanting to recreate that for a roamer born oh definitely it's prime location for future dungeons or whatever else they want to do there though yeah it makes you wonder if you'll ever really revisit the north shroud there's still things within i mean you have ogle morrow right in vilbrand you have the southern what lies beyond the segoli desert to the south in thanolin to say of nothing of other regions as well and then you have places like the northern shroud in and parts of the eastern shroud with gridania or with the black shroud as a whole there's stuff on eorzea you know itself that we still have yet to explore let alone the larger world oh yeah there's huge amounts of ineosia and there's much huge very much stuff in aldenard so like the far northern areas in the far south and i would maybe contextualize pagothan in the areas north of that is outside of aosia as well yeah it depends on how we want to look at that yeah yeah but then to say you know to speak of ilsa barton oathard and to say nothing americidia in the new world yes absolutely i mean we've got unlimited content we've got another 10 years at minimum yeah so what exactly was the political system i know we spoke a little bit on it with the monarchy that gilmore had but why don't we go to delve a little bit deeper so from what i can piece together we have a monarchy we have noble houses of which we know a few names you can find them all in fact koji has put a list out there if you want to go ahead and look for that um but there is a powerful was sorry a powerful priesthood of norfolka which seems to have had a focus on understanding life and death by the natural world which we see in tamtara by the the greenwood and the wormwood um and the other wood um altars which seem to sort of play out a metaphor for life through the perspective of the natural world of a tree growing from a sapling into a full grain tree into a dead tree full of worms also at the core of gilmore's political system seems to have been a harmony between here and allison i would suggest that perhaps the monarchy was allison because galvan sounds like a more eligible name to me than than huron galvanth was a respected monarch of gamora and a very talented lancer he honed himself in battle against the exile now this surprises me because gomorrah was and entirely or almost entirely subterranean and the exile presumably lived above ground while they were in the shroud because they had permission from the elementals so it speaks to me that the excel either must have raided down into the caves or gomorrah raided up onto the surface that that's the only way that i could see them conflicting the fact that we don't see a very specific farming of mushrooms or other life-sustaining things there are some but not a ton for galmora makes me think that there must have been some amount of foraging above ground i would assume so but they did have the muentis um sellers which was a huge uh agricultural complex which i think is one of the like a few locations that we can sort of point to nowadays as a true dusk white you know sort of center i would yeah i would agree i would also say the fact that the dusk whites still are often poachers you know to me even in present day doubles down on that there must be at least some amount of foraging for protein or maybe it's for wood or maybe you know it could be for any number of things i would think and i would also think that the fact that they had developed runes to keep the elementals out must have meant that the elementals weren't entirely happy although they were no longer full-on like apocalypse mode they weren't entirely happy with the gamorans living under the shroud i wonder if they tasked the excel 2 raid down into the caves as well yeah quite possible one of the other things about galvanth is you may be familiar with his name whether you realize it or not in that his corpse is defiled by the lambs of dalamud and a void scent placed in it and that becomes galvanth the dominator the final boss of the original temtera dungeon right and i can just comfort you all he didn't look like a squid in real life that was the void scent worth noting yeah i think it's valuable to note now galvanth uh you also might be acquainted with because there is a spire uh one of the um uh the sort of armed spires of gridania nowadays called galvan speyer i would have to assume it's named that because the spires were built specifically to fight exile and that's where galvans got his fame it's just another sort of note of how beautiful the attention to detail in this game is of its own world building unceasingly if you ever get a chance and i've tried to share some of the discord definitely go check out every lore interview possible with people like koji like on to the very beginning of the creation of this game they were thinking very carefully and very deeply about the world and the lore and the intentionality of things definitely yeah speaking of combat why don't we talk about the magic and arms and sort of fighting style of galmora because it ends up leading into the relationship that gridania has with those same practices right so lance users seem to be important to allies and culture sort of across the board you know the coercion it seems to be pre cure and migration the ellison in querthers and the ellison in the in gomorrah both used it uh they also uh the at least the ones uh in gilmar used archery very heavily and that's where the roots of gridani and archery come from uh it seems almost like they specialize in lance and bow while the ones in um in coerthas specialized in lance and sort of different types of swords and stuff like that but there were sword wielders in uh galmara we see that reanimated corpses in um in tamtara uh there are also thormaturges in tamtara now i'm not 100 sure if they would have practiced something as possible it's not too hard to discover thermometergy um or even just to have have had it um we've talked about this in the past right the idea that every class and job i mean jobs less so jobs are more specific but classes especially are more a collection of practices as we know them and so a thaumaturge is not necessarily a thaumaturge it's not necessarily a thaumaturge so the practices that they may have been partial to may not be identical to whatever the what exists currently for the order of naltol let's say but at the same time it is effectively what we would refer to and know as a thaumaturge right exactly um and we can point to who these allison were i forgot to talk about this earlier but um if you'll indulge me yeah the allison that so we know where the ellison lived at least some of them in the fifth fifth astrologer so we have a very very small mention of it but we do have mention of it that the ellison who would go into found coerthus which of course were a branch off of the same branch that went into the twelves word were a city-state of their own probably conquered by macaroni para i would say um that worshiped um hellon uh in central aosia i would have to assume we're talking that sort of river basin that we never go to where the white maiden flows between uh avalanche spine and the um black shroud and sort of just above mordona i would have to assume that's why they're talking about so i i wonder if um because the fact that this civilization worshipped alone you know in ishgard we see thormaturges who are integrated into the church of hello and i wonder if maybe there's a root there that's a theory of course but something to think about talking about the relationship of you know ellison's and people to their locales and gods why don't we talk about nafka and gilmore and their relationship with that specific deity of the twelve because it's interesting to note their primary deity of the twelve was the same as gurdanya's right so the gamoras did worship nothing indeed as their patron and it seems almost as if those living in and around the shroud invariably worshipped norfolk amdapor worshiped nothica gal mauro which has no cultural ties down to poor worshipped norfolka gridania continued to worship norfolk this is not like mark who's god we don't even know and then baladaya who worshipped zema into ulda who worshipped nalthal it's not like um nim and then in to um limpsa who worship of course uh lim lane so yeah it seems as if the location sort of inherently draws people to worship norfolk which makes sense right you know it is perhaps the most ideal location to worship her um it's the only location that we know of that hasn't changed uh deities even though like for example like glimpse elements you can't actually really draw a strong tie between the states of the black shroud and uh between the fifth and the sixth echelons um just like you can't with nim and with limsa it's a really interesting thing that they have continued to worship in africa i wonder if this is a result of living near nature spirits that rather near deific power level that that would be what i would have to assume i assume i mean and like you say being in and around the shroud i would also point to the other civilizations right lim lane makes sense as lim said lamensa is you know praying to the navigator and see voyages and journeying whereas nim oshan makes almost a little bit more sense as the wanderer and kind of a scholar and and their relationship with mountains and the world and then you look to ul daw's relationship with trade and being mercantile and why of course it would go with naldthal maybe more than azima and so there are almost reasons to split up like the two of fire or the two of wind for the for those different locales whereas i can't think of a reason amdapor galmora or gradonia would want to worship all thick like you know yeah like he's the second of earth but like a representation of time and there's not despite his stone being by aimed before keep there's not really a strong connection between him and any of those places so of with only one earth uh aspected member of the 12 remaining you know nafka all the more makes the most sense as the matron yeah hugely so so speaking of symbology related to gridania why don't we actually talk about the gilmore and flag because that ends up becoming very interesting and relevant right so you might have noticed if you've ever seen the gilmore fact that it looks a lot like the grit onion flag and you've probably seen it if you don't think you have without noticing it's all over i'm tara it's all over um palace of the dead and certain areas in the oval world as well uh it it's it looks just like the gridanian flag it's got these two serpents um that gridania also has uh and maintained because it represents uh peace between the here and the ellison meanwhile instead of the lily at its core which the gridanian flag has the galmaron flag has what i take to be a bouquet of mushrooms um which you would have to assume symbolizes the underground nature of their home yeah i mean they have obviously they're going to have a much stronger relationship with things like mushrooms compared to gradonia which gets to live above ground so i that that seems reasonable to me yeah and the lily that is in the gridiron flag is specifically to symbolize the accord made by joran who we'll talk about in a second with the elementals that allowed them to found gridania and leave galmara and as our final thing before we move into the sort of founding of gridania why don't we talk about galmora and its relationship with conjuring magic because that is also something that links them right so this is a crucial part of gilmore in history the gamorans never really the majority of them seem to enjoy living younger they don't like it down there they want to move on to the surface so they spend a great deal of time trying to discover and master conjuring now they probably for a long time had what we would consider country as a combat class but what they're looking for is the ability to commune with the elementals using country um they achieved this in 1076 when a conjurer you know like a newly minted conjurer by the name of joran lightheart successfully communes with the elementals and negotiates a return to the surface for his people uh for his achievement the elementals blessed joran they suffused him with a bright light and less than a decade later he has a son their son is born with two bumps on his head these bumps later become horns um and by the age of three the this son the first pageal is a prophet he's already predicting catastrophes and helping grijani to avoid or to prepare for them uh by the age of 12 he stops aging physically and declares himself uh you know you might have thought that the general citizens citizenry thought this was quite presumptive but declares himself unilaterally the chosen mediator between the elementals and the people of the shroud he adopts a new name we don't know what his original name was but his his name going forward is pota um in reference to the sound of the etheric communications of the elementals and his family takes the sun in pota in response to this one of the things worthy of noting also is about 50 years before this period you have the exoli kicked out of the shroud and them moving off to xelphatol and so you know there's an opening as it were in the shroud for uh for a new group right that's right the the gamoras were down there watching very carefully to make sure that they could get the next housing in the lot that they wanted that opened up and they managed eventually well and i'm sure that had nothing to do with why the elementals might have accepted them yes they almost certainly had it had very much to do with them of course the the elementals are very much about not having their the resources to the 12-wood over-exploited they're very very fastidious regarding this uh so without the exile being kicked out as horrible it is as it was for the excel and it's kind of unfair as it was um it needed to happen for gridania to exist now that you can debate whether that's a good thing or a bad thing um and that's one of the good things about this game so now gridania is founded but it is lacking one of the groups that was part of gilmore right you have the dusk right don't actually end up really joining up and being a part of gridania as a whole that's right so a section of the allison that live in the in gomar choose not to go up onto the surface um and i can see why the dusk whites have a proud culture they they have their own form of alchemy with the commanders they have their own sort of runic warding magics uh life in the caves must have been very very hard for them after gamora dissolved but they stuck to their ways and i can't blame them for not trusting the elementals who are and must especially have been back then just abjectly terrifying truly and they also have a repeated independent streak it seems like as a culture and whatever you want to say about good or bad you are inherently subservient to the elementals if you choose to be a civilization that exists within the shroud like you you can't escape that if you want to live in harmony with them you must be a form of subservient with them some might say you know uh co-equals or and you know uh symbiosis but to quite a large extent it is subservience yeah how co-equal can you really be when the elementals are constantly saying if you don't do this is this this and this and never deviate from it will kill you we will yeah you're gonna laterally murder you worthy of note if nothing else yeah but that's why it's like like i said they have this really rich culture from what we can see they have their own magics um they they are very openly not fond of the elementals they have they still live in galamar and parts of galamar obviously most of gomorrah's abandoned um but they still live in certain parts most notably the muntai sellers like we mentioned and some caves as well yeah one of the things that's a little bit sad but i actually do think teaches you a lot about one of the things that's good about this game is is framing right if you start in graduation even if you just do questions even just do quests and gridania a lot of times the dusk might get framed almost as consistently bad guys because you only see them under the context of being independent or living as poachers or being mistrustful of gridania and you don't always have the context as to why they might be that way in the first place which is more often than not relatively fair yeah yeah definitely i mean i know that ether sasha for example um every time that he comes across a a dusky npc that is a villain he's like ah another one yeah like the astrologian quest even the non uh twelves wood dusk white are still somehow the bad guy yes and of course they just whites are repeatedly villains in a great deal of the class quests in gridania those that aren't are immigrant species like the um keeper of the moon makote who is in the is it the archer quests yes uh and like we said this is a big part of the oppressive and the uh insular nature of guidance government which is lessening over time but you know still there well we've now kind of come to at the you know early years of groudonia's founding we've come to the inception of gridania and now we're about to continue on to what is modern gardenia but that is going to be a separate episode because we have already run probably well over an hour and that is probably going to be an hour in and of itself and much like we did thanolin where we covered its early history and then it's modern history we will do so here as well we certainly will we won't be doing that with lim solaminta because there is only one nation on billbrand uh post name opposed to that flower but um for the black shroud and for thanolin it just made sense yes and it will be a deep and lovely conversation i'm also looking forward to talking about our sea pirate boys when we get there oh very much so but in the meantime let's spend a little more time the twelves would yeah i'm looking forward to it gradani is an awesome state with some really unusual cultural touchstones a lot of people think of it as simply the european druidism but there are yeah a lot of shintoism in there if anything i actually think of it shinto first with some druidism as a part of it yeah i think it's just to a western audience it is it's aesthetic to remind them of of you know the imagery of the druids and stuff like that or or pop culture druids well with all of that said i've been elia forceron i've been danieri and uh we'll see you all next time guys yeah enjoy the videos this content was brought to you by the aorzian archives if you enjoyed this video help us please the 12 by leaving a like and subscribing for new content every thursday and comment down below with any topic you'd like to see our archons cover in the future for even more content discussion and exclusives please check out our discord and consider supporting us on patreon

Channel: The Eorzean Archives

Views: 6,773

Keywords: ffxiv, final fantasy, final fantasy 14, ff14, endwalker, gridania, black shroud, gelmorra, lore, ffxiv lore, a realm reborn, arr, moogle, elementals, ixal, ixali, lancer, elezen, kan-e-senna, duskwight, twelves wood, padjal

Id: vsNqcpg0cDo

Length: 48min 17sec (2897 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 22 2022