Is lore/sultan history randomized each game? How to do both classic mode vs. the story?

[Coffee]

I just began playing. I was surprised to find that my second character's journal is blank, it doesn't have any of the sultans' histories that I discovered with my first character. I expected the story to carry across runs. Now I'm wondering, is the history randomized each game? if YES, then... is the story actually any good? procedurally generated stories tend to be awful... and if NO, then won't it be kind of impossible to figure out the story through classic style? I can't remember all these sultan histories across runs.

This makes me wonder if the game should be played primarily on roleplay mode until you beat it, so you know the story, and then use classic mode for replay value.

Really enjoying it so far! Just confused about how to best enjoy both the gameplay and the story.

Edit: Please no spoilers.

[glass zebra]

After making a few characters starting in Joppa you will probably notice that 1 of the Sultan's history is not randomised while the others are (the Joppa statue is always the same). The story you are playing is mostly related to the current world + some stuff revealed in the main quest line + parts of that one Sultan history link to things (as hinted at in a Joppa starting quest). The histories of the others are mostly important for the historic sites and some spoilery later stuff.

You can very much find the complete stories of all sultans in a single classic run. You don't get more history bits in roleplay or something like that.

Story and world are very much bound together in Qud imo, so it is somewhat hard to say if the "story" is good. I definitely find the "lore" to be good and the story kind of reveals more of that, but so do the places you visit.

[Aegix Drakan]

There are some people, places, and lore that never change.

And a lot of what I've discovered so far about them are pretty nifty. Let alone the sheer vibes of the world.

[Dogsauce]

I do like that a lot of the stuff that doesn't change is written in a similar style to parts of the game that are generated each playthrough. Makes the prewritten and generated content feel like they belong in the same place when oftentimes generated text sticks out like a sore thumb in games. This results in Qud often having kind of a strange tone, but it works since it takes place in a world totally foreign to our own.

[Pixel Peeper]

Yeah, only the most recent sultan, Resheph, has a static history. The five previous sultans are just random weirdos, and their "stories" have no relevance to the world.

And without going into spoilers, their lore entries are... exaggerated. While they can be fun to read (just because of how absurd they are), they're more of a mechanical delivery method for historic sites, sultan cult compositions, relic names/quests, and lore "currency" (secrets).

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by Pixel Peeper:

Yeah, only the most recent sultan, Resheph, has a static history. The five previous sultans are just random weirdos, and their "stories" have no relevance to the world.

And without going into spoilers, their lore entries are... exaggerated. While they can be fun to read (just because of how absurd they are), they're more of a mechanical delivery method for historic sites, sultan cult compositions, relic names/quests, and lore "currency" (secrets).

Their history hints on a few more relevant things on top of the creatures you will meet in their historic sites or wild cult encounters, their cherub guardians, possible reputation changes and instant kill chances on their relics and the rest of the story hints at their "theme" like luck, gem, fasting to generate the special powers of the cherub, their sultan mask stats and extra bonus and possibly on some of their relics (not just their names). It does not have the same strength on the history of the world though and is all rather personal stuff. At some point you can use their history to estimate on those things way in early game so you can be extra happy when you realise you will get a +int 1st period mask later..

Some parts of their stories are kind of a "humble" version of what actually happened. You can read stuff like: crashed in their chariot while their tomb engraving can reveal is was something like a anti-grav sphere or that their twin died instead of themwhile their tomb engraving reveals that it was a time clone/hologram or something like that. The people attribute great things to them, but they clearly wrote the stuff much, much later and don't know how much knowledge and power they actually had. Hard to say how many of them actually killed people the ridiculous ways described.

[Pixel Peeper]

I'll use vagueness rather than censor bars:

Oh boy, +Int on a Kesil Face... what a waste that would be. That's OK, it's unlikely for the first three masks to all have bad stats. I need to grab some of the other ones anyway, I'm still only at 4/6 for the achievement. And sometimes there are cool relics with them.

Given how your own experiences translate on the wall... I'm thinking most sultan lore is a wild exaggeration of what actually happened.

[glass zebra]

The actions are probably exaggerated, but not the stuff involved. You definitely did not write those hundred books or were cheered when entering the Stiltgrounds, but the books existed and so did the Stitgrounds. The history you find uses so much more mundane things, likely based on what the people who wrote them knew.

Tinker is definitely the worst to find later in that specific case. I am unsure if you can roll the same theme on all Sultans, but I did skip the first for the second pretty often when that happened. I once had a fate sultan as first with 2 extra relics in the sacopharghus, with a fate axe and dagger, while I already had a Templar follower with 2 helping hands and nanon fingers (before the multiweapon and helping hand nerf). That was wild and such a good (or over the top) use for polygel. I honestly started to being an onlooker/pure babysitter.

[Pixel Peeper]

Originally posted by serikos:

The actions are probably exaggerated, but not the stuff involved. You definitely did not write those hundred books or were cheered when entering the Stiltgrounds, but the books existed and so did the Stitgrounds. The history you find uses so much more mundane things, likely based on what the people who wrote them knew.

Oh yes. The world is kind of verifiable public knowledge, so they couldn't just make stuff up. But I think sultan's roles were highly, highly exaggerated in the lore. We just don't have the records.

Come to think of it, you'd think Qud would have video recorders... maybe they gave up after the data got wiped a million times from all the catastrophes.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by Pixel Peeper:

Originally posted by serikos:

The actions are probably exaggerated, but not the stuff involved. You definitely did not write those hundred books or were cheered when entering the Stiltgrounds, but the books existed and so did the Stitgrounds. The history you find uses so much more mundane things, likely based on what the people who wrote them knew.

Oh yes. The world is kind of verifiable public knowledge, so they couldn't just make stuff up. But I think sultan's roles were highly, highly exaggerated in the lore. We just don't have the records.

Come to think of it, you'd think Qud would have video recorders... maybe they gave up after the data got wiped a million times from all the catastrophes.

Pretty sure the Mechanimists did a great job to well off the remains, in praise of the highest argent father.The sultans likely had some cool powers and stuff but probably just scavenged like we do and the engraver is instructed to write everything in their life as a form of praise. They did however still had some people around who could make those fancy masks and cherub, yet less and less so over the periods

[DJKingGhidorah]

The wiki[wiki.cavesofqud.com] has a good section on how the random Sultans' histories are generated and structured. The most revealing thing from a lore perspective (IMO) is the clear division between early and late periods and the differing material descriptions of each. The first two Sultans are early, the third is a mix, while the fourth onwards are late. The wiki doesn't currently explain how the actual dates/reigns work, but it's possible to inspect the source code for all this yourself (instructions[wiki.cavesofqud.com]). The relevant area looks to be XRL.Annals.QudHistoryFactory, and while it's pretty complicated in places, the average length of the Sultanate as a whole looks to be defined as 6,000 years (which is then randomised in various ways, hence the average).

Anyway, make of that what you will, but comparing the narrative elements of Early vs. Late sultan histories it seems pretty clear that the Early period was more technologically advanced, and that scavenging only begins to be mentioned in the Late period. To me at least, this gives a clear impression of the Sultanate as a long period of gradual stagnation and technological decline which finally collapses into a 1,000 year dark age after Resheph... does whatever he did. Things like the transition of the Cherubim from perfect biological simulacra to inferior mechanical ones from the fourth Sultan onwards, and the progressively worse stats/bonuses of the Sultan masks, seem to me to support this as well.

I also always found it curious that the official Sultan histories we find in the world, while heroic to an extent, clearly portray them as fallible mortal monarchs, and can include some pretty unimpressive episodes (Sultans losing a relic playing dice in a tavern and so on), whereas the corresponding murals in their Tombs depict them as near-infallible demigods. I would've thought it would be the other way around: a public hagiography vs. a secret history of what really happened.

[Pixel Peeper]

Well... the outside lore is just stories passed down by people. Historically, even gods are usually described as highly flawed individuals. Whereas the murals aren't meant to be a repository of accurate knowledge, they're basically propaganda meant to aggrandize the sultans' deeds. I think it makes sense.

But yes, clearly there was a big decline.

Given how little information we are given about the past in the game, I'm not sure the upcoming encounter is going to reveal much. But who knows, maybe it'll be a heavy-hitting lore drop.