Saturday, 18 March 2023

Lorwyn/Morningtide Online & the Lorwyn Player's Guide


You know the deal about these online articles by now. We get some feature articles and a whole bunch of Taste the Magic entries describing the world of the current set, with maybe a few excursions talking about older story stuff or behind the scenes looks at the work of the creative team. I'll list those I found interesting below, but I don't want to get to deep into them. There's nothing too shocking there and it's all there for you to read if you're really into Lorwyn. Instead I want to look closer at a handful or online articles, the Lorwyn Player's Guide and a short webcomic, which together form everything the Lorwyn/Shadowmoor era had to offer on the poster people of the post-Future Sight era: Planeswalkers!

[edit from much-later-Squirle]All of this was written before WotC's latest website move, so I hope it's all still "there for you to read". Most of the links I used go to the Internet Archive anyway, so those should be okay. If you also want to go through the articles I haven't covered, I think your best bet is to look up the article names on the wiki, and then search for those on MaxMakesMagic's Internet Archive datebase.[/edit]
Let's begin at the beginning, with the Planeswalkers minisite! Yes, unlike the previous promotional minisites we've seen, the Lorwyn one is entirely dedicated to a single five card cycle. To be fair, it's perhaps the second most important cycle in the history of Magic, after the basic lands. To my great surprise the whole thing is available on the Wayback Machine. You can click the pictures of the five planeswalkers to get to specific sites with two more links to articles. Those in the Ajani section aren't working for me, but you can find them here and here.

This is the first introduction of the new breed of planeswalkers to the world, so let's see what is said about the characters. Which is... not a whole lot.
  • Jace is a naturally reserved and confident, though explicitly "not cocky", telepath. He's made some bad decisions in the past and has a troubled conscience.
  • Ajani gets more specifics: a dead brother, being half-blinded, his pride dispersing, and him swearing to find his brother's killer and to reunite the pride. "But as time passes, he begins to lose sight of the difference between justice and revenge." Oh, and his magic is about light, both actual and the "soul's light."
  • Liliana, apparently, "is the girl your mother warned you about". Also "Long ago she made a dark deal with ancient, sinister forces to secure her necromantic power and youthful beauty".
  • Garruk's explanation is very vague again. Just that he's a gruff summoner and warrior-druid who doesn't like civilization.
  • Finally Chandra is a pyromancer who doesn't like authority.
I get the feeling their characters were still being worked on. Everyone just gets a handful of sentences on their personality,  The most detailed description is the Ajani one, which makes sense considering he's going to be the main character of the next block. Even there we see some work in progress though, as him using light magic and wanting to reunite his tribe never really comes up again. This type of very scant information on the Lorwyn five will remain the norm for a while.


In addition to these short introductions the mini-site also gives us some longer articles on planeswalkers in general. First there is You Are a Planeswalker. In it Brady Dommermuth explains what planeswalkers, the Multiverse, planes, aether and the Blind Eternities are, and how the Mending changed stuff. It's a good introduction to the Magic storyline, though if you enjoy this blog you'll know pretty much all of it already. It also reprints a bunch of old articles from the Pocket Players' Guide and The Duelist #1, as well as information on the rifts from the Future Sight Player's Guide, which is a great way to make some obscure sources more accessible. Some minor notes:
  • The article repeats the "One in a million born with the spark, one in a million of those ascend" numbers. That's already up from the "one in several million" we heard about in The Duelist #16, but in the future it seems that number will be quietly dropped, considering we now have multiple planes that produced two or three planeswalkers around the same time. The easiest explanation for that change is to say "the Mending did it". Technically we've got this post-Mending source contradicting that, but hey, progressive insight and all that.
  • Though powered down, planeswalkers "remain much, much more powerful than mundane mages", partially due to their spark, partially just because their planeswalking allows them to discover sources of mana and spells that planebound wizards could never reach.
  • We also get a theory about the spark's origin here:
"The most commonly held theory is that the lifeforce of all beings is "tethered" in the æther, and that when a sentient being's life begins, there is a remote chance that the being's lifeforce will be infused with the essence of the Blind Eternities themselves. In other words, the spark is an infinitesimally small fragment of the Blind Eternities that resides within a being's soul. That metaphysical connection to the Multiverse is what enables planeswalking for the rare few who come to know how to tap into it."
  • Why specific people get sparks is unknown, though some Dominarian planeswalkers believe that Gaea chooses who gets one.
  • The article mentions the Plane of Fudge and Bunnies twice. Perhaps we should go there after the current Phyrexian arc is over, just as a pallet cleanser. If the fudge and bunnies haven't been compleated, that is...
That's it lorewise for the minisite. There's a quick mention that "Chandra's spark erupted into the ability to planeswalk early in her life. She was drawn to the power of fire because of events we can't reveal just yet." in Doug Beyer's article previewing her card, but other than that we just get a quiz, an acrostic, and an article by Mark Rosewater on how planeswalker cards work in-game.


The next place for us to learn about these new characters is the Lorwyn Player's Guide. Most of it contains the usual information about Lorwyn, the lore parts of which are just a summary of the novel and some of the online articles I'll cover below. But there are also two pages that give us a short introduction to what planeswalkers are, plus a little more on the Lorwyn Five specifically.

  • We learn about Jace having been "the star prodigy of an elite mages' academy" who was expelled for a crime involving mind-control and memory suppression on both others and himself. He has an "unhealthy appetite for power" and is watched by... someone...
  • The Liliana stuff explains that the "sinister forces" she made a deal with are four demons. The demon bit was pretty much a given I think, but it being four of them rather than one specific demon is a nice twist. Funnily enough this description is suddenly very coy about what she got out of the deal, whereas the minisite didn't want to say it was demons but outright told us it was a deal for necromantic powers, youth and beauty.
  • Chandra, and I bet you didn't know this, "comes from a nomadic people who use an arcane set of movements to enable their magic".
  • For Garruk and Ajani there isn't anything here beyond what we already learned in the minisite. 
Again it sounds a lot like there was still a lot of developing going on behind the scenes. Jace's description looks like a first draft for an Agents of Artifice pitch, though it makes him sound like a much darker character. There is also no mention of that academy in AoA. Chandra being a nomad was, if I remember correctly, also dropped even before we got to The Purifying Fire, let alone by the time we get to Kaladesh. Once again Ajani has the most fully formed backstory.

When I first read these I thought they sounded like all five of them were moving into different colors over time. Jace wanting power and Garruk going from "predation" to "domination" sounds like their next cards would be at least partially black, for example. Ajani's next cards being the partially red Ajani Vengeant seemed to corroborate that theory, but either that was all changed post-Alara or I was reading too much into it. Garruk did go black but for completely different reasons, and Jace, Chandra and Liliana remain mono-colored to this day.


After those introductions we got no new information on the planeswalkers for a few months, until the Taste the Magic article Planeswalkers Unmasked. But despite having a lot higher word count, there isn't all that much more on them here either.
  • Ajani is confirmed as not being form Mirrodin! This was back when that had to be specified, since leonin (as opposed to panther warriors and other catfolk) hadn't appeared on any other plane so far.
  • His story is pretty much fully formed at this point, although he is not yet described as albino, just disliked by the tribe for being an "oddball".
  • Jace is said to be "obsessed with facts and the interconnections between them", and his "rigorous devotion to knowledge probably prevents him from relating well to others. He can't stand the interpersonal crap, the regalia of fraudulence and hypocrisy that shrouds almost every person's being." he's also "teetering on edge of the moral abyss". This makes him sound like a conspiracy nut to me. It also seems the "asshole Jace" depiction that is sometimes blamed for people's dislike of the character wasn't just in the flavor text.
  • There is no info on where he's from yet. Just that he is going to "attract the worst kind of attention, the kind brought by those seeking to subvert and control his power" and will get "mired in secrets too dangerous for him to handle", which again sounds like very vague hinting at Agents of Artifice.
  • Doug, seemingly unaware for the Player's Guide, makes a big deal about revealing that it was demons who Liliana made a deal with.
  • He also gives us the line "By the time you've spent your life becoming an accomplished necromancer, like Liliana, you've got a Blackberry full of seedy underworld contacts ("underworld" not in the "crime-ridden streets" sense, but in the literal "place where demons live" sense)", which I'm going to believe is long game New Capenna foreshadowing.
  • It's said that the deal undid "decades" of her aging. Knowing what we know now that is understating Liliana's age, though in such a vague way it's hard to call the later "200 years" thing a ret-con.
  • Chandra doesn't get much new stuff here at all, just that she likes "boom spells" and a reiteration of her hate off authority. But there is a reference to another source that came out in the same week. More on that in a minute.
  • Garruk's bit suddenly has quotes. No idea where those are from, whether Doug made them up on the spot or not, or why the others don't get any.
  • There's not much to say about him either, just restating that he's a hunter and "He'll need to either temper his predator instincts with some kind of ethical sense—or abandon his humanity altogether."
Oh, and Jace and Garruk have their face reveals here.


Finally, we get an actual story! Or the start of one at least. The original page seems to have dissolved, but Max comes to our rescue with links to page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4 and page 5.

The story is just a chase scene, as Chandra has stolen a macguffin on the plane of Kephalai, is chased by the local law enforcement, then uses her " ultimate" to make a big boom and escape. The story is narrated by both Chandra herself and by the bureaucratic report made by one of her chasers.

Being so short there is very little to discuss. Chandra comes across just like the short blurbs we've seen so far describe her. The art is great, though not every page has the best lay-out for a scroll-through comic. Chandra references Jaya before using her big spell, which is a neat but doesn't expand upon any connection between the two characters, and that's all there really is to it. For now at least. A year later we would start get more webcomics and this story was reprinted with a few extra pages and two follow-up chapters. There the people of Kephalai hire Jace to go after Chandra (setting up both the Jace vs. Chandra duel deck and the first chapter of The Purifying Fire), and the stolen thingy will become relevant for the Zendikar story and by extension the entire Nicol Bolas/Gatewatch plot. But for now, this is all we get.


What do we make of the introduction of the Lorwyn Five? Well, on it's own I think it's fine. It's all a bit scant, sure, but their characters are given clear personalities, and there are some hints as to where they are going. Ajani seems to have a whole story set for him already, Liliana and Jace at least have some plot hooks with the demons and the mysterious followers, and Garruk and Chandra... okay, they don't have much, but there are at least hints towards some sort of personal struggle with them. It's a fine enough introduction.

The problem is that we then got nothing at all. It'll be almost a year until the next webcomic, and almost a year and a half until the first novel featuring these characters. Leading to a storyline community still angry about the Mending projecting that anger unto these new characters. But I've written about that already. An additional problem I didn't mention there is that taking such a long time to get deeper into the characters can also lead to continuity issues. I guess squaring Jace's crimes on the wizard academy with the eventual Alhammaret story can be fudged by his memory issues, but Chandra's nomadic background was clearly part of an early draft of her backstory we never got to see.

The lag in the proper introduction of the new cast was probably always going to happen though. We know the debut of planeswalker cards was delayed form Future Sight to Lorwyn due to them simply not being ready yet, and I can understand not wanting to design the characters before the cards are done. I can also understand wanting to develop them as thoroughly as was done for their cards before debuting them, as it would be a shame to just put stuff out there only to either be stuck with something mediocre or to have to ret-con it. (Making the crash of the planeswalker novels and the ret-cons flowing from that pretty ironic, but that's a story for another time.) It's just a shame that the resulting lag turned an okay first introduction into a very poor reception. Luckily these five eventually managed to capture the fans hearts after all.


FEATURE ARTICLES
Okay, with all that covered, let's quickly go through the actual Lorwyn stuff in this Lorwyn review. First up is Lorwyn Lore, by Rei Nakazawa. It's your standard description of the new plane, talking about things like the thoughtweft, giant's namesleep, et cetera. There is a hint that Colfenor "harbors some dark, unique knowledge that could impact all of Lorwyn", but nothing more on what's going to happen to the plane. There is also some talk about the Path of Flame, "a process of physical and spiritual self-discovery" whose end "involves a fiery death the likes of which is rarely seen". Which still doesn't make it clear to me why Ashling was said to be such an unorthodox follower of said path.

We're also told greater elementals are "the purest essence of various dreams and ideas." I think that was about the point where I realized Magic's creature types would never fully make sense. Which is kind off ironic since Lorwyn was also where we got the Grand Creature Type Update which tried to fix the mess those types had become. But if elementals are incarnations of ideas, what are incarnations then? Or avatars? And wasn't the same true of the kami, who were all spirits? And while we're talking about those, why is spirit used as a type for both nature spirits and ghosts, which are entirely separate classes of beings? Oh, unless said ghost is a wraith, shade or specter of course... With both Kamigawa and Lorwyn tying one of these types up with many tribal cards it's become a knot that can never be untangled. Best to let it go.

In the Early Monringtide, Rei's Morningtide article, adds little more, just a further discussion about the tribes, and a bit more hinting at the Aurora doing something bad.

Lorwyn: the Human Shaped Hole is Jeremy Jarvis talking about Lorwyn's design. I'm just mentioning it because it has some neat art.


Working for Peanuts is an Aaron Forsythe article and not really lore related, but I found it interesting that he named Brady Dommermuth as the most important member of the design team after head designer MaRo.
"I had worked on set designs before that made decisions on flavor that didn't knot well with the work the creative team was parallel-processing, and the resulting battles over whose side should win out were rarely fun or productive. Because I knew how tightly tied flavor and mechanics were going to be in a tribal set, I wanted Brady there to help us make the crucial decisions and to guarantee creative buyoff on whatever plans the design team laid. I must say it was a smashing success."
We have come a long way from the lack of communication between the card makers and the story writers that turned the Odyssey era in such a chaotic mess.

Also of interest to you might be Building a Better Faerie Realm & Fit To Be 'Tide which are the obligatory articles on how the flavor text of Lorwyn and Morningtide came to be, Weatherlight Crash Course, which features some old story from The Duelist I've covered way back when, and Magic Add Archive, which... well, which has become completely broken now Adobe Flash is dead, but it might be an interesting starting point for people looking for old Magic advertisements (anyone remember Bob from Accounting and Poodle Boy?). Oh, and there was a Morningtide ministe, but I think that is gone by now. There weren't any stories or anything special on it as far as I know.


TASTE THE MAGIC
A Taste of Lorwyn is Doug's first coverage of Lorwyn, which is apparently a bit of a backwater.
"Not all the planes scattered across the seething intraplanar chaos are as vast as Dominaria, home to city-state archipelagoes and continent-spanning civilizations. Some lurk on the edges of planeswalker consciousness, ancient and steeped in mysteries, protected by their own obscurity. Lorwyn is such a place, a green little world largely untouched by the strife and powermongering that often squeezes other reaches of the Multiverse."
Kinda funny that planeswalker cards debuted on a plane that is supposedly mostly ignored by their kind.

We get a whole series of articles about the seven tribes of Lorwyn which dive deeper into their make-up and cultures than Rei could in his introductions. When Morningtide comes along these are followed by articles about the five main classes featured in that set. These articles also give us some more information on individual characters from time to time, like Vessifrus, who appeared in a few bits of flavor text, "an upstart looking to inspire rebellion among the flamekin" against the elves. The treefolk article even mentions several notable treefolk that appear in no other sources. On the whole Doug seems less inclined to just make up new stuff than Matt Cavotta was (there are no articles here giving whole backstories to individual cards like Helldozer or Protean Hulk got), and we'll see later on that characters are named in the style guide already, so that's probably where those treefolk come from. I always thought it was weird that so much stuff gets made in those guides that the fans never got to see.

One of those treefolk is named "Fionnsutha, the Wanderer". Checking Scryfall to see if they appeared in any flavor text made me discover just how popular "the Wanderer" is as a monicker in Magic! Think any of them ever wandered into each other?



Lorwyn Survival Guide feels a bit like a test run for the later Planeswalker's Guide articles. It doubles down on Lorwyn being on the frontier of the multiverse. It's difficult to planeswalk to, is described as "sparkblind" (as in, the locals don't know about planeswalkers) and..
"Lorwyn is remote from many large, established planar hubs and is poorly documented in the parageographical literature. Furthermore, Lorwyn does not stand out in the void; it resides in a region of dream and æther that obscures it from most travelers. However, some planeswalkers have had success traveling there by first preparing spells that attune the mind to patterns of nature. With this groundwork done, many planeswalkers find their spark naturally drawn through the Blind Eternities to the edges of the plane."
Doug also gives us some information on Lorwyn's geography. Apparently the inhabited bits are ringed by "meandering, seemingly ever-distant mountain slopes", with Glen Elendra being hidden somewhere in those mountains. The whole plane's mana is "naturally tailored" for illusions.

Some quick comments about other articles:
  • Book of Kith and Kin is a neat idea in that it simulates riffling through the book itself, but really annoying for archivists, in that it gives random pages every times you click on an image!
  • Doug begins answering mail in questions more regularly, mostly one at the bottom of each article, but sometimes dedicating a whole article to it, like Goodies from the Mailbag. The questions range from how much a planeswalker can bring with them to another plane, why Magic wont use guns, what the flavor is behind Wren's Run Packmaster giving deathtouch to wolves, to why certain kinds of mana are tied to certain lands.
  • The Known Multiverse is Brady Dommermuth filling in for a week and doing a listicle about the known planes, including a the obscure ones! It's clearly sourced mostly from the MTG Wiki, but it's neat to have a bunch of old and obscure planes acknowledged! I did notice he said the Meditation Plane was where "the emperor of Madara would meet his closest advisors" though. In the Legends II cycle Bolas didn't know about the Meditation Plane, which is why Tetsuo could lure him in and defeat him there. This mistake will stick, and from now on the Meditation Plane will be Bolas's domain, even in stories set prior to the Legends II cycle. We'll have to keep an eye out for it's future appearances to figure out a way to fix this inconsistency.
 

Lorwyn has some freaky looking creatures.

Finally, we get three actual stories! Well, I say three... more like one and a bit and an out of continuity thing.

First, the actual proper story, The Mana Bond. A wizard and his apprentice from Kephalai have been imprisoned and their mana bonds severed. The apprentice gets his master to give some speeches about mana, which include the explanation that to make mana "The land has to be infused with meaning—either the meaning that nature builds into the world inherently, or a social, emotional meaning", but the wizard gives up, thinking there is no way to reform the mana bonds from their prison. The apprentice stays hopeful and finds the corpse of a former prisoner who died trying to escape. Realizing this imbues the place with meaning he taps into the black mana of the prison, kills their jailers with it and the two escape.

This was actually really neat. The idea of "meaning" making places have more abundant mana is a great explanation for why certain places hold certain kinds of mana, a question that was asked by a reader in a previous article. It's a very short story of course, we don't learn how, why or by whom the wizards have been captured, and a bunch of it is just dropping information, but it's quite well written. It has vibes of the Jodah/Voska scene's early in The Gathering Dark, which is always great.

It's also pretty cool to see Doug use the newly revealed plane of Kephalai, and that he gives a whole list of locations on it. Those have even made it onto the wiki, which gives them a pretty good chance of being remembered if we ever return to Kephalai! They are...
  • The Tornadic Steppes "way up in the northeast"
  • The Lyceum, with near its campus the Lyceum Forest and the Wetland Trail.
  • "Foltessa, the meadow that grew over the burned wasteland where the fire elementals fought. That battle changed the history of elementalism in that region—it made the pyromancers establish their Code of Spellcraft."
  • Finally there are the Scorched Isles and the Vizier's Tower, who just get namechecked.
I guess I'm putting this story on the timeline around the same time as Lorwyn? There is nothing to give us any context to when it is supposed to happen. At least with the Guildpact and Dissension stories I could say "well, it's tied to a specific set, so I'll stick it alongside that". But this has nothing to do with Lorwyn. And we're now in a bit of a limbo period when there is no set "present" for stories to happen in. With no better options I'm putting it alongside Lorwyn anyway, but it is probably the weakest placement of all stories on the timeline. Putting it in the 4560ish era that would eventually become established as the present, so it can go alongside the Chandra story that introduced Kephalai, is also an option. (I wonder when it was decided that Lorwyn happened decades before the Alara-and-beyond sets. It's kinda odd to have the first planeswalker cards be non-diegetic to the setting they where printed in.)


Druids, Trees and Truth is what I called the half-story. Quite literally. The right half of the page is Doug talking about druids, the left half is a battle-speech by "Traweg, archdruid of the Gilt-Leaf Wood". Vessifrus, the flavor text flamekin mentioned earlier, is leading an army again the woods, and Traweg is setting up an alliance between elves, treefolk and changelings to face him. He's going to stop Vessifrus by taking the mana fueling his army away from him, by activating his "tap seven druids" ability.

This is even shorter and less substantive, but it's cool to see the mention of Vessifrus in flavor text and earlier articles being picked up upon. Again placement is tricky, but I guess it happens shortly before the Great Aurora, since Vessifrus is still around to give comments in the Lorwyn and Morningtide sets.


And finally, we have Following a Dream. I guess I was lying when I said I had covered all sources on the Lorwyn Five, since this story has Jace hanging out on Lorwyn to do a "mind study". Sort off.

From entries of his journal we learn he's following a dream. First in a kithkin's head, then it's stolen by a faerie, who gets, eh... snorted up by a giant who then has the same dream, and then Ashling starts communing with a great fire elemental inside the dream, which gets too intense for Jace, so he drops his telepathic connection.

This one's weird. First up, we don't really learn anything about Jace. He makes some condescending remarks about the kithkin being boring, but otherwise he's just a passive observer here. The elemental seems to be the one from the Lorwyn novels, but it is illustrated at the end with the art of Din of the Fireherd (the story is released shortly before Shadowmoor previews start). That's not how the elemental was described as looking. But it doesn't really matter, since this story can't be in continuity anyway.

Doug already starts his story with a whole bunch of "if"s, "might"s, and "maybe"s, making it sound like this is only a theoretical story about what if Jace went to Lorwyn. For a long time fans debated the status of this tale, but when we finally started getting some definitive dates and learned that Lorwyn happened 40 years before the Gatewatch era it became clear that Jace couldn't be around for this story. I guess Ashling could still be around in the modern era, but after everything she experienced I doubt she would still be looking for a great elemental to find her destiny, which is what she's going on about here. That plus Doug's hesitation to just say "Jace went to Lorwyn" is enough to make me agree that this one doesn't "count".


The article also has a reader asking about the order in which cards and books are made. Here we learn that a whole bunch of novel and flavor text characters were already in the style guide (which did not seem true in earlier blocks. For example, we know from earlier articles that many Kamigawa legends were made up by the flavor text writers). The writers get to work as soon as possible, sometimes even before the style guide is finished. After that there are regular check ins between writers and cardmakers to prevent contradictions, and to make sure characters who are only in the books, like Rhys in this case, get legendary creatures made for them. This sounds like a very sensible way of doing things.

It was funny to read that Rhys had to be moved to Morningtide because there were already too many legendary creatures in Lorwyn. Imagine that, a whole 10 legends in a single set!

Returning to my earlier wondering about why they would make so much stuff that would remain hidden from the fans: Doran apparently made it into the set despite not being in the novel because of his cool write-up in the style guide. A cool write-up that no one outside of WotC has ever seen! Ever since first reading that 14 years ago I thought it would've been better to just rename Doran's card as Colfenor for more story/card integration. I felt pretty vindicated in that when Colfenor finally got a card and it had a "toughness matters" ability just like Doran. I was also pretty happy when we started getting articles with short write-ups of each legendary in a set, and the art books to expand upon lore, so characters like Doran at least got some place to tell their tale, however brief. Still waiting on that cool lore for Doran though! The only thing we got for him was a short blurb in the arcana article Lorwyn Legend Art, but it doesn't say more than that he has great strength of will. The article is a kind off a dry-run for those "blurbs on legends" we'd later get, but it is very short. The only thing we get on Wydwen for example is that she's a snooty to-cool-for-you type of person. Which I think her art already communicated very effectively.


ARCANA
Finally, let's do a quick round up of the other arcana's:

There are some looks at the style guide:
A whole bunch of sketches:
Some stuff about the art and naming of cards...
In Lorwyn Token Art... wait, I no longer have to cover these, from now on tokens actually got printed and you can just find them on Scryfall!

Lorwyn Release TV Spots and Morningtide on the TV are more victims of Adobe Flash's demise. Judging from this one on YouTube we're not missing much though, just some barely animated art and some funky music.

Finally some random stuff:


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