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Confirmation
- Do we ever get confirmation on what was it exactly that caused Raedric to come back from the dead? He claims that it was a blessing from Berath, and the epilogue simply says it was due to his 'zeal.' Was it one of the animancers that he had working for him, since they had experience in fusing souls to dead bodies? Is it possible that this was done by the Leaden Key? Seems like something they might do.
- Likely his mental state upon his death prevented him from being put back to the Wheel. So he was brought back by Berath, who figured that either taking revenge on the Watcher, or being defeated once more, would give Raedric the peace his soul would need to continue the cycle.
- The animancer theory has a lot to back it up, and doesn't require Berath acting unusually. One of the animancers, whether For Science! or as a form of revenge when realizing they were doomed, may have done something, perhaps allegedly to ensure his child wasn't hollowborn, that bound his soul to his body and set him up to become an undead. (If it seems an odd sort of revenge — remember, the undead are all eventually doomed to And I Must Scream.)
- It's worth noting that his backup in that fight consists of a bunch of fampyrs, the most intelligent form of undead.
- One of his other endings explicitly calls him a deathguard. Given that a deathguard is a paladin whose soul refuses to move on due to unfinished business, yes it was Raedric's zeal that kept him going.
Watchers and ciphers
- How exactly is a Watcher different from a Cipher? Their powers seems to be quite similar.
- The game does note that they're similar, however a Watcher peers into and assumes the soul's viewpoint directly in first person, while Ciphers read more about a soul's interactions with its surroundings (which sometimes doesn't even register to Watcher's first person view). You can see the difference by interacting with Grieving Mother; not only does her Perception Filter technique not even work on you, you can also access her memory with *no* resistance. However, in Eder's quest, you can't peer into a dead object, so you bring it to a cipher to make sense of the soul connection and then you watch the soul's history from there.
- Interestingly, early dialogue with Grieving Mother implies the Watcher has never read the soul of a living person before. The lore seems to have been confused by the inclusion of the backer NPCs, otherwise the line between the two would have been much clearer to the player, at least up until the unique scenario with Grieving Mother.
- The confusion concerning Watchers and ciphers actually plays an important role in Grieving Mother's backstory. A lot of tragedy could have been averted if she had realized what she was sooner.
- The [[Doylist Watsonian versus Doylist]] answer is that the writers didn't actually know the difference. Grieving Mother, for example, had unexplained superpowers that don't match the abilities of ciphers or Watchers. Neither group is capable of anything resembling permanently brainwashing a village or maintaining an always-on omnidirectional perception filter.
- While not shown in game mass brainwashing and perception filters fits perfectly within the abilities of a Cipher
Little things
- When you first enter Gilded Vale, that one guy (can't remember his name) will demand to know if you've ever had a hollowborn child. Even if you are a Godlike, who are sterile. And you can't even snark at him for asking someone who he should know at a glance can't have kids if they've had a hollowborn child. Did the dev's just forget about that detail about godlike?
- Probably. However, there is an option to stay silent, so you could try interpreting that as looking at the guy as if he just said the dumbest thing in the world (which he has).
- You've skipped a possibility, which is that the man himself "forgot" i.e. doesn't know. How many godlike is he likely to have met, and why would he care to know that they're infertile? It's a very personal thing to ask of someone and godlike are not common.
- It's hard to consider Woedica the true Big Bad of the game - what if Thaos created her to conform to his ideals and not vice versa? What's more, what if she has been created - as an overthrown ruler already and she never actually ruled the gods? She'd be simply an effective power source for Thaos...
- Woedica isn't truly the game's Big Bad. Thaos is simply using Woedica and the cover of 'serving' her to hide his real agenda: protecting the secret of the gods' true nature. The game isn't really about stopping a god from consuming newborn souls — heck, you can even let her take the souls in the end with no apparent consequences. The game is really about the Watcher tying up some loose ends from a past life — Thaos and Iovara — before going on more adventures.
- The Marauder is definitely a woman according to the spirit outside Maerwald's room, considering that all of the other spirits spoke directly to Maerwald's past lives, so why did Maerwald go and say the Soldier is the reincarnation of his own father? The Marauder explicitly tells one of her men to rape a woman who is heavily implied to be the Soldier's mother.
- Do you get the same dialogue if you play as a male Watcher?
- Maerwald doesn't actually claim the Raider was the father of the Soldier. His speech is confusing, but it's clear that the irony lies more in the fact that the Glanfathan woman that commanded one of her fellow raiders to rape a Dyrwoodan woman would then reincarnate as the child borne from the assault.
