Been replaying Dragonspyre with my friend and one thing that I’ve always found fascinating about it is the way that it handles the ghosts.
All throughout the world, you see that every human has been killed. Dragonspyre is a ruined world, and the only people still around are the servants of the dragon titan. In place of everyone who’s been killed, a ghost stands where they once stood.
What I love about the ghosts is their various levels of comprehension of the state that they’re in. Some of the ghosts acknowledge what happened, that the dragon titan completely razed their world. However, many don’t. In fact, there’s a decent number of Dragonspyre ghosts who flat-out don’t even realize they’re dead. One that struck a cord with me in particular said something to the effect of “I’m no longer tangible”, seemingly understanding his state as “still alive but not able to touch things for some mysterious reason”. Many of the ghosts make excuses for the fact that they can’t do what they once did when they were alive. This is either because they don’t realize they are dead, or my interpretation, that they don’t want to acknowledge that their lives were cut short.
I also love that so many of the ghosts are very much stuck in their ways from when they were alive. It’s basically left up to interpretation whether that’s a symptom of them being a ghost, or if that militant adherence to order and rules is a symptom of growing up in Dragonspyre’s culture that’s impossible to shake. There’s an NPC, Belia Windgazer, who is still running paperwork for the vaults, even though that paperwork is coming from and going to no one, and is not useful for a single person. It’s running through the motions of the busywork that you did when you were alive, and that’s kind of nightmarish. Even in death, they don’t get any rest.
Another NPC, Zanna Fireflower, has made it her main priority to secure a tower that has visibly been toppled a long time ago, leaving only a single floor. She sees this as a necessary military accomplishment. However, in the present day, this is basically entirely meaningless from both an objective and political viewpoint. Gaining control of this tower does nothing for nobody, the tower doesn’t even stand there anymore. Is this fixation simply something that is static beyond the grave, or is it such a point of pride for her that she can’t let go of such a pointless task all these years later?
Playing through Pirate101 and getting to the point where you meet the four ghosts of Ratbeard’s crew adds a new layer to this situation as well. In that game, those ghosts cannot move on from the mortal realm and go to the next life because they still have unsettled business in this world. Does that imply that with such a massive tragedy on Dragonspyre, the dragon titan not only killed countless people, but doomed them to never rest in peace and move to the next world due to the fact that all of their lives had been cut tragically short, leaving every one of them with unfinished business? Absolutely horrifying stuff
OP I am shaking your hand so hard I love this ESPECIALLY as someone who just started Pirate properly in the last couple months and had the same connection of "Oh, oh these ghosts get to move on. Why don't they? How could they?"
Because after a tragedy on that scale, how would you even begin to put them to rest? And how many of them would even recall enough or be willing to recall enough information to help them move on?
The fact that Dragonspyre remains a world inhabited solely by the ghosts of fallen soldiers, and the remnants of those who made them ghosts? That will never not be completely devastating from a story standpoint.
I think the climate disaster caused by the titan that you describe in the tags is what sets Dragonspyre apart from a world like Khrysalis, despite both being ruined. The physical damage that the dragon titan has done to the world, covering the world’s environment with ash and smoke, represents a point of no turning back. Once that box has been opened, once the dragon titan has been unleashed, the world can never resemble what it previously did. Even if the wizard did everything they could to assemble the refugees and bring them back to Dragonspyre, the conditions caused by the people who previously lived there make it impossible for it to ever flourish again.
There’s a lot of parallels to real life climate disaster when I think about it. It’s the constant imperialist desire for growth, the cogs of the war machine, and hubris that future generations will clean up the mess that caused Dragonspyre’s demise, and is currently causing ours. Sub out magic for technology, and it’s almost a 1-to-1 parallel.
Are we Dragonspyre?
