idk who wants to read this but here's some word salad explanation of the lore in passageways (warning: its long)
okay so there are 3 distinct groups in this
the original expedition team
the extraction team (whose logs you read)
So the original expedition are your typical Marleybonian colonizers. They find this new world and build a settlement there. In doing so, they anger the spirit/will of the world and it begins to take its revenge on them. It gets rid of the colonizers and takes over the original settlement, warping it into a hostile and maze-like living compound.
This world is unique in that it is kind of "alive". Think kinda like that god world in Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (i think. its been a while since i've seen that movie). You know, like a world so powerful it gains consciousness. That kinda thing.
So back in Marleybone, the leadership there obviously is like, hey, why did our boys just disappear? So they hire the extraction team to find them and also to figure out what happened and prevent it from happening again.
The extraction team is a crew of 7, made up of half pirates, half wizards, and half miscellaneous Marleybonians. Don't check my math here.
The pirates are the Captain, the First Mate, and the Navigator. (I didn't actually assign them any p101 classes bc uh honestly I don't know enough about them and it wasn't really relevant, but if any classes seem to fit feel free to headcanon)
The wizards are the Mercenary (necromancer) and the Medic (theurgist).
The miscellaneous Marleybonians are the Engineer and the Chronicler.
In order of log appearance, they are
Captain (low education and distrustful of magic)
Engineer (tasked w/ restoring communication w/ Marleybone)
Navigator (tasked w/ tracking down lost colonizers, first to be taken)
Mercenary (necromancer, realizes something's wrong here and it ain't regular magic)
First Mate (reliable and level-headed)
Medic (theurgist, recent Ravenwood grad)
Chronicler (last left alive, very british)
So this crew hops into the world via Spiral Key and they go looking for the lost colonizers. Obvi they slowly realize that something Ain't Right Here. As they journey onward, the same thing happens to them as what happened to the original team. This time, one last person is spared, the Chronicler, and they escape to Wizard City.
Eventually either the Chronicler dies or just decides to have a garage sale or something but you, young wizard, buy an old key from an estate sale that turns out to be the Spiral Key to the spooky world. And that's where the game picks up.
You go through. Find the logs. Spooky things happen. At the end, the world is fed up with your intrusion and you are chased back to a world door. You barely escape with your life, but in your rush to escape you leave the Wizard City Spiral Key in the door which allows the entity chasing you to pass through. The ending is intentionally open ended. What happens after the door opens is up to you.
So if you pay attention to the medic's log, you'll see that they mention Professor Drake. Given that they're a theurgist, they mean Professor Sylvia Drake, as opposed to Cyrus or Malistaire. I took this line out of the original log to cut some length, but in the Captain's log, they mention that this is the Medic's first mission. So, from this, you can conclude that the extraction mission happened before the events of Arc 1 when Sylvia Drake was still alive. The events of the original colonizers then happened slightly before that. The timing of when you the player come in is up to individual interpretation though. It could happen at any time after. It could still be before Arc 1, meaning you are not the Scion young wizard but another wizard entirely. Or it could be after the events of the main game. Really up to whatever you headcanon.
Whats up with the wooden constructs?
So the in-game explanation is that they're the transformed bodies of the previous expeditions being puppeteered by the will of the world. The out-of-game explanation is that I already had them modeled and rigged from that other wiz fan game I was working on. When I was making this game, I was like, "hmm. what's a spooky motif in the horror genre I could put in here? ah. mannequins." And I remembered I had the constructs so I put them in.
So what the heck is chasing us at the end? Why can't I see a spooky monster? I wanna see a spooky monster :(
So there's not really one monster or something that you're running from. The world CAN manifest itself through physical means via 'possession' of a sort, but it can also just. Take you. And spirit you away. Like it did to the navigator. So I guess you could say the world itself is chasing you at the end. Presumably, if you were to stay there you would eventually suffer the same fate as the previous groups. Maybe if I decided to add a patch to the game I would add an alternate ending where this happens, but. Not likely lol. The other answer is that your imagination is capable of creating much scarier monsters than I can, so I intentionally stayed away from having a physical thing to be scared of. The other Other answer is that I simply did not want to design, model, rig, and animate a monster. :)
