Corlagon wrote:
Hardly, but here's what I think is completely lame - the perception that there actually needs to be "pure evilness" in the storyline to begin with. If you think the Kreegans are just faceless, mindless destroyers who can't be reasoned with by anyone, you musn't have finished the Half-Dead campaign. And yes, indeed, they are natural, or at least they're not particularly supernatural as far as the games imply.
A devil is not a faceless, mindless destroyer. A devil is a master manipulator, a being that in order to keep it's majesty must actually do as little as possible directly and utilize servants and slaves in it's own case, whose well-being is not it's ultimate objective. This is why in Heroes V Biara is the coolest demonic character of any Heroes game, because she behaves like a devil is supposed to.
If a demon/devil has to appear it must do so in a manner that does not make it's appearance 'cheap', in other words it only appears physically at special occasions.
To make your devils nothing but mortal biological creatures that are prepared to hurt others to get their way, is to diminish them by reducing them to the normal mundane level of evil. To make them creatures 'like us' who by no fault of their own are forced to devour others to survive inspires pity; to make us feel pity for devils is to make them utterly lame.
But if the 'demons' we encounter are beings created by the real demons, by avoiding those beings having to do the 'dirty work' they become non-lame again.
Corlagon wrote:
To engage in some wild, unsubstantiatable speculation of my own: maybe the Kreegans are agents of primordial creatures (the Creators) who simply view the Ancients and their defiant, uber-ambitious empire as an out-of-control plague marring the universe. After all, it's the Ancients who are fecklessly tinkering around with the laws of casuality and screwing around with the balance of the natural world(s) in their quest for expansion, not the Kreegans.
That is very similar to what I am saying. The 'Creators' (an ironic name) inhabited the Primeval magma from which all the worlds (and their creatures) were created by the Ancients.
The Fiery Realm is that primeval magma, the Kreegans come from the Fiery Realm, but the Kreegans that land on the planet open portals to the Fiery Realm directly, which allows the summoning of more Kreegans into existence.
But to defenses placed on their planets by the ancients, there are limitations on what creatures can be summoned, they must resemble existing creatures sufficiently or those defenses will not immediately kick in and swiftly eliminate them (think Escaton on a smaller and more focused scale).
The function of these 'chaotic armies', the Kreegans is to restore everything the Ancients have made to the primeval state (the Fiery Realm). That is not their conscious objective; which is to expand and multiply. Since their function clashes with their objective; yet carrying out their objective unwittingly realizes their function, they are kept ignorant of it.
Corlagon wrote:
As for Slayer's "demonic Kreegans" theory, there is ABSOLUTELY no proof for that nor facts supporting it. Kreegans indeed have portals, they use them among other thing to summon reinforcements to Infernos. I think a portal was also used by several Kreegans to escape into Fiery Realm during the fall of Eeofol. Kreegans cn also teleport. But there is nothing indicating that they used portals to summon creatures from Fiery Realm. Moreover, the Fiery Realm is just one of many Kreegan-infested worlds, while you make it out to be the source of the Kreegan.
Sometimes I wonder why I bother writing evidence here when I could have so much more fun actually playing Heroes IV OR Might and Magic than trying to debate with a bunch of people who completely ignore anything you post.
You want evidence. Start with Heroes III, about there is absolutely no evidence in the entire game that the Kreegans have queens, are hive-based and even come from space. All evidence in the game points to the Kreegans emerging from portals to another realm, one of the dwellings is actually explicitly named a "demon gate". The Kreegans come from Infernos, the only comment on the origins of the Infernos is this.
It is clear enough that the process of raising a volcano is key to creating a new Inferno city. Who are these underlings? Is the magic of volcano creating normally taught in magic school in Erathia? It can't be easy or cheap to do that and seems an elaborate step to go to if all you need to do is land in your space-ships kill a few dragons and go home again.
In Heroes IV it is explicitly stated that the Fiery Realm is where the demons 'get their power from'. A cursory glance of the Fiery Realm is a place where all that exists is a few tiny islands, each mysteriously adapted to house a specific Kreegan creature, in a endless sea of lava AROUND the potential exit point to Axeoth. The Kreegan creatures there are also mysteriously identical to those in Axeoth (Imps, Devils, Venom Spawns, Cerberi, Ice Demons).
Given that Might and Magic is what this forum is about, look at Anskram Keep in Might and Magic XI. The Imps in Anskram Keep are obviously and explicitly building portals. The imps emerge from said portals do they not?
Is there are Kreegan Queen in Axeoth popping out baby imps that are merely being teleported in by magical (sorry technological) means? Evidently not or else we'd know about it in Heroes IV.
