Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer

Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer - Kara Korum
This place gives me the heebie jeebies.

February 18, 2010 -
Once again, the kids over at [Trebuie sa fiti inscris si conectat pentru a vedea acest link] have provided us with some information on yet another zone in the upcoming expansion for their flagship MMO, [Trebuie sa fiti inscris si conectat pentru a vedea acest link].
Read on to discover the backstory of the area known as Kara Korum, as
well as some hints of what kind of challenges you'll be coming up
against. Hint: mutant dudes and giant lizards.

Not all is what it seems in the region of Khitai. The lush
vegetation of the Northern Grasslands is rivaled by the hostile desert
plains of Kara Korum, where magic and untold horrors rule. Players who
find themselves in this province will not only have to fight off
monsters, they have to battle with the land itself.

"Something wicked lives in the desert, something twists everything
and everyone. Legend says that the black crater is like a scab,
bleeding its pus into the world, poisoning it. Have you seen the people
that live there, pale as ghosts, with broken bodies? Have you seen the
trees big as mountains? Have you seen the children hunting for human
flesh? Nature itself has become perverted. There is an evil out there
that is better left alone."

-Kara Korum fisherman

A place of dread, a place of wonder, a place to die

Climb the trees as big as mountains. Listen to the deafening silence of
the statues of black glass, frozen in their mute screams, outside of
the Obsidian Temple. Visit the villages where madness can be passed
like a sickness. The balance has been broken, corrupted by the crater
which pulses at the heart of the region. Most of the playfield is rocky
ground, cliffs and mountains.

[Trebuie sa fiti inscris si conectat pentru a vedea acest link]
Kara Korum is also full of really, really good mimes.

The
Crater is a wound, and it leaks corruption like a scabbed river of pus
that permeates the land, perverts all laws of nature, and turns men
into monsters and sanity into madness. Twenty-five years ago, it
released a tide of fiends like the cloacae of a demon. Yah-chieng's
first act as God-Emperor was to dig something up from the Crater,
something secret, something he took back to Paikang. It lies in the
northeast corner of Kara Korum, and yet the Crater is the fulcrum, the
center to all mystery: the recent surge of magic, Yag-kosha, the
Corrupted, the Mandate, the Emperor's dark secret.

Between the two shores of the Yellow River delta, on the edge of
the Kara Korum desert, lays a village built on naked rock. Populated by
fishermen, traders and looters, the source of their riches mainly comes
from looting the bodies of dead adventurers that strayed into the
relentless desert. It is a simple village; their resourcefulness
revealed only by their work at the Obsidian Temple. Fighting the
decaying Corrupted that populate the desert; they refuse to see how
they are slowly turning into what they fight.

The Eternal Pyre

"In the village of Fengdu, whenever we kill a Corrupted, we throw
the body on the pyre. I don't know how many Corrupted. The fire burns
night and day. They smell like sulfur, bile, and popping maggots. You
can kill the Corrupted, but you can never escape them. The smoke and
stink and floating ashes get in your clothes, in your hair, under your
fingernails, in your food, in your lungs. Day and night, you can feel
them, smell them, taste them, even choke on them! You make yourself
vomit, but they're still there."

-Fengdu villager

[Trebuie sa fiti inscris si conectat pentru a vedea acest link]
This guy is probably not friendly.
Lighting
up the village day and night is a fire, fuelled by the bodies of the
Corrupted. Here are men and women that cherish life so much that they
want it to be eternal, yet they kill so much. Any Corrupted that moves
too close to the village will be hunted and killed, and fed to the
fire. And there are plenty of Corrupted.

The village of Fengdu used to be a trading hub – but since the
Corrupted started to spread, it has changed into something far more
sinister. In the slightly twisted minds of the villagers, it is still a
place of worship – burning the Lifeless has become a ritual of their
beliefs.

Valley of Giants

From the crater runs a river of a tainted fluid, like pus coming out of
a picked scab. A stream runs from the river into the Valley of Giants,
into a small lake there. Once it was an oasis of fresh water, but now
it is tainted as well. The oasis still has trees and some wildlife, but
it has changed. It has grown. In vegetation it is known as gigantism,
but in this valley it has taken off and become truly bizarre and
frightening, yet wondrous. Trees big as mountains, beasts so enormous
they would give even Conan pause.

Trees, bushes and other forms of vegetation that are found in this
environment are enormous – many times bigger than normal. There is also
something unnerving about them. That branch, doesn't it look like a
human arm reaching out from the trunk? Doesn't that stump have the
features of a grinning mouth?

The beasts are enormous too. Meeting one instills a sense of dread,
battling one is a furious contest where the prize is your life. The
valley also inspires a sense of wonder, through amazing and weird
trees, through fantastic creatures and through the contrast of harsh
desert meeting beautiful oasis.

[Trebuie sa fiti inscris si conectat pentru a vedea acest link]
That's the second biggest lizard I've ever seen!

The Frenzy

The veterans tell tales of the Frenzy, but not before a shiver and a
gulp of strong drink. Twenty-five years ago, the Black Crater vomited
an ocean of horrors – creatures from the elder night, beings of
grotesque symmetry, monsters that cannot be described by the
storyteller, for the mortal mind – mercifully – has limits.

The Imperial Army was no match for the beasts, but the power of
sorcery turned the tide. The scholars and mages found themselves
empowered by the Mandate. There, on the river, the final battle was
fought. The Khitan infantry made a brave stand, their sorcerous allies
hurling fire and lightning into the ranks of the demons. In the end,
they scattered the monsters.

But to this day, wicked things still crawl from the black sands of Kara Korum…