The Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny Official Guide is a guide written by William H. Keith, Jr and Nina Barton, published by Westwood Studios and BradyGAMES Strategy Guides, for the game Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny.
The two-hundred and sixty-four page document details various aspects of Guardians of Destiny, including but not limited to backstory, characters, spells, locations, creatures, maps, quests, and overall gameplay.
Table of Contents[]
Introduction[]
5
Into the Lands of Lore[]
13
Weapons, Loot, and Gear[]
29
Spells and Magic[]
45
The First Sphere: Hints and Tips[]
59
The Second Sphere: Hints and Tips[]
87
The Third Sphere: Hints and Tips[]
121
The First Sphere: Maps and Answers[]
143
The Second Sphere: Maps and Answers[]
173
The Third Sphere: Maps and Answers[]
217
Of Gods and Men[]
It's a terrible thing to be a god.
Imagine it. The supreme Cause of all that happens in your world, spending eon upon slow-passing eon, bored out of your omniscient mind because nothing ever happens that you do not ordain! Eternal life, eternal power, eternal knowledge, after all, is nothing so much as a perfect prescription for eternal and absolute boredom.
Perhaps this was why, in the remote and unknown mists of the Dawn of Time, the Ancient Gods created this world, a place where they could abandon for a time the trappings of divine and absolute power and enjoy a world where things occurred that they did not ordain, a place replete with that one quality that so delights and diverts the eternally divine - surprise.
Of course, a surprising world, an interesting world, will remain so only so long as its creator keep their all-powerful hands off of it. To this end, a sort of divine, non-interference pact was declared in which the gods agreed among themselves to watch, to enjoy, but not to meddle in the naturally unfolding affairs of the mortal world. And so it remained throughout the ages when the Gods walked among men.
At last, though, one of the Ancient Gods could stand the boredom - or perhaps it was the temptation - no longer. Mortal beings, after all, made tempting game pieces, and their affairs could become even more interesting with a little outside help.
This god's name was Belial.
He chose as his special diversion the affairs of the Dracoid Race, a species dwelling on the Southern Continent that until now had dwelt in harmony with nature and with their neighbors, the humans and the Hulines. By appearing in their midst and by giving them tokens of his divine pleasure, he goaded the formerly peaceful beings onto the path of war. Armed with Belial's powerful magics, the Dracoids swept out of their former dominions like a vast, fiery storm, slaughtering their neighbors, burning cities, enslaving whole populations. The peaceful Hulines were very nearly driven into extinction.
Indeed, the only thing to save the Huline was a second act of divine disobedience. Anu, the Ancient God later known as the Dragon Oracle or Draracle, count not stand by while the Huline were annihilated, regardless of what the pact amongst the Ancinet Gods might decree. He intervened in the war, saving the Hulines at the last possible moment by giving them some of the Ancient Magic that until now had been accessible only by the Dracoids.
The Ancient Gods acted slowly, with a deliberation that might seem glacial to mortal minds, but even they knew now that something must be done... if for no better reason than the fact that war among the gods themselves was now a distinct possibility. The mighty Council of Ancients convened and declared the unthinkable: Belial must die!
But how to carry out such a decree? For one immortal to deprive another of his immortality was as unthinakable as... well, as intervening in mortal affairs. Yet the deed had to be done.
Anu was the obvious choice for executioner. After all, he had already broken the law. He would carry out the Council's sentence, and the hands of the other immortals would remain clean.
In due time, Belial was slain. Not long afterward, as the gods count time, the Ancient Gods, disillusioned by what had happened among the mortals, left the world. Their titanic city, the renowned City of the Ancients, was allowed to sink beneath the waves, until only its tower tops remained gleaming in the light of the sun.
And this, it seemed, was the end of the story.
Except that Belial had found a way to cheat his executioner.
Before his death, Belial, had worked devious magics deep within the bowels of the earth, fashioning an immense and obscene Mother Beast, a kind of organic factory that could draw the radiations of the Ancient Magics from the air. The Mother Beast would bide her time across the millennia, slowly drawing in Ancient Magic power and storing it until, in the fullness of time, she could give birth to Belial, enabling the evil god to rise reincarnated from the dead. Belial's timetable was upset somewhat by the fact that the departure of the Ancient Gods deprived the world of most of their magic. The Mother Beast lapsed into a kind of long-sleeping dormancy, awaiting the appearance of power from which she could draw her creative energies.
The mortal world, meanwhile, remained an interesting place. The Dracoids, abandoned by their evil god of war, fell into decline. The last Emperor of the Dracoids, oppressed by the shame of an entire people, sought with his dying breath to purge the memory of the Dracoid's pact with Belial. Eventually, all the Dracoids were gone from the South Continent, and only their spirits haunted the dismal expanse of their cemetery and the black catacombs beneath their dust mausoleums.Meanwhile, their vast city at the artifice of the penitent Dracoid mages, sank deeper and deeper into the earth, now inhabited solely by the savage, reptilian creatures known as Ssar, and the obscene horrors known as stone squids. It may have been that the Ssar were creations of the dracoid, or pets, or both; the full story may never be known. Those savage and blood-minded creatures that remained, however, worshiped a fell and vastly evil monstrosity, a Great Worm that lived in an enormous subterranean lake near the ruined Dracoid capital. The remnant of the hulines slowly re-established themselves and their culture, their numbers growing once more this time. Some of the younger members of the species eventually ventured across the Bane River, establishing for themselves a separate community where they could pursue the ways of their primitive ancestors, distinct and separate from their soft and pleasure-loving kin to the west.
A vacuum invites filling. In the absence of the Ancient gids and the Dracoids, other powers gathered, hungry for power, for magic, for domination. In the south, a strange race of parasitic entities, the Ru-Loi, established their foothold on this world in an eerie and alien Citadel. There, they experimented with their own alien magics, killing all males who ventured near and abducting and enslaving any females they could find for dark and sinister magical purposes not clearly understood.
And in the northern continent, in the land of Gladstone, war came again to the Lands of the humans when the Dark Army marched against the White Army of Gladstone. It was a near thing, this war, with secret enclaves of the Dark army established almost within the shadow of Gladstone Castle itself. Nearby, one alone of the Ancient Gods took up residence. Anu - now the Draracle - had remained in the mortal realm in self-appointed exile. So far as mortals were concerned, he was no more than a strange and frustratingly obscure oracle, remote from human affairs or politics. He seemed to take little interest in the war or in the ebb and flow of mortal issues like right and wrong, and contented himself with dispensing weather predictions and ambiguous minor prophecies for the local population. An outcast from the company of his peers, he was concerned about Belial's plans for rebirth and had remained behind voluntarily as a guardian of the world's destinies.
Margarithe Fiston, see Scotia, meanwhile, a twisted woman once spurned by the man who eventually became King Richard of Gladstone and leader of the White Army, delved deeply - too deeply - into tomes and artifacts of Ancient Magic, becoming in the end the arch-sorceress Scotia of the Dark Army. Seeking a means of getting close enough to Richard to kill him, Scotia sought an artifact of Ancient Magic known as the Nether Mask, which held the power to transform it's wearer into any shape, any form. Finding the mask, she was on the point of realizing her psychotic ambitions when she was struck down by the hero of Gladstone, an epic event chronicled in the first Lands of Lore.
As she died, Scotia wrought one final piece of magic, attempting to send the Ancient Magic of the Nether Mask into her son, Luther, a young man empty of political ambitions or hatreds. The magic, unfortunately, was garbled in the passage; what Luther received was less the blessing of power than it was a terrible curse. At random and unpredictable intervals, he transformed into either a lizard or a hideous, lumbering beast.
There was another beneficiary of the struggle for the Nether Mask's power. Raised from the mud where it had lain hidden for uncounted years, the artifact once more became the source of powerful, Ancient Magic radiations, radiations that were sensed and absorbed by the long-dormant Mother Beast. Deep within her labyrinthine caverns, the Mother awoke and began giving birth to nightmare horrors.
Those horrors took many shapes. There were spidery creatures called Hive Warriors that tunneled through the earth, emerging in the upper world to seek out anything and anyone possessing even scraps of Ancient Magic. The Hive Guardians were larger, more powerful entities that remained within the Mother's caverns, tending her needs and protecting her from intruders.
And there were other, stranger and darker forms as well - the so-called Hive Lords, which anticipated the birth of Belial himself. The first incarnations were crude work indeed, blunt and stupid, malformed and badly smudged images of Belial possessing some part of his will and being and lust for corporeal existences, but lacking both his keen intelligence and his physical and magical strength. Each incarnation was better, more powerful, more intelligent than the last, but each was a dim anticipatory echo of the horror still waiting to be born.
One human, the mystic Dawn, was alarmed by the weakening of the magical defenses girdling Gladstone and by the appearance of the spidery horrors from the subterranean deeps. She was determined to learn the source of this plague and stop it, if she could, although she was frustrated by the Draracle's vague orations and less then candid prophecies. Accompanied by a four-armed agent of Gladstone named Baccata, she set off on a quest to recover the source of the black powers that were eating at the foundations of her world.
Meanwhile, Luther, hurt, confused, and terrified by the beast- and lizard- morphing curse he now bore, had been imprisoned in the Gladstone Castle for crimes committed by his mother, Until then, he'd been a farmer with no ambitions beyond bringing in the next harvest, and he certainly shared none of his mother's pathological hatreds.
Indeed, he had nothing but very little in the way of magical talent... and the hated curse.
And that is where the new story begins...
Index[]
243
BradyGAMES Staff[]
- Lynn Zingraf - Publisher
- H. Leigh Davis - Editor-in-Chief
- David Waybright - Title/Licensing Manager
- Janet Cadoff - Marketing Manager
- Debra McBride - Acquisitions Editor
Credits[]
- David Cassady - Development Editor
- Tim Cox - Project Editor
- Michael Owen - Screenshot Editor
- Carol Ann Stamile - Cover & Book Designer
- Max Adamson - Production Designer
- Dan Caparo - Production Designer
- Dave Eason - Production Designer
Licensing[]
This book was taken from the Lands of Lore series of video games or from websites created and owned by Westwood Studios and/or Virgin Interactive Entertainment, the copyright of which is held by Electronic Arts Inc. (EA). All trademarks and registered trademarks present in the image are proprietary to Electronic Arts Inc. (EA), the inclusion of which implies no affiliation with the Lands of Lore Wiki. The use of such images is believed to fall under the fair use doctrine of copyright law.