Information on Mer?

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Foolis-Maan
Posts: 1
Joined: September 25th, 2020, 3:12 pm

Information on Mer?

Post by Foolis-Maan »

I have tried a tad to look for information and general lore on the inhabitants of my favorite area, the ocean. Nagas, understandably, have little established lore. What with a stated xenophobia and all. Merfolk, however, are supposedly the elves of the ocean but have very little established lore, from what I can see. The unit descriptions have a little info about hunting and general way of life, of which the mer are apparently focusing their warfare on the land? I have only been playing the game for a little while, but there seems to be no obviously established lore. Very loose ended and quite a few plot points, like Nereids and all. I assume this is intentional, however I kind of do not want to break established lore if I ever do get around to making my own scenario.
The most I know of these fish people in Wesnoth is that they are shallow dwellers, and have faerie blood. They are fearful of the abyss. There are nereids, that are rarely seen by mer. They hunt with methods extremely similar to real river dwelling humans and also dolphins. They train their forces efficiently. They use arms and armour that is antithesis to their environment.
Mer also seem to have little love given to them, more than individual monsters and nagas to be sure, but lacking nonetheless. As was stated in another forum post by Darker Dreams, the merfolk lack the submerge ability, but undead have more submerge units than all base merfolk regular units. A tad weird, but this I think opens up a world of possibility in the lore. But again, I do not know if I would be breaking known lore if I added my own scenario /campaign / lore. I also know that there is the Dead Water campaign, and I have not played it, so sorry if this is a stupid question.
The main question I guess I am asking is if there is any established lore in game or on forum posts, any repository of the history of the mer and more generally the oceans of Wesnoth.
Pilauli
Posts: 115
Joined: August 18th, 2020, 12:56 pm

Re: Information on Mer?

Post by Pilauli »

I think the official lore is basically limited to the help menu and the mainline campaigns. So, read about them in the help menu, and either play through or read the scenario files for Dead Water, and I think that's pretty much it.

They also appear in a couple of other mainline campaigns, such as in a couple of scenarios of HttT and UtBS, and they are featured in various UMC (of course). They are being forced to dive for pearls in HttT and have powerful scrying magic in UtBS. I don't think either of these is necessarily representative of merfolk as a whole, though, because I'm pretty sure the HttT merfolk were only recently (as in, during Asheviere's reign) enslaved by orcs, and UtBS takes place in the far future.

I'm pretty sure I know why they don't have submerge, though: a fast water unit with submerge could strike from anywhere at any time, and that would be really annoying and/or stressful for anyone who had to play against them.
(Source: Velensk's guide on designing standard factions/eras advises against overuse of hiding abilities for this reason. viewtopic.php?p=502990#p502990)

Maybe nereids (or, according to the mermaid siren's description, naiads) are kind of like the aquatic counterpart to woses? I mean, they're mysterious dwellers and possibly guardians of (water/forest) that almost nobody ever sees, except sometimes the (merfolk/elves).

I would say it's been established that merfolk have royalty (Dead Water) and light-based magic (existence of mermaid priestess unit), and that they have a slightly Greek-ish theme going on with the unit type names and armor (triton and hoplite). Personal names, it appears, can include bits and pieces of Greek-sounding (e.g. Proteus), Hawaiian-or-something-sounding (e.g. Atlaua), and random stuff (e.g. Thaumas, pieces of sea gods like Apsu and Njord). And two letter-combinations that appear common in campaign-character names are "oo" and "gw" (prime hypothetical example: Gwaboo) although I can't figure out how the name generators could produce them.

The descriptions seem to imply (to me) that tridents and hand-held spears are effective underwater weapons, so even if they wouldn't actually be effective, I would guess that they're intended to be. Not being able to breathe water probably means they stay near the surface most of the time, and most of the other sentient races do live on land, so they have some reasons

I think one of the reasons there aren't more aquatic campaigns is that there's no underwater terrain (sea maps just have a huge expanse of waves, rather than kelp forests and volcanic crevices and so on), and not many underwater enemies (theoretically, you could fight skeletons, assorted monsters, or other merfolk/nagas). And fighting underwater should theoretically include consideration for the vertical dimension, but Wesnoth's gameplay is firmly 2-dimensional. It's a real shame.
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