We continue to publish exclusive Angel of Darkness documents from Murti Schofield, the writer of the game. This one reveals more details about Morgau Vasiley, one of the planned characters from the game.

MORGAU NOTES & SUMMARY

 VISUAL and STYLE REFERENCES:

–     Pris in Blade Runner

–     River Tam from Firefly

–     Demented Harajuku-Goth masques

–     Chiana in Farscape TV series (Gigi Edgley)

–     Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa – Mad Max

–     Lisbeth Salander from Girl withTattoo novels

–     Nikita (original French outing)

–     Geena Davis as Charly Baltimore from Long Kiss Goodnight

–     Hit Girl from Kick Ass

–     Harley Quinn – Batman

–     Modesty Blaise

–     Borg Queen from Star Trek, First Contact

–     Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club

–     Scavengers TV series 1994, Anna Galvin bodice, cuirass

–     Tank Girl

–     Martha Washington Goes to War (comic Dave Gibbons & Frank Miller)

SPEAR FIGHTING STYLE REFERENCES:

–     Prince Nuada spear weapon style in Hellboy II (Luke Goss)

–     Hit Girl in Kick Ass

–     300 Spartans

–     Achilles & Hector in TROY

PHYSICAL CONDITION:

–     Beneath the protective Cuirass Morgau’s torso is semi transparent. Her internal organs are partially visible, a side effect of the alchymical vivisection she underwent under Eckhardt.

–     Essentially her body is at war with itself.

–     She is totally dependant on specialised elixirs and essences that maintain her incredibly enhanced life force.

–     Though thin limbed and of a pallid white complexion her body is incredibly strong, in part due to the carbonite threading woven throughout her entire skeletal structure.

–     She is fast, strong and quick to heal.

–     Her arms are thin with semi-translucent skin showing blue veins.

–     Morgau’s spine is welded to rows of wiring, bone & silver rods, an ugly arrangement which leaves the heads of rivets & tiny plates exposed along her spinal column.

–     Her eyes are opaque milky blue until the irregular psychic abilities kick in when they become translucent.

–     Periodically Morgau’s body displays an alarming tendency to erupt into grotesque semi-crystalline, metallic extrusions. [reference  the growths on Bouchard’s badly injured man in Paris]. Only the Cuirass helps keep this in check.

–     She is not strictly speaking a cyborg, in fact her reliance-relationship to her Cuirass is more that of a mutual parasitic dependency.

–     Her need to ‘replenish’ is almostvampyric. Almost.

–     The truth is that she has not been entirely human for a while [see notes on Eckhardt’s Nephuman Meta Progeny and Warrior Sentinels.]

ABILITIES POWERS AND WEAPONS:

–     In combat Morgau displays a terrifying stillness, the ‘awful tranquillity of the wolverine focused on its prey.’

–     Partial and erratic psychic ability – triggered under stress. Unreliable and often barely under control.

–     Some of her more esoteric abilities are inbred as a natural descendant of a Lux Veritatis bloodline. Others have been brought to the fore as a result of the awful treatments she has undergone at the hands of the Black Alchymist.

–     The Culcrys, like the Chirugai, is part-forged from ferrilium, or sky iron, extracted from meteorites. [translation: SpearAxe or Halberd],

–     The Culcrys is one of the Iren Waepn armaments which include the Irenscild, the Iren Folm and even the Chirugai series. [NB there are a limited number of other Chirugai apart from Aiyessu which is attuned to Kurtis Trent.]

–     Knife missile or Excision Blade – basically a Baetyl stone that can be controlled by telekinesis. It is an arrow-head shaped artefact. Ferilium.

–     Morgau was trained from an early age in languages, ciphers, ancient & occult lore, ancient texts & symbols and psychic control of attenuated materials (usually Sky Iron). Codes, ciphers and numeric sequence series especially, fascinate her.

–     [see additional list of possible powers available or unlocked at a later stage in Morgau’s evolution i.e. in further Games.]

THE CUIRASS OR ALCHYMIC BODICE OR CORSELET-PROSTHESIS:

–     Eckhardt’s body is held together by a metallo-ceramic mesh cuirass – the waistcoat we glimpse beneath his flare coat. This Cuirass needs constant replenishing in order to maintain his physical continuation.

–     Morgau is also dependant on a cuirass or corselet-prosthesis to maintain both her life and the notoriously unstable physical powers she possesses. Eckhardt’s cuirass and hers differ but operate on similar Alchymic principles.

–     Forged of meta-link alloy, largely a mercury-brass amalgam.

–     Eckhardt, as the Monstrum, must harvest alchemically pure bio-elements to repair and renew his physical state. Morgau has been constructed to be dependant on specialised elixirs & essences of Alchymical derivation.

–     The Cuirass is a form of armour but this is not its main function. The vital bio-essences are administered via the Cuirass through a network of tubing built into the armour casing.

–     Morgau can only have access to these essential elixirs via her Cabal controllers. [though this situation changes in Game III or in the Kurtis spin off game when she experiences a radical transformation and allies herself to Kurtis in order to reform & recruit for the newly nascent Lux Veritatis.]

–     The Cuirass is highly flexible, more like a mail-link series of plates and tubing than a solid object.

–     It is constructed of prima materia metals, mercury amalgams and carbonite threading.

INFLUENCES ON MORGAU’S LIFE:

–     Morgau’s endless rage at the brutality & injustices of her incredibly perilous life is masked beneath a deceptively placid manner and frail appearance. [See note of the dangerous ‘stillness’ and tranquillity of her combat demeanour.]

–     Her upbringing, as an LV descendant on-the-run has engendered a finely honed paranoid attitude to everything in life.

–     From an early age she has proven to be of a mercurial temperament, rebellious and wilful. This trait appeared to become accentuated by her unstable upbringing and the effects of a serum given her by her father.

–     The misjudged administering of the flawed Vitalis Eterna serum by her father Mathias has had damaging effects on her mental stability

–     The effects of the vivisections & Nephuman adaptations performed on her by Eckhardt has turned her into something not entirely human and her rage at life and all who oppose her is a terrible force contributing to her general instability and unreliability. She is a danger to all around her, slave-owners, foes and allies alike…although she would never acknowledge anyone as an ally.

OTHER ITEMS – ODDS & ENDS – SCRAPS:

–     Morgau was slaved to work under Boaz for a while in the Cabal before being loaned out to Gunderson.  She learned all she could about the Gothic vivisectionist and had her marked out for an especially detailed vengeance. This was thwarted of course when Boaz was fed to one of Muller’s mutant podosaurs – The Pod.

–     Karel considers Morgau to be a Shadow version of Lara, a strategically valuable and biddable living weapon.

–     Morgau’s Siglum or Arcanum is an esoteric symbol, a highly personalised glyph of power; an arcane signature. It is also an identity anchor for an unstable individual struggling to maintain a sense of who she is.

–     Morgau once attempted to use the Chirugai, when she was working close to Konstantin Heissturm, but although she was able to awaken it the LV artefact did not respond to her control. She was not sufficiently attuned to its harmonic operation. She was lucky it didn’t kill her, as it was set to eviscerate anyone attempting to misuse it. Her Lux Veritatis lineage and training was all that protected her from a savage mutilation. On this occasion she barely escaped with little more than a sever scarring.

–     The search for the Mayan Genome Sequencer is something of a personal quest for Morgau. She has been told it could be a way to unravel the dreadful genetic damage done to her by Eckhardt. If it exists it might be a way for her to reclaim something of her misplaced human nature and normalcy… if it exists!

–     Morgau has her own network of ‘Irregulars’ built up when she was working as a free lance in her early independent days. They are all outcasts, exiles, freak heads, rogue personalities, wild cards, outsiders, unemployables and pariahs …named Crypsis, [other various names are listed elsewhere]. Typical T-Shirt = “From Chaos, more Chaos”.

POSSIBLE POWERS FOR CONSIDERATION:

–     Mind spear/needle

–     Telekinesis

–     Ectoplasm control

–     Time Judder/stutter

–     Paralysing shriek

–     Uber-mentat…Morgau has abnormally acute instincts when it comes to codes & patterning. She is able to discern disparate connections, meta-links and sequencing veiled from other, less astute minds. She worked as a security advisor for several illegitimate corporations at one stage.

IDENTITIES (SOME):

–     Morgau Nanuaat Madura Vasiley

–     Annessa Chimoya

–     Claire Issoux

–     Maude Holtzmün

–     Lilith – a name imposed on her by Eckhardt – but she never submits to this offensive designation. Capitulation is not in her nature.

NOTES ON THE CHIRUGAI AND OTHER FERRILIUM WEAPONRY:

No one has yet seen the full Chirugai weapon displayed or been able to master the full range of its diverse capabilities, not even the current Heissturm custodian.

Apart from its controlled flight and multiple blades the weapon’s potential capabilities can be enhanced by the addition of quartz-like attachments slotted into key parts of the weapon. These small slotted rods, or Catriches, unlock further weapon capabilities, in keeping with the user’s level of psychic skill.

In Game II or III Kurtis discovers a cache of LV Catriches which change the configuration of the Chirugai and transform it into an even more deadly weapon.

When in the possession of Konstantin Heissturm the Chirugai was stored in a specially constructed weapons cask or Vasculum. This was only when not in use. The Vasculum is distinct from the side-satchel Kurtis sometimes uses when carrying the weapon discretely i.e. in public.

POSSIBLE SCENE:

in which the Chirugai is discovered held captive by three ponderous chains. It thrashes and tears at its restraints as soon as any adept, LV or Cabal, approaches.

Discover more exclusive Tomb Raider – the Angel of Darkness content

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Artwork by Paschal McGuire, an artist for Tomb Raider – the Angel of Darkness

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Artwork by Paschal McGuire, an artist for Tomb Raider – the Angel of Darkness

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Paschal McGuire, one of the artists who worked on Tomb Raider – the Angel of Darkness, talks to us about his work and the mysterious language that appears in the game.

The language was a funny one. We wanted to make sure it was inoffensive, so i basically added bits to all the normal English letters and rotated some on their sides. It got to the point that i could rattle this stuff as normal handwriting, so i would just look at Murti’s story and pretend i was transcribing it. That way, if there ever was a case of someone saying we copied their work or it was insulting in some forgotten language we could say, no that’s just a shopping list .
The names in the Tomb Raider logo were done with the same principle. The cryptic words are the names of all my siblings and close relations!

I was trying to draw the ancient artifacts and was doing some doodles for a style tests.
Along the way i found some pictures of the particle accelerator at the LHC in CERN.
And the images coming out of the atom smashing looked a lot like this:

So that was the eureka moment. The glove was an alchemist dream- combine the shield and the glove and you had a medieval particle accelerator.
Which is why the design is on the shield and the glove and the game logo. From then on all we had to was draw the story showing that Eckhardt was mining minerals from humans (it was easier than mining in the ground) and from them he could transmute them into anything he wanted. 

The post THE LANGUAGE IN THE ANGEL OF DARKNESS AND SYMBOL DESIGN appeared first on Tomb of Ash.

14th Century Torture

An artwork by Paschal McGuire, an artist for Tomb Raider – the Angel of Darkness.

The post 14th Century Torture appeared first on Tomb of Ash.

“The Anniversary Edition had been worked on for quite a while and looked great. It wasn’t
finished but a huge amount of very good work had been produced (as you probably
saw from the video that was leaked). There was some peculiar politics going on
at the time which meant the Anniversary team had no idea there was another
version being made at the time.”

“I come from more of a Fine Art background than many of my colleagues so
my influences were pretty broad, from renaissance art to the paintings of
Francis Bacon (there is even a Bacon-esque painting I created in the Prague
level”, explains Kenny,

“Working at Core was however my only experience of
working in the games industry, even though it was for four years and AOD was
the only game I worked on so I will always have an affection for it, for all
its problems”.

The post Tomb Raider – the Angel of Darkness and Tomb Raider – Anniversary Edition concept art by James Kenny appeared first on Tomb of Ash.