Guild Wars 2

Is there anywhere I can read the story up to the present?

Recently joined Guild Wars 2 and loving it.

Keep coming across references and events that I I don’t know anything about. Referencing the wiki is tedious and more often than not, leads to more questions than answers.

Has the story of Tyria up to the present, been written down anywhere so I can catch up?

The story of Tyria has been retconned in a certain way from one game to another, so that it could fit the Gods being from outside (from the Mists) and being mere visitors as opposed to creators. Magic in particular has been fully rewritten. Even so, the GW1 user manual has some of the information you seek I believe. Other than that, it’s all spread on dialogues really, in the case of GW2 much of it is written on the Priory files in game, at Lornar’s Pass, and a lot is discussed/written on the Arah explorable (which is sadly hard to access with the low amount of people doing it).

You might try this. This is a set of videos on Season 1.

Season one playlist

There are videos on season 2 also. I didn’t find a playlist but you can undoubtedly find them by name if you google the episodes.

This timeline from the wiki is handy for a general reference.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Timeline

There’s also quite a few articles on the GW1 wiki about the various big events from Tyria’s past. A good starting point is linked below.

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/History_of_Tyria
https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Lore

And the GW2 wiki lore page adds a bit more.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lore

Also to bridge between GW1 and GW2 there are a few novels. None of them are great literature (and one is actively painful to read) but they do give a sense of the world’s lore and the lore of the “iconics” ie Logan, Rytlock, Caithe, Taimi, Eir (and Snaff). Those are Sea of Sorrows, about the rising of Orr and what it did to Lion’s Arch, Ghosts of Ascalon, about a team of treasure hunters going for a major artifact that was part of a catastrophe, and Edge of Destiny, about the iconics meeting, forming a team, and facing an Elder Dragon.

The latter is the painful one. When a grown human and a grown charr sound like puerile pre-teen human brats, it hurts. But it really is important to understanding all the in-game dialogue you see from the iconics.

(I did enjoy Sea of Sorrows much more than the other two. I just don’t know that I’d have liked it if I weren’t a GW2 player. The curse of game-related novels).

Thanks all for the great replies. I will look into each.

I have already bought the 3 novels from Amazon. I started Ghosts of Ascalon, because it came first. But I’m currently enjoying Edge of Destiny.

Thanks everyone, once again. If anyone has any further suggestions, these will be welcome, I’m sure by many.

I doubt you’ll find one article that covers the entire story. There might be a very general summary but trying to fit in absolutely everything you’ll see mentioned in the game would be a huge undertaking.

Also bear in mind that sooner or later you will come across questions that can’t be answered because the information hasn’t been made available. For example we know very little about the history of the Elder Dragons. We know they’ve woken up at least once before, that they consumed almost all magic in the world and nearly destroyed all life and civilisation in Tyria when they did and then went back to sleep. But we know next to nothing about them, or Tyria, before that.

When that happens it’s important to remember it’s not (always) an oversight or a plot hole. In this case it’s quite realistic. The last time they Elder Dragons awoke was over 11,000 years ago. We don’t actually know a huge amount about what Earth was like in 9,000 BC either. And because they nearly wiped out all civilisation and the time following that was pretty chaotic very few records remained to tell us. (Although in that sense Tyria has an advantage, writing didn’t even exist on Earth until about 7,000 BC.)

There’s also much more mundane stuff which certainly could be known but hasn’t come up, like the names of all the Krytan ministers or the exact location of the other charr Legions citadels.

There’s hardly any topic that covers all the lore, but here’s some points I can call from the top of my head

- Magic is free and wild, in cycles of wake and sleep the Elder Dragons feast and destroy everything in their wake
- The Seers father the ancient races, most notably the Dwarves, Mursaat, Jotun and Forgotten.
- The ancient races survive the next wake of the Elder Dragons, the seers teach the ancient races how to make a bloodstone to seal all the magic in the world. The Mursaat don’t agree because Magic is the very core of their functioning.
- The Bloodstones come to pass, a LONG period of peace and quiet is in effect
- The Mursaat feel betrayed and go to war. They suffer heavy losses and retreat to a veil between the real world and the Mists, they’re not to reappear until they learn of the Flameseeker Prophecies

- The human gods appear in tyria. They bring with them their children, the humans.
- They claim Cantha, followed by Elona
- They establish Orr and build a capital for the gods. They advance to Ascalon and manage to drive out the Charr

- The Margonites are hunted by the Forgotten, because of the flameseeker prophecies. Jadoth prays to Abaddon for sanctuary, Abaddon breaks the seal of the Bloodstones and releases magic. Jadoth and his people drive out the Forgotten.
- Wars break out among the people, clans of different kinds unite as Guilds and bring about the first Great Guild Wars (which is what the series is named after, not the actual fights between guilds of our time)
- A human king pleas to the gods to end this era of War. The gods agree agree (behind Abaddon’s back), but humans must pay for their actions. The human king sacrifices himself to seal the bloodstones again. Its thrown in the Mouth of Abaddon (where the Gate of Komalie to the foundry of failed creations sleeps. Unknown if it was already called gate of abaddon at that time)
- The Bloodstone breaks in 5 pieces, magic is seperated in four schools. The great Guild Wars ends. Abaddon is furious, and goes to war with his fellow gods. If not for a stunt of Balthazar he almost secured victory. Balthazar smote him down in the same ocean where Jadoth sank the Forgotten armada. The seas dry up and become a desolate plains where only the dead can survive. The area is unironically called the Desolation.

- With a weak and stable flow of magic in the world the people calm down and settle their continents in peace again. a new era of quiet comes in play.

- Glint’s Flameseeker Prophecies become known throughout the world. In a desperate attempt to stop it, the Mursaat appear before the humans to establish a cult that can quell the Gate of Komalie. Abaddon sends forth his Putrid Minister and The Seer to corrupt the ley of events in Tyria and Cantha. They bring about a breach in the Foundry of Failed Creations, and release the Plague upon the world. But they fail to bring about Nightfall.
- The Hunger corrupts lady Ossa in Elona in a last desperate, but this time succesful attempt to bring out Nightfall. Nightfall comes to pass and Abaddon’s voice is heard in the mists. The heroes manage to break Abaddon’s will before he can finish the Nightfall and Kormir merges with him. Abaddon is effectively dead (but not absolute).

- The release of the Bloodstones and, propably the violent stirring of Abaddon, have caused the Elder Dragons to awaken again. By the end of Eye of the North the Destroyers long for the wake of Primordus, and Jormag has corrupted Svanir and caused a clan of followers called the Sons of Svanir.

(I’ll propably have mixed something up, memory is a dangerous thing, but it should be like 90% accurate. If not, Fleshwound or Konig des Todes will correct me any moment)

Thanks for those.

After splashing out on the latest expansion, I found myself, in the form of a diminutive Asura Chronomancer, in the Silverwastes and beyond, discovering that the other races don’t seem to trust the Sylvari and something about a problem with the Pale tree.

I developed a Sylvari elementalist and have it to lev 50 now, anticipating lev 80 and exploring the Silverwastes and beyond as one of those Sylvari. The hope is to gain more insight into these enegmatic creatures and their facinating history.

I’ve been reading up as much as I can about the Sylvari, the Pale Tree, Ventari, Ronan and the association with Mordremoth.

I still a bit haunted by the look on Caithe’s face when the Egg was placed in Tarir.

But at each point I come across more loose ends and look forward to exploring those.

I especially would like to understand more about Destiny’s Edge, but of course, that would only be a start.

<Bangs head on desk, pounding fists in frustration>

Making up for all those years I’ve wasted on such nonsense as Gekkeiju Online, WoW, Metin 2 and Lord of the Rings Online. (Well, not so much Gekkeiju Online, which was fabulous).

I’ve followed RoseofGilead’s link to the time-line which seems a great place to start.

The Wiki is, of course, a great resource. Sadly the search function in the standard Wiki format seems stuck in the dark ages (or 2004). I entered the term The Pale Tree only to get a num return. I needed, of course, to enter Pale Tree.

Not a criticism of those compiling the Wiki by any means. It is common to all Wikis using that template.

Anyway, thanks for the support and the friendly responses.

Spacial.1683:

The Wiki is, of course, a great resource. Sadly the search function in the standard Wiki format seems stuck in the dark ages (or 2004). I entered the term The Pale Tree only to get a num return. I needed, of course, to enter Pale Tree.

It’s a Wiki, it’s contents are dependant on what users create. In this case the problem was a missing redirect, which I’ve now created.

If you find any other issues you can fix it yourself, leave feedback using the link at the top of the page or post about it here and someone should be able to sort it out.

Destiny’s Edge quick version :

On a sidenote; there is very little lore known of what happened before the human gods got into Tyria. All lore we got in GW1 was written by humans, en therefore limited to what humans knew. As a result, the concept of magic and some other stuff has been redconned simply because we now know stuff about magic and dimensions our ancestors simply didn’t know.

Anything we know prior to the coming of the gods, is what the seers and forgotten told us, and what we learned from dwarves and mursaat, and their tomes. And even they have a racial bias in understanding how the world works, so even if something is said, doesn’t necissarily mean its true.

I believe the Seers, Forgotten en Mursaat had the best understanding of how magic worked. Followed by the Jotun, who had a lot of knowledge as well, but limited themselves to the ‘worldly forms’ of magic and celestial magics. Dwarves I think knew about magic, but didn’t as much rely on it as the others.

If it’s the more recent developments before the pact advanced into the Heart of Maguuma that you are currently interested in, consider getting Living Story Season 2, as that holds most of the explanation for the Sylvari development from just one of five races to being the odd one out.

If you don’t have the gems or just don’t want to commit that much on top of buying the game, you can also join a friend on a play-through of all 8 episodes. You won’t be able to control the story yourself, but you’ll see and experience everything that happens, from the first intrusions of Mordremoth’s minions towards the east to the revelations of the origins of the Sylvari and the attack on the Pale Tree.

At the very bottom of this page are summaries:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Living_World

Welcome to Tyria and good luck.