Guild Wars 2

Hi!

I’m thinking about writing a short story about one of my characters’ background and I was wondering if I could check some lore accuracy things here. The story would take place about ten years before the base game’s story, and because of my character’s Ascalonian ancestry I’d like to have the story involve Ebonhawke, or, to be precise, the asura gates connecting Divinity’s Reach to Ebonhawke.

I haven’t read any of the Guild Wars 2 novels so all my knowledge on this subject comes from the wiki. It says there that in 1320 Queen Jennah had the Ebonhawke asura gate fixed after years of mismanagement. Do we have any information on whether the asura gates were completely broken before this, that is, so no one could travel through them?

In the story one of my character’s family members would get transported through the asura gate, but to the wrong place entirely. In lore, have the asura gates ever malfunctioned in a way that a person going through them was taken to a location without an asura gate? I’m thinking sort of in a way the Orrian mirror functions in Through the Looking Glass. In my story the location wouldn’t be completely random, but just outside Ebonhawke.

Thanks in advance for any answers. The plot of the story is nowhere near finished yet so I’m willing to scrap any ideas that don’t fit in the lore. I’d like for them to be as accurate as possible.

The actual tech of the asura gates is kept pretty tight-lipped in-game, partly because the asura zealously guard their tech. Knowledge is more precious than gold for them, but gold helps. However, what the novels do reveal to us it that the asura gates could always be attuned to other gates, but it usually took a lot of work to turn the dials and flip the levers. They basically get taken down for maintenance. That’s probably why the gates we generally find in-game are perma-connected to each other.

As for any transportation accidents that happen with the gates, not that I recall. When humans first met the asura, they had long perfected portal technology and had a massive hub of asura gates connecting their entire network. However, that’s also where Primordus had been sleeping. (Probably not a coincidence.) So it’s highly improbable that something would go wrong before an asura tech noticed. Then again, this is the asura we’re talking about, where magical mishaps occur daily.

I’m pretty sure that, if working properly, it takes two gates to be tuned to each other to form the purple wormhole that connects the two places. However, because there is so little known about the gates, and you’re writing fanfiction not canonized lore, I think you can take a few liberties with it. I would suggest the following options, depending on how you want the story to take place:
1. Just before stepping into the portal, there’s a mana surge and the portal destabilises. As you had already entered the portal, it had to dump you out somewhere, and the terminal flashes in the middle of nowhere (similar to the portals in Queensdale’s swamp) before winking out of existence, leaving you trapped wherever you are.
2. As the asura had a whole bunch of gates set up across the continent, and even on Elona and Cantha, it’s possible for a poorly-tuned gate (or one that was mishandled) to latch onto one of these abandoned gates just long enough to send a passenger through, but then shorts out because the other gate hadn’t been used in over 200 years.

If you want to learn more about what is documented about asura gates in the novels, I believe it’s in Ghosts of Ascalon. DR’s portal had to be retuned to have its traffic go to Ebonhawke instead of its previous destination, and it’s treated almost like an airline flight (or maybe train would be a better comparison, given airport security these days).

I remember one of the novels had the protagonists use an Asura gate that spit them into a random field with horses in it, but I don’t really think it was “accidental” as much as just a little weird. At least to me. I know the Asura are kind of flighty at times, but why did they have a portal that just shot you out in what appeared to be a random empty field?

But on the subject of Asuran “flightiness” I always figured the game and its lore treated all Asura tech as wildly unpredictable and an affront to anything resembling safety standards. While they might not have mentioned any instances of gates shooting you to incorrect places, I would assume that’s just one of many possible mishaps that may or may not occur when using Asura technology. I feel like you’d just consider yourself lucky if you didn’t come out the other side and find you’re suddenly a chicken or something.

Squee, you’re a bit confused there. It’s become a trope for the short, goblinoid race to be very “flighty”, as you put it, in their advanced technology in a magical age that also has a tendency to blow. Asura tech is reliable, it does what it’s supposed to, most of the time. The trouble the asura run into is that it works too well, or some unforeseen complication arises that then causes things to backfire. For example, there’s an asuran lab in Metrica Province experimenting on skritt. After rounding up a bunch of them into a cell (and it’s only like 7 or 8 of them in there), the skritt get smart enough to unlock the cage and decide to attack the scientists… for some reason. A similar experiment is trying to make an ettin smarter, but the method to do so turns him into an angry berserking monster.

Or that time they tried to calm an erupting volcano and somehow made a destroyer bigger…

Regarding the reliability of asura tech:

It’s not inherently unreliable, but it can be. The technology that the asura have perfected – such as most gates – is fairly reliable. However, they also engage in a lot of experimentation, and those experiments can have spectacular failures that would make a tinker gnome blush. The Thaumanova explosion is a good example, but there are others, and one of the most common reasons for finding an asura lab somewhere a long way from Rata Sum is because the asura has been banned from doing their experiments close to home for safety reasons.

As a particularly relevant example: there’s a heart in Brisban Wildlands where an asura krewe is experimenting with new gate technology. One of the events involves the asura opening a gate, but they can’t get it to open where they want it, and instead, each time they open it, it seems to be opening in some random place in the Shiverpeaks.

It’s not absolutely clear that the other end doesn’t have a gate, but given that they’re in minotaur, griffon, and icebrood territory, it seems unlikely. I think there are a few other cases of gates not having a connecting gate at the other end, such as Professor Portmatt’s Lab in Bloodtide Coast.

So it’s possible. A well-maintained gate with a stable connection is probably highly unlikely to send someone to the wrong place. Considering that it’s canon that the Ebonhawke gate was poorly maintained to the point of failing entirely requiring resupply to happen via caravans across land, though, it’s entirely possible that there was a point in there where it was malfunctioning.

Rognik.2579:

As for any transportation accidents that happen with the gates, not that I recall. When humans first met the asura, they had long perfected portal technology and had a massive hub of asura gates connecting their entire network. However, that’s also where Primordus had been sleeping. (Probably not a coincidence.) So it’s highly improbable that something would go wrong before an asura tech noticed. Then again, this is the asura we’re talking about, where magical mishaps occur daily.

The location is explicitly not a coincidence. The asura built the Central Transfer Chamber near Primordus because they were using Primordus as a power source.

Samuli.7852:

Do we have any information on whether the asura gates were completely broken before this, that is, so no one could travel through them?

It’s heavily implied that by 1320 it was as good as non-functional- like drax said, though, since your story will be years before that it could be in a period of malfunction before the failure.

In lore, have the asura gates ever malfunctioned in a way that a person going through them was taken to a location without an asura gate? I’m thinking sort of in a way the Orrian mirror functions in Through the Looking Glass. In my story the location wouldn’t be completely random, but just outside Ebonhawke.

It hardly ever happens, but yes. In Edge of Destiny, a heavily damaged gate was brought back online for a brief time, and it hopped wildly between destinations, most of which probably didn’t have a receiving gate. It’s mentioned in-game, too- there’s a rumor in Rata Sum about a human going to the Reach coming out of the gate in the Black Citadel instead, and a pair of asura outside Thaumanova (with no receiving gate in sight) apparently ended up there by ducking through a random gate.

Given the rarity, it’d take a little suspension of disbelief- it’s like writing that your character was struck by lightning- but there’s nothing inherently impossible about it.

Thank you for your answers!

The reliability/unreliability of asura technology is something I did consider but as the gate technology specifically is probably some of the oldest and so some of the most advanced asura tech, I came to the conclusion that a malfunction is highly unlikely. At least when it comes to a gate that’s permanently tuned.

If I choose to go with the assumption that the asura gate was functional but unstable at the time of my story, I think the most logical course of events would be that my characters were warned about the gate but they decided to ignore the warning or something of the sort. An accident out of the blue doesn’t seem very probable.

I’m trying to remember the old in-game dialogue by the LA gate hub, in original LA when it was out on its own little peninsula. I do recall some sort of chatter about the dangers involved. Though they were more the “dissolving into component atoms” sort of dangers than “getting detoured.”