Guild Wars 2

I’ll keep it short.
So I do a lot of roleplay and I know a certain person that roleplays as an ascalonian guardian that got lost in The Mists.

The backstory is that his character was an elite guard and during the fall of Ascalon, when King Adelbern cursed his people, that particular soldier got hit in the head with a rock and somehow made it to our favourite foggy place.
He claims that he spent there about 200 years and suddenly popped out of there and showed up in our current timeline, still being a guardian and not a revenant.

My question is: Is this even remotely possible for a human guardian or any living form to get into The Mists through falling rocks and then surviving there for about two centuries without any signs of getting older?
Perhaps Mists stop time and every life process, perhaps Adelbern’s Foefire caused a rift but then I bet there were plenty of unconscious humans lying around that also could have been sucked into The Mists for no particular reason. Give me your thoughts, thanks

To the best of my lore knowledge: he could have come back, but he’d only be a Revenant if he actually learned how to fight in the Mists.

Disclaimer here: different roleplayers have very different ideas about how closely they need to cleave to lore. I fall on the stringent end, and that’s the perspective everything below is written from, but this guy sounds like he plays pretty loose. By all means take our suggestions to them, but the important thing is whether you enjoy playing with the character. I wouldn’t let impossible backstories get in the way of that.

That said, it takes a bit more than a boulder to get into the Mists, with your body intact anyway. He’d have to put more effort into the backstory for me to swallow it- with the new precedent of Rytlock and Sohothin opening a portal, I could possibly buy that this elite guard was close enough to Adelbern that some kind of similar fluctuation nabbed him. It’s still a long shot, though, and I’d personally want a very good reason why this guardian had to be from the past. Rule of cool doesn’t cut it for bending lore.

As for living out the 200 years? That’s solidly beyond my belief. As far as we can tell, bodily processes don’t cease; you still move, and breathe, and talk, and fight, and die in the Mists, so you should still age. However, the Mists, and specifically the Rift, is supposed to touch on all times, so perhaps he only lived out a few years or so then found himself spat out in the future.

Oh, and one other thing- guardians weren’t around at the fall of Ascalon. Hell, they were still pretty rare more than a century later. If he wants his character to be a guardian it’d have to be a skillset he picked up from someone modern.

So, is the concept possible? For a super-special, one-in-a-billion case, accepting the alterations laid out above, yes, technically. If you can’t tell yet, I still don’t like the time traveler idea, or in general having to bend the lore that far to make a character work, but the Mists is a vague enough place that it can be abused into making this work. And maybe your friend pulls it off well enough to forgive that. That’s going to be your call.

Your friend might consider trying to expand on his original plans and try to connect to actual lore on the Mists. The Mistlock Observatory fractals is a good enough place to start. With some forced plot-complexity a living character might be called into a fractal that replays a historic moment, and somehow he might escape the endless replaying of the fractals and end up walking on Tyria again 200 years after the event. The player might want to employ a big dose of mystery and magical mumbo-jumbo in the explanation, while also building on events that are set in the lore. “Being hit by a rock” is downright insultingly simple for such long shots. I would also be careful about flaunting this backstory casually during RP, as it very well might result in him not being taken seriously.

The closest thing to a guardian at that time prolly be a heavy armor smiting monk xD
i have to agree the not ageing part would be hard to explain :s (i guess it depends on where your friend end up in the mist)

Okay I’ve missed one thing, quite important.
It was not a rock that hit him but a searing crystal that fell from the sky and landed next to him, this is when he lost consciousness.
So he got lost in The Mists during The Searing but it still does not hold together because how a tool of death would make him get into the mists?

I guess it would add up if there was more explanation to it, but if there is none then this idea can’t stand on its own just like that, because then we could use Mists to bend lore how we see fit.

Better if it had been the Foefire. As far as we know, the only way the Searing, or any other large rock falling from the sky, has sent people to the Mists is by smashing them to a pulp. Great way to get in, really, but getting out isn’t as fun when you don’t have a body anymore.

Aaron Ansari.1604:

Better if it had been the Foefire.

Another interesting RPing idea, if they go with the Foefire method, is that the guardian could be something like a free Foefire ghost in the same manner as Bria. The time difference could be explained away as them either being bound or something blocking their reformation, and him or her appearing as a living human is simply because s/he thinks they’ve never died in the first place. Thus, the illusion is constantly maintained subconsciously.

Character building moment after they’ve sustained their first major injury and start bleeding Foefire energy.

I find this interesting because I developped a character on a similar kind of plot.

First of all, I want to say that I personally find this kind of narrative borderline lore-breaking, and as such, quite difficult to play with other players. Which is why I keep my characters to myself, to fictions I write or intend to write, or to people who are interested in being part of my canon story.
Also, my non-RP reason for doing this is that I have always had a character/persona, who had some sort of a blurry RP in GW1. I did not want to lose that character, or his background.

Now, what happened RP-wise :
My character got into the Ascalonian army as a mage (he was, and still is, an elementalist). He was there during the Foefire battle. As the actual Foefire spell hit him, he was, himself, casting a quite powerful spell, that some of you GW1 players should remember : Rodgort’s Invocation. (http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Rodgort%27s_Invocation)

This spell, colliding with the Foefire one, created a rift that sucked my character into the Mists. That is how he “left” the GW1 timeline.

Now, why didn’t he age, and how did he land in GW2 timeline, you ask?

I used the Thaumanova reactor as a way out. As some people who commented here said, the Mists can also be a messy place where time is distorted, especially by events like those. So no, my character did not, in his eyes, “stay” 300 years into the Mists. He basically got blown away through one rift, right intoanother, and landed unconscious in nowadays (well, Thaumanova explosion’s) Tyria. Thaumanova seems like a good choice to me precisely because of all the dislocation shenanigans taking place over there.

Of course there is more intricacy and details to the character but I’m honestly not too keen on writing down all that, so that’s the very concise version to give another point of view on “surviving the mists”.

Once again, I write all this realizing that it is lore-breaking, at the very least a bit, and with no intention to impose it on anyone else’s roleplay. It is, I’d argue, a good way to create a “hero” in your own private version of Tyria, but it just does not work as well when you are bound, if RPing in game, to meet other people who might have a similar degree of “one in a million” background.
Imo, looking at it this way is probably the best way not to get into arguments when using a lore-breaking storyline.

Well, there are magical ways to keep you alive forever/a very long time. Anet explicitly stated such.

Honestly, I’d have to state, why that backstory? Some characters make sense to have long lives, but this combo makes me wonder. Elite guard of Adelbern, launched into the mists and emerging 250+ years later? I’d imagine such a character would be hard to play in the first place, as they’d likely share bits of personality with Adelbern. A person with strong feelings against Kryta emerging and seeing Ascalon gone and Kryta as the only true human nation around in the local area? Big, big leap.

As others said, it probably more likely to encounter some sort of random portal that opened back then, and emerged in modern GW2 times and spat him out before closing. But, he wouldn’t be a guardian or Revenant. Neither existed back then. One could pull a “Monk, but quickly learned some of the offensive guardian tricks and trained physically to start using the armor and weapons.” maybe.