Serpent Riders - How many Chaos Spheres were there?

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

As far as I know, this was never definitively answered in the series, correct me if I'm wrong.  So what is your theory?

 

That there were three Chaos Spheres, one for each rider, with only Eidolon's destroyed, and D'Sparil's left unaccounted for?

That there was only one Chaos Sphere, which was held by Korax, passed to the player of Hexen/Deathkings, and then at some later point was recovered by Eidolon and subsequently destroyed by the player of Hexen II?

That D'Sparil wasn't allowed a sphere for some reason but Korax and Eidolon both had their own?

Something else?

 

I always leaned towards the three spheres idea, but thinking about it I wonder.  The ending of Hexen does call it the Chaos Sphere, whether that means anything or not.

[KVELLER]

I believe it's only one sphere, and that the guy from Hexen never actually takes control of it. We do know that he gets teleported when trying to take it at the end of the game, and I assume the same thing happens at the end of Deathkings, which this time leads to his demise (or him getting lost god knows where).

[Not Jabba]

Three makes the most sense to me. There's no particularly compelling explanation for why the Hexen hero would get the (lone) sphere and then Eidolon has it later, and there's certainly nothing definitive about it in the canon -- the Hexen 2 wiki claims there are three separate ones, iirc, but this is probably an assumption, because it's not in the Hexen 2 manual. Corvus gets kind of tossed around between dimensions in Heretic and particularly in the expansion episodes, and it's reasonable to conclude that he simply missed it (with the real-world explanation being that the devs just hadn't thought of that part of the lore yet).

[Gez]

Honestly don't expect too much consistency in the "lore" of the Serpent Riders saga. After all, Raven demoted Real Korax to a mere Heresiarch and promoted his Serpent steed to Actual Korax, because they didn't want it to look too much like in Heretic.

[kristus]

What Gez said, but for the sake of argument. Considering how you don't have any Chaos Sphere in Deathkings, you probably never managed to acquire it. 

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

5 hours ago, Gez said:

Honestly don't expect too much consistency in the "lore" of the Serpent Riders saga. After all, Raven demoted Real Korax to a mere Heresiarch and promoted his Serpent steed to Actual Korax, because they didn't want it to look too much like in Heretic.

Yeah, I'm aware that the plot of the series generally seems to boil down to "we made shit up as we went" (and, according to that one interview, apparently "other people also made shit up as we went")  I'm more curious if there seems to be much of a "fanon" consensus on what people think about this since I don't think we ever got a real answer from Raven (primarily to take into consideration if I write any Chaos Sphere related shenanigans into any silly backstories for the WAD(s) I'm working on...)

[[McD] James]

I'm pretty sure there's just one, and that Eidolon was simply able to summon it at the end of Hexen 2, because reasons. I also don't consider Deathkings' story to be canon, as it doesn't add to the story in any meaningful way, and had zero effort put into it.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

I always assumed it was too big and firmly locked in the ground to be moved around, Eidolon defeats the original hero and takes over their position in whatever game the hexen ending is hinting at. Is deathkings even canon? I know heretic's e4 and e5 are in the same position except heretic 2 outright shows episode 3 to be the canon ending of heretic 1 in the trailer\intro.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

3 minutes ago, Pegg said:

I know heretic's e4 and e5 are in the same position except heretic 2 outright shows episode 3 to be the canon ending of heretic 1 in the trailer\intro.

In Heretic's case there's nothing about SotSR that's nixed by Heretic II that I can tell, in fact it seems pretty well acknowledged: D'Sparil curses Corvus to get lost in some series of "outer worlds" and he only gets back to Parthoris some time (seemingly a long time) later.  E4 and E5 are stuff he was doing while in exile.

 

Deathkings is a little more unclear, I always assumed it to be canon, but it's also more or less "doesn't really matter" as far as the larger story goes; the player ends up at more or less the same place as they did at the end of the original campaign even so and I don't think they ever acknowledge it again.  If you ignore Deathkings existing the only thing that changes is the notion that messing around with the Chaos Sphere might be too much for a human to handle (or that it was deliberately serving as bait in a trap).

[Not Jabba]

Logic aside, I think "you beat the second game in the series and won the only Chaos Sphere and did nothing with it and then Eidolon is implied to kill you offscreen and take it but there's no indication of how this happens" is simply an unsatisfying take on the series lore. It's a lot less interesting, and requires a lot more mental gymnastics, than having there be three Chaos Spheres.

 

If there is only one, I also find it odd that the second most powerful Serpent Rider is initially given possession of the artifact instead of Eidolon, or that Eidolon would not have been able to overtake the player and guard the sphere in the event that it was in some kind of "shared" pocket plane. Additionally, if the player had the only Chaos Sphere, and the Serpent Riders derive the largest portion of there power from possession of the sphere, then it doesn't seem like Eidolon should be considered to still be more powerful than the player, as the ending of Hexen indicates. Nothing about the single-sphere interpretation makes much sense to me.

[kristus]

5 minutes ago, Not Jabba said:

If there is only one, I also find it odd that the second most powerful Serpent Rider is initially given possession of the artifact instead of Eidolon, or that Eidolon would not have been able to overtake the player and guard the sphere in the event that it was in some kind of "shared" pocket plane. 

I guess that is why you were wisped away rather than get it in Hexen. ;) It's entierly possibe that Korax had a way to get to this Sphere. But it was guarded by Eidolon not letting you get to it. Ofc, this opens up a lot of new caveats. Like if they are so powerful to control the player. How are either of them ever defeated. If they can just transport the player away to the land of the dead or whatever?

[Cruduxy Pegg]

46 minutes ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

In Heretic's case there's nothing about SotSR that's nixed by Heretic II that I can tell, in fact it seems pretty well acknowledged: D'Sparil curses Corvus to get lost in some series of "outer worlds" and he only gets back to Parthoris some time (seemingly a long time) later.  E4 and E5 are stuff he was doing while in exile.

 

 

Actually you are right. I remembered the exile segment as if it was episode 2 but it happens after D'sparils death in the trailer.

[Gez]

 

14 hours ago, kristus said:

I guess that is why you were wisped away rather than get it in Hexen. ;) It's entierly possibe that Korax had a way to get to this Sphere. But it was guarded by Eidolon not letting you get to it. Ofc, this opens up a lot of new caveats. Like if they are so powerful to control the player. How are either of them ever defeated. If they can just transport the player away to the land of the dead or whatever?

The cooldown on the "teleport player" power hadn't yet expired. Or maybe it has a wide area of effect, so it's okay to use it on Hexen's player since he's far away in a different dimension but not on Hexen II's player because Eidie'd teleport along.