Things to Know
The Maculaverse is a vibrant array of characters and concepts I find interesting, some mine and some from other people's works, as was often done (Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood, etc) before the silly idea of copyright was invented. Part 1 is littered with references, and most are either self-explanatory and/or one-time, so I'll only cover the important stuff here.
If you've played my other ZZT games, you may surely notice a lot of references. They're not essential... I like making connections, and throwing in references for the very few who may get them. Probably the only one that I want to highlight, is that Bunnyvale USA in the Carnival of Nyarlathotep is, as the name suggests, based on Bunnyvale from the School Hard storyline in my previous game Iguanamus, although there's plenty of twists to keep it fresh, and it covers the parts that you never got to see in the original.
The Cosmos
The Cosmos (in other words, the absolute entirety of everything, with no asteriks) of the so-called 'Maculaverse' is an infinite 'steady-state omniverse' that consists of a boundless void filled with 'multiverses' that occasionally burst into existence by sheer chance. These 'multiverses' are inconceivably massive bubbles following specific laws of reality, and containing many universes that begin identically, before diverging in arbitrary ways after various amounts of time.
Azathoth devours universes for sustenace, but is also the sole reason the cosmos is an unending explosion of new worlds, and not a series of dying universes returning to the void
Oddities abound, even in the void between universes and multiverses, perhaps most notably Aberra. While astral projection of all sleeping beings constantly generates temporary dream worlds in the void, for them to exist in, Aberra was the only known dream world to have ever solidified into a permanent realm on its own, rather than because of Nyarlathotep's meddling. It's anyone's guess as to what brought it into existence to begin with, but over the past 2.8 trillion years, the Evil Eye twins Lutea and Macula have become quite known and feared in their corner (a corner that spans entire multiverse clusters) of the cosmos.
'Borrowed' Characters and Such
- Nyarlathotep and Azathoth - The original Nyarlathotep story by H.P. Lovecraft is 100% canon to the Maculaverse, and took place in a universe that he destroyed by unraveling reality. Nyarlathotep and Azathoth are heavily inspired by Lovecraft's original iterations but rebooted, as is explained more here.
- Buffyverse - The game takes midway into season 3. Buffy and Angel are on vacation together, and Drusilla and Spike just happen to be in town themselves, their breakup never occurring due to unknown timeline divergences. Very basic character summaries, as needed to understand the plot, are below.
- Buffy Summers - A powerful young woman who is the Slayer, the chosen one granted supernatural strength and resilience in order to fight to protect the world from the scourges of the underworld (namely vampires and other demons.)
- Angel - Buffy's boyfriend/parter-in-battle, and a 200+ year old vampire who was cursed with a soul to force him to atone for the atrocities of his demonic version from the past, named Angelus.
- Drusilla - A crazed yet quite powerful, villainous vampiress with a deliciously unpredictable personality and unknown psychic abilities that are unique to her. She was turned into a vampiress by Angelus, who tormented her unspeakably to drive her insane prior to finally transforming her.
- Spike - Drusilla's devoted boyfriend and fellow recurring Buffyverse villain. Highly charismatic and a skilled fighter, yet often incompetent and stuck teaming up with Buffy against more formidable villains.
- DooM - The first three games only (DooM, DooM ][, and Final DooM) are canon in a tongue-in-cheek way. If you insist on a 'logical' explanation, Galeam convinced Nyarlathotep go back in time and stop everything past the demon invasion of the Phobos/Deimos bases from happening because the post-apocalyptic (TWO apocalypses) Earth was too dull, but the collective memory still vaguely exists.
- Half-Life - The first game and Opposing Force are canon, and nothing after. The Resonance Cascade silently transpired in the Black Mesa facility on the release date of the actual game (19 November, 1998), just 10 days before the day The Carnival of Nyarlathotep takes place on. In short, a failed experiment at a top secret laboratory in the deserts of New Mexico led to a local interdimensional alien invasion and a military-led cover-up that concluded with the G-Man, an unknowable eldritch abomination under the employ of Nyarlathotep, swooping in and and nuking the facility while detaining anyone who escaped.
- Raptor: Call of the Shadows - Harrold's Death Emporium is the in-game vendor in Raptor, selling you all the weapons of mass-death you could ever want. No further explanation needed.
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