Sun_Paladin wrote:I always felt that each character is his own different "timeline" and own world. So many timelines in TOME, you can even get killed by your future self! And sorry to question you or sound like I disagree, I just want all the lore to work and all characters be satisfied.
The game seems to agree with you... Embers of Rage makes the Eidolon canonically real and easily accessible (at least via telepathic message or whatever it is) in potentially every ordinary run, even one done in roguelike mode, and if the Eidolon exists then lots of alternate realities exist. Every character you make seems to have his/her own universe, more or less. That's my impression, anyway.
According to that, I think you are free to think that worlds in which Aeryn dies of old age, happily and in love, are just as canonically real as ones in which she is slain in her ruined home by Kruk-aligned tinkers.
However, it's also very clear that this is a setting primarily characterized by violent strife. And the encounter beneath Eruan goes so far as to establish that even within the fiction, there are very powerful forces working to keep it that way. Outside the fiction, too, the basic mechanics of the game tend to keep it that way. If there weren't endless violent conflict, then what would the player character even do? This is a game about killing thousands of strangers, after all. It's a serial murder simulator. It's not very hospitable to stably happy endings.
I think it's probably safe to assume that, on the one hand, whatever characters, races, or societies you like can be supposed to succeed and live peacefully for a very long time in many canonically real settings... but that in the longer run, all (or very nearly all) will reliably fall back into violent, tragic conflict, in most if not all timelines. I don't think this is a setting where long-term peace and happiness are ever going to be normal, except possibly when DarkGod retires from developing the game and writes an epilogue to its story, in which (if he wants) he will finally be free to make a happy ending that doesn't block his future work.
But yeah, the text within the game seems to support the thought that a Sunwall rescued by a hero from the Maj'Eyal campaign is not guaranteed to fall to a hero from the Embers of Rage campaign - and that this would be true even if attacking the Sunwall in Embers of Rage were NOT optional. Maybe the Eidolon has even told stories of heroes who defended the Sunwall against the Kruk uprising! And the fact that there don't happen to be any ToME campaigns built around those stories is no indication that they are false stories.
Until DarkGod specifies otherwise, that is how I will think of it, anyway.
(Regardless, yeah the ending should always acknowledge the major story-altering choices you made within your run - whether or not you crossed the bridge, whether or not you attacked Aeryn, etc.!)