The Story of a Dead MMO – three events from City of Heroes’ Absurd Lore
I like roleplaying in my MMORPGs for the same reason I like to play tabletop; it’s lovely to build up a character in a shared world of imagination with other cool, creative people. City of Heroes was one of my first loves in that department. Released in 2004, the game had two successful expansions: City of Villains and Going Rogue, before it was suddenly shut down despite a decently profitable free-to-play business model.
It's an event that sits in the collective trauma of its die-hard fans, coming as a surprise to the developers themselves and the community at large. Fortunately, despite being abandonware, those diehard fans have resurrected the game via several homebrew private servers. If someone were to take a hypothetical look into these hypothetical places (certainly couldn’t be me), they might also be surprised to find that the roleplay community is still kicking!
It's little wonder why. The game’s lore is a feast for the imagination, taking itself seriously one moment, then spinning into unhinged mythology the next. If you’re reading this, I’m sorry in advance; I’m about to go into a madness-spiral into one of my childhood joys, and I’m dragging you with me. I loved City of Heroes, and the thought of it fading into obscurity makes me very sad, so here’s three absurd happenings from its lore to leave your head spinning.
THE RIKTI WAR(s)
Pictured: A snapshot from the desolate Rikti War Zone. You could hop onto this ship and punch aliens as a swarm of brightly-coloured particles and capes.
The Rikti didn’t arrive right away.
It started with a fleet of red disks, screaming open above streets and homes, destroying everything they came into direct contact with. These portals hung there for hours like the executioner’s axe, gathering dread while they were investigated by the world’s heroes and wizards, unable to discern their origin or nature. It wasn’t until nightfall that the Rikti struck. Thousands of invaders rushed into the world, destroying everything they met with boiling plasma weapons that bore through metal and stripped flesh to the bone. After twenty-four hours the portals shut, never to open again.
The Rikti War is the most dramatic, traumatic worldbuilding explanation for loading screens in an MMORPG. Looming over City of Heroes’ zones are giant blue forcefields aptly named “War Walls”. They break a sprawling city into tidy, themed zones that don’t have to be rendered all at once. These walls were built during the war as Paragon City, the invasion’s ground zero, was carved up into human and Rikti territory.
The war lasted six months, and the fiction doesn’t pull any punches: it’s directly stated that most of earth’s greatest heroes died or went missing. Almost all major supergroups – your Justice Leagues, your Avengers – simply ceased to exist. Any military efforts resulted in a grim toll of five dead soldiers for every one dead Rikti. The lore entry on a now-archived website directly states that worldwide casualties were in the hundreds of thousands. It’s a wonder that society survived with so much collective trauma dealt out over six months. The Blip ain’t got nothing on the Rikti War.
The initial catalyst for City of Heroes’ story is in no uncertain terms a near-apocalypse, and the Rikti are by no means gone. While a second in-game invasion didn’t go nearly as badly for earth’s heroes, the Rikti continue to be an unnerving existential threat to this day, even spreading a virus that can turn unassuming civilians into them.
ORANBEGA AND THE MU
Pictured: The Circle of Thorns having a boys night out
City of Heroes’ ancient history is just as messed up.
The Mu and the Oranbegans (dubbed the Circle of Thorns) were two ancient civilizations of mages who lived under powerful old gods. While the Mu are certified bastards, owing to their worship of the war-happy Hequat, the Oranbegans are unfortunate bastards with a horrible streak of poor decisions behind them.
The Oranbegans began as an enlightened, peaceful mage-society centred around the pursuit of knowledge. Meanwhile, the Mu started off as a rebellion of religious zealots who wanted to go back to the old ways. While the Mu rebellion failed, the Oranbegans didn’t pursue them. Hequat raised a nice, cozy little Island out of the ocean for her Mu children, and while the Mu performed disturbing magical eugenics and grew into a thriving religious dictatorship, the Oranbegans forgot about their would-be enemies, the two civilizations growing separately for generations.
Then the Mu returned and flattened them into paste.
The ruling council of the Oranbegans – the Circle of Thorns – were desperate. In an attempt to shield themselves from the Mu’s sky-ships, they sank their entire city, which now serves as one of many backdrops for the game’s missions. Backed into a tomb of their own making, they eventually made a deal with the prince of demons. This literal deal with the devil worked a treat as spectres, leviathans and demons surged out to fight on their behalf.
There was one small problem: they’d only agreed to help in exchange for the soul of every Mu man, woman and child. Stopping just sort of genocide to consider whether they were the baddies, the Oranbegans put their foot down. This greatly upset the forces of hell writhing under their command, and the only way they managed to escape their wrath was to shed their bodies entirely while the Mu stragglers escaped.
Did the Mu learn their lesson? Absolutely not, they’re now the pet wizards of Arachnos, the game’s most widespread villain group. As a reward for their mercy, the surviving Oranbegans have become body-hopping spectres of themselves, desperately gathering the souls of Mu descendants to fulfil their old contracts so they might finally be free.
The moral of the story? Everybody loses, don’t become a wizard.
MOT ATE CHICAGO
Pictured: City of Heroes’ later updates liked to flex what they could do with the engine circa 2011 — this elder-god head looks absolutely sick.
Mot is a Lovecraftian horror. Yes, it’s classified in-game as an Incarnate; on the same level as superman-analogue Statesman, or the Dr.Doom-analogue Lord Recluse. But that’s a little bit like saying that the ocean is technically a bowl of water.
A forgotten old god who had been sealed for thousands of years, Mot spent a lot of time sleeping underneath Paragon City’s Astoria, feasting on the souls of superheroes offered to it by the Banished Pantheon cult. During the Rikti war this cult rose up and desecrated Astoria in Mot’s name. Considering how utterly busy everyone was at the time, Astoria had to be condemned. An entire neighbourhood gets swarmed by necromantic cultists trying to resurrect an old dead god, and everyone has to ignore it because it’s not even the worst thing happening at the time. That’s an eerily familiar feeling.
The Pantheon finally managed to break the seals keeping Mot at bay, and to keep things short: it was bad for almost everyone involved. Like a bunch of college students desperately scrambling to finish a group project, a bar-brawl of organizations pitched in from both sides of the coin, desperate to put Mot back into its prison. You know it’s bad when even the violent dictator in a big spider suit sends his council of bondage wizards (give a big hand to our old friends the Mu, everybody) to try and deal with the problem.
The most eye-raising quote to come from the ensuing story arcs is delivered to you during Dark Astoria’s finale. You’re assembling a worldwide army, filled with superheroes, villains, corporations, mercenaries, mad geniuses – you name it, everyone’s rocked up to punch Cthulhu in his stupid mouth. As the ante is upped, you’re given a chilling, throwaway line:
“All we can do now is use the time that has been given to us. We will do what we can with whoever has shown up, but we'll have to hurry. Mot is beginning to consume entire cities. We've received word that nearly the entire population of Chicago has been absorbed by Mot. We do not know what city could be next.”
Yep. Mot ate Chicago. Oh, which part? The entirety of Chicago. How many people in it? Most of them.
It’s not even the most important thing happening, there’s no time to grieve or process the fact that an entire city just got ate by an elder god. You need to go and punch that elder god in the face. Go and avenge the entirety of Chicago for us.
Don’t worry, though, because Chicago did get spat out again. Being consumed by Mot alters all self-perception, making all your memories feel false, irreversibly traumatizing you. A pre-requisite to getting ‘eaten’ in the first place involves just giving up on existence, but - they’re alive! They’re fine! Everything’s fine! Back to superhero smackdowns! Don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it -
It just keeps going
These events aren’t even particularly rare in the City of Heroes canon. I’ve not even mentioned the paramilitary anti-metahuman organization Malta and their attempt to release a virus that kills anyone with superpowers. Or the fact that the aforementioned Statesman and Lord Recluse were once buddies who got their powers by opening Pandora’s Box – not a metaphor. Or the entire story arc where you go to a ruined future, or the “Wells”, sources of power that mind-control their benefactors, or the entire other reality that got ate by an overgrown amoeba named Hamidon, or the dimension you visit that’s just filled with werewolves, or –
City of Heroes was an MMO filled with these stories, and while the game has been preserved forever in its private servers, I know that all things must come to an end. Maybe someone’ll lose the files someday, maybe the crackdown on those private servers will be far more severe. One day, the last person who cares about these cooky, off-the-wall events in a little shared universe will pass away, and these fake worlds and characters will finally, truly be dead.
I think I’m being a little pretentious here, but if any of the above interested you, or if you’re a fan of comic-book storytelling… please check out the story wikis, the character profiles of the game’s somehow-active RP community, the janky 2008s youtube music videos made in honour of the game to compressed Nickelback songs. I loved it a whole lot, and diving back into it as an adult has made me love it a whole lot more.
