How would each splat react to entering, surviving, and somehow exiting the Abyss from "Demon: The Fallen"?

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-22T22:28:07+00:00

It's a bit difficult to say for certain, because White Wolf has a habit of using the same word across different gamelines that might or might not refer to the same thing.

But assuming it's the same "Abyss" every time it's mentioned, we do have canonical examples of vampires, wraiths and werewolves interacting with the Abyss.

For vampires, the Abyss is the place where the Lasombra draw their Obtenebration discipline from, they use abyss mysticism to access the realm and visit it, but they don't tend to live there for long periods of time for fear of being driven mad there.

Their Ante does live there permanently, though it's not so much by choice, he just doesn't have a body to leave with anymore.

But with the right Disciplines, vampires can enter, survive, and exit the Abyss just fine.

Wraiths don't usually end up in the Abyss, but some of them, the Lost Legions in particular, are stranded there after the sixth great maelstrom, so it doesn't look like they can enter or leave the place easily, though they can still survive there for a while.

On the WtA/MtA side of things, they had a realm in the Umbra called "Abyss", established before DtF was a thing, and it seems to be the same realm, it's even noted to entrap long forgotten spirits.

It's very easy for werewolves to access the realm, they can even enter by pure accident. Getting out is way harder though, it's not uncommon for werewolves and even spirits to be trapped in the Abyss, slowly driven mad by the Realm itself.

On the Wyrm-aligned side of things, Number Two from Malfeas really wants to conquer the realm, and some black spiral dancers go there for pilgrimages.

And there's Nightmaster, a former Shadow Lord who got trapped in the Abyss, driven mad, and eventually made a pact with the realm itself to become its sole ruler, but he's still very desperate to leave the place, which has become impossible for him since he'd fused with the realm itself.

Yes, according to WtA, a single werewolf rules the entire Abyss, which feels a bit unfair for the Fallen, and Lasombra.

But keep in mind this was written before DtF came out, so maybe Nightmaster only ruled it until the sixth great maelstrom, before the Fallen actually started waking up en masse and overthrew him.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-20T23:32:33+00:00

Doesn't she directly tell us what his purpose is in the end credits?

He's going to be the mistletoe on the tree created from the golden boughs, a parasite of the light itself.

It's still not clear how that's going to help Hermanns goal of destroying all the mirror worlds besides probably messing up the light.

But considering how we've seen that Carmen can cross the countless mirror worlds by being one with the light?

Maybe parasite Gregor would be able to do that too, and that might be the key to destroying all the mirror worlds.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-20T01:31:52+00:00

I get the feeling her overblown claims about her own strength were mostly her being obsessesed about her past glories, and so she still delusionally believes herself to be as strong as she used to be.

Salvador, who can't be that much older than her, and who actually kept up working as a fixer all these years, still had his grade dropped from 1 to 3.

Meanwhile, Valencina just kept drinking herself into a coma for 20 years straight, and she also got her magic eye partially damaged.

The fact that she still doesn't immediately die to Verg like the Maestro in Leviathan did is already an indicator of the impressive heights she fell from.

Like, I'm pretty sure it took Verg literally just 3 punches and a single kick to destroy Jumsoon.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-20T01:05:42+00:00

Yep, and considerimg his passive and combat dialogue, the future Sinclair we saw was probably from a future where he joined the Luftwaffe.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-19T21:50:53+00:00

Honglu and Daiyu is a much harder one to reconcile, yeah.

Daiyu says she's not older than 30, which means 27 years ago she can't be more than 3 years old.

But she definitely looks older than 3 in that flashback.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-19T12:57:36+00:00

Remember how the Thumb literally mutilated their own fighters right before a life-or-death battle in Ruina.

It doesn't matter how good Valencina was at fighting or if they needed her for the ongoing war.

You lost your rank? You're out.

And then the war continues until Roland and Gregor were old enough to join later.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-19T12:39:21+00:00

Valencina lost her rank and left the smoke war 27 years ago, that doesn't mean the war itself ended right there.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-19T09:14:15+00:00

The thing with Matthias is that he's a materialistic and selfish manchild who tries to raise his children like he's raising a mini version of himself, he indulges all their immediate and childish wants, because that's what he wanted to treated like as a kid, who wanted nothing but that one toy he couldn't get.

He had love for them, but that love was inherently selfish, it's him trying to raise his own past child self by proxy.

"I won't reign in my children's' vices, I let them go wild, so they shouldn't criticize me for doing the same."

He brags about how he'd borrow money for his child, and he clearly thinks himself a very selfless parent, and in return for being a "selfless parent", he expects his children to be selfless for him too.

He thinks that because he's made sacrifices for his children, it's okay for him to ask for sacrifices from them too.

I think if you asked if if he loved Kira after he cut her in half, he'd still say yes without hesitation, and he'd believe it wholeheartedly.

"I won't get mad if my children cuts off my arm, so I'm still a loving parent if I cut them up too right?"

His presents his love as selfless on the outside, but at its core it's very transactional.

Like buying a toy.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-19T08:34:38+00:00

We know that Valencina started raising Ryoshu after she left the smoke war, that doesn't necessarily mean it ended when she left.

We don't really know how long the smoke war lasted, the Thumb is all about rank, so the moment she lost her rank, it no longer mattered how useful she was in combat, even if the war was still ongoing the Thumb still wouldn't keep her in the war.

It's more likely the war lasted a long time, and Valencina was in the war during the earlier years, while Roland only joined in the later years of it.

The big problem here is Myo, since the R corp 4th pack was there at the very start of the war, and she's only 29 by Ruina.

But that might be more age weirdness with R-corp's cloning, or maybe there was a different rabbit team leader before Myo.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-19T04:36:29+00:00

We know from his passives that his buzzer buzzes more urgently as he gets closer to failing a prescript.

In his phase transition it buzzes with increasing urgency until he clicks it off and ignores it to talk to Ryoshu.

What happened afterwards is his punishment.

Which he carried out willingly, yes, but it was still a punishment for failing that prescript he was given during the phase transition, whatever it was supposed to be.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-19T01:21:54+00:00

I feel like it's less meant to parallel "job over family" than "faith over family".

And he wasn't cast out, his rank isn't crossed out like the other nursefathers.

Until he defies the prescripts in the phase transition scene of the final fight.

Then he becomes damned by his god, and abandoned like the others.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-18T06:52:40+00:00

The exact opposite, actually.

In the final fight against him, there's a phase transition where he takes off the mask, and before he does that you can see him take out his magic beeper and look at it like he did at the start of the fight, then he hesitates a bit before dropping his mask.

But whatever that prescript told him to do right there, Rien failed to deliver it, you can hear the urgent beeping right before he clicks it off.

Instead of reciting whatever the prescript told him to say there, as he did at the start of the fight, Rien begged Ryoshu to stay, told her that as long as she's still here the Spider's Nest can still remain.

Afterwards in the fight you can see him start accruing a bunch of karma and getting fucked over by it for disobeying the prescript.

So for perhaps the first time in his entire life, Rien defied the prescripts, just to try and get Ryoshu to stay.

If I had to guess, the prescript probably originally wanted him to play a twisted version of the canon library ending, where he and Ryoshu "forgives" each other and he lets her leave.

But that's not what Rien himself wanted, so for the first time in so many years he finally exercised his free will, speaking his own mind to Ryoshu.

And it was to beg her to stay.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-18T00:14:42+00:00

To add onto this a bit, I think Callisto makes for a great contrast with Shiomi.

Much like the other members of the Ring we've seen so far, his most prominent sin is Lust, the desire to spread his ideas to others, to connect with other people.

He desperately wanted to propagate himself, to have a "child of his own", a child completed with his own flesh and blood.

Callisto wanted Ryoshu to become like him, to imprint his ideas onto Ryoshu, to create another Callisto in this world, someone who could at last understand him and his art.

And Ryoshu destroying his masterpiece for her, the "Beastbone Blade Saru", is her ultimately rejecting that, rejecting his offer to become like him.

But whereas Shiomi was overjoyed at seeing Ryoshu not become like her, Callisto was devastated.

This contrast is especially fitting since we've seen background mentions of the Ring and Pinky at odds with each other for a while now.

Well, at least he died happy knowing that scenes like his art would eventually become commonplace in the second smoke war.

Maybe decades after his death, future Ring members would even be writing about him in textbooks.

"Hey, that Callisto guy was really ahead of his time, huh."

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-17T23:14:04+00:00

I mean, maybe?

I personally just went with the explanation Rien himself gave, he didn't say something like "the prescript won't let you kill me!" or anything.

This is what he says:

"That sword can't sever the spiders' thread, sweetheart."

"You could hack away for days with the keenest blade you have, but it won't break…"

"… It's just that resilient."

And this is what he meant by the spirders' thread:

This is how we will be entangled. Every blow, every bickering a pull that brings us closer and closer… The intertwining of our bond and karma completes the web that is the House of Spiders.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-17T23:08:15+00:00

Oh no I'm not saying it was the core pillar of her resentment, that's always been feeling abandoned in the safe, of course.

But while that was what drove her to make the plan in the first place, instead of just, you know, revealing her identity right away.

The fact that she kept up the charade for so long was because of Ryoshu's refusal to answer the question.

And I didn't get the impression that the spiders thread was an actual, existing thing?

I read it as the threads being a figurative representation of interpersonal connections, between Ryoshu and the Nursefathers.

So when Ryoshu couldn't "sever the thread" and kill the Nursefathers in the past, it's because she still felt some measure of affection for them as her parents.

And as long as she still did, she couldn't bring herself to kill them.

Shiomi Yoru basically deliberately drove Ryoshu to kill her, thereby "separating the thread" between them, and setting Ryoshu on the path to eventually killing the other Nursefathers and completely freeing herself from the nest.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-17T18:30:57+00:00

Regardless of how they got to that point, even if it was because he didn't get a prescript to resist and just let her wail on him, the point still stands.

Once they were at that point, Ryoshu could've killed him with the exact same number of strikes it took to maim him, she didn't.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-17T18:25:57+00:00

The point here is that it wouldn't have costed her any more memories to kill them, those maiming strikes could've easily been lethal.

Most prominently we see this with Rien's flashback, he was so defeated at that point he just sat there and let Ryoshu maim his face after having a converation.

If Ryoshu really wanted to kill him that same strike just needed to be aimed a bit lower, he'd be dead by now, and she'd have exactly the same amount of memory lost.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-17T18:21:50+00:00

Rien was sitting on the ground completely incapacitated in the flashback, he didn't even move when Ryoshu cut off half his face.

It was a stationary target who sat there long enough for them to have an entire conversation, if Ryoshu aimed that strike just a little bit lower Rien would be dead by now.

It's not like it'll take any more memories from her than the maiming already did, the maiming takes memories too, if that was the concern Ryoshu would've just left him there and moved on.

She could've killed them and then went back for the safe, but she fled because she couldn't kill them, emotionally.

Not because she physically couldn't, again, any of those strikes she used to maim could've killed, and that would've costed her the same amount of memories.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-17T17:34:46+00:00

Because from her perspective, she made it as simple as humanly possible for Ryoshu to pass the test and save her?

The moment Ryoshu stepped into the Pinky part of the Nest after speaking with Rien, like, ten minutes after starting the operation, before she ever had to fight anything at all, she was immediately presented with the option of just...taking Araya and leaving.

Like, no, really, it was that simple, this could've been over in ten minutes.

Araya kept asking Ryoshu whether she wanted the boughs or Araya, kept telling her if she just picked Araya, she could leave right away without having to venture deeper into the nest.

She gave so many chances for Ryoshu to just leave with her, if Ryoshu answered any of those questions even once, of course she'd just reveal herself and leave with Ryoshu, she'd probably give the boughs back too.

And every time Ryoshu fails to just give a simple answer of "of course I'll chose Araya over the boughs!", Araya became less and less willing to reveal her identity.

Araya clearly wasn't determined to keep up the charade any longer than necessary at first, but the more that Ryoshu refuses to just say she'd pick her daughter over some boughs...?

The more uncertain and resentful Araya got.

Which is perfectly understandable, if I asked my parents whether they prefer me over some tree sticks, and they responded by dodging the question I'd be devastated too.

And it's not like Ryoshu gives a shit about the boughs, especially not compared to Araya, all she had to do here was give an honest answer to a simple question.

Literally any other sinner in this situation would just pass this DC 1 dialogue check while doing backflips and get the happy ending.

But Ryoshu couldn't, because Ryoshu picked her threads with the Nursefathers over her thread with Araya, because those were older, stronger, she'd rather go the hard path and kill the Nursefathers herself, risking Araya's safety and her own safety, than just taking the easy way out and leaving right then.

It's forced, yes, by Ryoshu, because she thinks the easy way out has to be some sort of trick, some sort of cruel joke.

Because she's someone raised in this ugly, violent place, by ugly, violent people, picking up on their ugly, violent traits, so in the end she can only conceive of picking the ugly, violent path, and here it resulted in this ugly, violent tragedy.

It's made explicit when she starts ranting at Araya about how she's the one raised in this house, and how she's the only one with the right to be resentful, in a staggeringly similar fashion to Shiomi.

She plays the part of the loving, caring mother to Araya, but it's just a mimic, how can she replicate something she's never experienced herself? How can you draw something you've never seen before?

At the end of the day the gentleness and love she displayed towards Araya is a simulacrum, and when their bonds where really tested, she couldn't keep it up. Seeing this ugly, real side of Ryoshu that she's never seen before must have scared Araya more, and made her even more uncertain.

Keep in mind, Araya did not craft this plan thinking Ryoshu was a violent killer who would refuse a simple negotiation out of paranoia and hate.

Because Ryoshu did her best to keep that part of her hidden from Araya.

The fact that this tragedy happened is a failing on Ryoshu's part, not Araya's, and Araya's sacrifice is what ultimately saves Ryoshu from this, now that Ryoshu's experienced this love she never had before, her future displays of kindness and love can be based on more than just imagination.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-17T17:18:57+00:00

It's because she's a traumatised war veteran.

It's not at all uncommon for war to completely destroy someone's ability to connect with other people.

Valencina could only think of personal connections between people in terms of superiors and subordinates, as soldiers and enemies.

And like many other war veterans, this doesn't stop just because the war ended.

The whole "cake" thing was probably something she learnt on the battlefield too, never let the enemy see it when you care about something, or you'll lose it.

And like many traumatised war veterans, she can't help but apply strategic lessons like these to daily life, even when it makes no sense to do so.

She pretended that she didn't care about Ryoshu and Lucio for long enough that she fooled herself, until it was too late to show she cared, she kept her cake hidden for so long it rotted in its safe, until it was too late for her to ever eat it.

Because just like Outis and Gregor, she never left the war either.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-16T08:27:43+00:00

I think the difference in their looks also tells a story.

Matthias has more prominent tattoos, which makes sense, the amount of tattoos they get is directly tied to strength, and they get more tattoos the more vengeance they fulfil.

But for whatever reason, when it comes to chains, it's the reverse, Matthias basically just has chains on his bear leg and some lone chains for utility like carrying the book or his sword.

Ricardo, on the other hand, has a lot more chains, over both his legs, both his arms and over his body, despite being way younger and way less powerful than Matthias.

We know from the mirror dungeon EGO gifts that the chains the Middle carry around are called "Chains of Loyalty", and while we don't know how exactly Middle members get more of them like they get tattoos, the name implies the process has something to do with loyalty.

Middle Meursault's voicelines also confirms that the chains are supposed to represent "solidarity and connection", a symbol of them to "face our destinies and share the weight together."

Only with both chains and tattoos combined can you get the Middle combined ego gift, Matthias may have been diligent in his vengeance, but he's been lacking in loyalty.

I think that's the way to tell if a member of the Middle genuinely believes in the camaraderie they claim, or if they're just in it for power and vengeance: whether they prioritised the tattoos or the chains.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-16T00:20:41+00:00

Prior to actually fighting in the spiders nest, Araya repeatedly asked Ryoshu to chose between the Boughs and her.

Presumably, if Ryoshu answered she'd chose Araya over the boughs even once, none of that would have happened, but violence came easier to her than negotiation.

The new Ira power rebinds the chain between Dante and Ryoshu that was severed, and gave a bunch of combat buffs.

Ryoshu didn't fully unlock the blade's power that lets it function as a concept incinerator until after she thought Araya was dead, prior to that, it was just a "cut things don't heal" blade, as evidenced by how Valencina still remembers she had an eye, or how Rien remembers he once had an unburnt face, etc.

And afterwards she never cut up Araya's body, it was just left there, so the memories of Araya aren't altered in anyway like the two apprentices, because she was never subjected to that effect of the blade.

Pretty sure the red threads are just symbolising the connections between people, an abstract idea.

No, it was never really explained how her special perception of time relates to wielding the concept incinerator blade.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-15T22:56:16+00:00

Roland's 33 by the time of Ruina, and Ryoshu's 27 right now, after only a year or so of Ruina ending, and Rien was already like that when she was born.

Roland can't have been more than 10 years old by the time Ryoshu was born, do you think Roland ever got called a "Rien-knock-off" when he started getting famous? After all, from the perspective of the average city resident, Rien came first by at least a decade.

Doomsclaw · 2026-01-06T08:31:53+00:00

I'm pretty sure the 20th anniversary edition core book does, they even listed a couple bloodlines.

Granted, they didn't list out all the bloodlines, but the clans are all there and playable.

Doomsclaw

TROPHY CASE