"The Vaulters were a faction whose lore was directly influenced by game design. VERY directly, as you will see.
Originally, they were conceived as survivors of the Concrete Endless who had stayed below ground on Auriga in bunkers and caves to survive the cataclysmic bombings of the Dust Wars. Their eventual adaptation to life below ground with the aid of their slowly fading sciences gave them this unique look and feel; a sort of magical-dwarves-in-space kind of thing.
Then Dungeon of the Endless happened. Once we made the decision that DotE would be in the same universe, most of the team wanted it to be on the same planet as Endless Legend. That is when we ended making the Vaulters the survivors of the crash landing that starts Dungeon.
At the end of the day that didn't require much alteration to the look and feel of the faction, as in either case they were the medieval descendants of an advanced, spacefaring people. It made me rewrite a lot of texts, though."
~Jeff, aka Slowhands
"As with all Endless Legend factions, in order to find out what the Vaulters looked like we started by thinking about where they came from and who they are. Crashed ages ago on Auriga (thanks to Dungeon of the Endless ^^), they stayed hidden deep underground in the remains of their wrecked ship, as this ship was certainly the most evolved technology on Auriga at this time.
The effects of Auriga’s Dust Wars, but mainly time, saw their main energy source fade, then disappear. Though they came from a very advanced culture in terms of technology, the Vaulters had to be creative to survive: maintain/modify/recycle/adapt their equipment, recycle pieces of clothing, artefacts, etc. as weapons… For generation after generation of underground life, as a technology became unusable, it was logical to make clothes from a mix of recycled technological elements which were then combined with the stuff they produced from scratch: Handmade cloth from Auriga’s fibers, animal furs, etc.
The inspiration for technological clothing was the work of clothing artist Gareth Pugh and his combination of matte materials with shiny geometrical patterns, shaped in unusual volumes and often asymmetric, with a color palette between black and silver. To that we added a touch of “homemade” materials that they could produce themselves - a smooth and refined base, with raw and coarse additions ^^
The feeling was "We stayed way too long in the deep, afraid of going outside; let’s rediscover the bravery of our past and seek adventure on the surface as the explorers/warriors we once were… and really are."
We could easily imagine that the Vaulters were not used to light anymore, living for too long without seeing the sun; we chose to make them look strong, but pale. (I must admit that at the beginning, I wanted to give them more light-deprivation characteristics: Blindness in sunlight, total hair loss, genetic mutations due to inbreeding) but… we still wanted them to have a minimum of sex-appeal, so... ^^
Their architecture had to express the feeling that you only see the tip of the iceberg – are they really buildings ? is it part of a gigantic ship with only the main volumes emerging to the surface?
To enhance and shape this idea, we had to use the same recognizable patterns and materials on the clothes as on the city/ship."
~Corinne, aka Sostene
"When we were thinking about our factions, we decided that we needed one that should be the most human like as possible, so it would be easy for some players to identify themselves as that faction. So we needed a classical faction both in term of gameplay and lore. Yet It was hard for us to stick to something too classical…
Gameplay wise, many new players to the 4X genre tend to be very defensive; they are afraid of a game system they don’t understand. We needed a faction for those players: the Vaulters.
Let’s create a human faction that could turtle in, in big bunkers, vaults, and could with few cities compete with everyone else, and maybe beat them to a technological race. What a good defensive and scientifically advanced faction could do? Teleport of course, in order to defend quickly its borders! That technology need made us realize that we had an opportunity to create a very unique faction, one that could look as it did not belong there, as it is a fantasy world, not a scientific world… unless they came from elsewhere.
This is how we decided to make them that space faring people lost on that hostile planet, sometimes very reminiscent of movies like G.I. SAMURAI (Sengoku Jieitai), when it comes to fighting these medieval armies with big anachronic futuristic weapons and armors... I love the Vaulters!"
~Romain, aka Spacetroll
For more information on the Vaulters, check out the [FACTION PAGE] and [FACTION CARD].
Download on [DEVIANT ART] our wallpapers: LINK, and submit your own fan art!
