Okay! I had originally been planning to keep it vague and leaving what actually was going on a mystery because I thought it might be better that way? That being said, I did have an idea!
Please keep in mind that I'm 100% okay with any of this being changed or worked through. You guys can always PM me at theangstmonkey or we can comment back and forth here.
This is also something that Blight himself will not know unless there is a choice for there to be plot where the characters discover it. Like you said, that means I should be able to play him while we work out the kinks!
Since it's all up for approval, you can alter or change anything that you want. We can keep it a mystery if you want. We can work in the characters figuring it out if you want. We can scrap this whole idea and go with something else, if you want. I'm pretty much fine with whatever.
The main idea that I had was that some of the machines were using people of Felix's Thedas as a place to experiment with the possibility of removing the problem of free will. They're doing this by making human psyche's partially assimilated by programming. Basically, they're attempting to turn them into pseudo programs that they can then set a course for by writing in a set code. Again, all of it can be altered or changed as you see fit but here's basically what I had in mind:
Free will, as explained by the Architect in the second Matrix film, is the whole reason there even are free humans and the whole reason the One Program had to be written in. Free will is what enables human mind to break free of the Matrix, and free will is something that poses a danger even in regards to programs (IE rouge programs express free will and cause issues). If the machines can get rid of free will, they could better control the human crops they have and cripple the rebellion's source of new unplugged humans.
The experiments started because some of the machines realized that Smith was able to completely remove the free will of Bane and the other humans of the Matrix that he infected. Somehow, he infected a human mind and overrode the psyche of that human. To the machines, it's as if he completely rewrote Bane's software. The hardware all remained the same, his mind was still a human mind, his body still a human body, it was just his personality that had been taken over. Somehow, Smith had maintained him as a functioning human, even to the point where he could walk around in the real world. All of the humans infected with the Smith Virus had their free will stripped of them. What if there was a way to create something like that, but have control of it so instead of it being an infection, it could be written into the Matrix itself?
At first, they thought they could implement something like Smith but have more control over it. Perhaps there was a way to create humans completely bound to a software that they had written, but the idea of re-creating Smith was deemed to risky and dangerous. If the base program that controlled it rebelled again, they wouldn't have a way of stopping him. There's no One this time to stand up to it.
Instead, they implemented a plan to find ways to re-write what they see as the base coding of human minds. In simpler terms, they messed around with the psyche of certain humans and tried to see how it worked. They wanted to see if they could figure out a way to safely change human minds into something more controllable.
Unfortunately, more often than not the person's mind would reject the new imprinting and would start to deteriorate. To explain why this was happening to other humans, the machines wrote into the code the Thedas Matrix that a human selected for experiments would be attacked by darkspawn and "tainted". Then the new programming would start to be implemented.
Smith accomplished his re-writing of Bane's pysche by assaulting him and forcing his way into his mind. The machines behind the Blight Virus instead worked on a smaller scale, taking it slower, which caused the humans infected to feel a heavy taint in their blood rather than an intense assault of all that they were. There are also tells if the experiment isn't going successfully; i.e. one of the ways that the machines it's failing is that the human experiencing the taint starts to feel sick and die.
Some of them did successfully have their minds re-written. However, they became unusable as a power source. Their minds would instead fade into the darkspawn program and then deteriorate past the point of use. The humans in Thedas would see a the tainted person give into that taint and start to behave and act like darkspawn themselves -- Ruck and Larius are examples of this. They still had most of their free will at the points that we encounter them though it's clear eventually they will be completely assimilated by the darkspawn program.
Some of humans who are partially recoded as programs survive the process, but there was no concrete change in their free will. Instead, they act as "partial programs" while plugged in which means that they are able to sense and hunt out other programs, specifically the ones this Matrix has designated as darkspwan. This collection of partial human/program hybrids is known as the Gray Wardens by the humans of this Matrix. (NOTE: This is the part that might affect one of the characters already in the game, so we can just say that his experience as a Gray Warden is something else, or we could say this is a thing for him as well and perhaps he just hasn't had the knowledge to realize that it was going on? Since Gray Wardens are experienced in every Thedas Matrix, perhaps those ones are for some other purposes? Or they created them without the program infection, just with some basic ability? Maybe they did that to cover up the specific experiments happening in Felix's Thedas Matrix? Or something else? It is, of course, up to you and that character's player.)
Once, around 10 years ago, the machines working the experiment thought they had cracked the "code" that will cause humans to lose their free will and tried implement it on a larger scale. Once it started it eventually failed, however, and the humans involved with it started to reject the program. Luckily for the machines, this eventuality was written into the history of the Thedas Matrix and the machines let the humans plugged into the Matrix believe that the deaths were because an Old God had been turned into an archdemon. They were able to get control of the spread of it quickly, and allowed the course of action that enabled one of the Gray Warden humans to kill the archdemon program.
The fact that humans infected with the Blight Virus are partial programs, or at least somewhat coded as partial programs, is also one of the reasons they specifically wrote the Thedas Matrix as a pre-techology world. Perhaps they were worried that a brain with a concept of computer programming might be able to figure out what was happening?
Felix was able to survive for so long not because he actually lost any of his free will, but because of the dedication of his "father" Gereon. Gereon's experiments within the Matrix somehow shut off the coding that was trying to rewrite Felix and slowed the inevitable deterioration once it failed. The machines were interested in that for a moment but when it became clear that Gereon was doomed to fail they stopped paying attention to Felix (allowing Felix to get recruited).
The fact that Felix gets sick when he's plugged in is actually a good sign that he still has all of his free will, and isn't controlled by the machines at all. He just doesn't know that, hence the identity crisis he experiences.
Basically I'm basing the whole idea of how things worked for Bane, only instead of being completely rewritten and lost, Blight is just partially re-written. He's not a Gray Warden though so he doesn't have the ability to sense other programs. He mostly just has an intuitive relationship with the Matrix, and that allows him his quicker download speed.
Also because it's just a partial re-programming, when he's not plugged in, the virus doesn't affect him the way that Smith was able to affect Bane, but once he's plugged in it starts to deteriorate his mind again. That's why he experiences his sickness after a few hours of being in the Matrix.
Annnnnnd I think that covers it? I'm not sure if any of this made sense. Let me know if I need to clarify and if any of it is okay? I'll put Blight in the game tonight and we can just figure this stuff out behind the scenes? Thanks so much for baring with me while I figure this out!
Re: APPROVED + NOTE
Please keep in mind that I'm 100% okay with any of this being changed or worked through. You guys can always PM me at
This is also something that Blight himself will not know unless there is a choice for there to be plot where the characters discover it. Like you said, that means I should be able to play him while we work out the kinks!
Since it's all up for approval, you can alter or change anything that you want. We can keep it a mystery if you want. We can work in the characters figuring it out if you want. We can scrap this whole idea and go with something else, if you want. I'm pretty much fine with whatever.
The main idea that I had was that some of the machines were using people of Felix's Thedas as a place to experiment with the possibility of removing the problem of free will. They're doing this by making human psyche's partially assimilated by programming. Basically, they're attempting to turn them into pseudo programs that they can then set a course for by writing in a set code. Again, all of it can be altered or changed as you see fit but here's basically what I had in mind:
Free will, as explained by the Architect in the second Matrix film, is the whole reason there even are free humans and the whole reason the One Program had to be written in. Free will is what enables human mind to break free of the Matrix, and free will is something that poses a danger even in regards to programs (IE rouge programs express free will and cause issues). If the machines can get rid of free will, they could better control the human crops they have and cripple the rebellion's source of new unplugged humans.
The experiments started because some of the machines realized that Smith was able to completely remove the free will of Bane and the other humans of the Matrix that he infected. Somehow, he infected a human mind and overrode the psyche of that human. To the machines, it's as if he completely rewrote Bane's software. The hardware all remained the same, his mind was still a human mind, his body still a human body, it was just his personality that had been taken over. Somehow, Smith had maintained him as a functioning human, even to the point where he could walk around in the real world. All of the humans infected with the Smith Virus had their free will stripped of them. What if there was a way to create something like that, but have control of it so instead of it being an infection, it could be written into the Matrix itself?
At first, they thought they could implement something like Smith but have more control over it. Perhaps there was a way to create humans completely bound to a software that they had written, but the idea of re-creating Smith was deemed to risky and dangerous. If the base program that controlled it rebelled again, they wouldn't have a way of stopping him. There's no One this time to stand up to it.
Instead, they implemented a plan to find ways to re-write what they see as the base coding of human minds. In simpler terms, they messed around with the psyche of certain humans and tried to see how it worked. They wanted to see if they could figure out a way to safely change human minds into something more controllable.
Unfortunately, more often than not the person's mind would reject the new imprinting and would start to deteriorate. To explain why this was happening to other humans, the machines wrote into the code the Thedas Matrix that a human selected for experiments would be attacked by darkspawn and "tainted". Then the new programming would start to be implemented.
Smith accomplished his re-writing of Bane's pysche by assaulting him and forcing his way into his mind. The machines behind the Blight Virus instead worked on a smaller scale, taking it slower, which caused the humans infected to feel a heavy taint in their blood rather than an intense assault of all that they were. There are also tells if the experiment isn't going successfully; i.e. one of the ways that the machines it's failing is that the human experiencing the taint starts to feel sick and die.
Some of them did successfully have their minds re-written. However, they became unusable as a power source. Their minds would instead fade into the darkspawn program and then deteriorate past the point of use. The humans in Thedas would see a the tainted person give into that taint and start to behave and act like darkspawn themselves -- Ruck and Larius are examples of this. They still had most of their free will at the points that we encounter them though it's clear eventually they will be completely assimilated by the darkspawn program.
Some of humans who are partially recoded as programs survive the process, but there was no concrete change in their free will. Instead, they act as "partial programs" while plugged in which means that they are able to sense and hunt out other programs, specifically the ones this Matrix has designated as darkspwan. This collection of partial human/program hybrids is known as the Gray Wardens by the humans of this Matrix. (NOTE: This is the part that might affect one of the characters already in the game, so we can just say that his experience as a Gray Warden is something else, or we could say this is a thing for him as well and perhaps he just hasn't had the knowledge to realize that it was going on? Since Gray Wardens are experienced in every Thedas Matrix, perhaps those ones are for some other purposes? Or they created them without the program infection, just with some basic ability? Maybe they did that to cover up the specific experiments happening in Felix's Thedas Matrix? Or something else? It is, of course, up to you and that character's player.)
Once, around 10 years ago, the machines working the experiment thought they had cracked the "code" that will cause humans to lose their free will and tried implement it on a larger scale. Once it started it eventually failed, however, and the humans involved with it started to reject the program. Luckily for the machines, this eventuality was written into the history of the Thedas Matrix and the machines let the humans plugged into the Matrix believe that the deaths were because an Old God had been turned into an archdemon. They were able to get control of the spread of it quickly, and allowed the course of action that enabled one of the Gray Warden humans to kill the archdemon program.
The fact that humans infected with the Blight Virus are partial programs, or at least somewhat coded as partial programs, is also one of the reasons they specifically wrote the Thedas Matrix as a pre-techology world. Perhaps they were worried that a brain with a concept of computer programming might be able to figure out what was happening?
Felix was able to survive for so long not because he actually lost any of his free will, but because of the dedication of his "father" Gereon. Gereon's experiments within the Matrix somehow shut off the coding that was trying to rewrite Felix and slowed the inevitable deterioration once it failed. The machines were interested in that for a moment but when it became clear that Gereon was doomed to fail they stopped paying attention to Felix (allowing Felix to get recruited).
The fact that Felix gets sick when he's plugged in is actually a good sign that he still has all of his free will, and isn't controlled by the machines at all. He just doesn't know that, hence the identity crisis he experiences.
Basically I'm basing the whole idea of how things worked for Bane, only instead of being completely rewritten and lost, Blight is just partially re-written. He's not a Gray Warden though so he doesn't have the ability to sense other programs. He mostly just has an intuitive relationship with the Matrix, and that allows him his quicker download speed.
Also because it's just a partial re-programming, when he's not plugged in, the virus doesn't affect him the way that Smith was able to affect Bane, but once he's plugged in it starts to deteriorate his mind again. That's why he experiences his sickness after a few hours of being in the Matrix.
Annnnnnd I think that covers it? I'm not sure if any of this made sense. Let me know if I need to clarify and if any of it is okay? I'll put Blight in the game tonight and we can just figure this stuff out behind the scenes? Thanks so much for baring with me while I figure this out!