The Ultimate Hellsguard Lore Guide

[Galeteya]

As soon as I figure out how best to edit wikis (never done it before), I'll be doing so :). I'd posted this on the FFXIV forums but it was recommended I do so here as well.

This is a creation by people all over the world who never knew that they each held a little piece of this astonishing secret: one of the best stories ever never told by FF. Let me start from the top. I started playing FFXIV back in May of this year when a co-worker finally convinced me to pick it up. I immediately locked onto the Roes. Who can resist that Hellsguard flavor text? Sign me up for Badass Town! It was a few weeks in that I realized... my race really doesn't matter. In fact, there's not a lot of "me" around. Why?

Enter Google. I typed the phrase a large chunk of us probably have: "Hellsguard lore". Oof. Not a lot. Tried some more, still meh. Then I started seeing the comments from the community, "There's so little", "It's so mysterious", "It's just a content-save from 1.0 like Duskwights" (probably). But I'm into the RP scene. Not only that, I'm lore crazy for FF games, and FF always has something hidden. Always.

So I went digging.

I found a few threads. A Reddit conversation sparked my intrigue with things I never knew existed. A dozen people getting together and sharing these hidden sources with one another from someone simply asking "does anyone else know anything"? Then THIS came out. It lit a fire in my gut. So many people came together out of the love of this game to dig through this one last secret. It took them a decade, determined to solve something they loved. How amazing! Mine was a smaller endeavor and I knew it'd take time, but I it'd be worth it. Plus, I wasn't by myself.

Enter YOU. See, there were already all the answers out there found by other people. Snippets, clues, rare finds. They just hadn't known that someone across the world playing the same game held the other half to their puzzle. I just had to find them, spread them out, and start mapping matches to make one solid, seamless solution. Sounds easy? Well, we've all seen how hard it is to find the basic lore on Hellsguard... I wasn't satisfied. I dug, I read, I researched. I listened to interviews, read discussions. Not enough. I dug more, read more, listened to interviews, read translated transcripts. One source led me to another, and another--

After 3 months, I couldn't find any more. Some had even been updated with 5.0 and I needed to edit what I'd had. All that was left was to put it all together. I chose a format and began to separate each article, piecing them apart by note cards and individual Docs, crossing out which ones I'd already placed. I rewrote things with as best of a flow as I could. Finally, I sat back in awe at what you all had made.

I'm so excited to share it with the FFXIV world.
This was all of you.
Thank you for this beautiful journey. (Click)

[Tregarde]

FF-XIV can be incredibly lacking in details sometimes. Good job compiling the information.

[Galeteya]

Thank you so much!!! I hope it's of use to some folk!

[Hollow]

Where did you find the information about ash on the nose? 

[Galeteya]

@HollowI'm so sorry I never saw this. There's a Warrior quest that briefly touches on it, though I can't recall which xpac. There's another source in a sidequest as well. If you want specifics I can try and dig back to find the names of which ones.

There's some info on Curious Gorge's ash nose/lack thereof here: https://swanprincess-roegadyn.tumblr.com/post/143849735454/hellsguard-lore . Radiant Swan had a lot of good digging and inspiration.

Edited July 16, 2020 by Galeteya