Season One Lore: March
Duke’s grand tour begins as teases and hints build up
Season 2’s launch is fast approaching, but before it arrives to port we’ve go you covered with a depository of all the ongoing Lore, Stories, and Teases that came our way in Season One’s March Update. A lot has happened through March and early April, so grab a tankard and gather round while we catalogue it all in one place…
Catching up with the Lore
Before we begin however, you may be wondering what has been happening so far? Linked here are the latest Lore posts from recent months
Larinna’s Gold Hoarding
Larinna is once again busy with the Trading Companies, organising an Event for the Gold Hoarders this time around. She speaks about not judging people by their looks, and hints at the time she had a run-in with The Gold Hoarder himself. For more about this referenced back story, read the official tie-in novel, Sea of Thieves: Athena’s Fortune.
The Ancient Vaults the Gold Hoarders had recently refurbished to be a safe place to store their hoards are being robbed of their riches! Larinna’s information on this makes it out to be that the particularly rare Chest of Ancient Tributes is what the thieves are targeting. What is inside of them?
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There has been much talk recently of people having to band together to defend the Sea of Thieves. Is there a general feeling of unease within it’s normal inhabitants? Other than being woken in the dead of night by a loud shouting skeleton face in the sky… It feels as though people are aware of the danger Flameheart presents but that there may be something worse lurking unseen.
What’s Up with Umbra?
Another person to check up on now is Umbra, has she heard from Duke or much of what could be happening on the Sea of Thieves? Let’s find out…
Duke still hasn’t found the common courtesy to tell his friend what he’s up to. Maybe it’s that much of a secret… but then again this is Duke, so he’s probably just sailing aimlessly on a complete guess and a whim. Umbra does mention she has other things to occupy her mind with though, chronicling a pirate named Glitterbeard. We consider the story behind Glitterbeard to be a bit of a Spoiler, but for a bit more background, read here.
Duke’s Discoveries
No longer sulking in strange caves by strange statues, Duke stands boldly upon a cliff edge by a Beacon of Fate on Kraken’s Fall. Let’s hope that second part of the island’s name doesn’t end up being tied to his fate…
He is certainly worth talking to as he has a lot to say in few words.
We’ll go over these locations in the next section as they make up the majority of the mystery that this update brought. For now we’ll hone on a little bit more on Duke — in particular his voice. Its changed. There is confidence and bravado in there again, whatever he has found has spurred him on. But aside from that, it has a much different timbre to it now. Talk around Duke in the community ever since his excursion to Mermaid’s Hideaway has flirted with the idea that he may be turning into a Merfolk himself or that he is changing, and this change in voice could be seen as a hint toward that. In my personal opinion it does feel as though he is being possessed by something… or someone.
We shall only know as time goes on, but it has been almost a year now since he ventured into the Heart of Fire and made it back alive. We never quite found out what happened to him there.
Duke’s Clues
Now, going back to what Duke spoke about. He mentioned clues and that may lead some to think it was just sights he saw, but in fact in each location he vaguely recalled there sits a new item to interact with; a mysterious Stone Tablet that has a ‘Rune’ etched on to it.
Duke’s first ‘clue’ is on Kraken’s Fall, tucked away on a rock nearby the Altar of Resurrection. This is the first Stone Tablet you’ll come across if you follow the order that Duke gives you. Now these objects all appear the same but upon inspection they have unique engravings followed by some words that have been etched into the stone. They describe the appearance of a Rune, and then perhaps possible translations for what the engraving or Rune could mean?
There are two more such ‘clues’ that he mentions, much the same to this one. One in the underwater cave of the uncharted island at K-9, and the other near where Duke was hiding at Mermaid’s Hideaway.
Again, another engraving and three more words.
One more Rune, three more potential meanings.
There are a few things about these Stone Tablets that are curious, first when where they placed there? Was Duke the first to discover them in a long time, or has someone left these here on purpose? Not only that but who has etched those words onto them? Could it have been Duke? Until very recently his mastery of the written word was a little… wild, to say the least. If it wasn’t him, then that would suggest somebody else has been following these Runes as well.
And of course, not making things as easy as just being told a location to visit and find something, there is a fourth Stone Tablet that Duke does not mention. Maybe he didn’t mention it because he has no way of accessing it…
The final Stone Tablet that we know about hides down in a place only Pirate Legends have access to — Athena’s Fortune. That this Stone Tablet is free of writing might be an indication that Duke was the one responsible for scribbling on the other Stone Tablets, or it could suggest the person who wrote on them didn’t have the Pirate Lord’s blessing to come down to his ghostly tavern. So for this Stone Tablet we only have what the carving ‘resembles’ as an idea of what it could mean.
As it currently stands, it feels as though this is just the beginning of a much larger mystery, a mystery that we don’t yet have all the parts to. Be sure to keep an eye on these going forward, as their origin and meaning will no doubt be unveiled in time. Duke’s movements should be under extreme scrutiny.
The Sea of Thieves Social Media Teases/The Skelly Riddle
Not everything we are going to discuss today has happened exclusively within the world of Sea of Thieves itself — no, there has been an incredible wealth of information and teasing that has been occurring on the Sea of Thieves’ various social media accounts. And it has been a doozy to try and keep up with.
It began with a tweet from the Sea of Thieves Twitter page on March 24th.
No words, just an image of writing on parchment that resembled the Skelly language. Now, we a have a cipher for the language in the Tall Tale book for Revenge of the Morningstar and that has been used to solve a similar teaser that the twitter page put up before the Fate of the Damned update late 2020, but there are several characters in this image that we have no prior knowledge of. This led to much early speculation on what they could mean. Because we’ll be talking about this image a lot, we’ll be referring to it as the Skelly Note.
An early attempt from us is as follows:
Very wisely, Jeff thought to put the Runes that Duke had recently discovered to work and see if they fit somehow in the Skelly Note. Eventually coming to an early guess that it read something like “Silver Blade Ship Below ? Rock Sea 5” potentially hinting at the Silver Blade ship, the ship infamously captained by Flameheart Jr, being in a new ‘fifth Sea’. However, some of his guesses would soon prove to be wrong, as more teases and hidden messages were soon to follow. (Note from Jeff: I don’t know what I was thinking guessing that symbol related to ‘5’ haha)
Following March 24th’s tweet, the twitter account has posted numerous images and tweets that have a link to the Skelly Note.
Hidden within all of these images are characters that look similar to those that we’ve seen in the Skelly Note, or that the community has been able to deduce from the etchings on Duke’s Runes.
For example, the tweet about the Mysterious Notes had this character hidden on the table
Taking from both the written text of the tweet and the alt text that can be found, the community have for now found a way to try and figure out what these hidden characters mean. In this example, the tweet speaks about the ‘waking up’ animation, and this character resembles a ‘shining triangle’ from Duke’s Runes of which one of the potential meanings was ‘Waking’, so the community have come to a general consensus that this character might mean ‘Waking’. It then being used in the fiery clouds of red dust that appears when an Ashen Lord is ‘awoken’ lends some credibility to this idea.
Twitter and tweets were not the only social media platform to be used for this very elaborate #SeaofTease, as other platforms have been used too. Fleets and Stories on Instagram have been utilised, as well as other places like Spotify and Twitch.
The above image from the Twitch stream can be viewed in this clip that was taken — the stream itself was not saved or has either been hidden or deleted.
All these hints and enigmatic teases so far have done little to fully make the Skelly Note readable or understandable as there are still key characters that are seemingly unknown. And it doesn’t seem likely that they’ll stop with the clues dotted about wherever they can place them.
A good resource on what all these runes and characters could be is the Skeleton Rune page over at Ancient Isles University. The page is updated frequently as new clues are shown and research is done to try and whittle down the possible meanings of the runes. Use these as a reference to help narrow down all the information you need as there is a lot of going back and forth with trying to decipher these runes and the Skelly Note!
Season Two will be launching soon, on April 15th, if anymore of these teases appear on social media then we will collate them here alongside these, but it is likely we will be getting another wave of information and lore to sort through and try and make sense of when Season Two hits. Until then, keep a close eye on Sea of Thieves, something big is definitely coming…
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