How Does One Use the Tower of Wisdom?

Ormenos must have come upon the Tower of Wisdom and commanded the pariah to rebuild it. So, which structure in Ur'Rul was the Tower of Wisdom? It's obvious: the Red Temple. The temple of the mind. This was the highest level of human development before the creation of Conscientia. It's destruction directly prefigured the formation of Conscientia. We know it crafted writing (Glyphs). This is why Ormenos wanted it rebuilt.

So the Tower of Wisdom was once alive. Teeming with ideas. But it does so though division and externalisation and at it's heart, at it's lowest levels, is Eidos. What once was a temple is now a prison (or was it always a prison?)

This does lead to the question: where did the Glyphs come from? This is a big deal here because we are talking about epistemology. Writing of the Glyphs gave rise to their civilisation and thus Conscientia. This is a point at which the whole thing could hang. However, we want to maintain some degree of uncertainty. So the solution needs to fulfill the following requirements:

A. Deal with origin of glyphs
B. Deal with Ormenos' relationship with pariah
C. Maintain ambiguity

So:

A. The Goddess was an idealised human (Eidos) and was hacked apart to create the Glyphs. The Glyphs are distilled human thought. They divided Eidos up into Glyphs. All the Glyphs were taken from her. That is why she is able to learn them so fast. They all belong to her. They are the hidden wisdom within the archetype of human.

IMPORTANT POINT: This was not physical Eidos as we have in the game. This is a past that doesn't quite belong to her. This Eidos was non-physical. Perhaps either a living Glyph or principle extracted using the first DKR. In other words, this isn't Leeloo from 5th Element.

B. Well, Ormenos needed them to rebuild the temple. But he also fucked with them. Why? The pariah can't look into her mind or even understand Glyphs. Neither can he at this point. One possibility is that he had no mechanism to record/extract the Glyphs. Maybe he needed human sponges. Blank canvases to imprint Glyphs upon. Humans were is apparatus in some way. Perhaps neverborn/draugnir were used historically in this process. Maybe Glyphs were extracted onto humans. We already know that humans can be put into crystals, crystals can hold Glyphs and humans can hold Glyphs in their minds. So maybe he exposed the people to these Glyph chambers and they absorbed them through osmosis.

C. Still have questions about where Eidos came from, how she related to earlier Vanquished, how Era IV Vanquished related to her, etc.

SO!

Here is the final Tower of Wisdom Concept: A structure built upon the Eidos Temple that extracted Glyphs from her.

Now we need to figure out what gameplay this would involve the player that could get this across somehow in an interesting fashion. What is there for the player to do there other than bringing Ormenos back to life? Because basically, if he succeeds in returning, it's coming down to a life or death showdown.

So now we have to figure out what the interior of the Tower of Wisdom is like to see if that would yield any organic gameplay elements that the player could experience without some guys explaining the damn thing.

Structure of the Tower of Wisdom

It is built on the remains of the Goddess temple. So, it has a foundation at the lowest level. It was a place of Glyph writing and extraction. So perhaps there was a Fenrir room or something. Definitely something akin to a monastery. But again, let's go back to history.

We already have a tradition that tries to figure you the nitty gritty of how god relates to the earth by dividing things up into rarified concepts. The Jewish rip-off of Neoplatonism: Kabbalah. I know I already used the Tree of Life in the Mindscape but I think it would be better here. One problem is that the whole Sephirot thing has been done before, however, I would argue that it has never been done in any meaningful way. Generally they just mention Sephirot/Spehiroth and slap the image of the Tree of Life on things.

Ten Sephirot = Ten Rooms

The idea is that back in the day, folk would go into a chamber, sit down in meditation or what have you, and come out with a Glyph. Heck, maybe it took so long that only the neverborn could do it or something. Doesn't really matter too much. Ormenos came along, reconstructed the tower, hoped to get the Glyph of Hidden Mind and stuck pariah in the chambers to do it. Now, you might think that the pariah would be incapable of learning Glyphs. But how about when the Tower of Wisdom was created, everyone was pariah in those days. They only became non-pariah when they started learning the Glyphs (maybe there was a Glyph of Telepathy or something). In any case, we don't have to worry about it too much because the whole point is, that it didn't work out.

As the player navigates the tower of wisdom, they are confronted with Ormenos' failed experiments. Some of them can resonate with Glyphs you might have collected. The Graylands is a soul reward zone, this place is Glyph reward. The more Glyphs you have, the more stuff that can happen. Sometimes it will involve combat, social interaction, learning, or puzzle solving. The end is a showdown with Ormenos. Only eight rooms are accessible as Ormenos only needed to construct up to level eight to get Occult Glyph (see schema below).

"No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots go to hell."

-C.G. Jung

Now, what about the whole angel/Glyph thing in the Empyrean? Well, here's my thinking. There is the Kabbalah and the Qliphoth. Normal and corrupted Trees of Life. The Vanquished were able to generate 22 Glyphs in all (2 trees of life each with 10 plus 2 for the connecting Chambers). However, they couldn't combine them, or derive one from the other. Conscienta was able to do this. Basically, Conscientia is God. To him, duality can be resolved. He's a transcendent being. They deconstructed the Tower of Wisdom because they were plugging in all the Glyphs they had learned into the creation of Conscientia.