If you, like me, still have visions of last night’s grotesque trailer for a new Divinity game from Larian Studios burned into your head, then you’ll be delighted to know there’s already a whirl of fan theories as to what it all meant. Specifically, some fans think they’ve worked out who the man burned alive inside the wicker man is, or at least, who he’s supposed to represent.
I’m going to get into some spoilers for basically all the other Divinity games here, so if you intend to play through some of those in advance, read on at your own risk.
So, there are a few possibilities being floated for who that guy in the fire is. The first, and most probably, is Lucian, the human player character of Divine Divinity and a recurring figure throughout the Divinity games. There’s a ton of history behind Lucian, but what you probably need to know is that he was at one point worshipped as the “Divine”, chosen by the Seven gods of Rivellon. He stands in opposition to a force known as Chaos, the source of Rivellon’s demons which seeks to invade and consume Rivellon, but he also at one point adopted a baby named Damian who was known to serve as a vessel for the Lord of Chaos, which goes about as well as you can imagine.
Lucian is also the founder of The Divine Order. If you’ve played Original Sin 2, you’ll remember those guys as the folks rounding up Source users, but also will recall that at the time of the game, Lucian had already passed away…or so everyone thought. The end of the game has you discover him hiding in his tomb, having faked his death and is quietly working to purge the Source from Rivellon entirely. Depending on your actions when you meet him, Lucian might end up dead, or alive and still Divine. Sort of.
Which leads to the theories that the guy in the fire is Lucian. In the ending of Original Sin 2 where you allow all the world’s Source to be purged, Lucian is reinstalled as Divine ruler. However, unbeknownst to most, he doesn’t possess Divine powers anymore. He’s just a dude. One theory being floated is that somehow the people of Rivellon have figured out that Lucian is powerless and the gods are dead (you actually kill all seven of the world’s gods in Original Sin 2) or otherwise gone. Lucian’s committed a lot of pretty atrocious crimes over the years against a lot of people in the name of the greater good, so it’s not shocking that folks would be pissed and turn on him as soon as it was clear he had no real power. But even just beyond the lore, look: the guy looks like Lucian!
He’s the right age, he’s got the beard and the bushy eyebrows. He’s wearing a crown, suggesting royalty. And most importantly, check out the star-shaped scar on his chest. As pointed out in the Reddit post above, it matches the star on the end of Lucian’s staff pretty well.
Of course, it’s not totally certain that this is Lucian. Some other possibilities floated are that this isn’t Lucian himself, but an annual ritual where some other guy is tortured and killed as a stand-in for Lucian, who would already be long-dead at the time this is happening. There are other suggestions that this isn’t Lucian, but Damian, the kid Lucian adopted. Damian is a vessel for Chaos, so him being executed for that reason and Chaos bursting out of him when he dies would make a lot of sense. And both the Lucian and the Damien theories work with the game’s promo text shared yesterday: “The gods are silent. Rivellon bleeds. New powers stir.”
But then we’ve got folks elsewhere pointing out that the presence of a Blood Rose suggests ties to the former tyrannical Source King, Braccus Rex, who’s also theoretically dead by this point but has come back from the dead twice now.
Of course, that’s all assuming this game takes place after all the other Divinity games. There are plenty of folks suggesting it takes place somewhere in the middle of the timeline, or even as a precursor (given its name), and others reminding us that Larian’s Divinity lore hasn’t always been consistent.
There’s a lot to unpack here and it’s going to take some serious Divinity lore nerds to understand it all. Or, Larian might just tell us in a few months. Maybe they’ll make it easy. If you still want to unpack it a little further, we have an explainer on what exactly we do know about this new Divinity game so far, especially in relation to the kinds of games Larian Studios has made up til now.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
