Headscratchers / Hunter: The Reckoning

• I was reading back over the Hunter: The Reckoning books - yes, I'm a big fan and I miss my old game - and I realized that I had no idea who the mysterious man and woman were. You know, the ones from Fyodor's visions (a woman with a ruby ring and a man with an opal ring) and from, I think, the Storyteller advice in the Hermit splatbook, about the woman in a red dress and a man in black giving a Hermit his visions? I've either forgotten the answer to this (it's been a while) or just missed something the first time around, but who exactly are they? Were we ever told? All that comes to mind is Heylel Teomim and his twin stars/Avatars from Mage's Ascension book.
  • Word of God says they're the Scarlet Queen and the Ebon Dragon from the Kindred of the East backstory. The Hunters are more or less their second try at creating a race of heroes (after the first one screwed the pooch).
    • Does that mean the Hunters were also a failed experiment, and the Wu Tian mummies were a "third time's a charm" thing? Or was that just the Eight Immortals' independent action...
    • Could someone explain what all of the above just meant? I never followed Kindred of the East and have absolutely no idea what those people have to do with HtR.
    • Short version: the sort-of gods (Think very powerful Umbral spirits, like Luna from Werewolf: The Apocalypse) running the show in the Far East tried created a race of immortals to defend the world or at least Asia. It worked for a bit, but then they were corrupted, probably by the Wyrm, and became the Kindred of the East. One version of the Hunter backstory had the Imbued be the next try at that, but I don't think it was the backstory White Wolf went with.
    • To answer the above question, the Wu Tian (and the other Risen) happen at the same time and for the same reason as the Imbuing, as a result of the Sixth Great Maelstrom that blows up the Underworld at the end of Wraith: The Oblivion, so neither one can be an attempt to correct the "mistake" of the other — and the Eight Immortals probably were acting independently of the Scarlet Queen and Ebon Dragon, as was Osiris when he created the regular Mummies.
    • As far as the final answer to who the Messengers actually are, there wasn't one — at the very very end of Time of Judgment Lucifer goes over the last unanswered questions in his head and "Who empowered the Bright Shiners?" is one of them. Which means that the hints that the leaders of the Messengers, the woman in red and the man in black, are the same entities as the Scarlet Queen and Ebon Dragon are probably as good an answer as we can get. (Although no one in the setting has complete, accurate, objective knowledge of the cosmic state of things, the Kindred of the East least of all, and it's implied that seeing the Scarlet Queen and Ebon Dragon as merely the deities of "the Far East" is a limited and distorted perspective of who they actually are.)
  • Also worth noting is that initially White Wolf were going to make Exalted as the prehistory of the Old World of Darkness and the Hunters were being written right at that time (you can even see the early adverts for Exalted at the end of the Hunter: The Reckoning main book). And Exalted also features a Scarlet Empress and an Ebon Dragon. While I don't think this was ever confirmed officially there is some heavy implications that the Imbued were originally meant to be the deeply degraded remains of the Solar Exalted long after some catastrophe turned the Creation of Exalted into the World of Darkness (with other hints in different gamelines toward some sort of links between the Abyssals and the vampires, the Lunars and the Changing Breeds etc). The Trivia page even has a link to an unofficial confirmation of this. White Wolf later abandoned that concept but I think the idea might have been the Scarlet Empress and Ebon Dragon, having somehow been the only survivors of whatever ultimately destroyed their cosmology, trying to use what's left of the Solars in a desperate plot to...something. Maybe save the world from the fate theirs suffered. Neither were particularly benevolent back in their world but I suppose eons to think over one's mistakes could change an entity.

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