The first of the Kiri Ryona videos, as she is chained, tortured and sacrificed by a cruel, Stygian necromancer in the frozen ruins of upper Cimmeria.
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A big thanks to Rag40 for catching the necromancer side of these. Despite the fact AoC is a beautiful game, its camera options are pretty limited compared to games years older than it (Age of Conan: Unchained has one camera, and it's got a very narrow range of motion, compared to a stock SIX camera angles in classic EverQuest, which of course went live back in 1999). The camera is doubly annoying because it does an auto-pullback when you die. It takes some work to 'grab' the camera and pull it back in while the fatality is still in progress, but you lose close-up detail until you regain control of the camera. I understand AoC did not launch like this; some nitwit thought this was a good idea- the deaths can come with a radial blur for dramatic effect, but while the blur can be disabled, the camera is still a mess. The best solution is to have someone else catch video of it.
In that same age of Conan, the Cimmerian, some years past the legendary barbarian's early days of high adventure, now Conan I, and sitting on the throne in Tarantia, capital of Aquilonia, others also carved out their destiny at the point of a sharpened blade. However, not all heroes and heroines in Hyboria emerged victorious, not all legends ended well. Some served their destiny being themselves carved out and skewered on the end of a vicious blade, quivering and bleeding at the most gruesome terrors and torments that the Hyborian Age could provide. Most would be lost in obscurity to history, but for at least a few, fate could not be more cruel.
Of these, Kiri would be among the most infamous...the most scandalous. Fated to a horrid existence by the whim of a dark goddess, she who is Victim of The Prophecy, focus of an obscure legend in wintry, northern lands. A tale where a warrioress of potential greatness must endure a destiny of never-ending helplessness and torture, because the Fates had determined suffering was a cruel bitch, and she had to have a female champion.
That legend had reached the Far East along with Kiri when her first adventures in Khitai took her in sight of the Great Wall. A pallid whelp of a golden-haired barbarian from the dreaming west, running half-naked in the countryside with Stygian iron at her throat and wrists, in garb only befitting a slave, who both the Hyrkanians on the steppes and the Khitan in their walled realm saw fall on numerous occasions. Yóu Hún Yě Guǐ as they called her; the ghost of someone who died far from home and was seeking the way back. As the Khitan would scribe her into their records, as notated by the chroniclers of Nemedia, she was Kiri, Barbarian She-slave of a Thousand Deaths...
This is one of the big ones that Kiri was waiting to be victimized by, I wanted to waste no time getting it in the thread. The deliciously horrific necromancer impaling ice spike, which is suitably bloody as the AoC graphics engine can deliver.
