2023-11-11
Written by: Various authors
Views: 3179
Greetings, fellow adventurers of Tibia! Step into the 2nd special community edition of Explorer’s Diary and the 15th episode overall. Dive into 8 random contest entries for hidden mysteries and exciting discoveries.
The rest of the submissions will be in the last episode of the community series, coming out in just a week! Keep an eye on our website and Discord so you don’t miss it – we saved some very interesting entries for the end!
I remember the hype as players began to get close to level 999. What crazy awesome things could be behind that door?
And then…. disappointment as the most anticipated mystery (except for the Serpentine Tower) in all of Tibia seemingly just led to… nothing.
But some believed that there was more to this island. TibiaSecrets asked Lionet the question:
I know, I know. That could be construed as another frustrating answer, but as an eternal Optimist (or a fool, you choose 
) I decided to search for this map.
This clue is referencing the classic novel ‘Treasure Island’, a story about questing for hidden pirate treasure on an island. There are MANY references to this book in Tibia, so these were a good place to start.
As pirates are the main feature, I went to Nargor. I found several interesting things there, however a book caught my eye:
https://tibia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Legend_of_the_Swimming_Isle_(Book)
The book is just a title, no text. But I realized on the 999 Island, the main unusual thing you could do is swim. It then hit me that we don’t actually have a real name for the 999 Island. It’s called Schrodinger’s Island on Tibiawiki, but that’s not its official name. In-fact, if you look up the NPCs in-game, their location says ‘Secret Place’. It’s deliberately not named.
This ended up being a clue, but not in the way that I thought.
While looking at old articles on Tibia.com, I noticed something on the side of my screen:
It’s a screenshot of a character…. Swimming. Huh, let’s click it.
Oh, it’s actually 4 characters having a party on the beach and swimming. Immediately I noticed some strange things. Several items here can be purchased from the ‘Relaxed Bartender’ NPC. For example, the Pineapple can ONLY be purchased by ‘Relaxed Bartender’ and ‘Ariella’, a pirate npc. While that could be a coincidence, let’s look deeper at this:
I believe this screenshot, and the order/amount of the items it shows, is the map to ‘Door Island’! Let’s see where it goes!
References:
https://tibiasecrets.com/veil-of-secrecy-interview-with-lionet/
https://tibia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Legend_of_the_Swimming_Isle_(Book)
Eclesius is a mad and forgetful sorcerer who, among many things,
dabbles with summoning.
This might’ve gone wrong…
Eclesius: Erm… in short, there might be a goblin in my cellar. …
Eclesius: Okay, I admit it. It’s a demon. A… demon uberoverlord.
Erm. And… while it was still confused from switching worlds, I
managed to lock it up in a cage and ran back up the stairs…
Enter Samael.
Samael seems to have been summoned, called… to have 'switched worlds’.. Which interestingly is recurring in Eclesius’s missions!
In the quest for love, we summon a dwarf and elf into the 'space-time continuum’ to combine them into dwelves.
Eclesius: … I just happen to have a small crack in the space-time continuum under my house. Once you are ready, we will both go there and summon forth our subjects…
Summoning is depicted as literally pulling something to you from another place.
In the final mission, we get to learn about Samael and the demise of Eclesius’s former assistant Turian, who got transformed into a frog.
What a lovely cage! Samaels is quite the opposite…
Eclesius wants to save Turian, but what’s crazy is that Turian wants to stay a frog and find a frog lady by a lovely little pond.
Eclesius then gets the idea of a body exchange, which is the known way of completing the quest.
Eclesius: 'Eeny, meeny, miny, moe – I stay here and you will go!’
Before we go on with the theory, we need something concrete.. I found that you don’t always have to follow Eclesius’s instructions. In the first mission, Eclesius asks for a dark hat. Every quest-guide tells you to get that particular one. But here’s new evidence to suggest alternate solutions!
Another generally unknown fact (bug?) is that you can complete his missions without being an assistant.. Just ask him for a quest instead.
So what if we ignore the frog, and instead find the opposite of love? Some angry, demonic creature to body exchange with Samael? An alternate solution?
Enter Chief Grarkharok, speculated to be a lesser demon in another theory. Like Turian, he too is on a quest for love, seeking a troll lady. Interestingly, he has a penchant for eating frogs. Could he be the key?
We also have noodles and his dog lady in the lovely castle, and the corrupt heroes who want to find the human lady Princess Lumelia. Scary implications.
I tried the body exchange spell but didn’t succeed, but surely we are onto something, right? Could the Demonguard be involved? Infernal frogs in Drefia or the Isle of Evil?
Frogs in another world? Space-time Continuum?
I firmly believe that we need to find something sinister in 'another world’ or place, to body exchange it with Samael.
Effectively 'teleporting’ Samael from his prison… to us! And then we fight!
With this, it feels as if ‘the alternate solution’ to the final mission is at our fingertips…
Dreamer’s challenge picture from:
https://www.tibiawiki.com.br/Dreamer’s_Challenge_Quest
Realm of Dreams picture from:
https://tibia.fandom.com/wiki/Realm_of_Dreams
Trolls = lesser demon? theory:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vT4W7_sKdHwVi2lH4BOSyKCkWSaUqvNP4155dSCdjXl7gOG1qT_6dqTMgdbmxkYMJsY_4-2pddTArre/pub
Samael picture from:
https://tibia.fandom.com/wiki/Samael
In a response from Tibiaqa (What is the Lore behind Earth Library? – TibiaQA), user Bitencourt talked about the lore of some of the creatures from the Secret Library, which we can also find in Tibia’s creature library.[1] However, Bitencourt did not delve much into the fire section. I don’t blame him, the origin of the Burning Books is the most ambiguous, the one that lends itself to more interpretations, unlike his friends the Icecold, Energetic and Cursed Books. Tibia tells us the following:
Following this and based on the lore of the Library, I have a theory: the Burning Books also carry very forbidden and… very hot content within their pages.
Allow me explain my headcanon.
The Zathroth Library update teaser[2] talks about how the Inquisition banned and burned all the books they considered pagan, blasphemous and sacrilegious. Everything that was considered “sin” was incinerated: extremely dark magic, insane rituals that would turn our stomachs, but also more mundane tales of human corruption.
Forbidden stories but that, even so, generated curiosity.
However, these forbidden books continued to appear in Tibia, even if all traces of them were destroyed, they were always copied and distributed again. And we must remember that in the Tibian world neither photocopiers nor PDFs exist. Hence it was suspected that the originals of these documents were kept in a secret place: the Library of Zathroth.
Nevertheless, we can assume that the books with the darkest and most powerful magic and rituals were not distributed on a newsstand in Thais but rather unknown. So what books were copied and distributed in a more mundane manner to the point of raising suspicion of a secret library? Well, possibly the most carnal: stories of noble gossip, more harmless dark magic, and, why not? the hot stories that would surely not be approved as a book club by King Tibianus, but would be distributed in the taverns of Mainland. It would be naive to think that this content does not exist in our wonderful lore suitable for all audiences.
In fact this reference is found in the ice library:
Now, what’s to blame for Burning Books besides their temperature? Well, these books “are created from pages formed from damned souls…” and “Filled of what the gods opposing Zathroth and his allies would consider blasphemy and mockery of the godly order of things”, interesting reference. These books also not only burn but desire to tempt their enemies: “Burning not only with hell fire but also the desire to taint and burn everything that opposes Zathroth.”
I also happen to like this phrase they say:
Fortunately, an Ink Blob woke me up from these clownish daydreams of a half-burned elite knight whose druid could barely cool down.
-Anne
Source: https://www.tibiawiki.com.br/wiki/Ominous_Pillar
If you’ve ever journeyed to the Ankrahmun tombs, you’ll know that inside the boss rooms there are ominous pillars that cannot be killed and cannot be targeted. They are immune to every element and physical attacks. What’s particularly troublesome is that the pillars are usually positioned around the room so that no matter where you stand, you can’t avoid being targeted even from across the room or sometimes off screen. Of course if you’re a higher level running through the room, this should be no issue at all. However, if you’re working on a pharaoh bosstiary or farming the bosses, the pillars can be quite a nuisance. The pharaoh respawn time is about 5 minutes so your choice here is to either leave the room and run the puzzles each time or be pelted nonstop by these ominous pillars that hit between 50-100 hp each turn. After running some tests, there are interesting points to note about interacting with the pillars.
The pillars can shoot through treewalls and bombs of all elements not but not through magic walls.
Players cannot walk on the ominous pillars but items can be placed on them. This reminded me of the areca palms in Venore which can also be broken. Unfortunately, a physical weapon did not work on the pillar but I wonder if other things can be used on the pillars.
You can also shoot runes through the pillars.
The most interesting thing I discovered was that the only way you could interact with the pillars is by using the challenge spell either on a knight or with a mage familiar. It’s a little tricky on the familiar since you cannot target the pillars but if you lure a creature near the pillar, the familiar’s challenge spell will affect the pillars as well. Now that we know this nifty tip, how do we put it into action? If you’re planning to stay in the pharaoh boss room, you can summon the familiar and challenge the pillars so they target the familiar instead of you.The easiest way to do this is with 2 knights. One knight will summon while the other one challenges the pillar and runs past the familiar forcing the pillars to target the closest thing which will be the familiar. As long as the familiar is there, the pillar won’t retarget and with 2 players, you can alternate summons endlessly which also self heal. This same method can be done with any mage or knight combination as well. Happy hunting!
Arguably one of the most legendary events from the ancient days of Tibia are the Ferumbras raids.
Many stories survived about these events, most fogged by the ruthless passing of time. Among them, one motif seems to emerge too often to be ignored – the daughter of mighty Ferumbras. What role did she play in all of this cannot be confirmed, yet, even among stories of the very people present while evil Ferumbras was defeated, can we see her being mentioned, next to her father’s name.1
While Fortinbrae, which is the name of the lady being the focus of this article, could very well be a part of players’ imagination – we have confirmation that such a person did exist. In an article2 about old Ferumbras raids CM’s say:
What’s curious is the presence of quotation marks around the ’daughter’.
Maybe back then (or actually, ever) she wasn’t planned to be a part of the evil family and this aspect of the story was inferred by players?
The story could end here – a failed follow-up to Ferumbras from the pre-CipSoft days. Well, turns out Fortinbrae really tried to fill in her (possibly-)father’s shoes.
Imagine my shock, when, after one of the monster rampages on Testera I saw an unnaturally quick monster, running through back alleys of Thais, summoning creatures such as Demons, Hellhounds or even, peculiarly, Essences of Darkness.
That’s an odd boss, I thought to myself, how did people at the rampage miss THAT!?
I quickly tried to 'Look’ only to confirm that it was no ordinary monster, but a high level sorcerer. Before I processed the whole situation a dreadful white skull appeared next to the name:
One blink of an eye and I see the Thais temple, missing my backpack.
I spent the evening with a small group of dedicated players, chasing this lady, barely scratching her.
This was around 2008/2009. In the following rampages I caught a glimpse of this name a few more times. Now, knowing this was an unusual sight, I wish I had recorded it. There are only a few low quality recordings3 of this character.
Later, the idea for Mistress Fortinbrae raids on test servers must’ve been aborted. The character was deleted and the name is now owned by one of the regular players.
Curiously, just ’Fortinbrae’, is still in hands of CipSoft:4
Like ’Ferumbras’5 it’s a PACC residing in Kazordoon; last login almost 2 decades ago.
Was Mistress Fortinbrae just a test server experiment? Only time will tell. Recently, The Abomination was introduced into the game – boss, which for many years was thought to be a test server exclusive.6
I feel we might see this name somewhere down the line – let the heir surpass their parents. After all, if we are to believe what is written in some of the Tibian libraries7 – there’s Goshnar’s blood running through the F’s family veins…
┏━━━━━━༻❁༺━━━━━━┓
1http://www.nightmareknights.com/historyprojects/events.html (mentioned with misspelled name)
1http://www.nightmareknights.com/historyprojects/itemhistory2.html (mentioned with misspelled name)
2https://www.tibia.com/news/?subtopic=newsarchive&id=2700 (article by Community Managers)
3https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bRxdUsXDeA (vid from testserver)
4https://www.tibia.com/community/?name=Fortinbrae
5https://www.tibia.com/community/?name=ferumbras
6https://tibia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Abomination?oldid=855410 (old The Abomination)
7,,The Ferumbras Files”, Noodles Academy of Modern Magic
┗━━━━━━༻❁༺━━━━━━┛
– Senior Captain Marten
When coming out of water you might find that you can’t attack a creature right away while they can. Kind of unfair if you ask me! But what would you say if I told you you CAN in fact attack creatures right away? Impossible you say? Let me show you!
As we all know while in a protection zone it is impossible to attack anything at all.And while coming out of them you have a small cooldown before you can start a hostile action.
But I’ve found out that (at least when coming out of water) if you come out in a diagonal you can attack a creature right away, even use a wall or a bomb! Helping you set up in a more secure way!
It takes a bit of practice knowing the sweet spot of how to do it but it’s not that complicated just keep in mind that the interaction is a bit wonky since it involves invisible triggers and if you start moving everywhere you might either be suck back into the water by the edges or be pushed forcefully into lando by this triggers AND THEN enter that “no attack-allowed cooldown” then still. So practice it before putting it into practice and hope this helps someone as it has helped me!
I want to finish by saying that I don’t know whether this is an intended interaction or not only Cipsoft could tell.
In the mystical world of Tibia, inspired by D&D and Forbidden Lands, fascinating connections emerge from the lore.
Volo’s Guide to Monsters A Dungeons & Dragons Supplement
Imagine the mysterious Black Pyramid hovering above Hellgate on Draconia and the ominous Dark Pyramid in the northern part of Darama, both creations of Beholders later changed to Bonelords because of Copyrights issue. These Bonelords are known for their high intelligence and intense fear of danger. They’re so paranoid that when they feel threatened, they seek ways to eliminate the hazard.
My adventures revealed an amazing story. Hellgate faced fiery dragon attacks, and Bonelords guarding the Black Pyramid with hordes of their minions had to yield to the dragons, who renamed it… …Draconia…
Fiery dragons prefer warm, dry places and avoid the cold that’s their weakness. The Bonelords from the Dark Pyramid, fearing the dragons, embarked on a perilous journey to the north-west to find a safer place to create their new nest.
In another expansion, Svargrond emerged, influenced by Norse mythology. Helheim, an island for those who didn’t die gloriously, appeared. Its skull-like shape and underground areas resembled Hellgate.
A NPC Heirem (shaman) sought out help with a threat on the island during an Ice Islands quest. We discovered Bonelords had settled there, likely fleeing the fiery dragons.
It turns out the Bonelords abandoned their city out of fear and sailed by many boats to Helheim to create a new Bonelord sanctuary, a new home („Heim” means home in Scandinavian and Germanic language).
In the fascinating world of Tibia, the fiery dragon attack on the Bonelords remains a haunting mystery. What drove the dragons to assault these enigmatic creatures, and who might be responsible for this chaos? These unanswered questions will probably push us into further research.
But that’s not the end of the story. In the midst of these events, the gaming community has long debated the outcome of a showdown between a dragon and a Beholder, considering their stats and abilities. Surprisingly, from our summaries, it appears that in 8 out of 10 cases, the dragon would emerge victorious, adding a captivating layer to the ongoing discourse within the Tibia universe.
Best Regards,
Royal Explorer Holy Luca 
Both humans and creatures anchor themselves to deities or certain sacred objects to ward off evil or to bring them strength. They shout their names to the heavens, whether it arrives or not, the presence and importance of belief in Tibian lands is undeniable. My name is Luiz Maioral and I am the official anthropologist of Lutabra. At the behest of Emperor Kruzak, I traveled Tibia acquiring knowledge.
My first contact upon marching south of Kazordoon was with the Swamp Trolls. South of Venore we found, in the underground of a destroyed house, a strange altar with an object that would be considered trivial, but which received a central role in this vast community of trolls. Could this object belonged to the former owners of the destroyed house? Does this object really have the properties to score the final goal against humans?
I decided to keep an eye on this same species and after strange reports I now traveled to the dense and humid forests of Port Hope. When exploring the underground caves of Trolls we notice once again that a sacred figure plays a prominent role. Could this crustacean be a good omen for trolls? Or would it be a defender of this tribe with unimaginable powers? Summoned companion as precaution.
Following a long boat trip I went to the mountainous city of Krailos where I came across a small society of Goblins, who worship a Frog God, who supposedly was responsible for important things.
Apparently The Frog God appeared in a night vision to a goblin, through the vision this Goblin marched into the mountains and founded a city for his kind, a righteous city that prospered for a time. However, now this green society is being subjugated by gigantic Ogres, causing the little ones to return with prayers to their old amphibious God.
After returning to the city of Thais to resupply, I received a letter from an old friend from the Inquisition, reporting strange behavior in Roshamuul. A long search was carried out, but nothing very concrete was found. But was it necessary? The mere construction of sanctuaries is proof that these monstrous creatures of Roshammul worship something we could call a primitive God.
This false worship is generating discomfort in the upper echelons of sorcerers in the city of Thais. The inquisition was instructed to desecrate these altars. I refrained from such action and marched back to the mainland with several drawings of these shrines erected to an unknown (false?) God.
Real resources are running low, so I scouted the outskirts of my own city. When climbing the mountains and going through certain traps and puzzles I came across something that wasn’t actually a God, but that wanted to be… and apparently it cost him a lot. I hear him talking nonsense on the highest floors of this magical tower, and I don’t dare go up! However, certain documents found are enough to discover what this (future?) deity wants to receive.
| Name | TC Amount |
|---|---|
| Sabin Rene | 1000TC |
| Cavaleiro Kyon Efusa | 600TC |
| Anonymous | 550TC |
| Hegal | 500TC |
| Pala Thebs | 250TC |
| Acolyte Rain | 250TC |
| Vall Astaoldana | 150TC |
| Parrilla | 100TC |
I love how articles uncover more content in Tibia and help me understand Tibian universe better.