#dredge spoilers (?)

[solarockk]

Dredge implied lore? in my hermitcraft fanart? its more likely then what you might think eye

[were-changing-cake-vaults]

Gem would like to pretend that things are normal around Magic Mountain.

Or, well, that everyone else is normal, and she’s keeping all the weirdness to herself. She’s the one who decided to go a little creepy this season, after all, and as far as she can tell, she’s the only one smelling the rot coming from the river. All her neighbors should be fine, and have only commented that her boat burns a lot of coal fumes that sort of reek. It’s definitely not rot, and things are normal for them, and they are decidedly abnormal for her.

Which is fine! Gem wants her friends safe! Sure, she’s been hearing weird gurgling noises from the flooded caves that line the beaches, but she’s probably just hallucinating. Or maybe Scar is smacking salmon heads on note blocks again, despite living on the other side of the mountain. And sure, Impulse died and came back completely washed of color, but that’s just a demise thing. It’s just the creepy she dragged along with her- Joel’s totally fine, and that’s enough evidence for her.

Well, it would be if not for the fact that the salmon she’s been getting from fishing are starting to look…strange, all sharp-finned and much slimier than normal. And the cod, too, have far too many gills, like gashes down their sides. Grian pulls up a fish one afternoon and Gem swears it’s got six eyes, but Grian only remarks them as “weird patterning” and shoves it right into the furnace for cooking.

He’s been eating a lot of fish, recently, straight from this very river, the one that smells of rot. Caught them all himself. He’s also been fishing a lot- Gem doesn’t know the last time he worked on his base. He keeps trying to dredge up a book. She asks him one day why he keeps going if he’s already got a ton of books from the water, and he sounds haggard when he replies:

“The book, Gem. I’m not looking for a book. I’m looking for the book. It’ll give me all the answers I need. I haven’t found it yet, but the ocean will provide for me. I know it’s the next one.”

Something in the way he looks at her makes her gut twist. His eyes are empty, glossed over, and she knows the joke is that he looks like a cod, but it’s- he’s different, now, washed out and shiny skin, little to no meat on his bones, bags like pits under his soulless eyes. Something about the way he phrased that—the ocean will provide for me—makes her spine recoil back, feet dragged backwards towards her boat. A fear-stricken laugh bubbles up Gem throat as she tries to remember the last time he wasn’t fishing. When was the last time he slept?

Come to think of it, when was the last time she slept? Isn’t there a warning for those who stay up too late?

And when she tells him it’s an addiction, Grian just laughs it off, throws his rod into the sea, and pats the seat next to him. And then there she is, fishing alongside him, like she was always doing. She was planning to do this, yes. More and more of Magic Mountain arrives, plus Etho, who brings along a disc to put them in the mood. It’s a swan song.

The ocean sings back. It gives her an image of a great tall lighthouse, cherished by watery angels, who dance around it. It gives her the size, the colors, the materials to recreate it in verse. She smiles. It tells them all to knock another hermit off the list of survivors. She grins.

Before turning to join the group on their quest, Gem looks into the water one last time. Staring back is a well-kept woman with long, shiny red hair.

There is a book in her hand.

[eel-ectricity]

The Book of The Deep is in your hands.

[wren-kitchens]

i'm gonna lose my shit

so i was starting a new game of dredge cause i'm normal, and i was looking at the starting art (as a side note, its so beautiful i need to talk about it more) and i noticed

huh. whats. whats that

hmm those two things. look familliar

[whaile]

There is only one thing left to do. Throw me back.

please play the spooky fishing game

[nek-ros]

I LOVE FISH

[vieramars]

TMA + TMAGP fan cast but it's all Dredge characters

Lena

Gwen

Trevor Herbert

Melanie

Maxwell Rayner

Elias

[ms-scarletwings]

Aberrant Fish

!! Hi there, if you are reading this, know that this post is currently going through a sort of overhaul and revisit as of September. With the release of the Iron Rig DLC, and me finally getting around to finishing it, several updates to the hyperlinks below are in the works to fix some outdated numbering and account for the MANY additional aberrations that the latest expansion has added to existing regions.

The first hint many an angler will get of the dark, insidious secrets these waters hold,

and yet, they are the first thing to be accepted as only another flavor of mundane.

The game text calls them grotesque. The fishmonger calls them corrupted. You get to call them a bonus. Rather than fear and revile them, tradesmen will pay a shiny extra penny to add them into their stock. They are gestured to and spoken of, but never truly elaborated on by the townsfolk. They have probably been here long before most of them, and so will be here long after they are gone. They were certainly here before you. Maybe you don’t need their answers, and yet if you are like me, you still witlessly question and keep dredging for more.

Like many things pulled from those cursed depths, they whisper flecks of madness from an impossible voice. What messages do they carry, and what forces do they play vessel to? Are they the lingering embers from a long-extinguished calamity, or are they harbingers of the next one to come?

I believe we have already seen signs of fire with our own eyes- impossible, great beasts that prowl the four (now five) coasts, the dying cult, gibbering fog…. That damned book. These tortured creatures are but another form of the same smoke.

To the question of where they came from, if your fisherman pokes around enough and braves the darkness, he may have already found a response in one of the many obelisks scattered around the map. Specifically, I refer to this.

This would suggest the aberrants themselves are what leaked in through the cracks that the largest of all monsters wants to rend apart? Not entirely, but in part. For the researcher at the Stellar Basin came to her own conclusion I want to factor in.

Her words give credence to the possibility that it is actually those greater beasts themselves at the heart of the corruption. I think she was half onto something, because what if these twisted forms, both large and small, were blooms along the same set of festering roots?

The more dark stones you disturb in the frenzy of your own madness, the more you learn about the age before your arrival, about the islands, and especially about their current guardians. The Mindsuckers- carrion puppet masters given a home, the Basin creature- a spore that miraculously survived its dive to the abyss, and the Serpent- lifeless stone made animate and malicious, all had their creation remembered in great detail by the obelisks. Some hints point that their emergence was rather recent, relative to even more powerful beings, such as the leviathan.

Maybe there are even more unseen horrors far below, blessedly out of our reach, for now. My view is that the malformed beasts are the aimless children of such unfathomable things waiting beyond the veil. With them came its influence, and its corruption, and from them it continues to spread to all life surrounding. The smaller rifts were always a transformative disease upon the harbor’s fish, but with the rise of the new monsters, the sickness runs farther and less avoidably than ever. Whether these aberrant spawn are a gift to the worthy, or another deceptive evil that leads to madness remains left to be seen.

I will be giving a spotlight to each of these fascinating specimens at the back of Dredge’s encyclopedia, including those found in the expansions, for further comment and appreciation. Updating the list below as we go along!

[#104-109]

[#110-115]

[#116-122]

[#123-129]

[#130-135]

[#136-141]

[#142-148]

[#149-154]

[#155-159]

[#160-164]

[#165-168]

[#169-172]

[#173-180]

[#181-187]

[#188-194]

[#151-156] [update still WIP]

[#157-162] [update still WIP]

[#213-218]

[#219-224]

[Bonus I. Night Angler]

[Bonus II. Serpent]

[Bonus III. Basin Creature]

[Bonus IV. Mindsuckers]

[Bonus V. Unseeing Mother]

[Bonus VI. “Narwhal”]

[eldritchgray]

I just want it to be known that I think the little eyeball guys are really cute actually

[the-monochrome-jester]

“Silver and crimson! The book - covered in her blood!”

Throw it back

[artbysupercres]

...what happened to the previous fisherman?

Finished playing through Dredge and I absolutely loved it from start to finish. I cannot recommend it more highly.

[emiplayzmc]

Hmmmmmm this dialogue option seems familiar...

[sorelymisinken]

Dredge might as be called Dread sometimes

So anyway...

[tealmaskmybeloved]

hii so i just noticed you mentioned where he shows up? so uh you can ignore that last ask & maybe share what your fave fish is? or any of your fave abberations?

HEHEGEHEHEHEHEHEHE

My favorite non-aberrated fish is likely the Scarlet Prawn

Skrunkly lil guy I love him

My favorite aberrated fish are a tie between the All Seeing Cod and a new fish that's in the Iron Rig (which is kind of spoilery if you know the story, I'll tag it as spoilers just in case)

(The new fish will be under the cut)

This guy is called the Deep Form

This guy is a secret fish, and it took me like a lot of saving and resetting to get. Now he lives in my storage locker.

You have to do a lot stuff to get him (so when you get Aberrated Bait at the beginning of the Iron Rig HOLD ON TO IT)

[plural-headcanons]

the Player character / The Collector from Dredge are a plural system!

[whaile]

that's it. that's the game