Runescape: the entirety of Dwarven civilization and genetics.
Originally Dwarves as we knew was unable to cast magic, besides super-heating ores this would've been justified due to migrating underground to avoid the devastation of the God Wars. eventually the ability to cast magic was entirely lost. skip to near the present day and there was a quest series called Rise of the Red Axe, initially it was just an amnesia quest where you find out that the democracy of the Dwarves was at stake from the inside; it was shared among a few trading companies; called The Consortium, which was elected into power by people who was more civilian rather than Royalty. this is ok. the next bit is that the Red Axe (technically evil) has Arprosandrian Gnomes (basically exiles, that's for another story) who steals impoverished Dwarves from the poor side of town in the attempt to drum up a personal army.
The Aprosandrian Gnomes uses machinery to augment existing Dwarves into a berserk, feral state known as Chaos Dwarves and hypnotize them into following Zamorakianism. this fits into the Red Axe wanting to take over the entire ruling class. but then they somehow had a highly intelligent Ogre that they found (retcon: Kidnap) that had (forced) amnesia, he had magical memory-altering/hypnotic abilities, it's also assumed that his essence was used as a base and weaved with Chaos Dwarves to create Chaos Dwogres, presumably to give the Red Axe a highly strong fighting force that could use Magic.
Post Retcon: Dwarves were always able to cast magic, just that a god (who's kind of talked of in-universe) as an analogue of Satan curses the Dwarves thousands of years ago, they ran underground and sealed off their own magic, since their latent magical abilities were what was fuelling the curse that transformed them into Chaos Dwarves, this was eventually forgotten about and which proliferated the need for steam technology in their culture. but this came after a revamped quest that had a Dwarf using magic to move animate essence from rock monsters into regular rocks. apparantly the Aprosandrian Ambassador was also mindwiped by someone. the Ogre was mindwiped and even the head antagonist was mindwiped, however in his case it was due to bloodlust that attacked both Troll and Dwarf during a war several years ago before the quest series, the memories of that was sealed away by the Ogre.
In the actual last fight: said Dwarf, in a fit of an crazed epiphany (and guilt) about his past exploits in the war being uncovered by the player, actually forcibly unseals his magic WITHOUT MACHINERY which warped him into a Chaos Dwarf and your fellow protag into one too, just so you can kill the antagonist (essentially suicide by cop). but your dwarf sidekick could fight off the affliction without any ill effect. this just brings up more questions now. like what was the point of altering existing Dwarves with machinery, was Dragon Battlestaves really some conduit of Magic that fills anything with it, why mindwipe the Arprosandrian Ambassador, were they just covering their tracks whilst they find tune their mutant machines?
* Mindwiped, not in the state of actually having their memories erased. more like altered memories so that bad memories are either forgotten, or maybe spies who found machinery had the entire experience glanced over with the thoughts of Kebabs and Beer to make them look unbelievable. because obviously no one would believe a drunk. (finding out about the machines again must've taken like 2 quests)
Originally Dwarves as we knew was unable to cast magic, besides super-heating ores this would've been justified due to migrating underground to avoid the devastation of the God Wars. eventually the ability to cast magic was entirely lost. skip to near the present day and there was a quest series called Rise of the Red Axe, initially it was just an amnesia quest where you find out that the democracy of the Dwarves was at stake from the inside; it was shared among a few trading companies; called The Consortium, which was elected into power by people who was more civilian rather than Royalty. this is ok. the next bit is that the Red Axe (technically evil) has Arprosandrian Gnomes (basically exiles, that's for another story) who steals impoverished Dwarves from the poor side of town in the attempt to drum up a personal army.
The Aprosandrian Gnomes uses machinery to augment existing Dwarves into a berserk, feral state known as Chaos Dwarves and hypnotize them into following Zamorakianism. this fits into the Red Axe wanting to take over the entire ruling class. but then they somehow had a highly intelligent Ogre that they found (retcon: Kidnap) that had (forced) amnesia, he had magical memory-altering/hypnotic abilities, it's also assumed that his essence was used as a base and weaved with Chaos Dwarves to create Chaos Dwogres, presumably to give the Red Axe a highly strong fighting force that could use Magic.
Post Retcon: Dwarves were always able to cast magic, just that a god (who's kind of talked of in-universe) as an analogue of Satan curses the Dwarves thousands of years ago, they ran underground and sealed off their own magic, since their latent magical abilities were what was fuelling the curse that transformed them into Chaos Dwarves, this was eventually forgotten about and which proliferated the need for steam technology in their culture. but this came after a revamped quest that had a Dwarf using magic to move animate essence from rock monsters into regular rocks. apparantly the Aprosandrian Ambassador was also mindwiped by someone. the Ogre was mindwiped and even the head antagonist was mindwiped, however in his case it was due to bloodlust that attacked both Troll and Dwarf during a war several years ago before the quest series, the memories of that was sealed away by the Ogre.
In the actual last fight: said Dwarf, in a fit of an crazed epiphany (and guilt) about his past exploits in the war being uncovered by the player, actually forcibly unseals his magic WITHOUT MACHINERY which warped him into a Chaos Dwarf and your fellow protag into one too, just so you can kill the antagonist (essentially suicide by cop). but your dwarf sidekick could fight off the affliction without any ill effect. this just brings up more questions now. like what was the point of altering existing Dwarves with machinery, was Dragon Battlestaves really some conduit of Magic that fills anything with it, why mindwipe the Arprosandrian Ambassador, were they just covering their tracks whilst they find tune their mutant machines?
* Mindwiped, not in the state of actually having their memories erased. more like altered memories so that bad memories are either forgotten, or maybe spies who found machinery had the entire experience glanced over with the thoughts of Kebabs and Beer to make them look unbelievable. because obviously no one would believe a drunk. (finding out about the machines again must've taken like 2 quests)
