User:Sol Pacificus/Manual of style

Grappling hook

A grappling hook is a tool that consists of multiple hooks attached to a rope.
[expand a little on details?]

During the Third Crusade, the Assassins favored the device's versatility for their operations. Consequently in 1190, Rafik, the Keeper of Dasmascus gave a grappling hook to Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, suggesting that it would be useful should the young Assassin choose to travel by rooftop again. <-- inadequate ending for the sentence?

[it indeed proved useful in the slums because the buildings collapse?]
[when pursuing Fajera and the bridge collapsed Altaïr found it esp. useful for crossing the river ~ significant enough to mention?]
[he would continue to use it throughout his quest for the Chalice to swing himself across gaps he cannot jump]
[employed it as a way of pulling guards towards him. compare with Hookblade & rope dart?]

Reference

• Assassin's Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles

Nazim

Nazim (unknown - 1190) was a Templar crossbowman that participated in the Third Crusade.

In 1190, he was stationed in Tyre as part of the defense force for the Templar hospital. Alongside two Hospitalier soldiers, he was guarding the interior of a restricted building when he encountered the Assassin Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, who had trespassed en route to the hospital. Though unaware of Altaïr's affiliation, the Crusaders nevertheless moved to apprehend the intruder, decrying him as a "shameless thief." Nazim had barely just received the order to arm his crossbow when Altaïr overpowered his group and killed them.

Trivia

Because the video game's levels are designed with improbable architecture, it is impossible to determine the function of the building where Nazim is encountered. The interior of this building consists of naught but a few platforms suspended above a bottomless abyss with disconnected beams for navigation. One side of the building's façade resembles that of a typical church, at least with regards to buttresses and arched windows, the other side lacks these features, which are replaced instead by a large platform that protrudes out over the street.

Reference

• Assassin's Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles

Templar Hospital

The Templar Hospital of Tyre was a medical facility that operated in the 12th century and came to double as a stronghold for the Knights Templar at the height of the Third Crusade.

History

Located near the harbor, the institution was shut down at some point prior to 1190. Around that year, the Crusaders reopened the complex under the command of the Templar doctor Roland Napule, in the process drastically bolstering the city's reinforcements.

Though ostensibly a hospital, the facility was in fact employed for much more nefarious purposes, particularly in light of the Templars' fervent pursuit for the keys to the Temple of the Sand. People suspect to knowledge of these keys were detained at the hospital and subjected to brutal interrogations. While these operations were by no means publicized, the local civilians nevertheless whispered rumors of the horrors committed within its walls.

These rumors eventually reached the ears of the Assassins, who sent an agent to investigate. The infiltrator failed to return, however, and the Assassins remained largely in the dark on the exact details of the Templars' operations.

A few months later, the Templars captured an elderly man that had visited the Temple of Sand. Certain that this man knew the whereabouts of a key to the Temple, Roland Napule began a fierce interrogation in the detention room. Erstwhile, he sent two Hospitalier soldiers to patrol the sewers, wary that it was a potential route for intruders.

Unbeknownst to the Templars, the young Assassin Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad had arrived in Tyre, having been instructed by Fajera to seek the old man for aid in his quest for the Chalice. Guided by the the Assassin Rafiq Hamid, Altaïr infiltrated the hospital through the very sewers that Roland had sought to secure.

Despite the hospital's stringent level of security, the Assassin ultimately navigated his way to the detention room without injury. Interrupting the interrogation, he killed Roland Napule and rescued the prisoner, who gave his key to the desert temple in gratitude.

Layout

Exterior

The hospital was a prominent

Subterranean levels

Underneath the hospital was a complex series of dungeons, furnace rooms, and finery forges.

Trivia

• As Altaïr infiltrates the hospital through the underground passageways, the main levels of the hospital are never actually explored in Assassin's Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles.

Americas

The Americas, popularly known to Europeans as the New World in the past, is a continent that comprises almost the entirety of the land of the Western Hemisphere of Earth. The giant landmass is traditionally divided into two constituents, North America and South America, both of which more commonly receive the appellation of continent instead. To its west is the vast Pacific Ocean and to the east, the Atlantic Ocean that serves as its divide from the Eastern Hemisphere.

Though it was home to several powerful civilizations such as the Maya, the Inca, and the Aztecs, for the great majority of human history, it was unknown to virtually everyone in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The Atlantic Ocean served as a natural barrier that segregated the peoples of the two landmasses, and only select members of the Assassin Brotherhood were aware of its existence.

This changed in 1492 when the voyage of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, guided by the maps of Ottoman cartographer Piri Reis publicly exposed the existence of the continent to the majority of Europeans for the first time. A flurry of colonialism by European powers followed, and nations such as England, Spain, and France rushed to claim territory in the landmass in a contest for resources. With little respect to the rights of technologically inferior peoples which preceded them, entire populations of indigenous Americans were wiped out in the ensuing centuries of conquest.

In the meantime, the Assassins and the Templars extended their operations to the continent as well, establishing new guilds and rites as their millennia-long conflict continued to rage on. In the modern times, the Americas is host to many prominent nations that are the legacy of European colonialism, including Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Peru, and the superpower of the United States of America.

History

Isu era

Under the Isu, the Americas was the site of many of their Temples, most notably the Grand Temple near modern-day Turin, New York that served as the central facility where the Capitoline Triad worked to devise solutions to save themselves from the impending solar cataclysm. Other complexes included the Observatory, a surveillance center in Hispaniola; a vault under what would later become Chichen Itza that held the Prophecy Disks; and a series of infrastructure that stabilized the planet's crust.

After the Isu civilization collapsed in 75,000 BCE by their failure to prevent the cataclysm and the revolution of humans, the surviving humans proliferated freely, no longer under the dominion of their creators. For the following millennia, human civilization across the world progressed gradually.

The human societies of the Americas, separated from those on other continents by the oceans, developed independently and without contact with peoples of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Such was the segregation that by the time of the Third Crusade in the 12th century, the Levantine Assassin was mystified to gaze upon Americas from a globe holographically projected by an Apple of Eden. At that point, he was one of the few humans in the Eastern Hemisphere to learn of the Americas' existence.

Race to the Americas

In the 15th century, the Americas became known to the Ottoman geographer and later Assassin Piri Reis, who decided to include it in a series of maps he drew. By 1491, these maps had fallen into the hands of the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus. Compiling an atlas from Piri Reis's maps and those drawn by other cartographers, Columbus became determined to chart a western, seaward route to Asia. By this point, the Templars had become privy to the secrets of the atlas. Realizing that there was an entire continent virtually empty of major world powers, they became desperate to explore it first. Establishing their influence in this land before the European nations or their mortal enemies, the Assassins, could prove pivotal in their quest to inaugurate a New World Order.

Needing time to prepare their own expedition across the Atlantic, the Templars sought to cut short the voyage planned by Columbus, anxious that he would publicize the Americas to all of Europe. When they failed to murder him in Venice thanks to the timely intervention of the Italian Assassin Ezio Auditore da Firenze, however, they resorted to a more convoluted plan: to exhaust the treasury of Crown of Castile—the only venue left for Columbus—by keeping it embroiled in the Granada War as long as possible. This scheme failed dramatically when Ezio alongside Spanish Assassins Raphael Sánchez and Luis de Santángel helped put an end to the war.

Age of European Imperialism

Columbus's voyage proceeded at last in 1492, and all of the Templars' fears materialized, with Columbus's "discovery" of the continent spreading rapidly throughout all of Europe in a flurry of excitement. What followed were a series of further expeditions by Spain as they rushed to claim the "New World" for themselves.

Under conquistador Hernán Cortés, the Spaniards encountered the Aztecs for the first time in 1519. The invasion that followed led to the annexation of the Aztec Empire by Spain, and about a decade later the Inca also fell to Spanish conquest.

Appearances

• Assassin's Creed (Appears in hologram)
• Assassin's Creed II (Appears on a map)
• Assassin's Creed II: Discovery (Mentioned only)
• Assassin's Creed: Project Legacy (first appearance)
• Assassin's Creed: The Fall
• Assassin's Creed: Revelations
• Assassin's Creed: The Chain
• Assassin's Creed III
• Assassin's Creed III: Liberation
• Assassin's Creed: Forsaken
• Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
• Assassin's Creed: Rogue
• Assassin's Creed: Pirates
• Assassin's Creed: Memories
• Assassin's Creed Volume 1: Trial by Fire
• Assassin's Creed: Last Descendants
• Assassin's Creed: Last Descendants – Locus
• Assassin's Creed Volume 2: Setting Sun
• Assassin's Creed: The Movie