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Gnoman posted:It is something found right from the beginning. Well, sort of. This is from an Orcish perspective and obviously they'd consider themselves superior and their lifestyle the "correct" one that made them stronger, but at the same time, even by their own reporting, they get their asses kicked by the "peace soft" humans and are driven back. The fact that Orcs report it as "trickery and magic" rather than acknowleding that the humans might be martially superior puts the Orcs very much in line with fascist thinking about how the enemy is always both inferior but also unassailable because they're dishonourable and cheaters, but doesn't necessarily impugn the writers.
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May 9, 2022 14:11
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I was kind of hopeful at the end of Battle For Azeroth stuff when the horde is going "How about we just have a Chief, and not a WARChief to lead us?" that they were backing down on the fasc, nope.
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May 9, 2022 14:59
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AtomikKrab posted:I was kind of hopeful at the end of Battle For Azeroth stuff when the horde is going "How about we just have a Chief, and not a WARChief to lead us?" that they were backing down on the fasc, nope. I honestly think they are backing down on the fasc. The stuff we're discussing now long predates BfA.
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May 9, 2022 15:01
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'You know, I'm not exactly the most up to date on WoW lore, I'm sure it can't be thaaaaaa-'Cythereal posted:(TW for the sensitive) 
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May 9, 2022 15:08
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BisbyWorl posted:'You know, I'm not exactly the most up to date on WoW lore, I'm sure it can't be thaaaaaa-' You can glean all of this from the Warcraft 2 manual.
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May 9, 2022 15:39
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Torrannor posted:You can glean all of this from the Warcraft 2 manual. They're only sentient due to retcon. Prior to that it's not really different from breeding horses.
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May 9, 2022 15:46
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I sped read all the lore posting. I am now dead, died from an aneurysm. Thanks Blizzard.
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May 9, 2022 16:19
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Okay, I think I'm coming at this from a mildly warped perspective because while I know jack and poo poo about Warcraft lore(except from that one Reddit poster who had a giant analysis of how badly WoW failed), I'm also a fan of Warhammer lore which is honestly about as insane, so I was just 'mhm, sure' to the kaiju orcs. That said, the pizza party and the 'no non-white humans until 2020' both absolutely threw me. I was like, 'surely in 2012 when me and my friend were playing on my friend's stepdads account there must have been brown skin tones in character creation, right??'. And then I got to the Bronze Dragonflight. What the actual gently caress.
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May 9, 2022 16:36
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t3isukone posted:Okay, I think I'm coming at this from a mildly warped perspective because while I know jack and poo poo about Warcraft lore(except from that one Reddit poster who had a giant analysis of how badly WoW failed), I'm also a fan of Warhammer lore which is honestly about as insane, so I was just 'mhm, sure' to the kaiju orcs. Brown skin tones, yes. Actually black facial features, no.
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May 9, 2022 17:49
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Cythereal posted:Take that thought with you. Warcraft as a setting nakedly espouses fascist philosophy and dogma as a significant element of the setting and writing themes. To be fair, this is a setting where there are actually existential threats that pop up constantly. Put down the city-destroying terror of the week, and next week there's a country destroying terror. Rapidly following that is the world destroying terror, then the solar system destroying terror, then the timeline destroying terror, then the... (not thinking of specific examples here, just the generic escalation of threats as a storywriting thing) And, to the game's credit, there are situations where enemies bury the hatchet, however temporarily, to work together for a time. It's a lovely philosophy, but at the very least the enemies are real and not perceived, and are actually existentially threatening, rather than the strong but actually weak/weak but actually strong bullshit of making up threats where there are none. I'm glad I hopped off of the WoW train when I did. Dear lord did the story not go in good directions from the lore snippets I'm not recognizing. Contrasting the writing of WoW with the writing of FFXIV is interesting; with WoW it's pretty clear they didn't have any long-term plans for story arcs and had to just kind of pull random crap out of a hat, where FFXIV has a more coherent narrative where even if they didn't know where they were going to end up, the rough edges and the retcons are a lot harder to spot.
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May 9, 2022 18:09
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Siegkrow posted:Brown skin tones, yes. Actually black facial features, no. Especially the hair was limited to variations on straight or wavy. Basically, in 2002 you could look like this guy: 
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May 9, 2022 18:13
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Someone asked me about this in PMs, so I'll explain some notes publicly about the Human 1 update regarding what is and is not canon so far. What is canon: 1. In the human campaign, the PC becomes king of Stormwind at the end of the game, following King Llane's death. 2. The region WoW vets know as the Burning Steppes used to be Stormwind territory until the Dark Iron clan of dwarves had a little whoopsie about 250 years prior to the Warcraft games. 3. There is a major human city named Boralus, albeit I probably won't have cause to talk about it much again until Warcraft 2. It's the capital city of another human kingdom. What is not canon: 1. The PC of the human campaign being a woman. Yeah, no, I've had my fill of white dudes with short brown hair as the human PC is depicted to be, so out with that. 2. That there was ever an attempt by Stormwind to resettle the Burning Steppes. We actually know very little about Stormwind's history before the events of WC1, so I decided this was a more interesting background than just making her from one of the established Stormwind-controlled towns. 3. The Bronze Dragonflight having any involvement past the opening of the Dark Portal I talked about. I'm presenting this human campaign as an alternate timeline, in case anyone didn't grasp that, and I'm not going to be terribly fussy about the details except when I specifically note otherwise. I want to show off the human campaign, and I want to give a female character a leading presence in some fashion, however limited, before Warcraft 3.
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May 9, 2022 18:32
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As someone whose brushed with Warcraft have been limited to Warcraft 3 + the Frozen Throne, Heroes of the Storm, the tutorial area from WoW and whatever I heard second hand, I'm a mixture of "Yikes" and WTF at every bit of lore I hear. ...the weird thing is, time cops are a common fixture in any kind of media with time travel, but writers are usually intelligent enough to either a) make them the bad guys or b) show them actually protecting the timeline from external threats. Hell, in some media time travelling to fix stuff isn't even a crime, only causing disasters is! But I guess it's truer to life making time cops just keep a lovely status quo until the head honchos need to rewrite something.
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May 9, 2022 18:41
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Alpha3KV posted:From what I remember, you did have all the missions completed. What else was there to keep it from being considered finished? As for this LP so far, it's already proving to be a wild ride a couple updates in. I knew Warcraft lore was crazy and there were some questionable things in it, but only knew a few sporadic details. Only played WC2 as a kid, never cared to get into WoW or had a chance to play WC3.
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May 9, 2022 20:08
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GiantRockFromSpace posted:As someone whose brushed with Warcraft have been limited to Warcraft 3 + the Frozen Throne, Heroes of the Storm, the tutorial area from WoW and whatever I heard second hand, I'm a mixture of "Yikes" and WTF at every bit of lore I hear. I'm reminded of Dragon Ball Xenoverse, where the time patrol's job is to stop a different group of time travelers from mucking up history, and in fact the few times that history is changed for the better the powers that be try their best to keep the change. Actually time travel in Dragon Ball is kinda fucky.
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May 9, 2022 20:09
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It's always fucky.
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May 9, 2022 20:11
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GiantRockFromSpace posted:...the weird thing is, time cops are a common fixture in any kind of media with time travel, but writers are usually intelligent enough to either a) make them the bad guys or b) show them actually protecting the timeline from external threats. Hell, in some media time travelling to fix stuff isn't even a crime, only causing disasters is! In theory, B is what they spend most of their time doing (in WoW, we don't see actual bronze dragons until WC3 and the whole notion of Aspects and time travel wasn't a thing until WoW). The problem is that Blizzard never really established the stakes of the Bronzes vs the Infinites, and what makes a timeline change something the Bronzes have to correct versus any of the many stable alternate timelines that the writers have declared exist. And we know that time travel can be permitted, I'll discuss the War of the Ancients in WC3. We fundamentally don't know what the Infinites are actually trying to accomplish, only a series of crisis points that I'll call attention to as we get to them in the series. I have my own theory as to what the idea is supposed to be, which I'm putting to work in spinning this narrative for a timeline where the humans won WC1 (because the OC, someone with the talent and ability to lead Stormwind to victory, died six years previously in the canon timeline), but that's purely me bullshitting and trying to have some fun. I did say in the OP of the thread that this thread will mostly not be about that, though. This writing a narrative with an alternate timeline is going to be confined to the human campaign of WC1.
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May 9, 2022 20:14
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As Cythereal mentioned, the first inkling we ever got that the Dragons were more than just giant flying lizards was Beyond the Dark Portal, the expansion to WC2, and that was more a sole Horde hero unit, plus their backstory. Blizzard basically rewrote a bunch of the backstory in the lead up to WC3, and that’s where the idea of sentient dragons and the dragonflights come in IIRC (before, they were just reskins based off of your faction color). Also, did you all but isekai your Human protag, albeit with a runaway carriage rather than Truck-kun?
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May 9, 2022 21:11
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GhostStalker posted:Also, did you all but isekai your Human protag, albeit with a runaway carriage rather than Truck-kun? Please speak English if you want me to understand what you're asking. I genuinely have no idea what you're saying. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 21:17 on May 9, 2022 |
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May 9, 2022 21:15
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I played the hell out of WC1 and 2 and completely ignored the lore because it was pretty dumb. When WC3 came out I couldn't ignore the lore in the single-player campaign and it was so dumb that I managed to blot it from my mind and never finished the game or touched anything Warcraft related since.
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May 9, 2022 21:17
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Cythereal posted:Please speak English if you want me to understand what you're asking. Anime trope, it was just a joke. Isekai is one of the current flavors of the month in Japanese Light Novel writing which then get adapted into anime for the past decade or so, although it’s a fairly old one: being transported to another world (usually on your death) and living a different life and the culture clash that results (think Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for a fairly well regarded historical example), although nowadays they’re more wish fulfillment to be consumed by readers and viewers online so that they can forget about their mundane lives or whatever. One of the stock ways hack writers have of killing off someone at the start of one of these stories so as to have them put in said different world is having your protagonist getting hit by a truck, hence the memetic character of Truck-kun, which is established enough to have a Wikipedia page. Having your main character have their destiny changed by getting hit by a runaway vehicle made me think of said trope. Since you definitely had no idea what I was talking about, I’m gonna chalk it up to me having anime on the brain and seeing references where there aren’t any. EDIT: Noted, will never bring this up again. GhostStalker fucked around with this message at 21:25 on May 9, 2022 |
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May 9, 2022 21:19
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For those unacquainted with me: do not ever assume I will get a reference to anime. I do not like anime, I do not like anime styled games (for the most part, I enjoyed Final Fantasy 14 prior to the Endwalker expansion), I know nothing about anime culture and like to keep it that way, and what knowledge I have of Japanese language does not involve anime vocabulary. So no, there was no being transported to another world. My notion for what happened is this: 1. In the canon timeline, this character did exist. She died in a drunken bar fight before the events of WC1. 2. An agent of the Infinite Dragonflight arranged for her to be hit by a carriage before she could reach that bar, crippling her but preventing her from dying when she should have. 3. As a result of her surviving where she shouldn't have, she was in a position to become the player character for the human campaign of WC1, which she proceeded to win. 4. A time cop has shown up on her doorstep in alarm that this has become a dangerously unstable timeline.
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May 9, 2022 21:24
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GhostStalker posted:Blizzard basically rewrote a bunch of the backstory in the lead up to WC3, and that’s where the idea of sentient dragons and the dragonflights come in IIRC (before, they were just reskins based off of your faction color). I don't think the dragonflights were a thing yet in WC3 - they established the dragon colours but the only meaning to that was what element they attacked with. Only one or two dragons had spoken lines and they were every part stock fantasy enemy dragons. Dragons being quasi-divine beings with domains over major laws of reality is pure WoW.
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May 9, 2022 21:34
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I'm having good flashbacks to Azzur's lps (shame they got cut short with beyond the dark portal) and very, very bad flashbacks to the endless attempts to explain warcraft lore.
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May 9, 2022 21:39
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Tenebrais posted:I don't think the dragonflights were a thing yet in WC3 - they established the dragon colours but the only meaning to that was what element they attacked with. Only one or two dragons had spoken lines and they were every part stock fantasy enemy dragons. Deathwing being sentient was seen first in either WC2 expansion, beyond the dark portal or in the book "Day of the Dragon" which came out well before WC3. In fact, a lot of the aspect things were first introduced in DotD.
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May 9, 2022 21:44
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Will you explain how the game Blackthorn fits into this insane cosmology?
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May 9, 2022 21:53
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Afaik it doesn't.
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May 9, 2022 22:48
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Siegkrow posted:I'm reminded of Dragon Ball Xenoverse, where the time patrol's job is to stop a different group of time travelers from mucking up history, and in fact the few times that history is changed for the better the powers that be try their best to keep the change. I mean in Dragon Ball you can create an extra supreme creator/destroyer diety with time travel, KIND of makes it a bit important.
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May 10, 2022 00:26
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Around the time of Warcraft 2, Dragons were about what dragons typically are in fantasy. Strong, dangerous monstrous flying lizards that breathe fire, with powerful ones being intelligent; much as Metzen might regret making them sentient, they were never completely feral. The Aspects weren't a thing, and in fact Deathwing himself was going to be portrayed in the cancelled "Warcraft Adventures" game as Alexstrasza's rebellious son. The Dragonflights and Aspects business came later, but before Warcraft 3. Black Dragons are referred to at one point at "foul spawn of Deathwing", and there are multiple references to several of the Aspects in The Frozen Throne.
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May 10, 2022 01:48
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Cythereal posted:(TW: sexual violence) that one side builds rape factories where sex slaves are continually forced to produce children who are mind-wiped, magically enslaved, and rapidly artificially aged to be hurled into battle, Warcraft everybody! This was what I was alluding to. Rather than sweep this under the rug, there is an actual dungeon(s?) in the World of Warcraft that nod to this particular event. Phrosphor fucked around with this message at 01:09 on May 11, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 01:01
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Phrosphor posted:Warcraft everybody! This was what I was alluding to. Rather than sweep this under the rug, there is an actual dungeon(s?) in the World of Warcraft that nod to this particular event. Hoo boy will we get to that in WC2. Fun fact: the lore threads in the WoW subforum on SA have for years strongly discouraged talking about dragons because of the alarming frequency with which sexual violence comes up. And then there's this truly baffling incident.  One lore subject on the docket is Warcraft's relationship with interracial relationships, which I may combine with the LGBT discussion, and this particular character is honestly one of my top five or so strangest little slices of Warcraft. If you know who this character is, please don't spoil it.
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May 11, 2022 01:28
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aint nothing wrong with two consenting adult sapients doing what they want. 
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May 11, 2022 02:47
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I googled the name on the image and would like to reiterate a previous point I made:FoolyCharged posted:Impressive. A single update in and I'm already going ".... the gently caress?"
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May 11, 2022 04:25
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Cythereal posted:And then there's this truly baffling incident. Isn’t she from the Warcraft manga that got canonized with a cameo (or a fairly major quest line, I forget if it involved a raid dungeon, but I think it did since it had to do with one of the major dragons in lore) in one of the WoW expansions? I seem to vaguely remember her entire deal, but I won’t get into it so people can be appropriately weirded out when we do get to her. GhostStalker fucked around with this message at 05:57 on May 11, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 05:54
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Well, heading this off is one way to get me to post the next update early. Orc 2: Into Lands Uncharted  If you're like me (God help you), you're probably confused about where this mission is taking place. 'The Borderlands' have never been named again in Warcraft.  If I had to guess, though, this mission takes place in the area better known as Deadwind Pass, a mountain pass between the Swamp of Sorrows and Stormwind controlled territory. Also a haunted, almost lifeless wasteland courtesy of Azeroth's first necromancer causing so much death and destruction in the region that in the wake of her rampage ley lines across the continent were warped and rerouted into the area about a thousand years before this game.  Estimated position relative to Orc 1.  We have a new unit to go along with the new mission! Silly me was actually expecting a spearman unit to be tankier than the grunts - call it a pet peeve of mine how rarely spear/shield in heavy armor gets depicted in fantasy, I think hoplites are cool. What spearmen actually turn out to be is a fast, lightly armored ranged unit.  This time I properly scout around the starting position for a gold mine. There may not be any fog of war in this game, but vision ranges are tiny. Doubly unfortunate considering how clunky the UI is and how slow units are.  THE PALE DOGS APPROACH! In the first mission, the enemy AI was completely passive. Not so here, and I assume for the rest of the game. Humans will regularly dribble in one or two units at a time to the base - never enough force to actually threaten me, but enough to cause some damage if I send all my troops out. Being used to drag-selecting and hotkeyed control groups, this mission irritated me. I maintain that the UI is a bigger danger than the AI.  And another. I'm chalking this up to learning the game still, along with learning how many workers I need distributed in what proportions.  An interesting quirk of the AI, if an enemy unit catches sight of a worker and they're not currently being hurt by your units, they'll drop their current target to beeline for your worker. Who will in turn drop what they're doing and run away - and no, they don't automatically go back to working, you have to manually round them up.  While scouting the map, I learn that the humans have a new unit, too. Archers appear to be completely identical to spearmen, and I find their presence in this game interesting: I do believe this is the last time in the RTS series we see humans doing ranged combat without magic. That job is covered by elves in WC2, and dwarves in WC3. Humans in WoW couldn't be hunters (the only non-magical ranged combat class in the game) until the third expansion.  To go with our new unit is a new building. The lumber mill is not in fact a drop point for lumber. Instead, the mill unlocks spearmen for building at the barracks and holds attack strength upgrades for them. Still no upgrades for grunts, which I think is an interesting choice in terms of design.  I do approve of the frequency of small attacks, though, as a game design choice. This mission will teach you to keep a defensive force at home (if there are defensive structures in this game I haven't seen them yet), forcing you to divide your forces between offense and defense. A good RTS lesson, if somewhat hamstrung by the primitive UI.  Oh hey another gold mine, I'm sure the starting mine will collapse sooner or later.  I eventually decide to leave the grunts at home for defense and go marauding with a squad of spearmen. More than anything it's their speed that recommends them to me. Grunts and footmen are slow. I'm assuming that there's a barracks somewhere out here sending these attacks.  Enough attacks have dinged my barracks enough to set it on fire! Fortunately, per series tradition, workers can repair buildings for a pittance of resources.  The rest of the mission is just roaming about killing humans with my spear squad while my grunts defend the base.  As it turns out, there is no barracks and I'm wondering if there was just a pre-set population of human units slowly trickling into the base or whether the attacks came from off-map for the specific purpose. We're still firmly in training wheels mode either way, it seems: unless you just don't build more units, ever, none of the attacks will do enough damage to cause you any problems and you can easily replace all the losses you suffer.  A simple enough affair, all told. Still, this mission has given me some concern that managing this UI as difficulty presumably escalates in the future will be something of an ask. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 14:46 on May 15, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 12:07
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Here Corrupts the Noble Savage We know what the orcs are now. So how did they get to Azeroth? The answer begins on the planet Draenor.  Draenor at the height of the orcs' power about 200 years prior to Warcraft 1, delineated by each clan's holdings. We know Draenor has at least one other continent, but this is the only portion of Draenor players have ever seen. The orcs, perhaps appropriately for devolved elementals born of earth and fire, have never been seafarers. The orcs emerged in the shadow of two successive empires that ruled over this land: the theocratic Apexis Empire of the arrakoa which collapsed in civil war, then the sorcerer-kings of the Gorian Empire who the previously enslaved orcs overthrew in a cataclysmic war involving magical WMDs of all stripes. Rather than form an empire themselves in the wake of the ogre war, the orcs scattered and spread out into a clan based structure with each clan lead by a chieftain, and settled on an Iron Age level of technology - orcs may be decentralized, but they're not stupid. The orc clans bickered and vied for dominance, but only two of them concern us during this update, the Blackrock and Shadowmoon clans. (the above is from Warlords of Draenor and Chronicles) There's not much else to talk about : if you're familiar with the term 'noble savage' in all its patronizingly racist glory, you know what we're dealing with. If there's a silver lining to the depiction of the orcs, it's that they're not based heavily enough on any real world culture to come across to most people as racist beyond that point. We're a long way from Tolkien's work, or Warhammer's hooligans. Instead, the orcs of Warcraft are a bland admixture of influences from the classics: the Mongol Empire, the Vikings, and the Germanic tribes of the Roman era, with a dash of influence here and there from Celtic and Native American tribes, all refined into a bland and inoffensive barbarian horde who scream a lot about honor. Warcraft 3 will eventually add a dash of feudal Japan because someone had a fetish for blind samurai with back banners and nodachis. One notable feature to be aware of: 'shamanism' was the religion of the orcs at this time. In Warcraft, 'shamanism' has a distinct meaning: the worship of elemental spirits. As Warcraft includes Spirit as an elemental plane, borrowed from Eastern spirituality, this also includes worship of one's ancestors. How this jives with Warcraft's very well established afterlife and mechanisms for how death works has never been clarified. (Warcraft 3) And everything was basically fine until blue space goats turned up.  In 2005, the Chinese government told Blizzard that if they went ahead with their plan to add a race of anthropomorphic panda bears to the game as the Alliance's first new playable race in WoW's first expansion, the government would no longer let the game be sold or played in China. The Chinese government would walk back this decision five years later, but by then one of the series' more dramatic retcons was an entrenched part of the setting. To keep it brief, the draenei are from yet another planet, Argus, and their species is more properly known as the eredar. The eredar were a race of immense magical ability who prized knowledge, wisdom, and enlightenment above all else - everything we've seen of the original eredar civilization suggests a strong influence from Classical Greece culturally and aesthetically. This magical talent, and fearless pursuit of knowledge, drew an interstellar, interdimensional army of demons to Argus known as the Burning Legion. Most of the eredar were subverted or died, but a small number fled their doomed world in interdimensional starships with the aid of extraplanar beings of the Light (for now, think of the Light as a generic holy power) called the Naaru. These renegades called themselves the 'draenei' or 'exiled ones' and fled across the stars, perpetually hunted by the Legion. Eventually, the draenei made it to the planet they would name Draenor, about 200 years prior to the events of Warcraft. Yes, none of the native civilizations ever apparently named the planet, go with it. The draenei settled on Draenor in lands not currently claimed by the orcs, ogres, or arrakoa, and for a time existed in an uneasy peace with the orcs, broken by occasional skirmishes. The draenei, however, neglected to mention to the locals that they were being hunted by the Burning Legion. And after a century without any sign of demons, the draenei let down their guard and thought they'd eluded the Legion. (The Burning Crusade)  For as important as they are to Warcraft's backstory, and as popular as they are with Alliance players - one of the most popular in WoW behind the humans and elves - the draenei and eredar have gone on to play surprisingly small roles in the games themselves, even in expansions set on Draenor itself, pre-and-post-whoopsie. Everything started to go wrong on Draenor when the chief of the Shadowmoon Clan started to hear his dead wife talking to him. This was nothing unusual, as the Shadowmoon were a clan of mystics who delved deep into the spiritual side of shamanism, even developing benign forms of necromancy. What was unusual was that she was telling him to kill people.  Keep Ner'zhul in mind. In the hotly contested race for the title of 'Person Who hosed Things Up The Most For Everyone In Warcraft Who Isn't Literally A Demon Or Some Such,' Ner'zhul is a very strong contender. As you may have guessed, the being posing as Ner'zhul's wife was in fact a demon. An eredar known as Kil'Jaeden the Deceiver.  Not quite Space Satan, but he's the most commonly seen stand-in for his boss. Kil'Jaeden used Ner'zhul as a lever to begin to unite the orcs and turn them against the draenei. And when the draenei showed every sign of winning the war, Kil'Jaeden offered Ner'zhul more and more magical power even as it crossed the line into unholy magic. But, hey, surely trusting your dead wife as she's teaching you magic to rip peoples' souls out and starting a race war between two civilizations is a thing good guys do, right? Ner'zhul, at this point, had started to figure out that maybe all of this had been a bad idea.  Gul'dan, going neck and neck with Ner'zhul for that most dubious of titles in Warcraft. But Ner'zhul's apprentice, Gul'dan, met Kil'Jaeden and said hell yes I want to be part of a demonic army conquering the stars. Gul'dan deposed Ner'zhul, formed an organization of like-minded warlocks he called the Shadow Council, and picked the warchief of the Blackrock clan to lead the Horde. For good measure, Gul'dan then introduced the orcs to another demon named Mannoroth, who offered the orcs the chance to drink his blood and gain immense power. Everyone who didn't proceed to buttchug demon blood was killed and the modern Orcish Horde was born. They promptly tried to completely genocide every uncorrupted sentient being left on Draenor while Kil'Jaeden ordered Gul'dan to begin construction of a magical gateway that would become known as the Dark Portal. Taking Draenor, you see, wasn't the Burning Legion's real objective. It was nice, and the orcs would be welcome footsoldiers, but even finishing off the draenei was a secondary objective. Their real goal was on the planet Azeroth, a planet the Burning Legion had already been to once before. (minus the draenei, this is more Warcraft 3) One last person to meet in this post, though. Blackhand, Warchief of the Horde.  Oh, one detail I forgot: green skin means an orc who has drunk Mannoroth's blood or is directly descended from orcs who did so - the natural orc skin tones are various shades of brown, grey, and black. Color coded for your convenience! - this is from The Burning Crusade Blackhand was Chieftain of the Blackrock Clan when all this started - the largest of all the orc clans - and one of the first to drink Mannoroth's blood. Blackhand was known as a cruel, vain, egotistical tyrant, but also as an able strategist and leader who commanded the respect of his soldiers. Gul'dan found Blackhand a compliant puppet to lead the Horde, and as of the start of Warcraft 1, Blackhand is the warchief of the Horde. For the orc campaign, he's the player character's boss. For the human campaign, he's your arch-enemy (even if Gul'dan is the bigger threat behind the scenes). Spoiler alert: Orgrim Doomhammer overthrows Blackhand as Warchief and takes control of the Horde, and that's almost the end of Blackhand's story as established in Warcraft 2. More recent lore (from Chronicles and Warlords of Draenor) has begun to shade in Blackhand's character beyond being a cruel but vain warlord no one's unhappy to see go. In his more recent depictions, Blackhand is unusually comfortable with numbers and paperwork for an orc, with a great talent for organization and logistics. These qualities are what lead to his elevation as Warchief, more than his strategic or martial skill: compared to other warlords we'll get to know like Grom Hellscream, Kilrogg Deadeye, and Cho'Gall, what made Blackhand and his clan special were that they could put more, better trained, better equipped men in the field than any other, and operate more effectively as a unified army on bigger scales than any other clan in Draenor. In an alternate timeline where time travelers gave the orc clans advanced technology from the future, Blackhand was quick to realize and embrace the potential of guns, tanks, artillery, and trains. Just one last question to ponder, then. Who was responsible for the First War? Blackhand lead the Horde through the Dark Portal on its campaign of conquest, but he was manipulated by the warlock Gul'dan. (Warcraft 1) Gul'dan, though, was ultimately just a servant of Kil'Jaeden the Deceiver. (Warcraft 3) Except that's not the answer, either. Kil'Jaeden, and indeed all of the Burning Legion, were themselves being manipulated by another being named Mal'Ganis, leader of what the Burning Legion thought were a race of demons known as Dreadlords but were in fact spies from the afterlife who engineered the rise of the Burning Legion to begin with. (here on out is Shadowlands) And Mal'Ganis and the dreadlords served the Eternal One known as Sire Denathrius, lord and master of the afterlife of Revendreth where the souls of the greatest sinners were sent to be scourged in a final chance at redemption lest they be completely destroyed or consigned to the inescapable prison for irredeemable souls known as the Maw. And Sire Denathrius was just a servant to Zovaal the Jailer, the fallen judge of the dead and the Maw's greatest prisoner for his rebellion against the First Ones. And Zovaal's goal was to seize control of the fundamental machinery of every plane of existence so he could turn all of existence into one realm of endless torment and domination so that it could all stand united against a greater threat to come. Confused? I made a chart.  Oh, and for future reference, the Horde of this period is known as the Old Horde. Here, for easy reference with the other Hordes from throughout Warcraft. The Horde The Old Horde The Dark Horde The Mongrel Horde The True Horde The Fel Horde The Iron Horde The Fel Iron Horde One of these never made it past the concept art stage and wasn't actually in a game. See if you can guess which! Cythereal fucked around with this message at 17:58 on May 19, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 12:09
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The Borderlands are obviously on the border of the land duh 
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May 11, 2022 12:12
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I already know the lore and I'm still going 
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May 11, 2022 12:23
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Rarity posted:I already know the lore and I'm still going The forum should be upgraded to allow smilies as thread titles, just so this LP can simply be called
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May 11, 2022 12:25
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One of the things I relatively quickly learned in Warcraft 1 was that while most games reward having a balanced force of melee, cavalry and ranged troops, for a good long while into the game, the superior option is to simply go with ranged troops(spearmen or bowmen) to the exclusion of everything else, since they can do enough damage at range to kill most enemy melee troops before they get close enough to return fire. I remember that revelation trivializing large parts of the game. Also wait, if all the surviving Draenei got genocided on Draenor, how did some of them end up on Azeroth later?  Man, I'm going to get an F in "Warcraft Lore," I'm so bad at following all this clear and concise information.
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May 11, 2022 13:03
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