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PurpleXVI posted:Also wait, if all the surviving Draenei got genocided on Draenor, how did some of them end up on Azeroth later? Key word: "tried." What Blizzard ultimately went with is that the elements of the Horde that stayed behind on Draenor while Blackhand took the Blackrock Clan through the Dark Portal were actively engaged in attempting to exterminate the rest of Draenor's resident races - the draenei, the ogres, the arrakoa, the gronn, and so on and so forth. They didn't do a very good job of it, though, and the Burning Legion didn't give them much help because they regarded Azeroth as the primary theater of this war. UPDATE NEAR BOTTOM OF PREVIOUS PAGE
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May 11, 2022 13:07
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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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Christ, that is a lot of layers of successive "but the real bad guy is" that I never knew existed. I like a good cosmic fantasy so I can see how some of those ideas can be written into a cool story but I can just smell how it exists just to justify why there's another expansion's worth of war to fight after you beat the previous final boss.
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May 11, 2022 13:18
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Tenebrais posted:Christ, that is a lot of layers of successive "but the real bad guy is" that I never knew existed. If it helps, everything past Kil'Jaeden was the invention of one single WoW expansion. Up until Shadowlands, the Dreadlords were indeed explicitly just another race of demons, playing to the 'evil darkness and shadow' part of the demon spectrum rather than hellfire and brimstone.
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May 11, 2022 13:22
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But I find it really easy to follow?? The one responsible for the war is the Blizzard writers who keep adding a new culprit on every expansion. Like, obviously there can't be anyone behind them!
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May 11, 2022 13:24
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Blizzard actually making old GW look competent at writing worlds.
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May 11, 2022 13:31
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The crazy guy who wrote all the lore for Morrowind in like a week makes more sense than all the Warcraft lore.
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May 11, 2022 13:53
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Cythereal posted:Key word: "tried." Tried is difficult when the outside is getting direct help from the "Light" which canonically in warcraft terms can grant the ability to just mass loving rez people, repeatedly by injecting hot liquid energy into their veins or something. Actually there are so many dang ways to escape death in Warcraft verse I am never surprised when someone comes back around If nothing else the time dragons from either camp of time dragons can just yeet someone into the timeline as needed.
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May 11, 2022 13:58
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AtomikKrab posted:Tried is difficult when the outside is getting direct help from the "Light" which canonically in warcraft terms can grant the ability to just mass loving rez people, repeatedly by injecting hot liquid energy into their veins or something. Actually there are so many dang ways to escape death in Warcraft verse I am never surprised when someone comes back around If nothing else the time dragons from either camp of time dragons can just yeet someone into the timeline as needed. One clarification: the time dragons can't interfere with anything going on on other planets. They can only impact events on Azeroth itself.
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May 11, 2022 14:29
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Cythereal posted:If it helps, everything past Kil'Jaeden was the invention of one single WoW expansion. Weren’t the Dreadlords retconned in the same “lore update” preceding the Draenei becoming a playable race? I’ll let you get to that retcon yourself when you feel like dropping it in, but I seem to remember this was one of the first times Metzen had to go “yeah, my bad” when some Warcraft community lore dudes called him out on a retcon caused plot hole. And  you weren’t kidding about the amount of layers this goes down. I never read any of the lore for the most recent expansions (so nothing past maybe the beginning of Battle for Azeroth? I know Shadowlands, and now Dragonflight exist, but nothing really concerning the lore surrounding them) as I had pretty much given up on following the lore at that point, so these layers upon layers added in Shadowlands is new to me. It seems that whenever Blizzard wants to make anything seem more “cosmic” in Warcraft to add yet another overarching big bad with which to further raise the stakes, they go about it in the most ham handed way possible, and of course crib from other popular fiction with a slight coat of paint and a name change to get away with it (see, most of the Old Ones).
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May 11, 2022 14:38
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GhostStalker posted:Weren’t the Dreadlords retconned in the same “lore update” preceding the Draenei becoming a playable race? I’ll let you get to that retcon yourself when you feel like dropping it in, but I seem to remember this was one of the first times Metzen had to go “yeah, my bad” when some Warcraft community lore dudes called him out on a retcon caused plot hole. That moment involved a retcon involving the Dreadlords, and is from The Burning Crusade, WoW's first expansion. Making them beings from the afterlife sent to infiltrate and sabotage the other powers of the cosmos to engineer events for the benefit of the Jailer is from Shadowlands. The next lore update is... probably going to be less inducing, and probably much shorter in general, because much less has been written about human history in Warcraft. No joke, there's about a thousand years of history with humans that's almost completely blank, which is one reason I felt relatively comfortable introducing the character of Isidora and giving her background some details never present in the actual games or books.
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May 11, 2022 14:47
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3QJ8Pgjj3c This here is basically Gul'dan's backstory. These videos, usually 5 of them every expansion since MoP, are some of the best poo poo blizzard's ever put out.
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May 11, 2022 16:12
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Tichondrius is the leader of the Dreadlords, not Mal'Ganis. Unless Shadowlands did another weird retcon, which I would not put past Blizzard. I liked it better when Dreadlords were just smart and competent figures in the Burning Legion not the super ultra masterminds who answered to someone who answers to someone.
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May 11, 2022 17:00
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SoundwaveAU posted:Tichondrius is the leader of the Dreadlords, not Mal'Ganis. Shadowlands does posit that Mal'Ganis is the real leader of the Dreadlords, yes, or at least the one who directly answered to Denathrius. If you want to put more thought into this than Blizzard did, you could say something like Tichondrius was the head Dreadlord representative to the Burning Legion while Mal'Ganis talked to their real boss, or Mal'Ganis was promoted and Tichondrius kicked down the hierarchy at some point between WC3 and Shadowlands, but nothing like that was ever stated. Just that Mal'Ganis is the head Dreadlord in that expansion.
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May 11, 2022 17:05
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...did they really have to bring back Mal'ganis? He died in WC3 and it was a perfectly good death with some solid narrative weight.
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May 11, 2022 17:12
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Cythereal posted:Shadowlands does posit that Mal'Ganis is the real leader of the Dreadlords, yes, or at least the one who directly answered to Denathrius.
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May 11, 2022 17:14
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Tenebrais posted:...did they really have to bring back Mal'ganis? He died in WC3 and it was a perfectly good death with some solid narrative weight. They did this really early on in WoW's story, in the second expansion. And then they kept bringing him back. But this all ties into beings belonging to the six major cosmic forces (light, fel, death, shadow, order, life*) being immortal in the sense that they will always revive themselves, unless they get killed on their home plane. *It's a bit more complicated for major life aligned beings.
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May 11, 2022 17:17
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Tenebrais posted:...did they really have to bring back Mal'ganis? He died in WC3 and it was a perfectly good death with some solid narrative weight. Mal'Ganis has been brought back so many times over the course of WoW. Cythereal posted:Here Corrupts the Noble Savage Cyth, buddy, we live in a planet called Dirt. We don't get to complain about other races naming their worlds.
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May 11, 2022 17:19
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WoW's been running for 18 years, at this point they've strip mined every anicillary character of every scrap of the RTS game to fill up content
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May 11, 2022 17:24
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Rarity posted:WoW's been running for 18 years, at this point they've strip mined every anicillary character of every scrap of the RTS game to fill up content This is very true. And it doesn't stop with dead characters. Especially since a surprisingly larger number of those who "died" in WC3 didn't actually die. And even those that were unambiguously dead could still play important roles as flashback characters, or be impactful to the personal stories of others long after their death.
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May 11, 2022 17:30
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Torrannor posted:This is very true. And it doesn't stop with dead characters. Especially since a surprisingly larger number of those who "died" in WC3 didn't actually die. And even those that were unambiguously dead could still play important roles as flashback characters, or be impactful to the personal stories of others long after their death. I mean, Malganis was unambiguously dead after Arthas sliced his soul out with a cursed sword to circumvent his whole constantly reincarnating thing. Now that I think on it, I think he was the only enemy hero to acknowledge reviving at temples in all of wc3's plot.
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May 11, 2022 17:35
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Rarity posted:WoW's been running for 18 years, at this point they've strip mined every anicillary character of every scrap of the RTS game to fill up content "did you know that the peon in the first orc mission of Warcraft 1 has a very deep backstory?"
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May 11, 2022 17:38
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Okay, but... but... Sargeras? When I finally checked out on WOW's changes to the lore, roughly around when the Naaru were introduced, Sargeras was still the big bad behind so much. Or at least I hadn't heard otherwise. How is he not even in that list of successive "true villains behind this other true villain" at any stage...?
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May 11, 2022 17:39
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disposablewords posted:Okay, but... but... Sargeras? When I finally checked out on WOW's changes to the lore, roughly around when the Naaru were introduced, Sargeras was still the big bad behind so much. Or at least I hadn't heard otherwise. How is he not even in that list of successive "true villains behind this other true villain" at any stage...? Need to save him for the final expansion
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May 11, 2022 17:44
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Cythereal posted:
On the one hand, "lmao", on the other hand, this seems perfectly regular when looking at political parties splitting and merging. The giant chain of manipulations, however, is absolutely disgusting, complete inability to imagine, and I'm also guessing a complete inability to plan ahead. PurpleXVI posted:"did you know that the peon in the first orc mission of Warcraft 1 has a very deep backstory?" Oh no, when did I land in the Star Wars EU again? Somebody help me!
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May 11, 2022 17:45
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disposablewords posted:Okay, but... but... Sargeras? When I finally checked out on WOW's changes to the lore, roughly around when the Naaru were introduced, Sargeras was still the big bad behind so much. Or at least I hadn't heard otherwise. How is he not even in that list of successive "true villains behind this other true villain" at any stage...? The Burning Legion is a lore update on the outline. I'll get to it in due time. Other lore topics on the docket for the Warcraft 1 phase of the LP, if it gives people an idea of what to expect: Human history The Titans General Cosmology The Burning Legion The Void Ogres Medivh and company Magic 101 LGBT representation There's going to be lots more gameplay updates than that, so probably in five or six more updates I intend to open the floor for people to request lore posts. 
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May 11, 2022 17:47
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Cythereal posted:The Burning Legion is a lore update on the outline. Entirely fair. I'm just really confused how he's completely absent from this chain of Real True Villains when he was being dangled over everyone's heads since the manual of WC2. God, loving Warcraft lore...
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May 11, 2022 17:50
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Semi-serious question: are these dudes the Protoss? I ask because they have backwards legs and are wise and awesome Cythereal posted:Confused? I made a chart.  I remember on the old Masters of the Universe TV show we learned the Horde and Skeletor were both working for a nebulous head bad guy. I think Blizzard got the idea from there and never updated it
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May 11, 2022 17:50
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quote:(if there are defensive structures in this game I haven't seen them yet) There are not. Those came with Warcraft 2. Here...everything is units.
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May 11, 2022 17:53
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disposablewords posted:Entirely fair. I'm just really confused how he's completely absent from this chain of Real True Villains when he was being dangled over everyone's heads since the manual of WC2. God, loving Warcraft lore... He could have been on that chain as Kil'Jaeden's boss, but I felt putting the Legion on there twice with just their internal chain of command was redundant and I elected to keep KJ the Legion's representative. Nebakenezzer posted:Semi-serious question: are these dudes the Protoss? Blizzard loves to joke about this - and they have a very similar bronze-with-floating-crystals aesthetic - but thematically you'd be better served by jumping fandoms and calling them the Craftworld Eldar or the Post-Human Republic or some such. I'll make a more detailed lore post about them in the future, but probably not in Warcraft 1.
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May 11, 2022 17:54
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Cythereal posted:Blizzard loves to joke about this - and they have a very similar bronze-with-floating-crystals aesthetic - but thematically you'd be better served by jumping fandoms and calling them the Craftworld Eldar or the Post-Human Republic or some such. Yes, this. I guess you could draw some parallels between the dark templar and the Aiur protoss on one side, and the Draenei and the Eredar on the other side, but it wouldn't hold up to scrutiny. Craftworld Eldar is definitely a better comparison. I'm really looking forward to that lore post, but it's probably like more than half a year away.
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May 11, 2022 19:16
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Worth noting: There is actually a very minor difference between Orc Spearmen and Human Archers: Orc Spearmen do very slightly more damage, while Human Archers have 1 more unit of range. And yeah, no static defense structures here. Also, one last note: Not everyone drank Mannoroth's blood. One whole particular clan who will become important later weaseled their way out of drinking and survived (though it didn't do their popularity any favors), and Doomhammer himself was able to avoid drinking it and avoiding punishment by playing to Blackhand's ego. The reason this clan and Doomhammer knew to avoid it was because Ner'zhul was still alive after being deposed, held prisoner and used as a decorative figurehead with no power and making fewer and fewer public appearances. But he was able to sneak out a warning to Doomhammer and that one clan I mentioned. The Shadow Council never found out.
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May 11, 2022 19:19
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Nebakenezzer posted:I remember on the old Masters of the Universe TV show we learned the Horde and Skeletor were both working for a nebulous head bad guy. I think Blizzard got the idea from there and never updated it Seems more like parallel development to me, arising out of laziness. Building a bigger Bad Guy is an easy way to escalate the plot, and having the new villain be the old ones boss/manager/whatever is a similarly low effort way to integrate them into the plot.
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May 11, 2022 19:36
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MShadowy posted:Seems more like parallel development to me, arising out of laziness. Building a bigger Bad Guy is an easy way to escalate the plot, and having the new villain be the old ones boss/manager/whatever is a similarly low effort way to integrate them into the plot. Personally, if I had to guess? The Jailer and just about everything to do with the afterlife comes from the Shadowlands expansion, the first WoW expansion that Chris Metzen had absolutely zero involvement with. Chris Metzen's status as creative lead was succeeded by a man named Steve Danuser, and anyone who recognizes the joke in this thread's title has probably guessed that I have a very low opinion of Danuser as a writer. There's been a lot of changes, retcons, and recontextualizations to lore and characters in WoW following Danuser's ascent to the position, and I ascribe most of them to Danuser trying to put his own stamp on Warcraft now that Metzen is retired from Blizzard. Sargeras was definitely the overwhelming big villain of Warcraft under Chris Metzen's tenure, but Steve Danuser has different ideas. In particular Danuser has shown himself to be a fan of obscuring information from players and readers by presenting lore from the perspective of what are acknowledged to be unreliable narrators, and by making characters in-setting astonishingly incurious about their world and events that are happening. Danuser seems to be a storyteller partial to the "You'll never guess what happens next!" vein, at least he aspires to be so - he's been known to insist that players have no idea what's going to happen when in fact players overwhelmingly guessed exactly what would happen. And when players are wrong about things Danuser is hinting at, it tends to be because of poo poo coming out of left field that either were not hinted at or just flatly contradict how certain characters or lore notions had been established.
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May 11, 2022 19:46
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On all the humans being white Europeans, I was going to comment that I thought there was a dark skinned unit with a Jamaican accent but then I remembered that they were non-humans and the Chinese stand-in was a talking panda with a Japanese accent and this is definitely not getting better in retrospect. I mostly remember blazing through the campaign, marveling at the giant shoulder pads and being confused at all the backstory and plot of WC3 before playing tons of Footman Frenzy, so looking forward to getting even more confused!
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May 11, 2022 19:53
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Torrannor posted:This is very true. And it doesn't stop with dead characters. Especially since a surprisingly larger number of those who "died" in WC3 didn't actually die. And even those that were unambiguously dead could still play important roles as flashback characters, or be impactful to the personal stories of others long after their death. isn't it fair to say that WC3 started the process of "no, this dead character isn't dead after all" seeing as Medivh somehow never died, despite his death being one of the few canon events from the Human campaign Aces High fucked around with this message at 23:35 on May 11, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 19:58
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There's really no excuse, I get why small time developer Blizz wouldn't bother but they grew immensely.
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May 11, 2022 20:00
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Aces High posted:isn't it fair to say that WC3 started the process of "no, this dead character isn't dead after all" seeing as Medivh somehow never died, despite his death being one of the few canon events from the Human campaign I mean, technically, the retconning started with WC2. Seeing as overall, the Horde campaign was the canon ending to WC1, but certain parts of the human campaign, like the killing of Medivh were also canon. And yes, they did retcon that thing you mentioned for WC3, and then WoW further retconned it to make it make more sense, in that he really was killed, but his mother spent the very last bit of her power as the former Guardian of Tirisfal to revive him between WC1 and WC3.
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May 11, 2022 20:07
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I hate everything post-WC1 about Medivh.
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May 11, 2022 20:09
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all i remember about medivh is his book, because people kept talking about it i was a tiny babby when i played WC2 and 3, and i was into City of Heroes/Villains instead of WoW so this thread has been uh, enlightening
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May 11, 2022 20:24
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Minor Lore Bit: Warcraft and Physical Disabilities Someone asked me on discord about the OC I wrote for the human campaign, and specifically that I wrote her as physically disabled, and was curious about how Warcraft has represented physically disabled characters, so I thought this thread might find it of interest. Warcraft does recognize people with physical disabilities. Healing magic in Warcraft is as vaguely defined as it is in most fantasy settings, but it doesn't seem to be capable of restoring complex injuries. People in Warcraft do suffer crippling injuries, and people do become physically disabled from old age. With one exception, though, such things have never been depicted beyond people prone in beds or sitting in chairs rather than standing. At least by the time of WoW's third expansion, Azeroth has wheelchairs.  This is the only known appearance of one that I could find - Drek'Thar, an orc character I probably won't have reason to discuss again until Warcraft 3. As for the human OC, I came up with the idea that while she'd died in the canon timeline, it was getting hit by a carriage or some other seeming accident that prevented her from meeting that fate in this alternative timeline. Beyond that, I liked the idea of her being a strategist and planner more than a front-line fighter, and I thought it felt plausible that injuries sustained by the alteration in the timeline had lasting effects. From there, the notion that she's mobile enough to still operate in the field from a center of command but not fight on the front line herself felt like a natural evolution of the character. In an earlier draft of introducing the alternate timeline of the human campaign, keeping the fact that the end of the human campaign has the PC succeed King Llane as ruler of Stormwind as a surprise until it happens late in the camapign, I outright introduced her as Lady Isidora the Lame, on the basis that her disability would plausibly be her best known attribute to Stormwind society at the start of the game's campaign.
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May 11, 2022 22:07
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