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FrenchBen posted:The "funny" thing is that R.A Salvatore tried doing it about a decade ago with the Drizzt books - Orc king becomes chosen of Gruumsh, much warring ensues, which ends with Many-Arrows (Orc Kingdom) and the other realms aroound the land signing a peace treaty. And for many years it went quite well actually! Trade was flowing, orcs and humans married, it was seen as a sign of things to come... Then a Spellplague/timeskip combo later and Bruenor decides he shouldn't have signed this treaty, that he should have chosen the good old fashioned way of bashing everyone's brains in. Nevermind they were mostly losing. Oh, and his human daughter who used to be cool and kind is now full on the "kill the savages' children" train, much to Drizzt's displeasure. Then of course there's the Drow portrayal in general. Few people would call Warcraft progressive, but in the context of other fantasy settings, it might have been the least bad around there was about this - Quite a low bar, I know. Though it should be noted the reason the Orcs became a problem again was because of the Drow. Who poison the moderate King, and frame his likewise moderate son and heir for the crime, before helping a popular Warhawk assume power in the vacuum. When the war ended and the son took power, he met with the Dwarves and elves Many Arrows warred against hoping to salvage relations and was shocked that they held massive grudges and refused to allow Many Arrows to settle on the lands they used to have. It being mentioned the new King just realizing relations would not go back to how they were. The new King leaving saying he hopes one day he can restore trust as Drizzt expresses sympathy for him.
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May 15, 2022 23:15
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Welp. Three attempts at recording this update, three straight recording mishaps. Sorry to ruin the LP's purity, but for the final go at this point I turned on a cheat code just to speed things up (giving myself all unit upgrades). I don't really want to make attempt #4 at this map even if it is a pretty simple one. Also, have a teaser for the next lore update. I thought this bit of artwork was so neat it was worth sharing even if the subject won't be the main focus of the post. 
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May 16, 2022 02:42
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Cythereal posted:Welp. Three attempts at recording this update, three straight recording mishaps. I'm personally perfectly okay with this. Rather that than you burning out by update four. 
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May 16, 2022 03:21
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Full cheats on the early games is ok. The UI is so primitive that it's hard and frustrating to play
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May 16, 2022 03:57
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Slaan posted:Full cheats on the early games is ok. The UI is so primitive that it's hard and frustrating to play More importantly, Dosbox is really finicky and difficult to record. 
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May 16, 2022 11:49
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Yeah, this game isn't very easy to play if you have played *any* strategy game after it came out so I'm fully on board with you just doing what is easiest to deal with it's antique ways.
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May 16, 2022 12:04
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A 'cheating' or 'unfaithful' LP that's easier on the LPer is 1000x better than a dead LP that did it 'properly'.
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May 16, 2022 12:07
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poo poo, the point of this is for you to amuse yourself. No sense in turning it into something you don't want to do.
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May 16, 2022 12:58
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Okay, consensus is in.  I do promise I won't use cheats unless I repeatedly fail missions or recording fucks up, though. If you want LPs by someone good at RTS games, you want Jobbo Fett's or Melth's LPs. I am, and always have been, more of a 4X and RPG person. Also, lore post status update: I have three more lore updates scheduled, and after that I'll start addressing suggestions from the thread as there's going to be a bit of a gap where there's nothing immediate to discuss in reaction to the missions as far as I know. Already recorded on the docket are 'the orcs with guns and tanks' and the pandaren. If there's any other lore subjects you'd like to know more about, please ask! I think I'd rather leave the love and warcraft lore update for later. Probably can't put it off until WC3, but I'd like to at least wait until we meet Garona given that I'm planning to address both LGBT representation and half-breeds. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 13:38 on May 16, 2022 |
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May 16, 2022 13:11
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Cythereal posted:If there's any other lore subjects you'd like to know more about, please ask! yeah um I wanna know more about the sentient cosmic robots that made the big metal things that eventually got corrupted into humanity, please and thank you WTF is up with the cosmic robots
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May 16, 2022 18:45
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:yeah um I wanna know more about the sentient cosmic robots that made the big metal things that eventually got corrupted into humanity, please and thank you Good news, that's already on the schedule to go with Human 3.
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May 16, 2022 18:48
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I hope you’ll do a lore post on each race as we meet them. We got Orcs and Humans, still need- Elves, Trolls, Ogres, Dwarves, Dragons, Goblins, Gnomes, and whatever others I’m forgetting. Demons and Undead too please.
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May 16, 2022 19:19
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achtungnight posted:I hope you’ll do a lore post on each race as we meet them. We got Orcs and Humans, still need- Elves, Trolls, Ogres, Dwarves, Dragons, Goblins, Gnomes, and whatever others I’m forgetting. Demons and Undead too please. I will cover these as we meet them (ogres are in three updates and are the last of the currently scheduled ones), except for the races that never really appear in the RTS games like the Pandaren and other Dragonflights (exception: the Blacks and Reds).
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May 16, 2022 19:22
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:yeah um I wanna know more about the sentient cosmic robots that made the big metal things that eventually got corrupted into humanity, please and thank you Really not robots really, Cythereal might explain more, but not really robots themselves
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May 16, 2022 19:28
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The race I'm most interested in won't show up until Warcraft 3, I wanna learn more about the spiderfolk that should've been their own faction on account of being loving rad.
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May 16, 2022 19:35
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PurpleXVI posted:The race I'm most interested in won't show up until Warcraft 3, I wanna learn more about the spiderfolk that should've been their own faction on account of being loving rad. Eh, they're so minor in the scheme of things that I'll go ahead and put them on the list. I won't talk about the Scourge in general until WC3, but sure I can talk about the Nerubians.
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May 16, 2022 19:36
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Just thought of another. Can we get an update on flying in Warcraft when we get there? Ships also. Just an overview of the technology in the game and how it’s included. Oh and what is the deal with that giant turtle? I remember the Orc submarines but not a sentient island!
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May 16, 2022 19:38
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Oh, yeah, and I guess I should've asked this earlier, but like, what's the spoiler policy for this thread? I don't think I've seen it mentioned before.
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May 16, 2022 19:42
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achtungnight posted:Just thought of another. Can we get an update on flying in Warcraft when we get there? Ships also. Just an overview of the technology in the game and how it’s included. Going on the list for WC2, sure! achtungnight posted:Oh and what is the deal with that giant turtle? I remember the Orc submarines but not a sentient island! I'll mention it when I talk about the Pandaren, but... your post includes almost everything about the turtle himself. Azeroth just has a giant sentient turtle that wanders the oceans. The pandaren have a legend about it, and some pandaren live on his back. That's all there is. Azeroth's just weird like that. PurpleXVI posted:Oh, yeah, and I guess I should've asked this earlier, but like, what's the spoiler policy for this thread? I'm fine with spoilers, I assume everyone here has played or at least knows of the series. Just, I ask that you please not get too deep into the weeds about it until I get to the relevant subject.
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May 16, 2022 19:42
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Maybe something about each hero unit when we meet them. Are they typical Blizzard characters? Are they interesting? Will we see them past the initial appearance? I only really liked Deathwing & Grom Hellscream of all the heroes, but was not a fan of every way they were used later.
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May 16, 2022 19:46
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It literally only exists as the panderan starting zone in WoW as an excuse to let both factions get them. It is never referenced again. Also, I don't think the pandas are actually aware their island is a turtle, but it's been a long time since I played the zone.
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May 16, 2022 20:42
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FoolyCharged posted:It literally only exists as the panderan starting zone in WoW as an excuse to let both factions get them. It is never referenced again. Incorrect on both counts! You chat with the turtle near the end of the pandaren intro, and the turtle came back in Legion as the monk class's base of operations. achtungnight posted:Maybe something about each hero unit when we meet them. Are they typical Blizzard characters? Are they interesting? Will we see them past the initial appearance? I only really liked Deathwing & Grom Hellscream of all the heroes, but was not a fan of every way they were used later. That's planned, yeah. Edit: Seems there's a consensus behind doing the Pandaren as the first filler update, so in the interests of disclosure, my WoW main was a panda:  The pandaren are a very divisive topic among the WoW community, so fair warning that I'm likely to be more charitable than many. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 22:09 on May 16, 2022 |
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May 16, 2022 20:46
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Cythereal posted:Incorrect on both counts! You chat with the turtle near the end of the pandaren intro, and the turtle came back in Legion as the monk class's base of operations. I see you joined the Best Covenant, which actually has badass mail armor sets. Good on you. I think Pandaren are pretty well regarded at least here in the SA WoW community. Fake edit: I also agree with the Titans not being robots themselves, unless you stretch the definition of "robot" to absurd degrees. But we can discuss that when Cythereal makes their lore post
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May 16, 2022 22:19
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Cythereal posted:More importantly, Dosbox is really finicky and difficult to record. I thought dosbox had its own internal recorder, only downside being it outputs in raw .avi so it's effectively like using fraps
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May 16, 2022 22:46
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My main issue with recording DOSbox is that I need to turn the OBS recording option off and on again every time I fire up the game, but other than that as long as it's just set to record the window it seems to do so flawlessly.
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May 16, 2022 23:42
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Wait Thoradin was a human???? All the time in vanilla when ever I snuck into Arathi I assumed that wall and the bridge on the other side were built by Dwarves since the drat was clearly dwarven made and they had the same architecture, plus it's such a 'dwarfy' name. There is even a little dwarven base built into the wall. Crazy.
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May 17, 2022 01:00
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Cythereal posted:In my eyes, Metzen whatever his faults had passion for Warcraft and other games, and he was sincere about it. And it showed. He was a goofball, yes, and could be pretty horribly misogynistic (shout to the female character whose backstory prominently features being a sex slave who wears a sheer thong bikini with visible rear end crack and thigh-highs in-game), but Metzen had legitimate stage presence and charisma. I'm curious, which female character is this?
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May 17, 2022 03:12
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Nagna Zul posted:I'm curious, which female character is this? Alexstrasza the Life-Binder, Queen of Dragons.  Her sister, Ysera the Dreamer, had almost exactly the same outfit.  Alexstrasza is getting a new outfit in the upcoming WoW expansion that includes pants for the first time in the character's existence. Ysera is not, on account of being corrupted, then killed, then bound forever to the realm of death beyond the ability to reincarnate. In a book where Alexstrasza testifies at an international tribunal about her treatment at the Horde's hands, the book specifically mentions that she's wearing a modest dress rather than... that.
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May 17, 2022 03:24
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Cythereal posted:Alexstrasza the Life-Binder, Queen of Dragons. There is a video ~somewhere~ of a game designer talking about playing wow when she was younger and being so excited to meet Alextrasza in person when they were playing WoTLK. Like here is this extremally powerful matriarchal figure that is queen of the dragons! What a huge moment! Up until now your major female characters were Jaina (what is my character this week) and Sylvanus (hahahahahahahaah). (Am I missing any others? It feels awful that I can't think of any BIG female characters up to WoTLK apart from these too? The Evil Tauren lady I guess?) Then they described their total disappointment and shame when they found her and she was wearing.. that. At the time I am pretty sure she had one of the most detailed models in the game as well. Doesn't help that she is standing in the middle of a tundra at the top of a huge tower with no walls. She goes on to say it's why she got into game development, so that doesn't happen to the next generation of gamers looking for female appearing role models.
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May 17, 2022 04:37
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And here I thought the whole thing about dragon queens was that thy look like, y'know, dragons.
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May 17, 2022 07:03
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Cythereal posted:Alexstrasza is getting a new outfit in the upcoming WoW expansion that includes pants for the first time in the character's existence. *second 
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May 17, 2022 07:20
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SirSamVimes posted:*second The bigger horns and the fur collar make my brain stick at "Rita Repulsa" and it refuses to move from there.
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May 17, 2022 09:40
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I played Warcraft 2 back in the day, with cheats. Didn't think much of it, figured it's just a Humans vs Orcs fantasy game. Then Warcraft 3 came out, and suddenly, there's a story here. There was this manual, I think, and had demons and beings of light and suchlike, and I was all like, cool. Then WoW came, and I didn't even bother because I don't really do multiplayer (I'm not good at games, and so don't like it when people suggest I engage in onanism while I'm playing). But y'know, through cultural osmosis, you tend to hear things. Dragons. Chris Metzen and "Corruption". Sylvanas (mostly in the context of "what have they done to her!?"). Dranei (or however you spell their name). Panderen are a real race now rather than just a joke. Cataclysm. Classic. The backstory so far is so weird already, and I think someone needs to tell these guys to wrap it up already. Not everything needs an official explanation, and not everything needs to be defined by "canon". And not every new concept needs to be tied back to something that happened in something that was written fifteen years ago.
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May 17, 2022 11:22
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PurpleXVI posted:The bigger horns and the fur collar make my brain stick at "Rita Repulsa" and it refuses to move from there. After 10000 expansions, FINALLY I AM FREE TO HAVE PANTS
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May 17, 2022 11:31
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Should be a quest for all the tailors to make Alexstrasza a new set of clothes imo
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May 17, 2022 11:50
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Orc 3: No Man’s Land In the last update, Isidora reinforced Grand Hamlet and saved it from an orc assault. In this update, we see the canon fate of the town: complete destruction by the Horde.  Should you desire, you could reasonably assume that Human 2 and Orc 3 take place sequentially, with the humans repulsing the initial attack on Grand Hamlet before falling to the orc reinforcements. I, however, favor the idea that the fate of Grand Hamlet marks where the timelines diverge: the orc campaign follows from the canon event that the Horde reaches Grand Hamlet first and razes the town, while the human campaign happens if Stormwind can successfully reinforce Grand Hamlet before the main orc advance arrives, leading to a disruption in the orc offensive.  You know, I posited that the Borderlands as being modern-day Deadwind Pass, given that both sides advance from the Swamp of Sorrows to Grand Hamlet, but on second thought... yeah, no, I can't reconcile this map with WoW's map. Who the gently caress knows, let's roll.  The map, as far as I can tell, is exactly the same, with the difference being that here the orcs have established a town. I do continue to find the relative positions strange, given that according to the map the main axis of the orc advance is east to west, but in this map the orcs are encamped in the west and are marching east.  It takes a surprising amount of scouting before I find a gold mine.  The starting force of units is rather important in these maps, I've learned, what with how long it takes to start producing units of your own. Units are slow and resources take a long time to gather.  My scouting spearman finds a second gold mine and expires shortly thereafter. Even in death, though, he gives me useful intel: the dude in a dress next to the footman is a new human unit, the cleric, who seems to be a powerful ranged combat unit. More importantly, they can heal human units. This was not a pleasant discovery. Call me crazy, but I have a suspicion that the orcs do *not* have a healer unit in this game. We're still three games away from shamans.  I do have a new building on this map, mind. The temple is expensive, though, and I put a higher priority on getting a bunch of spearmen into the field.  If clerics can heal themselves, they show no evidence of it here. Much as it pains me to say it, as an inveterate healer player in MMO, I gank the healer first.  I'm starting to feel like a kill team of four spearmen isn't going to be enough to win this map...  While the barracks starts working on a steady stream of spearmen and the mill researches upgrades, I slowly push further south, catching sight of a peasant. As I suspected, there's an actual human town here, though I wonder if the AI actually needs peasants or if it just gets resources out of thin air.  Encroaching on the town stirs up the hornet's nest and provokes the biggest [counter]attack I've seen yet. My spearmen fall back while I order the defensive grunts forward.  This bodes well. I can now train necrolytes - Warcraft uses this name interchangably with 'necromancers' - and research the spell Raise Dead. Both necrolytes and the spell cost a ton of gold, though, which I'd rather spend on spearmen and their upgrades.  Reinforcements catch up and wipe out the human response force, who showed no sign of turning back. I wonder if these counterattacks are programmed to chase you to the ends of the earth? If so, this could be taken advantage of in the future.  It's a good thing I'm already attacking through the north past another gold mine.  It looks like I've cleared out the defense force.  A single necrolyte joins the army, as a conversation piece. Not only does he cost a lot of money, so does Raise Dead which has to be researched separately. Whatever necrolytes are capable of, I don't see them flex their muscles this map.  Spearmen are very effective against units, but as I start wailing on the barracks I learn that their damage against buildings leaves much to be desired.  But that's the end to human combat unit production.  Or so I thought. Gonna make a wild guess and assume that this church - which includes a crucifix on its steeple - is where clerics are trained.  The humans continue to send attacks even as I'm burning down Grand Hamlet. I make the erroneous assumption at this point that the mission will end once I destroy all the human structures.  This becomes an issue because I brought the defensive grunts out to the attack. The necrolyte is also here. Just like the grunts, he's very slow.  Unfortunately, the mission brief isn't kidding. I need to exterminate the human presence on this map in its entirety.  Oops. I send the spearmen back to deal with this. I shouldn't need any further forces.  It was around this time that I accidentally hit the windows key, kicking the game into this tiny screen mode that I couldn't figure a way to restore without playing the whole map again. So gently caress it, all that was left was killing the footmen attacking the town and finding a lone cleric hiding in the woods.  Not what I'd call a clean victory, but acceptable. Grand Hamlet is no more, and will eventually be rebuilt as Darkshire.
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May 17, 2022 11:52
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There is Nothing Funny About the Name 'Twisting Nether' Show of hands, who wants to see Warcraft attempt to do Planescape? That's what I thought. Unfortunately, here we are.  This image, published in Chronicles, is not entirely accurate but is nevertheless the best casual reference for Warcraft's cosmology. The material world lies in the center, surrounded by the elemental planes, and then the six great cosmic forces: light, shadow, life, death, order, and chaos. One important divergence made after Chronicles was published is that the Shadowlands, here depicted as adjacent to or overlapping reality, are instead a wholly separate plane of death. The Emerald Dream is effectively an alternate copy of reality, dominated by life and order. First up, the elemental planes are as they are in dungeons and dragons, though with the twist that up until very recently, the elementals and the Elemental Lords - ancient elementals of godlike power - were firmly under the sway of the powers of shadow. The PCs in WoW eventually beat some sense into them, and killed the two holdouts before installing more pliable successors.  The Elemental Lords - Ragnaros the Firelord, Neptulon the Tidehunter, Al'Akir the Windlord, and Therazane the Stonemother - fight the armies of the Titans during their invasion of Azeroth. Make of it what you will that the only female-coded Elemental Lord is the only one depicted here defeated. As for the other two elemental planes, Spirit and Decay, we know very little. The plane of spirit juices up life into uncontrollable levels, but is also harnessed by shamans and monks to fuel their healing powers. As for the plane of decay, we... see it on this chart, all necromantic powers thus far have been implied to be powered by the Shadowlands, though there's room to suspect that necromancy's association with disease, poison, and similar power in Warcraft might involve this plane. There have never been any confirmed spirit or decay elementals in the lore, though beings have appeared that might perhaps be such. One twist on the formula with Warcraft’s elemental planes, though, is that the planes themselves are artificial constructs build by the cosmic space robots around Azeroth, and as far as we know do not exist for any other planets. Normally the energies of spirit and decay keep the four classical elements balanced, but the growing world-soul within Azeroth consumed most of spirit’s energies and caused the other elements to run loose until the cosmic space robots shackled them. Whether or not this is true of all planets with a world soul at the core, we do not know.  A'dal, the closest thing to a leader the Light is known to have. Moving past this to the outer powers, we'll start with the Light. There's surprisingly little to say about the Light in a cosmic force: for a power that's the dominant religion of humanity, the draenei (reference my lore post about the Horde's origins), and has become something of the default religion of the entire setting, we actually know very little about what the Light means. What is claimed in-setting is that the Light is the original energy of the creation of the cosmos, the foundation of every soul and the guiding force of fate. If you're getting a sense that the Light has a lot in common with the Force from Star Wars... yeah, that's what a lot of it comes down to. The Light, when harnessed as holy magic, is mainly a magic of purification, healing, and protection, though that 'purification' can mean lasers and pillars of holy fire. And while the Light is often associated with benevolent healers, World of Warcraft has a long, long history of zealous fanatics wielding the Light to do their best Warhammer 40k impression. The Light doesn't seem to care what it's used for, and there have been canon examples of priests using the Light to torture captives. What the Light seems to be in absolute is a force of purity: one purpose, one path, one destiny. The Naaru are mysterious crystal beings that claim to be born of the Light, but tend strongly towards the inscrutable and using mortals for what they claim are good ends. They are also capable of turning into soul-eating Void entities of pure darkness and evil, which Blizzard insists is extremely rare and not at all normal, but I think that it's happened to as many Naaru in the games that players have seen as not.  The Emerald Dream has more recently been supplanted by 'the Gardens of Life' as the plane of primordial life, but Blizzard hasn't yet deigned to elaborate. The Emerald Dream was created by the cosmic space robots I've been mentioning regularly in these updates - I'll go into detail on them in the next lore update - as something of a combination backup copy of Azeroth and blueprint, a realm of idealized nature as though sentient races never arose. It is, yes, your typical dream realm full of spiritual entities, mischievous faeries, and so on and so forth, and is generally benevolent to those not of ill intent. Nature spirits of all stripes call this realm home, including the sentient magical animals of colossal power known as the Wild Gods. Accessing the Emerald Dream, as the name suggests, is done primarily through dreams. Learning how to dreamwalk successfully is the first and most important prerequisite for druids, who draw their power from this realm, but non-druids can physically enter the Dream through rare gateways protected by a flight of dragons specifically charged with protecting nature. The Emerald Dream, and beings tied to it, are also hilariously prone to corruption, as many WoW players can attest. I'll talk about the Emerald Dream and everything to do with it in more detail in Warcraft 3. After Danuser took over, though, a new plane was established as the cosmic home of Life, called the Gardens of Life, establishing that the Dream is specifically tied to Azeroth and Azeroth alone. We do not, as of yet, know anything about the Gardens of Life. The cosmic force of Order is embodied by the Titans, the cosmic space robots I've talked about so much and who will be the subject of the next lore post. In brief, they are the sentient souls of planets rich in life who wander the cosmos, ordering planets with life for long-term stability and leaving behind countless constructs to maintain their works. They are also almost all dead or corrupted. Interestingly, there is not some cosmic plane of order as far as Warcraft has ever established. The Titans are beings of the cosmos, in the regular deep space sense of the term. The force of Order is strongly associated with arcane magic in Warcraft, in that they take the power of the Twisting Nether (see the end of this post) and purify it for use in a relatively safe form.  The Void is a realm of darkness and insanity, drawing heavily on the works of H. P. Lovecraft and company. If there's a unifying concept beyond "Cthulu and friends!" and "tentacles and eyes in places they should not normally be" in Warcraft, it's the idea that the Void is a realm of limitless but incomplete possibilities, where reality is intensely mutable and everything is subjective and nothing is certain. Beyond the corrupting power of the Void itself, via Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, the ruling powers of the Void, known only as Void Lords, launch parasitic beings into material reality with the aim of latching on to planets and corrupting them into hosts for the Void. These are the Old Gods, some of WoW's most iconic villains, and after one really exciting one established the mold in vanilla WoW every subsequent Old God has been less and less impressive. Void magic is very rarely seen in the RTS games, where 'shadow magic' is more often death magic, but it's a common sight in WoW where a few class specs, and one entire race, are based on the Void's power. Blizzard under Danuser has been starting to assert that the Void is icky and weird and sinister, but not innately evil.  Five of the six major players of the Shadowlands - forget the bare chested dude with a big axe, he's an irrelevant chump. We know more about the Shadowlands, the realm of death, than any other cosmic plane in Warcraft for a reason you can see above: the current at the time of writing expansion is set there. In brief, the souls of the dead are brought to the Shadowlands by an order of psychopomps known as the Kyrians, where each soul is judged by the Arbiter - the giant construct in the background on the left - and assigned to the afterlife that best matches that soul's nature. While there are officially countless afterlives, only five of them really matter. I'll keep this brief - I can go into more detail later if folks want me to. Bastion looks like Greek Elysium but is so Buddhist it shits lotus blossoms, and is where the souls of those driven by duty and obedience to a higher power above all else are brought to become Kyrians. Kyrians are required to shed their memories and identities as part of their training to carry out their duties without prejudice or distraction from their mortal lives. One notable denizen: Uther Lightbringer. Ardenweald is a psychedelic realm of nature, where the souls of nature spirits are nurtured so that they can eventually be reborn, and the souls of mortals who loved and served nature in life are brought to turn into animals themselves and help with the cycle of death and rebirth. One notable denizen: Vol’jin. Maldraxxus is Valhalla, if Valhalla was run like a big time wrestling league. The souls of those who loved war and battle, be it for selfish or selfless reasons, are brought here to become the standing army of the Shadowlands and the realm's primary defense against invasion. One notable denizen: Kel’thuzad. Revendreth is a land of creepy castles and dark swamps straight out of Castlevania, ruled by aristocratic vampires and served by goblin-like (not goblins in the Warcraft sense) dredgers. The souls of the most dire sinners are brought to Revendreth to be scourged and punished as their last shot at redemption - the first and foremost problem tending to be getting such a soul to admit that they were wrong. One notable denizen: Kael’thas Sunstrider. Souls can be transferred between these realms at will, or re-sorted by the Arbiter, which usually happens when a soul fails out of training in Bastion or is cleansed in Revendreth. Except for the Maw. The Maw is where the souls of those deemed truly irredeemable are sent, to be imprisoned and tormented for all time. Greatest of these prisoners is Zovaal the Jailer, the original Arbiter before he rebelled against the First Ones - the beings who created this entire cosmology I'm discussing in this post - for unknown reasons and was condemned to the Maw. For reference, yes this is the guy who is officially behind pretty much every bad thing in Warcraft down to Thrall stubbing his toe that one time. One other notable denizen: Ner’zhul.  The series has never been able to decide if the Twisting Nether has any kind of physical reality or not. Rounding out the cosmos, we have the forces of Chaos. Which, yes, have their very own version of the Warp. I trust that everyone reading this is nerdy enough to know what that means. The Twisting Nether is, in theory, Warcraft's version of the astral plane: the gap between worlds and dimensions, full of roiling energy that's intensely dangerous to anyone going in full tilt. This is where the demons of the Burning Legion make their home, especially among shattered worlds cast into the Nether. This is also the ultimate source of arcane magic, though true arcane magic is purified through proper arcane rituals for use - the difference between purified and sanitized magic, and drinking the juice straight, is the fundamental difference between mages and warlocks in Warcraft. In practice, the series tends to largely forget this and just treat the Twisting Nether as space hell. More recently, the lore has begun to indicate that all the beings known as demons are foreign intruders to the Twisting Nether, and that there are in fact native beings to the Nether with hierarchies of their own, but to date there’s little information about these beings. There's more detail I can, and perhaps will, go into for all of these, but I think that will do for now. The Twisting Nether and the Light were established in Warcraft 2. The elemental planes, the Burning Legion, the Emerald Dream, and the Titans were established in Warcraft 3. The Void, the Old Gods, the Wild Gods, and the Shadowlands (though not in their modern form) were established in WoW vanilla. The Naaru were established in The Burning Crusade. The Void Lords were established in Chronicles. The Shadowlands in their modern form were established in Shadowlands. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 18:05 on May 19, 2022 |
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May 17, 2022 11:53
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Burning down Grand Hamlet was always one of the tougher missions for me as a kid because of those loving Clerics. As for Necrolytes they're just generally not worth your time, their one big trick, raising skeletons is... not very good, the skeletons are way too fragile to make much of a difference even if they're fresh and they decay super-quickly. As for the cosmology update... I feel like the big issue with multi-planar cosmologies is that it's very rare for a setting, whether videogame or pen-and-paper, to have enough going on to fill up one plane with interesting content, much less a dozen or more. Plus a lot of the "alternate planes" almost always just end up being devoted to a concept or an element and I wouldn't even know where to start writing an interesting adventure in Fire Land Made Of Burny Fire Things. I mean, hell, I love Planescape as a concept but even there the concept is doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting since something like... eight out of ten planes, including inner and outer both, are just irrelevant background fluff where there isn't really anything to do.
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May 17, 2022 12:09
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The Cosmos at least LOOKS badass, the practical bits are... not so great So the void lords whom at some point the wow players will beat up for purple loot basically idly yeet cthulhu's into reality in the hopes of getting their own titan for "reasons" Also I think the placement of the forces is important, like there is a reason LIGHT is next to DISORDER and LIFE, Light in Warcraft verse is a creative force, but left unchecked will destroy order in its burning "purity" Disorder is where it is because hey, they want to bring "purity" to the cosmos, by killing everything Death is decay and consumption, duh VOID is intriguing, Void wants to impose its own order on the cosmos, but is incomplete and will kill and consume rather than bring true life of its own. Void commonly uses an existing being or model... and adds tentacles and bits Order is where it is because the titans are creator beings, they make stuff, but like the Void, they want that stuff in THEIR image, they see endless possibilities like the Void, and have the power to bring it to lifeish. Life is one force that really hasn't gotten too much content itself, the wild gods when they show up are often much more involved with some other faction so the motives are not as certain, but I guess because its creative force that seeks to order and be pure it where it is. Blizzard could make some good strides by focusing an expansion much more on the wild gods and forces of life in the warcraft universe Also for the corruption bit, Forces of one side are really hilariously vulnerable to the opposing element. Light beings turn into void stuff super easy, Fel loves taking over beings of Order and using them to burn Wild gods and life beings just die all the dang time, sometimes not even for a good reason.
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May 17, 2022 13:10
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Cythereal posted:More importantly, they can heal human units. This is true in Warcraft 2 at least. There's no clerics, but one of the three units with actual differences are Ogre-magi vs Paladins and Paladins can heal while Ogre-magi can't (Ogre-magi are also a lot better than Paladins overall)
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May 17, 2022 13:26
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