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Their Line is Gone Out Through All the Earth So what did happen when Ner'zhul worked his spell and Khadgar closed the Dark Portal?  Ner'zhul survived the energies he unleashed, but not for long. As reality buckled and collapsed across Draenor, Ner'zhul and his remaining warlocks of the Shadowmoon fled through a portal that appeared before them, which deposited Ner'zhul and his followers directly in front of Kil'Jaeden, lord of the Burning Legion. Kil'Jaeden had found the Horde's results less than pleasing, but Tichondrius the Darkener and Mal'Ganis the Eternal, the two most senior Dreadlords in the Legion, had persuaded Kil'Jaeden that Ner'zhul and his followers might be salvaged, with the proper motivation. Ner'zhul held out for a surprisingly long time in the Dreadlords' tender cares before breaking. Ner'zhul's body was discarded and destroyed, but his spirit was retained and bound into an enchanted suit of armor and a sword that the rest of the Burning Legion believed that the Dreadlords had crafted. Ner'zhul would return to Azeroth mere days after the Dark Portal's destruction, from Azeroth's perspective - time works differently in the Twisting Nether, what had been years of torment for Ner'zhul had been hours on Azeroth. In the absence of Ner'zhul, the Horde collapsed. Some clans would choose to remain on Draenor, lead by Kargath Bladefist as their new warchief, while others fled to Azeroth in one final push before the Portal collapsed. The Draenor clans would survive, in part, but decline further into madness and corruption. The clans on Azeroth split into two factions. One faction, lead by Blackhand's sons Rend and Maim, rallied at Blackrock Spire and renewed their alliance with the Black Dragonflight. Rend and Maim believed otherwise, but in truth they had become the junior partner in this alliance under the effective control of Nefarian, son of Deathwing and operational leader of the Black Dragonflight while Deathwing convalesced in Deepholm, the Elemental Plane of Earth. Others rallied to the Warsong clan lead by Grom Hellscream and maintained a nomadic existence as they raided the human nations and attempted to evade capture.  The surviving forces of the Alliance were divided. Turalyon and Alleria went through a portal, promising to return. When they failed to return, the other commanders of Khadgar's expedition scattered. Danath Trollbane hunkered down with a force at Honor Hold, a stone's throw from the Dark Portal itself. Kudran Wildhammer assumed command of the stronghold established in Shadowmoon Valley, not far from Ner'zhul's fortress that had once been the city of Karabor. And Khadgar himself found his way to the draenei city of Shattrath, where the mysterious Naaru emerged from hiding and proclaimed Shattrath City a neutral sanctuary for all on Draenor. Turalyon and Alleria had in fact found the Army of the Light: the draenei militant hardliners who had stayed behind to fight a guerrilla war against the Burning Legion. The lightforged draenei, forewarned by the prophecies of the Naaru, welcomed the heroes to their cause. But, as the Naaru had warned, time flows differently in the Twisting Nether. Turalyon and Alleria would be reunited with the forces of Azeroth, and their son Arator, merely twenty four years later as far as Azeroth knew. But for Turalyon and Alleria, it had been almost a thousand years of endless war against the Legion. Both heroes changed over the centuries. Turalyon had become accepted by the Army of the Light as a general and paladin without peer, and underwent the same Lightforging that the draenei had to become the first (and to date, only) lightforged human. Alleria on the other hand had begun to investigate the powers of the Void, a cosmic power little-understood by Azeroth and clearly hostile to the Burning Legion. The ramifications of Turalyon and Alleria's choices would not be felt by Azeroth until what World of Warcraft would call the Fourth War.  The physical structure of Draenor collapsed into the Twisting Nether, becoming a shattered expanse of barely coherent reality floating in the void that would come to be known to all simply as Outland. On Azeroth, all concerned at the time believed that Draenor had been destroyed entirely, and all on the far side of the portal lost forever. As the city and kingdom of Stormwind rebuilt, the front gates to the city were heralded by the Valley of Heroes, a monument built to memorialize Khadgar, Turalyon, Alleria, Danath, and Kudran, who sacrificed themselves to finally end the Second War. The Alliance, however, soon found themselves facing one of the greatest moral quandaries in Warcraft's history: what should be done with the defeated orcs? I'm going to break my narrative voice a little here, because in-setting and out this is one of the most controversial subjects in the history of Warcraft. The Dark Portal had been destroyed, and it's been suggested that the Alliance's original plan for if they won the war was to shepherd the defeated orcs one and all back through the Dark Portal before sealing the gateway for good. The complete and - as far as anyone knew at the time - permanent destruction of the Dark Portal removed that option. Which left the Alliance with thousands of prisoners of war, a humanitarian crisis with no analogue in real world history. The orcs could not go home. There was no frontier to exile them to, every last inch of land in the known world was claimed by a militant empire. And almost every second of history between the orcs and humans had been the orcs attempting to exterminate (or, for the Twilight's Hammer, enslave and indoctrinate) the entire human race. The orcs had, in no ambiguous terms, been intent on complete genocide. Later lore has claimed that Orgrim Doomhammer intended no such thing, but Doomhammer had never once intervened to curb any clan's atrocities. He ordered withdrawals from fronts where he felt that the Horde could not win, such as the sieges of Ironforge, Shadowforge, and Gnomeregan, but the Stormreavers, Dragonmaw, and Twilight's Hammer were at least as atrocity-happy as Blackhand's Horde had ever been. More importantly, the Alliance had no way of knowing that Doomhammer had different goals than the Horde at large appeared to, and no knowledge that the Horde had been corrupted by demonic blood. So let me stress this right off the bat here: if you want to talk about the morality of this part of the story, that's fine as long as you stay reasonable about it. But do bear in mind the limits of anyone's knowledge in-character. The Alliance knew virtually nothing about the Horde, its politics and internal dynamics, or the history of the orc people. Khadgar's expedition had learned some, but they were not in contact with the Azeroth side of the Dark Portal.  Outland is all that remains of Draenor in the main timeline, and is the setting of WoW's first expansion: The Burning Crusade. The Alliance was deeply divided on the question. Some leaders, like King Thoras Trollbane of Stromgarde and Grand Admiral Daelin Proudmoore of Kul Tiras, advocated for outright extermination of all orc captives, a view also shared by King Genn Greymane of Gilneas who was not part of the Alliance but took part in the post-war summits regardless. Archmage Antonidas of Dalaran and King Terenas Menethil of Lordaeron, however, believed that if shown mercy the orcs might relent and lose their appetite for conquest. To this end, Antonidas and Menethil ordered the construction of vast prisoner of war camps across the northlands where the orcs would be put to work as laborers, farming and mining, overseen by the Knights of the Silver Hand and the Kirin Tor. Some leaders in the Alliance, like King Anasterian Sunstrider of Quel'thalas, King Magni Bronzebeard of Khaz Modan, and the newly crowned King Varian Wrynn of Stormwind, refused to commence any massacres but also refused to house any prisoner of war camps in their lands, and shipped the Horde prisoners off to Lordaeron. These camps would be come to known as internment camps, and they would be a lightning rod of resentment by humans and attempts by the orc clans that had escaped into the wilderness to free their brethren. We do know that there was little attentive oversight given to the running of these camps. All of the Alliance kingdoms were too exhausted, too focused on trying to rebuild, to pay any great attention to the internment camps. Some of these camps were well-run by idealistic leaders who treated their prisoners with respect and dignity. Some treated the orcs as slaves, and were run by cruel tyrants. In-setting and out the internment camps are an extremely divisive subject in Warcraft, and Blizzard's official line is that conditions and treatment of the orcs varied from camp to camp, and most humans in the Alliance resented the manpower and resources that went into building and running the internment camps when the human nations themselves had been so thoroughly ruined by the alien invaders that men like Antonidas and Terenas Menethil insisted had good in them.  Nine years after the destruction of the Dark Portal, the Grand Alliance of Lordaeron collapsed. Furious with Lordaeron's and Dalaran's merciful policies towards the orcs, and insistence on contributing trade and money to Stormwind far to the south as well to fund that kingdom's reconstruction, King Thoras Trollbane of Stromgarde withdrew his kingdom from the Alliance. He was followed almost immediately by King Anasterian Sunstrider of Quel'thalas, who cited the damage Quel'thalas had suffered during the war as proof that the Alliance had failed. King Genn Greymane of Gilneas, though never a member of the Alliance, ordered a complete withdrawal of Gilnean forces from beyond the nation's borders and began construction of a great wall intended to sever Gilneas from the outside world entirely. Though deeply unhappy about things, Grand Admiral Daelin Proudmoore of Kul Tiras and King Magni Bronzebeard of Ironforge chose to remain loyal to the Alliance, and the young King Varian Wrynn of Stormwind pledged his kingdom's eternal loyalty to Lordaeron in gratitude for their aid - though the broke, ruined kingdom of Stormwind had its own problems in the newly formed Defias, and could contribute virtually nothing to the north but well wishes. At the same time, however, a new phenomenon manifested in the internment camps of northern Azeroth: the captive orcs suddenly lost their will to fight. A strange lethargy seemed to overtake the race, a lethargy notably not shared by the wilderness clans who still raided the human kingdoms wherever they could. It was a strange, contagious depression that Alliance authorities initially believed was a disease of some kind, but Archmage Antonidas of Dalaran instead developed a new theory: Stormwind had extensive accounts of fel energy having disastrous effects on the landscape around Karazhan and the Dark Portal. The orcs, Antonidas theorized, must have been directly altered by fel energy themselves in some way. The wilderness clans still had their warlocks and received regular infusions of fel energy, but the orcs held captive in the internment camps did not. And after a period of several years, the malign fire burning in the orcs' veins had given out. In essence, the defeated orcs had gone cold turkey. Antonidas and Terenas Menethil of Lordaeron were ecstatic: here at last seemed to be proof of what they'd hoped for. If the orcs could be freed of this curse from the Burning Legion, then perhaps the day really would come that humans and orcs could learn to coexist, if a leader could be found who would unite the defeated and scattered orcs. That day would come a reckoning.
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Jun 13, 2023 01:16
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Cythereal posted:We do know that there was little attentive oversight given to the running of these camps. All of the Alliance kingdoms were too exhausted, too focused on trying to rebuild, to pay any great attention to the internment camps. Some of these camps were well-run by idealistic leaders who treated their prisoners with respect and dignity. Some treated the orcs as slaves, and were run by cruel tyrants. Are there any canon stories of friendships between Alliance and Horde members as a result of this? Cythereal posted:The orcs, Antonidas theorized, must have been directly altered by fel energy themselves in some way. The wilderness clans still had their warlocks and received regular infusions of fel energy, but the orcs held captive in the internment camps did not. And after a period of several years, the malign fire burning in the orcs' veins had given out. In essence, the defeated orcs had gone cold turkey. Drawing an almost oval pentagram with sticks and rocks for just another hit of that demon juice.
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Jun 13, 2023 01:24
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Cythereal posted:On Azeroth, all concerned at the time believed that Draenor had been destroyed entirely, and all on the far side of the portal lost forever. As the city and kingdom of Stormwind rebuilt, the front gates to the city were heralded by the Valley of Heroes, a monument built to memorialize Khadgar, Turalyon, Alleria, Danath, and Kudran, who sacrificed themselves to finally end the Second War. The valley of heroes gets so much funnier over time because not only are all of them still alive, but each statue has a little plaque on it with words from close friends or family honoring them, and more of those people are dead than the actual heroes they're honoring.
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Jun 13, 2023 01:31
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Your synopsis does a good job of demonstrating why I hate time dilation as a plot device. It basically removes the otherwise important dimension of time from the equation and largely has stuff happen 'because i said so'. Granted, WoW also goes into straight time travel as well, so eh.
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Jun 13, 2023 02:23
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As someone who didn't play that expansion, the Turalyon and Alleria parts just seem goofy to me. 'So yeah, your favourite Heroes from WC2 are back! But now in special, spookier skins. Probably also some trauma from time dilation thousand-year war, but eh.' Like, Turalyon and Alleria have spent more time with the lightforged than these young'uns from their relative childhood from a millennia ago.
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Jun 13, 2023 02:34
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turalyon and alleria reappearing as fundamentally new characters that happen to be the same people as some guys that were in another story is one of many elements in later warcraft storytelling where plot threads are spun out ahead of time to provide players with thematic ideas that the story will come back to, except the writers keep going back to the same couple of wells over and over again, which means the conclusions of those stories often end up dragging in weird poo poo to set up where the story is going next. two of world of warcraft's three worst expansions (wod and bfa) are built on doing everything in their power to reference warcraft 2 as much as possible, and while Mists of Pandaria resolved all of its issues in-game by having the events that lead up to Warlords of Draenor take place in a book, Legion didn't, so there are multiple subplots of varying importance dedicated to either warcraft 2 characters that hadn't been relevant for decades or setting character assassinations into motion (both literally and figuratively) for Battle for Azeroth.
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Jun 13, 2023 02:51
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Warcraft is really dumb. That's my takeaway from this. But drat if I didn't play a ton of Warcraft 3. I hope that's going to be a better playing experience, at least.
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Jun 13, 2023 03:34
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Rhonne posted:The valley of heroes gets so much funnier over time because not only are all of them still alive, but each statue has a little plaque on it with words from close friends or family honoring them, and more of those people are dead than the actual heroes they're honoring. at WoW launch, all of the plaque-writers were dead! then blizzard brought back a couple of them, ruining what had been a very solid gag of statues raised by the dead to honor the living
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Jun 13, 2023 04:04
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:at WoW launch, all of the plaque-writers were dead! then blizzard brought back a couple of them, ruining what had been a very solid gag of statues raised by the dead to honor the living Nobody stays dead in WoW. Or I mean some stay dead, but still get to interact with the world and such. Is there anyone important who died in WC1/2/3 that hasn't come back in some way in WoW? Maybe Daelin Proudmoore?
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Jun 13, 2023 08:37
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ApplesandOranges posted:Nobody stays dead in WoW. Or I mean some stay dead, but still get to interact with the world and such.
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Jun 13, 2023 08:54
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Probably a bit early to ask that question since the majority of named characters getting plot beats starts from Warcraft 3.
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Jun 13, 2023 10:19
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I actually enjoyed what they did with Alleria and Turalyon, more the former than the latter. Her exploration of the weird cthulhu powerset was fairly well-told, and it resulted in realistic consequences for her and her relationship with the people she knew. It was dumb and cartoony, but WoW and Warcraft as a whole have always been at their best (as limited as that peak may be) when they're being over-the-top and not trying to tackle the Orc Nuremberg trials or whatever. It all got weird when the 4th war happened, but then again nearly everything about BFA from a big-picture perspective was a colossal tire fire, one which I'm sure will pop up repeatedly once Cythereal finds herself freed from Warcraft 2 forever.
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Jun 13, 2023 10:55
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ApplesandOranges posted:Is there anyone important who died in WC1/2/3 that hasn't come back in some way in WoW? Maybe Daelin Proudmoore? Lothar is a big one. He's shown up a couple of times in magical visions, nothing more. For a given value of important, another one who sticks out in my mind is Antonidas. I've been noticing how much he pops up in the lore surrounding the WC2 era as Dalaran's leader, Terenas Menethil's closest ally, and an all-around smart, wise dude. There's a memorial garden for him in modern-day Dalaran, a bunch of items named after him (or are said to have been made/enchanted by him) and that's all as far as I know.
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Jun 13, 2023 12:17
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...what, did even Blackhand make a return at some point?
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Jun 13, 2023 12:29
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PurpleXVI posted:...what, did even Blackhand make a return at some point? Well. Not main timeline Blackhand at any rate. Likewise Doomhammer, who dies off-screen between games (I'll talk about that in WC3). Really, it's almost exclusively WC3 characters who seemingly died who have come back.
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Jun 13, 2023 12:33
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PurpleXVI posted:...what, did even Blackhand make a return at some point? Yeah he was important in the WoD alt-timeline
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Jun 13, 2023 12:34
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Alt-Blackhand was basically a walking metal album cover
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Jun 13, 2023 12:39
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:at WoW launch, all of the plaque-writers were dead! then blizzard brought back a couple of them, ruining what had been a very solid gag of statues raised by the dead to honor the living Not true. Falstad is not, and never has been dead. A few people at Blizzard and thought he was dead, but Falstad remains alive to this day, and was even in-game, at Aerie Peak! He's since been moved to a more important position, still alive.
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Jun 13, 2023 13:05
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BlazetheInferno posted:Not true. Falstad is not, and never has been dead. A few people at Blizzard and thought he was dead, but Falstad remains alive to this day, and was even in-game, at Aerie Peak! He's since been moved to a more important position, still alive. You just jinxed him.
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Jun 13, 2023 13:54
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The closest we get to main universe Blackhand showing up is has a magical chess piece in the Karazhan raid. Also, Rend is the only one of his kids that has shown up in WoW.
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Jun 13, 2023 14:06
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Falstad's been jinxing himself for years. One of his quotes in Heroes of the Storm is "Rumors of me death have been greatly exaggerated."
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Jun 13, 2023 14:07
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There is something pretty funny about how pretty much every WC2 Alliance hero is still alive despite everything while every WC2 Horde hero is dead. We even went to an alternate timeline to kill them all a second time!
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Jun 13, 2023 16:54
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I don't think it's that surprising - the Horde through to the end of WC2 were unambiguously The Bad Guys; the best you could say about any of them was that Doomhammer conducted his campaign of conquest and genocide with a modicum of honour. With the general demeanour of the Horde changing in the next game they'd all end up being villains to slay.
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Jun 13, 2023 16:57
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Tenebrais posted:I don't think it's that surprising - the Horde through to the end of WC2 were unambiguously The Bad Guys; the best you could say about any of them was that Doomhammer conducted his campaign of conquest and genocide with a modicum of honour. With the general demeanour of the Horde changing in the next game they'd all end up being villains to slay. Doesn't stop the modern Horde from naming cities and geographical features after them! The Horde's primary naval base in modern-day WoW is at Bladefist Bay, named after a guy considered disturbingly sadistic even by the standards of the WC1/2 era Horde. 
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Jun 13, 2023 17:01
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Cythereal posted:Doesn't stop the modern Horde from naming cities and geographical features after them! Oh yeah that doesn't happen at all IRL
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Jun 13, 2023 17:14
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I just think it's funny that we went to an alternate timeline with no fel corruption, and they were still all evil and needed to be killed. I mean, come on, it's an alternate timeline. You could have gotten away with making at least one or two of them take a better path. I guess the Laughing Skull clan were all good dudes in that timeline, so there's that, at least.
Rhonne fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Jun 13, 2023 |
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Jun 13, 2023 17:19
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Removed until I can get a verification of the source.
Cythereal fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Jun 13, 2023 |
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Jun 13, 2023 18:45
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Ah right, the 'this is terrible but if we don't do it like the original the timeline will be even worse' form of storytelling.
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Jun 13, 2023 18:48
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ApplesandOranges posted:Ah right, the 'this is terrible but if we don't do it like the original the timeline will be even worse' form of storytelling. That's always been the bronze dragonflight thing in WoW, but this is uhhh. Not a great way to do it. In the past its mostly been related to stuff like the Dark Portal opening and the Orcs invading. Or some more esoteric things like making sure the War of the Ancients ends the correct way. Or explicitly dealing with funny/weird alt timelines or strange time overlay bullshit, this specific one is the only time its well, what this is, and it is baffling they are doing it this way. They even managed to have an actually pretty good/tasteful quest series about the Warcraft 2 Horde and the Red Dragons involving an actual Dragonmaw Veteran who feels loving awful about what happened and is visiting the Dragon Isles to find some sort of atonement before he dies. The closest (and it's not even particularly close to this, it's a very different flavour of why make the player complicit in this thing) they've gotten in the past is ensuring a specific part of Warcraft 3 happens as it is supposed to. Lord_Magmar fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Jun 13, 2023 |
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Jun 13, 2023 18:54
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Who the gently caress thought this was a good idea???
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Jun 13, 2023 19:00
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A goon in discord pointed out that this might be a fake, so removed it until I can verify a source.
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Jun 13, 2023 19:10
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Cythereal posted:A goon in discord pointed out that this might be a fake, so removed it until I can verify a source. We are meant to be getting bronze dragonflight questlines with Chromie in I want to say 10.1.5, it could be in PTR, but looking on live it absolutely isn't in game right now at least because there's no new story stuff in todays update. It is very sad that this is entirely believable from Blizzard, but I don't think it's in the main game at minimum. It might be in the PTR for 10.1.5 though.
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Jun 13, 2023 19:17
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Lord_Magmar posted:We are meant to be getting bronze dragonflight questlines with Chromie in I want to say 10.1.5, it could be in PTR, but looking on live it absolutely isn't in game right now at least because there's no new story stuff in todays update. Yeah, the goon who originally posted that said it's just going around on discord but no one's been able to find a good source for it. It's sadly very easy to believe, but in the absence of a hard source I'm going to call this a very high-quality fake and I'm sorry to everyone who saw it for believing it without evidence.
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Jun 13, 2023 19:30
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Well, poo poo. Looks like it *is* legit. CW: sexual assault.  https://twitter.com/Portergauge/status/1668664967497936897 Blizzard, why the everloving poo poo are you doing this?
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Jun 13, 2023 20:02
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Cythereal posted:Well, poo poo. Looks like it *is* legit. Its also the third in a series of quests of the timeline just, changing, for unclear reasons besides "time bullshit is happening" as a lead in to why the Infinite Dragonflight exists. The one before it is ensuring someone dies, which is suitably dark for what the story is presumably doing here anyway (explaining that stuff like these quests are why the Infinite Dragonflight thing the sanctity of the timeline is bullshit and if they can change things they should).
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Jun 13, 2023 20:14
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Cythereal posted:Well, poo poo. Looks like it *is* legit. Anyone reading this, don't click through that Twitter link, it's just not anything anybody needs to see. Whoever wrote this quest chain should be fired immediately, just what the actual gently caress
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Jun 13, 2023 20:27
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 Why are people still playing that game
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Jun 13, 2023 20:41
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Approximately half a year ago... Cythereal posted:Metzen's Lament "Frankly, I'm terrified that Alexstrasza will wind up being the main villain of the expansion, it's exactly the kind of tone-deaf garbage that Blizzard would do." Somehow, they'll do worse!
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Jun 13, 2023 20:48
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[sigh] Blizzard put their best foot forward, then neatly shot themselves in it.
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Jun 13, 2023 21:21
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Just ridiculous, why why why would they go back to that hideous well.
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Jun 13, 2023 21:27
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