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Cythereal posted:Bit of both, really. From the outside this looks like some kind of cathartic purging.
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Aug 28, 2023 12:12
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CheeseThief posted:From the outside this looks like some kind of cathartic purging. Ahem. This is cathartic purging. Work in Progress posted:Horde 2: Barrens Chat I'm probably going to hell for this.
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Aug 28, 2023 15:00
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Cythereal posted:Ahem. Isn't Olga in Shadowlands at one point, although I guess you wouldn't know given you didn't play it.
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Aug 28, 2023 15:12
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Lord_Magmar posted:Isn't Olga in Shadowlands at one point, although I guess you wouldn't know given you didn't play it.  I did play Shadowlands, and thank you for explaining the joke for the class. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Aug 28, 2023 |
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Aug 28, 2023 15:13
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Ah, Barrens chat. Sincerely one of my "fondest" memories of vanilla WoW. Just so many people who are all incredibly bored because the zone is enormous, covers a massive level range, and nobody has their mount yet, so you're walking all over creation slowly working your way through quest chain after quest chain. And there's dungeons too, so there's that to go along with everything else.
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Aug 28, 2023 15:29
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I still remember the old forum-done CYOA: "You Awaken in Razor Hill". Very silly, but got into some serious Silent Hill horror vibes.
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Aug 28, 2023 15:34
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Ultiville posted:It's in Civ 6, sort of, but still not in a very satisfying way. You can turn on the Barbarian Tribes mode where you can do some very basic negotiations with barbarian camps, and if they sit around long enough they become city-states or minor civs or whatever they call those things.
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Aug 28, 2023 15:45
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Cythereal posted:
Oh, sorry. I thought you'd fully disengaged from WoW at that point my bad.
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Aug 28, 2023 15:56
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Lord_Magmar posted:Oh, sorry. I thought you'd fully disengaged from WoW at that point my bad. I'd intended to. Then my well-meaning sister who I don't talk to often bought me Shadowlands for my birthday because she thought I was still playing WoW and I duly played it a bit on and off. As I've noted, I liked Bastion and Ardenweald as settings. Thus ends the nice things I have to say about Shadowlands. It confirmed my inclination to quit the game that I'd intended to do with Battle for Azeroth. Dragonflight is the first WoW expansion I haven't bought and don't think I will ever buy unless there's a major course correction at Blizzard. As it happens, while I dislike using the term 'lebensraum' for describing the Horde in Warcraft - that's one hell of a loaded term - I do discuss things along that line in the next update. Personally I think it has more to do with Blizzard's preference for racially homogenous ethnostates than anything, even if they shoved the trolls into Orgrimmar when Blizzard decided they should be playable late in WoW's initial development. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 16:02 on Aug 28, 2023 |
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Aug 28, 2023 15:59
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Xander77 posted:A lot of the Civilization "why is every 'empire' just a genocidal lebensraum machine" complaints can be explained by the developers being American.
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Aug 28, 2023 16:00
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BlazetheInferno posted:I still remember the old forum-done CYOA: They even added Tednug and Scratchfever as NPCs who walk the road between Razor Hill and Orgrimmar.
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Aug 28, 2023 16:26
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Barrens chat... Is it like the infamous CoD lobby, but for RPG players?
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Aug 28, 2023 17:06
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Gun Jam posted:Barrens chat... Is it like the infamous CoD lobby, but for RPG players? The Barrens is a really large zone in vanilla WoW (it would later be split into two), a low level area, and since 3 of the 4 original playable Horde races started in that continent, it was also a hub for many, many quests and at least two dungeons that I recall offhand. You didn't have mounts at that point, so you had to walk a lot, and this was before quest markers were a thing, so it was really easy to get lost. So you have a lot, loooot of players levelling characters or alts or just loving about doing whatever. The chat of the zone became pretty infamous for being loud, rude, and strange. One quest in particular lives in infamy. It would eventually be overcome by trade chat in the main cities, but Barrens Chat is certainly a memory that WoW players (especially Horde) have. Kerzoro fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Aug 28, 2023 |
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Aug 28, 2023 17:55
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Gamers being gamers, Barrens General chat would often break out into bouts of godawful racism, misogyny, homophobia, and occasionally outright Nazi spam. I muted it pretty quickly and kept it that way for the few months I played the game.
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Aug 28, 2023 18:03
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A goon who wished to remain anonymous sent me this on discord. 
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Aug 28, 2023 18:06
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Cythereal posted:A goon who wished to remain anonymous sent me this on discord. If "goddamn wizards" ain't a major source of your problems, are you really in a fantasy setting?
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Aug 28, 2023 18:16
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Gun Jam posted:If "goddamn wizards" ain't a major source of your problems, are you really in a fantasy setting? Yes if the major source is instead "god drat dragons."
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Aug 28, 2023 18:56
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AtomikKrab posted:Yes if the major source is instead "god drat dragons." And god help you if you're dealing with dragon wizards.
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Aug 28, 2023 18:57
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Good news about azeroth!
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Aug 28, 2023 18:59
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BisbyWorl posted:And god help you if you're dealing with dragon wizards. Ehh, Malygos wasn't that hard of a raid boss.
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Aug 28, 2023 19:15
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Cythereal posted:A goon who wished to remain anonymous sent me this on discord.
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Aug 28, 2023 19:19
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Xander77 posted:"Futile theaters" seems like an understatement - if I recall the lore posts correctly, the Horde just attacked literally everyone, everywhere? Yup. Blackhand and Doomhammer tried to keep the Horde in line, but Horde clans mounted invasions of Ironforge, Shadowforge, Gnomeregan, and Zul'Gurub, all of which bogged down in bloody stalemates and wasted hundreds, even thousands of lives in futile assaults against these entrenched adversaries. Canonically, about half of the Horde's entire fighting strength died off-camera from the games between those sieges and the first naval battle of the war. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Aug 28, 2023 |
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Aug 28, 2023 19:24
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Cythereal posted:Yup. Blackhand and Doomhammer tried to keep the Horde in line, but Horde clans mounted invasions of Ironforge, Shadowforge, Gnomeregan, and Zul'Gurub, all of which bogged down in bloody stalemates and wasted hundreds, even thousands of lives in futile assaults against these entrenched adversaries.
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Aug 28, 2023 19:40
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Gamers being gamers, Barrens General chat would often break out into bouts of godawful racism, misogyny, homophobia, and occasionally outright Nazi spam. I muted it pretty quickly and kept it that way for the few months I played the game. Way more common than any of this, of course, was Chuck Norris jokes. The early-mid 2000s were a strange time.
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Aug 28, 2023 19:50
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Xander77 posted:"Futile theaters" seems like an understatement - if I recall the lore posts correctly, the Horde just attacked literally everyone, everywhere? I think the Siege of Ironforge/Gnomeregan was probably justifiable. Keeping the bulk of the Khaz Modan military bottled up when your primary goal is a blitzkreig decapitation of Lordaeron makes sense. Attacking the Gurubashi was pretty stupid though, and all just because Stranglethorn reminded Killrog's people of home and seemed like it would be a great new fiefdom. Same with the Dark Iron, though one can understand the impulse to take Blackrock Mountain as a strategic asset in your push north. Not worth a protracted guerilla war inside the mountain though. I seem to remember more recent lore about them taking the coincidental name of the mountain as a spiritually significant sign, so that probably made attacking it seem smart too.
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Aug 28, 2023 19:55
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Xander77 posted:It may be a question of scale and fantasy writers not being able to do math, but if you invade a new world and attack literally everyone ever instead of picking a direction for expansion (never mind negotiations or allies or... anything), losing mere hundreds\thousands of lives is definitely the least terrible outcome. Sanguinia posted:I think the Siege of Ironforge/Gnomeregan was probably justifiable. Keeping the bulk of the Khaz Modan military bottled up when your primary goal is a blitzkreig decapitation of Lordaeron makes sense. The impression I get from the lore is that the demon blood in the orcs' veins simply made them incredibly aggressive even by orc standards. We know from Warlords of Draenor that the orcs are never far away from trying to enslave or exterminate their neighbors, and fel corruption ramped that up to another level. There was no plan, there was no strategic intent. The orcs were attacking everyone in sight because the alternative was attacking each other, and it was all Doomhammer - not corrupted by fel blood - could do to keep the Horde from immediate civil war (other than the one he started) and from attacking the Amani and goblins. The orcs were just rushing in for a fight, and their sheer strength and ruthlessness let them do a lot of damage before they were finally stopped. Folks, please just enjoy the joke some goon made and stop nitpicking every single word someone writes. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Aug 28, 2023 |
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Aug 28, 2023 20:45
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RE: Barrens Chat, it also contrasted very heavily with the Alliance zones. So for a bit of WoW history, the different parts of the game in Vanilla did not receive the same amount of attention. The Eastern Kingdoms, the human side especially, got a lot of work and polish the other areas didn't, simply because they did it first; dwarven and Forsaken areas got somewhat second billing, and then all of Kalimdor was left in various stages of unfinished, because the game does have to come out eventually. That meant that, while both Dwarves and Gnomes had their own early leveling areas separate from Humans, Kalimdor mashed the Orc/Troll and Tauren players into one giant zone. One big area that wasn't ever fully finished, so it was both unreasonably large, covered an unreasonable number of levels, and was drat near completely empty. Barrens and it's contrast to Eastern Kingdoms made up a decent amount of "Blizzard favors the Alliance" memes at the time, comparing the long and connecting Defias Brotherhood and Onyxia questline with "Kill some boars...for the Horde!" "Ok, now kill some bears...for the Horde!" Lastly, while Southshore was the #1 place for Horde to invade for PVP, the Barrens were the big one for Alliance; on my own server, the vague desire to defend Barrens was so ever-present that the Horde created a channel explicitly for organizing and responding to Alliance attacks. So, depending on how the day was going, it was a zone that was too big, covered too many levels, was mostly empty, and also you had even odds your quest givers were dead even when you did finish the quest line (with the max level person who killed the quest giver doing a little dance next to them). All of which drove every Horde player at least a little insane, wherein they jumped on the channel-wide chat and shared that insanity with everyone else. EDIT: The extent to which the demonic blood altered the Horde has changed basically every time the games write about it. There's two big problems the Horde is - and continues to - face. 1) In Warcraft 1 and 2, the Horde had no depth. Orcs were just the exact sort of bloodthirsty monsters you get from D&D. That's because Warcraft 1 and 2 weren't really meant to have much storyline depth; they were living 90's power album covers (explicitly so! Blizzard's senior art director, Samwise Didier, did several covers for the band Hammerfall and even named an area in WoW after them). Now in Warcraft 3 they're trying to do a "Old Horde vs New Horde" thing, but they're completely ignoring that the "Old Horde" wasn't a group of well meaning proud warriors, they were genocidal monsters, and the writing wants to do a sudden switch away from that without really confronting that. 2) While Blizzard popularized the "noble savage" take on orcs in video games (as compared to the previous take of...actually it's not previous, people are still making games where you play as literal conquistadors and natives are an "enemy faction), they also switch wildly between the "noble" and the "savage." Some people want to write the Horde as starting anew, keeping to Thrall's promises and trying to make peace where possible; right now, they have more leeway in writing Thrall's Horde. Some writers very clearly want the Warcraft 1 & 2 orcs back where they're just aimlessly and mindlessly aggressive monsters. And some writers lean towards making the orcs just "naturally aggressive monsters" without considering how that might bleed into the "noble savage" writing, because "it's badass." The third group is mostly the actual senior writing staff. Right now, as of this point in Warcraft 3's writing, the story officially is that the demonic blood completely overrode the orcs and that Thrall's patience and ally-building with the Tauren is proof that the orcs could have been better on Draenor; also we know very little about pre-demon blood orcs (after all, this is long before Burning Crusade completely retconned the story of the Draenei and Draenor). This is going to change numerous times as the setting continues to get written, but at this point in time for this game, the official story is "demon blood did it." ProfessorCirno fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Aug 28, 2023 |
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Aug 28, 2023 21:25
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ProfessorCirno posted:So, depending on how the day was going, it was a zone that was too big, covered too many levels, was mostly empty, and also you had even odds your quest givers were dead even when you did finish the quest line (with the max level person who killed the quest giver doing a little dance next to them). All of which drove every Horde player at least a little insane, wherein they jumped on the channel-wide chat and shared that insanity with everyone else. So wait, were all NPC's in WoW killable? Like could you just spend your day mangling other people's quest NPC's to ruin their day and waste their time? That sounds like "great" quest design.
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Aug 28, 2023 21:27
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PurpleXVI posted:So wait, were all NPC's in WoW killable? Like could you just spend your day mangling other people's quest NPC's to ruin their day and waste their time? That sounds like "great" quest design. Yup. Welcome to old-school MMO design. You could even kill the faction leaders as they stood in their throne rooms, fighting through enemy capital cities swarming with guards, NPCs, and players. I have my black war bear mount that's the reward for collecting all the enemy faction leaders' heads. 
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Aug 28, 2023 21:29
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PurpleXVI posted:So wait, were all NPC's in WoW killable? Like could you just spend your day mangling other people's quest NPC's to ruin their day and waste their time? That sounds like "great" quest design. Gathering up a ball of players and dunking on the opposing faction base has still been a thing, including in the latest patch for dragonflight because the hub area is neutral territory and with enough people you can tear through the guards like paper and murder.
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Aug 28, 2023 22:01
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The Horde campaign feels a lot closer to the biblical story of Exodus than either the conquests of European colonial powers or the US westward expansion to me. A prophetic figure leads his persecuted people The tauren design influences are obvious but in my opinion it's too much of a reach to extend their themes to the whole narrative, given that their nemesis have an equally clear design lineage to Mongolians and everybody else being purely Gygaxian and mostly detached from their real world inspirations. The prologue campaign even explicitly namedrops Exodus in it's title and I'd attribute Thrall's moniker of "green Jesus" more to people knowing precisely one biblical figure even when they're thinking of Moses. ProfessorCirno posted:comparing the long and connecting Defias Brotherhood and Onyxia questline with "Kill some boars...for the Horde!" "Ok, now kill some bears...for the Horde!" Of course, the median wow player played to level 10 or something like that so most people never noticed that the story poofs out of existence for most of the levelling experience.
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Aug 28, 2023 22:04
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Asehujiko posted:The prologue campaign even explicitly namedrops Exodus in it's title and I'd attribute Thrall's moniker of "green Jesus" more to people knowing precisely one biblical figure even when they're thinking of Moses. Thrall is so specifically "green Moses" that the Warcraft movie ended with him in a basket among the reeds that the humans find 
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Aug 28, 2023 22:10
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All I remember of the Barrens were the constant attacks on the outpost in the middle, never a dull moment there!
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Aug 28, 2023 23:10
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Cythereal posted:
It's very deliberately loaded tbh "but we need your resources, this justifies what we're doing!" is, I believe, the explicit reason for a great deal of Horde bullshit in Ashenvale in particular but that's getting ahead of the narrative
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Aug 29, 2023 01:18
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Horde 2: Barrens Chat  So many people told me bout dis place, da Barrens. Where is Mankrik's wife, anyway? Two rows behind you and three to the left. I always found this a somewhat curious line from Thrall, given that he's never seen Draenor. He only has stories to go on.   Perhaps, but my people deserve a land to call their own. Warchief! We've spotted a herd of those marauders bearing down on us! Not subtle, are they? Nope.  Ha! There's no need to coddle me, boy. I may be old, but I'm not helpless.I've always found Warcraft's argument that the orcs need or deserve a land of their own to be an interesting one. With a few very rare exceptions like Dalaran, Warcraft defaults strongly to the ethnostate model. Race determines nationality and vice versa. Warcraft categorically has rejected the idea that humans and orcs could ever truly live in peace, and loves nothing more than to pile more outrages on the pile for why this race mixing shouldn't happen and is a bad idea whenever it does occur.  This mission is an escort quest, and very dull.  Warcraft 3 presents it as natural and good that the orcs should seek a new nation for themselves where they are the dominant race and drive out or exterminate every native people not willing to subordinate their independence to that of the orcs, and indeed that the orcs deserve such a thing.  A closer look at the female centaur model. The sad truth is that Warcraft defaults to a genocidal view of race relations and ethnostate purity except in specific cases where a hegemonic state forms - two of them, the Alliance and the Horde. No matter where you start in World of Warcraft, your first quests will probably include slaughtering members of another sentient race whose inability to coexist with your chosen race is taken as a given and annihilation is the goal.  And no, the Alliance is not exempt from this, given the origins of every single race within the Alliance as mutant offshoots of some other race (humans, dwarves, gnomes, night elves, worgen, pandaren, void elves, Dark Irons, mechagnomes, Kul Tirans, drac'thyr), space aliens (draenei), or both (lightforged). Humans start off hunting kobolds just like tauren start off hunting quilboar.  Warcraft in general operates on the supposition that these peoples, these cultures and nations are fundamentally opposed and impossible to reconcile.  I don't think this is entirely born of an extremely reductionist and zero-sum view of race. A common sentiment I hear from Horde fans is that the Horde feels like a loose alliance of very distinct races banding together, whereas the Alliance seems dominated by the extremely bland humans. I once felt the same way. I didn't jump ship to an Alliance main until Cataclysm despite liking the night elves.  I think there's a very understandable, very reasonable desire to show, not just tell, how different these peoples and cultures are. They're not right or wrong, they're just different.  I think, though, that this approach sacrifices the storytelling opportunities that a more cosmopolitan depiction of Azeroth could have had. A bunch of old enemies, each with plenty of entirely legitimate reasons to hate the other, now forced to live and work side by side, and fight together against common threats.  Warcraft in general consistently gets part of the way there, but consistently stops shy of anything that would put the setting in serious danger of real change in tone and general vibe.  I feel that Blizzard is a very conservative company (in a political sense, too, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion). Executives the world over tend to be risk-averse, and I think that Blizzard's leadership is understandably wary of departing too far from what has been proven to work. Don't fix what isn't broken and all that.  As I heard a few times of my criticism of Warcraft 2 (and, frankly, quite a lot of games I'm critical of in a mainly negative way!), I seem to want Warcraft in general to be something that Warcraft is not.  Goblins are already here, natch. In this case, Warcraft's characteristic obsession with ethnostates... yeah, I absolutely want Warcraft to be something else.  Fundamentally, I do not believe that the orcs deserve to build an empire of their own, displacing and eradicating everyone who isn't willing to lick their hobnailed boots like the trolls and tauren.  The entire sudden retconning of the Horde has always sat poorly with me after I learned about Warcraft's history. Warcraft 3 was my introduction to the setting, so as a child I thought that the entire point and message of the series was old enemies putting aside wounds and hatreds to start something new and better.  My problem with the Horde in general, and the orcs in particular, is that I feel that they haven't earned their redemption. Reasons were simply introduced retroactively for why it wasn't really their fault.  There is of course a reasonable argument to be made that it genuinely wasn't the fault of even all the Second War veterans of Thrall's Horde, much less those born on Azeroth like Thrall himself. They don't need to earn redemption because they did nothing wrong.  But imagine if Warcraft 3's story had played out with something like Thrall and his Horde not leaving the Eastern Kingdoms, and instead joining forces with the Alliance survivors against the Scourge because Thrall's sense of honor demanded it.  Not helping matters is Blizzard randomly descending from on high to excuse the actions of either side to serve the narrative they're telling right this second. Both sides have been beneficiaries and victims of Blizzard's moral largesse.  I'm not seeking to convince anyone to my way of thinking, just ruminating on my own thoughts while I have the bully pulpit, and I'm increasingly of the opinion that the entire Kalimdor arc of Warcraft 3 as executed by this game, and by WoW, was a mistake.  I am of the view that the best way to learn to coexist with people who are different from you is to live and work alongside them, rather than segregating yourselves into separate disciplines.  I never met a Jewish person to my knowledge until I was in college and had a friend who wore a yarmulke.  I didn't know homosexuality even existed until college. No one brought it up when and where I grew up, not even to decry it.  I wasn't even consciously sheltered growing up. My family was downright liberal compared to many of our neighbors. I just grew up in an extremely homogenous - ethnically and culturally - environment in a small, rural town.  To the Oracle. What is it? Legends say that it saw the strands of fate as they were woven by the Earth Mother. It alone can show you your destiny. Where can I find it?(for those wondering the obvious question about one of those remarks, the reaction of my family was 'Well, that explains a lot')  Thank you, Cairne. I will not forget you. Go with honor, young warchief. May the Earth Mother smile upon you.This concludes Barrens Chat: Cythereal edition..   Er, Cairne? Aren't you forgetting to tell Thrall something? About an ancient ally of your people who live in the forests surrounding Mount Hyjal who are extremely xenophobic, shoot first and maybe ask questions later if they feel like it, and think there's no such thing as an overreaction?
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Aug 29, 2023 12:01
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On the Hoof Who's ready for some noble savages, emphasis on the noble? I must acknowledge that I know very little about the the indigenous peoples of the Great Plains of North America, the real-world group or groups that this race is heavily based on. Beyond that this connection exists and is extremely blatant, I do not feel qualified to make a detailed assessment. If there are any goons with more insight, I welcome your input. Today's subject, the tauren.  The history of the tauren actually begins with another people, the yaungol. Where the yaungol came from is unknown, based on the fact that they are a distinctly animalistic humanoid race native to what is now Kalimdor it is possible that the yaungol are descended from some forgotten animal demigod in the vein of the quilboar, harpies, and other races of Kalimdor. The yaungol might very well be a native sentient race of Azeroth, predating the coming of the Titans. What we do know is that the yaungol were a nomadic people, hunters and gatherers who roamed across the plains and steppes. Both the ancient troll and elf empires considered the yaungol beneath their notice, while the yaungol tribes could be fierce when attacked they preferred to migrate away from danger rather than fight. One of Azeroth's ancient empires, however, saw the yaungol as a valuable resource. The tyrannical Mogu Empire of what is now Pandaria sought out the nomadic yaungol tribes and enslaved them, seeing the yaungol as physically powerful and suitable as a labor class. We know virtually nothing of the yaungol's history prior to their enslavement by the mogu, because the mogu made a concerted effort to completely eradicate their culture and history. Even the yaungol language was forbidden on pain of public torture and execution for speaking a single word. Truth be told, we don't know how much resemblance the yaungol we know today even bear to their predecessors, the mogu flesh-shapers were known to work on their yaungol slaves. When the pandaren lead the revolution that overthrew the Mogu Empire, the yaungol fought alongside the other former slaves, and after the revolution's victory, the yaungol scattered to the winds. Some yaungol remained in Pandaria, preferring to remain in the steppes and plains, keeping apart from the new Pandaren Empire and their allies. These Pandarian yaungol would remain a people apart from their former comrades in arms, distrusting the Pandaren Empire's promises that they would not become tyrants like the mogu had been. The very remoteness of these yaungol made them regular targets of mantid attacks, and after the Sundering shattered the continents, the yaungol grew steadily more warlike and aggressive, turning increasingly to raiding their neighbors and pursuing dangerous shamanistic rituals for the resources and magical power they needed to survive. This was the state the yaungol were in when the mists of Pandaria were dispelled during World of Warcraft, violent and savage raiders on the fringes of Pandaria.  The people we know today as the tauren emerged from those yaungol who migrated north across Kalimdor following the end of the Mogu Empire and the freedom of their people. Many tribes came to live on the plains near the Well of Eternity, where the Kaldorei Empire treated them with amusement and contempt. The Kaldorei nobility considered the nomadic yaungol beneath their notice, not even worth enslaving, but the peasantry of the Kaldorei began to trade with the yaungol whenever a tribe passed through their lands. From these ancient night elves, the yaungol learned (or relearned, both possibilities have been suggested) druidic magic and met the demigod Cenarius, who helped the yaungol rediscover whatever they could of their heritage. Over the centuries, living near the Well of Eternity altered these tribes of yaungol, transforming them into the tauren we know today. The tauren at the time of Warcraft 3 have changed hardly at all since before the Sundering, herding and hunting the kodo beasts of the plains but slowly losing ground to the far more aggressive centaurs. Though ancient allies of the surviving Kaldorei, the two races largely fell out of contact after the Sundering, both becoming deeply isolationist in their way as they separated into northern and central Kalimdor. Honestly, even in World of Warcraft nothing's really changed. The tauren just keep on as they always have, and if some tauren have taken to studying arcane magic or taking their reverence for the sun (which the tauren hold to be one of the eyes of the Earth Mother, their vaguely defined creator goddess, along with the moon) to the point of developing powers recognizable to the east as paladins, good for them. At their best, the tauren have often acted as the conscience of the Horde, among the few unambiguously all-around good guys of Warcraft. At their worst, though, they often seem rudderless and going with the flow even when the Horde's leadership takes the empire into very dark places.  There's more to this family tree, though, and all connected to the modern day Horde. When the yaungol scattered across ancient Azeroth following their liberation from the mogu, some yaungol wandered very far afield indeed, to the lands of what became Northrend. For reasons unknown, the Titan energies of Ulduar and other facilities in Northrend affected the yaungol tribes differently from the Well of Eternity. Where the central tribes became the tauren, transitioning from yak-people into bovine people, the northern tribes instead took on the aspect of bison, becoming the taunka. Much like the yaungol tribes who stayed in Pandaria, the harsh environment the taunka dwelled in shaped these people into a much more aggressive and warlike culture than the relatively peaceful hunter-gatherers of the tauren. The taunka were the first example World of Warcraft ever depicted of what the setting has come to call 'dark shamanism.' Normal shamanism involves the elemental spirits willingly giving a shaman their aid, often in exchange for favors or reverence or some such. Dark shamanism, however, involves forcibly subjugating spirits and stealing their power. When the Horde invaded Northrend in the campaign against the Scourge, they encountered the taunka, whom the mainstream tauren considered brutal in the extreme. Understandable given Northrend, but brutal. Later WoW lore would call dark shamanism an atrocity that scars the spirit and is considered an abomination by everyone, and closely linked to the Old Gods and the Twilight's Hammer, but this wasn't the case with the taunka. Horde players had an extended questline where they helped the taunka push back the Scourge and the taunka people swore allegiance to the Horde, with chieftain Roanuk Icemist journeying to Orgrimmar to represent his people to the Horde. You might wonder how the lore has reconciled the taunka being proud members of the horde with present lore about dark shamanism. Blizzard settled for the expedient solution of completely forgetting about the taunka and dropping their religious practices down a plot hole, precisely two taunka have ever been seen since the Cataclysm expansion, both as minor cameos in Warlords of Draenor.  One last tauren-related subspecies to discuss. The tauren joined forces with the night elves and other peoples of ancient Kalimdor to repulse the Burning Legion's first invasion of Kalimdor during the War of the Ancients. One particular tribe of tauren, who dwelled in the mountainous lands surrounding a peak known as Highmountain, saved the life of a powerful moose spirit, who transformed the Highmountain chieftain and his people into bearing the antlers of moose rather than the horns of other tauren. Highmountain became part of the Broken Isles following the Sundering, and the Highmountain tauren largely continued as they were. From my very limited understanding, they're patterned off the indigenous peoples of the American Pacific Northwest and Canada's British Columbia. Both the Alliance and the Horde helped the Highmountain tribe during the Legion expansion, when they together repulsed another invasion of Azeroth by the Burning Legion. The mainstream tauren were all too happy to reunite with their cousins, and the Highmountain tauren joined the Horde. And a few weeks later helped commit genocide against the night elves. Highmountain chieftain Mayla has said she feels bad about this.
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Aug 29, 2023 12:02
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You know, it feels like you could easily still have had a Warcraft where all the various species and races intermingled freely, and then just having the "Horde" and "Alliance" as political factions of the same greater nation. When a given conflict rears its head, one side might suggest caution and defense, while the other side says to go on the offense, and then rather than being permanently attached to one of the two, you pick whichever one makes the most sense to you/your character at the time. It feels like it would even have been less work, since there would be more shared locations and less faction-specific locations(each group could conceivably have had a political capital/HQ where you only had a reason to go if you were primarily picking their side.). As for the orcs wanting their own ethnostate, I'm going to dissent and say that if we assume that everything up till the start of WC3 makes sense, with the internment camps and most humans treating the orcs poorly, the orcs might not really see a place for themselves in a human-elf-dwarf-gnome-etc. alliance because no one seems to want them there and they'd expect the same sort of treatment again. Wanting to get the hell out and away from your oppressors seems like a reasonable enough response if they don't have any real expectations that reform might happen in human society in some way. Now, if the Scourge had been visible to the orcs by the time they were preparing their exodus, instead they could've gone: "maybe this is a chance to mend relations, by helping out the humans" or maybe some "enterprising" camp warden might've shoved the orcs out with pikes to form a living wall against the undead. They could've used it as a chance to make an escape or to impress some humans into giving them a chance. Like say maybe the warden is about to push them back into the camp after they save everyone, but then Uther comes along and is all: "hey what's going on here. oh they saved our lives? well maybe we should be thankful instead, don't you think." and that could've started something. Maybe as a result Thrall, Arthas and Jaina are together for part of the human campaign, and Thrall and Jaina leave for Kalimdor together after Medivh tells them it's a pointless fight they're guaranteed to lose. The orc campaign starts after their ships get separated on the way over, and they have to survive for a while until they find the humans again, meeting the Tauren on the way and bringing them along to the party. You could retain a lot of the same story beats, really, with only minor modifications. Instead of killing everyone they meet on first sight, maybe the orcs encounter Quillboars and etc. fleeing a Centaur slave raid, and then get dragged into the Centaur vs Tauren conflict that's been brewing for a while, learn about how the centaurs have been bullying everyone in the area for a while, and then make a deal to help out the Tauren in exchange for being taught how this part of Kalimdor works and provided guides to help them find the humans.
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Aug 29, 2023 13:06
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To an extent I think the "answer" is that the Orcs should have integrated into Tauren culture (whilst keeping their own traditions/tribes that they rediscover etc) rather than what happened.
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Aug 29, 2023 13:15
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Lord_Magmar posted:To an extent I think the "answer" is that the Orcs should have integrated into Tauren culture (whilst keeping their own traditions/tribes that they rediscover etc) rather than what happened. That certainly seems to be implied in the scene at the start of the mission - or at least that Cairne is offering it and Thrall graciously says the orcs deserve a land of their own. I'm not sure the orcs and trolls integrating into the tauren's way of life would be a better outcome, though, at least in terms of war and conquest. Nomadic hunter-gatherers and pastoralists claim territory too, they're just not occupying all of it all of the time. The size of the orc and troll populations has always been very vague but it's at least a city's worth, and feeding that population is going to require a lot of land taken from other peoples even if they're doing it on behalf of the Bloodhoof tribe. Settling an agricultural society would be more land-efficient, if nothing else. ...not that Warcraft has ever really concerned itself with realistic food supply and land use issues. Orcs in Warcraft 3 apparently feed themselves with burrows.
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Aug 29, 2023 13:22
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Tenebrais posted:That certainly seems to be implied in the scene at the start of the mission - or at least that Cairne is offering it and Thrall graciously says the orcs deserve a land of their own. Oh yeah, it's more that the things Cyth was noting about the Orcs kind of taking over this area of Kalimdor in a way that isn't much better than their efforts in the EK would be a bit different if they're integrating into existing Kalimdor cultures rather than so heavily building their own. Thunderbluff is specifically intended to be a permanent settlement for the Tauren that they'd never had before, they're less nomadic by the WoW time in part because the Orcs provide them with extra protection and security from groups like Quillboar and Centaur who predate on them for cultural and survival reasons.
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Aug 29, 2023 13:54
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