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 Look, you all know what Warcraft is. A beloved franchise from childhood for many of us. There have been many LPs of the Warcraft RTS saga that have attempted to preserve the dignity this series once possessed, ignoring the countless retcons and reimaginings and bizarre plot twists that ultimately followed. Some have even tried to present new, better stories. This is not going to be one of those LPs (mostly). Warcraft is a gigantic trainwreck of a setting and an IP, and if you only know the setting's more recent developments by internet hearsay, then buckle up. This is going to get weird, this is going to get racist (sometimes in a well-meaning but clueless white people way, sometimes ooga booga pygmies sacrificing explorers to volcanoes in a game made in 2010), and this is going to get stupid. I will be presenting and discussing Warcraft in the full scope of all the current lore and story that has grown up around these games. Those who wish to pretend that Warcraft is still a dignified veteran of the once-glorious RTS genre, leave the the thread now. You have been warned.  (fan art by a goon) How This Will Work I will be playing through Warcraft 1, Warcraft 2 (including Beyond the Dark Portal), and Warcraft 3, with lore posts accompanying each gameplay update to discuss things mentioned or talked about in the update, or maybe just unrelated things if there's nothing of interest in the update. I will be discussing all of this from the view of all the current lore about Warcraft in all of its convoluted, messy, and just plain weird... glory? I know and expect that there will be lots of discussion about Warcraft lore in this thread. I'm fine with this! All I ask is that people refrain from personal attacks on each other. Warcraft lore gets very strange, and downright offensive to some people. There's been retcons piled on top of retcons, and information squirreled away in the damndest and most limited places. Some of Warcraft's writers have also recently discovered the storytelling device known as the unreliable narrator, just to muddy the waters further. I have no doubt that I will make mistakes when I write things up, and there will be strange tidbits I am not familiar with even with my breadth of experience with Warcraft as a setting. I must stress, I intend to write this LP from the perspective of providing summaries and making fun of Blizzard, not attempting to provide a detailed settling of accounts (and with another WoW expansion on the horizon, God only knows what's going to become outdated and invalid over the likely course of this LP). So rage at Blizzard if you like, but please refrain from personal attacks on one another. Let me make this official. Stop with the 'but this is what REALLY happened!' poo poo. I'm fine with talking about stuff that happens in later games! I've been doing that from the start! But please understand that in the course of this LP I've been deliberately introducing lore slowly and piecemeal because I'm trying to present it in a way that makes sense to people who aren't familiar with this stuff. Stop trying to correct and clarify things that are going to come up naturally to discuss in proper detail and context later.  1. This thread will contain unmarked spoilers for everything Warcraft. This thread is dedicated to documenting all the many and varied ways that Warcraft's lore and story have become convoluted, hosed up, racist, sexist, or just plain were from the start. I'm not even making a special effort to learn anything about Dragonflight, but what I know, I will document if and when it seems relevant. The bit of Dragonflight story I mentioned that kicked this off, I learned because I clicked on one youtube content creator's clickbait video title of 'Blizzard hates night elves!' 2. I will ask people not to discuss certain subjects at particular times in the thread. Warcraft is a long series and I still have an enormous amount to cover. This rule is to keep the thread on track (relatively speaking) and not shooting off in random directions as people seize on details I mention that I intend to cover later. This rule is not because I care about spoilers. 3. Do not make personal attacks on other posters. Fair's fair, this has not been the kind of kerfluffle I feared might happen when I started the thread, but I am going to emphasize it now. If you have criticism for how I conduct this thread or other peoples' posting, do not drop to name-calling. 4. If you are concerned with preserving the sanctity and reputation or continuity of Blizzard or Warcraft, this is not the thread for you. Blizzard, in my eyes, is a company run by greedy, sexist, racist, homophobic sexual predators and drunkards with a company culture of sexual harassment and assault. I am going to this effort because I used to adore Blizzard in general and Warcraft in particular like quite a lot of nerds my age. Do not confuse my effort for any affection or inclination to apologize for Blizzard. Yes, I enjoy making this LP, but I also hold the object of this hobby in deepest contempt. I am going to be unfair to Blizzard and Warcraft. I am going to cast things in unflattering lights. I am going to mock senior developers and executives. If you're looking to white knight Blizzard, this is not the place for you. Oh, and just to make things even more fun, I've never played Warcraft 1 or Warcraft 2 before, and it's been at least fifteen years since I played all the way through Warcraft 3. If you want to see examples of good gameplay by someone skilled at the game who knows the maps... well, this may not be the thread for you. And if I run into trouble? Thank you, Blizzard, for continuing to put in cheat codes. One other thing. I will not LP WoW. Ever. Don't ask me about it. Further Addendum: This is not a place to discuss what does or does not make you horny, y'all.  Gameplay Warcraft 1 Orc 1: This is All the Jailer's Fault Human 1: Non-Canon Orc 2: Into Lands Uncharted Human 2: Isn't 'Grand Hamlet' an Oxymoron? Orc 3: No Man's Land Human 3: Counterpoint Orc 4: They Shall Not Grow Old Human 4: The Calling Orc 5: Raiding Party Human 5: Shoot the Messenger Orc 6: Terminus Human 6: Civil Warcraft Orc 7: The Call to Power Human 7: Breaking Dawn, and Heads Orc 8: The Bloodied Claw Human 8: Doing in the Wizard Orc 9: There Goes the Neighborhood Human 9: Covenant of Fire Orc 10: Breakthrough Human 10: The Hammer Falls Orc 11: The Widening Gyre Human 11: To Ash and Cinder Orc 12: You Have Selected Regicide Human 12: Through Fields of Flame Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness Horde 1: This is Still the Jailer's Fault Alliance 1: The Crucible Horde 2: I Shot the Sherriff Alliance 2: Run Like the Wind Horde 3: Trolling Southshore Alliance 3: Destroyer Destroyer Horde 4: Landfall Alliance 4: Way of the Huojin Horde 5: Taking a Tol Alliance 5: A Job Well Dun Horde 6: The Eyes Have It Alliance 6: The Crossing Horde 7: En Garde Alliance 7: Bleeding Them Hollow Horde 8: Nor the Battle to the Strong Alliance 8: Devils in the Dark Horde 9: Doomed to Repeat Alliance 9: The Gauntlet Horde 10: Demolition Man Alliance 10: The Wages of Sin Horde 11: Reaper's Due Alliance 11: Kinslayer Horde 12: Gul'dammit Alliance 12: Or High Water Horde 13: The Center Cannot Hold Alliance 13: Perihelion Horde 14: And the Walls Came Tumbling Down Alliance 14: Boldly They Rode Warcraft 2: Beyond the Dark Portal Horde 1: Shadowmoon Rising Alliance 1: Favor the Bold Horde 2: Getting Boned Alliance 2: Stranglehold Horde 3: Calorie-Free Filler Alliance 3: Replay Value Horde 4: Through the Gate Alliance 4: Operation Lionheart Horde 5: Circling Back Alliance 5: A Storm in the Port Horde 6: Stormwindfall Alliance 6: By Pyre's Light Horde 7: Fire the Canon Alliance 7: In the Shadow of Death Horde 8: The Conquering Tide Alliance 8: Passage at Arms Horde 9: Teaching Moments Alliance 9: The Planet Killers Horde 10: Plea Bargain Alliance 10: Blizzard Polish Horde 11: Days of Fire Alliance 11: Raven's Flight Horde 12: A Silhouette of Dreams Alliance 12: Eschaton Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos Prologue 1: Thrall Aboard Prologue 2: Thrall that Glitters Prologue 3: Thrall the King's Horses Prologue 4: Thrall the Sound and Fury Prologue 5: Thrall In Alliance Intro Alliance 1: Yup, Still the Jailer's Fault Alliance 2: Armageddon Game Alliance 3: Into the Arena Alliance 4: Portent Alliance 5: Candle in a Hurricane Alliance 6: The Left Hand of Destiny Alliance 7: Last Call Alliance 8: Ring the Bell Alliance 9: Stormbringer Undead 1: Cult Classic Undead 2: Bring Out Your Dead Undead 3: Tempting Fate Undead 4: See How They Run Undead 5: Sunset Undead 6: Seeing Red Undead 7: The Direct Approach Undead 8: Rite of Winter Horde 1: Manifest Destiny Horde 2: Barrens Chat Horde 3: Backdraft Horde 4: Things Fall Apart Horde 5: Vexed to Nightmare Horde 6: Hack Job Horde 7: As Above, So Below Horde 8: The Reaving Night Elf 1: Thunderer Night Elf 2: Rending of the Veil Night Elf 3: The Scythe and the Clock Night Elf 4: Dark of the Moon Night Elf 5: Spin the Wheel Night Elf 6: Head Case Night Elf 7: The Last Rose of Summer Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne Night Elf 1: Demon Hunter Hunter Night Elf 2: Island Hopping Night Elf 3: Rocks Fall Everyone Dies Night Elf 4: Quality Assurance Night Elf 5: Retroactive Continuity Night Elf 6: And the River Runs Red Night Elf 7: Motivating Factors Night Elf 8: The Bridge of Sighs Alliance 1: I Feel... Edgy Alliance 2: Betwixt and Between Alliance 3: Sewer Level Alliance 4: Cower at the Tower Alliance 5: Give and Take Alliance 6: Path of Exile Alliance 7: Covenant Undead 1: Death Grip Undead 2: Breakout Hit Interlude: Beckon the Vengeful Undead 3: Nine Tenths of the Law Undead 4: Voyage of the Damned Undead 5: Gatecrasher Undead 6: All Work and No Play Undead 7: Drums in the Deep Undead 8: Unforgettable Undead 9: Clock Blocked Undead 10: Till All are One Interlude: Dies the Fire Horde 1: Terminal Approach, Part One Horde 1: Terminal Approach, Part Two Horde 2: Water of the Womb Horde 3: The Tempest Lore Lore 1: Warcraft: Devolved Elementals and Mutant Robots (what are humans and orcs in Warcraft?) Lore 2: All Time Cops are Bastards (the Bronze Dragonflight) Lore 3: Here Corrupts the Noble Savage (Horde backstory) Lore 4: The Empire Without Qualities (Stormwind backstory) Lore 5: There is Nothing Funny About the Name 'Twisting Nether' (general cosmology) Lore 6: Remember the Titans (the Titans) Lore 7: Power Ogrewhelming (ogres) Lore 8: Uncle Lothar Wants You! (Anduin Lothar) Lore 9: I've Got Magic Hands (overview of magic) Lore 10: All's Fair in Love and Warcraft (LGBT issues and representation) Lore 11: Every Day I'm Panda-ren (pandaren) Lore 12: As Opposed to the New Gods (the Old Gods) Lore 13: Hammer Time (Orgrim Doomhammer) Lore 14: Huffing the Twilight Sparkles (the Twilight's Hammer) Lore 15: You Face Bearassus, Bearedar Lord of the Bearning Legion! (the Burning Legion) Lore 16: Getting Medivhal (Medivh and the Guardians of Tirisfal) Lore 17: Blackrock Down (the Blackrock clan) Lore 18: Not that Kind of Bleeding Hollow (the Bleeding Hollow clan) Lore 19: Give an Orc a Gun (the Iron Horde) Lore 20: My Garona (Garona and Me'dan) Lore 21: Hybrid Tax (half-breeds and interspecies relationships) Lore 22: Balance of Error (alternate timelines) Lore 23: And the Band Played On (aftermath of the First War) Lore 24: The Horde Without Qualities (the Horde at the start of the Second War) Lore 25: Hanging Together (the Alliance at the start of the Second War) Lore 26: Critical Race Theory (trolls) Lore 27: Every Day We Stray Further from Laurelin and Telperion's Light (high elves) Lore 28: Thorium Ships and Iron Men (naval warfare) Lore 29: Come Play, my Lordaeron! (Lordaeron) Lore 30: Burning Hearts of Azeroth (the Black Dragonflight) Lore 31: Gray Eminence (Gilneas) Lore 32: What You Don't Need (goblins) Lore 33: The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall and Rise of Stromgarde (Stromgarde) Lore 34: Gnomore Bad Puns? Gno! More Bad Puns! (gnomes) Lore 35: That's a Grudgin (dwarves) Lore 36: Titan O'Machy's (the Titans, part 2) Lore 37: Lost in Translation (Dragonmaw clan) Lore 38: Kul Story (Kul Tiras) Lore 39: A-Viking We Will Go (vrykul) Lore 40: Light Makes Right (the Church of the Holy Light) Lore 41: Dynasty Warriors (mogu) Lore 42: Nevermore (Alterac) Lore 43: Flying Purple Mana Eaters (Dalaran) Lore 44: Good Band Name (Gul'dan and the Stormreavers) Lore 45: Metzen's Lament (the Red Dragonflight) Lore 46: Saur Grapes (Varok Saurfang) Lore 47: Die by the Sword (the Burning Blade) Lore 48: There is No Ner'Dana (Ner'zhul and the Shadowmoon) Lore 49: Bring Your Son to War Day (Turalyon, Alleria, and Arator) Lore 50: Lord of the Clans (the Shattered Hand, Bonechewer, Laughing Skull, and Thunderlord clans) Lore 51: The Defiant (the Defias Brotherhood) Lore 52: Warsong of the South[western Draenor] (the Warsong clan) Lore 53: Character Assassination and the Beneficiaries Thereof (Khadgar) Lore 54: Please Don't Puff the Magic Dragon (the Blue Dragonflight) Lore 55: The Men Who Stare at Goats Extraterrestrial (the draenei) Lore 56: All Aboard the Goat Boat (draenei miscellanea) Lore 57: Applied Soteriology (The First Ones and introduction to the Shadowlands) Lore 58: Blessed are the Poor in Spirit (the Kyrians) Lore 59: Blessed are the Meek (the Night Fae) Lore 60: Blessed are Those who Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness (the Necrolords) Lore 61: Blessed are Those who are Persecuted (the Venthyr) Lore 62: Blessed are You when People Insult You (the Jailer) Lore 63: Watch the Birdie (the Arakkoa) Lore 64: Minor Race Compendium, Part One (Murlocs, Jinyu, Gnolls, Kobolds, Vulpera) Lore 65: Minor Race Compendium, Part Two (Virmen, Hozen, Mermaids, Tuskarr, Wolvar) Lore 66: Minor Race Compendium, Part Three (Ethereals, Brokers, Sethrak, Tortollans, Saurok) Lore 67: Minor Race Compendium, Part Four (Drogbar, Furbolg, Centaurs, Harpies, Quilboar) Lore 68: No Time to Argue About Time (timeline of the games) Lore 69: Their Line is Gone Out Through All the Earth (aftermath of the Second War) Lore 70: Dances with Frostwolves (Frostwolf clan and Thrall's backstory) Lore 71: Warcraft Bestiary, Part One Lore 72: Warcraft Bestiary, Part Two Lore 73: Insert Racist Joke Here (the naga) Lore 74: Michael Moorcock's Lawyers Called (Arthas backstory) Lore 75: The Darkness and the Light (Uther the Lightbringer) Lore 76: A Graveyard of Dreams (Jaina Proudmoore) Lore 77: Roll the Bones (necromancy) Lore 78: Give Them a Hand (the Knights of the Silver Hand) Lore 79: At the Shores of Rubicon (the Culling of Stratholme) Lore 80: The Pale Beyond (Northrend) Lore 81: The Breaking Wheel (the Legion's Evil Plan) Lore 82: Bone 'Er? I 'Ardly Know 'Er! (overview of the Scourge) Lore 83: Knights of the Living Dead (death knights) Lore 84: Spiders-Men (Nerubians) Lore 85: Bloody Elves (vampires) Lore 86: With a Deafening Thunder (Sylvanas backstory) Lore 87: Lich, Please (Kel'Thuzad) Lore 88: The Hoodoo That You Do (Scourge miscellanea) Lore 89: On the Hoof (tauren and cousins) Lore 90: What to Expect When You're Expecting the End of the World (Burning Legion compendium, part one) Lore 91: The Storm (night elf history) Lore 92: Where the Wild Gods Are (the Wild Gods) Lore 93: Perchance to Dream (the green dragonflight) Lore 94: What to Expect When You're Expecting the End of the World, Part Two (Burning Legion compendium, part two) Lore 95: The Ashes of Eden (intro to night elves) Lore 96: Dust in the Whisperwind (Tyrande Whisperwind) Lore 97: Mystery of the Druids (druids) Lore 98: This Angers Me Greatly (Malfurion Stormrage) Lore 99: Illidammit (Illidan Stormrage) Lore 100: Thrall the Small Things (Thrall in WoW) Lore 101: Passing Strange (Maiev Shadowsong) Lore 102: Nightfall (Suramar and the Nightborne) Lore 103: Oh Hell[scream] No (Garrosh Hellscream) Lore 104: Here Ends the Savage Noble (Varian Wrynn) Lore 105: Heavyweight Title (giants) Lore 106: Good Night, Sweet Prince (Kael'thas Sunstrider) Lore 107: Tragedy of the Twinks (Anduin Wrynn) Lore 108: He Never Scoured (Lord Garithos) Lore 109: Storm of Blood (blood elves) Lore 110: Can of Wormholes (interstellar travel) Lore 111: Void Where Prohibited (void elves) Lore 112: Thorium Chef (food and drink in Azeroth) Lore 113: An Outlandish Tale (Outland) Lore 114: To the Bitter Dregs (the Scarlet Crusade) Lore 115: Taking the Black (the Forsaken) Lore 116: By Armageddon's Light (Elune and the fate of the night elves) Lore 117: A Wail of a Time (Sylvanas in WoW) Lore 118: All Work and No Play (the Fourth War) Lore 119: Dragging On (dragon miscellanea) Lore 120: Pyramid Scheme (Zandalar) Lore 121: Invincible (the fate of Arthas) Lore 122: Tide Rolls Out (the fate of the Scourge) Introductions, Interludes, and Other Analysis Inter Script: Warcraft 1 Warcraft 2 Introduction Warcraft 2: Beyond the Dark Portal Introduction Inter Script: Warcraft 2 Warcraft 3 Introduction Aside: Warcraft and Physical Disabilities Aside: Artifacts, Part One Azeroth Bestiary: Dragonhawks He-Orc and the Warlords of Azeroth (an analysis of the artistic inspirations for Warcraft) The Craft of War, Part One (what do I think is wrong with Warcraft?) The Craft of War, Part Two Remaking and Rewriting: Warcraft 1 A Long Road (the making of Warcraft 3 and Reforged) Blood Trail (Blizzard's depictions of colonialism) The Road to Hell (Alliance RoC campaign retrospective) On Thin Ice (Undead RoC campaign retrospective) Bored of the Horde (Horde RoC campaign retrospective) Into the Forest I Go (Reign of Chaos retrospective) The Frozen Throne Introduction A Dream Gone Astray (Night Elf TFT campaign retrospective) Through a Prism of Tears (LGBT representation, Warcraft, and MMOs) Set Back (Alliance TFT campaign retrospective) Incense and Insensibility (how do I think WoW could be fixed?) The Craft of War, Part Three Canon Fire (thoughts on 'headcanon') Death's Dark Shadow (Undead TFT campaign retrospective) The Nine Billionth Name (post script) Cythereal fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Feb 4, 2024 |
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May 7, 2022 18:32
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Fanfic Repository Tales from Another Timeline: Unfinished Dreams Tales from Another Timeline: The Penitent Tales from Another Timeline: The Dragon and the Lion Tales from the Second War: The Games We Play Tales from the Second War: Blood-Dimmed Tides Tales from the Second War: Visions in the Storm Tales from the Second War: The Last King Tales from the Second War: In the Wake of the Storm Tales from the Second War: Fury Tales from the Fourth War: And Their Words to the End of the World Tales from Beyond: Trial of Atonement Tales from the Infinite: Dreams We Conceive Beyond the Farthest Star On the current thread title: Back when the lawsuits started, Chris Metzen made and then deleted this:  Previous thread titles and explanations: Warcraft 1: 'It's like Looking in a Dark Portal' https://twitter.com/stevedanuser/status/936442223050100736 Steve Danuser, the lead writer for WoW, is very fond of his edgy goth fuccboi self-insert who bones Sylvanas. Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness: 'You Think You Don't Want This, But You Do' Blizzard director Jay Allen Brack, when first asked at Blizzcon about doing WoW Classic, told the person asking "You think you want this, but you don't." Warcraft 2: Beyond the Dark Portal: 'The Horde is Here Waiting for You' WoW Lead Designer Ian Hazzikostas, on Alliance players who wanted to play high elves, told them that the Horde is there waiting for them as blood elves. Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos: 'I Feel Like We're Doing Our Jobs' Alex Afrasiabi responding to criticism of Sylvanas Windrunner's writing after Teldrassil: "Any time we get a player base that's divided in their support for a character, I feel like we're doing our jobs. Any time it's one-sided to the point of 'this is clearly the right direction', it's not as interesting." And now, a shrine to people finding out about the setting.  FoolyCharged posted:Impressive. A single update in and I'm already going ".... the gently caress?" Anaxite posted:Zug zug! I mean, oh boy, I've been looking forward to FoolyCharged posted:I have no idea how a company this progressive ran into the legal troubles they did. Bifauxnen posted:Oh cool, a Warcraft LP! I played the very first one back in the day and maybe Warcraft 2 or 3, but I barely remember and never kept up with it. Sounds like it'll be cool to look back on the series as a whole! anilEhilated posted:Okay, that's quite a huge undertaking, looking forward to learn about just how messed up Warcraft has become... Rarity posted:Blizzard why Bifauxnen posted:Oh cool, a new update already! This'll be fun to see what wacky discordant things come up after the human's first episode! BisbyWorl posted:'You know, I'm not exactly the most up to date on WoW lore, I'm sure it can't be thaaaaaa-' Rarity posted:I already know the lore and I'm still going Poil posted:It's all so stupid and terrible my brain is actively rejecting and trying to deny that it exists. t3isukone posted:You know, I thought Overwatch lore was idiotic but I'm almost-almost!-impressed by it just being ungodly boring and offensive instead of...whatever the hell happened here. painedforever posted:... what Fivemarks posted:On one hand, Jesus loving Christ Blizzard. precision posted:i've only just now read the first lore post and i'm already convinced you are just making all this up! Randalor posted:WHAT THE gently caress? dervinosdoom posted:I don't think I like Warcraft anymore Drakenel posted:I think I retroactively hate warcraft. I've never touched WoW (for the better it seems) but... Lynneth posted:I'm sorry, what? farraday posted:I just appreciate that it took a whole sentence before we got to the first retcon in the Warcraft: Orcs and Humans cinematic but Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness can't get past the first word. PurpleXVI posted:I knew WoW had some issues, but this thread has consistently revealed new and harrowing depths to me. Slaan posted:Crazy elf incel? Mindopali posted:I've already lost hope upon playing gothic 3 and the third birthday, quietly accepting that some stories never get the endings and attention they deserve. What's a little more damnation along the way? life_source posted:are you loving kidding me TLM3101 posted:I read all 241 pages and... What the actual hell, Blizzard? As for me? 
Cythereal fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Feb 4, 2024 |
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May 7, 2022 18:32
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Orc 1: This is All the Jailer's Fault I have the GOG version of this game, which does run well on a modern OS but has to run through Dosbox. Figuring out how to record this was a challenge.  The introductory video presents the straightforward premise of the game: the great human kingdom of Azeroth has been built into a paradise by generations of wise kings, supported by the valiant knights of Stormwind Castle and the wise priests of Northshire Abbey. Retcon Alert: 'Azeroth' was later changed to be the name of the entire planet, and 'Stormwind' is the actual name of this kingdom. Most of the human kingdoms of Warcraft could better be described as city-states, consisting of one large city that shares its name with the kingdom, and then a surrounding region of countryside and villages.  But this idyll has been disturbed by the emergence of a vast Orc Horde from the uncharted swamps and jungles to the south and east, an enemy that attacked without warning or mercy, destroying everything in its path.  Riding wolves larger than horses and commanded by warlocks wielding unholy magic, the Orc Horde is poised to destroy this great bastion of humanity.  The human and orc campaigns of Warcraft 1 tell contradictory stories for the most part, and I will be presenting both campaigns in alternating order. As the orcs are the canon victors of Warcraft 1 (though there are elements of the human campaign that are canon to the larger story), I will be starting with the orcs and present their campaign wholly out of character.  The orc briefing screen. 'Blackhand' is the leader of the Horde, I'll talk about him and the Horde at large later.  The orc player character is never named during this game, but later games would give the orc player character from this game the name Orgrim Doomhammer, and he'll go on to be a major figure in the story.  The first mission is as simple as they come: build 6 farms and a barracks in a charming place known as the Swamp of Sorrows. In case you're wondering, the origins of this place's name have never been stated, though it seems to have had this name since before the orcs arrived. It might have something to do with a renegade religious sect of trolls who live in the region who are devoted to a god considered extremely bloodthirsty even by troll standards. These trolls, however, have wisely chosen to not interfere in this game.  Estimated position on the map.  To be blunt, most of this update was spent fighting the interface, which is extremely primitive by modern standards.  The orc not visibly carrying an axe is a peon, the Horde builder unit throughout the entire series. The main lot in life for peons throughout Warcraft is to be abused for comedy, and in 2020 the Horde's newest (at the time of writing) race proved their worth and joined the Horde in part by defeating an attempt by peons to unionize by throwing them a pizza party and giving them meaningless but impressive-sounding titles with no increase in pay or change in working conditions.  The orcs with axes are grunts, a basic melee unit.  Town halls produce peons and serve as the drop-off site for gold and lumber, the two resources in this game. They can also build the roads you see here, structures can only be built if they have access to a road. This is one feature that will never return in future games.  Farms are your supply cap.  In case you were wondering, there is no drag-selecting units and no control groups in this game.  If you want to select multiple units, you have to click a unit, then shift-click others, up to a maximum of 4. Yup, you can only have 4 units selected at once. Also, there is no intuitive right-click action either. You want to move a unit? Press M and then the destination. Want to attack? Press A and then the target.  There are a few human units dotted around the map. These are footmen, who are statistically identical to grunts. There are (well, were) two in this patrol to my three grunts, so the humans die, but not before seriously wounding two of my grunts.  Then another footman comes along and finishes one of the wounded grunts before going down. In a game with a snapper, more responsive UI, I should have been able to use my healthy grunt to tank for the wounded, but that wasn't possible here.  While exploring the map, I'd trained some more peons to harvest lumber and gold, but scorch mark visible at the top of the screen is something most Warcraft fans remember: gold mines exploding when exhausted. In this case, the starting gold mine near your starting position has a very low amount of gold so you have to explore and find other gold mines (and the humans nearby), which is a bit of gameplay design I admire for the first mission. Blizzard wants you to explore, find new resources, and be aggressive rather than turtling in your base. Meanwhile I'm looking to build a barracks to replace the grunt I lost, and the white outline indicates that the barracks location is next to a road and clear so it's good to go.  The barracks does what you'd expect.  The nearest gold mine is to the north, where the footman patrol was. This, unfortunately, means a bit of a hike for our peons.  I could keep exploring if I want, but there's no point to it. I have access to more than enough gold and lumber now to finish the mission.   Work, work.  Small steps, and this mission is nothing storywise, but we've made a fine first step in the story of the Jailer's bid to reach the control center of the afterlife where the concept of death was invented, tested, and created, so he could then use it to drain the living soul of this planet and remake all of reality into a prison of eternal torment so that he could reforge it into an army to stand united against a coming threat from outside reality. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 14:41 on May 15, 2022 |
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May 7, 2022 18:33
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Warcraft: Devolved Elementals and Mutant Robots So, Orcs and Humans. Straightforward, no? No indeed. Today's question is a simple one: what the hell are orcs and humans in Warcraft? This is a Warcraft orc.  Warcraft orcs are devolved descendants of a colossal construct made from elemental fire and earth to combat an eternal, hungry, and sentient jungle on a planet that a race of sentient cosmic robots decided was overly chaotic and needed to be tamed so that life could flourish in a controlled fashion. The elementals were created because this planet was too close to the elemental plane of spirit and so caused life to run out of control, to the detriment of the planet's potential for long-term sustainability, and so a force of primeval destruction was created to check this uncontrolled force of life.  Grond, the miles-tall elemental kaiju that is the original ancestor of the orcs, among other races. Though this elemental being was ultimately destroyed, the energies unleashed during the battle between elemental and plant monster created numerous new types of elemental life, many of which themselves slowly became smaller, weaker, and fleshier. Orcs are the furthest extent of this lineage of elemental devolution at this time. (all of the above is from Warlords of Draenor and Chronicles) This is a Warcraft human of Stormwind, the human kingdom of this game.  The same race of sentient cosmic robots that created the ancestors of the orcs also visited this world, which is also host to a sentient soul growing in the core of the world. One of the races they created to service their design on this planet was a race of ten foot tall giants made of iron and lightning. However, a race of parasitic extradimensional entities implanted into this planet by beings from a cosmic dimension of darkness and chaos were in danger of corrupting that soul within the planet. Although the cosmic robots defeated these parasitic beings and imprisoned most of them, these parasites created an extradimensional sickness that infected and corrupted the iron and lightning giants, turning them into flesh, and these beings in time devolved into what are now known as humans. (Wrath of the Lich King)  An iron vrykul, the original race of automatons that would eventually become humans. They seem to have been meant as security and defense drones for the cosmic robots' operations on Azeroth. I should also note this fact: despite being a race of golems mutated into fleshy creatures by an extradimensional virus, humans in Warcraft were uniformly white until 2020 when the Shadowlands expansion for World of Warcraft added visual options to humans to give them African, Hispanic, and East Asian facial features and skin tones. Many existing minor human characters were then retconned into being visibly not Caucasian. This does not apply to any of the games this LP will be covering or any of the characters we will discuss, and to date no human culture in Warcraft has ever incorporated notable non-European cultural elements.  Just in case you thought I was joking, this is from Blizzcon 2019 hyping up non-white people as new customization options. This is not to say there are no depictions of what could be considered non-European based cultures in Warcraft, but I think we should leave the discussion of how amazingly racist Warcraft is even by fantasy video game standards for another time. Oh, and one last note here: despite orcs being devolved elementals from one planet, and humans mutant robots from another planet, they are in fact capable of interbreeding and having children. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 17:54 on May 19, 2022 |
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May 7, 2022 18:33
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FoolyCharged posted:Impressive. A single update in and I'm already going ".... the gently caress?" Gotta be honest, getting exactly this reaction in various discords when nonchalantly discussing modern Warcraft is what gave me the idea to do this. 
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May 7, 2022 19:07
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Anaxite posted:Zug zug! I mean, oh boy, I've been looking forward to In Warcraft, magic in the environment makes genetics as reactive and malleable as a Fox News anchor's political views. The origins of orcs and humans are actually very straightforward and tame by setting standards.
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May 7, 2022 22:43
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ilmucche posted:I thought orcs came to azeroth from beyond the dark portal because their home was calling apart. That's what my vague memories of the excellent manual for Warcraft 2 are telling me I'll cover this in the lore post accompanying the next orc update. For now, I left it with how the game's introduction framed it.
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May 7, 2022 22:57
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Pyroi posted:... It was announced in 2019. It was added in 2020.
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May 8, 2022 00:05
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tithin posted:What's funny to me is that no one's ask where the thread name's come from yet. Other titles I considered for this LP: This is All the Jailer's Fault (for the moment) - Let's Mock 30 Years of Warcraft! You Don't Think You Want This, But You Do - Let's Mock 30 Years of Warcraft! What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been - Let's Mock 30 Years of Warcraft MRRRRGGGGBLLLE! Let's Mock 30 Years of Warcraft! Giving Creeping A Whole New Meaning - Let's Mock 30 Years of Warcraft!
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May 8, 2022 00:53
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ChaosDragon posted:So question did the Orc and Human origins were explained pre WOW? Or the plot is that the Orc are fleeing from another place to the Human's place? The orcs are from another planet and have arrived on Azeroth via a magical gateway called the Dark Portal, that much is established in the manual. The humans of Azeroth, however, don't know about this. As far as the humans are concerned, the orcs burst out of nowhere from the direction of uncharted swamps and jungles. No one ever saw an orc before the current war began and the humans don't know that the orcs are from another planet. It was one of those very 90s 'mostly a fantasy setting, but also space travel and other planets via magical means' games.
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May 8, 2022 01:43
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anilEhilated posted:...they seriously did this? Would it make it any better if I mentioned that the resolution of that storyline was revealing that the guy attempting to unionize the peons was a power-hungry warlord who wanted to start a revolution of the peons to install him as the new warchief and then institute a reign of terror, so the new batch of little furries were welcomed into the Horde for preventing a peasant revolt and civil war?
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May 8, 2022 14:40
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Azzur posted:I'm here, giving Cythereal my full support and hoping to see some magic happen! Glad to have you! I really enjoyed your LPs! As it happens, while my plan is to mostly keep to a weekly update schedule, at least the next update will happen well before then because Human 1 is also very short. Regarding lore post plans, I have firm plans for lore topics to overview for a while, but after a certain point I intend to open the floor for people to suggest things they think they want to know more about.
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May 8, 2022 18:50
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Recording Human 1 was very short, so that's going to go up earlier than planned, probably within the next few days, and I think it's safe to say that anyone who hasn't been on discord or PMs with me discussing this project is going to be rather surprised about how I'm going to handle this and what the accompanying lore post is going to cover. My general plan is to do updates at least once a week, with the potential to be more often if the mood and inspiration strikes me. GhostStalker posted:Now this I did not know, which makes sense since I parachuted out of keeping up with Warcraft lore around the time Battle for Azeroth was heating up and Sylvanas had become Warchief (and of course would subsequently lose that position because she was becoming too “evil” especially after Garrosh and Blizzard has to make the Horde continue to be “morally ambiguous” so that they don’t lose the players who would be turned off by genocide and the like that they would be committing lore wise (and trying not to pander to those who would absolutely play the Horde because of it)). I didn’t even know that particular race existed, and I was glad not to know until now… In the interests of disclosure, I mostly stopped playing WoW during Battle for Azeroth in favor of checking out this obscure little game called Final Fantasy 14 that my friends wouldn't stop raving about. I might not have ever touched Shadowlands had a family member not bought the expansion for my birthday, not realizing I'd largely dropped the game. I still follow the game pretty closely (in large part because Final Fantasy 14 drove me away pretty drat hard), but I'm very pessimistic about Dragonflight. WoW explicitly called what happened to my favorite race in the whole setting an act of genocide, and this after years of defanging them - but that's a tale for Warcraft 3.
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May 8, 2022 23:35
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GhostStalker posted:If I remember correctly from Azzur’s LP, your favorite race was the Blood Elves? After all the retcons, I must say I’m somewhat curious about how Blizzard hosed it up even more. Night Elves. And. Uh.  How about we not talk about this one again for a while? For those unaware of what Night Elves are or what that official Blizzard artwork is depicting, we'll talk about this in Warcraft 3, assuming the LP gets there.
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May 9, 2022 01:35
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SIGSEGV posted:Also, how are you going to handle the stupid poo poo in WoW that happens after all this? We still need to see it after all. I may be depressed and consumed with regret and self-loathing, but I'm not that depressed and consumed with regret and self-loathing. Was LPing Star Trek Online not punishment enough for my sins? Cythereal fucked around with this message at 02:03 on May 9, 2022 |
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May 9, 2022 01:53
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Siegkrow posted:Let Cyth introduce enough concepts and I'll help out along the way. This. As I said, I'll probably post the next update and attendant lore update in another day or two, and I'll be explicitly discussing some WoW-era lore. There's a lot of games to get through and a lot of stuff to talk about, so please be patient y'all. 
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May 9, 2022 03:05
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Okay, gently caress it, time to throw another torch in. I promise that future updates won't happen this quickly, but I was really bored this weekend.
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May 9, 2022 12:26
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Human 1: Non-Canon I need to explain a few things ahead of this post, so please bear with me. The human campaign of Warcraft 1 is mostly not canon, though a few specific events are. These events, which I'll call attention to when they happen, occurred despite the orcs winning the war. The human PC of Warcraft 1 is also non-canon, and for that matter has never been established as a discrete character at all. The role of human leadership in Warcraft 1 is split in the story between King Llane Wrynn, and a knight commander named Anduin Lothar. As we'll eventually see, however, the PC in the human campaign is very explicitly not either one of these characters. Faced with the fact that this campaign is non-canon in general, and that the player character has no name or identity, I've elected to indulge myself with a more narrative approach to playing out the human campaign of WC1. And since Stormwind as a fictional culture, history, and society is the literary equivalent of a dollop of miracle whip smeared across a slice of uncolored starch that cannot legally be advertised as bread in some countries, I've felt the need to further invent a few things for the viewpoint human character I've created. I'm even going to contradict one thing the game does establish about the player character. If you don't care for this approach, feel free to skip the human updates for the most part. After Warcraft 1, Blizzard will switch to a much more tightly interwoven narrative structure for the series with far less room for interpretation.   It's over. It's finally over. Would that I could let that be so. Who are you?! How did you get in here?! My name is Validormi, and I am a dragon of the Bronze Dragonflight. That doesn't mean anything to me. No, I don't suppose it does. Isidora Turan. Queen of Stormwind. Vanquisher of the Horde. None of this, unfortunately, should have come to pass. Explain. You were meant to die six years ago in Boralus after making several poorly chosen remarks to a pair of Kul Tiran marines while heavily inebriated. Your career should have met a premature end from a broken bottle of mead to the neck. Instead an out of control carriage struck you in the street and put you in the hospital for a month. Far more subtle than usual for Murozond's agents, credit where it's due. ...I think I understand less now than I did before you showed up. The Horde was meant to win this war. Your survival, and victory here six years later, has upset a great many affairs. If you're an ally of the orcs, then you have made a very poor choice of castle balconies to appear on. My allegiance lies with my Aspect and Azeroth herself, not with any mortal power. This is merely a courtesy to assure you that rectifying this timeline is nothing personal. Rectifying the timeline? Rectifying what? What possible things have I somehow broken by saving my people? Hmmm. Perhaps we should start by going over your entrance to this war. Your father was the last duke of Northern Redridge, the region better known as the Burning Steppes. King Baraden offered a duchy to any lord who could reestablish a foothold in the region, and your grandfather took up that challenge. Under his leadership, and your father's, the tentative colony began to prosper. Embershire, yes. Then the orcs appeared, erased that little dream from history, and left me the last of House Turan. Between your family's closeness with House Wrynn and your military experience on the Steppes, King Llane offered you a high command. Orcs were beginning to make incursions into the heartlands. I remember. Please don't throw me off the balcony, your majesty. At least not before I finish this account. Then get on with it. Estimated position.  Human 1 is actually almost identical to Orc 1. We have exactly the same objectives, resources, and hostiles on the map. All human units and structures so far are identical to their orc counterparts, differences between the factions won't appear for some time yet. We have a town hall, a farm, a peasant (worker), and three footmen (melee units).  Like orc peons, human peasants are the Alliance's worker unit throughout the series. Unlike peons, they are generally not subjected to abuse for laughs. At most they're involved in occasional Monty Python references.  Footmen are likewise the iconic Alliance infantry unit of the series, and in this game are completely identical to orc grunts.  This whole 'battle' was nothing. Without any gold mines in sight, I sent the squad out to survey the region. You didn't have maps of the area? Ask me about the Quartermaster Corps some time. Better yet, don't. The orc patrols are a lot more thinly scattered than the humans were in Orc 1, at least where I went exploring.  ...It took your soldiers that long to find a gold mine thirty feet from the town hall. I was not pleased with the quality of our scouts, no. Couldn't you have just... gotten up and looked out a window? I was looking at a map table and scouting reports, I only knew what was out there if the scouts called it in. Oh. Right. The broken leg. The healers kept me from dying in the street from that carriage you mentioned. But yes, now that you've so kindly mentioned it, I do in fact need this cane to walk anywhere without undue pain, when I'm not beating uninvited guests around the head with it. So yes, I stay in my center of operations and lead from behind a desk and set of charts. Alas, Robert. What did him dying here change? That isn't what we agreed to discuss. As in Orc 1, our starting mine doesn't have enough gold to complete the mission so I needed to find another. With that done, this mission is basically over.  Orc architecture changed dramatically from WC1 to WC2, but the design of the humans has stayed remarkably consistent.   I will never understand why gold mines do that. Any fancy dragon explanations? The world is just funny like that, I'm afraid. A bit of mining the new site later, and we're done.  So tell me, dragon, what's so wrong with this? You earned some genuine trust from King Llane and the rest of Stormwind's army. By the end of this little skirmish, you weren't just that strange noblewoman from the Steppes. You'd earned some legitimacy, however slight, with Stormwind's leadership. And what, was Llane meant to live through this war? Not at all. What was not intended was for him to have a successor.
Cythereal fucked around with this message at 14:45 on May 15, 2022 |
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May 9, 2022 12:28
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All Time Cops are Bastards In case you have no idea what was happening in the previous post, this... may not actually clear anything up for you, but I'll try. Shortly before his retirement, Chris Metzen - more or less the father of Blizzard Entertainment and still held in high regard for his visible passion for their games and for not currently being known as a sexual predator - declared that one of his greatest regrets with writing Warcraft was making dragons sentient beings instead of just big lizards. While he was probably referring to a gameplay mechanic in Warcraft 2 being (TW: sexual violence) that one side builds rape factories where sex slaves are continually forced to produce children who are mind-wiped, magically enslaved, and rapidly artificially aged to be hurled into battle, Metzen also later used dragons to introduce time travel to the Warcraft setting with World of Warcraft. If any of this sounds familiar to those only casually acquainted with Warcraft, it's because the next WoW expansion is centered on the dragons in one of many moves in the last few years that could be interpreted as a giant middle finger to Chris Metzen. Far better writers than Blizzard have struggled with writing time travel in their stories, and much like J. K. Rowling's approach to writing time travel, even their limited way of using it at first probably would have been fine if just left as a brief plot device or gag (in this case, letting players in future games experience events of past games). Inevitably, players crying out 'Well if time travel exists then why don't good time travelers prevent horrible tragedies?' Blizzard, not being up to tangling this kind of extremely thorny metaphysical question, elected instead to institute an organization of time cops whose sole job is to enforce the status quo whether it makes sense or not and put them front and center in some of the strangest storylines in Warcraft. Folks, meet the Bronze Dragonflight.  Five probably irrelevant characters named Alexstrasza, Ysera, Nozdormu, Malygos, and Neltharion face one of the lead candidates for the final boss of WoW’s upcoming expansion. Back when the cosmic space robots arrived on Azeroth and were ordering the planet, they noticed a bunch of big, smart, magically powerful winged lizards flying around. Quite a lot of them, in fact. Primordial Azeroth seems to have been something on the order of the ancient ecosystem of the modern American Godzilla movies, and so wizard van that I’m actually kind of surprised that Blizzard’s never set a game or WoW expansion here/then. Five of these dragons chose, or were chosen (it's been said both ways), to become lieutenants of the cosmic space robots. Each of these dragons were empowered by one particular space robot with a portion of their power, and collectively they were called the Aspects. The Aspects' charge was, aside from protecting Azeroth in general, to prevent a specific prophesied event called the Hour of Twilight. Let's acknowledge that the Hour of Twilight ended up being possible mostly because of the Aspects and move discreetly along. (this is all from vanilla World of Warcraft)  Nozdormu the Timeless, father and lord of the Bronze Dragonflight One of these five was Norzdormu, and he was given power over time itself. In the moment of his empowering, he foresaw that one day he would go insane, become a time terrorist trying to shatter linear time, and ultimately be killed by five player characters empowered by his own time cop self in a desolate wasteland at the end of time. (Murozond is from Cataclysm)  Murozond, Nozdormu's evil future self who his good past self would help some player characters kill as part of a storyline that was actually kind of cool in a FF14-style insane anime way but most people disregard because it was part of a bigger story that was really loving weird and generally despised. The other notable bronze dragon is Chronormu, better known to players as Chromie, but not for reasons that merit substantial discussion in this post. I’ll discuss her in detail later when I explore Warcraft’s relationship with LGBT issues. Aside from that, the bronze dragons' main purpose in Warcraft has been to allow player characters in WoW to revisit moments from the game's backstory, and to assert authorial fiat about events. We know that there's a bunch of stable alternate timelines that they let exist, but certain events prompt them to fix it (mostly caused by their own future selves under Murozond's command). In fact, one of these has already been directly relevant to Warcraft 1: the time terrorists tried to sabotage the opening of the Dark Portal, kill a fellow named Medivh who we'll talk about in due time, and prevent the Horde from reaching Azeroth. Alliance players were forced to go along with this, too, because the game's writers, using the Bronze Flight as their mouthpiece, asserted that had the Horde never come to Azeroth, the kingdoms of the Alliance would have turned on one another in civil war without an external enemy to unite against and thereby doom the world (The Burning Crusade). This detail, written into the setting back in 2007, was the first and one of the most explicit condemnations of peace as weakness that destroys the world by Warcraft writers. Eternal, genocidal hellwar, according to Blizzard's writing of the setting, actually makes both sides stronger and gives them the strength to save the world. If this sounds more than a little fascist, well. Yes, this is a classic element of fascist philosophy, that civilizations are defined by their wars and struggles, which make them stronger. Peace makes you weak and soft. Peace would destroy the world. Take that thought with you. Warcraft as a setting nakedly espouses fascist philosophy and dogma as a significant element of the setting and writing themes. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 17:55 on May 19, 2022 |
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May 9, 2022 12:28
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PurpleXVI posted:Oh, I can't wait for that one. I'm sure it'll be super enlightened and not loving weird at all. You'd be surprised, actually. It's not what I'd call good about representation, but it's actually better than most big-name franchises about LGBT representation.
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May 9, 2022 13:50
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Folks familiar with Warcraft 2 may recall that the Horde can build 'dragon roosts' which produce dragons for the Horde to use as units, and the 'dragon roost' is a red dragon visibly chained down. Yeah, that's (TW for the sensitive) a fully sentient woman chained to the ground and forced to continually have children whose incubation is magically sped up, then are enslaved and aged up into the usable unit the moment they hatch.
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May 9, 2022 14:02
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Someone asked me about this in PMs, so I'll explain some notes publicly about the Human 1 update regarding what is and is not canon so far. What is canon: 1. In the human campaign, the PC becomes king of Stormwind at the end of the game, following King Llane's death. 2. The region WoW vets know as the Burning Steppes used to be Stormwind territory until the Dark Iron clan of dwarves had a little whoopsie about 250 years prior to the Warcraft games. 3. There is a major human city named Boralus, albeit I probably won't have cause to talk about it much again until Warcraft 2. It's the capital city of another human kingdom. What is not canon: 1. The PC of the human campaign being a woman. Yeah, no, I've had my fill of white dudes with short brown hair as the human PC is depicted to be, so out with that. 2. That there was ever an attempt by Stormwind to resettle the Burning Steppes. We actually know very little about Stormwind's history before the events of WC1, so I decided this was a more interesting background than just making her from one of the established Stormwind-controlled towns. 3. The Bronze Dragonflight having any involvement past the opening of the Dark Portal I talked about. I'm presenting this human campaign as an alternate timeline, in case anyone didn't grasp that, and I'm not going to be terribly fussy about the details except when I specifically note otherwise. I want to show off the human campaign, and I want to give a female character a leading presence in some fashion, however limited, before Warcraft 3.
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May 9, 2022 18:32
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GiantRockFromSpace posted:...the weird thing is, time cops are a common fixture in any kind of media with time travel, but writers are usually intelligent enough to either a) make them the bad guys or b) show them actually protecting the timeline from external threats. Hell, in some media time travelling to fix stuff isn't even a crime, only causing disasters is! In theory, B is what they spend most of their time doing (in WoW, we don't see actual bronze dragons until WC3 and the whole notion of Aspects and time travel wasn't a thing until WoW). The problem is that Blizzard never really established the stakes of the Bronzes vs the Infinites, and what makes a timeline change something the Bronzes have to correct versus any of the many stable alternate timelines that the writers have declared exist. And we know that time travel can be permitted, I'll discuss the War of the Ancients in WC3. We fundamentally don't know what the Infinites are actually trying to accomplish, only a series of crisis points that I'll call attention to as we get to them in the series. I have my own theory as to what the idea is supposed to be, which I'm putting to work in spinning this narrative for a timeline where the humans won WC1 (because the OC, someone with the talent and ability to lead Stormwind to victory, died six years previously in the canon timeline), but that's purely me bullshitting and trying to have some fun. I did say in the OP of the thread that this thread will mostly not be about that, though. This writing a narrative with an alternate timeline is going to be confined to the human campaign of WC1.
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May 9, 2022 20:14
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GhostStalker posted:Also, did you all but isekai your Human protag, albeit with a runaway carriage rather than Truck-kun? Please speak English if you want me to understand what you're asking. I genuinely have no idea what you're saying. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 21:17 on May 9, 2022 |
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May 9, 2022 21:15
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For those unacquainted with me: do not ever assume I will get a reference to anime. I do not like anime, I do not like anime styled games (for the most part, I enjoyed Final Fantasy 14 prior to the Endwalker expansion), I know nothing about anime culture and like to keep it that way, and what knowledge I have of Japanese language does not involve anime vocabulary. So no, there was no being transported to another world. My notion for what happened is this: 1. In the canon timeline, this character did exist. She died in a drunken bar fight before the events of WC1. 2. An agent of the Infinite Dragonflight arranged for her to be hit by a carriage before she could reach that bar, crippling her but preventing her from dying when she should have. 3. As a result of her surviving where she shouldn't have, she was in a position to become the player character for the human campaign of WC1, which she proceeded to win. 4. A time cop has shown up on her doorstep in alarm that this has become a dangerously unstable timeline.
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May 9, 2022 21:24
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Phrosphor posted:Warcraft everybody! This was what I was alluding to. Rather than sweep this under the rug, there is an actual dungeon(s?) in the World of Warcraft that nod to this particular event. Hoo boy will we get to that in WC2. Fun fact: the lore threads in the WoW subforum on SA have for years strongly discouraged talking about dragons because of the alarming frequency with which sexual violence comes up. And then there's this truly baffling incident.  One lore subject on the docket is Warcraft's relationship with interracial relationships, which I may combine with the LGBT discussion, and this particular character is honestly one of my top five or so strangest little slices of Warcraft. If you know who this character is, please don't spoil it.
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May 11, 2022 01:28
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Well, heading this off is one way to get me to post the next update early. Orc 2: Into Lands Uncharted  If you're like me (God help you), you're probably confused about where this mission is taking place. 'The Borderlands' have never been named again in Warcraft.  If I had to guess, though, this mission takes place in the area better known as Deadwind Pass, a mountain pass between the Swamp of Sorrows and Stormwind controlled territory. Also a haunted, almost lifeless wasteland courtesy of Azeroth's first necromancer causing so much death and destruction in the region that in the wake of her rampage ley lines across the continent were warped and rerouted into the area about a thousand years before this game.  Estimated position relative to Orc 1.  We have a new unit to go along with the new mission! Silly me was actually expecting a spearman unit to be tankier than the grunts - call it a pet peeve of mine how rarely spear/shield in heavy armor gets depicted in fantasy, I think hoplites are cool. What spearmen actually turn out to be is a fast, lightly armored ranged unit.  This time I properly scout around the starting position for a gold mine. There may not be any fog of war in this game, but vision ranges are tiny. Doubly unfortunate considering how clunky the UI is and how slow units are.  THE PALE DOGS APPROACH! In the first mission, the enemy AI was completely passive. Not so here, and I assume for the rest of the game. Humans will regularly dribble in one or two units at a time to the base - never enough force to actually threaten me, but enough to cause some damage if I send all my troops out. Being used to drag-selecting and hotkeyed control groups, this mission irritated me. I maintain that the UI is a bigger danger than the AI.  And another. I'm chalking this up to learning the game still, along with learning how many workers I need distributed in what proportions.  An interesting quirk of the AI, if an enemy unit catches sight of a worker and they're not currently being hurt by your units, they'll drop their current target to beeline for your worker. Who will in turn drop what they're doing and run away - and no, they don't automatically go back to working, you have to manually round them up.  While scouting the map, I learn that the humans have a new unit, too. Archers appear to be completely identical to spearmen, and I find their presence in this game interesting: I do believe this is the last time in the RTS series we see humans doing ranged combat without magic. That job is covered by elves in WC2, and dwarves in WC3. Humans in WoW couldn't be hunters (the only non-magical ranged combat class in the game) until the third expansion.  To go with our new unit is a new building. The lumber mill is not in fact a drop point for lumber. Instead, the mill unlocks spearmen for building at the barracks and holds attack strength upgrades for them. Still no upgrades for grunts, which I think is an interesting choice in terms of design.  I do approve of the frequency of small attacks, though, as a game design choice. This mission will teach you to keep a defensive force at home (if there are defensive structures in this game I haven't seen them yet), forcing you to divide your forces between offense and defense. A good RTS lesson, if somewhat hamstrung by the primitive UI.  Oh hey another gold mine, I'm sure the starting mine will collapse sooner or later.  I eventually decide to leave the grunts at home for defense and go marauding with a squad of spearmen. More than anything it's their speed that recommends them to me. Grunts and footmen are slow. I'm assuming that there's a barracks somewhere out here sending these attacks.  Enough attacks have dinged my barracks enough to set it on fire! Fortunately, per series tradition, workers can repair buildings for a pittance of resources.  The rest of the mission is just roaming about killing humans with my spear squad while my grunts defend the base.  As it turns out, there is no barracks and I'm wondering if there was just a pre-set population of human units slowly trickling into the base or whether the attacks came from off-map for the specific purpose. We're still firmly in training wheels mode either way, it seems: unless you just don't build more units, ever, none of the attacks will do enough damage to cause you any problems and you can easily replace all the losses you suffer.  A simple enough affair, all told. Still, this mission has given me some concern that managing this UI as difficulty presumably escalates in the future will be something of an ask. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 14:46 on May 15, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 12:07
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Here Corrupts the Noble Savage We know what the orcs are now. So how did they get to Azeroth? The answer begins on the planet Draenor.  Draenor at the height of the orcs' power about 200 years prior to Warcraft 1, delineated by each clan's holdings. We know Draenor has at least one other continent, but this is the only portion of Draenor players have ever seen. The orcs, perhaps appropriately for devolved elementals born of earth and fire, have never been seafarers. The orcs emerged in the shadow of two successive empires that ruled over this land: the theocratic Apexis Empire of the arrakoa which collapsed in civil war, then the sorcerer-kings of the Gorian Empire who the previously enslaved orcs overthrew in a cataclysmic war involving magical WMDs of all stripes. Rather than form an empire themselves in the wake of the ogre war, the orcs scattered and spread out into a clan based structure with each clan lead by a chieftain, and settled on an Iron Age level of technology - orcs may be decentralized, but they're not stupid. The orc clans bickered and vied for dominance, but only two of them concern us during this update, the Blackrock and Shadowmoon clans. (the above is from Warlords of Draenor and Chronicles) There's not much else to talk about : if you're familiar with the term 'noble savage' in all its patronizingly racist glory, you know what we're dealing with. If there's a silver lining to the depiction of the orcs, it's that they're not based heavily enough on any real world culture to come across to most people as racist beyond that point. We're a long way from Tolkien's work, or Warhammer's hooligans. Instead, the orcs of Warcraft are a bland admixture of influences from the classics: the Mongol Empire, the Vikings, and the Germanic tribes of the Roman era, with a dash of influence here and there from Celtic and Native American tribes, all refined into a bland and inoffensive barbarian horde who scream a lot about honor. Warcraft 3 will eventually add a dash of feudal Japan because someone had a fetish for blind samurai with back banners and nodachis. One notable feature to be aware of: 'shamanism' was the religion of the orcs at this time. In Warcraft, 'shamanism' has a distinct meaning: the worship of elemental spirits. As Warcraft includes Spirit as an elemental plane, borrowed from Eastern spirituality, this also includes worship of one's ancestors. How this jives with Warcraft's very well established afterlife and mechanisms for how death works has never been clarified. (Warcraft 3) And everything was basically fine until blue space goats turned up.  In 2005, the Chinese government told Blizzard that if they went ahead with their plan to add a race of anthropomorphic panda bears to the game as the Alliance's first new playable race in WoW's first expansion, the government would no longer let the game be sold or played in China. The Chinese government would walk back this decision five years later, but by then one of the series' more dramatic retcons was an entrenched part of the setting. To keep it brief, the draenei are from yet another planet, Argus, and their species is more properly known as the eredar. The eredar were a race of immense magical ability who prized knowledge, wisdom, and enlightenment above all else - everything we've seen of the original eredar civilization suggests a strong influence from Classical Greece culturally and aesthetically. This magical talent, and fearless pursuit of knowledge, drew an interstellar, interdimensional army of demons to Argus known as the Burning Legion. Most of the eredar were subverted or died, but a small number fled their doomed world in interdimensional starships with the aid of extraplanar beings of the Light (for now, think of the Light as a generic holy power) called the Naaru. These renegades called themselves the 'draenei' or 'exiled ones' and fled across the stars, perpetually hunted by the Legion. Eventually, the draenei made it to the planet they would name Draenor, about 200 years prior to the events of Warcraft. Yes, none of the native civilizations ever apparently named the planet, go with it. The draenei settled on Draenor in lands not currently claimed by the orcs, ogres, or arrakoa, and for a time existed in an uneasy peace with the orcs, broken by occasional skirmishes. The draenei, however, neglected to mention to the locals that they were being hunted by the Burning Legion. And after a century without any sign of demons, the draenei let down their guard and thought they'd eluded the Legion. (The Burning Crusade)  For as important as they are to Warcraft's backstory, and as popular as they are with Alliance players - one of the most popular in WoW behind the humans and elves - the draenei and eredar have gone on to play surprisingly small roles in the games themselves, even in expansions set on Draenor itself, pre-and-post-whoopsie. Everything started to go wrong on Draenor when the chief of the Shadowmoon Clan started to hear his dead wife talking to him. This was nothing unusual, as the Shadowmoon were a clan of mystics who delved deep into the spiritual side of shamanism, even developing benign forms of necromancy. What was unusual was that she was telling him to kill people.  Keep Ner'zhul in mind. In the hotly contested race for the title of 'Person Who hosed Things Up The Most For Everyone In Warcraft Who Isn't Literally A Demon Or Some Such,' Ner'zhul is a very strong contender. As you may have guessed, the being posing as Ner'zhul's wife was in fact a demon. An eredar known as Kil'Jaeden the Deceiver.  Not quite Space Satan, but he's the most commonly seen stand-in for his boss. Kil'Jaeden used Ner'zhul as a lever to begin to unite the orcs and turn them against the draenei. And when the draenei showed every sign of winning the war, Kil'Jaeden offered Ner'zhul more and more magical power even as it crossed the line into unholy magic. But, hey, surely trusting your dead wife as she's teaching you magic to rip peoples' souls out and starting a race war between two civilizations is a thing good guys do, right? Ner'zhul, at this point, had started to figure out that maybe all of this had been a bad idea.  Gul'dan, going neck and neck with Ner'zhul for that most dubious of titles in Warcraft. But Ner'zhul's apprentice, Gul'dan, met Kil'Jaeden and said hell yes I want to be part of a demonic army conquering the stars. Gul'dan deposed Ner'zhul, formed an organization of like-minded warlocks he called the Shadow Council, and picked the warchief of the Blackrock clan to lead the Horde. For good measure, Gul'dan then introduced the orcs to another demon named Mannoroth, who offered the orcs the chance to drink his blood and gain immense power. Everyone who didn't proceed to buttchug demon blood was killed and the modern Orcish Horde was born. They promptly tried to completely genocide every uncorrupted sentient being left on Draenor while Kil'Jaeden ordered Gul'dan to begin construction of a magical gateway that would become known as the Dark Portal. Taking Draenor, you see, wasn't the Burning Legion's real objective. It was nice, and the orcs would be welcome footsoldiers, but even finishing off the draenei was a secondary objective. Their real goal was on the planet Azeroth, a planet the Burning Legion had already been to once before. (minus the draenei, this is more Warcraft 3) One last person to meet in this post, though. Blackhand, Warchief of the Horde.  Oh, one detail I forgot: green skin means an orc who has drunk Mannoroth's blood or is directly descended from orcs who did so - the natural orc skin tones are various shades of brown, grey, and black. Color coded for your convenience! - this is from The Burning Crusade Blackhand was Chieftain of the Blackrock Clan when all this started - the largest of all the orc clans - and one of the first to drink Mannoroth's blood. Blackhand was known as a cruel, vain, egotistical tyrant, but also as an able strategist and leader who commanded the respect of his soldiers. Gul'dan found Blackhand a compliant puppet to lead the Horde, and as of the start of Warcraft 1, Blackhand is the warchief of the Horde. For the orc campaign, he's the player character's boss. For the human campaign, he's your arch-enemy (even if Gul'dan is the bigger threat behind the scenes). Spoiler alert: Orgrim Doomhammer overthrows Blackhand as Warchief and takes control of the Horde, and that's almost the end of Blackhand's story as established in Warcraft 2. More recent lore (from Chronicles and Warlords of Draenor) has begun to shade in Blackhand's character beyond being a cruel but vain warlord no one's unhappy to see go. In his more recent depictions, Blackhand is unusually comfortable with numbers and paperwork for an orc, with a great talent for organization and logistics. These qualities are what lead to his elevation as Warchief, more than his strategic or martial skill: compared to other warlords we'll get to know like Grom Hellscream, Kilrogg Deadeye, and Cho'Gall, what made Blackhand and his clan special were that they could put more, better trained, better equipped men in the field than any other, and operate more effectively as a unified army on bigger scales than any other clan in Draenor. In an alternate timeline where time travelers gave the orc clans advanced technology from the future, Blackhand was quick to realize and embrace the potential of guns, tanks, artillery, and trains. Just one last question to ponder, then. Who was responsible for the First War? Blackhand lead the Horde through the Dark Portal on its campaign of conquest, but he was manipulated by the warlock Gul'dan. (Warcraft 1) Gul'dan, though, was ultimately just a servant of Kil'Jaeden the Deceiver. (Warcraft 3) Except that's not the answer, either. Kil'Jaeden, and indeed all of the Burning Legion, were themselves being manipulated by another being named Mal'Ganis, leader of what the Burning Legion thought were a race of demons known as Dreadlords but were in fact spies from the afterlife who engineered the rise of the Burning Legion to begin with. (here on out is Shadowlands) And Mal'Ganis and the dreadlords served the Eternal One known as Sire Denathrius, lord and master of the afterlife of Revendreth where the souls of the greatest sinners were sent to be scourged in a final chance at redemption lest they be completely destroyed or consigned to the inescapable prison for irredeemable souls known as the Maw. And Sire Denathrius was just a servant to Zovaal the Jailer, the fallen judge of the dead and the Maw's greatest prisoner for his rebellion against the First Ones. And Zovaal's goal was to seize control of the fundamental machinery of every plane of existence so he could turn all of existence into one realm of endless torment and domination so that it could all stand united against a greater threat to come. Confused? I made a chart. Oh, and for future reference, the Horde of this period is known as the Old Horde. Here, for easy reference with the other Hordes from throughout Warcraft. The Horde The Old Horde The Dark Horde The Mongrel Horde The True Horde The Fel Horde The Iron Horde The Fel Iron Horde One of these never made it past the concept art stage and wasn't actually in a game. See if you can guess which! Cythereal fucked around with this message at 17:58 on May 19, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 12:09
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PurpleXVI posted:Also wait, if all the surviving Draenei got genocided on Draenor, how did some of them end up on Azeroth later? Key word: "tried." What Blizzard ultimately went with is that the elements of the Horde that stayed behind on Draenor while Blackhand took the Blackrock Clan through the Dark Portal were actively engaged in attempting to exterminate the rest of Draenor's resident races - the draenei, the ogres, the arrakoa, the gronn, and so on and so forth. They didn't do a very good job of it, though, and the Burning Legion didn't give them much help because they regarded Azeroth as the primary theater of this war. UPDATE NEAR BOTTOM OF PREVIOUS PAGE
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May 11, 2022 13:07
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Tenebrais posted:Christ, that is a lot of layers of successive "but the real bad guy is" that I never knew existed. If it helps, everything past Kil'Jaeden was the invention of one single WoW expansion. Up until Shadowlands, the Dreadlords were indeed explicitly just another race of demons, playing to the 'evil darkness and shadow' part of the demon spectrum rather than hellfire and brimstone.
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May 11, 2022 13:22
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AtomikKrab posted:Tried is difficult when the outside is getting direct help from the "Light" which canonically in warcraft terms can grant the ability to just mass loving rez people, repeatedly by injecting hot liquid energy into their veins or something. Actually there are so many dang ways to escape death in Warcraft verse I am never surprised when someone comes back around If nothing else the time dragons from either camp of time dragons can just yeet someone into the timeline as needed. One clarification: the time dragons can't interfere with anything going on on other planets. They can only impact events on Azeroth itself.
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May 11, 2022 14:29
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GhostStalker posted:Weren’t the Dreadlords retconned in the same “lore update” preceding the Draenei becoming a playable race? I’ll let you get to that retcon yourself when you feel like dropping it in, but I seem to remember this was one of the first times Metzen had to go “yeah, my bad” when some Warcraft community lore dudes called him out on a retcon caused plot hole. That moment involved a retcon involving the Dreadlords, and is from The Burning Crusade, WoW's first expansion. Making them beings from the afterlife sent to infiltrate and sabotage the other powers of the cosmos to engineer events for the benefit of the Jailer is from Shadowlands. The next lore update is... probably going to be less  inducing, and probably much shorter in general, because much less has been written about human history in Warcraft. No joke, there's about a thousand years of history with humans that's almost completely blank, which is one reason I felt relatively comfortable introducing the character of Isidora and giving her background some details never present in the actual games or books.
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May 11, 2022 14:47
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SoundwaveAU posted:Tichondrius is the leader of the Dreadlords, not Mal'Ganis. Shadowlands does posit that Mal'Ganis is the real leader of the Dreadlords, yes, or at least the one who directly answered to Denathrius. If you want to put more thought into this than Blizzard did, you could say something like Tichondrius was the head Dreadlord representative to the Burning Legion while Mal'Ganis talked to their real boss, or Mal'Ganis was promoted and Tichondrius kicked down the hierarchy at some point between WC3 and Shadowlands, but nothing like that was ever stated. Just that Mal'Ganis is the head Dreadlord in that expansion.
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May 11, 2022 17:05
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disposablewords posted:Okay, but... but... Sargeras? When I finally checked out on WOW's changes to the lore, roughly around when the Naaru were introduced, Sargeras was still the big bad behind so much. Or at least I hadn't heard otherwise. How is he not even in that list of successive "true villains behind this other true villain" at any stage...? The Burning Legion is a lore update on the outline. I'll get to it in due time. Other lore topics on the docket for the Warcraft 1 phase of the LP, if it gives people an idea of what to expect: Human history The Titans General Cosmology The Burning Legion The Void Ogres Medivh and company Magic 101 LGBT representation There's going to be lots more gameplay updates than that, so probably in five or six more updates I intend to open the floor for people to request lore posts.
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May 11, 2022 17:47
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disposablewords posted:Entirely fair. I'm just really confused how he's completely absent from this chain of Real True Villains when he was being dangled over everyone's heads since the manual of WC2. God, loving Warcraft lore... He could have been on that chain as Kil'Jaeden's boss, but I felt putting the Legion on there twice with just their internal chain of command was redundant and I elected to keep KJ the Legion's representative. Nebakenezzer posted:Semi-serious question: are these dudes the Protoss? Blizzard loves to joke about this - and they have a very similar bronze-with-floating-crystals aesthetic - but thematically you'd be better served by jumping fandoms and calling them the Craftworld Eldar or the Post-Human Republic or some such. I'll make a more detailed lore post about them in the future, but probably not in Warcraft 1.
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May 11, 2022 17:54
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MShadowy posted:Seems more like parallel development to me, arising out of laziness. Building a bigger Bad Guy is an easy way to escalate the plot, and having the new villain be the old ones boss/manager/whatever is a similarly low effort way to integrate them into the plot. Personally, if I had to guess? The Jailer and just about everything to do with the afterlife comes from the Shadowlands expansion, the first WoW expansion that Chris Metzen had absolutely zero involvement with. Chris Metzen's status as creative lead was succeeded by a man named Steve Danuser, and anyone who recognizes the joke in this thread's title has probably guessed that I have a very low opinion of Danuser as a writer. There's been a lot of changes, retcons, and recontextualizations to lore and characters in WoW following Danuser's ascent to the position, and I ascribe most of them to Danuser trying to put his own stamp on Warcraft now that Metzen is retired from Blizzard. Sargeras was definitely the overwhelming big villain of Warcraft under Chris Metzen's tenure, but Steve Danuser has different ideas. In particular Danuser has shown himself to be a fan of obscuring information from players and readers by presenting lore from the perspective of what are acknowledged to be unreliable narrators, and by making characters in-setting astonishingly incurious about their world and events that are happening. Danuser seems to be a storyteller partial to the "You'll never guess what happens next!" vein, at least he aspires to be so - he's been known to insist that players have no idea what's going to happen when in fact players overwhelmingly guessed exactly what would happen. And when players are wrong about things Danuser is hinting at, it tends to be because of poo poo coming out of left field that either were not hinted at or just flatly contradict how certain characters or lore notions had been established.
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May 11, 2022 19:46
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Minor Lore Bit: Warcraft and Physical Disabilities Someone asked me on discord about the OC I wrote for the human campaign, and specifically that I wrote her as physically disabled, and was curious about how Warcraft has represented physically disabled characters, so I thought this thread might find it of interest. Warcraft does recognize people with physical disabilities. Healing magic in Warcraft is as vaguely defined as it is in most fantasy settings, but it doesn't seem to be capable of restoring complex injuries. People in Warcraft do suffer crippling injuries, and people do become physically disabled from old age. With one exception, though, such things have never been depicted beyond people prone in beds or sitting in chairs rather than standing. At least by the time of WoW's third expansion, Azeroth has wheelchairs.  This is the only known appearance of one that I could find - Drek'Thar, an orc character I probably won't have reason to discuss again until Warcraft 3. As for the human OC, I came up with the idea that while she'd died in the canon timeline, it was getting hit by a carriage or some other seeming accident that prevented her from meeting that fate in this alternative timeline. Beyond that, I liked the idea of her being a strategist and planner more than a front-line fighter, and I thought it felt plausible that injuries sustained by the alteration in the timeline had lasting effects. From there, the notion that she's mobile enough to still operate in the field from a center of command but not fight on the front line herself felt like a natural evolution of the character. In an earlier draft of introducing the alternate timeline of the human campaign, keeping the fact that the end of the human campaign has the PC succeed King Llane as ruler of Stormwind as a surprise until it happens late in the camapign, I outright introduced her as Lady Isidora the Lame, on the basis that her disability would plausibly be her best known attribute to Stormwind society at the start of the game's campaign.
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May 11, 2022 22:07
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achtungnight posted:Kudos on not giving our impaired heroine cliche magic talent, or is that planned for later? I look forward to watching her strategic moves. Nope, no magic at all. If it comes up, and I don't know if it will, as I've outlined her her background is in the cavalry. She could still take the field, but it's rather hard to read a map and order around a military force from horseback.
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May 11, 2022 22:20
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achtungnight posted:Read Book 5 of the Belgariad by David& Leigh Eddings for one example of a handicapped king kicking rear end in the cavalry. I'd rather not. I loved the Belgariad as a kid. Then I found out that David & Leigh Eddings spent time in jail for child abuse.
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May 11, 2022 23:07
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:Was the Chinese government full of massive Horde fans? They felt that the pandaren - yes, for those unaware, pandaren are real, I'll get to them at some point - were an offensively racist portrayal of faux-Chinese culture and civilization.
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May 12, 2022 01:17
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