11.0.7 spoilers: Future of the Kirin Tor

Lore Story
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Just been reading over the wowhead post on the datamined stay a while and listen conversations. A lot of the comments don’t seem to be happy with the writing direction but, I think it might be setting up the magical city state to pursue a more isolationist policy in future story lines.
The way it’s written seems to be they got ahead of themselves after their successful gambits in Northrend and Legion, then finally got their nose bloody again and are probably returning to their roots in Lordaeron to rebuild. They’re pretty much in the same state they were end of wc3 and seem shaken, kind of like what happened with Silvermoon and the blood/high elves too.

Not sure what they’ll replace the council of six leadership with though. Seems a bit silly to leave some of the most dangerous magical artifacts/prisoners up for a free for all with no hierarchical control.

Thoughts?

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Probably nothing. The Kirin Tor will be another organization like the Cenarion Cyrcle or the Earthen Ring. They’ll just put mages in Kirin Tor robes wherever they want, and use whatever Kirin Tor characters they want for any particular questline. The Kirin Tor won’t be a political faction anymore, since the devs already have to many for them to deal with, they’ll just be a recognizable club. They aren’t making the world-building deeper, they are making it shallower. Of course an organization should and would have some structure and hierarchy. But I don’t think the devs will feel any need to develop one.

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It was about time they suffer some Karma considering they turned a blind eye when Jaina and Vereesa dunkedn down on the Sunreavers. Seems a bit of justice still exists. Actually.

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They wrote themselves into a corner in regards to the Kirin Tor. It was never truly the neutral organisation that it desperately tried to masquerade as being and it was very dubious for Vereesa to avoid paying for overseeing the torture and murder of innocent civilians.

At no point in the story has that really been addressed and even this latest resolution dances around the subject. Hopefully it means Azeroth’s mages will get their opportunity to shine with their racial aesthetics instead of the Kirin Tor overstaying their welcome in the spotlight across multiple expansions.

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Honestly, it has promising aspects.

I personally like the idea of the Kirin Tor featuring a more isolationist attitude after all this, and it would breed some in-world conflicts that would be nice to get into if done right. And I say ‘done right’ strongly.

Honestly, I vibe. If the story direction wanted to, having periods and side-stories of dangerous artifacts and magical prisoners running amok because the Kirin Tor are currently rebuilding and closing themselves off feels nice. It gives that sense of disordered chaos in the aftermath of a devastating event that needs sorting before it goes out of proportion. It could also give a hint as to what the world will feel like if a faction like the Kirin Tor did not exist.

Will the world be worse off? Up to the writers. Who knows, maybe the prisoners and other magic evil-doers all this time just wanted to retire in a place other than a prison cell. Or that they really did want to blow things up for their own ends.

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Hm, I wouldn’t call it isolationist, more like anti-interventionist. The Kirin Tor think they were too proud and should step back from taking a leadership role in the world, instead taking the lead of others, and only guiding gently and honestly.

We shall build our strength not from dominion or deceit, but from dedication to learning and magic.
We can still fulfill that mission by investigating. Training. Advising.

The typical modern “we were so bad before, in some vague systemic way that we won’t bother to explain, but we’ll try to do better now”. So I personally don’t really expect anything vaguely interesting to come from this.

That said… the retreat of the Kirin Tor authority should realistically create a power vacuum that other magical organisations would rush to fill, which could be used to tell interesting stories. The Stormwindian mages and the Silvermoon mages clashing over how to deal with magic threats, or trying to regulate or tax specific kinds of magic world-wide, or becoming recless in their experiments with dangerous phenomena or something, with the Kirin Tor between them trying to wield only soft power would be an interesting setup.

I’m just not seeing something like that ever happeing in Warcraft. Instead, I expect “Kirin Tor” to become basically synonymous with “mage” in the future story, so that they have less distinctions to worry about instead of more. So, the opposite of this one:

You don’t build cultural representation up by removing other factions. You do it by actually putting the cultural representation in the game. And they’re not doing that. Indeed, they are moving away from that. We’re getting more homogenized, when the mages of the Kirin Tor are so unpolitical that they can pe inserted anywhere, not less.

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Honestly, even that feels good even if it is just wishlists and theorycrafting on our side. Controversy and opposing views are a nice way of building conflict that does not overly hamper the deals of one side.

And feeling jaded about these ideas is warranted. As we have seen less conflicts and more resolutions to things nowadays, it just seems difficult that the idea of sensible in-world conflicts will happen. By the least, most of these plots I have experienced came from roleplaying the possibilities rather than blizzard developing the direction themselves.

Ah well. I would certainly enjoy more interworld conflicts that are more closely opposing to other events than who painted who in red or blue or who lost x many heroes and lands and… yeah, you get the point.

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I agree. But really, at this point I feel that any conflict or negative attitude a creative roleplayer explores in their plots is more likely to get some careless retcon afterwards than not. Which kinda makes following the lore at all useless. Might as well just tell your own stories without caring about Blizzard’s haphazard setup, at this point.

Which is basically the same conclusion I came to something like a decade ago or so, so I guess there is a point to calling me jaded on this… I mean, I know I have a lot of confirmation bias here, but it would be nice if my negative bias wouldn’t be confirmed that often and that clearly. :wink:

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Dalaran destroyed and the High elves losing yet another home means Vereesa and her stooges were in the wrong clearly communicated.

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Oh don’t worry, i’m with you there. On all points stated.

I do rather enjoy exploring plots crafted by others and detailing my own next to the provided content and giving it a spin that fits the audience. So long as it is all in good humour and ultimately meant to tell a story and not establish control over others (why does that even have to happen?).

For instance I do love how players act out and interpret the events that happen beyond the main stories blizzard tells, and the other things they outright ignore. It builds on the aspect of a bigger world to me ^^ which story devs as we know it tend to ignore or dont really give much of a service to.

Driving back on topic though, I do like the Kirin Tor - or perhaps I liked what they used to represent before the shenannigoats with Jaina and Vereesa happened. As a faction, I hope - perhaps with too much optimism - that their colours will remain rather than becoming black and white.

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I’m actually kinda more with Thalstarion on that one, in that I would prefer the racialized magical groups to the centralized control organization. I’d really like to see different takes on what it means to be a mage, from the different cultural groups. But yeah, not happening, so… Kirin Tor it is.

Concerning them I’m frankly not really sure if there would be a way to make them interesting to me again. The drama around the purge and the ousting of Jaina at the start of Legion were actually the moments where I found the organization and their internal ternsions more interesting. Apart from that they mostly just felt like a basically replacable platform to do world-saving from. Even the Nexus War, which could have highlighted the dangers of magic in mortal hands was a conflict without any weight, since they said that Malygos was nothing more than a crazy dictator without any real point.

So, turning towards the positives… What is it you would imagine the Kirin Tor did and should supply in the future? I’m pretty sure they’ll still be at every faction-neutral staging ground for world-saving action, and Khadgar will still be Khadgar. Is that enough, or could you imagine better than that?

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Okay this is gonna sound silly. Really silly, but hear me out.

Magic police. This is just one of the possibilities I kinda ‘liked’ beforehand in certain institutions that hinted a magocracy. Whether it be because they think they’re better at it and thus deserve the ‘right’ to police it or perhaps was the result of some devastating event that was caused due to certain motivations.

I take this from other mediums where there has been events that warranted security around the use of magic. And in levels of policing, it would be mired with incredible levels of controversy and challenges, an obvious example being that the Kirin Tor becomes further untrustworthy with the management of magic even after they rebuild - if they rebuild, that is.

I suppose this also means their faction neutrality will stick.

Mind, this can work as it is with that statement you had done before, which upon reading was really cool:

Perhaps i’m just copying or expanding on it, but honestly it has likeable potential. If it comes to certain priorities, they could just be vague mentions in the form of dialogue or just journal entries. Devs seem to enjoy doing that with all the world-trottering achievements set up per expansion and per patch.

This is partly why I suggested the idea of another aggressive/vital front for the Kirin Tor to cover, picking up from the tethers of the Violet Hold being no more and such. Khadgar should always remain how he is, perhaps pushing on as to how little he cares about faction grievances at this point so he can focus on his own affairs for once.

Ultimately just my 2 cents on the table. This thread hasn’t devolved yet so it’s nice to discuss. (hope it doesn’t fall apart.)

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Ok, you got me on that one, I’d have been all for that - and that was how they were originally predicted. But considering how they worked with everyone and everything, no matter how dark the magic they use, since Legion at the latest, I kinda feel that has been thoroughly undermined. If we’re not banishing a Kel’thuzad for necromantic rodent experiments anymore, letting demon-heart-eating maniacs police themselves and are fine with void users, what the magic that they would they be policing?

I don’t think we really have anything that’s clearly “magical crime” anymore, only “crimes commited with magic”. And while that still allows for a police force that employs magic, it doesn’t really lend itself to being sourced out to the Kirin Tor. I guess I’d have to see the stories that they’d plot with that, to see if it would feel “right” to me to have them as the magic policemen without borders.

It does kinda contradict the questline though, where they wanted to explicitly withdraw from politics and dominance, doesn’t it?

So… I guess I agree that it was great when the Kirin Tor were the magic police 15 years ago. But I’m not sure making them so again could work.

Ok, you’re right, that would be kinda cool, I agree. I don’t see this happening in a 100 years, but it would be an interesting kind of story that would create room to highlight the differences between different groups, while maintaing a commitment to solving the resulting problems.

Now that you mention it… the violet hold and the escaped prisoners could lend themselves to a few interesting stories. The Kirin Tor 20 years ago were not the Kirin Tor of today, and meeting some of the prisoners that were condemed for things that are accepted now (and probably understandably furious about it) could make for some nice drama. And since it has elements of a deconstruction of the KT-past, and californian writers seem to be all about that, I could actually see that happening.

Not sure if I’d like the result, because a too ham-fisted approach could easily devolve into AMCAB, all magic cops are… bad, but with a bit more care it could be fine.

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Heh… this took me a lot of thinking.

And i’m afraid I have no concrete answer, shamefully. Unless they were to go into extremely neutral tasks that do not concern the aligments of certain factions? Whole ‘Responsibility’ and ‘Jurisdiction’ thing.

Even saying that is a stretch, but so long it makes sense for this to work somehow! :smile:

Wholly agreed here! The measures of what the in-game world considers today as ‘magic crime’ is not as clear-cut. And in my honest opinion such a shame, as I often enjoyed the ‘pariah reputation’ such dubious and malevolent natures Warlocks, Death Knights and Demon Hunters often implied.

Nevertheless, crimes committed with magic has its place and potential. It’s present in the evolution of fictional and fantasy literature i’ve found, where once magic in certain forms is outlawed and policed. Nowadays they are either dubiously accepted or even tolerated, slightly off-topic I know.

But it could represent a direction the new-fangled Kirin Tor restoration could represent. If only because i’d appreciate seeing the ‘old man yells at cloud’ trope involving older Kirin Tor wishing for simpler times when there was less paperwork and consideration due.

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Yeah i’m not a huge fan of these melting pot umbrella factions either. I appreciate it takes time and effort to showcase each individual playable race/culture under the spotlight so it’s the easier option to condense them like this. But, these new organisations like the Ty’rs Guard just come off as somewhat bland.
Even the semi-neutral ones like the Dragonscale Expedition are partly guilty of this. It would of been nice had they picked at the rivalry between the Explorers League and Reliquary more than they did. Even though I can appreciate them wanting to show greater co-operation for the timebeing post faction war, what happened is that both organisations ended up getting watered down and lost some of their story driven identities. For instance both no longer feel as predominately Dwarven or Blood Elf as when they first started out and are much more overall Alliance/Horde orientated.
Eventually if they lean in this direction too much I can see the game world becoming less exciting because the stakes consequently get lowered once you take out that competition and individualism and create these overarching clusters. Where once these factions/races had separate goals, divergent ideals, morals etc… that you could interplay with each other in story writing you now erode that framework on which to world build on. A framework that helps in enriching the game by giving it more distinct cultures and groups to work with and represent.

So to return to the topic of mages it would be nice to see more independence between the races and have for instance the Nightborne chronomacers do something on the side of the main story, or maybe the Shen’dralar Highborne as just two examples.

To be fair it’s not that foregone, the Kirin Tor could still engage in non-overtly political assignments and persuits as I don’t see this as contradicting their own mission statement before or after this new dialogue.

For instance, when doing the priest order hall quest to obtain ‘Light’s Wrath’ back in Legion, you learn that they sent out a mage to track down the dangerous artefact, neutralise it and lock it away for safekeeping. At that point in time the Scarlet Crusade had lost possession of it and the staff was changing hands every time some priest lost control of the thing. Eventually you find out it ended up in the Nexus Vault under the stewardship of Azuregos. None of which involves meddling with the affair’s of the main factions or even major ones.

I’m sure there are other examples, but this is just the first that comes to mind I’m familiar with.

On a related note, it does make me wonder what becomes of Dalaran’s subfactions like the Council of Tirisfal, Tirisgarde and even the uncrowned too and what role they will play moving forward if they’ve not been disbanded or somewhat dissolved.;

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Just to add, in the seasonal comic narrated by Khadgar (Tony Amendola), it notes that he mourns the fact that the Kirin Tor had been disbanded. Now I can’t remember if the comics like this were considered cannon, but it’s very curious timing if not.