[A-RP] Guards of the Gate

Argent Dawn
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The Guards of the Gate

The Guards of the Gate is a currently unformed military organisation situated within the Kingdom of Stormwind, that seeks to stand guard to the Four ‘Gates’, largely in a metaphysical sense.

The Gates to Stormwind
- We seek to defend Stormwind and its provinces against any and all threats.
The Gates to the Alliance
- We seek to aid the Alliance and it’s holding within the Eastern Kingdom.
The Gates to Azeroth
- We seek to defend Azeroth itself against invasions and threats against the planet’s safety.
The Gates to the Light
- We seek to defend the sanctity and divinity of the Holy Light against the foul corruption of Void, Fel, Necromancy, Arcane, and Nature.

These so-called Gates are the foundations of the guild concept, and it heavily limits the recruitability of those we seek to enlist.

These IC classes will not be recruited.

Death Knights,
Warlocks,
Druids,
Shamans,
Monks,
Demon Hunters,
Mages,

These IC races will not be recruited.

Night Elves
Void Elves (High Elves are accepted)
Mecha-Gnomes

More obscure races and classes will be judged on its own merit, and ensured that they do not clash with the Gates.

The Now

The Guards of the Gate is aimed to fulfil the roles of Shock-Troop and Riot-Police in terms of Guard-Enforcement while focusing heavily on the Holy Light, and to not be limited to only Stormwind City. Our aim will be to have some presence in the greater Kingdom of Stormwind, I.E. Duskwood and Redridge. We’re hoping with this approach, we won’t be stepping on any toes with established guilds that already exist and are well situated. Further saturation on a rather niché RP-style isn’t our goal.

OOC’ly, we hope to build positive relationships with guilds already in the area, to further generate positive RP experiences, and just be generally good folk! Future goals in the coming weeks are creating varied story-plots and events, with people who are interested to be invited.

The Approach

Our focus will be on consistency with storytelling, immersion, credibility, and verisimilitude. While realism is important to maintain, it’s often misused as a term, and thus tends to elicit confusion. With an eye towards quality over quantity, we seek to embrace the numerous possibilities of the Warcraft Universe, while also giving it out own creative spins, as roleplayers do.

We will also endeavour to seek out individuals and guilds to cooperate with, maintain expectations, plan/plot future activities, and intertwine storylines and accomplishments.

In short, we want to be your new best story-telling friend.

In terms of activity, there are no requirements aside from simply informing us if you’ll be active or idle. I do not desire to force people to log in daily, as my personal policy is “If they want to roleplay with us, then they will come.” I do not plan on hand-holding nor ‘spoon-feeding’ roleplay to guild members.

The Events

Due to the nature of the guild, there will not be daily events. We hope to have a on-going story-thread for future encounters, as well as try to build Frenemy relationships with existing communities, with an Open-Door policy.

There exists plans to employ a very light rolling system for events and encounters within the guild, but will otherwise encourage Free-Emoting when applicable. The policy will be “Rolls as a last resort”. Roleplaying events will be attempted to have variety, with the more ‘expected stuff’ on offer, in addition to numerous attempts at the more unique events! Variety is the spice of life.

The Future

One of the key aspects of the Guards of the Gate is the plan on tying the guild heavily into whatever directions Blizzard takes High Exarch Turalyon and his leadership/regency of the Alliance/Stormwind. I, personally, suspect that we’ll have an Alliance-Focused Sylvanas Loyalist/Renegade sides in action, and I wish to take the guild into whatever depth that would take us. As such, the lenience and the larger moral direction of the guild is largely left undecided, with the potential to become more zealous, or more acceptive as time goes on. This stance will let us adjust the guild going forward, with this as our starting state. (As an example, AU Yrel popping up and teaching Turalyon how to Lightbind.)

Our aims will always be peaceful coexistence within the Argent Dawn community, and by jumping on the bandwagon blindly far ahead of whatever fruits the tree will sprout, we hope to have already establish ourselves as a trustworthy source of roleplay when the time comes, and to prove that we’ll be willing to accept whatever consequences our actions will elicit. Our goal is and will always be the creative endeavour of roleplaying, which in all aspects is a cooperative medium, not a single-player accomplishment.

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Current Happenings

  • With the Unit signed into existance, the guild has begun recruiting choice individuals…

Future Happenings

  • Strengthening the Unit before an evil thing happens. (Hint Hint Community Event!)
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I’m curious about this one. Void, fel, and necromancy I can obviously understand, but can I ask why nature and arcane are considered opposing to the sanctity and divnity of the Light? That’s not a viewpoint I’ve seen before.

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I hope guarding the Gate will go well for you! :slight_smile:

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I just have the idea of some average human guards seeing a tree and going: “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

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If this is a Light-centric guild, why are Pandaren excluded? Not to suggest pandaren priests are a common archetype (they’re certainly rarely RPed), but pandaren are shown to be familiar with The Light, and have numerous significant Light-based priests, especially in the Shado Pan.

Either way, good luck with the concept! I’ll echo what others asked about where the clash is between arcane/nature, especially since draenei seamlessly integrate arcane usage with Light, but I’m sure you have an answer. Hope you all have fun!

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So, to explain this, I need to explain my two view-points on this.

Firstly, Future-proofing. Since the expansion is still within its first patch, and there’s no clear signs on what’s going to happen besides some Old-God Whisper nonsense, I don’t feel, in a way, comfortable with recruiting them, then going two/three patches down the line “Oh, so, apparently you’re demon-spawns now. Off with the head!” Depending entirely on the writing direction of Turalyon. In-and-on itself, this isn’t an issue.

Secondly, the buy-in for the guild concept. There already exist numerous, well established and long running guilds that are Light focused but do recruit Arcane and Nature casters, so I wanted to dig deeper into the ditch to make the guild further stand out. Will this hurt in the long term? Possibly. Does it make us stand out? Yes.

And to further clarify while we’re on the subject, WE DO LIKE ARCANE AND NATURE CASTERS!!! This is purely based on what we’ll recruit, so this is not our friend-list!

These two view-points in combination gives the guild the unique prospect of changing the viewpoints on Arcane and Nature magic as the expansion/Turalyon’s lore progresses. And I thought it would be a cool dynamic to explore down the line.

Also, a factoid. In the old old lore that was most likely retconned, a Paladin in a novel didn’t like Arcane magic. I’m fairly certain it was either Dawn or Dusk of the Dragon, or something like that. (The one Alexstraza was broken free from the Orks). Don’t quote me on this. I’m not sharing this as a fact nor a reason for this stance, but just something I remembered as I was rambling on. :smiley:

The viewpoint here is largely judged from an In-Character perspective. From the lore I’ve been able to find, Pandaren don’t practice/preach the same views as Humans, Dwarves, (some!) Gnomes, Draenei’s, and High-Elves do. I believe it’s the Crane(?) that teaches the Pandaren how the Light is, and thus Pandaren view the Light differently than the ‘core’ races.

The same case goes with Mechagon-Gnomes, and are generally seen as the greater offenders as they pervert(!) the Light into pills and engineered sacralige. And to further extend from this, Taurens would also not be recruited, nor would some Gnomes be, simply based on how they employ and view the Holy Light. (Weirdly enough, Light-forged and normal Draenei are okay because Reasons, and Turalyon is okay with it… We’re biased, sorry. :frowning: )

I hope the rambling wasn’t too much, since I wanted to over-explain rather than under-explain. Do feel free to inquire further if something read confusingly.

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This was assumed to be the case in early MoP, but we later saw in ToT, and Legion, that view of the Light is largely the same as the other “traditional” races. We mostly know this thanks to Yalia Sagewhisper, a prominent priest in The Shado Pan.

This is as good a reason as any! Biases are good to hold in RP, rather than getting on with anyone and everything. It would make sense for a human to hold a draenei’s foreign view of the Light above that of a pandaren or tauren, especially because Turaleyeooeon himself has more a draenei philosophy than a human one.

Yeah yeah! I hope it all goes well.

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I have legit never heard of it. I’d be interested in interacting with a Pandaren Priest who would share the same view as… Us, for the lack of a better term. Might have to revise the stance, either now or down the line once we get more hints as towards what path Turaleyeooeon is riding down. :thinking:

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Appears to be a relatively unique perspective to military RP! Looking forward to seeing you out and about!

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I really enjoy the ideas behind this guild - I’ll need to keep an eye out for you all when I’m next in Stormwind. My main question is: do you have a uniform in mind?

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Day of the Dragon, which was retconned years ago, but back then the Church and paladins both had this sort of distrust towards mages and arcane magic - likely due to the fact fel and necromancy were both arcane magic back in those days. In the lore as it stands now the Church of the Holy Light adores both magi and the arcane for its capacity of helping people.

As for the guild concept? Gucci, I like the idea of it.

But while Mogi voiced a concern for pandaren, I’m more curious about this. We’ve seen several instances of Dark Iron being fanatical believers in the Holy Light. Are they barred outright or would such an exception be judged, as you said, on its own merit?

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There are, currently, no uniforms. There are plans should the whole Lightbound thing be brought from AU, but this will honestly just be revised around when I feel comfortable launching the guild, and should players who have joined beforehand feel like a Uniform would do us a solid. Majority rule here. I’ve personally never been a huge fan of uniforms when they’re not essential to the guild concept, but I do get the appeal for them! But again, majority rule here on this.

Thanks for the Novel name. And yeah, I reckon 4/5th of the novel is in the trashbin now. Which is a shame, I kinda liked parts of the novel.

And the Dark Irons… I was debating between having them or not. As I understand it, which is very probably wrong, they are Paladins of the Firelord faith? Like, their whole jist is praying to the Firelord for Holy Light’s blessing. Granted, this wasn’t the reason why they ended on the list. The biggest reason is simply their long history of atagonizing the Alliance, and how recently they fully became members of the Three Councils, and by proxy the Alliance.

As I envision the guild, it’s simply be amongst the first in a long line of military units Turalyon will organize as a means to restore the lines of defense for the Alliance, as the Fourth War seemingly depleated all resources. This impression comes from when you talk to him in the Throne Room, as he expresses desire to rebuild the army. And here’s where my headcannon jumps in, it would be most logical to start with what you’re familiar with the most, and then once the core is laid down, to add more layers.

This is another way that I’m personally future-proofing. If, for example, a Dark Iron and a Pandaren would join, and they’d naturally progress up the ranks to be an essential part of the guild structure, to then have Turalyon suddenly go “Wait, they’re the bad guys. >:(” It, to me, doesn’t feel fair unless the players expres acceptance to be prepared for such an event to occur, and for the potential rammifications. As I wrote above, I have a clear desire to maintain vermisilatude with whatever happenes. I also realize the complete egotistical fallacy that thinking I’ll be able to, but damn it, I’m going to try!

So, TL;DR, Same with Pandaren, I will revisit this come further hints towards Turalyon’s lore directions.

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That might have been the case before they re-joined the other clans and the Three Hammers was forged, but not anymore. They renounced the Firelord and want nothing to do with him. What we see in the Champion of Light encounter in the Battle for Dazar’alor is Dark Irons whose belief in the Light nigh on borders on Scarlet Crusade levels of fanaticsm.

This seems like a weird reason of excluding these races, though, As of yet there has been no indication that Turalyon would declare any of these races “the bad guys” and you could make the argument that if this is the case, Turalyon would begin with his draenei because those are the ones he is the most familiar with, having spent a millennia fighting along side the Army of Light. But fair enough.

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Ah, alright. I will admit, I’m not 100% on all the racial class lore differences. Thanks for updating me.

But, yes. The context behind the reasoning is the speculation on a Old-God Whisper; that it applies to Turalyon and not Calia Menethil. (It’s spoken by Il’gynoth!)

The golden one claims a vacant throne. The crown of light will bring only darkness.

This, to me, implies a potential Lightbound situation, and it could be an entirely different person! As such, I’m being overly cautious with the guild concept until further information can be found.

Also, if he were a Draenei, then I would agree with you that he’d start with Draenei’s only. But he’s not, as he’s of human origin. He’s also a huge fan of Anduin Lothar, the Lion of Stormwind. (At least, last I checked…) And assuming he hasn’t lost the touch of humanity over the thousands of years he’s been in space, I felt that the current limitations would strike a compramise between the various facets of the guild concept to create a unique, interesting blend that stands out and tries new things instead of rehashing tried and true guild structures!

But really, I’m entirely open to reconsider things as the entire guild is essentially based around long-term evolution, and I’m hoping I’m giving off that impression as I explain my thought process.

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Accepting pandaren and dwarf priests would unfortunately also require people on AD to play pandaren or dwarves :pensive::pensive:

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The Dark Iron Clan has been active and loyal allies to the Alliance since Cataclysm and they have been part of the Kingdom of Khaz Modan since (right before?) the Cataclysm. Honestly by that logic the Gilneans, Kul Tirans, shouldn’t be allowed in either.

That said, I love the concept of this guild and I’ll see if I can meet you guys on two of my Light-believing characters!

Both are working towards Army of the Light armorr just incase for the the Future :wink:

Had me chuckling!

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… Oh yeah. I had honestly forgotten that it happened in Cata, not more recently.

:upside_down_face:

Time to recruit some Dark Irons.

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Sounds cool + I think pandaren just don’t fit a guild like this from an aesthetic view point so keep em out :+1:

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Always a good sign if a GM listens and takes in feedback :fist_right:

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