So, to be short.
Why it should ever be a thing? Why should we, rpers of SW, acknowledge or disacknowledge Dark Ranger roleplayers in SW? What do you think?
Personally to me, it makes no sense. I’d like to learn what others think about this specifically!
Edit:
To summarize whole debates that currently are of 843+ messages +, here is a small recap where both “sides” are presented through a neutral POV.
In general, it makes no sense whatsoever why a Darkfallen (Quel’dorei or Kaldorei) would be visiting Capitol cities of the Alliance in particular. While being still true to the Horde, Darkfallen were left at their own liberty to decide: Remain with Calia Menethil or do as they please. Some of the Darkfallen Kaldorei have expressed their wish to re-join the Alliance yet IF Tyrande will accept them. Tyrande is still in Ardenweald, so are other leaders of the Alliance, exception made for Tyralion.
Some people have a different perception over a couple of lines from a recent Undercity quest chainline, where “wish to re-join the Alliance” equals “they have been accepted into the Alliance.” - this argument was often backed up by the idea of “If there’s a Darkfallen skin for Kaldorei/Ren’dorei, then they already have been accepted into the Alliance.”
Counter-argument to this is "Unlike previous types like Demon Hunters or Death Knights or Ren’dorei, who were formally pardoned or / and introduced to the Alliance by Wrynns or Tyralion, were not introduced officially to the public yet.
With this,camp has split into two: People who mostly believe that game mechanics = lore and those who believe = If it’s not clearly stated anywhere, that Darkfallen have been accepted into the Alliance, then they are not accepted to the Alliance. Not yet.
Alliance Dark Rangers seem to just be a result of easily adding the skins. Rather than any real thought as to who gets em. (God knows why velves got em)
Unfortunately the blazé attitude in which they were added, while good for individual customisation, is gonna be hell for RP.
Short term it might be feasible to just ignore alliance Dark Rangers but long term it’s going to be impossible i fear.
Not all Darkfallen, as they are now called, are actually with the Horde. Some decided to go their own path and we know that the Ebon Blade has Darkfallen too.
It wouldn’t be too far-fetched, especially for Kaldorei Darkfallen, to seek allegiance with the alliance. Some might feel resentment toward the Forsaken/Horde still now more than ever. I haven’t done the Alliance perspective yet for the Lordaeron quests, but what I understood from those who have is that Calia basically gave a letter of goodwill to Greymane, so I guess there is some fraternization going on? Nothing concrete of course.
That said, the way I see it at least, is that these Darkfallen will be treated the same way Death Knights, Void Elves, and Illiradi have when they were introduced. A lot of skepticism and hate with them having to prove themselves first before being… well, tolerated.
Personally I like the Dark Ranger outfit but will be using it without the skin tones.
I mean you can theoretically use the pale skin and red eyes for other reasons, I’m pretty sure some are going to use it for Nightmare corruption already. I’m just baffled as to how or why Void Elves have it.
It’s certainly possible some Night Elf Dark Rangers regret what they did for Sylvanas. A little time has past since the battle for Darkshore, which might have given them more perspective. They were, after all, manipulated into fighting for the Horde: We know freshly raised Undead are extremely susceptible to negative emotions (such as horror, rage and feelings of abandonment - which the Forsaken would’ve capitalized on in their recruitment).
All this being said - despite their personal feelings - It’s hard to believe any Dark Ranger would be welcome in Stormwind. At least not for the time being. Of course rpers are entitled to explore the possibility, but I’d seriously quell any expectation that character would get very far.
This is especially true in Kaldorei lands: It’s worth remembering that barely a few months ago that Darkfallen was contributing to the extermination of the Night Elf people, and the destuction of their lands. Expecting them to be able to walk into Astranaar as if nothing happened would be far fetched to say the least!
I think its entirely possible for the raised Kaldorei to remain with the Alliance. It’s just more puzzling when you get your “defectorcore” Dark Ranger high elves popping up randomly in Stormwind City.
Yep. Why would they suddenly want to join the Alliance after being loyal to Sylvanas for so long? Where’s the motive? Leaving the Horde post-SL makes sense for a number of reasons… but why then go to Stormwind? Moreover, who in Stormwind would want them?
People seem to forget that the Horde could’ve risen them as recently as BfA and as far back as cataclysm, then manipulated/forced them to fight for the Horde.
So the question is more, why wouldn’t they try and return to the faction they’ve been a part off for many years (high elf) or freely joined as void-corrupted elves a few years ago?
“Oh but they’re undead” yes and ??? The Alliance isn’t the same Alliance that rejected the Forsaken decades ago. They’ve learned to tolerate half-demons and warlocks, they’ve learned to tolerate death knights, they’ve learned to tolerate void-infused elves, they’re going to learn to tolerate dragonkin in their city, but a small bunch of undead elves is suddenly a step to far?
Just treat them the same as you would treat DKs and DHs (which means nothing because I’ve seen how SW Roleplayers treat them as normals).
That’s a good point that I didn’t consider. I was focussed on the Dark Rangers who were Sylvanas’ trusted Lieutenants for over a decade - it makes no sense for them to join the Alliance or be accepted into it. But other groups of Undead Helves? It’s possible.
I’ll still maintain my skepticism of Kaldorei Dark Rangers rejoining their living kin, at least for the time being. There’s so many things, not least of all how recently the genocide took place, and how they were directly involved. People should feel welcome to try though - it’ll make for some interesting RP for sure.
Dark Rangers wouldn’t be allowed to walk in Stormwind, period. As of the Lordaeron questline, both the Blood Elf and Night Elf ones are still part of the Forsaken. You can even find Delaryn and her NE rangers in Lordaeron as part of the Undercity faction and hostile to Alliance players.
You could compare them to death knights in order to make an argument, but that’s a stretch. The Ebon Blade was allowed in Stormwind because Varian granted them a royal pardon at Tirion’s request. Varian evens mentions that the only reason DK players aren’t executed already is Tirion’s letter. As of yet we are still waiting for any lore in which either Tyrande, Turalyon or Anduin does that for dark rangers wishing to rejoin the Alliance. Until then they’d be seen as enemies and, quite simply, killed on sight.
Remember that Forsaken delegation that went to Stormwind and was never heard from again ? Yeah.
I wouldn’t totally blame some roleplayers for thinking otherwise though. The fault lies with Blizzard for introducing dark ranger customization to both factions without providing the actual lore for it. It could have been something as simple as Calia writing a request to have NE Dark Rangers pardoned and welcomed back into the Alliance or having some of them joining the Ebon Blade. Until they do that though our only lore regarding DR’s is that they are: Sylvanas’s former agents, part of the Forsaken, hence the Horde, unwelcomed on Alliance territory, much like Ze’khan and Rexxar are unwelcomed without a letter of safe passage from Velen, or Shaw and Flynn on Horde territory without a letter of safe passage from Baine.
Esentially, but that would need to be added in the actual lore through quests or novels or whatever in order for it to become canon. Remember, individual dark rangers may do as they wish, it doesn’t mean others will accept them.
In conclusion, they could definitely make it work for Dark Rangers on the Alliance side. They just didn’t do it yet and we have no lore stating that dark rangers have been pardoned or received back into the Alliance. On the contrary, dark ranger Velonara and Delaryn (the Night Elf one) pledge themselves to the Forsaken and the Desolate Council. Until further notice any Kaldorei dark ranger would be either Horde or a wandering pariah who may want to be received back, it doesn’t mean they would. Not yet anyway.
New roleplaying opportunities are introduced by Blizzard and as always, there’s backlash against it and people who suggest that characters that use the new race/class/customisation options either shouldn’t be acknowledged at all or should exclude themselves from roleplaying hubs and roleplay exclusively where they can’t be seen or heard by civilised people.
It’s basically like clockwork at this point.
Though I’ll admit Blizzard hasn’t put a lot of effort into the lore behind these customisation options, the dots are there to be connected if you’re willing to put in the effort.
The faction war is no longer a thing as of 8.2.5 and effort was put into ensuring that the cycle is permanently broken and there were concerted efforts to try and heal the rift between factions.
An example of this can be seen in Calia Menethil, a character more or less unaligned with the Horde who the Forsaken have turned to for guidance, including the reanimated night elves of Darkshore.
While I personally consider this absolute garbage, it’s the official lore that people have to work with if they want to roleplay in the modern Warcraft setting.
With Calia Menethil offering this guidance and serving as a rather neutral bridge between the Forsaken and the Alliance ever since 8.3, it seems rather clear to me that she has likely smoothed things over to the point where the Kaldorei might accept the return of their undead kin and where the void elves and handful of high elves left in the Alliance might accept these lost dark rangers without a purpose now that they are abandoned by the evil Sylvanas who was using them all along.
Is this moving too fast? Maybe, but it matches the breakneck speed of Warcraft lore in general, with its annual calamities and non-stop action. This setting has always moved too fast.
This is the Warcraft setting that roleplayers have always had to deal with. A setting in which the writers make awful and bizarre decisions, a setting in which everything moves too fast and a setting that requires roleplayers to connect the dots and make assumptions in order for anything to make sense.
It’s a pain in the backside, but it’s what you have to deal with if you want to roleplay in this setting. The other path leads towards server-lore and headcanon. If someone refuses to acknowledge a character as being a part of the Alliance because that character uses official customisation options that Blizzard has specifically given to player-characters that belong to the Alliance, then I’d say that person is unfortunately operating on headcanon.
What you are saying though is, by all means, headcanon. You even admit it yourself that in order to make sense of this you have to
Or making assumptions is exactly that. You’re making assumptions about how the dark rangers would have joined the Alliance without there being any solid lore to indicate that. That’s the very definition of headcanon. Ideas held by fans without any texts or media that explicitly support that.
Don’t get me wrong. I agree wholeheartedly with you on the matter and as I’ve said, I don’t believe the people RP’ing dark rangers on the Alliance side should be blamed for what’s essentially Blizzard’s fault. It would make sense for that to happen. It would be so damn easy for Blizzard to implement it into the actual lore. But they haven’t. It’s that simple. And until then the very notion of Alliance Dark Ranger is headcanon outside of gameplay mechanics. You also have Alliance/Horde DK’s and DH’s. But they are part of their own factions, aren’t they ? The Ebon Blade, respectively Illidari. So a lot of that is gameplay mechanics.
There are a lot of roleplaying opportunities here to be sure. I myself have already played with the idea of using Darkfallen models for villains during events, dark ranger characters that are unwelcomed everywhere but seek to rejoin their people and all. Still, I wouldn’t go for a stroll in Stormwind until Blizzard actually writes something on the matter. I’d expect the guards to pretty much kill my dark ranger on sight until I receive a pardon from Turalyon or something. After all, she did follow Sylvanas and committed war crimes. Or am I wrong ? And people have no reason to assume upon seeing a dark ranger that they are anything other than Horde.
I wouldn’t advocate ignoring them either. Some are genuinely good roleplayers and want to play out interesting and niche ideas. But it’s hard to justify it in any way that makes sense for the time being. How did a dark ranger even make it past the guards in order to enter Stormwind ? The same guards that killed Forsaken diplomats on sight last time they came over. Even more so now. After the war.
You say that the war is over, there’s effort for peace. But that’s not how people work. Even irl, from a sociological perspective, tensions remain high even after a peace treaty is signed. Not so much between leaders, but the actual people. Anxities, hatred, fears, things built up during the war, through bad experiences, form the basis of social interaction. Yes, the war is over. There’s an armistice (which from a international law viewpoint isn’t the same thing as peace btw, but a temporary cessation of hostilities), yet old hatreds will persevere. As we can very well see with Genn, Deathstalker Commander Belmont, Rokhan and Talanji in Shadows Rising. Things happened. People were killed. Sacred places burned. You can’t just wipe that and pretend it never happened and interact on a clean record. It’s not how people work. If anything, books like Shadows Rising and Exploring Azeroth show us that the scars of the Fourth War are yet fresh in memory and dictate the basis of social interaction between peoples of both factions. If the guards don’t kill a dark ranger in Stormwind, then the mob will probably lynch them and that was about to happen last night.
As a paladin… No. Come on, we both know it is my sacred duty to be an eternally occurring nuisance to all people roleplaying things that don’t fit my holier than thou worldview. Stormwind’s mead shall not be tainted by your unholy touch.
I’m making assumptions in order to try and make sense of why Blizzard has allowed Darkfallen as an option for player-characters that are a part of the Alliance.
You’re making assumptions in order to try and treat Darkfallen player-characters that are a part of the Alliance as not being a part of the Alliance.
People who want to to roleplay in this setting have to deal with what they’re given by Blizzard.
Using the example of Dark Rangers making it past the gates of Stormwind City, the fact of the matter is that they can. As of 9.2.5, a Darkfallen (so long as they’re a high/void elf or a night elf) can absolutely walk into Stormwind City without any sort of hostilities.
Instead of trying to insist that they shouldn’t or that they can’t when they absolutely can, you should instead accept Blizzard’s decisions and ask yourself why they can. We’ve got to work with what Blizzard gives us if we want to roleplay in this setting and what we have been given is Alliance Darkfallen.
Talk about how the setting should be more realistic if you want, but this has always been a generic high fantasy setting that has thrown such realism to the wind. Canonically, there were no weird race riots or lynch mobs when anyone else joined the Alliance (even death knights just got pelted with insults and rotten fruit) and unless Blizzard says otherwise, there won’t be any in this instance either.
The unfortunate reality is that by having Darkfallen characters be an option for Alliance characters, Blizzard has shown us that the Darkfallen can now be found in the ranks of the Alliance, even if we haven’t explicitly been told that. If they couldn’t be, then we wouldn’t be able to make Alliance characters that are Darkfallen. Even in the cases of the Ebon Blade and Illidari, they worked for and within the two primary factions, and there’s no such external group for the Darkfallen either.
The only sensible course of action is to accept that they exist in the Alliance now (something that has been shown via their inclusion as an option for Alliance characters) and figure out how your character will handle this, instead of trying to police how other people roleplay them.
That’s what I am trying to point out, that we are both making assumptions here and working with, relatively, headcanon. So accusing others of doing that when you are forced to do the same isn’t exactly fair.
You may have a point in that regard though, yet our opinions differ. I see it as me (and most of the posters above) making assumptions based on a status-quo lore we already have in the game and the lack of anything save for a game mechanic to show Alliance Darkfallen of any kind while yours is based on trying to justify something that RP’ers are doing without much evidence and a deviation from the status quo. First is easier to defend, burden of proof and all. It doesn’t mean you’re wrong, merely that our opinions differ and we’ll have to agree to disagree on the matter. I already know how my character will react to darkfallen and I’m not particularly fond of that situation.
And I cannot help but disagree with that. It’s a matter of how we see things done by Blizzard in different ways. For me, that is game mechanics and holds little relevance to the lore. For you, it’s an indication of lore. In terms of evidence, it’s very little and I’d rather stick to a safer approach. Better safe than sorry, in other words.
No one is trying to police how people RP, but this is an MMO. It’s not a single player game. It’s shared by multiple people and communities and even if certain things are not laws, there are many unstated or rather unwritten norms about what is or isn’t acceptable, much like in society. Someone’s RP will automatically affect someone else’s and usually people need to come to unwritten agreements more or else (a social contract if you will) for RP to even be feasible. We all go in that direction by different ways. At the end of the day this is merely a debate about how to treat an issue than Blizzard has done very little to cover and we’re both working from headcanons here in the lack of concrete evidence.
On another note, there’s a little mention if you talk to Dark Ranger Velonara of Kaldorei dark rangers wanting to go back to their people. You could take it as a hint, but wanting and doing are two different things. Even more so when they’d still have to be accepted. And all the known dark rangers in game, Kaldorei included, are still tagged as Horde and have chosen to remain with the Forsaken.
Secondary, comparisons with the Ebon Blade, Ren’Dorei and so don’t really stick on the long term. As said above, it’s mostly a stretch. Both had very clear lore through questlines and books about when and how they’ve joined the Alliance and actually being accepted into the Alliance by the authority of the king, which in a medieval context is pretty much total. And that’s the thing, they needed that. Death Knights would have never walked through Stormwind alive if not for Tirion’s letter and Varian’s pardon. It’s what Dark Rangers are lacking and what, I hope at least, Blizzard will give them and clarify this situation rather than just, hey, I killed your people under Sylvanas’ orders and now I want to join you, take me up, thx.
When it comes to “kill them on sight” from POV of a guard or even “arrest and kick them out of SW” from the same POV (guard players that is), it’s kinda difficult, because most of Darkfallen/Dark Rangers RPers just like Ogre players - will simply state and wave in front of the guard or everyone else noses THAT magical embassy paper that pardons them or grants them permit to enter SW.
Its something I’ve seen has increased and serves as a main reason/excuse. It was the same for Ogres, Sin’dorei and now Darkfallen.
In Calia’s quest, it was said that Darkfallen finally found their home but once Under City was blighted, they “didn’t know where to go” and now are mostly occupied with staying at Undercity. While sure, it summarizes the majority of Darkfallen’s intentions, we still will have those very few, individual Darkfallen that would “go against the system”.
But personally for me, it’s very hard to believe that an elite soldier who fought and killed for the Horde or/and Sylvanas, suddenly wants to go to SW. I mean, technically, they can try. But as my friend said: “It’s the same as if a Sith would enter a Jedi temple and say he’s neutral.”
My biggest problem is that Darkfallen RPers don’t even try to think from a logical perspective: “Why would I go to the capital of a faction I recently fought?” “What should I do so people won’t bother or even attack me?” - we are talking about elite soldiers who suddenly deny basic form of survival instincts.
So it’s very, personally, hard to deal with those and its just easier to not acknowledge their existence in SW. I don’t say that its a bad concept. Any player that does “Ogre RP” or (now) “Darkfallen RP” can lead to great RP. But these concepts don’t belong to SW. SW is picked by them only because its the biggest low-effort random RP hub today, with Horde cities being more than dead. =/
