Cant believe its been 25 years of Warcraft and 15 years of Wow. I mean say what you will about the lore and game mechanics, but this games has changed so many lives and changed the gaming scene. watching the 25th anniversary really makes me tear up. Hopefully with shadowlands it will revitalize the game and rp community.
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I hope so too, man. I’ve been a Warcraft fan since the first one back in 95’ and of Activision in general since the first Lost Vikings back in 93’. Friendships were forged and broken over those games back in my neighborhood. There have been ups and downs, and we’re not all happy with everything, but…it’s been fun. This is one hell of a good franchise.
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And my hair just got a little greyer.
I first bumped into warcraft 2 at a classmate’s birthday party and so here we are. I remember another school friend so excited about WC3 and how he was in awe at the night elves, their aesthetic and their longest elf ears ever. Some years later, another classmate eagerly anticipated the hot new warcraft MMO and it was such a bittersweet thing. More warcraft at long last but given the trend of everything being an MMO, I couldn’t pick it up.
Nope. He actually preserved her corpse in a fancy coffin to mock her disembodied spirit with the fact of her defeat. Arthas was really petty as part of his autocratic [psychological diagnosis withheld] personality. Not getting his way made him moody and dangerous and Sylvanas evaded him and slowed his invasion, thus “earning” a special treatment along the way.
I just remember her death in WC3 and how I totally bungled the use of her special, unique banshee unit in that one mission, getting her killed outside Silvermoon’s gates. Oh, what could have been…
Anyway, this whole shadowlands business got me leveling again so that’s nice.
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This. I want bustling RP hubs again. I don’t want to have to walk around/wait for 30-40 minutes to find random RP, I want to build character relations with people I met through RP, lead storylines with them, meet new people, have the server community be lively with prominent figures not being the ones that make the best trolly one liners on the forums, but the people who’re good at RP and do it a lot. Guild leaders, campaign organizers, those people who have played a significant part in shaping the community and IC events of larger cities.
I want that RP community back that made me invested in roleplaying.
The people who helped me learn with not justharsh words, but also elaborate explanations and a whole lot of patience that I didn’t deserve, and those who stuck around me even when I wasn’t all that good at RPing, and I was stubborn to avoid admitting it, nor was I really a fun person to be around OOC, on any level.
I’m rambling, I just got home from a nightshift.
But yeah! Hope Shadowlands revitalizes the community and gets more RPers on board.
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It crawls free of its grave, howling in triumph; Dream Diary 71.
“WITCH HUNTER”
Far up in the western mountains a small community is nestled between the peaks; an insular group of hardy survivors living apart from the wider world. It isn’t quite a town as the small houses and cabins are too far apart but its people know to see to one another.
It’s this uniquely isolated culture that draws a reporter to the place during the summer months to interview the locals and show the world who they really are. The reporter, a short haired blonde woman is never seen without her notebook and camera as she drives around the serpentine mountain roads.
The locals aren’t quite forthcoming, seeming superficially content with their humble lives but with an undercurrent of sadness that suggests something deeper. Sifting through news archives, it’s revealed that a less than respectable egyptologist moved to these mountains in the 1920’s, hoping to live out his days alone in obscurity after being humiliated for his wild ideas about egypt’s past and brought all manner of research and treasure with him.
Sensing a new story, the reporter soon chases down the old home, now an abandoned hovel partially reclaimed by the wilds. In the dusty cellar she finds a surprising amount of goods including notes on an unknown queen along with her sarcophagus!
The story takes a turn as the mummy’s spirit awakens and drags the reporter out into the woods to a lake, spouting exposition of how she has the people of these mountains in her thrall while visions of their true forms flood the reporter’s mind. Each month they make sacrifice to sustain and build her power and soon she will spread her influence to all lands!
The touch of the spirit world leaves a mark on the reporter and now she sees the locals for what they are; long dead miserable shapeshifting revenants. Figuring that the undead queen can be stopped by stopping the sacrifices, she confronts the locals one by one.
Along the way, she meets the local priest. Not quite undead, he knows the score as well and sees an opportunity to set things right. Together, they exorcise a highy protective owner of an apple orchard by crude weapons and a strange ancient burial rite as the priest explains it; no power of the church will let these beings rest. Their curse predates it, after all.
In the orchard, they find a crude, angular knife resembling a kukri, obviously homemade with a strange calendar etched all along the blade. These are the daggers for the monthly sacrifices! Another undead servant is confronted; a sad, dark haired lady that just seems to want it to end, having just finished her monthly blood tithe, dagger in hand.
The sorrowful spirit is released using the orchard dagger and she passes on her shapeshifting to the reporter, claiming that having used it to hunt, it will help in ending the ancient curse. Now a hunter of the undead and the witch queen that rules them, the reporter takes flight as a crow, ritual daggers at the ready.
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Let’s bring this discussion here, instead of derailing the background thread.
To answer your question, yes, three sons and a daughter.
And to get the “so many children” thing out of the way even before anyone asks, because elves appearently aren’t very fertile - there are three Windrunner sisters and they had a brother. Both Vereesa and Alleria are mothers, and both conceived their child(ren) with a human father.
I’d say that puts an end to that point.
Also, I’ve tried having family members be NPCs or phantom characters with another character before, or eve nplay them myself and reduce their relationship to the off-screen and I can’t say either of those worked well in my experience. It felt forced and immersion breaking.
I’m comfortable with the current situation as it is. It doesn’t require any mentions when he thinks they died years ago and he has no real motivation to look for them because of the same reason.
And when/if I find someone I trust enough to RP either of them, it can be solved with the son/daughter finding their dad instead of the other way around. Lyth travels around a lot and spends precious little time in Silvermoon, so it’d make sense for them to have trouble getting to him.
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It’s logical, though you shouldn’t even need to defend that point. Lyth is what, 900 years old? Even if he didn’t get married until he was half a millennium old, he could have had each of his four children a century apart. It’s completely reasonable.
Good luck with how it works out. The mystery seems befitting of a demon hunter, so I can understand why you aren’t in a hurry to find people to fit the bill of his two surviving kids.
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Defending one’s self from dumb headcanon on elves is my favourite passtime. “btw ur elf isn’t grown til they’re one hundred” is a common one.
Which ignores Sylvanas being a ranger at 20 in Edge of Night, or Valeera being roughly 19 in the comics.
Even worse for Night Elves.
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I always took it as elven races aging at the same pace of other races, it’s just that their full lifetime is WAY longer, and as such their age-groupings are also considered valid at different times.
A 100 year old Night Elf isn’t exactly gonna act like a teen I’d assume, they’ve experienced life for 100 years.
Draenei are in the same boat
Whould it kill Blizzard if they would tell us this little but critical information about the races lifespan and age-grouping?
Good old days when the RPG books were canon…ish. 
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Blizzard seems to have a fear of numbers. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that they don’t have a good grip on the world they created. There were contradictions between lore in the games and lore in the RPG books…maybe they figured they should keep things vague to avoid screwing it up (instead of tasking a specific person with keeping lore consistent as Bethesda does with Elder Scrolls, or keeping one official document available for relevant employees on an intranet as is done with the Star Wars franchise).
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The thing is, people keep talking about how extensive and large WoW lore is.
But so many essential details from every day life is missing, that wether we like it or not, unless you’re RPing a human, most of the things we know is just straight up headcanon and speculation.
We don’t know anything about religious practices, barely anything about cultural customs and there’s actually pretty much nothing about government and politics.
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I can’t leave it be, gods help me.
WoW humans are as alien a race to real humans as a gnome. Their culture is of Azeroth and contemporary Stormwind in particular, not Earth and medieval England. A lot of people make this mistake.
With draenei, we actually do. They have philosophical angles, full length prayers, ritual and more.
In fact a whole lot about orcs. Especially orcs! Many other races have fleshed out cultural customs for life, death and a myriad of things inbetween.
Not true either. Which race are you operating from that has no political lore?
Ackshually true for cultural adulthood for D&D longears and the Warcraft RPG books straight up copypasted a lot of lore for reasons that I can only assume to be sloppiness. That’s probably how it entered the headcanon genepool of WoW players along with paladins being immune to a bunch of things by divine blessing and wizards and sorcerers being different things.
Alright, so how do priests (that aren’t a Golden boy Anduin) become priests? In any race? At what age do they start training, how do they apply, can they marry, and what kind of daily duties do they have?
Afaik we’ve no idea. And those are pretty essential to RPing one.
That’s one flashed out race - although I could probably ask questions about those that are essential to Roleplay and are left without a canon answer too - but do please try writing a single page worth of text about how, say gnomes or tauren treat their young for example. You can’t, because there’s next to nothing confirmed. We can only guess by how a couple of important NPCs are acting like in the books or in game.
What do we know about any race at all, except the name of its leader, politics-wise?
The game just assumes we’ll assume they’re like a king or a prime minister and let it go. It’s specifics I’m talking about, not vague answers that makes enough sense so that it isn’t question further by people who just play the game and/or read the books.
But I could be wrong, please do give me source to a site that has blood elf aristocracy, clergy and education detailed, it could be just me who hasn’t found any of that.
The RPG books are no longer canon, thus it truly is only headcanon at this point.
Dude, I wish you’d post here more often. I know it was a brief post, but that was seriously raw and a good example of short writing.
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Draenei initiate priests are Proselytes trained at the exodar. A full fledged “priest” is an Anchorite with additional ranking titles tacked on by seniority.
That aside, communal worship is demonstrated on Draenor and there’s the whole subclass holy order dedicated to the safekeeping of the souls of the dead in the Auchenai. It’s a fair bit more lore than many races get.
They do leave large gaps in lore of what’s not immediately relevant to clobbering baddies. We do know about cultural biases and discrimination as humans, dwarves, orcs and draenei had a bit more sexism going on in the olden days and reformed by necessity.
We’re not getting the names of local representatives beyond things like the elected mayor of Redridge or the forsaken having magistrates. Gnomes used to operate under a meritocratic democracy but Gelbin’s not held any elections for a while. It’s regressing to a unitary executive state by distressingly unanimous consent.
It doesn’t exist as the aristocracy seem to have died off en masse and political power rests with the regent lord and council. It doesn’t stop players from assuming influence and extrapolating a magocracy, though. Blood elf priestesses are called Matrons.
Definitely. I’m just pointing out where a bunch of headcanon stems from.
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One race having a somewhat flashed out system doesn’t mean the lore overall is as flashed out as that. The same information is missing from a lot of other races and we can’t really assume anything is similar to the draenei, seeing as they’re literally space aliens.
That still leaves a lot to be desired though, doesn’t it?
Oh definitely. It’s a culture and tradition wholly divorced from Azeroth’s native population and the church founded upon Tyr’s sacrifice and the Naaru visions of Mereldar. Then we have the matter of this human institution with its bishops spreading to other races with wholly different religious structures in new denominations but maintaining enough of an ecumenical consensus to avoid religious strife but for one outlier cult.
The Sisterhood of Elune as a governmental body is a different matter and the nature of her divinity being a mystery gutted by myth as first assembled from remnants of the titans.
The cult of forgotten shadows getting some meat on its bones did expand its non canon chunks into a proper dogma of balance but ultimately did nothing to define its structure and justify its focus on Shadow over the Balance spec’s thematic mastery of both forces of creation.
There’s certainly lore avaliable but we’ll never see a full list of Elunarian initiation rites, the proper way to anoint a new Prophet of the draenei or the complete human hymnal to Tyr’s selflessness.
Omg Christina Ricci is an elf! I’ve seen her in films for years but didn’t recognize it till you put it that way.
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