Headcanon 2: Electric Boogaloo

I don’t think personally they’d join Raptari or anything Zandalari related. Raptari aren’t as much druidic as they are an order dedicated to Gonk. Dinomancers aren’t druidic, rather they are individuals able to control dinosaurs and turn into them in some cases.

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I mean, they did help grow pumpkins on the pumpkin-farm in Stormwind?:man_shrugging:t3:

Ngl , I read that aswell… I mean it ain’t perfect, but I was just trying to look for a reason to have the Trolls ditch the CC, hence the whole

Last part of having their own organisations… I leave that to someone else their headcanon(someone who cares more about Trolls as a race then I do!)

Wish granted.

Troll druidism is a much more insular and explicitly religious organisation than the cenarion circle. Where the Circle focuses on big picture global concerns and maintains at least a veneer of neutrality and concerns that aren’t culturally kaldorei, troll druids are focused on troll interests and the worship of troll gods!

This has been a pronounced issue for years with trolls considering wild gods and even wisps to be “loa” and treating them differently as a result. A troll druid is not one with the wilds, kin to the trees or keeper of the wild; they’re a different kind of shapeshifting loa priest typically devoted to Gonk, God of the Hunt and Master of Shapes with specific implications. They’re also a contributing factor toward non-zandalari not urbanising, keeping the trolls, much like the kaldorei, to a mostly rural existence in tune with the wilds.

Dinomancers are even more niche, focused on maintaining Zandalar’s strange megafauna by a unique kinship and quite unlike a cenarion druid, has no interest in leaving the island other than for war or preserving holdouts like the isle of giants in pandaria. With their power tied to these beasts, they feel it wax and wane with the health of the herds and are intimately interested in raising more dinos and culling those that outstay their welcome by predation.

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Gravebloom, Graveweed and Grave Moss are all part of the same genus (or family?) of herbs, sharing a common ancestor pre-War of the Ancients, but after the world split they evolved into their respective subspecies of plant we know today.

This is why Gravebloom is only found in Kul Tiras, Grave Moss in Eastern Kingdoms’s western regions and Grave Moss in Zandalar. They’re all used in rituals pertaining to death, and usually found in places touched by it like graveyards.

Just same herb, regional variants after the world got split. Over time they’ve gained similar but slightly different flavours of qualities that alchemists use for rituals dealing with death and the spirits.

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I maintain this is one of the better comparisons to how Demon Hunters view the world.

Going by lore nuggets in Nazmir, zandalari troll culture and ways of dress is yet another titan cargo cult and they forgot their past over generations. That much isn’t headcanon.

The headcanon is that the original trolls were uplifted from the native fauna, the tusked dinos in particular just like how draenei were uplifted from talbuks. This is a spontaneous occurrence on titansoul worlds as the immensely powerful godlike being physically and spiritually alters the world they inhabit.

As is standard, the uplifted, whether by design or not, resemble their creator and become bipedal, sapient creatures naturally inclined to reverence of greater powers. Like draenei and orcs, trolls ended up spiritual and martial. This is another standard development; the titanborn are uplifted to have an innate sense of defending their territory and treating their world as sacred.

These creatures, barring outside interference to accelerate the process or corrupt them, form naturally as a sort of immune system to protect the world and its titan.

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Tidesages have a peculiar burial ritual for those who truly transgress against the Tidemother; the body is cleaned, prepared and then immersed in specially prepared sea salt for a time. Once mummified, the dry remains are brought to a particular cave up in the mountain peaks where it is ritualistically bound in fishing nets and blessed rope. Sealed away far above sea level and their corpses left as dry as they can be, they are denied their return to the sea, never to be carried away on the tides.

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Here’s one for worgen:

The closer they get to transforming as the rage inside them builds up due to whatever trigger caused it, they become increasingly bestial in appearance. Their eyes turn wolf-like with an ember glow, their ears get tapered at the tip. Teeth turn into fangs, finger nails grow thicker/longer/sharper. Hair and beard (if you’ve any) gets gruff - you know the vibe.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/556162089111126026/935278717104689182/unknown.png

a fella at this stage is this close :pinching_hand: to tipping over to a rage-induced transformation. Your last attempt at reeling the beast within before you wake up caked in someone’s blood after the episode’s over.

Note: This headcanon only applies to rage-induced transformation, being a gradual progress as you go through the stages, not the voluntary type you’d undergo to go wolfman greg on someone

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I think its prevalent on any world with a high amount of “Spirit”. Both Draenor and Azeroth had immense amounts, its just the world soul used most of it on Azeroth, calming the elements and on Draenor it bloomed out of control.
Draenor was kind of a world where the “Lifelands” (or whatever they’re called) had tipped the cosmological scale in their favour too much, hence wild and “SAVAGE” lifeforms.

The world as an organism is a good metaphor though. The planets around the world souls are in effect a shell protecting embryonic life.

Murmur is an elemental lord(I mean it isn’t called this but let’s call a spade a spade), has its own cult (see the Codex of Blood). I imagine you could do magic music in a sort of shamanistic way within the rules of the setting.

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Sound is an element by these rules which is interesting. It makes sense that shamans can manipulate the elements to make music of a sort:

In the beginning there was silence and darkness all across the earth, then came the wind and a hole in the sky.

Thunder and lightning came crashing down, hit the earth and split the ground,
fire burned high in the sky.

From down below fire melted the stone,
the ground shook and started to pound…

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It is rather peculiar in a fun way.

I have a character I play off these ideas who is very, very soft spoken. To the point that people assume they are mute. I imagine that this allegiance would result in side effects
here and there that would be… Undesired.

Yes I did just start with a magic bard idea and work backward but it’s fine because I didn’t even have to bend the lore to do it lmao.

Honestly you could probably do something more interesting than that by a long shot. But that’s why I post it in this thread: Because I know someone more creative than me will find it and use it.

Right?

It’s kind of the bin of wild ideas but I hope the thread at least inspires someone’s RPing and gives them new angles to consider within the lore.

Shek’zeer’s dungeon journal supports this:

Dissonance Field — The Empress creates a dissonance field which disrupts the sound associated with magic

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But what’s the colour of magic?

Depends which deck I’m playing but usually blue.

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I suspect, but do not know how to prove, that older Night Elves had different sounding names.

Azshara comes to mind immediately. It’s a far tinnier name than the usual night elf name. Admittedly that’s the only example off the top of my head that has a name like that BUT we see this pattern repeated in the names of Naga. (Warlord Parjesh, Lady Sarevess, Lady Vashj, Zar’jira, et al) with lots of J’s and Z’s and other letters that stick out to me less. Also their surnames are not “ForestThing+Noun”. They have specific, developed surnames… Which I am open to the possibility of being ForestThing+Noun but not translated to our delicate consumer ears, making them sound foreign and therefore bad.

They do however have WaterThing+Noun names occasionally.

I surmise this is just what an old style Night Elf name sounds like. Azshara didn’t change her name, after all. Lintian suggests it may be some aspect of a Highborne dialect of Darnassian (The name of which doesn’t make any sense but we’ll ignore that.)

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That’s been my general view as well, the unusual phonetics of naga names probably being antiquated highborne caste naming conventions.

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Besides that headcanon you mentioned, I actually have other headcanon about the name of the language.

(Yes, I have a lot of night elf related headcanon!)

We know from some Legion items that the language of the Kaldorei Empire is not the same as modern Darnassian — it requires specialized knowledge to read. My headcanon is that it wasn’t called Darnassian back then. For lack of a canonical name, I usually call it “Ancient Elvish” in RP.

Why is the modern night elf language called Darnassian, then, if the city of Darnassus was only a few years old? My headcanon is that “Darnassus” or maybe “Darnassia” was originally the name of the northwestern province of the Kaldorei Empire, where the modern night elf lands are in the north of today’s Kalimdor. Since most of the night elves who survived after the Sundering lived there, the Darnassian dialect — that is, the dialect of that province — became dominant and eventually, continuing to evolve from there, supplanted the ancient language.

Night elf society became fragmented and decentralized after the post-Sundering transition of power to Tyrande and the Sisterhood. Local communities mostly managed civilian matters on their own, united only by a common clergy and army. But the idea of Darnassia, a united nation encompassing all night elves, remained, and after the Third War, Tyrande gave the new capital city — after millennia of the very concept of a capital city not existing in night elf society — the name Darnassus in honor of that vision.

Related is my old headcanon on the administrative division of the Kaldorei Empire: https://maia.everett.one/files/KaldoreiEmpireDivision.pdf

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More of an IC headcanon than anything else. In my orc’s very limited and biased understanding of the War of the Ancients, she retold the events as follows:

The Night elf Queen was a powerful warlock who communed with the demons and sought to make her people drink the blood of the prime demon himself, Sargeras. Her Shadow Council (the Highborne) ruled the Night elf Horde with a fist of iron and fire until the young Malfurion Stormrage - a powerful warrior in the days of old before he heard the call of the wilds rose in rebellion with fire in his heart. He cast the demons out of this world by challenging the Sorcerer Queen to a Mak’gora using the axe of the legendary Broxigar Saurfang, avenging his battle-brother’s death with a mighty blow that tore the world asunder.

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