How much would my character know?

Lore Story
1

I’m just wondering how much History/Lore would my character know?

There seems like there is plenty of knowledge out there in the public space, with the Chronicles and all the player-base focus on the lore… but how much would a character in the game actually know?

I know it’ll depend on their race and history, but surely there are limits to each characters knowledge based on their own character history. Or do we expect that most of the characters in the game have pretty cohesive librarian/lore-master like knowledge of the world and history around them?

2

That would depend on what quests have you done on your character. It is already reflected in game in few cases. There are NPCs that have different greeting text if you’ve done quests with them in past expansions.

But overall it’s all up to you. Lorewise if on your main you have done main quests for every expansion (or have loremaster achievement) than basicly you know every important person, been near every important event and know how universe itself is being run.
Yet if you create lvl 1 orc warrior who smashes things he/she probably shouldn’t have much knowledge about world at large. Though for RP reasons you could claim that “I’ve read in that one book about X”.

3

Thanks for the reply…

I think what I was trying to get at (admittedly in a very clumsy manner) is would a character know anything near what we as players know about the world and the history/lore?

Even for the most avid bookworm character, are there any parts of the world which would be a mystery?

We’ve seemed to have turned over every major stone now haven’t we?

4

Frankly, the devs don’t seem to have put much thought into it. Usually there is no “commoner” level reaction, but if there is, like in BfA or Shadowlands, everything that is in the Chronicles somehow became common knowledge, everyone seems to know everything that is going on and there is no problem with old Emma roaming Oribos to visit dead relatives. On the other hand, 15 years after Cata, we are still supposed to think that the people have no clue what happened to the last (unreplaced) archbishop, because that would be bad for morale, I guess…

So your guess is as good as anyone’s. And that has been a problem for RPers who need some common ground for a long time.

5

In classic random npc knew deathwing existed. So I assume there is some base knowledge about the higher beings and mysterys in the world, but if you ask them about the deeper reasons on where deathwing comes from, they would probably not know it.

So I assume from that interaction, that most people know atleast of the existence of all kinds of things but wont be able to explain it in detail.

So your character probably could know that there is a lichking but not that is arthas and so on