Nah, that was an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons standard thing, throughout all of its settings, alignments. I was never that much a Dragonlance fan, but then I was somewhat soured on it because the first book I read of that setting was ‘Kendermore’ which just seemed a bit…silly? I preferred the Forgotten Realms setting, which also ran the whole gamut of alignments from Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil, pretty sure it was a D&D thing, not just Dragonlance.
You’re right about it being 2nd Edition onwards though, before then Paladins of any type had to be Lawful Good, it was only from then onwards that they changed it to reflect the nature of the Deity the Paladin worshipped. Not sure if it is still a ‘thing’ in 5th Edition, but a player character race is Tiefling, so half demon, so I would imagine it still is, yeah.
Nice to know I’m not the only one who still differentiates between D&D ( old red, blue, aqua, black and gold box/book ) sets and AD&D (which became just D&D around 3rd ed lol, some said the ‘advanced’ part scared peeps off)
Yeah, there was a fair bit odd about dragonlance in its way.
From Kender, gully dwarfs and tinker gnomes ( Kender are like wrinkled kids, with the personality to boot, gully dwarfs are like lepper gnomes without the radiation and tinker gnomes speak all in a rush, no spaces like ‘himynameisBekkaDeeppockets’ lol)
To the sliding scale they tried to use in the setting from lawfull good to chaotic evil.
If you ever fancy trying again, I suggest starting with the original 3 books ( dragons of autumn twilight, dragons of winter night and dragons of spring dawning ) they are much better in terms of story. Or, if you like magic much more, try the books about the early life of Raistlin. The Soulforge and Brothers in Arms are truly exelent, imho (though I’m a little biased lol)
When I said ‘only system’ I wasn’t meaning the alignment, but the sliding scale system.
It went like this.
With the good side starting at lawfull good and the evil side ending at chaotic evil.
As you played the modules, you could slide down the scale from the ‘good end’ towards the ‘evil end’ and your characters actions were taken into this.
Where as in normal AD&D you had to do something much more major to move
(Like a friends half elf paladin. His order sent him to deal with a bad guy, I think it was a necromancer. Turned out it was the guys father, and since he had to kill him, it moved him from lawfull good to something like neutral evil. Poor guy had no choice back then, his paladin ways and the laws of his order gave him no wiggle room. He ended up becoming an assassin in game)
Oh Gods, I’d forgotten about tinker gnomes and Gully Dwarves. I could just about get my head around Kender. “OK, so they’re basically hobbits, but slender, they wear shoes, and all seem to have kleptomania, and use a weapon that is part staff, part slingshot (Actually, Hoopak’s were vaguely cool)”
Then I saw people RPing them at a LARP system, and I was like “Oh no, not having this”
So when they came into my Faction’s camp I issued Order 66.
Hahahahaha!
Yeah. Kender can burn your bacon, you just had to learn how to deal with them. My char came up with what came to be known as ‘Kender bags’ which everyone ended up using later on in the campaign.
You basically made a small pouch and just filled it with stuff.
Shells, pebbles, bits of glass. Broken keys, acorns, conkers ect. Leaves if they were unusual shapes, beads, bits of coloured sting, ends of ribbon ect.
Anything colourful, disposable and most importantly…not worth a goram thing.
I sold them for a while on the road in character, it allows my char to pick up junk constantly without everyone telling me off lol. They caught on quite well further down the line.
Little buggers just could not resist a small pouch with interesting feeling things inside, and it had a higher attraction level and pickpocket roll than the mages spell component pouches, the money bags or most other things.
I have to say those bags saved Tasslehoff’s life from becoming a smoking pair of boots from a fireball spell at least once after Raist took the black robes in our adventure
Tho I did hang him up in my hand once by his topknot for pocketing something really important from my char.
Colours and styles are what I mean by “proper high elf hair”. Not that the hairstyles need to be identical to the blood elf ones, but something else than the void elven ones - something tidier, without tendrils, that allows the faces to show, and with more regular hairlines.
And this is it. Blue eyes don’t make high elves. Blood elves keep the name given to the race by Karl’Thas. The exiled ones, and those who didn’t join the Horde, (approximately 10% of the current living Thalassian population) took back the high elf name.
I’d be overjoyed by this.
Love it!
This is something I feel should be uniquely added to blood elves. Let them hone that arcane touch. Not that I’d be against it for void/high elves, of course.
Ideally, it shouldn’t matter, and mostly it doesn’t, except, of course, for comments like the ones we’ve seen above, along the lines of “But you aren’t high elves, you’re void elves - it’s right there in your tag!” It’s no a huge deal, but it’ll be an unnecessary annoyance having to ignore those people.
You’ve always said that all our requests have been unreasonable. Sorry if I don’t take your concerns seriously.
I don’t know if you played the war campaign and Darkshore warfront on the Horde side but I’ve seen plenty of both MEN and WOMEN Dark Rangers. Both Quel’dorei/Sin’dorei and Kaldorei. High elf looks were unique to npc’s now it becomes playable to hopefully both sides (Void elves still don’t have it) so I’m not sure why those undead elf options shouldn’t be made available to blood elves?! And just because they are called dark RANGERS doesn’t mean they are just hunters and rogues. They are elves to use necromancy alongside their class. They’ve been portrayed mostly only as rangers because Sylvanas is a ranger and the most popular dark ranger.
Edit: yes I know wowpedia says they are undead elven archers who use necromancy but nowhere in lore says they can’t be mages or warlocks or warriors or monks etc.
Yeah, done it on both Horde and Alliance (Because I frickin’ love the Horde Horse you get for doing both sides story)
I don’t like it. I joke about it being because they appropriate my culture (Dark Rangers are ex-Banshee’s, Banshee’s are all female damnit, thats what the ‘Ban’ bit means! stop messing with Celtic myths), but really its just a lore thing. Dead Elves become Banshees in lore if female, and Spectres in lore if male. Spectres can’t possess people!
So it just jars with me as a bit of a lore goof, Not to mention that Wisps can’t possess people either, so Night Elf Dark Rangers don’t make any sense either, but ehh, Blizz be Blizz.
I just don’t like it from a lore point of view and a roleplay element. Does the Horde -really- need another dark and foreboding race? Not really. Just looking at the Blood Elves we’d then have Psychic Vampires (Normal Blood Elves), Psychic Vampires who are Undead and have an insatiable need to cause pain (Blood Elf Death Knights) and Psychic Vampires who are half demon (Demon Hunters)
What are Dark Rangers really adding to that?
As to the classes, it specifically refers to Dark Rangers losing their Nature Magic but gaining Necromantic powers instead, and the nature magic is specifically a Farstrider thing, hence my line of thinking that it would only really make sense to those classes who would logically be Farstriders, so Warriors, Hunters, Rogues and possibly Monks, as the Farstriders seem to be the vestigial remains of what passes for Druidry in the Sin’dorei population, given that it directly references them having Nature magic to a degree, unlike any of the caster classes you mention.
But thats just like, my opinion on it. I don’t see them adding anything to the game, and potentially making it worse, because you know for every 1 person who plays a Dark Ranger really well, with the proper pathos and the ‘longing for, but not belonging to’ Quel’thalas vibe, you’d get ten who just want to be Undead ninjas.
Yeah but a dark ranger is a class, not a race, so we can take the use of the word “ranger” to mean something significant there. I mean it’s not only conincidence that all dark rangers we see use bows and ranger-like melee weapons.
A dark ranger mage is like a demon hunter shaman. It’s a class cross.
Dark rangers come in a few different “races” - most are “banshees” possessing elven corpses, some are forsaken more typical to the proper definition. The only thing the dark ranger class seems to have commonly about it racially is it involves undead races, and typically the spirit of the individual is “possessing” or “inhabiting” whatever body they have- although in somecases they’re simply risen undead with the typical “imperfectly attached” soul stuff going on.
So dark ranger makes some sense as a hero class (although i’d argue having another elf-centric edgelord hero class is boring) but as a race it does not.
I think the horde playerbase is divided upon the notion of undead elves. Those who are elf-crazy or forsaken fans appear to be on board, the rest aren’t terribly excited by the idea of getting slightly paled blood elves with red eyes as a “new race”. It also further confuses the issue of horde identity more so than forsaken already do- undead elves may be outcasts but they don’t really come across as a “racial group” with a centralised identity, desires or wants in the same way other races or forsaken do. Rather they’re typically individuals who tag along with forsaken and don’t really have a “racial identity” to speak of.
But not all night elves becomes wisps after death.
The first Banshees to have been seen on Azeroth were beautiful night elven women and the ghosts around Ameth’Aran in Darkshore had Highborne Banshees and the Banshees who sing with Sylvanas in the Undercity are “Highborne Lamenter.”
Also, the Banshees in Dire Maul - Capital Gardens.
Do we know that night elves actually become wisps upon death? I mean, wisp spirit, sure, but they’re not visible to or able to interact with the living any more than other player spirits, unlike the actual wisps we see in the game. Even without all the new death subject matter in Shadowlands, death, spirits, resurrection, necromancy and all other death business was already a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, deathy-weathy … stuff.
When you make pizza sauce, with tomatoes, garlic, paprika, oregano, salt and whatever, what’s basil really adding? Just that touch that make pizza sauce really taste like pizza sauce.
But also this, of course.
Dark rangers as a hero class would be awesome. Only issue I see, is that they’d be restricted to elves, making yet another elf exclusive hero class to go alongside the demon hunters. A possible solution would be to open up the demon hunters for other races, but then we ought to have a proper lore reason for the need to recruit more, meaning we’d need more demon trouble, which I don’t see happening very soon.
I’d love to see other races being able to be playable as customisation options for the Forsaken. Similarly to how orcs have posture options, Forsaken could have race options, where you can choose between Forsaken human (standard at the moment), Forsaken elf, or maybe even other races (Forsaken dwarf, anyone?). All races that can canonically be raised as Forsaken are potential customisation options for the playable undead. It’d require quite a lot of work, especially if you want your playable undead elf, orc, gnome or troll to be able to lack a jaw, have various degrees of visible bones and rock all the Forsaken hair styles, but it might become one of the most popular additions to character creation choices ever.
This is of course true, I was generalising when I said about Banshee’s, but my point stands, they’re dead elven women, the males become Spectres, and Night Elves for some reason just can’t make up their mind -what- happens to them posthumously, but thats monotheism for you I suppose!
Technically yes. Because the very quests people are referencing here shows us dead Night Elves becoming Wisps, in some cases Angry Wisps, which we very definitely can see and touch and interact with.
Because they try to kick our bottoms.
That only works if there is only one set way to make a good pizza, or Pizza sauce even, people will always disagree, there isn’t a set way.
Similarly I just can’t see the point of Dark Rangers or what they would add, but then equally in a Pizza sauce I would leave the garlic out as I hate it and the feeling is mutual.
This.
It would be a massive problem on Horde side, we’re already getting elf -fatigue, and I don’t think we need more.
If they were going to give a race different skins to reflect giving the Void Elves the Blood Elf stuff, they should give Darkspear the proper Green skins like the Revantusk have, so that people can do the Forest Troll aesthetic which has been sought after for quite a while.
Yes, so night elf dark rangers aren’t too far out of the realms of possibility, considering the majority of the Banshees we see in-game are “Highborne” named.
I was more driving at the point that Blizzard really seem unable to keep their own lore consistent on what can and cannot be a Dark Ranger. Its like you have people calling Nathanos a Dark Ranger.
How? How is that possible? He was in game a good long while as what he was, a standard Forsaken Who had been raised during Arthas’ invasion of Quel’thalas (Or possibly EPL, I don’t know -where- he died exactly), Then along comes Danuser and he needs a new model so has the Val’kyr do something they’ve never done anymore, so zapped him out of his own body and into that of his nephew (Not sure if the bloodline connection was necessary, thats never explained in ‘Dark Mirror’) That is not how a Dark Ranger comes to be. I don’t think there actually is a word for what type of Undead Nathanos is, as his creation scenario is unique, maybe I don’t know, a Revenant?
But yeah, its the bizarre inconsistency that annoys me. As well as not wanting to see Silvermoon suddenly flooded with ninja dead elves in RP.
Very true, but you can still argue that basil certainly adds to the pizza, even though it’s not necessarily needed.
Heretic! May the garlic gods smite you. But yeah, it’ll always be a matter of personal taste.
Free for all demon hunters, then. Troll demon hunters! Gnomes! But again, this should follow an actual need for a new wave of demon hunters being trained, which would only happen if we get another demon related patch. It’s possible, of course, as both nathrezim and eredar have candidates to take over all or parts of the Burning Legion.
Yes, please!!!
Why not turn most of the options currently restricted to NPCs on for players? If you’re going to be able to play as a Farraki troll, from a tribe which has absolutely no reason to even join the Horde, why not also put most other NPC options on the playable table?
Rumours have it that a bunch of allied races have been taken down on the latest beta build, most likely going through some updates. That gives us hopes, of course. Meanwhile, the amazing Ramavatarama has done a nice bit of tweaking, combining (and cutting a bit off) two different hairstyles to make an awesome new one: https://twitter.com/RamavataramaArt/status/1281689651053559808?s=20
This has me thinking. Beards and other features are being chopped up and divided into more features. The same could be done with hair, similarly to what Ramatavarama has done. Hair base, top, details and/or tendrils could become separately customisable (is that a word?) features, not only on void elves, of course, but for all races. I mean, obviously, not all combinations would look equally awesome, but players will choose the styles that best fit their character fantasy.
Do we have the names of those races? At the very least, the other three Legion allied races should get some updates before release as the Void Elves are.
