Argent Dawn Roleplay Compendium

Argent Dawn
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WELCOME TO ARGENT DAWN EU!

Argent Dawn is the most populated roleplay realm on the WoW EU servers, and still very active to this day. There are many public roleplay events organized every week, a great number of guilds to choose from, and plenty of spontaneous roleplay opportunities in the open world. This thread aims to help both new and returning players get connected with other roleplayers on the realm, and feature helpful resources related to roleplay.

ROLEPLAY GUIDES & LORE TIPS

GUIDES

Created by members of the community


LORE TIPS

Understanding the setting as a new player

Other lore YouTube channels: Nobbel87, The Lost Codex


FINDING ROLEPLAY & COMMUNITIES

ROLEPLAY HUBS

While roleplay happens all over the world, the following locations have a higher chance of finding spontaneous walk-up roleplay:

  • Stormwind
  • Darkshire
  • Stromgarde
  • Orgrimmar (Valley of Honor)
  • Silvermoon

You may also find roleplayers from time to time in Gilneas, The Hinterlands, Bel’ameth, Astranaar, Booty Bay and The Crossroads, but it might not be as consistent as in the above locations.

Please note that the activity in the hubs is not representative of the roleplay landscape as a whole. While the faction capitals Stormwind and Orgrimmar are seen as melting pots, other hubs may lean more into particular themes. New content releases may also temporarily affect the activity levels in hubs.

OUTSIDE HUBS

Outside hubs, there’s always roleplayers on adventures or socializing with their guild, community or friends, so you might stumble into people in the wilds. Many public events are also organized outside the hubs; they’re advertised on the forums, on the Argent Archives website, and/or on Discord servers. Adventure and conflict campaigns are often advertised on the realm forums when public, and on Discord when targeting a more focused audience.

If you see a group of armed roleplayers in a forest, for example, they may be having a private roleplay event and running parts of it in a raid chat invisible to you. In this case it might be good to send one of the players a /whisper message to see what is going on before approaching them in-character.

If you’re told it’s a roleplay event, you may politely inquire whether it’s possible to join or if it’s better not to. Please don’t be discouraged if it’s not always possible to partake; it might just be that the group’s story plot, ongoing scenario, or the event organizer’s capacity with player numbers makes it difficult to include new people on the spot. Wish them well and don’t take it personally!

DISCORD SERVERS

Discord servers have become common for staying in the loop about the many different roleplay scenes revolving around particular themes or areas. The realm forums display only a fraction of all the buzz happening in the roleplay community as a whole.

Argent Dawn EU Roleplay is currently the largest general discord where you can find a repository of more niche community discords and roleplay resources. Public roleplay events found across different advertising platforms are also posted there in daily, weekly and monthly listings.

If you’re looking for Horde roleplay in specific, there’s the Horde AD RP Community discord.

Forum links to some of the more niche communities below. They’ll be listed as long as the associated forum threads are open.

Not all communities are active on the forums, and you can find a lot more servers listed on the Argent Dawn EU Roleplay discord.

IN-GAME COMMUNITIES

On occasion, you might see invite links to in-game communities. These communities are player-made groups where members can chat and organize events. To access the Communities in-game, open the Guild & Communities interface. They’re used to stay connected without the need to share the same guild or faction, though most players seem to prefer chatting over Discord. However, this feature is very useful for creating a crossfaction party/raid group among the members, which may benefit crossfaction events if you’re not in a crossfaction guild with the other players.

FINDING GUILDS

Guild recruitment posts are typically shared on the realm forums, on the Argent Archives website (see the Guilds page), and in the more niche community discords that cater for a specific race, area or theme. Other than that, your best bet is to meet people in the game world and look for interesting guilds through the many public events organized on the server. Some guilds host information on sites like Carrd, and the members may have a link to it from their TRP AddOn profile.

Don’t be shy to post on the forums if you’re looking for a specific type of guild - people are often happy to offer tips and recommendations.

Finding the right guild can feel like a gamble as far as roleplay preferences, expectations and group dynamics go. Don’t be disheartened if the first guild you join doesn’t work out; take it as a learning experience and check out what else there is that might interest you. It can sometimes take time to find the right environment you enjoy.



WEBSITES

The Argent Archives is a webportal created in 2007 to help tie the Argent Dawn roleplay community together. Despite running on an old framework, many roleplayers continue using the site to this day for sharing public character profiles and events, and for posting literature, visual arts and screenshots related to roleplay. Logged-in users have an access to the archive’s search function - there’s a lot of server history at your fingertips!

Warcraft Wiki - When it comes to WoW lore, this site is great for finding information about anything and everything related to the setting, with sources provided (in-game, books, etc.). Formerly known as Wowpedia, and before that as WoWWiki, the website was split from Fandom and moved to wiki.gg in 2023. Please refer to the Warcraft Wiki for the most up-to-date content. The Timeline page may be useful when planning your character background.

Wowhead - Having difficulties with a quest? Unsure where to find a specific NPC or item? Need help with talent builds? Head over to Wowhead - a searchable database created to provide World of Warcraft players with tools and information to make their gameplay more enjoyable.

The Ultimate Guide to Warcraft Lore in Print - If you’d like to get your hands on WoW literature outside the game but are unsure where to begin, Blizzard Watch maintains a guide listed in chronological order. This means that instead of being listed by when the material was published, it’s being listed by its order in the Warcraft lore timeline so you can start at the beginning and read your way all to the end if that’s your desire.



IN-GAME ROLEPLAY RESOURCES

ROLEPLAY ADDONS

AddOns are widely used by WoW players in the context of RP, PvE and more to improve the gaming experience. WoWHead’s guide on installing AddOns

Total RP 3 - for creating and previewing character profiles in-game. Usually referred to as TRP, this AddOn is very widely used, and will help you identify other roleplayers in-game. The AddOn also has a map scan for finding other roleplayers if they have enabled the setting. If you were to have just ONE roleplay AddOn, this would be it. This is enough to get started.

Cross RP AddOn - to view TRP profiles of the opposite faction.

Simply RP - Looking For RP (LFRP) - a lightweight World of Warcraft addon designed to help roleplayers find organic, spontaneous RP in the world. It’s not widely used by the community at the time of posting, but might be a nice extra to give a try.

Listener - for easier tracking of chat messages when there is a lot going on, such as busy events. It lets you see the chat messages of a targeted player cleanly in a separate overlay window.

Story Teller - useful for sharing longer stories, songs and theatre acts in-character, potentially saving you from exhaustive copy-pasting from an external document.

Elephant - AddOn for saving chatlogs, and while not specifically aimed at roleplayers, it may be useful if you wish to compile notes of a roleplay session afterward.

Musician - Musician allows your character to play music that can be heard by the other players nearby, provided that they have installed the add-on as well. Any song file in MIDI format can be played. There are 24 instruments available including lute, harp, trumpet, violin, war horn but also drum kit and electric guitar. It’s also possible to perform live music using your computer keyboard as a piano. Related plugin: MusicianFX

Shortwave Audio Player - This is a brand new AddOn that lets you create playlists from in-game music and audio files, and broadcast them to your party members. Might be fun for adding extra immersion to your roleplay events! The AddOn is still early in development. Test demo video

RP Toolkit - based on D&D 5e rules, this is an out-of-the-box event system packed neatly into a single addon. You don’t need this for everyday roleplay, but Dungeon Masters might find it an interesting AddOn for the purposes of hosting private campaigns.


USEFUL ITEMS

Elixir of Tongue is widely used for crossfaction roleplay, to understand the common language of the opposite faction. This means ‘Common’ for the Alliance, and ‘Orcish’ for the Horde. You cannot understand for instance Darnassian or Gutterspeak using the elixir.

You might also enjoy browsing Useful Trinkets and Items for RP, War Within Edition

If you’d like to slightly alter the size of your character, there’s the Noggenfogger Select Down and Select UP potions, with each stack up to 10 subtly increasing the effect.

A list of other size-altering items with descriptions. I recommend using these sensibly in everyday roleplay, but they might be helpful to portray a huge foe at a guild event for example.



FORUM FORMATTING

The Ultimate Forum Guide (Codes, Trust Levels, FAQ) may help with the formatting of your event and guild posts.

You might wonder why some people are able to post images and hyperlinks to external sites, while others can’t; this is due to Trust Levels implemented by Blizzard on their forum platforms. Please note the requirements and perks might’ve been revised since 2018 - there’s little official information about the trust levels for the WoW forums. Trust Levels aren’t permanent, and inactivity can cause your Trust Level to decrease.

You should be able to link to other threads and posts on the WoW forums regardless of your trust level.



SHARDING AND PHASING

Sometimes you may see roleplayers mention sharding and phasing, terms referring to technology in which players are divided into separate copies or versions of an in-game area.

Sharding is the most common culprit behind not seeing other players when arriving at a roleplay event location, and in such a situation, please check with the event host if there’s a raid group for pulling players into the same shard.

https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Sharding_(term)

When too many players are in an area, the game automatically creates a new “shard,” a copy of that area. Players entering the area will be placed on the new shard. The world appears identical from the player’s perspective, with minor differences:*

  • Players can only see other players on the same shard.
  • Each shard has its own set of NPCs. As such, rare NPCs may respawn at different times on different shards.
  • Each shard has its own set of objects such as herbs and mining nodes.

Shards can be any geographic size but are usually limited to zones or smaller areas. The borders of a sharded area are invisible to players.

By design, players usually do not notice when the game moves them between shards, but players may notice NPCs momentarily disappear.

Sharding and parties

When joining a party or raid party, all party members are automatically moved to the leader’s shard, but only if they are in the same zone as the leader. If they are not in the same zone as the leader, party members will not change shards.

On roleplay servers, most areas should have sharding turned off, however it’s usually turned on for the most recent game content, or special event areas. Yet, it may also impact past expansion zones, such as Pandaria and Amirdrassil at the time of writing.

Phasing is a game design tool that changes outdoor areas, based on an individual player’s accomplishments or quest progress. Some zones have different phased versions that can be accessed by the NPC Zidormi.

https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Phasing

For some places like Dragonflight zones, players have found that characters below level 70 cannot interact with players who are level 70 or above.

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I endorse Miss Winterflow’s words of wisdom!

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Thank you so much for this :heart::rose:

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Updated the title, to better match all the information within. There’s so much useful content created by our community that I wanted to create a central post to easily find helpful roleplay resources.

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Very nice work!

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Great work by Acrona. Posts like these provide great bridge for people who only start roleplay. And for those who struggle finding it because maybe they were too focused on roleplaying in a bubble and now aim to broaden their field of rp. I know I was looking for exact things like these when I was starting. And I hope that nicely compartmentalised information like that will benefit our rp community in attracting more people. The more, the merrier! Sending love from Amirdrassil :purple_heart: Let’s have more people see this great post.

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Moderators, please sticky this!

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Always good to have such a compendium for those interested in joining us. I approve strongly of such a Light blessed post. May this soon be pinned to the top

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Very good Thread. I Like this.

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Very good post, Acrona. bringing the quality as always.

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Been adding some bits and pieces to the post that might be helpful, but at the same time trying to avoid it getting too bloated / overwhelming. Will see as time passes by what else might be valid to add - there’s been some good questions I’ve heard a few recent newcomers wonder about, such as how much basic lore they’re expected to know. But for now I hope this is a decent summary to help people get started, especially when we might expect some new and returning players with WoW housing & the next expansion reveal approaching.

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This was really needed for new and even experienced RPers. Thank-you.

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Great thread, hope this gets stickied!

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100% should be stickied and good to see the pinned posts finally being cleaned up too.

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Reorganized the structure a little bit, from the POV of what type of information a newcomer might first look for.

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Finally a much deserved pin :pushpin: :clap:

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Very nice thread :smiley: I love it when someone makes a good looking one like this <3

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Added the Beginner Bar RP - Curious Octopus under the Tips section as it’s a nice initiative that’s been running for some time now.
Update: Unfortunately this initiative has been discontinued.

Also added a couple more communities to the Discord server list - will keep them listed as long as the associated forum threads remain open, as an indicator there’s still activity within the communities. Please remember to add an update once in a while what’s happening in your community!

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New AddOn: Shortwave Audio Player

Added ‘Shortwave Audio Player’ under the Roleplay AddOns. This is a brand new AddOn that I think a lot of people here will be excited about! It lets you create playlists from in-game music and other audio files, and broadcast them to your party members. Amazing potential for adding extra immersion to your roleplay events - kudos to Sarvaad for bringing it to my attention.

Had a quick test run in a party group and recorded it in action:

Link to the AddOn: https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/shortwave-audio-player

Split into three audio channels, music, ambience & SFX, you can set any kind of mood you want! Designed specifically for roleplay events, but usable for anything. Need the atmosphere to be rainy, but you’re in sunny Mulgore? Just activate some rain sounds and you’ll be just a little bit more immersed. The raid marker over there is supposed to be a Vrykul? Play some Vrykul sounds on their actions to really drive it home.

Installing Shortwave is enough to let you listen along to sounds your group leader plays, no further configuration required.

  • Each audio channel has a seperate broadcasting & listening setting, so that you can listen to your own playlists whilst letting your DM set the mood, or quickly search through sounds without broadcasting them to your group.
  • Just listening requires no configuration whatsoever.
  • Extensive searching through all audio.
  • Always using in-game music? The addon turns your active music off for you, and back on whenever you’re done.

Some known issues/difficulties with the WoW sound API:

  • Pausing is not possible, you can only start/stop sound files and WoW only tells you if they’re finished or not, now how far in you are.
  • All sounds currently use the master volume, meaning that playing different channels at different volumes isn’t currently possible.
  • Muting your sound or turning your master volume to 0 will mess with playback. Playback won’t work at all with sound off, and setting the master volume to 0 will spam play whatever song you’re on. Not great for your group!
  • All of the search data has been split into seperate addons so you can disable them as needed. Have a low memory system? Considering turning off the SFXData addon in the AddOns menu. Blizzard added a LOT of creature sounds.
  • Some sounds won’t play, or won’t have audio. This is usually just on the game, e.g. music from SoD shows up in the list, but won’t play. Some voiceovers will be encrypted, and won’t play unless you’ve recently gotten the game to give you the key. Nothing to be done about these, and no way to detect which is which other than experience.

Very excited to see this AddOn developed further, cheers Gooby! Please help them with support and feedback. Here’s a link to their Bsky page. I heard they’re already thinking on how to implement additional features, such as the possibility of inserting a delay between the playlist tracks if you don’t want them to play immediately one after another.

FYI during testing, noticed that if the other person used an older version of the AddOn, it caused some playback issues on my end (playlists wouldn’t work, plus repetition at the start of audio files). Both people using the latest version fixed it.

Edit: Another FYI, in our testing hitting Pause didn’t stop the audio playing for the other party members unless you’re the leader or been given Raid Assist role.

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