World of Warcraft is, in many ways, not a very good game. It definitely isn’t a very good platform for roleplay, although additions like transmog and the language potions improved it a little. The main reasons to roleplay in it are the community, always the largest among MMORPGs, and the setting.
The setting was always a fairly simple distillation of the fantasy genre, but because of its hopeful and humanistic themes, it was a place where we could build our characters knowing that they had a place in a greater schema which tended towards goodness. That’s no longer true, and I find it difficult to muster the motivation to roleplay now, without any other settings presenting themselves.
It’s tendencious to claim this as a fact. Regardless, I addressed this in a post above — No Warcraft without Christianity - #98 by Wrall-argent-dawn. Most people aren’t willing to take true moral subjectivism to its fullest extent, which indicates that they don’t truly subscribe to it.
The examples I referenced are examples of individuals or groups who drove the Revolution away from anti-clericalism and eventually brought an end to it.
It startles me that you really conceive of ‘Western culture’ as a monoculture born out of the French Revolution. You could only possibly arrive at this viewpoint by extreme myopia in your worldview: discounting the fact that the Revolution didn’t manage to force itself on half of Europe’s regimes; the hundred years of the conservative political order of the Congress of Vienna; the continuing influence of Christianity on politics and culture in a majority-Christian Europe over the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries; and the fact that even France today is as much a conservative republic as it is a liberal one (despite laïcité, which even in its own time was opposed by the Action française).
A simple, stereotyped definition: tending towards ultimate meaninglessness.
Hopefully Day of the Dragon is canon enough for you gamers … of course people shouldn’t be yelling about Jesus IC and I think it’s fair to say that “Deo Gratias” with Latin being a stand-in for common might’ve meant “Praised be to the Light” but the idea that deifying the Light as a godlike figure rather than a power is non-canon / has never happened is not a belief based in reality
You can absolutely RP an old man who was a Northshire cleric who believes outdated dogma that very few people are aligned with now and if you’re a crazy Scarlet maybe you might believe in the Light as an all-powerful and vengeful Old Testament-esque power instead of just “positive magic” - there is canon backing for both of these if you really want to RP that IMO
on my hands and knees BEGGING for actual religions in WoW and not just vague, poorly defined theology
like… when i’m writing a fantasy nation/race/whatever, i’m always going straight to religion. if you explore something that is so often the core to a society, then you can expand from there. but what we have with WoW is just a mishmash of ideas with no consistency, at least from my perspective.
so many, many flaws. 10K+ old elves? i wither and die inside. it worked for Tolkien, where everything’s presented as myth, but it doesn’t work in WoW where our perspective is just objective gameplay. how can a society function when you have elders that would have seen the last Ice Age?
There’s hardly any detail in WoW’s societies at all.
Comparisons to a theme park are common, but apt. The world has style but is appallingly lacking in substance. Nothing gets any elaboration beyond what happens to be where the storyteller is looking right now.
The amount of headcanon guilds have to use just for day-to-day activities… I guess it lends itself well to the world’s sandboxy qualities but I do wish we had more detail and history.
This is especially pointless because why write in 10k years if you aren’t going to do anything with them? There’s basically no lore whatsoever for what happened in most societies in that time.
I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure I follow here. What is Duncan supposed to be the source for? He never references a singular monotheistic God (let alone anything resembling the Abrahamic God) in the novel. And not even a single reference towards deities as a concept (which I doubt anyone is disputing? Elune, Wild Gods, etc. are very much real) is actually spoken by him.
He believes in the Light as a higher power that guides people’s actions, a fact that’s really established to be a shared notion across all believers, even outside of humanity with the likes of Velen going non-stop about having his actions guided by it, or Anduin and his magic bones.
From my perspective it’s an attempt to create a sense of Ancient Wonder and majesty, imitating the likes of Elrond and Glorfindel - mythical heroes and figures from a time beyond our own, whose deeds are legend and whose wisdom and strength are unlike anything the mere mortals of Azeroth possess.
It works when you are presenting things as myth rather than purely story, when the world you are writing about is shown from a perspective that is clearly not objective. The Lord of the Rings wasn’t written to be just a normal story but possessed a contrivance that it was a translation of an earlier text - we’re simply reading a myth from another civilisation, passed down over countless centuries through to us today. But imitating aspects of Tolkien without maintaining this contrivance doesn’t work, especially with the Warcraft series where you are very obviously viewing events as they actually happened. The veneer of it all being a myth deflects, in my eyes, many of the logical flaws you would expect from a 10K+ lifespan, and so on.
It also doesn’t help WoW when the LotR elves actually act like they are that old (with concerns being mostly around the greater world, the passing of ages, immortality, etc) whereas WoW elves are very… human. Everything in Elegy could have been about a faction of Amazonian tribal humans and the dialogue could have worked fine.
That the Light has been shown to be treated as a singular god-like entity - personified / deified (‘a higher power’) - on many occasions from canon sources
He speaks about things being ungodly / devilish, I think that is a fairly direct reference
Yeah I agree so in what sense would it be bad RP to play a character to see the Light as this character, Abbendis etc do? I think some of you are letting the worst excesses of deus vult tier RP make you argue for something that is a very standard concept (ie, for a character to have faith outside of the default dogma of their culture)
Yeah apart from the part where he believed in a ‘higher power’ and believed that people against it (mages or whatever) were ‘ungodly’
So is literally anything written ever - is your argument that nothing is canon because everything is a mere word
You can reference anything you want as a deity because religions are based on faith and not objective proof - if your characted believed that there was a divine mushan beast spirit that was the god of the valley of the four winds, why would that be " bad RP " (lol) ? What would stop your character from holding this belief
Yeah they are often talked about as god like. But characters referencing to a god being in a heavily Christian sourced religion is more likely to be of an Abraham design and theme over a Viking sourced Titan god or Elune. This is referenced by other editors drawing the same conclusion of not just ‘a god’ but ‘God’ on the wikis themselves because those holy themes and names line up with those Abrahamic takes foremost.
Suggesting the knights of northshire were merely mentioning Odyn and the Titans I think is a bit disingenuous when we can understand that the writers were going for ye olde Christian knight man theme believing in devils, hating witchcraft and hells with demons and the act of sinning in a very Christian style.
Duncan treats it as a cosmic force guiding people’s actions, a fact that has always been a central belief in Light worship in the setting, but he never compares it to anything resembling a singular deity.
The letters “g, o, d” are ever written in that sequence exactly 5 times in the novel in following order:
The sight of a dead town in the aftermath of a massacre by the Orcs and using “ungodly” as an adjective to describe the grotesque violence.
“something odorous”
A dwarf using lowercase gods in plural as an exclamation of astonishment.
“We were forced to go deeper underground”
The narrator again using it as an adjective to describe a creature’s demonic roar in response to being burned by fire.
He describes mages as being wicked creatures who deserve to be punished for communing with demons for power (i.e. he incorrectly conflates them with warlocks). He’d see them all sent to hell for their evil ways. The emergence of Orcish warlocks had people react with prejudice towards their own mages, fearing they might be seduced by the promise of demonic power (fel) and turn against their own people.
I don’t think that’s bad for individuals to base their believe around. I’ve been fairly vocal about how Before the Storm (based Christie Golden) factually canonised the possibility of this by stating that individuals can reach the Light through belief in anything – a hero, a story, a code of rules – for so long as it inspires the individual to walk a path of righteousness that brings them closer to the Light and its many virtues. I’m contesting the idea of an Abrahamic God figure being a factual part of the wider Light worship among humans at this point in time after Chronicles recounts the foundation of the faith among humanity. No monotheistic god-like figures were present.
Personally, many of my characters view Tyr as the progenitor of humanity, though his role is one of a sacrificial Saint that my characters revere for his virtues among the likes of Mereldar who was the first to deliver the Light to humanity.
Late Edit: In Traveller 1, Durgan One-God worships Eonar as a monotheistic creator goddess who created the universe, though he’s considered an outlier in the wider dwarf society for rejecting the role of the rest of the Titans in this myth. He views them as creations of Eonar, a very unpopular take, but one he has absolute faith in.
Edit 2: This sounds a lot like Eru Iluvatar and the Valar in Tolkien’s work.
On the other hand, if you are a particularly nasty loyalist, you grin in glee every single time this happens: Every death really does count. Every death is one more soul for the husk army of the Jailer or fuel to be used to make weapons and armor to further the cause. Better yet, you can rub it in the face of those who lost somebody, reminding them that no matter what they do, their friends are in eternal damnation forever.
And even if you die yourself, it doesn’t matter because you’re so spiteful toward the universe (e.g. Hate god) that you will go laughing into the eternal night, knowing you sent so many in there before you just to spite the universe. In true nihilism, as Agent Smith showcases in Matrix, the only meaningful thing left to pursue is to end existence itself.
One thing I’ve learned over the last few expansions is to try and make the best out of them.
Why does the book specifically bring up his / his group’s weird beliefs in this very specific way if what it meant is just “he worships the Light in the exact same way as everyone”
You should edit that into the Wowpedia article but also IDK in what sense that contradicts the idea of characters having unorthodox/incorrect interpretations of various faiths - I don’t think it does and apparently neither do you since you give examples to that effect later
Yes, I understand - but what that writing is inspired by isn’t exactly subtle (as with all WoW lore)
Agreed
Abrahamic for sure not but I consider Warcraft 1 / 2 canon and prefer the explanation that understanding of the Light changed rather than “it was retconned” - and as you’ve said there are many characters that talk about the Light talking to them / ordering them / guiding them &c &c - and I think in a scenario where a force called “The Light” (singular) is personified to that extent it points to the idea that a lot of characters (as with people IRL) tend to give a personality / a face to unknowable forces and you can really easily justify your (f/ex) human character thinking that Tyr was created by the Light as its divine messenger or whatever and invoke the Light/Tyr as a character might a god rather than saying “I will now cast positive energy magic =P”
From this I think we might say that if a human had an unpopular take where they began to speak about the rly powerful light god and had absolute faith in it, that would be in line with portrayals in very recent canon media
I’m not arguing that people should sprint around quoting the Bible and talking about Christ being reborn on Noblegarden for the record Telaryn – my core point is that I think that people posting that playing a Durgan One-God esque concept is instrinsically bad RP are goofy + if you want there are canon sources that give weight to that kind of concept (not that you need to have assembled the 95 theses of WoW novels to justify playing as basic a concept as [character is part of a weird cult])
Of course
I think when a character talks about sending mages to the devilish underworld & is all about the Light as a higher power then the subtext (to me) is clear. If you interpret that differently then that’s fine too but I think it is good fodder for someone who specifically wants to play some old Northshire man who believes something 99% people don’t agree with
