Velen heard about the Shadowlands and said “nah, we need to keep our dead spirits on Azeroth, not letting them get involved with ANY of that again…”
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I’m still bothered by the fact they never updated Forest Song.
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If only they got to construct the Infinity Circuit… ahem, the second Auchindoun on Azeroth in the wake of the new revelations.
I’m genuinely curious of how they’ll wrangle the canon of shadowlands’ real, full story being split between the covenants with the venthyr specifically being the continuation of the leveling story.
They’ll write it from Vol’jin’s perspective and just have the book stop at the start of Legion with “and then I died” followed by a hundred blank pages.
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Velen: “Your choices are hellish realm of death and eternal labour or becoming a COOL soul-robot to defend azeroth from threats and continue being around your loved ones.”
Literally everyone: “Where do I sign up?”
Put me in one of those cool robots, I ain’t hearing no bells until my soul is destroyed.
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I still insist the major facts about the afterlife would uproot most faiths and leave multitudes of people seeking alternatives like the draenei/eldar soul crystals/vigilants, lichdom and demonhood to escape what’s objectively horrible.
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perfect opportunity for con men to take advantage and claim to be selling guarenteed access to their preferred shadowlands realm
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Selling indulgences/venthyr pardons. You know it’s an official document because it’s excessively ornate!
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Promise me this and you can con me all you want!
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I point out that every single faith’s afterlife got canonised in 9.2 and that the four main Covenants don’t represent the entirety of choices.
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“Show, don’t tell” is the way, or should have been, especially with this theme. They can canonize whatever they want, but when we don’t see even a glimpse of anything but different shades of hell in-game, it’s but slightly less bad than putting critical events into books instead of the game. Very easy to miss and quite hard to believe in, especially with what kind of storytelling SL presented. And indeed, such revelations would shatter the world’s foundations, with the seeking of immortality becoming the highest priority for anyone who wants to avoid eternal torment. Not that it couldn’t make a compelling story, but Azeroth is still better as it is, and not an eternal battlefield between demons, servants of the Old Gods, undead and the few others that have their own way to keep the soul in our world. And that’s why SL should be forgotten as an idea, canon or not.
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The thing I’m talking about is literally told in game.
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Yet you can demonstrably be sentenced to torture in a vampire’s cage for the most petty nonsense, the list of mortal sins long and arbitrary unless you somehow skip the line to be a warlord in the undead hellscape.
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Told. We don’t see it, we don’t meet anyone or find anything not from the main areas, we don’t know if the NPC who tells us about it even speaks the truth (unreliable narrator, remember?). Meanwhile all the worst parts are here, present and looming. So if words of an NPC are the only way to salvage this mess, someone’s done a poor job.
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Ditto.
I hope people will use Shadowlands as a case study of how not to worldbuild your video game.
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This is my main gripe with it. Not that relegating such a revelation to an NPC is good storytelling or world-building by any stretch of the imagination, but I could live with that in a pinch.
The trouble is that we can’t trust such by default anymore… which leaves either “show don’t tell”, or assuming it to be a lie until such a time that we’re given a Word of God ruling that it’s canon.
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Pelagos’ “you’ll get to pick” stuff would necessitate the immediate end of Revendreth when only like five people opt into the “Eternally tortured by vampires” option. Suddenly the entirety of Shadowlands’ anima supply dries up and whoops the afterlife’s broken again.
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And good damn riddance.
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You’d think so, but when there’s no more room in hell, the dead shall walk the Earth.
Coming 2030: World of Warcraft: The Shadow’s Requiem.
The Shadowlands enjoyed a modicum of peace following the Jailer’s death, but it didn’t last. With Arbiter Pelagos’ new decree, souls that had been born to Revendreth dried up, and with them the anima that sustained the Shadowlands. Worse still, hostile and negative souls began to spread through otherwise peaceful afterlives, necessitating the destructive intervention of Maldraxxus that caused more trouble than they were worth.
After a particularly destructive incursion into Ardenweald, the Covenant Leaders said no more, and banded together to repeat the mistakes of the past. They robbed the Arbiter of his will. Pelagos had foreseen this, and instituted his proclamation as a philosophical magic - one built into the very weave of Shadowlands. It could not be undone, no matter how they dominated him.
Desperate, the Covenants, lead by the Primus, now turn to a new source of anima: the world of the living.
Also we’re finally going to Tel’Abim
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