The Last Titan - my wishes as a Forsaken player

Lore Story
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Hello, fellow Azerothians! I hope you’re all having a blast in Midnight.

As we all know, next expansion we are heading to Northrend. I felt like this is a golden opportunity to expand the Forsaken lore and fix the plot issues in a way that makes sense and stays true to their identity.

As we know, the original Forsaken were liberated Scourge who banded together to survive a cruel world that wanted them dead. Survival and trauma has always been their theme.

Following the events of BFA and the rise of Calia Menethil, it felt like the story of our favorite zombies was heading towards humanization, effectively killing the edge and depth of their culture.

Years later, we are addressing the Scourge problem again, who are currently divided and scattered in the absence of a Lich King. And here is where the Forsaken could be fixed in a way that every fan would approve: have liberated scourge join the ranks of the Forsaken.

Such a story would fix several issues the Forsaken have right now:

  • depleting numbers due to their inability to reproduce,
  • a new purpose: to integrate their newly recruits in their ranks and prosper as a civilization,
  • restoring their identity as misfits and outcasts,
  • a solid army that balances the power imbalance between the Alliance and the Horde,
  • cool new types of undead open for the Horde.

Such a scenario would also allow for faction conflict with credible stakes. If the Forsaken have amassed a great army right next to Gilneas, it’s fair to say the Alliance would have problems tolerating it.

Now I know all this is wishful thinking and it’s probably in the tinfoil category, but I’d like to hear your thoughts about it.

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I think it is extremely unlikely we’ll see Forsaken lore develop in any meaningful way during the Worldsoul Saga. Like with all the other Races, the Warcraft writing team have been sunsetting all the conflict and unresolved plots.

Calia is almost certainly a character written into the story from a time when WoW’s lore was going in a different direction, and she’ll be quietly parked as a side character until they can figure out what to do with her.

Shadowlands/Maldraxxus has completely trivialized the mystery of undeath, necromancy and plagues. Now that’s out in the open, we can’t really put it back in the box.

The Forsaken will never again get to be misfits and outcasts because everyone has to tolerate each other now. There’s no fight to reclaim Lordaeron, there’s not even an Undercity left. We’re not defending ourselves from the Alliance because the very nature of undeath has gone from evil and wrong to…neutral.

Its time to get our coffins ready after all.

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That’s a realistic take and I tend to agree, but I can’t help but see the opportunities here.

She isn’t really parked quietly and that’s annoying. She represents the Forsaken everywhere as if she is one of them. But I hope you’re right and she will fade into irrelevance soon.

Maybe we don’t need to. We can approach it from a different angle. We can focus instead on the experience of undeath and necromancy, build new characters with their own motivations or work on the ones we already have.

That is because they’ve been humanized. They need their claws back and a good motivation to use them.

Except both the Light and the Void hate them with a passion and could use any of their lackeys to try to purge them.

I say not all hope is lost, not yet.

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That sounds like it would have been a good idea… back in Cata or so, when it would have prevented the Forsaken from becoming Scourge 2.0, and would have prevented the kind of villain-batting and scapegoating of Sylvanas that we got. At this point, I think your goals are largely misplaced.

I never understood that one. With the living, losses take the growth time of a generation to replace, which makes them unrecoverable within the time-frame and war-torn setting of the game. So the Forsaken aren’t in any more precarious position than anyone else. And worrying about future generations seems like a very strange concept for dead people that cannot procreate for their own lineage, apart from being quite premature.

Effectively ALL races should have severe population problems right now, and I would find it much more interesting if that actually had consequences, rather than seeing them handwaved away. But since we are doing the handwavy thing for everyone else, I don’t see why we would want to make an exception for zombies.

What do you have in mind here, though? To me that sounds like baiting even more humanisation, by making the Forsaken into a centre of mental healthcare for the poor liberated Scourge victims. And killing Scorge suddenly becomes taboo, because Undead Lifes Matter, or something, so we only get more non-violent conflict resolution on that front.

You could of course go all-in on how utterly crazy the brain-damaged undead can be to create conflict, but that doesn’t sound like a faction issue and more like a pve story about internal conflict within the Forsaken. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I don’t think that’s what you were going for.

…how does charity towards other undead do that, exactly?

  1. What imbalance? The faction power levels always seemed pretty arbitrary to me, and I don’t think I remember any sources claiming much of an imbalance.
  2. Why would a power imbalance between be a bad thing for the story anyways? Even assuming war, an empire versus an underdog isn’t exactly a less interesting suggestion than two balanced powers pushing against each other.

…don’t they already have all of those?

Sorry, but the faction conflict is a lot deader than the Forsaken. It died more than half a decade ago, and Blizzard has been putting more nails into that coffin with basically every single patch. The more aggressive leaders have been humbled and/or replaced, the aggressive sub-factions have been villain-batted to cartoonish degrees, and the gameplay is moving away from the factions as fast as they dare. It’s not coming back.

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How would that prevent the villain batting? She could have turned into LK 2.0 in scenario.

Well, it makes sense to me. They have a finite number of soldiers and they can’t produce more. The living instead can slowly recover over a generation or two.

Yes, the game has an intense timeline with frequent wars but not all these conflicts happen at a global scale, therefore the casualties are isolated.

Of course, if we were to analyze this more issues, at least several races should have gone extinct no matter how prolific they are. But with a little mental exercise, we could imagine that at least a generation has passed between major wars.

That’s one way to put it and it would summerize quite well the original Forsaken story.

But my idea wasn’t turning the Forsaken into baby sitters, but growing a civilization. Among the Scourge are fierce warriors, mages and necromancers, not just mindless zombies. I was thinking more like “putting talent to good use”.

I wasn’t but it could end up being good if written well. There are crazed elements among them that could stir some trouble.

Come on, at this point the Alliance is vastly superior in many ways. I mean they got space goats with lazers :sweat_smile:

I think being the underdog is cool but it gets old, everyone deserves to shine and win a war or two.

Kind of, not liches or vrykuls :sweat_smile: but I guess vrykul would make a sick playable race

That’s a shame, really. Been around for a long time and the whole Alliance vs Horde never got old for me. I hope they don’t disband the factions.

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We cannot. Blizzard gives us the year with relative regularity, and we see the age progression of younger characters that fits those numbers. There weren’t generations between great wars and extinction events for anyone. So the Forsaken, with a tradition of Val’kyr necomancy since Cata, probably had the largest growth potential of all the races until the end of BfA. And yes, it makes no sense whatsoever that instead of declining, the player races somehow became the flourishing hegemons of Azeroth.

Sure, but what makes them care? No matter how many soldiers there are, they aren’t exactly protecting their lineage by protecting the Forsaken as an organisation - rather, if that’s what they cared about, they should be protecting the realms of humans and elves. The reason that makes most sense is still the paranoid “so that we can stand against the people who want to kill us”, and that’s the story we already got from Cata to BfA, and which makes less sense during faction peace. I guess you could go for a security dilemma plot, where the Forsaken act to ascertain peace, and thus build capabilities that the ones around them see as threats but doing that at this point sounds very artificial to me.

No, that’s what she actually did. She relied on univited necromancy, coercion, propaganda and mind control to make the Forsaken into an extension of her will, rooting out the ones that might challenge it. That’s Lich Queen stuff.

In the alternate version I imagined, the Forsaken would have stuck to the radical commitment to “free will” they had before, and freeing the Scourge undead wouldn’t have been (purely) instrumental, it would be their kinda moral obsession. Considering how broken Forsaken “free will” is, and how unlikely the surrounding nations would have been happy with its morbid excessed, this would still have given them an interesting and constantly suspicious role within the faction conflict, but it wouldn’t have required the pure villain batting they got.

What does that mean, though? So the Forsaken have bigger numbers. What do you want that to change? Do you want them to go spreading undeath across the world, because if they don’t get to live, no one should? Do you want them to… build more houses and… trade worms? Do you want them to become a centre of morbid arts and sciences?

I’m not seeing what you are going for, and with everything I can think of, except the paranoia route, you don’t need the recruitment drive to get it.

They already had those in BfA, and the factions were still depicted as equal at best. Like all the times before, the Alliance didn’t crush the Horde, they were no more than holding their own until a Horde civil war got going once again. The power imbalance you imagine was implied to be irrelevant. Space goat space lasers did not defeat Orgrimmar.

And in BfA just as in MoP, the Horde didn’t so much lose, as turn against their leadership, standing with the victorious Alliance. So yeah, if you’re sick of that Warcraft trope, you are certainly right to be, but that trope never required or implied Alliance superiority. On the contrary, it usually seemed implied that the Alliance couldn’t have done it alone.

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The Alliance might have its space goats and lasers.

But you know what I got?

An ordinary voodoo mask. That’s right. Better run.

Right now.

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You jest, but that’s basically it. Whenever the narrative decides, the vodoo mask can be just as powerful as the space laser. It always gets a bit ridiculous whenever different areas of the WoW themepark are pitted against each other, but if there were ever a situation where Blizz decided to use the space laser in the confines of the faction war, having the trolls go to their loa to bless some vodoo mask and then shooting the spaceship down with their vodoo laser, or at least subduing its defenses against boarders with it, wouldn’t be much outside the norm.

Legion was a thing, and there were tons of space ships that could shoot green lasers everywhere. No one cared, we just went in, killed the commander, left some kind of explosives and poof, gone. Heck, we’ve done the same to ziggurats since WC3. Space ships in WoW aren’t a different power level, they’re just a different style choice.

So yeah, if you put on the vodoo mask that’s meant for some “go nuts and kill 200 random alliance guys”-quest, I better run…

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So uhm…

Funny thing… They did :’D. It was one of the world quests that took place during BFA in Drustvar. The Lightforged Draenei were fighting against the Horde forces at the mountains and the Horde’s answer to that is Troll voodoo.

It was literally the Horde character spooking 200 LFD with a voodoo mask as they were portalling in.

Someone with better navigation skills than me can find it, I forget how t.t Only the sweet memory.

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Well, I feel confirmed in my Warcraft pattern recognition here, though I didn’t get the reference. xD

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I guess you’re right, it makes sense. Though I must wonder, why did Blizzard press on this issue so much? Was it all for the sake of “Sylvanas bad” plot?

Well, as we’ve seen in the Liadrin cinematic, the Scarlets are still well and active so that’s one threat.

Also, why would it be exclusively for the defense of the Forsaken? The Horde presence in Eastern Kingdoms has always depended on the Forsaken and later on the Blood elves.

That’s what I meant. Sylvanas would have become a Lich Queen anyway just because the writers wanted her to be.

I agree.

Why not?

We have shadow wielders and necromancy already, both put to good uses among both factions. Warlocks, shadow priests, death knights exist. Tapping into forbidden arts is not a taboo anymore.

Never said that. My suggestion was liberating already dead scourge not making new ones. If they can be brought to serve the Azeroth factions why the heck not?

Can even have certain undead join the Alliance, vrykul would make a great playable race.

That’s the flaw in full out faction wars. The Alliance cannot use its superiority because the plot won’t allow it.

Yeah, this is getting old, hope we don’t see another civil war within the Horde.

I wish Blizzard made up their mind on what to do with this faction and maybe we could have peace and security without the Alliance for once.

:rofl: Trolls.. always winning wars with the power of style and vibes.

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Great idea, new forsaken should come from the remnants of Scourge and other neutral bands of undead. If someone alive would like to join them after death, they should make a written agreement to show both parties are willing to do so. They should NEVER resurrect random corpses without their consent. This should be their key difference from the Lich King.

This.. will be much more difficult, if they are to create a proper civilization, it means other countries will have to accept them as a nation, which automatically eliminates their identity as a misfits.

Without technology and magic, the horde army would have crushed Alliance easily. Forseakn are practically perfect soldiers, they do not need to eat, drink, rest, breathe or sleep, which makes them one of the most elite armies of Azeorth

For Forsaken to return to its darker aspects, they must do something that will not only displease the Alliance, but also the Horde. Which I honestly don’t believe would ever happen. Maybe making Calia more dark will help, in TLT she will be kidnapped by Scourge and go through similar experiences as the real Forsaken (taking away free will, forced to kill her own loved ones), an interesting idea would also be to create an Alliance with Helya. If Lorderaon opens the arms to the enemy of almost everyone on Azeroth, their image will be severely damaged.

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