Just be a fancy lady. The evil magic is a treat.
“Sure, Bobby. Lord Sargesomethin’ got his nethers twisted and is tryin’ to burn every world out there but it’s almost harvest season so get your butt outta that wheelbarrow!”
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Yuuup.
And that’s expecially relevant for Kaytlinne here. Who canonically comes from Elwynn forest, but since there’s a grand total of about 2.5 settlements in-game and no one sane is going to Goldshire, so…
Considering what gnolls make their tents of and how there’s a quest near Eastvale where you are literally investigating the dissappearances of two guards who ended up being -eaten- by murlocs… they are definetly more dangerous than the game lets on since you kill them in the hundreds. Especially since both murloc and gnoll, some of them know enough of magic to cast lighthingbolts, fireballs and icebolts. You definetly want to watch out around them.
Even on Desartin who is pretty seasoned and has fought on Argus, he still treats those races seriously.
I still hope we’ll get there once housing comes out.
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I’d say, human race is very much the exception in how the magic, advanced technologies and other matters above medieval society are treated across the world instead of a norm. The Frostwolves in WoD had about one shaman per dozen clan members, for example, and that’s with their entire clan still living close to the stone age, with every member pulling their weight in the hunts and gathering. And they aren’t even said to be the most spiritualistic or magic-inclined clan either, so this is about an average number for the orcs. Well, maybe it’s less now after all the Horde’s been through, but it’s still not an event of a year to see a shaman doing his things for an orc. Just like night elves have druids and priestesses of Elune as a part of their lives, or the trolls living all their lives among the spirits and the loa of all sorts.
On the other hand, most of these magicians and priests would hardly know more than a few spells, with most of them easily being completely unfit for combat. Say, if a shaman was seeing to the calm tides and fertile ground all his life, he likely won’t do much when thrown to the frontlines even if he’s good at what he does. And the same can be told everywhere: not every spellcaster is good, and not everything they’re good at can be useful in the heroes’ daily lives, ergo small-scale combat. Along with the often-lacking worldbuilding, this makes people completely overlook life outside of the endless war and conflict, or not even trying to put their class’s abilities to use in RP. So… if we don’t see the world as the world, it’s on the devs first and foremost. We can’t headcanon every single thing, however we’d try.
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I am willing this into existence…
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Tbf this is to an extent the current tactic. Paia’s ‘casual’ set (I think it’s the one I’m transmogged to at present) doesn’t enormously scream ‘evil warlock’.
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The gravity of playing certain edge-cases of characters, which then seem to be content hanging out in populated social areas/capitals, even though by distinction shouldn’t be present.
And that magic is too conveniently used at times.
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The presence of guards in cities.
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The presence of people in cities.
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Yes, Man’ari…
For me, the scale of the world is the thing that people in RP consistently underestimate, which can be pretty damaging, in my opinion.
It’s awful for travel RP when you’re gearing up for like, an expedition somewhere far-flung and people just say “take the flightmaster” because they take the scale of the world presented in game as an absolute fact.
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I’m going to say scale.
It’s incredibly easy to lose track of the scale when you play as the Champion of Azeroth and you’re afforded all the luxury of convenience through portals, everything magical and enchanted at the tip of your fingers, and being a top priority person to be briefed about new developments personally by faction leaders.
But that’s not the life of the average peasant on Azeroth. Per Traveler, night elves were a distant myth from far away lands that no villager from Lakeshire had ever seen in their life by early Mists of Pandaria. News primarily travel by word of mouth in Azeroth with traveling merchants being the #1 spreaders of news and rumours—newspapers exist, but someone still has to physically carry them to those far away places, and Lakeshire is not a major trading hub or destination that garners a lot of travelers in the lore, save for aforementioned traveling merchants who bring news and rumours of night elves—it’s an out of the way village out in the country that you have to make a conscious decision to visit for the sake of it.
Per the same novel, they’re a common sight in Stormwind, but out in the countryside people can go their entire lives without ever encountering another race—or a mage. Anyone can in theory learn magic, but it’s expensive, and unless you’re a natural born sorcerer with a lot of raw potential, nobody is going to sponsor you out of the goodness of their heart if you’re a country bumpkin nobody.
You have night elf villages out in the hard to reach Kalimdor wilderness that still haven’t received news of them being in the Alliance because of how slow word travels when it has to be delivered in person, and the Kalimdor wilderness is treacherous and slow to travel. Elves live long enough where it’s completely normal to not hear from someone for a century and think nothing of it. Even in the Eastern Kingdoms it takes 6 weeks to fly the length of Dalaran-Stormwind.
That’s not to say that magic is rare in the setting. The very same Traveler series highlights this as Aram, a common child from Lakeshire, gets whisked away on an adventure by his explorer father and for the first time he gets to see the wider world out there. He experiences Kalimdor with all its fantastical wonders, and it’s juxtaposed with how truly new and alien these things are to a villager from the countryside, despite being relatively common in Kalimdor. When majority of the population are still sustenance farmers, they don’t have the time or the means to see the world like we do.
That’s also not to say that these things must be rare in RP either, but keeping in mind the sense of scale and what the norm actually looks like to people in-universe helps inform the baseline reaction to these fantastical things that we the RPers often portray, and in turn inform how your own character deals with the incongruousness of their circumstances. Treating those out-of-the-norm things we RP and see in quests as The Literal Main Character as the baseline contributes to the shrinking feeling of the setting that people often complain about, and a lot of the times that shrinking is player-made!
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Completely absurd scale for flying! Otherwise, yeah. It’s a big world and travel takes a while. The example that stands out to me is how the trip from Lake Kum’uya to Warsong Hold is supposed to be a day’s journey when riding. Ingame it’s what, a minute run?
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Yeah six weeks flying is ‘Fantasy Writers have no sense of scale’ in the other direction. I could buy ‘by horse’ like, the Roman Empire took about 2 months by boat and horse to cross at it’s height (speeded by the Roman Empire being an integrated transport network where you were probably safe to use the roads/waterways). Six weeks for someone to fly is ridiculous and I will be ignoring it.
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I think its taking into account resting, switching etc. there will probably be 2-3 days per week during that 6 weeks that you’re just waiting at the nearest Inn stop for your gryphon to rotate/rest up. They’re flying beasts who are very fast but somewhat notorious for not being overly long-distance beasts of burden. When you consider rest/adverse weather etc. the 6 weeks makes a lot more sense.
It also makes more sense when you consider the EK in-game is like 0.01% of its actual size. Hillsbrad alone takes weeks to traverse on foot.
Keeping in mind that the Roman Empire is like an ant compared to the Eastern Kingdoms actual size.
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It’s two weeks of flight travel and four weeks dealing with flight master bureaucracy on both ends. Hope you got your papers in order.
Not counting Arathi where there’s ~2km between Stromgarde and the big wall at most per the Before the Storm novel.
Kinda curious if there’s a master list of ‘in character’ travel times from quest text, books, short stories, etc. I know there’d be a lot of contradiction going on.
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This. The 6 weeks is in context of a letter being delivered, as it turns out the author of the letter had been murdered, and the calculations of when the murder must have taken place—i.e. when was the last confirmed time he was alive, given the distance the letter had to travel and how long such a distance would take for a courier.
6 weeks on gryphon back, accounting for rest. Of course it turned out the mage had been murdered by a flying demon that Medivh summoned that had no need for such considerations, and was able to fly across EK and kill the mage in question faster, thus giving Medivh an alibi during the original presumed date that was calculated from normal gryphon-back courier for the mage’s last known date he was still alive.
Off the top of my head, 2 miles from Darkshire to Manor Mistmantle if you cut a straight line through the woods. The road curves, so might be longer. 6 weeks to fly from Stormwind to Dalaran, accounting for rest. 1 month by foot across Feralas due to the dangerous and difficult to travel terrain—though it’s noted that night elves know faster and safer paths through the forest.
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I happen to recall from Day of the Dragon that it took Falstand and his gryphonsquad, carrying Rhonin, Vereesa and Duncan Senturus, from Hasic ( which I assume would be somewhere on Lordaeron’s southern coast) about half a day to fly from there to the Wetlands. But that was without any stop, as the novel said Falstad didn’t want to land on Tol Barad, the only possibility for a stop, because it was cursed ever since the Horde took it.
Granted, this is from the time when Warcraft’s map looked very different, as Dun Algaz was meant to be at the north end of the Wetlands, where Dun Modr is in-game so I may be somewhat off.
Housing and garrisons are the closest that we’ll ever get to simulating the unseen majority of Azeroth and even then, I suspect that most roleplayers likely won’t use it for the simulation of middle-of-nowhere backwater villages where no one’s ever seen a mage or an elf.
So these countless villages will probably remain fringe lore and inaccessible in the game that we play, in which we roleplay our characters. Our characters will never interact with all of these sustenance farmers and superstitious yokels that make up the majority of the population, at least not while they’re on-screen and being roleplayed in the game.
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When it comes to using real scale of Azeroth, I think there´s also the problem of RPers viewing the “we´re not actually here” negatively because it´s “bubble RP”. But it´s impossible to avoid if you actually want to represent the scale.
We can´t have it both ways, the world can´t be seen as this vast and empty space where mage visiting a village will be the most interesting thing that has happened in a decade, while also never going outside of the areas represented in-game.
A guild RPing Redridge villagers who have never seen a night elf in their life can only use Lakeshire, a place where night elves appear during each yearly tourney and whenever Blizzard shards Stormwind. Either they´re going to bubble (a terrible thing that ruins AD according to some people) or they´re going to RP in the much smaller in-game world (and thus will not bat an eye when 50th mage that year visits their lakeside town).
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I’m not sure I follow - since we already do see exactly that. Go through Stormwind’s regions and you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything other than farmers. The manner in which all of Stormwind has been semiotically developed is that it’s dominated largely by rural, undeveloped land outside of its capital.
This isn’t solely restricted to Stormwind either, and the same applies to other lands as well. Go to Drustvar and you’ll have superstitious yokels that have no clue about what evil sorcery is like, in spite of being native to that land - or Stormsingers and Tirasians also seemingly being unaccustomed to Tidesage Magic at times in dialogue.
You don’t need to rely on out-of-game lore sources and books to visualize that most of the in-game world’s characters simply are living “mudcore” lives as you appealed to it above.
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