Vulpera and their relationship to Loa are a huge interest of mine, IC and OOC, as well as vulpera RP on an OOC basis!!
I, therefore, apologise for the long post but…!
I hope it’s interesting :>
Some facts tend to be forgotten or overlooked, when it comes to vulpera and their place on Zuldazar. For one, vulpera were very much not in a place to be influenced directly by Troll culture:
- Prior to BFA, the only non-troll race allowed in Dazar’alor were the tortollan (see tortollan gossip around the harbour in Dazar’alor!)
- Prior to the Cataclysm, Nazmir and Zuldazar were kept separated by the shattered wall we see in-game.
- Zandalari were very much mega-bigotted villains prior to BFA and Talanji’s rise to power. Getting past the borders unharassed would’ve been incredibly hard, and being received peacefully/with any sort of respect by the Zandalari would’ve been near-impossible.
In the questline, the Zandalari NPCs recognise the sethrak and question their sudden resurgence, but do not recognise what the vulpera are, as a good example of how little the vulpera mattered to the Zandalari, and how little communication there was between the two peoples.
The majority of influence Zandalar had on vulpera is limited to murals/ruins, which are never treated as anything of (non-mercantile/scavenging) interest, and the only trolls they could actually meet were exiles.
Exiles are Zandalar’s worst criminals (+ their families) sent to the dunes to die. Most of them are bandits and criminals, as seen in the Scorched Sands questline; they have gang-wars and whatnot. To vulpera, they’re either corpses to pick (yay!) or yet MORE ruthless competition for land/food/resources (boo!). They’re likely the Zandalari most disenfranchised with Dazar’alor’s Loa, as well.
So it leaves the Loa to influence vulpera by themselves – and really, they do a terrible job at it. They don’t even try.
I have a lot of fun writing and speaking anti-Loa sentiment IC, because once you start to weigh the facts, it’s craaazy just how neglected the vulpera are by the named Loa of Zandalar.
- You have Jani appearing in Vol’dun. They have the best rep amongst vulpera RP’ers (scavenger-Loa for a scavenger-people DOES make a lot of sense!!) but really the only thing he’s actually, actively doing in Vol’dun is the same he does anywhere else: stealing and scavenging. This time it’s from a desert that already has very little, where everyone is starving and in desperate need of materials/things to live or sell and whatnot, and he takes the same items they’d use for survival, ‘everything has its purpose’, and throws them on top of an ever-growing hoard which he defends very callously.
Vulpera who don’t have to contend with the saurid for scraps might like him in concept, but those who do have to contend with the saurid likely hate the Loa’s guts. He’s rich, he’s powerful, and he’s stealing what little we have to scavenge. In Dazar’alor you can make a case for a ‘Robin Hood’ sort of vibe for Jani, but in Vol’dun…? Not at all.
- You have Kim’bul who basically is a non-entity until very recently, he locked himself away in his temple after his people died and he’s been quiet ever since lorewise - he has the best chances as someone a vulpera might follow, as far as I can see, but literally qualifies only due to Having Done Nothing for quite some time, and therefore not having the opportunity to mess anything up.
Tortollan worship him now! And I do see tortollan and vulpera as people who likely traded with one another often, and maybe even had some sort of terrible bond via both being victims of sethrak slavery. That being said, he also didn’t come out of his sadboy temple to help put a stop to that, either. He’s not benevolent or charitable any more than the rest of them.
- Sethraliss also a non-entity, but questlines state that any sort of non-sethrak guest to the temple was unorthodox, so it’s likely that vulpera worshippers were very rare - and it would be the least useful loa to worship, considering she was away for 16,000 years until very recently. The Faithless/Devoted split, and the lore surrounding that, suggests she was silent (read: useless) during this time, as well.
The Devoted’s resources were probably quite the boon, though…? So ‘worshipping’ simply for resources, imo, is a viable survival strat.
- Finally you have AKUNDA, who is presented by Blizzard as a benevolent entity, but when you start to think about him he becomes a very insidious, terrifying monster of a Loa. He’s set up shop in the place where trolls deemed irredeemable are sent to die, like a spider waiting in a web.
As a Loa of ‘new beginnings’ he could be a very positive presence, but instead he takes what ‘offerings’ they have ( that being everything they have left, rendering them unable to actually -leave- once they’ve reached the temple, in a place like Vol’dun), erases their bad memories/minds, and rewrites them, utterly and literally, in his name. Whoever you were before Akunda, that person is dead by the time you’re fully integrated.
It’s a very cool narrative. It’s a horror narrative. When doing the q-line I very much expected all of this to be the case ONLY because bandits had taken over the temple, but no! it STILL happens once you free Akunda. So that’s Just Akunda.
I think there’s a reason we see 0 vulpera near or in Akunda’s temple, and it’s because the freak is terrifying and vulpera simply know better.
Then you take Dazar’alor into account.
Zandalari are rich and to their Loa they offer blood/gold/numbers – things Vulpera simply cannot offer. They’re poor and they’re on the brink of survival. They would have very much benefitted from Loa blessings, but couldn’t afford any.
On the other side of a massive green mountain you have a City of Gold that sprawls half a jungle, full of the rich and the powerful and the well-fed, guarded by gold-clad Loa, safe and beautiful - and they’re forbidden to reach it.
Personally, I can’t imagine vulpera worshiping Gonk, Pa’ku, Rezan, Bwomsandi, etc etc, all of the Zandalari Loa purely for the fact that they’ve utterly ignored the vulpera through years of hardship and slavery and starvation. Dazar’alor’s Loa are transactional, and they prefer rich followers. My character is very embittered by this, and he does not feel they deserve any sort of worship. They’ve never done a thing for vulpera, lore-wise.
Personally I subscribe to more elemental-based worship, if they do worship anything, or a more general ‘Dune’ worship, since it comes up in so many of their voice-lines and in-game texts. They say they came from the sands, they follow the dunes, and so on. But overall, they seem more pragmatic than religious, and more culturally incentivised by elders/spirits and so on as opposed to outside forces. They likely go on a caravan-by-caravan basis.
Though, I also don’t think it’s impossible for vulpera Loa-worshippers to happen. If they learn about these amazing creatures through word of mouth, and end up with some token/amulet/idol/boon, they’re not going to deny it – and they genuinely may just end up harbouring actual faith. And there’s always the infinite nuance capable by story-writers :> The above points are more just a personal interest!
Bringing this back to the OG topic --!! (oops)
I do love more humble minor Loa, however, being crafted by RP’ers!! I’ve seen some really amazing examples of this IC over the years, like vulture Loa and Loa of oases and whatnot. Since just about any spirit can be deemed a Loa, it’s never too jarring – its a term, as some people have said, that can be applied to any spirit, really. There’re thousands upon thousands of spirits.
I’d love to see more celebrations of individual caravan lore shown IC, written about ooc, etc!
As for changes,
This is something I notice plenty. Vulpera rp can be incredibly insular in certain groups - perrrrrsonally, I’d accredit it to the ‘deLeTe vUlpEra’ vibes some people have, as seen earlier in the threads.
You can feel when someone is bringing their weird OOC biases into IC, and it does, unfortunately, leave IC marks.
Most of my vulpera were made in BFA, when there was an absolute trend of hardcore Hordies literally murdering vulpera on the streets of Orgrimmar for Not Being Horde Enough (unsubstantiated IC), and they suuure remember it to this day. Orcs are the enemy, as far as my mains are concerned; they witnessed far too much OOC-IC mess, too many deaths. This is where ‘kin’ as a term really took off in AD RP, where vulpera really started to form ‘realm’ traditions of sticking together and suspicions and caution around other people - it was a direct reaction to people… RPing badly, basically.
((This critique of course does not apply to those RP’ers, orcs or otherwise, who went about murdering vulpera for totally legit IC reasons. I love IC conflict. Murder away.))
It’s a very non-immersive OOC view to take into IC, a sign of a flawed RP’er, imo – World of Warcraft is quite literally full of animalistic races. You’d have learned long, long ago not to pet them, not to treat them like animals, etc. It’s simply a fact that some people have snouts and some have flat faces and some have tusks and some have feathers and some are small and some are large. They’re not animal races, they’re races.
The difference between entering an event with people who aren’t affected by OOC bias and those who are is night and day. You feel it. The immersion slips, the atmosphere is weird. Just RP, is my advice. You’ll be able to filter out the good from the bad like any other race with a tiny bit of patience and some open-mindedness.
I entered vulpera RP near the end-ish of BFA, after RPing nelves/worgen/humans, mostly Alliance races but occasionally Horde, since Cataclysm. I tasted plenty of styles of RP.
And yet, I have not been able to escape vulpera since starting to RP them! I’ve never wanted to return to any other character. It has been the most dynamic, vibrant, amazing, interesting RP I’ve ever had. It absolutely can swallow you because it’s so good? I have no idea what it is. The characters are incredible, the storylines can be gritty and dark and ruthless, the backstories are flexible and there are SO MANY incredible people and incredible writers and story-tellers amongst vulpera RP’ers.
Anyone who flat-out denies themselves the chance to witness it and involve themselves in it are just, quite frankly, missing out.
… And trust me, as far as the ‘bad apples’ 
go, we serious vulpera RP’ers hate them faaaar more than you do : )
As Mekavolt said, there’s a real issue with in-fighting as well, which is the other half of the ‘closed gatherings’ issue. I’ve had cases where I’ve invited two groups to one place, and both declined because the other would be there. A lot of new vulpera RP’ers also get immediately swallowed up by those spearheading these ‘dramas’, and they never get to experience the wider community because of it, which is a real shame. I think part of it is the hostility people have towards others they feel are bringing the community down – more often than not misattributed, as far as I’ve seen.
Few people are willing to accept that people are multi-faceted. It’s impossible to know someone until you know them.
The community is incredibly scattered. I’ve tried for a very long time to lure the far reaches together and it’s a real task and a half. That being said… I keep hopeful.
I do have faith this can be mended.
And honestly…!! I think this sort of thing is the answer. People need to talk to one another more, and they need some open spaces to experience more than what they’re usually confined to.
I’ve been planning a few open events for vulpera for a long while now, and would love to make these cultural festivities a reality for people to enjoy :>
I love vulpera rp’ers and i want to see and experience more of them!! ra
