Here is a thread for discussing the Warcraft RPG and associated Warcraft lore.
Why did Ner'zhul choose Arthas to be his champion out of everyone else?
What was so special about him? Well, he was the crown prince of Lordaeron but was that all there was to it?
Why not Uther or Varian or Aliden Perenolde or Galen Trollbane?
Hell, he could've even picked one of his own like Thrall or Grom.
Arthas was young and stubborn enough to be easily manipulated. Ner'zul used his madness and obsession of saving his people at any cost by giving a powerful sword to get his revenge only to become the doom of his own people himself.
Why did Palpatine manpulated Anaking for example? Anakin was young and very emotional and aggressive, such person is way easier to manipulate others then if he tried it on someone more mature and experienced like Obi Wan.
So if Anakin doesn't like sand, what does Arthas not like?
snow
walking
basicly everything he can't sit on a throne, jaina or invincible for
but that's what he does in all of the human campaign
that's why he is in such a bad mood and falls to darkness it's all because of his horse -christie golden
How often did Onyxia comfort Anduin when his daddy was missing?
Never. KYS pedo
Not very often seeing how he never brings her up again.
Because he's gay and didn't enjoy thr experience.
Such experience turns boys gay.
Who do you think is the father of all those whelps?
My dudes, the "Now we are one" is LK. Nerzhul was long gone by the time LK interacted with Arthas, hell he was already barely (his old orc) self by the time he used the powers from the eye, scepter, book, etc to forge Frostmourne, Plate and Helm/uncover the powers of death.
Same for Arthas, the most powerful parts of each personality remain, but LK is by all accounts his own character.
Which is why
LK he chose him, Arthas was like the man who metaphorically created LK/Nerzhul was, willing to do anything to save his people and had the power+ambition to actually go through with it.
Soulless setting. Simplistic game with lackluster mechanics. Try DnD 5E?
Friendly reminder that WoW never happened.
Prince Arthas just took the frozen throne for himself, what do you think will happen next?
Lots of brooding on his frozen throne. Preparations to btfo demons and Preparations to renew his war against the living to feel his war against demons.
He uses his undead control powers to take over the rest of Northrend.
After that he unites with the other races to defeat the Legion once and for all, like the battle of mt Hyjal but with the undead also being allies.
3 way war between alliance, horde, and night elves+allies vying for control over kalimdor while the forsaken try to do a neutral mercenary kinda deal to ensure their survival. In general there is just more war without frequent common ground and less power of friendship and understanding like mount hyjal.
If they ever do an MMO faction tensions should be ever at the forefront.
I always thought that the gameplay for Warcraft 4 should be atomized into much smaller factions. You don't play Alliance, you just play as blood elves, but over the course of any given game you interact with the map in order to recruit other factions and form a larger alliance. It's map-dependant, sort of like mercenaries, but you don't recruit an individual ogre you recruit the whole ogre faction and add ogre buildings to your tech tree. I definitely feel like Frozen Throne was building up to this with the stuff in the 1-player campaign.
If I were running Warcraft tabletop I would structure the campaign around the same basic principle, because it makes story-sense and is cool, post-WCIII is an age of strange bedfellows.
Perhaps, but I don't trust Blizz to balance a faction per race
No, I don't trust them to do anything right (thought I admit that SCII co-op was fun), but it's actually an easier paradigm to balance. Choosing dwarves as your faction means you start as dwarves, but the factions that you recruit to build your army can also be recruited by other players, other players can even recruit dwarves later in the game. It would break them out of their usual rut of designing super-complex factions that lead to super-narrow lanes of play.
Would be great and a fun spin on the stale rts genere. I'd also suggest that some factions you get block you from getting others.
Yea, there's a lot of potential to create indirect interaction through faction choice/recruitment, either for balance reasons or for cool-factor. Some rules can be game-wide and others can be map-specific, and this can let you do subfactions for story reasons, the feral trolls in one region can be different from another (either in game terms or just having different voice/skins/lines). I don't even feel like this is my idea, I feel like it's implied by the naga and the blood elves and the c**ty knights and all the other smaller sub-factions in the Frozen Throne storymode.
>what do dreadlords eat?
Hope.
Honestly I just want to see a game kinda like Azeroth Wars/Lordaeron the Foremath/Kalimdor. Asymmetric global RTS. Where an entire storyline is unfolding over the course of a game that can be altered dynamically depending on the skill and decisions of the players
>Prince Arthas just took the frozen throne for himself, what do you think will happen next?
False. Arthas and Ner'zhul fused into a completely new being that combines both their characteristics before they became undead.
Because now they are free of the shackles of the Burning Legion via Arthas smashing the ice that held Ner'zhul in the Frozen Throne, both of them are now truly free.
There is however no Arthas. Nor there is any Ner'zhul. The new being is just THE Lich King. And he will avenge everything the Legion made Ner'zhul do and experience and Arthas who was as much of a victim as he was a butcher when he became a Death Knight.
His quest is that of both vengeance...and redemption. He would be what if Darth Vader survived his electrocution by Palpatine after his Heel-Face and joined Luke to make amends for his time in the Empire.
And he does so by calling everyone in the Scourge and going to Outland to strike from there at the Legion, give true death to its most powerful leaders in order to shatter the Legion and this way atone for at least some of the atrocities Arthas and Ner'zhul did before making amends for the rest.
Needless to say Azeroth as a whole freaks out because the undead all of a sudden are going to Outland...
>False. Arthas and Ner'zhul fused into a completely new being that combines both their characteristics before they became undead.
Well yea, to some extent, but most of that happened before the end of WCIII. The Arthas that I'm talking about is no longer Arthas. No-Longer-Arthas is a soulless pawn of Ner'zhul but he retains much of Arthas's intellect and personality. At the end of Frozen Throne, No-Longer-Arthas destroys Ner'zhul and takes his crown. Obviously some part of Ner'zhul is surviving in the crown, and obviously this is something that Ner'zhul wanted or was at least willing to risk, but if anything No-Longer-Arthas has more personal agency (after putting on the crown) than he had before, because before that he was just a pawn of Ner'Zhul. But your take sounds cool, and I was wrong to say Arthas took the Frozen Throne because it's no longer Frozen.
>No-Longer-Arthas destroys Ner'zhul and takes his crown.
Nah. Ner'zhul's final words are extremely clear that both of them are now one. Which pretty much says that the new Lich King is neither Arthas nor Ner'zhul, but a completely new entity that may even combine the memories and traits of both of them.
If Blizzard were smart (which they aren't and will probably never be), they would've then explored that. And since Arthas freed Ner'zhul's spirit from the confines of the Frozen Throne, and thus shattered what little hold the Burning Legion had over the Orc Shaman-turned-Lich King, then both of them actually became truly free. And with that freedom the stuff that made them whom they were, including their consciences, would re-emerge. This would result in a Lich King aware of what he did due to the actions of Ner'zhul and Arthas since he'd be the fusion of both beings. One who would actually want to make amends and seek redemption while also seeking vengeance on those that made Ner'zhul do all those things he did and by that extension everything Arthas did under Ner'zhul's thralldom.
But nope. WoTLK happened with the moronic part of Arthas being the dominant personality, the ending of WoTLK happened, Shadowlands happened and thus Arthas dies in the most atrociously bad way imaginable while Sylvanas gets away with everything like they did it with Kerrigan in SCII despite the fact she also did her share of atrocities in WoW even after she and her Forsaken became free from Ner'zhul's control.
I largely agree, you're just understating the degree to which they were already one. Before that, Ner'zhul was part of Arthas,, but Arthas wasn't part of Ner'zhul.
I think it would also make sense in canon to say that Ner'zhul is dominant and that his intellect mostly supplants the undead-Arthas-entity, 'we are one' is just Ner'zhul describing a personal experience. It would also make sense within canon to say that The Undead Monarch Formerly Known as Arthas and Ner'zhul ends up being a perpetual battleground between a ghost-human and a ghost-orc.
Tbf and this is my personal take on it, I like the idea that Arthas actually did became the dominant force and basically became the new Lich King by backstabbing Ner'Zhul. Like, why writing such a good character in Warcraft III that even becomes the coverboy of the expansion, a man that wanted to become a king and a much better one then his father only to give everything up that makes him this man to become a new entity that isn't him anymore. The whole fusion thing is so confusing as you can't tell if it's Arthas and Ner'zul working together in one body or that the two are no more and it is a whole new person who's just called the Lich King, for Ner'zul that's even a dumb idea cause if he still wanted to conquer Azeroth for himself why not just take over Arthas's body completely but then you have a character killed off who basically was the main charatcter in Frozen Throne?
It has been mentioned in many sources that during the five year sleep on the throne Arthas destroyed Ner'zul and took over the body completely to make himself the new Lich King and I like it. Arthas is such a great character so why invent a new one for the Lich King?
I think Blizzard's reasoning is that Arthas is a way more developed character than Ner'zhul.
In Warcraft 2 Ner'zhul was just our boss telling us what to do before every mission, while in Warcraft 3 we pretty much *were* Arthas. We came to know what he wants, what he values and his insecurities.
Not to say that Ner'zhul doesn't have the potential to be a good character but he was unfortunately victim to the way his game was designed. We just didn't get to know him the way we did Arthas.
Hopefully the CSW team will do his character justice.
So. Which of the 2 official rpgs are best for a Warcraft adventure?
I mean do you want wow lore or not and do you like 3.0 or 3.5 dnd better?
The Forsaken are cool alongside the Horde and I'm tired of pretending they aren't. Yeah it didn't go in a good direction but nothing did in the end. I think that multiracial squad in Pandaria's early zone actually did the best job of showing camaraderie the motley bunch of misfits that the Horde were after Hellscream freed them from their need to savage.
Undead that just so happen to be only human with some elves being a subfaction of the not really villains anymore faction is almost as cringe as immortal savage matriarchal forest elves joining default dan fantasy protags as dedicated doormat.
Forsaken should be the undead rejects of every species, united in their disdain for the lich king and the rage at being abandoned by their kinsmen, trying to survive in a world that they infect by merely existing.
>…rage at being abandoned by their kinsmen, trying to survive in a world that they infect by merely existing.
This is literally every Horde race. Forsaken belong in the Horde.
>trying to survive in a world that they infect by merely existing.
>This is literally every Horde race.
That's just the Orcs and the Forsaken though.
All Land is Troll Land, so they can't "Infect" anything. And Tauren are okay too I guess.
>This is literally every Horde race. Forsaken belong in the Horde.
Like frick either of those sentences are true.
The tauren are incredibly connected to the planet, they're the inverse of corruptive. The trolls are generally net-neutral, they don't really corrupt anything much but their brand of mysticism isn't usually super connected to the natural world so much as the spiritual one. Only the orcs can be compared to an infection.
And the Forsaken don't belong because the Horde don't belong in the Eastern Kingdoms, so maintaining a presence there was always a bullshit MMO-ism. The whole point of the Horde's exodus and founding of cities was getting the frick away from the old lands of the east and forging their destiny in the wildwestern world. Every step that put them back onto eastern shores was directly dissonant with their established coherency.
Theramore should have been the Alliance Capital, with its population bolstered with waves of refugees. Kalimdore would be the only continent, with the Eastern Kingdoms being the first expansion.
Remember when blood elves joined the horde in response to Asian wow players gf's wanting a cute race for the horde
Yeah that was such BS.
Especially since they get 'brought in' by the undead.
You know, the creatures who killed 90% of the elves? yeah they are fine listening to them apparently
To be fair, the belves of BC were in a very different place culturally than the high elves of a few years prior. Half their city is wrecked, half their land is still occupied by Scourge, they're resorting to fel magic and slurping a naaru to sate their addition, a large chunk of their very limited forces (plus their leader) are deployed in Outland, and they've already seen good results from "unconventional" alliances with the naga and Illidan.
Why snub Sylvanas when she brings a good offer to the table? Its not like the Scarlet's situation where accepting the Forsaken would mean sharing/ceding their land to abominations and submitting to some foreign zombie elf. Its one of their own leaders coming back, offering a place in an alliance that allows them autonomy, and bringing in a bunch of muscle to help retake their lands. And its not like the entire population blindly trusted them. There were citizens arguing with dissidents in the street over it.
I could easily see Warcraft 4 as NE, Naga/BE, Horde, Alliance, Undead, Legion
With the Horde getting Undead units in Forsaken ally missions, Alliance getting NE units and BE getting summoned Legion units for a Illidan campaign.
Really each expansion of WoW is just a campaign idea from the unmade WC4 isn’t it.
honestly having the illadari as a faction would have been sick.
Naga, belves, broken draenai, demons, maybe orcs? they subjugated a few of those.
>add Illidari as a third playable faction in BC with BT as their capital instead being a raid
>blood elves, fel orcs, broken, naga, and some sort of demons as their races
>maybe swap out naga for something if there were too many issues getting equipment to look right on their character models
>Horde get ogres as their new race instead of belves
>Illidari and Shattrath really don't trust each other but aren't outright hostile since the latter figured out that attack on the city was probably Kael'thas false flagging before he openly defected to the Legion
>maybe orcs? they subjugated a few of those.
Going by BC they subjugated a LOT of them,
Also Satyr, I love Satyrs.
I feel like Kael probably shouldn't defect if Illidari are made playable. Let the Bloodelves get the energy he was bribing demons with.
>Horde get ogres as their new race instead of belves
Then the Horde ceases to exist on most servers.
>Illidari: blood elves, naga, broken, fel orcs, man'ari
>Horde gets ogres, but also get dark ranger elves as compensation for Illidari having orcs
>Alliance gets blue goats and high elves to even things out
You get an elf, they get an elf, everyone gets an elf!
i mean, that is warcraft now. So many elves.
I'd give the Alleinace Panda People instead of Blue Goats if I could redo Warcraft, but yes, the Horde had an image problem.
i think the blue goats are alright.
It was a interesting iteration of "advanced aliens" and they actually had a foreign culture feel to them.
something that almost never comes up when people talk about why quel'thalas allied with with the forsaken is that Lor'themar (who was still very much trying to hold the whole thing together as ranger general long before becoming Regent Lord) was Sylvanas' second-in-command when -she- was ranger general. They knew each other personally.
>as cringe as immortal savage matriarchal forest elves
well you haven't played wc3.
But in fairness wow kinda fricked over the Nelves. The men are supposed to be walking wrecking balls who have been meditating to fight in the emerald dream for centuries. Each one a druidic powerhouse.
I think the idea of Forsaken getting into the Horde out of pure political convenience is fine, the problem is that they never really delved into internal tensions while also making the Forsaken so blatantly evil that the entire faction looked evil by association. Not saying they should've been sweet little angels, but if you're gonna have playable Scourge-lite there should have been one hell of a PR campaign obfuscating what they were actually becoming.
Demons? Ha ha, of course not, Sylvanas killed Varimathras herself. Just ask her advisor Varen Mathelhoff, he was there!
Developing a new plague? Heavens no, that's just some captured surplus from the cult we only ever use for the most dire emergencies!
Slaughtering innocent farmers? But how will we keep exporting all this cheap food to Durotar if we don't have good farmland?
Then just have them be too politically integrated and powerful to outright boot by the time characters realize how hard they've been rused.
Funnily, in an old, now-defunct private RP server that was exactly what I played, a Forsaken diplomat PR guy who turned all our guilds' wetwork into nice digestible takes for the big greens.
The concept of the Forsaken being a necessary evil is a compelling one, too militarily effective to drop without making the Horde lose their foothold in the Eastern Kingdoms which would isolate and annihilate Thrall's favorite clan tucked away in the Alterac Mountains and make them perma-lose that silly base-race battleground that used to be cool. But also, I think on an individual scale Forsaken should be able to find common ground and camaraderie with their allied races, while much of the Royal Apothecary and Arcanist upper castes are hand-wringingly evil the footmen and operatives can be just out there, grateful to their queen for freedom and proving themselves in battle against her enemies same as any Orc in service to their Warchief.
Why are the Frostwolves still in Alterac, anyway? I thought they all moved to Kalimdor.
It's where they initially exiled themselves to away from Gul'dan's forces during the first war. The frost elementals helped them purge their fel corruption and reconnect to shamanism.
I know. I said "still", as in why didn't they follow Thrall to Kalimdor like they were supposed to.
Oh yeah, well I guess they like the icy boys too much to give it up. Also probably reminds them of home (Though Winterspring would solve both those issues for them)
Here's the honest and moronic truth of Blizzard's lore; they did. They went back to Alterac after Orgrimmar was founded.
And that decision was probably made by blizz specifically so the horde would have a reason to care about the EK. Wow lore always serviced the mmo structure at the the expense of its own integrity.
Their excuse was wanting to protect the wolves, the elements, and the tomb of Durotan and Draka. Which makes sense. Once the Plaguelands civil war had weakend the scourge, and the forsaken (And I suppose the Revantusk) had reached out they could safely return.
>protect the wolves
They brought the damned things with them, that was the whole point of leaving; uprooting themselves, taking all their treasured companions and possessions, and striking out to start anew.
>protect the elements
The elements exist everywhere, and given the Frostwolves weren't doing anything about the catastrophically damaged and corrupted Plaguelands, that were inarguably far worse off than Alterac, I'm gonna have to say that anyone in-verse who used that line of argument was bullshitting for some ulterior motive.
>tomb of Durotan and Draka
That I could see, but at some point you have to let the dead lie and move on. They went to a whole other continent, named their realm after Durotan, and established a home away from corruption to restablish and reconnect with their roots; literally everything about why Durotan left the Horde and ended up in Alterac originally. It's almost kicking his grave to spurn that over a couple graves that aren't any more notable than the thousands upon thousands everywhere else on the Lordaeron continent.
All that to say, I don't disbelieve you anon, but it just makes Blizzard look dumber if it's true.
>They brought the damned things with them, that was the whole point of leaving; uprooting themselves, taking all their treasured companions and possessions, and striking out to start anew.
Maybe they weren't breathing there.
>The elements exist everywhere, and given the Frostwolves weren't doing anything about the catastrophically damaged and corrupted Plaguelands, that were inarguably far worse off than Alterac, I'm gonna have to say that anyone in-verse who used that line of argument was bullshitting for some ulterior motive.
I mean the spirits may be more local or not. Specific ones they feel indebted to. They want to keep those from getting tainted the way the Plaguelands down the hill did.
I dunno. It just makes Thrall seem incredibly scummy. Drek'thar seems to teleport from Alterac to Orgrimmar as plot demands, and there's no damn spirits or alterac wolves in Alterac Mountains that anyone encounters. All in all, it completely justifies the Alliance to be hostile to the Horde when Thrall said he'd leave humans alone after killing Admiral Proudmoore yet a) allied with a faction the alliance considers morally and politically hostile, b) kept a portion of his own clan squatting in the EK after saying he'd abandon human lands, c) kept cutting down the night elves' forests after they saved his entire race and d) failed to tell everyone that Jaina is the reason Grom was even able to be saved and redeem his entire race, which culminated in Garrosh nuking her home.
But then again, worse things have happened since then so who even cares anymore.
Couldn't it be argued that Thrall was responding to Alliance encroachment into Kalimdor? The Alliance, as a political force, did not need to be there. The nelves could have been left alone and probably would have been able to work out a lumber deal much sooner. Theramore could have either pulled out after it was clear the EK weren't completely fricked, or severed ties to join the new Horde itself.
Thrall keeping his original plan would have left the orcs isolated in a shitty desert flanked by two hostile powers, backed by an entire continent of hostile humans that already tried to snuff them out once.
If they had kept the original EverQuest idea of local rep. Maybe they could have done quest chains in the expansions to woo different minor factions to the Horde or Alliance since races were so strictly faction aligned.
Theramore humans went to Kalimdor for largely the same reasons the orcs did. And where do they have to go back? Lordaeron is almost entirely plagued or under undead control. Stormwind just recently rebuild and they are under political instability. When Stormwindians sought refuge in Lordaeron, they returned home after the war was over. There's no home for Lordaeron citizens to go back to.
Besides, Thrall does not own Kalimdor. Anybody can be there. As for the elves, they clearly couldn't work out a deal because in five years, it seems Thrall didn't or couldn't stop the Warsong from cutting down their homes.
I'm not saying Thrall had a moral right to the entire continent, I'm just saying that it seems hypocritical to treat him like some scheming expansionist when the Alliance had also expanded in a way that was extremely threatening. And the night elves did reach a deal a couple times IIRC, the first broke down after Wrathgate, the second during Cata because of a false flag attack.
I'm not saying he's scheming, I'm saying he abandoned his mission statement when he did the opposite of leaving the eastern kingdoms alone. He settled Durotar because it's a rough land like his ancestors' and his people crave hardship. He wasn't forced to be stuck in a shitty desert and subsist on attacking night elves for lumber.
>when the Alliance had also expanded in a way that was extremely threatening
Dwarves going on archeological expeditions is not extremely threatening, and that can be dealt with without allying with the humans' worst enemy (the undead).
>Dwarves going on archeological expeditions is not extremely threatening, and that can be dealt with without allying with the humans' worst enemy (the undead).
Ironically in the old 3.5 RPG there actually were blurbs saying that if the DM wants it Brann can be sought out for peaceful resolutions to the excavations in Mulgore and the South Barrens, and that could be extended to Alterac Valley.
Yeah but the others went along pretty willingly. Hell, one of the war things is an aggressive tauren skycaptain.
>no damn spirits or alterac wolves in Alterac Mountain
The spirits don't usually incorporate into elemental bodies. Also there 100% ARE frostwolves in the battleground, they're unsuitable for durotar or really anywhere else on Kalimdor bar Winterspring and Hyjal which are Nightelf territory.
So either his people rear them in a little section of Alterac, a kingom that's already betrayed the rest of the alliance and is otherwise in the hands of the Syndicate, Orgres, or Undead. Or the wolves who helped them at their darkest moment die out in the desert.
The stranded alliance and Horde teams in Jade Forest and later Kunlai Summit were fricking glorious.
Killing off one of the alliance team members soured me on Legion.
>what do dreadlords eat?
After Shadowlands I guess just Anima..
Bleuch.
>play a game
>can pick from several mythic races as your character
>ah yes, I’ll be a rotting corpse
Undead shouldn’t be PCs, same with golems
>upcoming new race is Earthen
>can be Death Knights for some reason
>undead golems
They can? I guess someone at Blizzard realized it was moronic that somehow breaking the Crown of DOMINATION would make it impossible to create FREE WILLED Death Knights.
Or I guess they could have been an old experiment with Ulduar Earthen rather than from this new stupid continent that puts Nerubians way too close to Silithis and Pandaria when the whole point of the divergence was how far away the Aqir were split up.
>People willingly becoming undead evil knights
But why. They look intact but that's because gameplay / better corpse conditions
Then again, the only reason druid is locked to 5 races is because they have to design the forms
Bolvar was apparently recruiting willing DKs during the BFA events to justify skipping the DK intro zone and to have Allied Race DKs.
And then Shadowlands added some nonsense about him not being able to do that anymore without the helmet. Honestly it would be interesting if that WAS true, if it was used as an excuse to bring back Terron Gorefiend again.
>But why.
A sense of duty, a chance to correct/atone for past mistakes, hunger for power even with a cost, and I imagine the circumstances of the offer (you're already dead and stay dead if you say no) play a part. Also, 3rd gen DKs are a whole different league of undead, they barely rot if at all.
>Sylvanas nodded. "Arthas once forced the Val'kyr to raise death knights for his army. That was a much more potent ritual than the one with which they now transform fresh corpses into Forsaken. They can use their powers to reshape your body and make it stronger, more... enduring."
I wonder if Nathanos and Sylvanas ever fricked as undead
No. Nathanos is codes as a lapdog kind of character. He gets to admire Syvlanas and is allowed to orbit, but never actually touch her. Just look at how he is treated and how he reacts in the Undercity throne room scene.
Any argument against Undead is a double-argument against Humans because Undead are just Humans + an actually interesting factor.
what do dreadlords eat?
I know this sounds like a dumb question but simple stuff like that can define the agenda of an entire race. Orcs for example invaded Azeroth because their homeworld was dying.
Why do they subvert and deceive? Why do they serve the Legion/Denathrius and the cosmic force behind them? How would that benefit them in the long run?
Tichondrius ate souls in wc3.
Going purely by old lore and the RPG supplement, it seems that demons don't need to eat mortal food, but they can still derive some measure of sustenance or at least enjoyment from it. pic related, screencap from the Lands of Conflict supplement.
Can I play a vulpera?
Honestly a lot of that filler was really good, possibly better than Legion itself, but that's partly me being a crumudgeon about Legion and Chronicle's retcons.
Whoops, but thanks
If I have to use WoW's lore going forward as a campaign, what egrigious bits were stapled in or changed away from what could have been a WC4/classic WoW feeling?
I know Legion was apparently supposed to be the end, but there was lots of what I can only call filler in between.
Like Warlords of Draenor feels like something they came up to not release Legion too quickly.
Mists of Pandaria could be cool, but I know they shifted its location to add the "uncorrupted" Dranei for Burning Crusade.
I don't know if Cataclysm was alway planned too, even if it updated a lot of stuff and looked sort of fun.
>I know Legion was apparently supposed to be the end
Ive seen this said before, but where does this come from? And were they just planning on ending with a massive ass sword just sticking out of the planet?
>Like Warlords of Draenor feels like something they came up to not release Legion too quickly.
Also to tie-into the WC1-adjacent movie.
And something of a nice sendoff to Metzen's Orcaboo ways.
I'd imagine that WC4 was going to a mismash of different WoW expansions, spread across at least two games in some order.
A campaign to rediscover Draneor/defeat Illidan. Or play as him as the case may be, recycled into TBC.
A campaign to defeat the Qiraji, but whether that was going to involve the War of Burning Sands or just take place after that I couldn't guess.
A campaign to defeat The Lich King mimicking WotLK
And the final campaign where The Lich King calls down the Legion and it's do or die to save the planet (again).
Maybe with Illian/Blood Elves, Qiraji and Pandarians being playable races.
No, considering how much they were pushing elementals in WoW and Deathwing, he would have been a bigger thing.
Cataclysm would have been a bunch of dungeon missions, possible tied to the Old Gods.
>wow lore sucks and the story is shit compared to Warcraft 3
Fair enough
>every alternate story presented in this thread so far is either dogshit moronic or so boring that it feels like a side story compared to Warcraft 3
This is why blizzard ignores you homosexuals. Even though they suck ass as writers. homosexuals like you can’t even keep Warcraft rts lore straight, let alone build on it.
For example
>night elves
>matriarchal
Malfurion is literally the leader in Warcraft 3. It’s only in wow where he was relegated to sleeping until cataclysm that the troony nelf rper fanon idea of them being a matriarchy began to take root.
I can see why they'd make this assumption since the women were the only ones we saw until we freed Furion.
That said it's more accurate to say that they have strict gender roles.
I was going to correct that guy, then I realized that he was explicitly talking about WoW lore so I didn't. You pompous twit.
18 people have posted in this thread. I would bet money that the single dumbest person in this thread could write a story for the first 4 years of WoW that was better than what Blizzards came up with. But if you put all 18 of us in a room together, forget about it, it would be even worse than Blizzard.
Yea, WC3 is more amazon than matriarchy, Tyrande is a military leader, but she defers to Furion's judgment and moral leadership (waking him up and hearing what he has to say is her top priority), but she also ignores him if she think's he's wrong.
In my headcannon the druids and the sentinels are just two of the night elf hosts, there can be a lot more, the druids and the sentinels are just the ones guarding the coast.
Best race, coming through.
Should they have skipped the Draenei and kept the Pandarians in as the Alliance race or just made “Broken” Draenei the default.
?t=374
Khadgar might be a pretty shit wizard.... but sadly he still might be one of the best on azeroth
Could Blood Elves have ever worked as their own stand alone faction like the Night Elves were?
The ones we got in TFT were Alliance reskins and they don’t really seem like they could have held their own conceptually when WoW was being retooled to have faction play.
They just seem too small in number to be worth playing in an RPG.
Yes. Don't forget that night elves weren't standalone in the sense of fielding 100% nelf units either, they made heavy use other races. Blood elves could work similarly with naga, broken, and enslaved demons.
gonna second just making them a illdari faction
>blood elves
>naga
>broken
>demon hunters
>random demons
sounds like enough stuff
I know it's cheesy, but I thought it would be cool if the bulk of the blood elves joined up with some satyrs and naga and other ex-elves and went on a redemption arc, eventually finding new forms of magic to replace the loss of the sunwell. Then we can have righteous sun elves, while still having "blood elves" as creeps on some maps.
I don't think that "blood elf" should have ever been more than a transitional phase. If they aren't going on a redemption arc then they should just turn into another variety of demon-elf because that's obviously where they're headed.
>I know it's cheesy, but I thought it would be cool if the bulk of the blood elves joined up with some satyrs and naga and other ex-elves and went on a redemption arc, eventually finding new forms of magic to replace the loss of the sunwell. Then we can have righteous sun elves, while still having "blood elves" as creeps on some maps.
I mean according to the Warlock Green Fire Quest that;s SORTA what the Host of Souls bossroom in Black Temple was, but Illdian barely gave the bloodelves access, instead using it to lure full Demons away from the Legion.
>thrall tells grom not to attack humans
>Grom does it
>Thrall tells Grom to go chop lumber
>Grom unhappy and kills wisps and shit
>Cenarius starts kicking his shit in
>Sees demon blood pool
>Literally the exact same shit he drank before
>Drinks it AGAIN
So uh
Why the hell did he keep fricking up?
You can argue the presence of demons was causing his blood to stir. But WoD and BFA removed absolutely any doubt anyone might've had that orcs aren't naturally bloodthirsty and murderous.
What part of BFA did that?
I thought the Forsaken were the Horde baddies there
They were pretty happy to get a chance to kill night elves and humans. They followed Sylvanas willingly. Even Saurfang said that orcs are rotten and psychotic, though that's rich coming from him, since he drafted and commanded the damn war.
Even Rexxar acts like a psychotic animal. When you go burn down Jaina's homeland with him, he's pissed off that the alliance is fighting them. If you point out that the Horde started the war, he says it doesn't matter.
Meanwhile, Etrigg (whose life was saved by a human), is going senile and talking about honor and family of the horde while you're slaughtering kul'tirans and raising them as undead for Sylvanas.
>since he drafted and commanded the damn war.
The invasion yes, but not the random burn it moment.
God, BFA had some of the best scenery and side story stuff but the worst main plot. It could have easily fit into a more limited war for contol of the seas, or even a Vanilla like semi-cold-war than a series of warcrimes.
I dunno about the alliance part, but the entire horde side of the war (main stories and side stories) are just atrocious. It's Sylvanas and her simp being sniveling evil dickheads and all the rest of the horde named characters plugging their ears while they command you to commit atrocities on humans and night elves, except Baine is doing the opposite: He's seditious but he's too much of a pussy to leave the horde.
I mean I liked most of the actual Zandalar bits. THough I did dislike Rezan totally wiping out the idea of Paladins on Zandalar being "Heathens" who were loyal to good and the not-quite-understood concept of the Light before the Loa.
The ones who would stand athwart when the Loa asked for too much sacrifice.
And the Wakana references got a little tiring.
tauren and night elves are friends
Damn, I remember this one. This picture is older than most Gankerners by this point.
It looks like she’s consoling him because he couldn’t get hard
of course not, that would be lewd. She's helping with relationship advice because she's 8000 years old and knows a lot of things about that
A shame Blackchain quit.
BFA would have been way better if the main story had been about the various neutral factions (like the ones that were the central thing in Legion) trying to pull together the resources to deal with the impending Old God bullshit because the Alliance and Horde leadership were clearly too goddamn stupid to be of any use.
Eh. I don't consider any of wow canon.
The Night Elves were the frickups there, why were they such salty b***hes that they sent an immortal demigod out to kill a caveman with a big rock
The human part made a bit more sense since he wanted to ensure their new land was safe, and humans had been the enemies for years, even kept him prisoner.
But yeah the night elf conflict, and especially drinking demon blood.. AGAIN is purely on him bein a frick up
probably a stupid question but what systems do people use to run warcraft styled campaigns?
It's easy to forget that he didn't have absolute freedom to act at the time. His mandate from the Legion was to destabilize and crush the kingdoms of the world in preparation for the Legion's arrival. Arthas was a means to those ends, effortlessly culling Lordaeron and providing a foothold to then take Quel'Thalas and Dalaran. These were the primary objectives under which the Lich King was acting, and any further manipulation was an example of him reusing resources to disguise his long-term plans.
Reminder that Night Elves were responsible for the worst incidents, naming the summoning of The Legion, to Azeroth, and complete utter genocide of the elven filth is demanded.
When Medivh was fricking Garona, you think Sargeras was actively paying attention... or even worse, taking possession?
I think the writers were going with that being something he hid from Sargeras somehow. A little act of rebellion, love and creation vs hate and destruction.
It works way better the way the movie did it, where instead of fricking Garona he had that little act of rebellion by fricking her mom, making him her dad. And not just because it makes Me'dan no longer exist.
Garona works better if she was just something cooked up in a lab rather than have to explain she’s a rape baby but not a human rape baby, an alien rape baby where she looks nothing like her supposed mother’s species.
She also works better if you ignore the WoW lore bullshit where they crunched the timeline between WC1 and WC3 to 20 years, when before WoW it was originally ~40-50 years between them, and there was amble time for a rape baby half-orc to grow up into adulthood.
>She also works better if you ignore the WoW lore bullshit where they crunched the timeline between WC1 and WC3 to 20 years, when before WoW it was originally ~40-50 years between them, and there was amble time for a rape baby half-orc to grow up into adulthood.
You mean from the Dark Portal opening to the actual events of WC1, that's the time that was vague in 1, 2, and 3.
Also as of WC3 Thrall was not all that old. And IIRC it was established Arthas was young, but alive for WC2's events, so WC2-3 was less than 20.
>You mean from the Dark Portal opening to the actual events of WC1
I do not, though that is an additional factor. Blizzard retconned the duration of the First War, the duration of the Second War, and the duration between the Second and Third War.
Not after WC3, DURING WC3 Thrall was a fairly young adult, and born before the end of the 1st war. (Though Orcs hit physical if not mental maturity at like 14, something they actually remembered when showing Thrall's son in Dragonflight)
Arthas also seemed traumatized enough by the orcs to have been alive for WC2, not sure if the manuals specified that he had though.
>Orcs hit physical if not mental maturity at like 14
It's 12-13
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Life_spans
Which makes me think, in the First War Gul'dan aged up child orcs to increase their armies right?
How old would they have been?
Were they mentally toddlers or even babies?
>Most orcs are mental manchildren
Explains a lot actually
>What was so special about him?
He was written that way.
I kinda want to run a warcraft campaign
I want to be on kalimdor
And that's about all I've got so far
There was a thread a few months ago where people discussed stuff they'd do to fix Warcraft into something usable, and a lot of the anons thought Kalimdor was appealing if they were gonna try to run a game in the setting, so you're among good company on the board.
>Whole Horde area is very "points of light" -ish, with fortified settlements surrounded by untamed brutal wilderness
This is kind of what I was thinking, a bunch of ragtag misfits rolling across the Barrens.
A lot of these post feel very much like video game mechanics though. I'm not very much interesting in putting a lot of emphasis on factions, for example.
One of the issues with translating Warcraft to tabletop is that even ignoring how entrenched the factions are in WoW, the RTS games were still very much color-coded teams fighting other color-coded teams. Factionalism is going to be present no matter what.
The trick is to divorce the players from the Us VS Them mentality of factionalism; kingdoms might care about contesting their hegemony, but a starting group of players don't. To the players, it doesn't matter if the village chief telling them to go slaughter a rampaging thunderlizard has pink, green, purple, or furry skin, just that he's willing to pay them reasonably and put in a good word with the alchemist for their trouble.
And they don't care who they're working with, cause every group in northern Kalimdor's fought with and against each other at some point, so what matters is just who's willing to shake hands and stand beside them now.
The factionalism should just one more tool for you as the DM, so that you have excused for why you're throwing quests at them once they start getting more powerful and their actions might have bearing on the realm. Why are they being asked to assassinate the Satyr Hellcaller leading a coven of warlocks in Felwood? Because Nazgrel negotiated an agreement with the Sentinels to offer a concerted effort helping to root out remnants of the Legion in exchange for druidic assistance setting up lumber farms to meet Orgrimmar's needs, and your group has done a few jobs killing demons for him in the past. Et cetera, et cetera.
Even in WoW, the PC is a high-caliber mercenary who will work for anyone and typically makes it a point to stay above the faction war where possible.
Yesss, just what I need now.
So I've been consuming some Warcraft stuff, and I'm intrigued and theorizing about setting a game in it.
I'd like to ask, ignoring the official ttrpgs, what would your preferred starting point be?
Location- and timeline-wise and why?
The most popular settings chronologically tend to be post-WC3 pre-Vanilla WoW, and post-WotLK pre-Cataclysm. These are the major exoduses in the direction of Warcraft's lore and are both starting points for all of the respective overworld issues in their games.
Location-wise that one should really depend on what your group wants to be faction-wise, although some neutral settlements like Booty Bay or the Argent Dawn could make for some interesting 'melting pot' adventures. A pre-Vanilla Argent Dawn struggling to stay afloat with no Tirion and the Scourge at the height of its power could even be particularly grim and survivalistic in spite of the high magic. I'd say in general pre-Vanilla is best for a group that isn't super familiar with World of Warcraft so they could experience the dungeon plotlines and layouts without it being a retread. With pre-Cata, you can take the most liberties with how the setting can diverge from the official story while still letting it feel like WoW, for groups that have more of a general familiarity with the game, and there are a fair few Alliance/Horde contested areas like Hillsbrad or the Barrens you could work with, possibly pivoting off into a bigger bad after indulging in PvP fantasies for a bit.
Depends on what state of the world and what races you want. Starting at the end of Wc3 leaves the world state in a different spot than classic does. Starting post Wotlk is different that post Legion or post BFA. You can make a plot about forsaken establishing themself right at the end of frozen throne, or you can make a plot about some radicals wanting to start a new war in the current timeline. It depends. Everything can equally be great of bullshit, depending on execution and how much the rest of the table vibes with the idea.
post wc3, little pre-vanillia wow.
I hate that the forsaken joined the horde and the night elves the alliance. Each should have been their own thing.
There should be no "major" wars between the factions, just skirmishes at most. The world is coming off several major conflicts and the focus should have been rebuilding and pacifying the local territory. Vanilla wow actually did that aright with the player being tasked to scout mines and kill critters infesting the area and such.
I find it interesting that before night elves were introduced, the Quel'thalas elves were the tree-hugging elves.
Then later it was revealed that they were ironically the elves who split from the actual nature lovers because they wanted to be able to do sorcery.
Of course blood/high elves can fulfill both roles, where they like the forest but also use a sorcery to make it prettier and nicer to live in, like how they enchanted Quel'thalas to have a temperate climate all year round.
the high/blood elves do seem to still respect nature. We even see some of the blood elves in outland making their outposts nice. So I could easily see some of them using druidic magics. Magic is magic after all.
Whats wrong with the genesys one? (Aside from little to no players for the system)
So I have seen a
D&D 3E version of Warcraft (offical)
A customised D&D 3.5E version of Warcraft. (Offical)
A Genesys adaption
A modified D&D 5E adaption
Any other adaptions, preferably to a simpler and less fiddly system?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3hWDeEiNI5aYzQ2YmM4M2YtZDE2Ny00OWRmLWIxMzctOTQ5M2QwMGZhZmY1/view?hl=en&resourcekey=0-AI7YGWNIj67gCkxUZj2xQw
"Drums of War"
This is an alpha version, I can't find any more recent ones. It looks good, for the most part. It handles specializations well, and has a "Corruption" mechanic where whenever you gain Corruption, roll a 2d10 (or some other dice I can't remember) and you if roll under the number, you're lost to darkness and become an NPC. Kind of like how most Star Wars systems handle the Dark Side for Jedi
If you were compressing WoW down to ten levels for something like DCC or Shadow of the Demon Lord/Weird Wizard
It would be either
Lv1-3 equating to 10 WoW levels
Lv4-9 equating to 5 WoW levels
Lv10 representing the band of heroes who can beat , the Lich King and other major threats.
Or if there was a Lv0 in there, you would count WoW levels 1-10 as that and end up adjusting Lv10 to be 55-60.
For expansion content. To avoid the whole Outland Guards could solo end-game Classic content issue, you would have to revise their numbers down.
So Lv69-70 subtract 60 add 10 for being more dangerous Expansions.
So a level 75 monster is really 25 which converts as level 2 or 3 foe if you count Lv0 or not.
Actually no, I came up with a better chart
This one compresses the numbers down so you could theoretically go and explore expansion content while doing the normal thing.
I only wrote up to Wrath level limits but later high end content gets bunched up increasingly at the top.
L1 = to 10, L2 = to 20, L3 = to 25/62, L4 = to 30/64/72, L5 = to 35/65/74, L6 = to 40/66/76, L7 = to 45/67/77, L8 = to 50/68/78, L9 = to 55/69/79 and L10 = to 60/70/80
So what was the original plan for after WoW anyway?
People say it was a placeholder to keep fans happy when they worked on Wacraft 4, but they seemed to be in for the longhaul when Burning Crusade came out and they switched over to Starcraft 2 as their last RTS.
Calling WoW a placeholder just sounds like wishful thinking from people that hate it. You don't make a game of that scale, complexity, and dependence on long-term support as a "placeholder", and its clearly something they were planning since at least the end of WC3 with that Rexxar campaign.
There probably was no concrete plan in place for "after WoW" because they'd need to wait and see how the MMO was received before making any, and it didn't take long to become an industry dominating monster.
What happened to Rexxar?
He and a lot of the NPCs from the WC3/Early Wow era just got sidelined after a while unless they were a faction leader.
Garona was surprised to be running the assassin guild in Darkshire in beta too but she didn’t make the final cut.
He bummed around desolace and blade's edge for a long time, and showed up to help during Legion. Then he went senile during BFA and invaded neutral kul'tiras while blaming Jaina for it. He even got mad that they wounded his pet wolf while defending themselves.
what does blood elf/nightborne administered occupied northern Kalimdor look like?
Autosage?