The World in WoW, part 2: Cosmic Challenge

I'd hoped to write about the present state of affairs in Azeroth and Outland first, but it doesn't work. Current affairs in the Warcraft universe are tightly bound to its fundamentals. On the whole this is a good thing, I think—the nature of the world should matter—but it means that you have to go to Bible school before you can profitably read the Sunday paper.

There are countless worlds in the Warcraft universe, each with its own solar system or something equivalent. They're separated by the Twisting Nether, an unbounded chaotic space in which everything's up for grabs. Normally, both physical and magical barriers keep inhabited places separate from the Nether. When they don't, things tend to get ugly, with raw tendrils of arcane force, the equivalent of solar flares, beating down on the surface and just about anything wandering out of the Nether in search of food. When Draenor got mostly blown up, the surviving fragments—what people in game now call Outland—were left exposed that way. It's very pretty, but it's not safe:

Originally the world of Azeroth didn't have organic life. It had elementals:

Their activities were presided over by the Old Gods. This is the mortal (?) remains of one of them:

There's a little pink splotch just left of center, in front of the tentacle. That's a gnome, and maybe give a sense of scale. The sword in the thing was wielded by one of the Titans, who arrived on the scene some unknown time after the elementals and Old Gods had gotten established. The Titans are out to bring out the full potential of every inhabitable world, and to make more. (It's a good thing they're immortal.)

They cut imposing figures. This is one of their servants; to get the sense of a Titan, scale it up so that she can pick up that sword seen above:

The Titans fought the Old Gods and elementals for a very long time, and finally won. The Old Gods were killed and/or banished. (One has since woken up, but no screen shot of it, since I've never been to see it in game.) The elemental lords were banished as well. Life as we know it got underway.

Unfortunately, all was not well. One of the Titans, Sargeras, succumbed to despair at the magnitude of his people's chosen task. So many worlds, so much opposition...in the end he snapped and decided to unmake the whole show. He built an army, the Burning Legion, to help in the task. He corrupted entire races (or their majorities, at least) into its ranks, smashed his way through things. This is Socrethar,one of the eredar, among his most powerful followers, and yes, this screen shot was taken from Tivara's normal eye level:

Azeroth proved an unusually tough nut to crack. But that's going to be a post of its own.

I really, really like the mix of forces at work here. The Old Gods lend a nicely Lovecraftian touch to things, and that corpse out there in the game world is a wonderful touch. "What's that?" "Looks like a god with a sword through its head. Don't encourage it." The elemental lords come across as just plain alien, sliding from comprehensible concerns into the purely mysterious and back again. And as I've commented before and will again, Blizzard does epic scale so amazingly well: the great demon lords have a physical presence to match their master's epic despair and rage.

Next time, the forces native to Azeroth's organic phase, energy fields, and more. Probably also the return of the elementals and Old Gods.

The Scourge Event as Tivara Sees It

This is really just an excuse for a bunch of screen shots, and a little exposition for my friends who read this blog but don't play WoW.

The Scourge is an eclectic army of the undead, created by some members of the demonic Burning Legion as their next weapon in the war against Azeroth and its inhabitants. Many of the Scourge are mindless, but not all—it's got officers with substantial powers of personal choice, and even in the ranks there are individuals who can think for themselves at least some of the time. The supreme commander of the Scourge is the Lich King, an entity fusing the corrupted souls of human paladin Arthas and orc shaman Ner'zhul. (You can see the state of things with him in the intro video for Wrath of the Lich King. The voice is that of King Terenas, Arthas' father.)

The Scourge is strongest in Azeroth's northern reaches. The Lich King and his Frozen Throne wait way at the top end of Northrend, the continent being opened up in the new expansion pack. In the currently accessible realms, the northern zones of the Eastern Kingdoms are most likely to be Scourge-Ridden. The Plaguelands are what used to be the four northern human kingdoms, including Arthas' own Lordaeron. But every so often the Scourge reaches out in an effort to grab more territory. Its mobile necropolises go ranging far and wide, unleashing waves of summoned undead who must be driven back before the crystals that do the summoning can be destroyed. This is the second such outreach since the end of the Third War (which was Horde + Alliance versus the Burning Legion). It probably won't work in the sense of giving the Scourge any permanent gains, but the effort ties up a lot of resources anyway.

This is the necropolis parked outside Thunder Bluff, the tauren capital:

This is the one outside Orgrimmar, capital of the Horde, taken from wyvern-back as Tivara was flying across Durotar:

And this is one in the Tanaris Desert, in mid-attack:

Here's the necrotic shard at the center of one beachhead in Tanaris. Notice that there are lots of corpses around it and nobody standing up except Tivara and Sagarmatha. Beat-down of the shard's last defenders is about to begin:

This is another necrotic shard, this one in the Blasted Lands, with the clearing still in progress:

Each necrotic shard has health, just like characters and monsters, linked to the undead it summons. Each time one of its summonees gets killed, it takes some damage. So the first step is to kill a lot of them—two hundred, give or take:

The mound of re-dead bodies beneath our banner shows this work in progress. The banner itself, by the way, comes from the Argent Dawn, a cross-faction union of dedicated Scourge foes, who are among the few genuine heroes in the game. It's always a pleasure to work with them. People who collect enough of the necrotic runes that empower these invaders can use them as currency to buy useful tools from the Argent Dawn, including battle banners. When they're planted, they unleash a consecrating fire just like the one paladins can invoke. Very handy.

When the necrotic shard is broken enough, Scourge engineers teleport in to try to re-energize it. Notice that the shard is now purple-black:

The engineers keep working regardless of what's going around them...

...until someone burns a few necrotic runes to break their concentration. At this point the engineer releases the Shadow of Doom lurking inside:

When all four are defeated (if, of course, they are), the necrotic shard collapses, and nothing remains but the great smell of Brut:

When enough of its necrotic shards have been destroyed, an invading necropolis' commander packs it in for the day, and that zone is safe for now. For a few hours, at least, until the necropolis is back with a fresh set of shards.

The World in WoW, part 1

A week or two back, my friend Sean Collins asked me: Might you ever be interested in blogging what you think about WoW's world and mythos? All I know about it is what I read in the instruction booklet for my nephew's copy of the game and it sounded neat enough, but I was wondering how an experienced gamer and fantasy fan like you think it stacks up.

This is my answer, in as many parts as it takes. :) Before I get started, though, let me give a second thumbs-up to the crew at Blogatelle. We don't always agree, but they continue to do some mighty fine thinking about the world and the place(s) of charactes in it. This series will be the better for many, many conversations I've had with Sean Riley, and for the posts he and others have written.

I should start by talking a little about my preferences in fantasy worlds.

I almost always prefer them big and diverse: the more I get the feeling of layered history and present complexity, the happier I am. I particularly like it when cultures make sense but don't work the way they would if consistently administered by amoral pragmatists (or starry-eyed idealists) with a package of mid-to-late 20th century American middle-class values and prejudices. Thus, for instance, I remain fascinated by M.A.R. Barker's world of Tékumel, by George R.R. Martin's Westeros, by Jacqueline Carey's Terre D'Ange, and of course by Middle Earth, than which there is no whicher.

There is a place in my heart too for compact, focused environments, but it's a different kind of pleasure, and not one that applies here.

It's also important to note that I'm very seldom troubled by occasional gaps and discrepancies, for two reasons. First: Having worked as a contributor to several ongoing game worlds myself, I know that perfect consistency is very hard, and I find that I'd rather have each part be really good even if there's some joinery to do than keep everything perfectly synchronized and lose some nift (that's the noun form for "niftiness", as exposited by the late Britt Daniel, who's been on my mind lately). Second: I'm less than impressed by the perfect harmony of what we know about the real world. Incomplete data, premature speculation, simple misunderstanding, too rigorously applied theory, and a whole lot more things lead to us DOIN IT RONG, as the LOLcat crowd has it. And I don't actually expect a work of fiction to work better than the real world. I like it when things harmonize, but am not shocked or (generally) driven off if there's a bug in the mix somewhere along the line.

So that's what's going on behind my eyes when I look at the Warcraft universe.

I think that the Warcraft universe is really cool. It is big—currently sprawling over parts of two worlds, one of which was actually blown up by evil warlocks—and very diverse. Furthermore, it's post-apocalyptic fantasy, a thing I find fascinating. Pretty much everybody in the world is reeling in the wake of past and present disasters: humanity's gone from seven kingdoms to one (plus a couple hangers-on), the night elves sacrificed their immortality to save the world and now their leaders are playing stupid politics, the dwarves and gnomes are fighting off an invasion of troglodytes that destroyed the gnomes' capital and is interfering with excavations anywhere, the orcs are free from demonic control but had most of their whole damn planet blown up and are in precarious circumstances in their new home, the blood elves had almost their whole population and their key sources of mana stomped down by the Scourge and their heroic leader turned out to be one of the worst bad guys of the moment, the tribe of trolls allied with the orcs is still scrabbling for survival while their rivals keep summoning blood gods and other nuisances, and while some of the Scourge broke free to regain free will and self-control as the Forsaken, they're not getting any less dead.

It is a fascinating glorious mess. It is a fantastically good setting for adventure from the frivolous to the tragic.

And that's the starting point for this series.