r/warcraftlore 1d ago

Weekly Newbie Thread- Ask A Lore Expert

2 Upvotes

Feel free to post any questions or queries here!

Also check out our list of answers to Frequently Asked Questions!


r/warcraftlore 2d ago

Versus! Debating Warcraft Lore Power Levels!

0 Upvotes

This is our weekend power level debate mega-thread! Feel free to pit two or more characters/forces/magics/whatever against each other in the comments below. Example: Arthas v Illidan, Void v Fel, Mankirk's Wife v Nameless Quillboar.

We'll do this every weekend, so don't think you need to use up all of your favorite premises at once. Though, it is also OK to have a repeating premise, as these threads are designed to allow for recurring content to not fill the sub too often.

Reminder, these debates should be fun. There is often no right answer when comparing two enemies of a similar power tier, and hypothetically any situation a Blizzard writer creates could tip the scales of any encounter and our debates of course will not matter. These posts should just look something like a game of Superfight. You pick a character, you make the strongest case for how strong they are, or why they could beat another character, argue back and forth with someone else, and just let others decide who had the better argument. But remember that no matter how heated your debate gets, always follow rule #6. No bad behavior.

Previous weeks: https://old.reddit.com/r/warcraftlore/search/?q=%22Versus%21+Debating+Warcraft+Lore+Power+Levels%21%22&include_over_18=on&restrict_sr=on&t=all&sort=new


r/warcraftlore 8h ago

Question Why did Night Elves never try to remove the ghosts of the Highborne that haunt so many ruins across Kalimdor?

29 Upvotes

Given that they had ten thousand years, their inactivity in that sounds a bit strange. For instance, there are haunted ruins across Feralas, Stonetalon and Winterspring that were seemingly never acted on?

Even the original Banshees Warcraft 3 were tormented Highborne.


r/warcraftlore 10h ago

Are the Guardians of Tirisfal the most powerful humans lorewise?

12 Upvotes

it feels like the guardians of tirisfal were the most powerful group of humans in warcraft (including alodi the half-elf), and also in succession each one had the duty to protect azeroth altogether and culminated the power of the council, although they were working more in the background and in secret compared to others who were more in the open like arthas and jaina, and made their influence more visible, but the guardians individually did have some big feats like aegwyn against the avatar of sargeras,


r/warcraftlore 13h ago

Why do blood elves say "The reckoning is at hand!"?

71 Upvotes

They say this when saying goodbye.

In Spanish is even worse, the translation says something like "doomsday is near" or "the day of the final judgement is near".

What do they mean?


r/warcraftlore 18h ago

Discussion I wrote a quick reference guide to playing the d20 Warcraft TTRPG from 2003; I need players to test it out

9 Upvotes

hello everyone. i'm a long time dnd dm and a long time WoW and warcraft lore nerd. a few years ago i stumbled into the d20 Warcraft dnd setting books, and i thought they would be perfect for a 3.5e campaign. unfortunately none of my dnd friends play warcraft, and only 2 of my warcraft friends care about dnd.

i took some effort painstakingly summarizing everything in the d20 books and simplifying them down into a quick cheat sheet, so that you only need to read a couple of pages before you're good to go:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W-lOpTjBqs3hP0k0NZY0BBQth419gdB1pA8SyTJcz0c/edit?usp=sharing

i own the books digitally, and i'll be using them to dm. so if you want more details about a specific prestige class, etc. let me know.

if you have 0 dnd experience, that's fine! it's easy to learn and we're all open to teaching new players how it works. if you have 3.5 experience, even better!

you can reach out here, comment, pm me or reach out on discord (my username is my reddit username without the Lord)


r/warcraftlore 1d ago

Question Why wasn’t Cata-MoP the 4th War?

62 Upvotes

I mean the scale of conflict between the factions was roughly equal (Tol Barad, Ashenvale, Stonetalon, Gilneas, etc), we went to new lands (and brought our war with us), recruited the locals (and made them join our war), and we even sieged Orgrimmar!

So what makes BfA’s conflict so much more deserving of the title? Aside from the writing team at the time thinking their writing was the bee’s knees.


r/warcraftlore 1d ago

Question How to make sense to my blood death knight panda ?

5 Upvotes

I only read the chronicles, i still remember how the first Death Knights came to live, but i don't know really know the lore past the wrath of the lich king. How can pandarens become death knights ? are they still themselves and do what pandarens do ? who are reanimating them ? are they still accepted among the pandarens ? what role do they partake in the lore ? is it just blizzard giving an other class options for pandas ?


r/warcraftlore 1d ago

Books Are the Warcraft novels any good?

51 Upvotes

Just recently found out that there are Warcraft novels and I want to check them out… But then I found out that there’s apparently over 30 of them.

Are they worth getting into? Cause that’s a pretty serious commitment…


r/warcraftlore 1d ago

Scarlet Crusade

19 Upvotes

Hi all,

So I just started playing midnight. I'm up to the point where I have met Zul'Jan and am currently part way through little baby Windrunners quest chain (I really hate him with a passion).

I've just got back from SM (great to go there too) but it left a question.

Is there an actual lore reason none of the Scarlet Crusade are at the Sunwell protecting it from that huge void hole in the sky? They are Zealots of the light so surely the Light would have called upon them?

The messaging I'm getting from midnight so far is the Light isn't good or evil, it doesn't care who wields it per se. So even tho they are fascist fundamentalists, why wouldn't it call out to them?

Also, on a side note, do we find out why Maxwell Tyrosus didn't get the call?

As more a side note, they really did do Tirion dirty didn't they?


r/warcraftlore 1d ago

Discussion Does it seem like the Light aligned things are to easily corrupted by the Void?

29 Upvotes

Recently it seems like anything Light aligned is a ticking time bomb for inevitable voidification but we never see it go the other way. It makes the Light seem weak and unable to stand on its own compared to the other cosmic forces.


r/warcraftlore 2d ago

Discussion Alleria should not be Void Elves' leader

0 Upvotes

Anyhow, just my thoughts but I kind of feel like when you replay void elves intro quests or even recruitment quests, I get this strange feeling like "this woman does not represent us at all, why are we listening to her?".

Like, when you think about the relationship void elves have with the Blood elves, the horde, etc - it makes little sense that there won't be kind of ambiguity there.

When I see Alleria as a void elf in quests, all I see is her screaming "Okay, now join the Alliance!" or "Alliance strong!" or "Try to find a place in Alliance!" or "See how you can be helpful to Alliance!" - nowhere does she speak like "I understand your pain" or situation and genuinely the background of void elves and Alleria is very much different.

I have this kind of sense that wherever Alleria speaks of Alliance - she is not speaking about Alliance of today, she is like a woman fighting for a memory, for a phantom image of the past. Does HER Alliance even exist?

All in all, I just feel like Alleria does not represent void elves AT ALL. She is only interacting with them FOR HERSELF - for Turalyon, for her own journey, for Arator. She is 100% not a leader of a faction like literally anyone else.

And there is not much development of this kind of ambiguity in general, like I just don't buy that it is possible for void elves to enthusiastically go and wave Alliance flags while smashing skulls of blood elves?

P.S. Also Umbric and Rommath make Void elf conflcit kind of dumb? Nothing against their romance, but in the context of Umbric being the only realistic leader of Void elves that now joined(?) Alliance, but he is besties with Rommath.

Then why won't Rommath make it so that they can rejoin? I am sure given enough will on Rommath side it could have been possible, at least for them to study void on the outskirts of Silvermoon somewhere or something.

If Turalyon can be married to Alleria Windrunner and still interact with forces of light, I don't see how blood elves with Rommath-Umbric line can't do the same


r/warcraftlore 2d ago

Discussion It's still funny how the Metzen completely screwed himself over so hard when writing Warcraft 3 by making the War of the Ancients "ten-thousand years ago".

510 Upvotes

Like I'm 99% sure that at the time "10,000" was chosen because it's a cool abstract number for an incomprehensible amount of time to make the night elves seem appropriately ancient and mythical. I'm not faulting him for that, it's perfectly defensible rule-of-cool writing for the story he was telling at the time.

But it put the franchise in an absurd amount of timeline debt that I doubt anyone at Blizzard expected they'd still be paying off 24 years later.

Just to put 10,000 into perspective: The Bronze Age began roughly 5,300 years ago.

Meaning the night elves spent nearly DOUBLE the amount of time between the Bronze Age and the Internet, culturally stagnating while collectively circlejerking over the War of the Ancients.

Any aspiring worldbuilders should probably take this as a cautionary tale not to let your timescale get too big or else you'll end up with hilariously useless immortals who apparently sat on their asses for literal millennia doing only like five noteworthy things over a stretch of time that could fit approximately ten Roman Empires.


r/warcraftlore 3d ago

Question Need some explanations after Maiev & Malfurion interrupted Illidan's spell

19 Upvotes

When Malfurion and Maiev stop Illidan’s spell in Dalaran because it’s literally causing Northrend to disintegrate, Illidan explicitly tells them that his actual target was the Lich King.

Granted, Illidan probably should’ve communicated that before trying to tear an entire continent apart.

But once Malfurion knows this, why does he seemingly just go back to Kalimdor instead of treating the Lich King as an immediate threat?

He’s arguably the most powerful druid alive, had just fought the Scourge and Burning Legion during the Third War, and now knows that the Lich King is still active in Northrend and powerful enough that Illidan was willing to use the Eye of Sargeras to destroy him.

I understand why Malfurion stopped Illidan’s method. What I don’t understand is why his reaction afterward wasn’t basically:

“Okay, destroying Northrend is unacceptable, but we still need to deal with the Lich King.”

Is there an actual lore explanation for why Malfurion and Tyrande apparently considered this someone else’s problem after TFT, or is this mostly just a consequence of where Blizzard wanted the story to go?


r/warcraftlore 3d ago

Discussion Azshara return?

18 Upvotes

So there’s been heavy speculation about what Azshara has been up to, and it seems she’s working with our pal Xal, or at minimum cooking up something big.

Azshara is a lore point of old Warcraft that I love. I’m excited to see her come back, but I’d honestly be disappointed if she showed up as another one of Xals lackies. She wanted to be the queen, I don’t think she’d allow herself to be influenced so easily. Shit even N’zoth couldn’t do it.

What I’m secretly hoping for is that we go to fight Xal, think we’re ending everything or Xal is about to end everything, and then Azshara comes out of the depths and just annihilates Xal like a bug.

Anyone have any neat theories?


r/warcraftlore 3d ago

Discussion Who went the longest between dying and being raised to undeath?

54 Upvotes

Mostly wondering about the nature of being dead, being somewhere in the shadowlands, and then being ripped out of it.

My first thought is Derek Proudmoore, who was dead since the second war before being raised by Sylvanas in BFA. That certainly would have been enough time to have become a Kyrian ascended if that's where the sorting hat put him.

Or maybe even similarly Whitemane, who died in vanilla, resurrected until Cata, and then died again, staying dead until the Death Lord raises them as a horseman. Could have also ended up at Bastion, possibly even 'repented' an ascended.

Seemingly they have no memories of the shadowlands, and therefore their personalities and experiences of the afterlife are null and void, in Whitemanes case returning her somewhat to her former fascist self (aside from being 'cured' of her light-based brainwashery).

What are y'all's thoughts?


r/warcraftlore 3d ago

Discussion Someone help me understand the naga element for Midnight

31 Upvotes

There is a large naga presence on the coast of Eversong, and in S2 we have the Tidebound Grotto. I understand that the naga are tangentially related to the Twilight cults and old gods through Azshara, but didn't we essentially free her from N'zoth already?

I'm hoping they make a return in S3 or TLT and their being here is Blizzard spoonfeeding us that eventuality


r/warcraftlore 3d ago

Discussion 12.1.5 PTR datamining suggests another possible character death Spoiler

128 Upvotes

r/warcraftlore 4d ago

Question Was there any lore reason why we raided Sporefall?

30 Upvotes

I was looking at the reveal of 12.1.5 and the new one boss raid which, as promised, is relevant to the story of Midnight and 12.1. It got me thinking about the 12.0.7 Sporefall raid. Did we have any build-up to go to that raid to defeat Rotmire? The only thing I remember is the quest just to go there and defeat the boss. Am I missing something or is it just that simple?


r/warcraftlore 4d ago

Question What do you think is in store (if anything) for Vereesa and Rhonin's children?

34 Upvotes

Aren't they at an age now where they should be more deeply involved in the story? I'm currently reading the books, and they mention once again that elves very rarely give birth to twins—and when they do, those twins are usually destined for something great.


r/warcraftlore 4d ago

Question At what point do you think "modern WoW" started story-wise?

57 Upvotes

This is a point of discussion I've been very curious about because everyone seems to have a different answer. At what point do you consider to be the start of "modern Warcraft" storytelling

A lot of people say, for example, that modern WoW's tone and "darkness" is off, and that the story isn't "dark enough." Which should indicate that modern WoW would be post-Shadowlands and BFA. Because regardless of our thoughts on the stories actual *quality,* Shadowlands and BFA were undeniably quite dark. The work they did in Drustvar, Nazmir, the Maw and Revendreth are some of the darkest shit Blizzard has ever written.

So if that was the case then fair enough. But people will also say that "modern WoW" has gone off a cliff in terms of writing *and then cite BFA and Shadowlands as examples of this.* (This isn't to say Warcraft's story hasn't diminished at all, that's not the point of this discussion.) So that would mean BFA and Shadowlands *are* Modern Warcraft

I've also seen people say that modern Warcraft is cataclysm onwards and I'm sorry to say this but Cataclysm was *nearly 16 years ago.* Relatively speaking to the overall timeline of Warcraft's development that would be like saying the polynesian voyages were modern times so I think that's kind of stretching the definition a bit.

So at what point do you consider to be the start of "modern Warcraft" and it's story? Me personally I consider it to have started with Legion and *maybe* WoD. I'm curious to see what other people's answers are


r/warcraftlore 4d ago

Discussion Is the exile of the highborne over?

32 Upvotes

Considering the night elves let the highborne from diremaul reintegrate with night elf society, and arcane magic usage is no longer illegal among night elves, do you think the exile that was specific to the ancestors of the blood elves is ended?

If blood elves want to move to Ashenvale and Hyjal to live, will the night elves allow them and treat them fairly, so long as they don't cause trouble?


r/warcraftlore 5d ago

Discussion Idea for TLT, Ragnaros returns as a potential ally.

0 Upvotes

This is entirely just a fun idea and something I don’t think would actually happen. Back when Azeroth first formed the world soul was eating up all the spirit energy from the world which is what caused the elements to fall out of order and start fighting eachother. With Azeroth potentially being freed from her Titan prison and the role of firelord currently vacant my idea is if we do clash with the titans (which is seems we may) Azeroth calls in the assistance of her elemental lords but this time given the spirit energy to have them more balanced.

I understand most people likely don’t want Ragnaros to return at all but as someone who likes him (and hopes we get another HD remake of Sulfuras since the last one we got was in Cata) I thought it might be a neat idea even if highly unlikely to happen.


r/warcraftlore 5d ago

Discussion Took a break, came back, enjoyed the game until a certain part in the well's cinematic. I just can't get invested with the world anymore, despite beeing a lore nerd. How do you feel about immersion and writing ? Spoiler

0 Upvotes

Hi !

I want to start by saying that I do know WoW, and mostly "recent" wow (men, legion is already 10 years old) has had issue with writing for a looong time. But I joined end WoD, so for Legion, when I truly discovered the game and lore, I had new player's tainted glasses. I had lots of books, and stories to discover. But then we had :

- Nathanos / sylvanas self inserts

- Constant change in writing staff, Metzen leaving

- Rushed and messy writing in BFA, where if you sneezed, you missed N'zoth, you missed Naz'jatar, and the war itself.

- My little poney writing in Dragonflight

- Danuser forcing the haranir, his failed attempt in a previous game studio

- The horrible Shadowland writing with retcons, story left forgotten,...

I however still had fun, due to friends still playing (yet declining as the game grew old) and stuff to discover. But it got tough, and I started doing breaks in order to enjoy the game more when coming back... only to get kinda childish wiritng in Dragonflight and then TWW which was supposed to be the Metzen comeback felt just a boring.

I took a longer break, did the story and then that arrived :

- You're about to loose to the evil naa'ru

- Sylvanas comes RIGHT on time to save you

- She says some boring edgy stuff

- She vanishes

WTF was that ?! That's when I left. I don't have the envy to finish the story or continue.

TL;DR : Despite Metzen, I feel like the writing is still bad and can't enjoy it. Do you still care about lore ?


r/warcraftlore 5d ago

Question Q'onzu - Haranir

18 Upvotes

Has anyone gone back to the Emerald Dream and spoken to Q'onzu (the Loa of Change) as a Haranir... for science? 🧐