Welcome to a thing I just made up! I guess that's technically all my posts though so maybe that's not really a big deal.
It's Loral history, where I discuss the voluminous lore of a topic without the aid of google, just off the top o' my head. Today in honor of the release of the new expansion for World of Warcraft, err...Monday...and search algorithms which I'm pretty sure are not a thing on steemit, I present, well, World of Warcraft. Ugh. Ok well off to a great start.
WoW all the way down, guys
I should give a quick run down of my history with WoW. I played in the beta, then quit and rejoined about once every 5 years since. I have never raided. I have only finished the barest handful of dungeons. I have been kicked out of at least 5 guilds (probably worth a post someday). Oh, and I played all three of the RTS Warcrafts and Hearthstone too. OK! Let's go!
So, in the beginning, there was the dark and the light. No, the land and the water. Tiamat and Marduk?
Chaos and Order. So, yeah, Tiamat and Marduk. Order is Titans, they create life, this has made many people angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. There some uncertainly whether they create everything and demons corrupt some of it or if they just call anything they didn't create demons, but either way, there are demons. Demons are Chaos.
The Titans have a dude named Sarge who's especially good at beating up demons. Actually not 100% that they have genders as I think he's made of bronze or something. No matter its genitalia or lack thereof Sarge is in charge of fighting demons and these bad magic guys called the Eredar, who maybe are demons? They are certainly squiddy. This is the beginning of time so cut them (and me) some slack on the details.
So Sarge hates them until he goes crazy/crazy like a fox and becomes their boss. They war against the Titans for a long time. It's during this time that the Titans create life on Azeroth and put the dragons in charge of nature. Turns out that was a bad idea in a coupla cases. Details omitted cause I don't remember them.
At some point there's a group of the Squiddy guys who call themselves the Draenei who are less demon, which the demony ones take exception to. They play hide and seek across the universe getting otherwise cool species killed in the process.
You'd think they'd be better at it.
At some point the titans win and lock up Sarge but demons are still around.
So time passes and at some point the not demony squiddies land on a planet they like and name it Draenor after themselves despite the fact there's not only life there already but intelligent life. It's Orcs and they are super cool kinda tribal shamanistic people who are explicitly not green. They actually get along pretty well for a bit, until of course the other Eredar show up and start wreckin' stuff, including making the Orcs drink their blood and turn all crazy and green.
OH! I forgot, on Azeroth some stuff happened before that.
There was this well of magic energy and Elves (with purple skin) overused it. One of their queens really overdoes it and basically gets Atlantised and turned into a snake lady along with all her followers. The rest either give up using the magic as much or evolve to not be purple anymore. Not sure on the deets on that one but the upshot is some elves are purple and some are not.
The ones that are purple are more nature-y and there are a bunch of them called druids that protect nature, sort of. A lot of the time they become evil. For example, they become different animals, and most of them are fine, except being wolves. Being wolves is super evil for some reason. A group of them being wolves become contagious and BAM! off brand werewolves. Later on another becomes evil because his son dies.
Oh and they sleep a lot. Like a Druid sleep sorta thing where they see the Emerald Dream which is what Azeroth would look like if it were all natural. Which is like, what? Natural by what definition people? Didn't the Titans screw with all this nature anyway?
So, anyway, magic. Humans show up at some point and the elves teach them magic and boy are they good at it. One of them become the sorcerer supreme and acts as a guardian to protect the planet from the demons. Which is great by why didn't the Orcs get a guardian, right? Anyway, one of the guardians decides to try and destroy Sarge's corpse or...no, heart? Anyway in the process she accidentally gets the dude stuck in her unborn child. Later he becomes the guardian too and then of course goes crazy.
So on the Draenor side the orcs that are corrupted are following a warlock dude Gul'dan and he and the human guardian guy...er....Medivh? Don't ask me to pronounce it...work together to open a portal that lets the orcs come through and attack.
So stuff gets messy here and there's lots of details that I straight up don't remember but basically the orcs keep making their way back to Azeroth via demon power. There are a coupla wars, in the process Draenor blows up, a bunch of the human kingdoms in Azeroth get destroyed, and an orc leader gets turned into an evil hat and stuck at the north pole like an undead Santa, if Santa was just a hat (though, in a way, isn't he?).
Exhibit A
So the humans put Orcs in reservations until one of them named Thrall grows up and starts learning to shaman. He leads them to a new continent across the sea (picking up trolls on the way) where the purple elves and were-cows live. They kinda fight over trees for a while but things get serious when the demons show back up and try to take this really cool mountain for some reason. It has a big tree on it and I'm pretty sure it's important. Like Yggdrasil important. It may even just be called that because when you have a world tree why not just flippin' cop to it, right?
Anyway, back on the other continent which honestly I have no idea what the name of it is. I think Lordaron? At least something spelled remotely close to that is a kingdom there. There's a plague up in the north and the prince of the kingdom Arthus...err...I'm not super confident on the spelling there either, but close enough....goes around killing peasants to stop it.
It's no ordinary plague though! All the dead turn into zombies or ghouls, or sometimes weird ghost ladies. Turns out the Santa hat of the damned has been spreading the plague to create an army. Prince Art Finds out about a super powerful sword that is cursed. He knows it is cursed. He is warned like a million times about the curse.
So of course he goes and takes the sword. Surprise! It was cursed.
Now he's evil and goes around stomping his own people. He kills his dad. Then he goes up to the north pole to become the new evil santa, only he only gives presents when people kill him.
Oh, and at some point a bunch of the undead he created get a will of their own somehow and one of the not purple elves gets turned into a ghost lady then somehow gets her body back and ends up in charge of them (becoming a very purplish grey in the process). This will be important later (not the color).
So, yeah, mountain fight. Orcs get free of the demons and everybody works together to defeat the demons.
For a LONG time everything is cool between all the factions. Horde and alliance....oh wait, I forgot to mention, the Orcs lead this thing called the Horde with the undead and the cow people and trolls and I guess also goblins and what's left of the non-purple elves (they went crazy earlier for unrelated reasons, something to do with the evil santa). Everyone else is in the alliance including guys I didn't mention earlier like dwarves and gnomes and pandas and a few I did like the purple elves, the werewolves and the non-demon Squiddy guys.
Anyway, for a long while not much happens, almost as if there's some kinda weird status quo that only changes for specific events. Things get weird in the barrens. There's some nonsense with a new world tree and the aforementioned evil druid guy.
At some point Thrall goes somewhere else. Don't ask me where I'd stopped playing by this point. His buddy Grump Deathchisel takes over and is...gasp...evil! Thrall's troll friend Vol'jin tries to tattle on him and fails, then after a long complicated storyline becomes the leader for like five minutes before turning it over to the chief of the Undead people. OH! Her name is Sylvanus...I think.
Anyway she turns evil for rocks. That about brings us up to present.
So what did I get right? What did I forget? Did the portmanteau of lore and oral history work for you? Do you have a better title!? ENGAGE WITH ME PEOPLE!
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Calling out @dustinseth (someday...) and @veryspider for an entry