Chronicles of the Great Wars: A compendium of all StarCraft short stories

Campaign Discussion
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Hey all!

So for those of you who don’t know, Blizzard’s had a spotty history with StarCraft’s short stories. In spite of referencing them constantly, Blizzard’s deleted all lore content aside from comics from its website, including short stories, which sparked me to start a project to try to preserve them, maybe even add them all to a proper official archive. Now, to give credit where credit’s due, they recently made an archive where they added a bunch of them, but it has some MAJOR omissions still (none of the WoL stories, the WoL ones listed aren’t from WoL, no 10th Anniversary). So I’ve been working on an actual preservation effort, to not only keep the old short stories alive, but to keep their formatting in line with the new pdfs.

So I’ve put together two archives for the short stories, one master pdf set up like a compendium and a single point you can access every short story, and one an archive of the individual files you can download. I proudly present Chronicles of the Great Wars, a project to keep the old short stories alive and preserved in a state that’s accessible:

Chronicles of the Great Wars Compendium download:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kgvFfyqpUxMqt7twIIubghN9zXG5jJFz/view?usp=sharing

Individual short stories archive download:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0jn0ckxbbogo0ds/AAA8ujMCCWC56s3oBxILOXhMa?dl=0

(god I wish I could actually include links in a not awful way)

Short Story Patch Notes

  • Added title pages for the StarCraft 1 and Wings of Liberty era short stories, formatted by my good friend Evan Norris. The text of these stories have also been formatted to align with later stories and make it much more readable than the broken word docs and text dumps they were prior.
  • “Revelations” and “Hybrid,” previously only available in the defunct Amazing Stories magazines, have been added, and checked against their original print versions to fix some of the small spelling, grammatical, and content errors of the previous online backup StarCraft Legacy had (credit to our good man Gradius for having made the old SC Legacy backups and making it accessible all these years, literally kept an entire wing of stories alive).
  • Fixed Acid Burns to spell the name of the roach’s origin planet correctly (Garrxax and not Garxxax). This was fixed in the website version of the story a bit after it released, but none of the pdfs for the story were updated to match the website, so this pdf is now in line with the corrected version.
  • Heaven’s Devils: Lost Transmissions, while not a true short story and rather a series of loreful webpage messages to help hype up the release of Heaven’s Devils, has been given the short story treatment and added/formatted in.
  • Added the 10th Anniversary short stories that were recently released.
  • Added bookmarks and a table of contents links for easy navigating.
  • Added some transition text to set the tone between the expansions eras of short stories.

Some further notes, there’s a few things present in the individual file archives but absent in the main compendium. I may revisit some of the less structured ones in the future in an effort to preserve them in their “true” form.

  • Project Blackstone: The transmedia campaign that wove in with the short stories from the Heart of the Swarm era. The tweets and emails proved a bit too unwieldy to weave in, and the actual sections of tweets corresponding to each short story is something in War Stories, a paid ebook from Blizzard, who I didn’t feel comfortable using their format. However, the tweets and emails are in Word doc form in the dropbox archive.
  • Nova Covert Ops ARG: At the release of Nova Covert Ops, an Augmented Reality story featuring puzzles, videos, twitter accounts, and voice clips came out to help build up the release. Unfortunately, these don’t translate well to pdf form, but the individual files are in the dropbox archive.
  • Comics: All the online comics are still available for free on the website (Shadow Wars, This Sacred Land, Nature of the Beast, and the one-off expansion ones), and I omitted them since they’re a very different medium. However, pdf backups of all the comics are in the dropbox archive.
  • Manuals: By popular demand the dropbox archive also includes the manuals from StarCraft 1, Brood War, and StarCraft 64. The first two of these have lore, the last one is just for fun.

Unit, character, and planet pages from the old StarCraft website is something I’ve been wanting to try to preserve as well, and that may be my next project.

I hope some people get good use out of this, this has been something I’ve been making for a while in an effort to keep these stories alive and going, especially the long-deleted or inaccessible ones. Back when I started, I had hoped Blizzard might use the early ones on their own website to keep them alive, but that seems unlikely now, but hey I can dream. But if anyone ends up finding a use for this, that’ll be good enough for me. Hope you all enjoy it!

10 Likes
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Feels like it’s been forever since the last SC2 short-story was released.

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Surprisingly actually we got three this year, but I think a lot of it was lost in the rest of the 10th anniversary fanfare. But yeah I think they only really coincide with major expansion launches.

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I liked those three. Especially the Protoss one. Because Selendis is yay. Snarky female Nerazim is also yay.

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Nice, good work.

I’ve got the ones from the battle.net SCC for SC1, but I really missed the old starcraft2.com unit descriptions.

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Frustratingly most of the old SC1 unit pages are still up (though I know a few you still have to Wayback for), but none of the SCII ones. And that has SO much in terms of lore for characters (side WoL crew especially) that you can’t find literally anywhere else.

Still need to figure out how I want to preserve those though, since a lot of the flavorful elements were in the “unit science” widgets and I’m not sure how Flash dying is going to impact preserving those. Thankfully I have the flat text of them all, but preserving them as flat word documents doesn’t feel right. I’m sure there’s a way I just have to find it.

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Thanks for the hard work! Some stories were hard to find!

Would really appreciate, though, are they any way available? No archives even for texts seemed to have lived or I’m bad at searching things.

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“Korhall will endure”.

The necromancers are all around us.

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There’s working Wayback Machine pages for them, so they’re not completely lost. I’ve also saved just the raw text of most of those pages (I think just the HotS planets I missed and the one not-actually-a-planet article they made for Shakuras). I might just do a pdf of the screenshotted pages though it’d be pretty unflexible in terms of being able to search or do anything with the text. Been super busy with other things sadly so haven’t gotten the chance.

As mentioned though Blackstone is a big frustration since there’s a lot of lore there but it’s all in flash. I preserved the actual text of it in the above archive but it’s pretty dang ugly.

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I made my backup of the units technical sheets with screen printing it looks nice

the infinite cycle must endure

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Anyone want to join the SC2 campaign discord chat? I can get you an invite.