You make a valid point Thokk I won’t disagree. But with it being Kormed and knowing how things have been run or ran by him things never last long lol.
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All of that only to exclude anti bigotry OOC rules.
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Lmao is he Anti bigotry ?
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How would I know
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Lol but ya just said anti bigotry OOC rules or ya refering to something else ?
I don’t understand the question and I won’t respond to it.
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Thanks for confusion then.
There was a guild of repentant Scarlets who operated under the leadership of a few Draenei, and had multiple races where the goal was both to help the Scarlets members repent and aid to those the Scarlets had wronged, and to turn the Scarlets unique anti-undead abilities and knowledge to good use in Northrend and other areas where the Scourge and the Legion had left a lasting mark on Azeroth’s people.
Thing was, after that story had played out, they renamed and moved on to assisting the Gnomes, Kaldorei and Gilneans who were otherwise neglected by the Alliance military.
There’s only so long the bigot storyline can run before its played out, and you have to wonder why folks are so hard to keep holding up that flag.
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I think it’s an oversimplification to suggest that bigotry is the primary motivator behind Scarlet RP.
I have never done Scarlet RP as such, but the concept of the Scarlet Crusade is fascinating to me. Sarestha’s backstory is Scarlet - she was a Paladin in the Crusade before her untimely death and subsequent Deathknightification. The Crusade holds a place of interest for me, in the world of Azeroth.
Is this because RL Sarestha is an evil bigot who wants to play out some hyperreligious hate on screen? No.
It’s because the story of Lordaeron is a tragedy, and I love it. No matter which angle you view it from. (I won’t go into them all in this post but Southshore, Theramore, and more are all extensions of the tragedy of Lordaeron’s fall). The Scarlet Crusade were the most militaristic organised branch of the fallen Kingdom. Their lives were characterised by a constant struggle - a daily fight to survive against the terrifying and evil Scourge. Their outposts were scattered - people probably died just travelling between Scarlet holdings. No more could you wander beyond the limits of Tyr’s Hand and pick flowers in the meadow - the Scourge was everywhere. If you’re unlucky enough to be in Stratholme you’re constantly at war and having trouble breathing due to the constancy of the fires set by the traitor prince. I could go on. In this society characterised by immense danger and fear, extremism seeps in, at the behest of Dreadlords, master manipulators, who turn the Crusade away from its noble purpose and gradually into extremism.
To be a person involved in that space…? An RP character? It’s tragic. Your morals and values are all twisted out of whack. The wider world seems all the more insane as both Alliance and Horde welcome Death Knights into their ranks - the same Death Knights who wholesale massacred New Avalon and Havenshire; the last significant agricultural bastion of Scarlet power. Not to even mention the internal twisting - the constant inquisitions for instance. Sarestha still hates being touched, as a result of some of those. Touch means pain. Imagine living in a world where there is no safety - not within the walls, not without. An agonising, awful place where the only desperate hope is that one day the common cause that lives are lost to daily will achieve its ends - the eradication of the undead and true peace once again.
It’s fascinating how a genuinely noble cause gradually shifts until the people within it do not know what is right and wrong anymore. I’ve greatly enjoyed that aspect of Sarestha’s backstory since her inception many years ago - she had to overcome a lot of biases, but she’s also retained a zealous devotion that led her to trust Sylvanas far further than she ought to have been trusted, a dedication to the Light that’s accompanied by a dedication to the ‘cause’, which leads to some pretty twisted viewpoints in the name of righteousness. The Scarlet Crusade is a broken organisation made up of broken people, but there are fascinating aspects to it.
I’m on a soapbox a bit but my point is that there’s a lot of reasons to like the crusade beyond just basic “I want to be a jerk”. It’s fascinating engaging with the tragedy of a traumatised and manipulated people who mean well but have been so damaged that they can no longer express it in rational or helpful ways.
This isn’t an endorsement of a particular Scarlet guild, (indeed this one sounds a bit Argenty, and I’m not remotely interested in MG guilds at the best of times) but my feelings on Scarlet RP more broadly. I think just seeing the Scarlets as a bunch of bigots and all who RP them as the same is a gross oversimplification. I haven’t experienced them directly because my “Scarlet” character has always been a Forsaken lol, but I know and understand that there have been bad actors who have used concepts like the Crusade to push their negative IRL perspectives, but there’s also been good Scarlet RPers on this server, people like Crowelly, who actively fought against that stuff while still enjoying the Scarlet RP theme. So to keep perspective, let’s remember that it’s not a sin to like Scarlet RP. There are a myriad of reasons why someone might.
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hey there!
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Yeah, I definitely overstepped my bounds with my previous post. I’m sorry, Sarestha.
In regards to the post, I should have said people trying to lionize the Scarlet Crusade, rather than approaching and dealing with the damage it did, to the people around it and within it. It was a classic situation of people closing ranks against ‘the other’ in the face of a horrific situation, blaming ‘the other’ because nothing else made sense, and then having one of the most subtle and malevolent Dreadlords in existence slide on in and inflame the very worst of human nature while simultaneously ostracizing and assassinating all those who would have kept the Scarlet Crusade from travelling down that dark road.
Its what makes the Scarlets such an iconic and fan-favourite faction of villains, misguided champions and such easily hateable fodder for the players. The Scarlets are, for the most part, entirely unrepentant in their ‘Crusade’, so entirely sold on their mission they willingly ignore the hypocrisies and atrocities they commit because if they just do this one last thing, surely it will all be alright and they will be vindicated in the eyes of their people … but it’s never quite enough. The number of Scarlet refugees or defectors also speaks of the fact that the spark of Humanity within the Scarlets is never quite fully extinguished, which makes them all the more tragic because its a horrid combination of peer pressure, religious indoctrination, paranoia and guilt that keeps the Scarlets together.
If they acknowledge they’re in the wrong, they have to take responsibility for everything. Even when the knowledge that the leader of the Scarlet Crusade was a Dreadlord, the leadership of the Crusade didn’t slam on the brakes or call a meeting to discuss what was the will of the Light, and what was the insidious whispers of a Demon, but they went out of their way to destroy all evidence that the Dreadlord had ever infiltrated their organisation.
They knew they’d been lied to, that their entire Crusade was a sham and yet another ploy to divide, weaken and fracture the defenders of Azeroth to allow the next Legion invasion to succeed, and decided to double down on the lie instead because if they didn’t, they would be called to account for the tortures, the murders, the desecrations and the treason they had committed, as individuals, as a group and by proxy from their allies within Stormwind and the surrounding regions.
I think it comes down to the two separate types of Scarlet Crusader RPers.
- Type A realises that the Scarlet organisation has lied to them, mistreated them and guided them down a path of horror and bloodshed, and for reasons unique to every character, they break away. If they run from their past, confront it, try to heal or try to bury the pain and the ‘lessons’ the Crusade engraved on them with indoctrination, inquisitions, peer pressure and the like, they’ve still taken a hard left from the Crusade’s agenda and ideology, and I don’t see any red flags here.
- Type B clings to the Crusade and thinks it can be redeemed, despite all evidence to the contrary, and ignores the expansions worth of lore that the Crusade has refused to stand with any other group up until the Legion expansion. Worse yet, they try to proclaim that the Crusade is recognised or supported by the Alliance leadership. This goes back to Vanilla, where a Scarlet NPC in the Cathedral speaks to the players and urges them to head to Tirisfal to seek out the Crusade, and at the end of the quest-chain, another NPC explains that bigots within the Humans of the Eastern Kingdom had been discreetly supporting the Crusade and funneling recruits, resources and supplies, either to help suppress and distract the Forsaken, and out of a misguided belief in the Crusade’s horrid beliefs of Human supremacy and the ‘lesser’ status of non-Humans. And while this isn’t necessarily a bad idea, when that character refuses to ever acknowledge or interact with the consequences of the Crusade’s actions, and its choices, makes me uneasy.
At the same point, this point can be applied to a lot of groups and characters. Forsaken still loyal to Sylvans often get accused of being kill 'em all ideologists, when rather they mourn for the Banshee Queen they thought they knew, the ruthless leader who would do anything to protect and preserve the Forsaken, who were innocent victims of Arthas and the Scourge and were, from their perspective, unfairly treated as monsters and active threats by their living family members and people after the Forsaken clawed back control of their own minds and bodies.
We can point this at the Garrosh loyalists, or rather those few who remain and still actively shout their loyalty, forgetting that the ‘Orcs first, second and last, and all others can kick rocks’ was what caused Garrosh’s ‘True Horde’ to get folded like an omlette, that turned the Horde from the faction most likely to win the conflict started during the Cataclysm into the faction that only survived because of the mercy of the Alliance’s High King. Garrosh appealed to the worst of the Orcish social structure, that might makes right, that Orcs were superior to all others, that nothing mattered but loyalty to those above you and victory at all costs, ironically making Garrosh a lesser echo of Blackhand and the Shadow Council, rather than Grom Hellscream, the father he so desperately desired to emulate.
We can point this at the Defias, who started out with noble intentions and descended into banditry, murder, extortion and populist propaganda, taking advantage of the disasters around them to rally recruits and sabotage the Alliance’s efforts to protect Westfall and Elwynn Forest rather than protect the people they claimed to represent. And yet, their cause was not without its merits. Onyxia, in her role as Katrina Prestor, didn’t have to use sorcery or dark magic to influence both the Council of Nobles and the Stonemason’s Guild, just appealing to the vanity, pride and greed within the leadership of both groups, and stood back to admire her handiwork as the worst parts of the Human spirit rose up and resulted in widespread death and destruction. Eventually, VanCleef’s daughter would rise up and those Defias who remembered, or strove towards, the Defias’s original goals of uplifting and protecting the common people from the depredations of a cruel and unjust government, would rally to her cause even as the bulk of the Defias continued to sink lower and lower, eventually abandoning the root of their cause to become mercenaries and assassins for whoever could pay them more.
A character with their origin, or ties to, an evil faction isn’t a bad thing. But when players ignore or try to lionize the actions of the evil faction and steadfastly refuse to acknowledge there’s a reason this is an EVIL FACTION, eyebrows need to be raised.
Lot of healthy conversation going on here surrounding one of the more unhealthy RP prompts/back stories. As someone who keeps their Scarleting to a repentant nature it is nice to see.
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I’ve always liked Scarlet storylines and I would have loved to RP one back in the day. I would probably still consider it, on a char other than Norman.
The Trouble with Many Scarlet Roleplayers - is basically its own storyline.
The very concept always has a tendency to attract a certain type of…person and the line between IC and OOC beliefs and ideologies becomes very thin with those people, to the point that it’s blatantly obvious the person is actually just a raging (fill in the blank), looking to bring their OOC insanity into this game.
It’s unfortunate for the people who genuinely just like the history/story and want to RP it.
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That’s the thing, man. Morality is so often informed by subjective perspectives, and part of why I find the Crusade fascinating - their morality is hypocritical. Objectively, measurably corrupted and hypocritical. But I’ve met people caught up in cults (long story I won’t go into here), and believe me, those who don’t escape or wake up somehow will jump through 1001 hoops to try to justify why it all made sense in the end, and continues to do so. At its worst, the Scarlets represent that side of humanity that will seek to justify their cause no matter the cost. Others simply so desperately WANT to believe that they dismiss or downplay the cost, seeing it as a necessary evil. There’s a moral ambiguity to it because on one level these people seem like victims - the stability of their day to day lives has been torn to absolute shreds as they face survival after a literal zombie apocalypse. They are so desperately clinging to the hope of restoration, and so deeply hate the Scourge that robbed them of home, family, friends, peace, whatever, and on top of that they get manipulated by two highly ranked and deceptive demon lords. Like… whew. That’s rough. There’s a lot to work with in that space. But at the same time their response to their victim status has been so over the top that they themselves have become perpetrators of atrocities, indiscriminately killing Alliance and Horde who in other circumstances may have happily worked alongside them, turning to shadow magic and violent inquisitions, and dedicating themselves so strongly to revenge that they lose themselves in it. I find it tragic and poetic, and I think there’s beauty in telling those stories. Not all of them will have happy endings, but my favourite character is still processing through her Scarlet trauma, and may hold on to aspects of it forever, so it remains a fun theme and backstory element, that has potential to RP out in a more present-day situation as well.
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I personally find the most fitting fate for the Scarlets is to be raised into undead as Forsaken.
Not only so they’re made into what they hated, but so they’re also sentient enough to know that this is what happened an actually have to unlive with the fact this is what they now are and their friends and family now wish to destroy them with all that hatred, zeal, ignorance and outright stupidity they one had.
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Good luck with your Scarlet Crusade themed guild.
i wonder how many would realize theyre an abomination, an affront to the natural cycle
and go “yes, destroy me”
Or they come back like Calia, undead and infused with the Light. Yea, theyll definitely go for that
Thank you so much! Now that we are cross-faction and cross-server, while we have a guild listing and forum post on Wyrmrest Accord, we will be bringing everyone from WRA who is interested in joining to the Scarlet Reclamation on Moon Guard for the Alliance side where the Alliance presence is heavy to find random RP in RP hubs like Stormwind City. Anyone is still welcomed to join and we welcome Humans/Kul Tirans/Worgen, (all) Dwarves, Void Elves who are High Elves or Blood Elves as well as Blood Elves on Horde side who may have sided with Lordaeron during the Third War instead of returning home to Silvermoon during the Scourging of Lordaeron like we saw with the Priests and Sorceresses from Warcraft 3 or who abhor the undead at all costs (which could definitely include Forsaken if not just the Scourge alone).
wouldnt it be healthier for WRA to to bring more ppl to the server instead of taking away?
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I don’t think the word “all” means what you think it means.
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