Even if the Desolate Council approved another wave of Lordaeron-wide necromancy, I don’t think it’s practical at this juncture. We haven’t seen a single val’kyr since the big name ones and their benefactress betrayed the Forsaken, and this coincided with the implosion of Azeroth’s other major undead faction. Surely a more efficient recruitment strategy would be to poach the Scourge of free-willed corpses already walking.
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Honestly, it is not all that rare. Players who know their Forsaken lore reaching back to the Scourging of Lordaeron were once upon a time not rare, and we understood our characters lore. Once upon a time, it was normal to have Forsaken who were rounded and understood their duality. Alas, the Forsaken were ultimately used as cheap blight throwing goon props for less than impressive writing. Often serving only as props for Sylvanas fan service.
The Forsaken as a whole, including Calia, deserve a full story founded in their roots reaching back to W3.
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The Forsaken would benefit a lot from having a leader that actually likes being Forsaken.
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If we’re necroing a thread…
This shows a problem with Blizzard’s writing. iirc, they said years ago that there were no evil playable factions. And yet they wanted the Forsaken to have that “playable evil faction” energy, contradicting their later claim.
As the cherry on top, by having that “crazy evil” energy, the Forsaken have forsaken (pun intended) any moral high ground they had over their opponents. The Alliance and the Scarlet Crusade became at worst the lesser of two evils, and the Forsaken became Scourge 2.0. That means you can’t claim the moral high ground playing as them at the time, even when fighting a villain group.
This also contradicts how they want to sell some conflicts as “morally grey” when one side is clearly worse than the other, or one is right and the other is wrong. I get that it’s an war-based MMO that needs villains for the players to beat, but flip-flopping on what’s justified and what’s not hurts the story and shows the writers behind such inconsistency are bad at their jobs.
There are writers on the team who can do this, the problem is they often weren’t in control of the plot.
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Forsaken players mostly got a bad rep in vanilla because forsaken rogues were the quintessential lowbie ganker from horde (gnomes for alliance iirc) - a lot who stopped playing theirs largely complained about the direction they were pushed in for years
It’s probably no surprise the race’s popularity dropped from second on horde to below all the core races and some of the ARs when the writers handle them the way they do
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Yeah that’s what I’m saying. They created this moral compass and everyone is supposed to adhere to it. The problem is the faction design did not rely on that compass initially.
We had two faction who did their thing, the Horde struck the Alliance, ok, nasty but they are the enemy the end justifies the means, the alliance reacts, retaliates, victims and all that, the Horde attacked they are the enemy, the end justifies the means, even if that wasn’t really the case with the Alliance, but it should have been.
Fast forward to now, the Horde struck the Alliance, Baine, Thrall, Lilly cry in pain. Come on.
This game needs more bad guys not more good guys.
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This is troll erasure and I will not stand hunched over for this!
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I think people kind of just got tired of this. We had almost the same story for 20 years: Forsaken do something to cause Horde and Alliance to fight, pause to fight big bad, repeat. I think it just got old and people want a new story.
Lack of imagination? Almost every media had Undead as bad guys. Having good Undead is probably one of the most original things in fantasy and I would guess a huge draw for players. What you deem incompetence I would call character development.
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I always struggled with the narrative that necromancy be default is evil. This approach is narrow in scope and demonstrates a lack of creativity.
Here are some applications of necromancy that are not evil in nature.
-Solving crimes such a homocides.
-Finding closure in death on behalf of family members. Example: Wife suddenly dies in her sleep, and her family including her children never had a chance to say goodbye.
-Military strategic, questioning troops that fell in combat for insight into enemy movements.
-Intelligence gathering, question the dead for intel.
-Sooth the restless dead, and help them find their peace.
-Consensual transitions into undeath by choice. In RP I have seen a number of living characters choose to become undead for a wide variety of reasons. Example: Elderly huan mage who wanted to be able to extend his “life” so he could continue to study magic arts with the added benefits of being an undead who no longer needed to sleep, and be distracted by simple biological needs the living have.
Alas, death in many communities is automatically seen as evil and scary, thus allocated to the “bad guy” role in plot and story.
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I remember reading a synopsis of how necromancy can be removed of its ‘evil’ nature when it comes to worldbuilding exercises, and at the end of the day necromancy tends to defy consent.
Dungeons and Dragons necromancy uses the soul as an unwilling battery for most undead creations and prevents them from escaping to their afterlives unless their divinity has a specific divine protection against undeath.
Scourge has something of a similar manner in which the soul is locked within the body through almost all stages of necromancy.
You could argue the Trolls have the closest semblance to the necromancy you are speaking of in which they commune with loa, spirits, and the dead on a transactional level; while Orcs have a straight up veneration of the honored dead.
In the end, Necromancy will be defined as evil because it treads past the notion of consent for the souls manipulation and simply goes to using it as a tool. If Warcraft was built without this foundational rule, Necromancy could have a neutral purpose.
Or, arguably, if Necromancy was allowed to flourish many of these negative traits could have potentially been researched out of the craft.
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There does exist in the MMO a number of quests in which necromancy in some form is deployed in more neutral to good manners. Often consulting with the honored dead and such.
The application in which the Scourge deployed necromancy, is without a doubt evil in nature.
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Reminds me of how we were robbed of Zelling for close to nothing of substance in the rest of the story.
Not to mention the criminal lack of Forsaken in Maldraxxus to learn how to properly do a necromancy.
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With 9.2.5 at least there is some discussion / Forsaken inclusion in the stories.
I continue to be baffled how Shadowlands utterly overlooked the Forsaken for the most part. I don’t know if it is a small mercy considering how Shadowlands went, or just accept it for more of the same. At least DKs got some lore.
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To be fair. Uh.
You’re not supposed to be there.
Kel’thuzad and Calia are just super special apparently and can go to the Shadowlands at will.
You’re telling me homeboy Faranell or Hecular wouldn’t try to hitch a ride to Maldraxxus to get their PhD’s in Virulence and Toxicology or Taphonomy and Necrotic Studies? It’d be like getting a full ride to Yale for Forsaken!
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Play Divinity 2. You have one original story of a sentinent undead.
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Necromancy is thought of as evil because it violates “the natural order of things”. That is not logical argument but a philosophical one. And, as such, depends on your philosophy.
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Why are the Forsaken quantified by what they do to the Alliance? And that sounds more interesting than turning them into boring, passive rotting guys. Their insanity and sadism are a huge part of their identity. Strip that away and you have what left? Nothing really.
The lack of imagination is that they can’t have a faction or a species that falls outside the Alliance moral compass. That is what they are essentially doing to the Forsaken, what they seem to have done with orcs. Everyone is a good guy, everyone has the human code of morality, nobody is allowed to step outside of it. A series of castrations that are turning one of the most interesting factions in this game into sad jokes. And of course the people who gobble up this stuff are equally deprived of imagination, I mean you call this castration character development.
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Trying to remember where I heard it, but there was some old vanilla lore that suggested that Tirisfal and other prominent locations that were ravaged by Arthas are “permanently cursed” with the taint of undeath, meaning that just leaving a corpse on the ground in the area could cause it to spontaneously rise as a result, and the most willful became Forsaken.
At least, this was supposed to be where all the Forsaken Player Characters came from back in Vanilla, since you just woke up at the bottom of a Crypt and walked out to meet Mordo. The Valkyr raising bit was added in Cataclysm (and is now defunct as of Shadowlands). Prior to that, Nezmith here woke up in the Crypt and walked out like any other Vanilla Forsaken PC.
I feel like they could easily expand that “abrupt awakening” lore. Living humans who don’t plan on visiting the abhorrent Shadowlands can simply choose to rest in Tirisfal under the Forsaken’s protection until they reanimate and continue their business. Makes the Forsaken Society less of a Scourge-adjacent problem and more like a volunteer community bound by cause.
Unlike other cultures, Humans don’t have a method to converse with the departed, so the Forsaken represent that connection. But you have to make Blizzard give up the whole instant terror any living human seems to have towards any random undead, as demonstrated in the writing by Zelling’s Wife suddenly going ape at the sight of her pale-sickly husband, who just prior was pale… and sickly. And the “Gathering” where Golden wrote that the majority of the Forsaken were just plain rejected by their living kin by default. I feel like this bias can be explained as being due to the Light’s influence in Human Religion, which could be broken down over time, especially with the factions playing nice now as of Dragonflight.
Lots of directions to go now that the Faction War nonsense is over.
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In order to be insane or sadistic, you have to be going against a certain measure of sanity and sadistic towards another party. You cant on one hand claim a wish for Forsaken to be evil but on the other say they can not fall short of a standered of goodness. This holds true for someone accused of murder and their only defense being that they do not believe murder is wrong, it simply wont hold up.
With respect, you seem to not understand how having a faction AS evil as the Forsaken have been show to be extremely limiting to story growth. Now if the Forsaken was one person, by all means it works. But considering Forsaken are a people who have free will and not a hive mind, you are going to see more nuance. You even have early examples of Undead defecting from the Sylvanas regime. Without diversity in ideology and the freedom to express it, you are left with a rather monotoned villian organization. It seems Forsaken players at large are starting to not like that and want more for their characters.
This is imagination and writting not limited by one singular alignment.
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