(Because let’s face it, it needs it. And being roleplayers, we’re writers at our core and therefore suited to the task.)
The catch?
We add one part of rewritten Shadowlands story at a time, responding to the previous post much like we do in in-game roleplay. Keep it to the length-ish of one in-game roleplay post, no paragraphing! Together on a whim, let’s built something more thoughtful to WoW’s world building than what we got.
I’ll start:
Zovaal was a secret construct/puppet of the Primus all along — the Primus’s memory was removed and him jailed by the Arbiter for being the true villain of the expansion.
An exception to the rule: You do not need to respond to forum troll or OOC contributions.
Sylvanas Windrunner existed between the world of the living and the dead; only she - a survivor of Frostmourne’s influence - could feel the pull of the Primus’s rune magic that demanded all life be made to serve in death.
But she recognized it far too late as the Primus’s magic, even when jailed in Torghast, was powerful enough to deceive even her until the player character unwittingly frees him.
Sadgati views the Shadowlands as a personal experience which is different for everyone. The experience can range from being assigned a role in the realm of the dead to being sent out as a reincarnate. The idea of going to the Shadowlands as a mortal to fix the afterlife with bows, swords, and shields then coming back to tell the tale…Cool story bro!
This is from the point of view observed by the eyes of a character who runs a trade company with too primary ports, one in Azshara and other in Westfall. Both ports has over a 1000 under her employ so the stories are coming from commoners.
Thus a shared experience of the Shadowlands is stuff only known from late night plays, portside/office gossip, mead hall chatter, etc…
Bolvar having once worn the Helm of Domination is unaware he is being used as a puppet to lure the most powerful individuals from Azeroth into the Maw. With the goal of trapping them in the infinite tower Torghast and grinding them down through endless combat and eventually forging them into weapons.
With the added benefit that if wills can’t be broken and shaped into puppets for the Primus, they always can be sent to Denathrius’s realm and tortured to give endless founts of anima (like Garrosh).
Knowing that trouble stirred in the realms of death, and yet trusting none of her political allies or enemies with this truth, the Banshee Queen recruited the only entity she knew who would handle the matter with the delicacy it required.
Have all the character and faction storylines but don’t bury them under exclusive content that you need to make 4 alts to actually experience the entire narrative of the expansion.
But her choice was not Nathanos — though loyal, patient, and thorough, he was never as delicate of an instrument needed to weave such careful threads — instead, Sylvanas called upon another entity into which she could place conditional trust…
Shadow-Hunter Voljin. Something stirs deep within Torghast, a soul that not even the jailer can control, one that Sylvannas is all too familiar with. She will need allies and the old Shadow-Hunter will help her find her quarry.
Though Vol’jin himself had hand-chosen Sylvanas as his successor as he lay dying, the trust between them had never grown beyond frail, save the enduring of the Horde. If only the Shadow Hunter knew. But such reservations were the frivolities of the living, and so the Ranger General entered Torghast to search of an old ally she planned to renew.
(Realizing one sentence is not quite feasible, let’s perhaps keep it to the length of one in-game roleplay post! Also, story is )
The Banshee Queen traversed the halls, outwitted the traps, defeated lesser interlopers, and cornered a prideful soul-keeper who acquiesced that giving aid to Sylvanas was preferable to surrendering their own soul.
“Mawsworn,” the burner of Teldrassil commanded, bow drawn and arrow pointed, “Bring me the soul of the noble leader who perished upon the shores of the Broken Isles. You will know them by their noble spirit, and resolute tenacity in the face of the gathering dark.”
The soul-keeper fled behind pillars and through entryways evocative of Icecrown Citadel’s own ancient architecture. The style, a beautifully painful aesthetic, was so foreign to all else on Azeroth. How could they not have wondered at the seat of the damned not even resembling an all too common ziggurat, or the necropolis’ that brought terror to the elven and human lands only thirty years ago? Her thoughts flooded with events of the past, her victories, her regrets.
Shadowlands is a cosmic DMV for souls, and the entire expansion is waiting and filling out forms then realizing you have the wrong form and have to go back in line for the correct form oh and you forgot another form of ID so you have to start all over. It is a massive pain and a waste of time, but also considerably better than what we got.
Expansion 1: Northrend revisited. Despite Bolvar’s dethroning, the Scourge is going crazy, and organising. We gradually, slowly, start to uncover the fact that the Scourge and the Cult of the Damned are in service of a new master. Gradually we start to uncover who he is, what he wants, and why this damned hole has been rent in the sky.
Expansion 2: Shadowlands but with more Azerothian involvement. Get the Argent Crusade up there. Get the Ebon Blade doing stuff outside Oribos. Throw in some Alliance and Horde specific quests to maybe reconnect with old heroes. In short, I don’t hate the broad thrust of Shadowlands. Some elements, like the secret nature of the dreadlords, were actually interesting. But they REALLY needed to make it feel connected to Azeroth somehow.
I could go longer but I’m not wasting much brainpower on that expansion lmao.
Chronicles 4 retconned the first ones as beings the shadowlands natives believed in, but were not actually real.
Also, a real opportunity was missed by not using this phase-diving gimmick we have now to have a distorted umbral landscape full of spirits and monsters of the dead to interact with and circumvent in a back-and-forth not unlike Silent Hill or Legacy of Kain.
What we got instead was the bleak concept ripped from the PnP World of Darkness game Wraith, where you learn that all of the souls of the dead become currency or food.
)