Building a Forsaken from the bones of a previous character

Wyrmrest Accord
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So…neat situation arose for me tonight.

Wrapped up the main campaign of TWW. Unlocked the Earthen. Overall, TWW was a decent expansion and story and got me all nostalgic. So for WoW’s 20th, I’ve decided to roll an alt and deliberately take them through every single zone in the game. No Heirlooms, no skipping anything. With 20 years of content, that’s going to take a while. It’s okay, this isn’t someone I’m trying desperately to hit max level as fast as possible. I’m even making them another Hunter (Mostly to snag any low level Mail transmogs I may have missed).

Spent time deliberating on what kind of character I wanted to do. Did I want to finally realize a member of the Adeptus Gnomechanicus? Roll an Earthen?

I eventually decided to roll a Hordie (Mostly because all my other Horde Alts are lost to time and there will come a day that the Horde/Alliance narrative splits again), and settled on a Forsaken after rolling some dice and flipping some coins to decide.

In the process of character creation, I decided to just for fun input my last major Hunter Character’s name. I wasn’t expecting anything, last time I tried to re-roll the character the name had been taken by someone else (Kinda like how Vanndrel here has to go by Vanndrel and not “Starstalker”). To my absolute shock, the name was available again.

I got Clinton Avers back.
And he’s smelly now.

This is kinda awkward because A) I want the name/character back in my possession but B) Avers was a huge racist when it came to the races of the Horde and by the time I race changed him into Vanndrel here, I’d settled that his story ended by staying on AU Draenor after having finally killed enough Orcs even his bloodlust was sated and he was horrified by what he’d done.

So I’m coming to the Council of RPers to help me figure out how to bring this new version of Clinton Avers to life.

Option 1: Something went terribly, terribly wrong on AU Draenor

Kinda the easy solution, but Avers escaped AU Draenor with the arrival of the Mag’har Orcs and was subsequently raised as a Forsaken in the aftermath. Maybe he was part of Yrel’s Army of the Light and Sylvanas did it for the irony. Maybe somehow he ended up as an undead thrall to a Shadowmoon Necrophyte before breaking control. Somehow between the end of WoD and modern day, he wound up undead and as part of a faction he’s traditionally hated.

Option 2: Not the same Guy

Still keep the name Clinton Avers, but wholly different dude. Blank slate in terms of personality and motivations.

Option 3: Re-Roll

Roll up a Kul’Trian to maintain Avers’ legacy, but go with an entirely different Horde character to experience the entirety of WoW’s content with.

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What if he died and came back reincarnated as a gnome, but aware of his reincarnation, so he’s consumed with hellish worry about what he did to warrant this punishment?

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A Mechagnome experiment gone awry, eh?

Rubs chin thoughtfully

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See, no, you’re already interested whereas I’m kind of trying to convince you to play a character steeped in misery. You’ve got to come at this with the right mindset.

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I’m planning on going through every. single. zone. of WoW. The ‘steeped in misery’ part will come as a matter of course.

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Maybe the mag’har find out this is the same dude that killed a whole bunch of their peeps, but instead of being locked up for the crimes committed in his previous life, he’s sentenced to roam far and wide and help the horde wherever he can. Or he chooses to do so himself as self atonement to ease his guilt.

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Throw some cha ching at the start of Avers and you get $avers, so in truth Clinky Avers should be a goblin who is scouring Azeroth for new profit opportunities. He’s the great gentrifier, the market marksman, returned from the whacky experiments of unethical goblin scientists who weren’t sure exactly what that ray gun did.

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Gonna try to roll all three of these together as a writing prompt …

Avers ended up fighting alongside the Iron Horde and the Draenei rebels against the Army of Light because :poop: went from 0 to 100 really quick, and as much as he doesn’t like the Horde, in any incarnation, watching families screaming in terror as they’re being dragged off to be turned into flesh-automatons was a straight up “NO.” situation for him, Orcs or not.

Being who and what he was, he became a crucial if small component in the rebellion, but against Lightframes and armies of unflinching Light-Bound Orcs and other races of Draenor, and eventually the Naaru themselves stepping onto the battlefield, and his own age catching up to him, Avers had to step back to a more logistical role, which leads to …

Strange situations make for strange bedfellows, and the desire to prove you’re alive, and celebrate whatever victories, along with copious amounts of alcohol, can lead to odd situations.

Behold, the unlikely child of Avers and whatever Orc or Draenei he was closest to, emotional or otherwise, in the aftermath of this celebration. And being Avers … he’s not going to let his child, or children, end up alone in the middle of a battlefield. He’s going to ensure they survive. He’s going to murderdeathjustice anything that even looks at them funny …

And then the Horde shows up and what remains of the rebellion sprints towards the Portal while Grom finally does something useful and delays the Army of Light. Avers has no particular love for Hellscream, but he does have an interest in his people, be it his child(ren) or the group of Mag’har, Ogres and Draenei he worked with, also getting to that Portal back to Azeroth, because Draenor is lost at this point, no matter what happens.

And in the process … Avers takes a fatal injury. He stays on his feet long enough to get his people through the Portal and they start running from Orgrimmar along with the Saberon and the Botani because holy :poop: that is a lot of angry Orcs and Forsaken and Daddy Avers made damn sure his kids and allies knew what the Horde had done in his universe, regret for his own actions or not.

Avers last minutes are spent trying to obscure any tracks or signs of his group’s presence, knowing his wounds are fatal, and collapses with the walls of Orgrimmar filling his vision, flipping off the Horde flag one last time as his vision goes dark …

Avers senior rises from the grave due to Sylvanas spam-rezzing every corpse she can get her hands on, and the process is traumatic as with every Forsaken, with Avers SR getting gaps in their memory and only starting to recover them mid-way through the War of Thorns, finding himself horrified by the situation and what he’s done in the meanwhile, and makes it his last mission to go put a bullet in Sylvanas once and for all, finding himself once more amongst unlikely allies amongst the Horde in the process.

Avers JR (and other children he may have had/adopted) end up with the Alliance, with Orc or Ogre-blooded ones popping up as Humans and Kul’tirans who keep their faces obscured, while Draenei-blooded ones appearing as shorter, less bulky Draenei, who are desperate to find Dad, figure out what the hell they do now, and knowing only conflict with the Army of the Light, are happy to blow the hell out of the Horde on sight but also entirely freaked out by our version of the Army of the Light and the fact that there’s a Light Forged Human now leading the Alliance, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah this is baaaaaaaaaaaaaad!

Avers SR stays with the Horde in the aftermath because if there’s ever another Garrosh or Sylvanas, he’ll be in prime position to put a bullet between their eyes or, failing that, pass information on to the Alliance through his children, and his children stay on with the Alliance because its not the bloody Horde and they can likewise keep an eye on the Army of the Light, just in case Turalyon and his kind come down with a terminal case of Yrel’s Disease.

YMMV, but good luck!

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As a thought, he could be one of the Kul Tirans raised by the Forsaken in BFA? Retaining free will he refused to aid the Horde, but was no longer able to openly serve the Alliance. A little after WoD admittedly, but having to reconcile who he is with what he has become, and only now returning to civilisation could be an interesting twist!

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Interesting stuff to chew on. Thanks guys!

Coincidentally, if anyone was curious…with zero heirlooms and only a 5% Warband XP boost, to 100% Trisfal Glades quests will see you head to Silverpine Forest at Level 16.

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It’s been a bit since I old world leveled through questing but I can’t imagine it’s anything like it is back in the day. You may not zip through but I’m curious if it will go fast anyway?

Also, I vote Gnome because it’s a reward to be a Gnome, not a punishment.

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D:

They edited Garrosh and Sylvanas’ interaction in Silverpine! When did that happen?! Garrosh no longer calls Sylvanas the B word.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I left Trisfal doing nothing but quests and selling drops with 38 gold. I’ve gone with Mining and Engineering on Avers this time to again, gather transmogs I never obtained, so I’m curious how rich doing this will get me.

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They did this years ago and it was a big controversy. Did it feel kind of lame without it? I wish they just replaced it with another name that wasn’t demeaning but also got the point across that there was zero trust and love between them.

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If Avers was a human and killed a bunch of Orcs, I don’t see why Avers can’t be a Forsaken and still hate Orcs.

I could see him waking up, looking down at himself and being “Oh sh-t.” And then having to come to grips with the fact of what he is now. And how to handle it. Forsaken tend more toward the negative emotions, so he can still hate them, be bitter about what happened, and struggle through.

If you want him to actually acclimate to Horde, he’ll probably need a reason. Either he needs something from them, one of them saves him, or something like that. Or he could have risen without his memory and has no idea - which also might be fun if any Orcs recognize him.

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You’ll still level fast even without heirlooms or any boosters beyond the Warband.

And storywise, the one that sounds the most interesting to me is the basic ‘died, got razzed as a Forsaken and hasn’t come to terms with it yet’. If you wanted to truly torture the character (and yourself) you should pull a South Park and level entirely through killing mobs without interacting with Horde quest givers at all beyond the character’s initial rez. That also includes crafting your own gear.

So basically WoW but with a survival mode attached to it. At least until your character has finally suffered enough and begrudgingly begins to accept help from the Horde.

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A darker take, but there’s also the fact that, as a Forsaken, he won’t naturally heal without magic or heavy use of both the Cannibalize racial skill and the mushrooms from the Plaguelands, and the latter isn’t really healing so much as repairing.

He’ll never get stronger, every movement he makes will wear him down, he’ll never recover from that wear-and-tear, and with no more Val’kyr and Necromancers in short supply, repairing his battle-damage is going to become increasingly, and annoyingly, difficult without a dedicated Shadow healer patching him up.

So why not prey on the Orcs he hates so much? There’s pirates, brigands and the like all over the world, and Orcs number amongst them.

A torn limb might get patched back up with some Orc muscle and tendon. A broken rib? Orc bones are notoriously thick and tough. Skin got burned off the torso by a fireball? Tanned and bleached, nobody’s going to really notice the difference unless they get really close.

Could also be a situation of creeping horror for whatever remains of the real Avers inside that Forsaken, that they’re in a Ship of Theseus situation and at what point will they, or have they, reach the tipping point? I know of several Forsaken RPers who specifically went on to become bounty-hunters because nobody cares about the ‘dead or alive’ types, so long as you bring in the head to collect the bounty…

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Very. WoW doesn’t swear often so it’s a big punctuation moment and without it…the whole encounter just kinda stops. It didn’t really land with the punch you’d expect.

I’m thinking that’s the angle I’ll be going with as I (re)build Avers’ character. Sylvanas stashed caches of newly risen Forsaken before running off to join Nips McGee’s army. Basically being headaches for the Horde as these caches of Forsaken get disturbed, woken up, and turn into Forsaken terrorist cells who are loyal to the Dark Lady and basically agitating the peace between the Horde and Alliance.

Oh that’s grim. I kinda enjoy that.

Biggest thing though is I really did retire Avers because playing as a fanatical racist was getting tiring, so I’m not sure how much I want to lean on Avers as big of a Orc hater. There’s also the timeline of how/when he got back from AU Draenor and was turned into a Forsaken. I’m thinking his motivation for doing/seeing everything in WoW is more to do with trying to find someone who can “fix” what was done to him. Like his memories are shot completely through with holes but he knows he’s not supposed to be Undead, not supposed to be with the Horde.

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