Dumb Thought : Light-Raised Forsaken as the future of their Race?

Wyrmrest Accord
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Inspired by https://imgur.com/t/worldofwarcraft/hbgHmT7

We’ve seen, with the aid of a minor Naaru and a powerful Priest, it is possible to raise a ‘Light Undead’ that functions in a very similar fashion to a normal Forsaken, but apparently has a form and state of being more similar to what the Val’kyr did to Sylvanas and Nathanos, being pseudo-alive and does not appear to rot and decay.

We know that the Forsaken are slowly but surely warming up to Cauliflower’s position in the Desolate Council, and that Paladins for All is an inevitability, and the fact we don’t have them yet is honestly a head-scratcher.

What if that’s what we’re going to see happen in the next three expansions? We saw in Battle for Azeroth that people in desperation were willing to embrace Undeath, either from the Forsaken or from other sources, if it meant saving their families or pursuing their goals. We’ve seen the Vampirates as a form of pseudo-living Undead, and we know that Blood-aligned Death Knights can mimic the ‘window-dressing’ properties of the living if they absorb and use enough life and stolen vitality to pull it off.

What if that’s how the Forsaken get rebranded? No longer the vengeful monsters who sought any and all methods of kill the Lich King that damned this to their existential hell, nor the embittered kill ‘em all zealots of the Banshee Queen Warchief, but now a unified and thoughtful community under the guidance of the Desolate Council. What if these Forsaken, once they gain access to Paladins, and using Cauliflower as a conduit, can channel both the Light and the power of the Shadowlands into the Dead, and even each other? Now, those who cannot bear to leave their loved ones, or who may yet be needed to handle the endless threats that menace Azeroth, are given a second chance at (Un)life in return for aligning with the Desolate Council and complying with the Forsakens’ new goal of undoing as much of the harm they have caused as possible while also keeping tabs on the Scourge and other rogue forces on Azeroth.

Much like the Primaris Marines from 40k, it could start out as friction between the ‘originals’ and these ‘upstarts’, but as the process is refined and more and more of the original generations can undergo the process, the Forsaken find themselves with a slow but stable restoration of their numbers, access to new minds and new viewpoints and ideas that come with them, and possibly a cure to the Forsakens’ plight of having chunks of their souls missing due to the harm caused by Arthas’s runeblade, Frostmourne, and by dint of his domination of the Undead of the Scourge, their spiritual and physical torment, transformation and enslavement under his control.

All those souls, all of them missing chunks due to the hunger of Frostmourne and the machinations of the Jailer, all those chunks of soul, all those loads of anima, being funnelled into his servants and weapons, is the canonical reason no Forsaken has ever been able to be raised into actual life again, as most dead or Undead have been able to be. Forsaken and the Scourge at large, unique amongst all Undead, on Azeroth, are unable to be resurrected as one of the living, especially if something else has control over, or has contaminated, their Soul. More-over, in the actual lore, bringing somebody back from the dead is immensely powerful magic and is extraordinarily draining on the spellcaster, requiring exhaustive rituals and places of power in which to perform those rituals.

Namely, the Altar of Storms, found in the Blasted Lands and at the base of Blackrock Mountain. That said, we have access to other Naaru, and the Sunwell is right there. A small pool in the center of a recently hallowed area where the Forsaken Paladins and Shadow Priests have created an altar in which one of the recently dead, or a properly prepared Forsaken, can be raised into this more advanced form of Undeath.

Or do I just need to be dragged outside and rolled back and forth on the grass again?

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Honestly, I think this would be super cool as a playable allied race.

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In some ways it seems like there isn’t much of a meaningful difference between “light raised” forsaken and the living, and other forms of undead like Death Knights also experience undeath differently.

If the Forsaken already accept these various forms of unlife under their national banner, why not accept… life? Is there any potential for a Forsaken society which accepts anyone goth enough to want to live in a blighted kingdom of dead forests and weird frankensteins?

And if there is a spectrum between mindless zombie to fully intelligent and emotionally complex seemingly-immune-to-rot undead like Menethil, Nathanos, certain Death Knights, and Sylvanas, where does the spectrum define “you’re just alive you’re not forsaken enough”?

A forsaken identity which accepts the living would be distinct from just “Lordaeronian”–I figure they would still have a cultural identity where shadow-based religion/magic is more common than Light-users, where plague and blight are things to be tolerated and exploited rather than cleansed, and where the living, if nothing else, are expected to avoid daylight enough to maintain a sallow complexion and incorporate skull motifs into their clothing. We saw in the meeting between the living and the dead where Calia died that there is some appetite among the living to re-unite with their dead countrymen, and humans willing to eschew the light and hang out under the plaguelands mushroom trees could make this society self-sustaining.

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Okay, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, I’ll attempt to provide the best possible answer (as a diehard Forsaken player and fan of all things undead) in good faith.

First of all, I don’t know if we can really say that the reason no Forsaken can be raised back to life (as opposed to being raised into undeath) is Frostmourne. My own personal thoughts aside about what an awful mess Shadowlands made of the lore of Death magic and necromancy, that would require the assumption that every Forsaken was killed by Arthas himself. Which we know isn’t true.

So it’s more than just Frostmourne rending their souls: it’s the magic which has imperfectly attached their souls to their bodies preventing those souls from properly rejoining with their flesh and allowing their bodies to “function” as living beings’ bodies would (and thus making them “alive”). Before Calia, it was easy to say that the reason the Light is harmful to the undead is because they were raised by Death magic, which is adjacent to Shadow, the Light’s canonical “opposite”. Calia throws a wrench into all of this by challenging conventional notions of the undead as beings of Shadow: but if we take Margrave Sindane’s explanation of necromancy as gospel (“Necromancy is necromancy, regardless of the magic used”), then perhaps it’s safe to assume that Calia would be similarly harmed by Death or Shadow magic (in the same way that the Light harms Forsaken raised by Death/Shadow magic).

So—and I’m really shooting in the dark here—perhaps it has to do with the magic that has reattached their souls to their bodies. Maybe an undead raised by Arcane magic (such as Meryl Felstorm) would feel unusually intense pain when encountering Fel magic, since he has so much Arcane magic keeping his soul tethered to his body.

But I think this obscure theorizing about necromancy lore is secondary to the real issue at hand: Why can’t the Forsaken just accept goth humans and be cool with the living?

And the answer is because no one who is still alive, no matter how agreeable they might be to the “aesthetics” of undeath, can truly understand what it is like to die and be reborn into a body that is dead, least of all to experience the kind of pain and rejection that an overwhelming majority of Forsaken characters have. The trauma of becoming undead warps your body and mind in unpredictable ways, as Lilian Voss explains to Thomas Zelling:

It is already a stretch to call Calia Menethil “Forsaken” because she has never really been “forsaken” by anything or anyone. Her resurrection, and her immediate acceptance by those around her, already places her in stark contrast to almost every other example we have of Forsaken who are raised against their will and forced to accept (or reject) their new existence.

Whatever was lost in the transition from life to undeath is gone and, like the kingdom of Lordaeron, it’s never coming back. From a roleplayer’s perspective (and from the perspective of a longtime Warcraft fan), I find that idea to be endlessly fascinating and interesting to explore. The idea that a character could be twisted toward embracing more negative emotions and darker thoughts in a way that is entirely inscrutable to those who haven’t experienced death and imperfect resurrection is, in my opinion, a lot more intriguing than trying to delineate between “Lightforged undead” and “Sylvanas/Nathanos undead” and “death knight undead” and… hopefully you get where I’m going with this. It boils down to the same problem Shadowlands had. Overexplaining fantastical concepts like magic, necromancy, and the afterlife removes the mystery. And when the mystery is gone, it just becomes boring.

In my eyes, even despite not liking the fact that the Light of all magics can suddenly create undead, Light-raised undead are still undead and thus can relate to not having a functioning body (and presumably the aforementioned damage that occurs during the trauma of transformation), while anyone who is still alive cannot.

As for “rebranding” the Forsaken… I mean, it seems like that’s the direction they’re going. We’ve covered and recovered this topic many, many times so I feel like anyone who reads these forums semi-regularly already knows how I feel about it. I just hope that any rebranding leaves room for the darker Forsaken to thrive even if we’re no longer allowed to be explicitly portrayed as the baddies. I’ll still proudly display my Queen’s loyalist tabard and drop my Undercity banners.

Not to mention this item:

The flavor text alone here is just one more reason why I hope my favorite race never truly becomes “Lightwashed”.

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Less in regards to being ‘personally’ slain by Frostmourne, or any other Runeblade for that matter (which adds a horrifying new angle to the 3rd Generation Death Knights’ need to inflict pain and suffering and how they could bind Runes to any weapon they wished, meaning there’s not only thousands of Living beings slain, and marked by, Walmart versions of Frostmourne and possibly tens of thousands of Domination-imbued weapons just sitting in pawn shops, personal collections and enchanter’s workshops), but rather than the Scourge’s ‘hive-mind’ and much of its power was derived through the link with the Lich King’s armor and sword, trapped in that glacier of ice.

All Undead raised by the Scourge, either slain directly by Death Knights or not, are touched by Domination magic, channelled through the Dread Blade Frostmourne and the Lich King’s armor, through to the rest of the Scourge. We know that hundreds, if not thousands, of Kyrians ended up being recruited to serve the Jailer towards the end of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion onwards, some knowingly serving the Jailer, others believing that they were merely being assisted by a secretive and sympathetic agent. How many souls were snatched up and redirected to the Maw, either by being tainted by Scourge/Domination magic on their soul via being raised by the Scourge or slain by Death Knights, or through Kyrian shenanigans, or worse yet, the rebel Maldraxian houses that sided with the Jailer for far longer than the Dark Kyrians ever had?

Direct splitting of the soul seems to be unique to Frostmourne, due to its nature as ‘The’ Runeblade from which all others were derived, but we do know that splitting chunks off of a soul is possible without killing the target. Demon Hunters do it, some Death Knight abilities were stated to drain the life-force and ‘essence’ of the target, Warlocks could literally bring Demons into the Material Plane and cheat death by using Soul Shards and Gems, which trapped the entirety of or potion of a slain creature’s soul and used it as fuel for the spell in question.

What if that’s what’s stopping the Forsaken from being raised. Some vital part of them is marked by Domination magic, and due to the Kyrians and the Robo-Arbiter, the whole thing was run on imperfect automation and nobody questioned anything.

It reads as Maw, it goes into the Maw, we don’t question the Path, drink the Kool Aid and surrender your identity for the most incompetent and head-up-bag-of-holding ‘God’ in the setting, let alone the absolute nonsense that were the Attendants who’d literally sit there diddling themselves rather than ever deviate from their directives as the whole Shadowlands was falling apart, visibily so, all around them.

There is a very good likelihood that the missing chunk of the Forsaken’s soul is either bound to the Maw, or was expended to make Mawsworn, and that means that this spiritual wound, albeit on a much smaller scale than what we see with Sylvanas and Uther, will never heal. Its why not even entities like the Naaru or the Wild Gods or even Elune herself seem to have the option of just “Shim Sham Salami-bin!” and restore their Undead’d servants back to life.

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My unded ADD wont alow me to read all of the replies so… just gunna go with the above.

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I always go to the argument that the experience is the main importance, but since the Archpriest covered that thoroughly, ima gona rant.

This gental transition into a pretty corpse, a path around death so that you can hold on to what ever you value most, we had this option with the Val’kyr. The cooperative, mutually beneficial process which you express is indeed only a possibility because of Calia. The living seen Sylvanas and the Forsaken as the bad guys and would not consider making such arrangements for unlife.

Lets fast forward a little, more than enough of the living view unlife favorably, and we acquired the light based means to raise these “whole” undead reliably. We wouldn’t be called Forsaken anymore and none of it will make whole the souls of the OG Forsaken. In order to do that, we need to retrieve those lost parts from the Maw, either by raid or negotiation.

We get that done, huzzah! Now we are creating an imbalance in the machine of death becausean increasing number of people want what we have. Negligible as it might be when compared to the entirety of the cosmos, but it will bring the undead new threats from thw cosmos.

I think undeath needs to remain undesirable. Leave it as a gruesome, painful, and tragic transition so that only the best types of individuals join our decrepit ranks. This will keep us hidden from greater forces which might seek to purge us. We can hold on longer to the essence of what it means to be Forsaken.

Besides, we don’t know what tricks the Naru or the Light itself is playing. If Forsaken give themselves over so quickly to this new state of undeath, we might hasten our journey into a different type of chains.

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I will forever be upsetti sphaghetti that BFA wasnt about Azerite being harvested to empower the Val’kyr to continue restoring the Forsaken to the point where they can start families again

We couldve had dark humans on Horde side!

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Yeah but regardless of their alignment, having humans on Horde… I’m glad they didn’t go that route honestly lol

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Psh, the Horde is just Red Alliance at this point anyway. May as well go all in.

(Posted on the wrong Rakham.)

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I just want to know why the Alliance aren’t using the Light to mass rez all their dead now. If they have the power and Calia’s form is acceptable, why isn’t that just normal? Just take Saa’ra and a priest to a battle and mass rez the fallen before they have a chance to decompose.

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I read this as genital translation. I need stronger coffee.

Oh, definitely. Only a small number are permitted and it involves the Shadowlands giving permission. Only those totally committed to the protection of Azeroth’s World Soul and her people might be permitted to undergo the process, and even then, like the Light Forged Draenei, the process has an absurdly high mortality rate.

You’re UNDEAD. It doesn’t matter if you just got paler and your eyes turned red, blue or gold, your heart will never beat again, you’ll never know your own warmth, food and drink will lose all taste, animals will shy away from you and your very presence unnerved and provokes instinctive fear and unease from your former friends and family amongst the living.

Its not living forever as a sparkly vampire, it’s willingly condemning yourself to physical damnation, and social ostracisment, from everything you’ve ever known and taken comfort from for a excruciatingly long vigil against Powers that could sweep you away like an ant if you let your guard down.

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Oh yeah, right there with you. When i looked it over before posting i had read it twice to make sure ot was right.

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I’d like a light-raised Forsaken as a future alt, that’s for sure. More cool looking character models pls!

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It sure does seem like that though. Calia is physically pristine and utterly human in her attitudes, culture and (apparent) emotions.

Does she still get to perceive “living” pleasures like food, drink, smells, warmth, sex? I dunno, I don’t think we’ve gotten much lore about her internal emotional state, as keen as I’m sure we all are to get answers to the question of “does Calia still feel randy sometimes”. Has her moral compass been tweaked toward darker paths by her change? Doesn’t seem that way. Even if forsaken just have the appearance of being sparkly vampires it changes their vibe a lot, at any rate. (I do wonder how different Calia’s reception might have been if she had been given a normal forsaken model–obviously decayed/dead and suffering, rather than a perfect immortal human)

I guess I’m on team “just let goth humans join” because being forsaken could be about being “technically” undead (like Calia, who is just a pale immortal human) or “culturally” forsaken, like this totally living dude who chooses to walk around in creepy robes with a skull on his head because he doesn’t like society or something

https://i.imgur.com/ZwFqGhu.png

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She also didn’t die in a frenzy of fear and pain, torn apart by a mob of ghouls, skeletons, zombies and abominations.

Its only been 4-5 years. We have no idea if she’s ‘wearing out’ like a normal Forsaken is or if the Light Necromancy is a cheat code.

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Yeah, maybe. I dunno what to think about “forsaken aging” lore–the old Tirisfal starting zone quests seemed to imply that the eventual fate of becoming a mindless zombie was inevitable, and fairly quick, since it was happening to forsaken even in “classic year”. Sylvanas, on the other end of the spectrum, remained rot free and non-zombie-brained for about 20 years with no sign of stopping, but she is a powerful person with access to unusual necromancy. But light magic is unusual necromancy too.

Anyway I do like the Zelling looked like an absolute wreck after being dead for like 2 minutes. Some zombies get to look nice for years, others immediately turn into jawless boneman

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What if Calia isn’t here so that Lightforged Forsaken can become a thing, but she’s here to prevent any form of population replacement from happening? Like the Light forseen that they need the Forsaken to die, but force can rebound, so they just need the Forsaken to die out naturally.

Calia will stand in our way through her sense of what’s right. She might be like "We are not meant to be here and disrupting the great cycle. Let us exist in grace with the time we have and then pass away so that life can bloom in our once great Human nation. "

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That is an actually legitimate, and genuinely concerning, question. We know the Primal Power are fighting over Azeroth. Death having a foothold here with Walmart versions of Maldraxxus, and now with Bel’amethadone, might have been something they foresaw and either worked to mitigate or neutralize it, but as always, they underestimated the Mortals they were attempting to puppet.

I still hold out hope for the future of the Forsaken, however. I’d be heartbroken if they truly did die out fully but also disturbed if they have to go back to grave-robbing and raising the newly dead to replenish their numbers. A Pseudo-Living state would be trifold, in that A) they’re getting something back that was unjustly taken from them B) there is a hope, a future, for the last true people of Lordaeron and C) The Horde does not lose the Forsaken.

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This is true, but now I wonder if the easiest route might be best. They might just “Forget about it.”
Forsaken population replacement is too complicated or nuanced, so they turn from it and focus on messing up other parts of their huge story and lore. It might be best for Forsaken RP if Blizzard just leaves it alone.