This is just me being dumb, but God damn I want to see these characters get more story-time.
And fair warnings? Its one of my Dumb Thoughts Threads.
We gonna get spicy.
Geblin & Erazmin:
High Tinker Geblin Mekkatorque has taken a beating, watching his beloved city become an irradiated hellpit due to trusting a close friend who just happened to be kookoo for cocopuffs and had a massive jealousy issue with the High Tinker, watched his people get ignored and sidelined by their much bigger allies, watched the Alliance ignore the plight of the Gnomes and had to rely upon good-hearted allies, mercenaries and adventurers to retake his homeland, only for that rotten Trogg-clogger Thermaplugg re-irradiate Gnomeragon a second time … and then get nearly killed during the battle of Daz’alor before being revived and being crowned the new king of the united Gnomanity of Azeroth.
And then we have Prince Erazmin, who has had to hold it together as his father descended into madness and began mechanifying the citizens, reducing many of their once noble and intelligent race to mindless drones or tortured cybernetic mockeries unable to deviate from their ‘optimized’ goals and objectives, as decided by the Mechagnome King. A long, slow, grinding rebellion of attrition and loss against the superior forces of his father and trying to keep up the morale of his flagging rebellion as more and more of their people were kidnapped, slaughtered or worse yet, mechanified and sent back to attack their former companions as mindless machines.
At the end of the Battle for Azeroth, the Gnomes and Mechagnomes unified under a recently revived Geblin, with Erazmin as his second and chief advisor. This heals a wound for both Gnomes, Geblin to have an intelligent and kind companion at his side to heal the damage his friend Sicco Thermaplugg did, while Erazmin gets a new father figure, friend and teacher who knows the burdens of leadership, and being on the losing side for so long, and can teach the Prince how to be a better leader and Gnome.
Geblin’s an old Gnome. He’s tired, he’s beaten, he’s had the absolute bejeebus kicked out of him, survived a direct ballista strike, watched his fellow leaders fall to corruption, die fighting overwhelming odds, or turn inwards to save their own people at the cost of their allies. This Gnome survived the 1st and 2nd Orc Wars, the Chaos Wars and the fall of Gnomeragon during the Scourging of the Eastern Kingdoms. He is tired. And here’s Erazmin, young, tempered, wise and eager to forge a better destiny for all of Gnomanity and willing to work whole-heartedly with the duly-elected ‘King’ of the Gnomes without qualm, or ego, or treachery.
I’d love to see that story keep playing out, Geblin slowly and surely passing the reigns of leadership to Erazmin, slowly and gradually reversing their roles until Erazmin, young and vibrant and unbowed by decades grief, loss and betrayal is ready to be elected the new High Tinker/‘King’ of the united Gnome races, while Geblin can just step back, be an advisor, just go tinkering and helping quietly and grieve for all he’s lost, because when you think about it, who has been there for Geblin? Who carried his burdens when it all seemed hopeless and too much to bear, when all his allies were ‘too busy’ or the Gnomes’ plight was ‘secondary’ to the war effort or their own issues? Nobody. Geblin had nobody who stood at his shoulder as a friend and a confidant, nobody who was an equal whom he could drop the illusion of control and confidence to admit he’s lost, he’s hurting and he has no idea how to pull his people out of this hole without outside help.
We also get to see Erazmin step up and out of the shadows of the larger-than-life characters and re-establish the importance of Gnomanity to the Alliance, bringing technology and improvements to the Alliance’s member states, and more importantly, their people that will simply reinvigorate their economies and their industries in new and exciting ways. We’ll get to see him step up and actively push for Gnomish agendas and be unafraid to turn around and tell veteran members to sit down and decouple their communication units, he is speaking rather than Geblin’s exhausted tolerance for the Human-first antics of the Alliance High Council. A new leader, fresh and full of fire and all too familiar with the consequences of being too passive, but with the wisdom of a wise and tested friend like Geblin to help him not walk down a dark path pushing for those agendas.
Mayla and Baine:
PLEASE SHUT UP ABOUT ANDUIN, BAINE, MAYLA IS THERE AND MAKING MOO-MOO EYES AT YOU.
I want to see Mayla getting tired of Baine’s ‘honor, duty and the Horde’ and just give him a stand and deliver ultimatum about their relationship. Baine, being Baine, has to go check with Ancestor Spirits (aka Cairne), leading to a trip to the Shadowlands, we go to the Eternal Plains, a chunk of the Afterlife reserved for Tauren and others who enjoy a simple, peaceful nomadic life, and are finally introduced to not only the Cairne, but Cairne’s mate, Tamaala, who was apparently a very spiritual person whom Baine takes after quite a bit emotionally.
This leads to a bit of an exploration of not only the Taurens’ relative differences between the Tribes, the Highmountain, the Kalimdor, the Northrend and even the Yaungol of Pandaria, but also Baine finally admitting he’s terrified of letting anyone get close, because they either die, like his father, mother, his friends and so many Clan-members to the Centaur before the Orcs came, or they fall to darkness, like so many of the Grimtotem, the Twilight Hammer Cults, the Primalists, Garrosh and the like. Mayla points out that he’s so afraid of possible failures that he’s crippling himself, and by extension the Tauren peoples, because he won’t take a risk for fear of the potential of failure. That the Tauren people will scatter to the winds because the thought of failing himself and his people is more damming to Baine than the actual failure itself.
Eventually, Baine finally heads to Bastion and asks them to not erase his past, but help him face his inner darkness and we get to meet the Angry Baine that hungers to give in to his rage, his hatred, his anger, all those dark emotions buried beneath his good nature and Tauren sensibilities and Baine manages to overcome it, accepting that anger is a natural part of oneself, but allowing it to hold the reins uncontested is spiritual poison. We meet the Child Baine that was a small, terrified child captured by the Centaur, overwhelmed by fear and loss, who watched his closest play-mates and friends, and the adults looking after them, slaughtered and eaten by the barbaric Centaur Tribes of Kalimdor, and help Baine come to terms with that his powerlessness then does not mean that he is responsible for their deaths now, that his guilt is misplaced and his self-loathing is undeserved. And finally, we meet the Inner Baine, who is torn between his duty to the Horde, and his needs as a person, who is desperately, madly in love with Mayla, worries deeply for his friends, desires to celebrate wildly and without restraint but is shackled and confined but the duties and responsibilities as the High Chieftain and a member of the Horde Council, and Baine has to come to terms with the knowledge that this ‘Inner Baine’ is everything he wants to be, and nobody but himself rejects it.
Finally, at the end of it, Baine emerges more comfortable with his own insecurities and trauma and, apologises to Mayla, and tries to propose to her, only for Mayla to tell him she’s chasing him, and she’s not prepared to accept anything less than his unconditional surrender, to which Baine blinks, then laughs loudly and tells Mayla he looks forward to many skirmishes before she can claim to have ‘caught’ him. Back to the Eternal Plains to find Mayla’s ancestors to ask their permission, since they’re in the Shadowlands anyways, to find both Mayla’s parents and Baines have been watching the whole time and heartily approve of the match, both in terms of politics and love, and we get a nice little party celebrating the union, or at least the courtship, and leave the next ‘morning’, only for Tamaala to tell us that “The Spirits have never seen what happens when new life is kindled in the realm of the dead. Tell Mayla we will watch the childrens’ future with great interest.”
When we tell Mayla, she blushes, and then narrows her eyes and mutters that she’s going to have to hurry up and ‘catch’ Baine a lot quicker than she anticipated, and we return to Azeroth.
Asric and Jaadar, Grumblers-for-Hire:
In this brave new world of co-operation and mercantile collaboration, everybody’s favourite failures from Shattrath and Dalaran show up as the heads of an investigation company that will keep eyes on anyone … for a price. Asric, as always, is the snarky, sassy bend-the-rules type, while Jaadar is, as always, the upright, uptight stickler for the rules, and send players out to help wrangle difficult patrons who haven’t paid their dues, recover ‘sensitive’ documents and recover agents who have gotten in well above their heads, all the while snarking and bickering like an old married couple.
We encounter Griftah, in a cell, loudly complaining this is bad mojo, while Jaadar yells back this is a long-overdue moment of justice and Griftah can sit in that cell and rot while their agents turn the infamous con-artist’s possessions into repayments to his hundreds of victims, while Asric commenting that maybe Griftah shouldn’t have tried to swindle Talanjii, and that there’s no deal he can cut this time that will keep his lanky blue backside out of a cell this time.
We find a couple of books around the office, and on their missions, that tells the highly inflated tales of derring do, valor and roguish shenanigans the disgraced Peacekeeper and Investigator have gotten up to since the last time we saw them in Legion, including a dangerous entanglement with a Naga siren who is currently pursuing them for child support, stealing treasure from a Pirate Lord and losing it all at a gambling casino in Ratchet, and sneaking away as the outraged Pirates laid siege to the Goblin Port only to be blasted to the bottom of the ocean before they could even make landfall, an ill-fated attempt at becoming paladins that has them permanently barred from Uther’s Tomb for ‘tomfoolery and casual blasphemy’ and a month-long binge with Khadgar in Ironforge’s taverns that resulted in a sternly worded letter of condemnation from two members of the Council of Hammers and an unofficial declaration of honorary ‘Dwarf-hood’ to the trio from the third for the sheer volume of beer consumed and the properly impressive drunken bar brawls that followed.
Valtrois and Stellagosa, Azeroth’s Most Useless Lesbians 
What happens when an Elf and a Dragon are both desperately trying to propose to one another secretly, but keep screwing up each other’s plans by dint of being emotionally clumsy when it comes to romance?
Shenanigans, that’s what.
Each is trying desperately to follow the courtship ‘rituals’ of the other side’s people, yet has a very inflated view of the steps required and doesn’t realise they’re taking guidance from what effectively amounts to high-society drama romance novels, written by authors of dubious personal acquaintance with romance and made even more chaotic by the natures and personalities of the two idiots in question.
Players get sucked up into the nonsense after either Valtrois (Horde) or Stellagosa (Alliance) cause a near-disaster trying to prepare some horridly over-wrought display to propose to their love, and we have to find a way to either convince these proud and desperate fools that maybe something simple and from the heart will be more effective that actual world-shattering displays of affection, especially since the rest of the world will have to live in the smoking aftermath.
A series of quests ping-ponging us between the two love-struck idiots, it all ending in hilarious disaster as the two, laughing hysterically at all of it, fall into each others arms and say “From the top?” and fly off to court each other, hopefully with less world-shaking disasters this time, while Lor’themar and Thalyssa share knowing looks, and Kalecgos idly wonders how Jaina is doing these days …
What are your favourite NPC characters who deserve a little love and lore-attention in the future?