I don’t want to be Elune‘s favorite child. Could live with that !
I am working on a fantasy story with a Forsaken alike nation in it. Lot of this is still rough draft but it’s made up of Varlocs; Gargoyle Banshee types who can appear human but turn to stone in sunlight. Metzgerei; walking corpses who’ve Frankenstein’d themselves to keep walking and frequently augment themselves with machinery or other weird ish they found. Strigori; essentially a swarm of mosquitoes that can look, walk and talk like a man, and Ghasts; clawed, sharp toothed cannibals who retained the most humanity but are conversely the most prone to feral maulings.
They maintain a very loose federation of states with an even looser definition of a republic. Nevertheless they do attract free willed undead from across the globe. Current story has them dealing with an influx of semi corporeal Onryō immigrants; the monsters from The Grudge and The Ring. Bit of a cultural origin clash. The natives were formed via mutagen virus. They’re less trusting of undead caused by curses or straight up necromancy. Very cold relationship with the other Egyptian styled necromantic kingdom across the sea who’s prior leadership was the cause for their existence.
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God only was mentioned in WC1 which was before Metzen showed up.
God was not mentioned in WC2!
Furthermore the Light only first appeared in WC3.
The idea of assembling a variety of undead that all behave differently based on their respective cultures’ real-world mythological variants and making them try to figure out each others’ quirks has more appeal than I thought it would.
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Sounds awesome. Looking forward to reading it sometime 
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I like to imagine how undead from different folklore would interact. Like every culture has its vampire or ghoul but I think it’s the Chinese vampires who hop and can sense only breath.
And I like picturing a pricolici (Romanian undead werewolf vampire thingy) winding up there. And just sort of awkwardly hopping because they don’t want to come off as an uncultured tourist.
Edit: It is! Jiangshi is the term. I am God awful with Asian languages. Which is odd because Swahili rolls off the tongue just fine. Though the Tanzanian language- the one with the clicking- impresses and terrifies me.
I so love how humans really took communication in wildly different directions. Even if it’s made a great deal of cross cultural interaction a series of baffled stares.
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This is one of the reasons why Maldraxxus disappointed me slightly:
- House of Rituals is the origin of Liches, who have always used Egyptian-motifs since they’re mostly Tomb Kings derivatives, so I was hoping the House of Rituals would have a lot of Egyptian necropolis architecture, maybe even a Sphinx
- House of Constructs is better since all of their subzone uses a lot of Middle Eastern antiquity necropoli
- House of Eyes I feel they gave up on, the entire subzone has one underground structure and one “central hub” that uses the House of Rituals hub. I was expecting more spider themes.
- House of the Chosen I feel could’ve been different: the “elite” force of members Chosen from all the other Houses.
- Plagues was fine I think
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Let’s be real here the only culture WoW’s understood is pop culture. Hence why early trolls behave like something out of colonial adventure fiction. Also mighty ignorant of history for Europeans to pretend they were always above some ritual cannibalism. Nobody was dumb enough to let corpses decompose in the open, so where do you think that Ostrogothic intimate familiarity with bones came from?
Plus just - a weird amount of cannibalism during America’s manifest destiny period. Fun fact cannibalism is not a federal crime, nor a crime in most states. God forbid people smoke weed but as long as your human flesh was ethically sourced its perfectly legal.
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There is also elements of the fear of any religion that wasn’t some form of Christianity (and often still hating you for being the “wrong” kind of one). An attitude well displayed by Lovecraft’s works.
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That would’ve been cool too. But my guess is blizzard didn’t want to go heavy on Egyptian architecture after having done it a raid tier ago with Ny’alotha. They also reused Uldum for 8.3 which is basically WoW Egypt.
Another reason why the “orc fatigue” from WoD was such a stupid complaint. Reason why we hardly saw any Demon hubs on the Broken Isles during Legion.
I’ve always been suspicious/curious of the fox tails that decorate their wagons. Are they trophies from a conquered clan, or the preserved remains of ancestors.
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They are more likely to just be animal tails. Actual Vulpera have longer, bushier tails.
Interesting idea. This is something I’d read. I suggest taking note of WoW’s story for what NOT to do about an undead nation.
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oooo I’d read more about this.
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Clarification on the Wailing Bone story. It’s actually a warning tale about improper burial and disrespecting the dead. The vulpera have important after death rituals that must be followed. They csn’t just dump thier dead anywhere or they could be eaten by scavengers or washed away in heavy rains.
One of the two cousins does just that, he throws the grandmother’s corpse in the river hoping it will get washed away, and the wailing bone keeps wailing because they didn’t dispose of the body the way it needed to so the wailing bone drives both vulpera crazy and they both die. One by murdering the other and one by drowning.
Don’t mess with the wailing bone. It’s a good story though.
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(disclaimer: I do hope the forum members are not going to start some questionable stuff or throwing 
at people)
That being said, the current narrative team members still do stick to the
https://twitter.com/Shadesogrey/status/1422038109206634501
mantra, and seem to defend this as a way to go.
So, yeah. Danuser & co. might be nice people. But these nice “our horde” / “build Shadowlands from the ground up” “'cause not much afterlife lore” people might present a different set of… challenges in finding a cooperation with the customer base.
gl hf
I guess you missed the memo. Vengeance is bad-bad. Orc / Elune / whoever was sad, that’s enough. Killed in gruesome ways people are inconsequensial in comparison to selected few NPCs.
gl hf
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Yup but I do think the vulpera have a wailing bone, like actually.
yeah, I think so too, it does actually seem to have some magical properties connected with the Shadowlands. It’s not just some superstition.
It makes a lot of sense that the tails on caravans are memorialized ancestors, vulpera seem deeply familial and since they live a hard existence, it seems like they are not strangers to death and decay. It seems like they carry the dead in the caravans, sometimes for months before the wailing bone finds the right burial spot. They probably have holistic preservation techniques etc.
You are expecting things to make sense. They wrote plots that support the Daelins but obviously don’t want the entire Horde experience to be variations of Terror of Darkshore, on top of unwillingness to actually let the Alliance be proper morally grey where their more questionable behavior has less of a “we are going after much worse people” excuse.
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