Exploring Azeroth: Northrend is the third installment in the first series of travelogue books since the old tabletop RPG guides.
Reading the book I got this feeling I’m skimming through Wowpedia articles. Turns out, the book is full of rewrites from Wowpedia with very few actual changes. It’s a problem by itself. You pay for the book that has little to offer beyond that which already exists for free on a fan-site. As for how ethical is it? I don’t know. But I can say that it feels lazy.
Are there actually new tidbits there? Sure. Story hooks for the Dragon Isles and a pretty wholesome backstory that connects the Frostborn dwarves with their Ironforge cousins.
Wowpedia rewrites lead to some weird situations. For example, turns out, Earthen and giants still fight against iron dwarves in Thor Modan. Giants are still throwing boulders at the city. As it is in-game: in the place made back in 2008. But since then, the Iron Army has been reintegrated into Ulduar defense forces: they protected the facility from the Legion. So why do they fight? Why they do still throw boulders there so many years afterward? Well, maybe someone can write speculation on Wowpedia, and in a few years, it can be added to a new book: for example, only the Iron Army within the vicinity of Ulduar was reintegrated into the fold!
Sure, the Kalimdor book had the same issue, but back then it felt like a conscious decision to roll the world back to the Cataclysm-era stalemates. Here, it felt like a byproduct of the Ctrl-V approach.
I didn’t write all that to bash the writer because maybe they simply didn’t get enough direction from Blizzard. Who knows. I don’t. But someone had to approve the book as it is, and it’s pretty sad. Not even mentioning the usual squander of pages: when I see one short paragraph taking up the whole page I kind of feel bad for the trees used for it.
So, as a potential solution for potential next books like this. If you can’t move the zones past what we see in-game, just write these books in the time periods of their expansions. Northrend is set in WotLK, for example.
In my personal blog I have additional criticism regarding how the book handled Azjol-Nerub, the Scarlet Onslaught etc. but since I have no idea if anything I write here is checked by anyone who can influence the situation… I feel like it’s enough.