This topic is as pertinent to the current game as the Eredar/Dreanei retcon from Burning Crusade, but something dawned on me as we’ve seen the new Warcraft III: Reforged models roll out. There were no Forsaken-style Undead in Warcraft III. They seem to have been a completely new thing added with WoW, same as our current Draenei were never in Warcraft III, either.
Like the Draenei being written into Warcraft’s lore to have always been there all along, this is the case for the Forsaken as well, such as their inclusion in Edge of Night before Sylvanas and Garithos take Lordaeron’s capital.
Edge of Night excerpt
Before her waited a grotesque, quivering mass of corpses, their armor piecemeal, their bodies broken, the stench unimaginable. Their plaintive, desperate gazes reminded her suddenly of children. They disgusted her. But their need empowered her. "The Lich King falters. Your will is your own. Are you to be outcasts now in your own land? Or do we embrace the cruel cards fate has dealt us and retake our place in this world?"
Her questions were greeted with gurgles, then a rasping, almost desperate cheer. Bony fists lifted toward the sky. These poor people: peasants, farmers, priests, warriors, lords and nobles… they hadn’t yet come to grips with what had happened to them. But for somebody—anybody—to assure them that they belonged somewhere was electrifying. “We are abandoned. We are… forsaken. But when the sun rises tomorrow, the capital will be ours,” she pronounced. And now they roared.
“But what of the humans?” a young alchemist asked as the din faded. Sylvanas recognized him from the previous night’s fighting. A cool intelligence flickered in his eye sockets: Lydon was his name. Already he’d come to embrace his situation, referring to humans as if they were a separate race; she made a mental note to make use of him.
“The humans will serve their purpose,” she answered, her mind already calculating. “They believe they are liberating the city. Let them fight on our behalf and spend themselves for our gain. They are”—she stumbled upon an analogy she’d used before—“arrows in our quiver.”
The heaving mass of undead clapped and coughed and hacked gleefully in assent. Sylvanas regarded the whole mob coldly. And so are you, she thought to herself. Arrows I will aim at Arthas’s heart.
The outcry against the retcon for the Draenei was rather loud back in the day, as people generally have a dislike of retcons out of principal. World of Warcraft was obviously new when the Forsaken were introduced, but would the Forsaken be considered a retconned race that had always been there, or simply additional lore that happened to be off camera during Warcraft III?
It’s really only the appearance of the Forsaken, their actual models, that were ‘retconned’ by WoW to differentiate them from your average ghoul or zombie.
The Forsaken themselves were founded towards the end of the Scourge campaign in the original Frozen Throne expansion for Warcraft 3. Likewise it was in that expansion that Sylvanas received her unique model, having been a generic banshee in the base version of the game.
As it stands, I don’t think this is enough of a change for there to be any real outcry over it, unlike the Draenei who suddenly had un-‘broken’ cousins in great enough number to foster a playable race.
It’s slightly more than that, though. Even in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, asides from Banshees, there are no Undead that even have any talking lines in Sylvanas’ campaigns. There was no semblance of the Forsaken existing beyond the average ghouls.
This I agree with, though. I only even realized this had happened at all now many years later myself.
Yet they are shown to be intelligent enough once broken free from the will of the Lich King. Semblances of their old lives, like their capacity for speech and their old personalities, may have returned with more time.
It’s not as big of a stretch as the Draenei just happening to crash land on a planet that was connected to Draenor by the Dark portal.
Are they? Once again, asides from the Banshees, there isn’t really any presentation of the Undead such as the ghouls being particularly aware of anything.
I mean more that they are able to function and follow commands. Previously undead were shown to be barely capable of wandering around and moaning without the driving will of the Lich King or the command of a Necromancer.
Granted I suppose you could say Sylvanas or the Dreadlords took over that job, but I always interpreted the rest of the undead to be going through the same awakening that Sylvanas had.
I think the forsaken would correspond to something like the zombie units seen in the Stratholme and Hearthglen levels. They’re not units you can create while playing as undead but I guess in lore they could have been present along with things like skeleton archers.
In the original game, your basic orc just wandered around unless given direct commands and uttered “zug zug.” Most of us just used our imagination to imagine they had a richer existence “off camera.” I think most of us did the same with undead units, especially the ones that were awakening. This doesn’t feel like a retcon at all.
I haven’t seen the Reforged zombie models yet, so I am curious to how comparable they will be.
Grunts and Warsong Orc and such had talking lines that showed a that Orcs were a greater range of existence beyond “Zug Zug,” same as they Humans beyond Peasant Humans with talking lines in the game.
This was not the case for the Undead.
That would be headcanon, not canon. Whatever people imagined it would be unlikely to have been Lydon and what the Forsaken would be.
There’s a lot of inconsistencies betweem Warcraft and WoW. A lot of it has to be forgiven for meta reasons. The geography in particular is screwy in Warcraft since they could just cut to a new level - they didn’t have to actually map out the world coherently.
Interestingly I think the Forsaken or Undead PCs most resemble Ghasts, which is a sort of uber ghoul that appears in D&D and other fantasy settings. While they’re not explicitly stated to exist as Scourge units - makes about as much sense as I can figure. Since there’s a clear line between the pc undead and ghouls.
Granted that’s headcanon but I’ve looked into this at length and there just isn’t a concrete explanation.
How’s that? Basically every tech tree Scourge unit in-game except the frostwyrms, meat wagons, obsidian statues/destroyers and summoned skeletons/skeletal mages had spoken lines when trained, selected and ordered around. “The sleeper awakes/Make your choice(crypt fiend),” “Us hear and obey/We done waiting(abomination),” “Must feed/Me eat dead people,” etc.
Zombies didn’t, but then not only weren’t they trained combat units, but that was justified in Kel’thuzad’s short story; the plague victims’ own minds were still in each raised zombie’s head, but the will of the Lich King suppressed them so they couldn’t really say or do anything independently as long as they were Scourge.
That is rather part of my point. Was there any distinction for these units between their time under the Lich King or their time under Sylvanas? Only the Banshees had any indication of their free will with talking lines in Sylvanas’ campaigns.
And I am allowing for that, like I said, I just think that the Forsaken became more distinct gradually after they ceased being under the Lich King’s control.
Sylvanas using ghouls still seems to be canon, as per Chronicle: Volume III, Page 101:
Only too late did Garithos lean what a promise from Sylvanas truly meant. After conquering the city, Sylvanas rewarded Garithos with death. Her ghouls feasted on the human's remains. All they left behind were bones.
I mean, I guess since chronicle is supposedly now written from the titans’ pov, I don’t really care if they think of us as ghouls, or if there were proper “Ghouls” in the forsaken that were actually distinct from other forsaken as being fully ghoulish, I’m not really offended.
If nothing else, I DO HOPE that they go ahead and throw in some forsaken models in the unit editor at least, for fun’s sake.
I was hoping the Forsaken levels would have special Forsaken units too. If they don’t, I’m going to feel compelled to rely on just using banshees, meatwagons, and abominations lol