Kaldorei are weird. Their lore is terribly communicated, they have two different identities between the RTS that spawned them and the MMO’s implementation of them. They’re tied to two of the more abstract part of the setting, Nature and Elune, that seem to be different to whoever is writing that week. Because of that, there’s always been a history of disagreement on interpretation with guilds.
I wanted to do an interest check for a Kaldorei guild aimed to be a fiery reinstatement of their original culture / fantasy, heavily emphasizing the martial physicality with their warrior spirituality to home in on the original feeling of a warrior culture they had in wc3. As such, it would be a Kaldorei guild where the military entwinned with the spirituality and cultural aspects, given the cultures ‘warrior steward’ fantasy.
You know how much I enjoy Night Elves in how they were initially shown. Good luck to you, and if you need any assistance in providing enemies and such for events, just let me know.
I hear Ashenvale is particularly scary to wander into.
To the lore though, as you mentioned the Night Elf lore is beyond complicated. They hate magic, but allow Highborne back and continue to dislike the Blood Elves that do the exact same thing, like how does that even make sense. The whole Elune and Wilds things, I think comes down to Priestess (Female) and Druids (Male). Because that’s how it was originally after hundreds of years taking to master the craft, and looking at the lore it’s hard to say this male priest is a High Priest of Elune, and this female druid is an Archdruid of X.
The shear amount of conflicting Lore and reference make it hard to pin down properly. I do hope you manage though, would love to see more Night Elves out and about in Kalimdor.
There’s definitely room for Kaldorei guilds. For instance, Conclave of the Moon recently had a very good run, but went on hiatus due to RL. However, it proved that so long the project is driven by passion and the leadership pours a lot of energy, the endeavor will thrive. As such, you have to wonder if you are willing to put this kind of effort.
Also, I think that, unless you are overly restrictive with membership, you should not worry too much about conflicting lore interpretations. Make it a matter of IC conflict and foster development through it.
I agree. Even with the inconsistencies in lore, that’s widespread among all races to an extent. I would love to see a new Kaldorei guild. There’s always a market for one!
Part of the dichotomy of night elf lore comes from the translation from RTS faction of which we never see a civilian settlement to a fully fledged civilization in an MMO. Keep in mind that in famous Sparta the vast majority of the population were not Spartan warriors. In medieval France, a place ruled by a chivalric lords, it’s estimated that only about 1% of the population were actually knights, and though it was an exceptionally Christian place and time, most of the people you met there would not have been clergy either.
I think when you kinda step back and look at the night elven civilization holistically, the “lore discrepancies” make more sense. Yes, there are warrior orders such as the Sentinels that can be ruthless, competent, and badass, and normal elves that are far less. You can see much the same thing in the portrayal of elves in Tolkien.
I think it’s the badass part of night elves that kind of sets them aside from many more generic fantasy elves, so we give them a little less room to breath than we do the other factions. And of course Blizzard keeps raining calamities down upon them.
That all said, always happy to see night elf guilds going!
While I get this angle. We’re talking about a fantasy setting at the end of the day, and a race that lives so long that there’s no reason they aren’t all trained. You look in some similar fantasy settings, and you do see races or cultures where Elves (often even Dwarves) have a population far more capable of producing soldiers from their population, proportionate to it’s size, where even a civilian militia can end up being more disciplined than what races like human armies can produce. And beyond fantasy, the OG Mandalorians are a fairly good example of it as well. In any real world context thats insane, but real world humans don’t have the circumstances or culture of the Night Elves. While some of their inspiration is real world humans, plenty of it is pure fantasy. When we’re talking about a culture that is defined entirely by a military steward culture (because the center of their reborn civilization was the tree whose blessings WERE their sacred charge of service) I don’t think it is entirely fair to compare it to what happened with real life armies, because nothing can compare to the scale of the War of the Ancients or the perspectives these elves would naturally develop even before they had immortality.
