Let’s try something a bit more light-hearted. This is a thread for anyone who spends time thinking about backstories for their characters.
Looking forward to WOW: Classic, tell us a little bit about a character you’re planning - race, class, backstory, personality. If you don’t know which yet, make one up for fun.
Will you approach quests from a perspective of how your character would feel about it? Will you mostly seek out a guild to act out a large in-game story?
I actually got kind of a cool story. I started a month or so after launch, and at the time I knew very little about the world except a few things that i learned playing the rts of warcraft.
Well, one day I finally made it down to the shimmering flats. As a tauren warrior it had already been a struggle to even make it that far without wanting to destroy my mouse/keyboard every mob pull. But there I was, trying to farm parts, buzzard bones, scorpid venom…and those ever elusive turtle shells.
When out of no where I came upon another warrior, of the orc verity. We were both about to attack a buzzard and I thought since i’ve been there awhile i’d give it up him and go about hunting more turtles. He said thanks and moved on. Then a few minutes later, i saw him running towards me, jumping and zig zagging. A dirty human pally had decided to attack and so as a fellow member of the horde it was my duty to engage and assist my brother…
we both died, then ran back and died again. Then we grouped up…and died. Pretty sure it was like a lvl 40 so we were just wrecked as two under geared warriors who had no idea how to spec or play the class.
Then we played for the next 10 years together. Every once and awhile, he’d take a summer trip with his family over to my state and we’d bbq and drink and shoot da $h1t. But alas, life starts to build up and many hours of game time turned into quick log ins to do dailys and wave. Then turned into, gotta help with kids homework, and the house needs repairs and working different shifts.
We’d ended up playing some mobile games together every once and awhile, and even tried to get back into warcraft in 2016 for a few months but it just didn’t have the same feel to it.
Whelp, I’m happy to announce that we’ll be back together here in classic I know you were waiting to know LOL
I just got done building him a PC and shipped it off to him (He had an old amd64 quadcore with 4gig ram 1333 and some really old AMD HD 1g gpu)
So you better watch your back out there you pally, we’ll be ready this time, the shimmering flats will rain with the blood of our enemies…or we’ll just die again. But it’ll still be fun.
Oh and sorry OP, i know not so much of an actual RP backstory, but a real story none the less ![:smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/smile.png?v=6" ":smile:")
So, I’m embarrassed to say this was one of my earliest attempts to play something not exactly canonical. I currently don’t plan to attempt this again in WOW: Classic, wanting to be much more lore-driven.
Erelody is … a half-elf. The backstory I gave her was a human father, a sailor who was shipwrecked, and who returned a couple years later with a daughter. Said daughter had skin of a normal enough color, but that hair and those eyes. She was frequently teased as being half-troll because she looked more like those monsters down in the Stranglethorn.
Choosing to be a warrior was, in part, still struggling to be accepted by her father’s people, in this case by helping protect and defend them.
Cool story, and just the sort of fun I’m hoping to have in WOW: Classic - meeting people, joining and actually engaging rather than just getting something done and running off.
Did someone say RP?
/Slides in to thread
I am still leveling characters but I am happy to give ideas of characters I have. One is a Shaman who has White fur which through their lore is apparently rare. She is blind and is very in tune with the elements. She was taken from her home out in the Muglore plains to be raised on Spirit Rise in Thunderbluff.
Another character I have is a Tauren Druid who is just a normal Tauren, no special fur, nothing. She just is a child of a Mistrunner and Runetotem so obviously picked up the Druidic learning and abilities from her parents. She is big on balance, hates goblins and their greed, and actually feels the Night Elves and Tauren should be friends as they are out to save the Earthmother (in her eyes) from harm and mend the illnesses that have already plagued her. - Which means she HATES Undead. Scourage, Horde Undead, anything. Dead should remain dead and they are a plague that need to be purged. She hates that they are part of the Horde.
This story was a combination of actual RP events in Vanilla and my character’s backstory at the time. With a little bit of temporal retconning, it fits remarkably well into my ‘remake the same character’ plan.
I feel the spirits gathering. It is time for a tale to be told; one that has not been told ever before.
I tell you this story in the old fashion, as I was taught by my teacher Magaura, and his teacher Renklor before him, and his teacher Cydonixal before him, and so on until the first of us was taught by the spirits themselves.
Our story is the tale of a shaman named Aryxymaraki, and his rise and his fall, and his rise again and his fall again, and his rise again.
Aryxymaraki was born thirty-six years ago, to a mother and father whose names have been lost to time. At one point he knew them, and he is the only one who did.
One month after his birth, his tribe was swept down upon by centuars. The images of fire and blood haunt him to this day. His tribesmates defended themselves as best they could, but they were overpowered by the superior numbers of centuar. Blood stained the ground, and corpses became fertilizer for the next season of plants.
The centuar rode off, after slaughtering every man, woman, and child that they could find. Perhaps there were other survivors. Aryxymaraki knows of none, and the spirits do not answer.
He survived purely through luck. His mother had been holding him, and as she was struck, she landed on him. He was hurt and knocked unconscious, and the centuar believed him dead.
Some time later, a patrol of braves from the nearby Redhorn tribe came to investigate the smoke. Seeing them, Aryxymaraki’s mother roused enough to speak one last word, and hold out her son…she held him out and spoke in a trembling voice, “Aryx…ymar…aki.” The braves assumed that this was the child’s name, and it became so. Aryxymaraki was taken to the Redhorn tribe, and there he grew up under the eye of the tribe’s shaman, Magaura.
As he aged, he was somewhat solitary. But it was clear to Magaura that he had great potential as a shaman, for the spirits favored him. So it was that he became his apprentice, and learned the ways of the shaman to replace him when it became necessary.
When he was not engrossed in training, he would mostly spend time with Norlak or alone. Norlak was a young warrior of the Redhorns; a warrior’s training is not so rigorous as a shaman’s, and so Norlak was a warrior before Aryxymaraki was a shaman. After Norlak left (that is another story, and it is his to tell, not mine), Aryxymaraki threw himself even further into his studies.
And so it came to pass that Aryxymaraki was almost completed his training as a shaman, in his twenty-ninth year of age. But before he was accepted as a full shaman of the tribes, he needed to complete a rite of passage. A malevolent force had been detected coming from the north, scrying, wishing to learn more about the Shu’halo people. Aryxymaraki was to search out this force, in spirit, and divert it.
He succeeded, but at an unknown cost. It was an extremely difficult rite, even more so than anticipated. The full story is told in this scroll. Suffice it to say that without ever moving from one spot, he shattered one of his horns, and gained a vast amount of experience and wisdom.
After this, Aryxymaraki knew that he had a quest that he must pursue. His encounter with that malevolent force had shown him what evil was, and he wished to undo at least some of the evil that he had been marked by in his lifetime.
It is a simple matter to return a willing spirit to its body. A skilled shaman or priest can even create a new body for a willing spirit. But something that cannot be done is the restoration of a spirit that has passed Beyond, and gone to be with the other spirits. At least, that cannot be done…as far as any mortal knows.
But the spirits know. And they know that it can be done. And they know how.
Aryxymaraki beseeched them to teach this skill to him. But not even for him would they teach it without first testing the pupil. First, they interrotaged him for his reason.
He wanted; no, needed; to restore his family. His mother, his father, and his older sister. All cruelly slain by the centuar before their time. This is his quest, and has been for the last seven years.
The spirits approved of his reason. And so they set the terms of the test.
He must fetch a vial of blood from General Marcus Jonathan; another from the Arch Druid Fandal Staghelm; another from the Archbishop Benedictus; and another from High Tinker Mekkatorque.
He must obtain a suit of armor, so powerful as to cast aside any blow, and yet so flexible as to be worn by a shaman or others not trained in the heaviest armors.
He must obtain enough leather from the great devilsaurs to form the bodies of those he wishes to bring back.
Finally, for each family member, he must obtain the purest essences of existence, to bring back their spirit. One essence of each of the Foundation Elements - Fire, Earth, Air, and Water. Five greater essences of each of the Magistarium Elements - Magic, Astral, Nether, Mystic, and Eternal. And finally, two essences of each of the Vital Elements - Life and Undeath.
Only then will his quest be complete. Only then can he rest. Aryxymaraki has never truly aspired to anything other than finishing his quest and retiring as the shaman of the Redhorn tribe. He would rather have lived a quiet existence on the plains of Mulgore than have become a hero of the Horde, as Warchief Thrall has declared him to be. But such are the twists of fate.
Fate comes from the most unexpected places, and strikes at the most unexpected times. As Aryxymaraki worked unceasingly to gather what he needed for his quest, disaster struck. His horn began to speak to him again.
It whispered to him of blood and fire. It murmured to him of darkness and rot. It softly purred to him about the murder and torture of innocents.
For his remaining horn was corrupted by a dreadlord named Barathum; the price of his rite of passage. And through that horn, the dreadlord had a hold on Aryxymaraki. Once more he was forced to struggle with a dreadlord. But this time, he was older, and wiser - yes, being wiser was a disadvantage in this fight, for he better knew what would happen if he lost. He took great pains to conceal the struggle from his family, the Tears of Draenor, for he was confident and did not wish them to worry.
He is told that sometimes, rarely, during this struggle, he would wake, spout gibberish, and fall asleep. He remembers nothing of this, but he is told that he did it three times over the course of five or six months.
And then it happened. He was relaxing in Orgrimmar, speaking to Asachi and the Elder Ruarc. He recalls Asachi saying something, and he responded with something that he knew to be wrong and did not care; the horn was being particularly bothersome that night. Images of his murdered family floated around him. For one moment, and one moment alone, he wished death upon the dreadlord.
His anger was his downfall, and he knew it. He knew himself to be lost to Barathum in that instant, and he ran before he could harm his family.
The horrors he experienced, and the tortures Barathum inflicted upon him, shall not be related here. Suffice it to say that when he awoke in Felwood, he was surrounded by people that he thought he had betrayed, murdered, tortured, or otherwise harmed a thousand times over. He has no knowledge of how long passed. It could have been minutes. It could have been millennia. He is told it was only months. Only months…in his spirit’s prison, in the Nether, it was years.
But thanks to his family, and his friends, he is himself again, and his quest must continue. Such is his path.
I’ll probably just play the same character I played in Vanilla–a black dragon in hiding after defecting from the flight. It made a lot more sense before Blizzard absolutely obliterated Dragon lore by killing off most of the aspects and nerfing the power of the remainder. Vanilla as a time frame was perfect for dragons. They hadn’t lost their clout yet.
Of course, he won’t tell anybody. Originally he was a rogue, but I might have to transplant him over my Paladin, who was a character I enjoyed at the time but slowly came to lose interest in. Question is…how to justify a black dragon who uses the light? I guess in some circles the Light is just a form of magic.
I always kind of take character creation somewhat seriously, because I want to make the character as though it is me, in the game, if I were a certain race and class.
I don’t have any idea what I will name my characters in Classic yet. That might be one of the hardest things to figure out, actually.
My Gnome Warrior I originally made, I liked how he was speedy but kind of strong for a gnome. He was an Arms warrior. I had him take up mining and engineering, which kind of played into his race lore as a tinker gnome. I saw him as being an adventurer gnome - discontent with simply staying in the Coldridge Valley and setting out on a grand adventure to battle ferocious beasts (and Hordies) and to build more extravagant contraptions.
For years after that I made my gnome warrior a protection warrior. I just…I enjoyed Arms so much more than Protection. I was cool with tanking here and there, but I didn’t like traversing the world as a prot warrior. And I switched to smithing, and it just didn’t have the same magic as engineering. It felt like I was trying to be a full-on Warrior, more than a gnome warrior like I should have.
My personal lore for Alvie is that she was a frost mage. However, I don’t have anything that satisfies the requirements so I’ll probably go to my main; nelf drood.
The plan I had was to re-explore my characters’ backstories, as well as develop new characters.
In regards to any quest and storyline in Classic or Retail, social roleplayers tend not to claim that they were part of the quests themselves, but rather witnesses to the events or on parallel paths. 3,000 people can’t all have killed Edwin Van Cleef or claimed Thunderfury/Ashbringer/etc. The quests and outcomes become acknowledged in a fairly generalized/abstract manner.
The fun is creating and weaving a story that interweaves and coexists with the ones we see in the game. Your character’s personal stories, your guild stories, even a server-wide story. Being unshackled from what the game tells us our background, but working alongside that lore to create something new.
Interesting point. I was thinking more in the realm of less world-defining quests, and more in terms of character development. I had multiple characters play through the same starting areas, but how they perceived the quests and the mobs varied based on them. Getting trapped in a cave or swarmed by murlocs could be used as “it happened to you too?” moments to build a connection.
(That, and I’ve got several short stories written from one of our realm forums writing prompt ideas about the starting zones.)
Two character ideas I’ve rolled around in my head and didn’t play horde enough to expand on: Orc Warlock and Troll shadow priest. Orc warlocks, especially, are seen with a lot of suspicion - but even a troll shadow priest could be viewed askance given the betrayal by Zaldazane. Both would need to seek out their training while trying not to draw the negative attention and ire of others.
My current plan of an orc hunter will likely have a rather simple backstory - bit of a loner, enamored just a bit with the tauren lifestyle, preferring to be outside the city. Possibly a bit about a disapproving father, an older sister who was killed at some point, some general expectation he’d be a strong warrior and “playing with animals” better be just a phase.