True. But this is irrelevant to my point. I never argued trolls are a peaceful civilization, only that much of the land they settled on was vacant when they moved in. They didn’t take it from anyone.
Tirisfal was populated by human tribes that, as far as we know, were being left alone by the Amani Empire even if they laid claim to that region. The high elves lived among these Tirisfal humans for years before they first ran into the Amani after leaving the human settlements.
The Amani didn’t start waging full scale war against the humans until they allied with the high elves with the goal of wiping the Amani out.
I’m not sure its ok to label all descendants of the Aqir as Biological weapons whom are ok to kill off at a whim. Look at the Nerubians, some of them turned out to be reasonable civilized creatures.
Yes, eventually. But at the time they were biological weapons attempting to eradicate all life on Azeroth so they could release the Old Gods from their prisons, thus corrupting Azeroth’s world-soul and creating a Void Titan that would usher in the destruction of the entire universe.
Saying the trolls had no right to save the universe from an existential threat is ridiculous.
The trolls were attacking the humans long before the elves/trolls war came to a head. Not to mention they were already encroaching on humans lands as well.
I’d also point it was the Amani who restarted a war to try and wipe out the High elves first.
Not true, although rare, Chronicles mentions that Amani raiding parties would attack the humans living in Tirisfal, thanksfully Lordain would quickly put them to the blade.
I’m fairly certain the trolls did not know of the threat of the old gods, nor that the Aqir served them. The trolls just hunted the Aqir down because the Aqir had attacked them. The trolls building far flung settlements using their fiercest warriors to keep watch for the Aqir returning is a good tactic.
But I’m not sure this can be used as some sort of claim to the land as they weren’t the first ones there. And, from the point of view of the trolls, they were just hunting down the Aqir for vengeance and to prevent future attacks, not to save the world.
True, there were border skirmishes between the rapidly expanding fledgling humans of Arathi and the Amani Empire. It hadn’t yet reached the point of a full fledged war though.
Do you have a citation for this? I can’t find any reference to the Tirisfal humans being raided.
I’m fairly certain the trolls did know the aqir were slaughtering entire tribes en mass and showed no intention to stop. The trolls hunted them down because the aqir were attempting to commit full fledged genocide. The trolls then spread out so they could keep the aqir contained to prevent them from trying to commit genocide again.
What part of this is at all unreasonable for them to have done?
So what would you have had the trolls do, exactly? Allow the aqir to wipe them out? Not expand into the vast stretches of now empty territory because it wasn’t the specific lands they were born in even though claiming that land didn’t hurt anyone?
None of that makes any sense. You can’t compare the trolls saving themselves, and by proxy the world, from the aqir to a land grab like what the trolls were consistently subjected to.
If the Trolls wiping out the Aqir was nescessary to their survival, more power to them. The High Elves settling in What would become Quel’Thalas was essential to their own survival, as Tirisfal was driving them insane with old god whispers, and they almost died in a blizzard in the mountains of northern Lordaeron.
Humanity allying with the Elves to beat the Amani was also essential to the humans survival, as they couldn’t beat the Amani alone, and the Amani, through constant raids, showed signs that once they were through with the Elves, they’d come for the humans.
Thats the only “land grabs” that I can think of right now involving the Troll. Unless you count the Zandalari’s problem with the Pandaren, but thats a reverse situation, since it seems like the Zandalari want to stake claim to pandaria by proxy of their Mogu allies.
On the topic of who was first or whatever, humanity did live on what would become modern Lordaeron for a very long time. The ancestors of humanity that followed Tyr actually settled in Tirisfal before the trolls expanded across that region, and we have no idea how widespread or not humanity was by the time the Amani arrived.
Ehh, the thing is the Arathor Empire was founded to protect humanity from the forest trolls. The problems between humanity and trollkind existed before the Arathor Empire was founded, so it was hardly an expanding border issue.
Thoradin and his Arathi realised that troll incursions were becoming worse and worse, and only united could humanity survive. Thoradin knew in an outright war, the human tribes would loose against the increasingly hostile amani, so he wanted to unite them.
It was Amani hostility towards human tribes that ultimately led to Arathor’s founding. Many things were shaped by this, such as Strom being founded in an open plains specifically to negate forest troll raids that came from forests.
Yeah I’ve got Chronicles open, I’ll state the passage;
On the rare occasion that Amani raiding parties appraoched the kingdom, Lordain put them to the blade.
Page 127, Chronicles 1.
It’s referring to Tirisfal in particular here.
Gilneas was right there completely unowned by anyone. They also could’ve gone south to live in Arathi with the humans. Or landed on the land that is now Kul Tiras.
It also took years of marching through miles and miles of land and fighting the Amani every step of the way just to get to where they’d found Quel’thalas.
It wasn’t necessary for their survival. In fact they arguably took the harshest, most dangerous path they had access to purely because they really wanted a powerful leyline section to make their Sunwell on.
This is what the high elves told humanity the trolls would do but we don’t actually know that it was a guarantee.
We also don’t know for a fact that the Amani would have gone for total genocide if they did defeat the humans. Apparently they controlled Tirisfal for a long time without attempting to commit genocide against the humans there.
True, and Arathor all around made reasonable enough moves with the knowledge and pieces he had to make sure his people were safe. I don’t begrudge him for that.
It was more the aftermath where the humans conquered massive swaths of former Amani territory and pushed the forest trolls into small corners of their lands with a “kill on sight” policy, treating them like vermin.
That is how war goes of course. But that is what I’d consider an expansionist conquest.
Thanks. Honestly Tirisfal is weird as far as lore goes. Going by the old maps of the troll empires Tirisfal is smack dab in the middle of the Amani Empire at their height, so how did a bunch of Vrykul set up shop there? Did the Amani just… let this happen? Why didn’t the Amani try to conquer them?
Gilneas had fog of war, for a lack of a better term. The Elves didnt know it existed. And moving in with the humans is a unrealistic scenario. Not to mention I’m pretty sure the human areas were also fog of war covered. The Elves did not know anything about the continent, they knew tirisfal, and knew they needed to leave now due to the whispers.
As the humans, I wouldn’t risk it, the trolls may or may not have genocide the humans if victorious, but slavery is hardly a better alternative.
The vrykul ancestors of humanity settled in the region after Tyr died fighting Zakazj and Kith’ix to honour their fallen god.
The Amani didn’t settle in the region until during the Aqir War, which had to have happened afterwards cause Kith’ix was involved and died during that war.
So vrykul, and their human descendants, settled in Tirisfal’s reigon before the Amani arrived, and just never left. I guess the Amani were just never able to dislodge the vrykul from what they considered ‘their’ territory.
Gilneas is where Malfurion and the druids dumped the worgen, which happened before the Highborne’s exile. I’m not sure how widespread this knowledge was, but elves had visited the region before the Highborne came to the continent for good.
Alternatively, the Highborne avoided the area cause of the worgen being there, and they didn’t want to live close to them.
To be fair, this was probably knowledge only the druids had. And since the highborne shunned druidism, they probably wouldn’t have access to this information.
I dunno, not wanting to live near worgen seems like it could be a valid reason to avoid Gilneas.
Another was that they didn’t want to go south further into human lands. Dath’remar didn’t want to conquer lands from primitive humans, so he bade the elves to leave humans alone. It’s why they settled in seemingly abandoned ruins, they thought no one lived there and there was a nexus of power. Seemed perfect.
It’s really too bad that the Syndicate is ruined with a cartoonish philosophy of wanting to enslave Orcs because if it wasn’t for that the Alterac humans were the realest of the real, the eternal thugstas of the humans.
They sided with the Orcish Horde in the Second War, they allowed convoys of High Elves to be killed by Forest Trolls, they aided peasant revolts and they even tried to assassinate Uther.
The Syndicate could be eternal thugstas if they drop the slavery quackery and side with the Witherbark and crush Stromgarde once and for all. The Horde suck and couldn’t defeat Stromgarde in the Battle for Stromgarde. So it’s time to get some thugstas to take it down from the inside. I would join the Syndicate if this were the case. The good days of humans who are some real ones and Orcs teaming up to take down the Alliance and their phony Elf pets. Free my brothers and sisters in the Witherbark Tribe.
I could have sworn I read something on wowhead about Shaw arming them in the 8.1 PTR too but maybe it was cut. This line from Shaw might be some remnant of it that was left in though.
Quest: The Fall of Zuldazar
Mathias Shaw: An assault on the city of Dazar’alor will destabilize the Horde’s relations with the Zandalari. Our goal is to draw them north into Nazmir. We’ll hit them with guerilla tactics and rile up the blood trolls.
And I agree that blood trolls are free to go in all sorts of interesting directions, especially now that G’huun is gone. It’s not hard to believe they could have a culture that doesn’t revolve around him, as more time passes with them free of his influence.
We have an extra shipment of weapons on hand. I suggest we distribute them among the blood trolls. The enemy of our enemy, after all…
That should give the Horde a nasty surprise. And if the blood trolls accidentally hurt themselves… Well, it’s a win-win.
Didn’t make it to live. Mathias had some more story in 8.1 that included an encounter with Nathanos as well as going to Stromgarde, but it never even made it to the PTR from what I recall.
Along with the “7th legion Despoilers” killing defenceless Vulpera, it was one of those things players got up in arms about. While the vulpera one was toned down, they seemed to entirely cut the blood troll one.
Strangely enough, when the Syndicate succeeded in taking a portion of Stromgarde Keep, it was partially under the leadership of orcs (Nagaz and Marez Cowl) from the Argus Wake, a Shadow Council offshoot. And it happened while the Witherbark tribe and Boulderfist clan were also fighting the Stromgarde humans for control of the keep. So Stromgarde was brought to it’s lowest by the Syndicate (with help from some orcs), the Witherbark, and the Boulderfist (even though the Syndicate/Argus Wake weren’t cooperating with the Witherbark/Boulderfist). I would imagine they definitely could accomplish a lot more if united.
Decrypted Letter
Summary
Greetings, Master,
Forgive me for the method of sending this message. My shadow mages in Alterac are intent on their tasks, forcing me to use a foreign messenger – conscripted from our new “allies” – to bring you this report. But I have encrypted this letter with one of our most esoteric ciphers. Its words are safe from these yokels.
Our plans progress well; as mentioned, we made an alliance with a group of humans who call themselves the Syndicate. Its leaders were once the nobles of Alterac and they crave to once again hold sway here.
And so they have struck a bargain with us. A bargain they will regret.
Today the Syndicate holds little power in these lands, but they know the area well and have assembled sufficient manpower for the tasks ahead. With proper guiding I am confident that soon, the Syndicate will again rule Alterac.
In addition, we have urged the Syndicate to aim for the city of Stromgarde in the nearby Arathi Highlands. The city is a battlefield between our forces, ogres and the humans of Stromgarde, but we feel that with careful tactics we will own this once great city.
And when this is done, the next stage of our plan may begin. With a nation of our own and a base of power in this region, we may then prepare the way for the Third Host.
Soon, the Legion Lords will reward our works by raining fire from the skies once again!
The Council was wise to appoint you head of the Argus Wake, marshal of their strategies in the land of humans and dwarves. And I am honored to serve as the hand of your will in Alterac.
In Sargeras’ Name,
Nagaz,
Argus Heirophant
Quest: Wanted! Marez Cowl
Summary
A bounty has been placed on the head of Marez Cowl, a high-level advisor and operative of the Syndicate. She was last seen within the Syndicate controlled territory of Stromgarde.
…
Marez menaced our defenders, and it is rumored she was an emissary between the Syndicate and some other, darker power. We are glad to see that she’ll no longer ply her powers against us.
Quest: Dark Council
Summary
The letter you brought me was written by a being who calls himself Nagaz, a member of the Argus Wake. I don’t know what this Argus Wake is, but if they’re in alliance with the Syndicate then they must be a threat.
I want you to find Nagaz and the Argus Shadow Mages mentioned in that letter. I want you to find them, and kill them. Search in the Uplands, where the Syndicate is strongest. It is north of Strahnbrad.
With luck, you’ll find these envoys of the Argus Wake there.
…
Well done, . The Argus Wake does not sound like a group we want running the Syndicate.
And although you may have destroyed their leader here, Nagaz was merely the servant of another. The Argus Wake might run deep through the continent of Azeroth.
Much of is not all of. We don’t know how much of the land the Trolls claimed was taken from others, and, beyond what Ximothy covered, nor do we even know who might have been living in these areas before the Trolls. We do know that the Trolls had no issues taking land from people for their expansionism, though.
Are Trolls framed as being in the right for retaking land from violent, lawless barbarians? I think that’s a key issue to consider here - the original debate was about the framing of it. There’s no doubt that Trolls took land from others. Everyone has done that. The question is in the portrayal, because those that take land from the Trolls are never forced to face the fact that they are conquering and settling someone else’s land, nor are the Trolls ever portrayed as justified in trying to retake it.