N’raqi and C’Thraxxi are just breeds of Aqir from the looks of things: Bug-like Horrors with Squid-Faces.
The Aqir of the Azj’Aqir Empire who moved into Ahn’Qiraj were altered into the more bug-like Silithid and Qiraji to differentiate them from the Aqir that C’Thun already had. He wasted no time in using them as his primary army while keeping his main Aqir buried until N’Zoth grabbed them for himself.
Yogg-Saron forced the Aqir that came to him to get rid of their Squid faces and become full Spider-People like the Aranakk.
Of course there is the possibility that the Aqir/N’raqi/C’Thraxxi are all N’Zoth’s offspring since Xal’atath called one of Yogg-Saron’s N’raqi a pustule of N’Zoth. It would be ironic if the armies of Y’Shaarj, Yogg-Saron and C’Thun were infact all stolen from the weakest of the Old Gods through sheer power in Mind Control!
…somewhat back on topic, because my gripe is less a lore issue than a game design one…
individual Shadowlands zones sound pretty cool and have interesting stories, but what I mainly dislike is how few of them we start out with. Yes, I understand the interview answer that boils down to ‘those shadowland realms that aren’t currently in trouble don’t need us to visit them and thus don’t get visited by us’ but at the same time it feels like they withhold too much of the game! At launch we get fewer and fewer zones and more and more skinner boxes. Too much of Shadowlands feels ‘missing, to be released later’ to me.
(Satire): Coming in Patch 9.1: Afterlives Expeditions. Team up with two other players to visit various afterlives in the Shadowlands as you hunt down anima! You can compete against other players, or against teams of NPCs! Ever wanted to fight Teron Gorefiend, Gul’dan, and Ner’zhul over soul juice? Here’s your chance! Ever wanted to thwart Antonidas, Terenas Menethil, and Anasterian Sunstrider as they join together once more to gather anima for the afterlife shared by their people? Now’s your chance!
“The undead surrounded us, constantly tormenting us with horrifying acts of depravity. Finally, he came. He introduced himself as Doctor Theolen Krastinov. We came to know him as the butcher…We finally understood what the screams were from. The Butcher exposed us to pain that we did not know existed. He used us in countless experiments to devise a plague. The days turned to weeks. We would have died on that first day had it not been for that cruel bastard keeping us alive through magical means…We feel nothing. Our souls remain here, in limbo. We are unable to leave until our remains are found and spirits laid to rest.” - Eva Sarkhoff, servant to the Barov family of Caer Darrow
Krastinov didn’t invent the Plague of Undeath, but he did further develop it to make it suitable for the Cult of the Damned’s use. The Plague isn’t just a mass mind control. It sickens and kills it victims first and then turns them into dormant undead, they don’t fully rise unless triggered to do so by necromancy. Antonidas found this out and was worried about plague victims who had already been buried rising from their graves. It is a weapon of mass murder just as the Blight is. The Blight, aka New Plague, was also developed by studying the Plague of Undeath. The Blight was developed to be effective against the Scourge, which is why it’s so brutal. I’m not defending Sylvanas’ commissioning of the Blight, but Krastinov was personally responsible for performing experiments that were at least as bad as what the RAS did, if not worse.
Assuming the quest text Baalsamael mentioned makes it to launch, no one gets sent to the Maw directly from the Arbiter, because the most sinful souls go to Revendreth first. It may be that Revendreth immediately condemns them upon their arrival and tosses them into the Maw right away, but if no one judged by the Arbiter is supposed to bypass Revendreth entirely, then then Sylvanas wasn’t supposed to go to the Maw in Edge of Night. In any case, Krastinov isn’t morally superior to her, and yet he ended up in Revendreth, seemingly on the basis of “He was a decent doctor before he decided that chopping people up for experiments was fun.”
This was one of the biggest things I noticed while reading the sinstones, too. Is Craftenium the first realm of the Shadowlands to be given a specific name outside of the ones we visit in 9.0?
The mention of Craftenium could be just a fun lore tidbit, but I am hoping it foreshadows a future patch zone! The way the Mad Designer is described, and because their “genius” is what earned them a place there, makes me think that the realm would be a destination for mages, sorcerers, architects, engineers, and inventors. We have not really seen these themes or aesthetics represented in the Shadowlands yet, so it could make for an interesting change of pace.
I very explicitly do not like to shoot people down, but the insistence that Sylvanas “naturally” went to the Maw via the Arbiter’s system is, at this point in time, an absolutely silly display of denial motivated by revenge fantasy.
Sylvanas’ soul has all but been confirmed to have been intercepted at the time of her death at Icecrown by some entity doing something they shouldn’t have been doing—almost certainly the Jailer.
If the Arbiter actually sent her to the Maw, I’ll be more genuinely shocked than I ever have been in the history of WoW. If Blizzard ends up claiming that Sylvanas’ pre-Cata crimes are in some way more damnable than those of planet-destroying people we see in Revendreth, there is officially a problem.
Unless it turns out that the Arbiter sends people to the Maw because she doesn’t think they did anything damnable…
The Maw wasn’t always called the Maw(https://shadowlands.wowhead.com/item=180804/worn-obleron-etching) and it’s probably the Venthyr throwing unspeakably Evil Villains in there that is to blame for the Maw’s reputation as a place for the Irredeemable.
Of course it would still leave the question of why Obleron was made inescapable… Is it simply because being a paradise for WMD inventors requires it to be heavily secure so that they don’t blow up the rest of the Shadowlands while testing their weapons?
If that is indeed the case then Sylvanas it might have been that Sylvanas wasn’t bad enough for Revendreth(much less the Death Realms of Eternal Torment) and got sent to what would have otherwise been a paradise for a WMD inventor!
Yes, the Forsaken used the Blight on the living, but they didn’t need to make the Blight so brutal in order to kill living targets, as there were already several types of weapons that could be used against the living, including the original Scourge Plague that the Forsaken studied in order to create the Blight. Devising something that was harsh enough to kill the Scourge and keep them dead was the tricky part, and the finished Blight is so harsh that the Forsaken themselves have to use protective equipment to handle it or else it will kill them too. The Forsaken were studying necromancy at the same time, but they’ve never successfully come up with a way to raise intelligent undead without the help of the Val’kyr. Even Sylvanas could only raise shambling skeletons at the Siege of Lordaeron after she ordered the use of Blight, not intelligent undead. In fact, without Sylvanas and the Val’kyr, the Forsaken have probably lost their ability to increase their numbers.
tl;dr Killing living humans is easy, killing Scourge and Forsaken permanently is quite a bit more difficult. In order to be able to kill Scourge, the Blight had to be strong enough that it would also kill just about everything else.