I’ve written two.
A “Shattered Glass” version of Azeroth where, when my gaggle of incompetent omnisexual kleptomaniacal characters were in the Warlords of Draenor expansion, found a group of Draenei extremists who hadn’t sided with the Legion but had lost faith with Velen, and the Naaru, and were determined to keep running, and after learning of the world known as ‘Azeroth’, and studying the Dark Portal, made their own, much smaller gateway for a one-way jump to their version of Azeroth, screw the cost to Draenor.
And they powered it by attacking a Iron Horde Creche, where the children and those too old or too injured to fight, and at the time of the story, those who were fleeing the Iron Horde as Gul’dan attempted to convert all the Orcs still loyal to the cause into Fel Orcs, and chaining hundreds of Orcs together to ‘boost’ the Gate.
Characters failed to stop the ritual, and were sucked through the collapsing Gate due to the splinter-sect of Draenei messed up the ritual due to rushing, and found themselves on AU Azeroth, where Azshara had swiped left instead of right when she was approached by the Legion, but Xavius being a nightmarish
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in every reality, the Well of Eternity was still forced open, but without Azshara’s support, the rebellion was ended without the Sundering sinking the majority of Kalimdor … but it did splinter the Kaldorei Empire, and the other races on Azeroth were likewise affected.
Azshara and her Highborne ruled over what remained of the Kaldorei Empire to the west and north and individual city-states scattered around the continent of Kaldorei who rejected anyone else’s rule but their own, the Trolls rallied around Zandalar and rebuilt their Divine Empire to the Eastern coast which had been separated slightly from the mainland and doubled down on serving the Loa who had stepped up during the Sundering, the Mogu had become benevolent overlords under a Lei Shen who had sought guidance from the Celestials and had never struck down Ra’den, and turned Pandaria into a military meritocracy and the Keepers in Northrend still held control of the continent, as Loken had taken the end of his affair with Sif with maturity and chosen exile rather than allow the whispers to manipulate him into a murderer, leaving Thorim to become the new Prime Designate of Azeroth.
So with the whole planet unrecognizeable and everybody up in arms because a Gate means Burning Legion, and Azshara’s daughter, now the Empress of her mother’s domain, had taken and was interrogating the Draenei splinter-sect, seeing them only as more Eredar demons and not people. The resulting political firestorm, and the AU Burning Legion kick-starting a second Sundering because they still want that damn World Soul.
And being the AU Version of Azeroth, it only has a massive well of self-renewing arcane energy, not a proper World Soul, but there was so much of it that both Titans and Demons believed it was the real deal, so as the Legion invaded and started sucking up the energy trying to get to the World Soul, and the Kaldorei factions who still, for the most part excluding Illidan’s faction of Druids and Demon Hunters and Tyrande’s … people … (No spoilering), relied too heavily upon the arcane, also started drawing on far too much arcane energy to push the Demons back, and caused an actual Sundering as the strain of so much arcane energy being pulled through the ley-lines started quite literally disintegrating the continent under everyone’s feet.
Due to being addicts, having never developed the Moonwells and being Demons, both Legion and Kaldorei still kept going and it ended up a End-Of-Days scenario with the Mogu, Trolls, Non-Arcane Kaldorei and Vrykul, alongside what Humans, Dwarves and Tauren still existed due to various circumstances that predated the start of the story, fighting at the last remaining Daughter Well on Kalimdor as the Mother Well and the other Daughter Wells all started imploding and sucking huge chunks of the mantle down to ‘plug’ the holes, including whole city-states, and entire armies, and fighting off both Demons trying to take the last Daughter Well, and then desperate and strung-out Kaldorei who had just got hit with their first ever encounter with being cut-off from magic and had started draining the life out of everything to try and counter the cravings and the physical deterioration.
Characters ended up opening a Gate to another world that the exiled Loken said could provide shelter to the Mortals since this Azeroth was about to head into a new ice-age from all the dust and debris in the air, and with the amount of Fel and Arcane energy floating about and what had happened to the Leylines, it was a good chance that the biosphere might collapse and not be able to be restored for several centuries before Freya and Ammunae’s protocols could reliably start to reseed the world with life, and Hodir, Thorim and Rajh can end the unnatural ice-age and restore the planet to a level where life can flourish again.
Characters hustled as many people through as they could, tried to urge Lei Shen and his Immortals to join them, but the Divine Emperor refused, stating he would hold the line and collapse the Gate once they went through rather than allow this calamity to claim a second world.
Players jumped through … and found themselves in a Time Storm as the fragment of the Hourglass that their Mage had been concealing acted up once more, and hurled them back into AU Draenor … hours after the end of the siege on Felfire Citadel, when they’d spent over two years in AU Azeroth.
2nd Version was where Antonidas of Dalaran figured out that the Orcs just needed some new energy to replace where the Fel had been, as was canon in the Lore, the Alliance instead opted to try filling it with Light rather than leaving the Orcs to linger in the Camps and cost them a fortune, as they did in the main timeline.
Either it would work and they could put the Orcs to work for them, or it wouldn’t and nothing of value would be lost.
Spoilers, it worked a little too well.
With the Orcs lethargic and gripped with the horror of their actions, and most of their forces the result of Warlocks forcing dozens of generations to unnatural adulthood and then filling them with the Fel, the infusion process not only revitalized the Orcs, but rendered them docile and completely subservient to any Light-wielder who could tap into this pool of ‘Light’ energy within them and give them commands.
Orcs that couldn’t undergo this process, who were few and far between, were given to Blackmoore who seethed at the loss of his command to a handful of camps, while the Alliance basked in their new prosperity, since Orcs were so strong and durable, they could do the work of a team of Humans, and due to the Light infusion, remained docile and compliant even in the worst of situations. Orcs formed the backbone of basic manual labour and doing the worst jobs in society, and farms started popping up, since the Orcs were ‘inhuman’ and ‘beasts’, to produce more Orcs that could be infused and used to do more labour … except very few Orcs were born who had this spiritual ‘hole’ in them that the Fel-touched Orcs did.
This became a massive sticking point as Antonidas and others pointed out that this was a form of slavery, and as monstrous and vile as the Orcs were, forcing them into existence and turning innocent children into slaves or condemning them to the prison-camps if they weren’t compatible with the process was just as abhorrent and vile as what the Legion and the Horde had done in the first place.
The other side of the argument pointed out the Orcs were alien to this world and had no homeland, and even if these ‘unuseable’ Orc children weren’t frothing barbarians, they were still massive, brutal creatures with a predilection towards aggressive responses, and it was Orc labour that had rebuilt the remaining Human, Elven and Dwarven Kingdoms and had become a foundation of their economies.
The squabbling drew new battle-lines until Uther, seeking some sort of sense from this, went to Blackmoore’s camps to study these ‘uncorrupted’ Orcs and met a young Thrall, who had been put through the gladiator pits and had become quite a good warrior, and the Paladin’s heart was moved by seeing the warmth between Thrall and Teressa, between the Orc and ‘Captain’, and the tutor who had educated Thrall who would not shut up about his strange and unique pupil. Uther took Thrall from Blackmoore, and Teressa after getting ‘bad vibes’ (I am paraphrasing here) from seeing how the drunken, bitter Noble after around her, and took them on as squires, much to the chagrin of his much older squire, Arthas.
Teressa ended up quite the Priestess, and one who was not afraid to march up and smack-talk anyone who was doing ‘wrong’, while Thrall ended up being quite the conduit for the Light, and the poster-child the Pro-Conscience side of the debate would trot out that the Orcs did indeed need to be watched, but not enslaved. That if Thrall could become a Paladin and uphold the Three Tenets, then other Orc children could likewise be raised in similar fashion, and integrated into the Eastern Kingdoms gradually.
Blackmoore, being a
, immediately joined the Pro-Economy side of the debate and revealed that he’d captured and beaten an Orc Warlock for the secrets of the Horde’s Shadow Council, and knew now how to drain Orc children into immediate adulthood, which would also render them perfect candidates for the Light infusion process and thus could be safely used to replace the aging and battered work-force of older Orcs who were dying in droves from neglect and the unending labour they were commanded to perform, and given what the Horde had done, many people saw no reason to offer the Orcs, who were always and would always be beasts, and monsters, and savages, a second chance.
This led to the War of Paladins with one side calling the infusion process monstrous, and the others refusing to allow Orcs any chance to self-autonomy to prevent the rise of a New Horde. Eventually, the events of Warcraft III kick off, Thrall and Teressa kick off following the Prophet’s visions with an expeditionary fleet of Human-raised Orcs and after some shenanigans, Darkspear Trolls and Tauren and encounter the Kaldorei, though without Grom mucking things up, there’s no outright conflict.
Grom ends up consumed by the Legion and leads what ‘free’ Orcs are left into a death-march to keep the fight going at the behest of the Dreadlords who are watching it all go down and trying to prep the Eastern Kingdoms for the Scourge.
Uther, Arthas and Jaina end up at Stratholme, having ended up on opposing sides of the War of Paladins due to ideological beliefs, and are witness to the Scourging of Stratholme and call a tentative truce to deal with the Undead, which fails miserably as gold matters more than good to one side, and the Legion and the Cult of the Damned has already sunk their claws into both sides, whispering to one side that if they lose, they’re going to be beggared, and to the common folk of both sides, that if the Orcs are indeed people and can still be Infused, then what’s stopping the Nobles and the Mages from doing the same to every Dwarf, Elf and Man who steps out of line, causing wide-spread civil unrest that allows the Plague-infused grain to be spread to nearly every village, town and city and causes multiple, albeit smaller, outbreaks of Undeath that weaken and turn everybody paranoid to outsiders, further fracturing the Eastern Kingdoms.
Thrall meets the Tauren, starts putting a more Shamanistic twist to his Light abilites and starts and starts getting visions from the Spirits, which does help the few Free Orcs who escaped Grom’s death-spiral under the Legion to make peace with following a ‘Pink Orc’, Tyrande is a lot less standoffish learning that these people seek to fight the Legion as well, Illidan is released from his prison more to move him to a more secure location and ends up in the fight anyways, but with less stupidity this time because people aren’t punching each other in the face just because, and when Jaina shows up, the Survivors of Lordaeron aren’t immediately set upon by Orcs and the ‘Outlanders’ don’t immediately get the Kaladorei’s hackles raised.
Jaina still thinks Orcs are monsters, but she’s willing to admit that they can change, and the Legion doesn’t manage to destroy the Pact made at the end of the Chaos Wars, meaning Horde and Alliance don’t end up constantly fighting each other en-mass.