Agreed. Most of the EU was hot garbage. And so were the prequels when they came out. Funny that people ironically think well of them now.
And they don’t even have the weird creepy stuff WW usually puts in their books like V:TM or Werewolf: TF.
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I just want them to do new ones.
Every other approach to lore books they’ve done since just hasn’t had the same impact, and the ones that got close were retconned and brushed aside as a “point of view”.
I want a concrete guide.
WoW is an RPG. I want to be invested in that aspect of it all, and it’s just hard when the absolute basics of our races are either outdated and out of print, or lacking to the point of entire communities needing to work off headcanon to get by because the game itself provides nothing.
The Exploring series has given us absolutely nothing of substance in particular./
While I do want them pulling from the old books more, the world building was pretty solid back then, getting new ones entirely would be more beneficial in the long run.
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Can’t stress this enough. What in the world are these books for ? Pretty much every single page could be summed up as “Alright so these guys are doing the exact same stupid crap they were already doing 15 years ago”. The amount of substantial updates they gave us would fit in a single tweet. Why won’t you just make an official lore account and write tweets regularly to keep us updated about minor offscreen changes then ? At least that way we’d know what folks are up to, sorta.
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Not at all. Stormwind population was way out of any scale. Leave it dead.
They were published under Art Haus label which was a subdivision created to make RPG’s based on the OGL it ceased operations when D&D moved to Fourth Edition. It was reabsorbed into White Wolf when the latter was bought by CCP.
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It reminds me a bit of the mention of Gilneas in Before the Storm – a reminder that it exists, there’s technically nothing wrong with it, along with the subtle implication that absolutely nothing is going to change for quite a while.
The trouble with the Exploring books is that they don’t have a purpose – the RPG books were designed for the important role of expanding the worldbuilding, and setting up the lore species/civilizations before we went to explore them ourselves (see the one released just before WotLK).
There’s also the weird fact that they don’t seem targeted towards anyone. Casual fans of the lore wouldn’t bother purchasing the books, and lore nuts would already know most of the basic information.
I suppose the reasonable explanation is they’re worried about the backlash of establishing lore in books that can’t be accessed in game.
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They’ve also been totally removed from circulation as you can’t even buy the PDFs any more.
In some ways. I wasn’t fond of their take on Blood Elves, though—they were clearly conceived as a villain race/faction, rather than for playability.
I think their fondness for retcons is exactly why they won’t do another concrete guide. It would force them to commit to the world being a certain way and not being able to change it later when their next “genius” story idea strikes. (I’m even willing to roll with a certain number of small inconsistencies if it makes the story better, but they passed that limit a long time ago.) After all, Chronicles started out being the definitive lore guide, and look how fast that changed.
Except this annoying cosmic chart. They seem determined to stick to that darn thing like glue, no matter how sterile it makes their universe.
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I don’t know if someone’s already said this, but I vaguely recall the quote about this.
The RPG wasn’t made totally irrelevant. The quote was something like, “they’re canon unless they contradict the game” or “they’re canon–unless they aren’t”. Maybe I’m misremembering.
Regardless, that’s a good rule of thumb if you’re role playing, writing your own stories, or on the narrative team at Blizzard, IMO. For example, finding a chapter in the RPG on the warrior subculture of the night elf Sentinels doesn’t necessarily conflict with established lore.
Also, hell, even the Chronicles get this treatment. They’re canon until they conflict with a content cycle. Then it’s just guidelines. (Insert Pirates of the Carribean gif here.)
Also let’s remember that the reason why the rehabilitation of the RPG is a subject at all is that the RPG addresses many things that the canon sources don’t : biology, organization of the society, religions, languages, “mob race” lore, relations between races… In other words, worldbuilding elements.
The day the canon sources start to actually commit to worldbuilding, then we can let the RPG rest, because its content won’t be needed anymore. In the meantime…
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They have been made totally unavailable.
Blood elves ain’t villains. They used to be grey. But now we are Sindar elves basically. Stale and boring.
Other way around. If ideas from the RPG find their way into the lore, they’re canon; if not, they’re not.
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My way around…if you find a way to make material into good RP… run with it.
Leave canon debates for the Trekkies.
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For your own head canon, do as you please. But there is an actual canon story.
If you want to RP that you are really the planet Jupiter, but you got sucked into a black hole and turned into a Night Elf, and that you married a Brutosaur and became Queen of Stormwind… that can be your RP. But it is not the canon story that people are discussing here.
There is the World’s End Tavern for that sort of Fan Fiction.
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Actually, there are MULTIPLE canon stories that run parallel. There is the canon of the individual player’s experience and the canon of the metaplot where some NPC is given all the credit for what the player does.
There are even multiple canons going on in the player experience. The text addresses you by name whereas the speech just says “Champion”.
And then there’s stuff that you experience in the game that is later decanonized. And then there are the times where are you being given acknowledgement for the things you never did, such as when Wrathion keeps reminding my Dracthyr of all the fun times they had together in Azeroth.
That’s not “multiple canon stories” though. That’s one canon story delivered by a game that’s filled with impossible situations and continuity errors that ought to be ignored since they are the result of the constant conflict between the lore and mere gameplay mechanics.
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This is how I’ll leave it.
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Yeah, and they’ve been unavailable for a while now. I wonder what’s leading to their rediscovery lately, as it seems like we’ve recently had quite a few questions about RPG lore.
No, not in the MMO. But they’re pretty bad in the tabletop RPG.
I like to think of us as Noldor, personally! Proud exiles who have established great realms, good at magic and craftsmanship.
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Yeah I think of the Blood Elves more like the Noldor. Especially with the Light being a thing for both the Noldor and the Sindorei. The light of the trees and the silmarils being a big deal to the Noldor, while I don’t think the Sindar ever saw the light of the trees in person.
Though I would like to think the Sindorei could be sort of Vanyar instead… they definitely have the Noldor edge.