Oh that’s right. I always forget that thanks to Sylvanas having Garrosh syndrome, technically speaking the Scourge were rampaging across Azeroth while Shadowlands was ongoing.
Probably because nobody mentions it.
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I mean, the Jailer is an idiot, for multiple reasons, but really?
Just have us fall forever. What are we gonna do? Hearth out? We can’t use our Hearthstones while we’re falling and we’re gonna build up speed and momentum as we fall, to the point we’ll eventually fold up like pretzels from the G-Forces of our own body-weight falling for so long, let alone passing out from blood flowing up into our heads, and eventually crushing our own brains under the pressure build-up.
Hellfire, just shift the drop point to the endless abyss about 20 meters over to the left, or fill the area with all those horrible spike-covered machines and have it play out like sticking your finger down a drain with a waste disposal unit set to armageddon.
Slaps the Jailer with the Evil Overlord’s List and both additional Lists, repeatedly and at length.
Yooooooooooou waste of a perfectly good pair of nipples.
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This is so very true and applies to every IP, not just WoW. The more you learn about a setting, the more you start to see the nuances, holes, inconsistencies, and contradictions and realize that the people who are loudest about things have never moved based simple stereotypes.
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“WoW is often inconsistent with its own lore” is not exactly news.
The Horde has literally fallen for the same trick by three (four?) separate dictators turning them into a genocidal war machine after swearing “never again.”
WoW is a saturday morning cartoon, not a serious story.
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Remember when Chronicles was marketed as being the lore source for WarCraft going forward and then contradicted itself before the book even came out, resulting in a quick 180 turn to being “Chronicles is all Odyn propaganda”.
You’d think after getting played so many times, people would stop buying them.
Bought Chronicles. It’s worthless, but it’s a pretty book.
I had planned to buy Chronicles but seeing as it’s useless for lore canon, why bother?
Buy Exploring Eastern Kingdoms instead, even if the lore becomes outdated you still get the joy of Flynn being gay for Shaw in the margins of his book report and that’s worth the price of entry.
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Yeah the most liberating thing ever is to stop taking this nonsense salad seriously because… …
“YOU’RE RPING WRONG! X CAN’T HAPPEN BECAUSE LORE!!!”
So hey theres a quest where you eat some nuts and then someone gets mad at you and forces you to poop the nuts back out so another unfortunate victim eats the poop nuts and these nuts are implied to have been eaten, been pooped, and been eaten again in a cycle and this is
this is canon
and oddly one of the most succinct distillations of what WoW’s story is
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I wish blizz put out big beefy artbooks instead. I never played ffxiv but I do own a handful of the artbooks because they are very nice. I actually legit want one in that style for shadowlands and bfa
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I would love artbooks - especially with concept art. I am surprised blizz has let this opportunity pass them by.
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The only piece of non-game blizzard media I’ve ever bought was the Illidan book. The one thing which I remember from that book is some lore about how Zangarmarsh mushrooms released spores which gave Maiev’s army rashes. I consider this cool outland elf rash lore well worth the price of admission
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Is it safe to peak back in now? Is the 
Chain Daddy gone?
.
Jokes aside, none of my characters went into the afterlife for Shadowlands. Like others have noted, many Champions connected to Bolvar/DKs and any connected to major Lore characters went into the Shadowlands, so the RP hooks are smaller than previous expansions. Since the Scourge were leaderless and all over the Eastern Kingdoms canonically in the story (as that one Kyrian scenario in Lakeshire shows), that’s where many of my more Alliance-aligned characters were.
To say I was disappointed that we didn’t get any Scourge invasion content, dailies, scenarios, etc. is an understatement. There is potential for a lot of storytelling there with local militias and other folks rising to the call to defend their homeland. After all, as Genn Greymane put in a BfA cinematic: “We’ll be calling up farmers next.” The Alliance was scraping the bottom of the barrel towards the end to fill its ranks during the Fourth War and Shadowlands supposedly followed quickly after BfA. I’d like to think this short-handedness required quite a few “Champions” and their respective guilds to stay home and keep civilians safe from the relentless Scourge onslaught.
Maybe, if Shadowlands gets the Star Wars Prequels Clone Wars treatment, I’ll write more characters who actually went into WoW’s afterlife during the events of Shadowlands. But for now, it was just such a terribly handled expansion design- and story-wise that I’d rather steer clear from it for my own sanity and happiness.
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Sadgati was born in 590 and is now 44 years old. She has always spoken of an afterlife or next life. She recently stated that she may be with child soon after fading to black, she feels the signs of souls wandering around her in droves after which it fades to one or none. The stories of Bolvar is hardly believable to her asides from many eye witness from Icecrown. What she believes of others saying it being a shared experience of fighting a conventional war in the realm of death and reincarnation amounts the same skepticism we face while watching The History Channel show about alien abductions. Sadgati’s message to the leaders of Azeroth: Cool Story Bro!
That tracks, considering we spent the tail end of BfA in some Old-God induced collective fever dream.
I mean, one of the darker theories I’ve put forwards is how do we know we have permanently beaten C’Thun, or any of the Old Gods?
These are mind-melting entities of such immense psychic power they were able to dominate one of the most 
darwinian nightmare planets in the setting (Azeroth pre-Ordering) and bring it’s absolutely insane native population of elementals to heel with tentacle monsters and crab kaiju, and were so powerful that even the Gods of the Material Plane, the Titans themselves, had to get directly involved to deal with the strongest of the Old Gods and nearly killed the planet in the process.
We’re absurdly powerful entities beyond what should be the norm for our respective species, we use Primal Powers like they’re the easiest thing in the world to plug’n’play with, and we even had N’Zoth riding shotgun in our heads and some random-
spellcaster was able to cleanse this infection by going shim sham salami-bim?
We are the Flesh of the Old Gods. We are their final and penultimate vessels, for an Old God cannot die so long as a single scrap of their matter remains intact on this world, and C’Thun, Yogg’Saron and G’hoon all left things behind, C’Thun’s essence is stores all across Silithus and beyond, Yogg’Saron has his Black and Green Saronite everywhere, and G’Hoon’s plagues live on in not just the fungal infestations and disease-carrying pests within Nazmir, but within the Heroes of Azeroth, where he whispers to us we already carry his contagion out into the world.
Anything that has been afflicted by the Curse of Flesh is a potential carrier for the will of the Old Gods. Even Orcs and Draenei, despite being alien to the world, have taken matter infected with the Curse of Flesh into their bodies and become infested with he Curse.
We have driven most of them back into stasis at best. Only Y’Shaarj and N’Zoth are permanently dead at this point, Y’Shaarj because Amun’thul is a giant manchild and ripped the Old God out personally and tore a life-threatening hole in the World Soul in the process, and N’Zoth because it transferred all of itself into the Black Empire and got roto-rooted by the Murder-Hobos Florida People Honster Mumpers Champions of Azeroth, and in such a way that even if some of its corporeal matter remains behind, its spirit was either totally annihilated by the piss laser kame hame ha friendship beam Azerite Nuke that got deployed right into his core and was either destroyed outright, or sent screaming back to the Void where it belongs.
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I don’t think we have, as one of the whispers reminds us: “They do not die; they do not live. They are outside the cycle …”
Or if you want to be Lovecraftian: “That is not dead which can eternal lie and with strange aeons even death may die.”
I’m pretty sure N’Zoth has stowed himself away in Xal’Atath’s old home and is preparing a comeback and the others may have had similar backup plans. They’ve had millennia to plan and prepare for setbacks, after all.
Also remember what was said to us in Ny’alotha:
“I… know you. What you were. What you will yet be.
You will follow him to the deep places. The dark waters will flow in his wake.
With many eyes, they will see again. They will drink, and be uplifted.
Deeper, deeper its roots will reach. Welcoming our embrace.
Her dreams sing beneath the surface. Our dreams. Our song.”
Our dreams. Our song, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of the Old Gods.
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This wasn’t in Ny’alotha this was in Dragonflight when we time traveled.
This, I think applies to the Nerubians of Dornogal because the ‘normal’ Nerubians are almost blind and rely almost entirely upon pheromones to communicate and ‘see’ each other, but those exposed to the Black Blood to be mutated lose their ability to detect pheromones and instead gain enhanced vision.
We know that the new race of Troll/Elf race, the Harronir, was desperate to contain and remove the Black Blood, even going so far as to expose themselves to outsiders despite strong social taboos to remain hidden and unknown, because the Nerubians started to meddle with the Black Blood, and with how close the living roots of the Mother-Tree are to the region, the chance of the Void infecting those roots and causing more harm was incredibly high.
But we’ve also seen that the Harronir as a whole value their privacy and social customs above their duty to protect the roots now, with only a rare few members willing to keep up the fight once exposed to outsiders. For all we know, the Elders of the Harronir might very well be affected by the Void and the Old Gods, and might subconsciously be holding back their more proactive members to avoid interfering with what they may seen as the Void of the World Soul, while the Song of Azeroth’s World Soul might be exposing the lie to their followers.
The Harronir leaving Dornogal to return home might find their homeland even more chaotic and hostile than the frontlines they were so uncomfortable on.
We assumed that the ‘Her’ they spoke of was the World Soul, but it could be Xal’atath herself, and the Old Gods are putting their faith in this very powerful entity to get the job done after their own failures, or perhaps the whole point was to rally us to become as aggressive and dangerous as possible to become the ‘level’ of tool that Xal’atath would require to succeed in her mission. To ‘whet’ us, to sharpen our resolve and skills, over and over again, to the point we could deal with any other rivals to the control of the World Soul and yet leave us divided enough that we’d never truly unite in defence of it, should each and every one of their singular plans fail, the ‘group’ effort’ would still be empowered to succeed.
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