Hey folks. I was wondering if anyone could point me towards any resources about Stromic lore and culture. I have an idea for an Arathi character but I can’t seem to find anything that goes into much detail about what their culture was like beyond the bare-bones Wowpedia article. I probably just don’t know where to look, so could anyone point me in the right direction?
Stromgarde is pretty bare bones. Stromgarde and Alterac are the least developed human Kingdoms in the game and don’t really have a whole lot going for them.
What you see on Wowpedia is unfortunately most of all what we have.
All we really know is that Stromgarde greatly valued martial prowess, as it was noted as having a “Strict Martial Philosophy” and was one of the greatest supporters of the early Alliance. Thoras was also noted as the King with the most battle experience in the beginning of the Second War. They have a long history of skirmishing with the forest trolls that share their land. They valued loyalty, shown by Thoras’ personal outrage at Alterac’s betrayal and him putting Stromgarde in danger to set things right.
Stromgarde left the Alliance because they did not want to pay for the Interment Camps. Thoras was murdered by his own son Galen, and then Stromgarde fell to pieces, picked apart by bandits, ogres and trolls.
Lorewise, Stromgarde is really bare. You’ll pretty much have to take that “Strict Martial Philosophy” and imagine what that meant for their culture.
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I too would like to know.
You could base a generalization of the people from their character representatives. Role players do that all the time with character archetypes. Danath “Horde don’t have brains so keep them in chains” Trollbane doesn’t seem very fond of the Horde, or the more inhuman looking races. His family name is Trollbane. Maybe state sponsored racism was a big part of Stromgarde culture.
There’s also the birthplace of the modern human kingdoms bit.
This is just headcanon, but I always imagined that Stromgarde valued being resolute in most things. The whole reason the kingdom exists is because when the nobles moved north and founded Lordaeron, and most of the average citizens + the royal Arathi descendants moved south and founded Stormwind, it was a population of soldiers that stayed behind and refused to abandon the ancient, crumbling city of Strom. They then imparted that stubbornness into their national character. I imagine the armies of Stromgarde being these unrelenting legions that would eventually overwhelm anyone they went up against.
I really wish we could have a novel or series of short stories that showed us the seven human kingdoms in their prime.
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I am gonna defend Danath a little bit here. Let’s go over his life-
He led the liberation of khaz modan, fighting through lands that had been ravaged by the orcs
He was then put in charge of the orc internment camps (there really any evidence of them being any more than prisons until he left, then it seems like things went to hell)
He spent the next 20 years of his life on a planet the orcs had ripped apart, fighting off orcs at their absolute highest level of fel-corruption. He missed the entirety of their redemption and shedding of demonic masters, since that happened on Azeroth.
Yeah, the dude’s racist against orcs, but he’s basically only been exposed to them at their absolute lowest points.
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Yeah if you want Stromgarde specifically then I’d look up that, Thoras, and Danath.
If you want stuff going all the way back to Strom, then I’d look up Arathor or Thoradin and just chase links from there. That said, I’m not sure that there’s a whole lot of in-depth information there. It’s probably mostly from Chronicles and the Arms Warrior sword from Legion.
Thanks, everyone! I’ll go look up more stuff about the Stromgarde leaders and such and see where that leads me. Thanks for helping out a human lore noob.
Game wise the kingdom of Stromgarde is quite small; in lore I wonder if it was actually larger. Alterac too.
As far as I recall, both Alterac and Stromgarde have iffy timelines with regard to their demise, and are short on details. Both of them fell apart after the second war, and last I remember reading, it was still a mystery when and how Alterac fell apart. I think it was partly due to them being a traitor nation in the Second War. The surviving Alliance nations didn’t take kindly to it.
Alterac basically never recovered after Perenolde was arrested and just fell into decay.
The real mystery is how Stromgarde fell. It doesn’t seem to have been touched by the Scourge and I’m pretty sure it still existed in WC3.
According to the death knight campaign, the undead son killed the father. I’m not sure when.
I remember one of the main reasons I was looking forward to Chronicle was to finally find out what specifically happened to Alterac and Stromgarde. How naive I was.
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Honestly even Alterac’s always seemed poorly explained.
The last time we saw Alterac as a functional country was BtDP, whereupon the nation as a whole was made out to be pretty disgusted by their ruler’s actions and the rest of the royal family came across as poised to wash their hands of him and practically just let the Alliance have him for punishment as a gesture of good faith to keep them from just dissolving the kingdom.
Then Deathwing busted Aiden Perenolde out of prison, we never heard from him again, and the kingdom degenerated off-screen into a ruined wilderness inhabited by ogres and bandits that nobody talks about any more.
One might presume that the regular populace disseminated into the neighboring kingdoms, but not unlike Stromgarde, it’s never really been satisfactorily explained how a fortified capital city under heavy guard (in the case of Alterac, by an occupying Alliance army) had its walls torn down and its keep occupied by a bunch of random ogres.
Stromgarde’s got the same problem. Especially when one considers that since it left the Alliance, the whole Stromgardian army should have been at home rather than spread out chasing Thrall’s Horde around the Eastern Kingdoms, so it’s even more perplexing how a pack of random ogres, trolls and bandits successfully not only besieged a fortress city full of people and defended by seasoned warriors, but seemingly wiped them all out except for a handful of leftovers at Refuge Point.
It’s just bizarre. The timing and geography of Alterac’s fall at least put it in a position for its general populace to have potentially relocated to nearby Dalaran or Lordaeron prior to the Third War as its infrastructure fell apart, but in the case of Stromgarde their fall was after the Third War, by which point they and Gilneas (who wasn’t accepting visitors) were the only human kingdoms left standing in the northern subcontinent. So…where did all the people go? Are we to believe a spontaneous handful of ogres, trolls and Syndicate bandits managed to virtually exterminate the population of an entire kingdom? A kingdom entrenched in a gigantic fortress city with a longstanding warrior tradition?
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The Bandits of course are led by Aiden’s Son Aliden who rejected his father.
Aliden worked for Blackmoore incidentally… He also wore a Stormwind Tabard so despite being opposed to Magistrate Henry Maleb he may actually have been loyal to the Alliance…
Magistrate Henry Maleb claimed that he arose to his position of Magistrate due to the Syndicate killing his predecessor yet anyone who has visited the past version of Hillsbrad through the Caverns of Time knows that he was Magistrate and ruler of Southshore long before that!
Magistrate Henry Maleb has gotten the people of Alterac and Aliden fighting against him for some unknown reason and wants Alliance Adventurers to think that his conflict with the Alteraci is due to a dead non-existent Magistrate!
This schemer is now a Worgen(and mysteriously escaped the Blighting of Southshore)… Considering the existence of Challe in WoD in Nagrand any visit to WoD’s AU Azeroth will expose us to this scheming Magistrate and expose him for what he truly is!