I enjoy hearing other points of view. I always try to, and encourage those new to RP to try to, have an attitude of “huh. That’s really different from the way the nanas told it in my village. Tell me more.”
I do have my limits, some the same as other people have mentioned. But the bottom line for me is, if it’s fun for you, and your fun includes doing what you can to make it fun for me, then I’m in until mom calls me for dinner. Otherwise, the playground is big enough to find some other kids to go play with.
They’ve certainly moved away from “this is the bible of what happened” to “this is what this character tells you happened” over the last few years, which is different.
It allows for more nuance, yet there are limits to how far from conveyed information you can probably get.
I prefer headcannon that fills in the blanks. For instance: there are pruple crystals floating all over Dalaran, yet the ones at the Violet Hold are red. Its never been explained why, in game. So I have my own ideas.
When it comes to ancient history, they use the unreliable narrator thing a lot, this is true.
But I think we can assume objectivity in observable events. The observable narrative of expansions plays out as we observe it, so a good portion of the lore remains objective.
That would have been pretty interesting… they could have messed up timelines and made things REAL crazy via an old world redux BUT…I don’t think we’ll ever see the world updated again like with Cata (because they didn’t handle that all too great and people were kinda pissed).
And this is one of many reasons Shadowlands did not work.
It’s like that proverbial dog who thinks he’s going to the park but finds out he’s at the vet.
Shadowlands was not what we’ve been fed for years. It was entirely unfamiliar and offered nothing for me to reminisce over. It should have shown me everything my character has been through since the beginning.
Kicking myself in hindsight for not also requesting some input on the particular HC I’ve been crafting for Taraghlan. Thank you all for the input, I’m kind of glad to see that WRA isn’t as rigid as my anxieties told me.
As for the lore I’ve crafted for Taraghlan, the simple idea is that he comes from the Highwind tribe, a tribe of Tauren that resided in the hills of Loch Modan but were largely wiped out and driven from their homeland come the fourth war. The Highwind have a much different culture to the Tauren of Mulgore and Kalimdor, more akin to the ancient celts of Scotland and Ireland in both aesthetic, practice, and dialect due to syncretism with the local dwarves.
The Highwind were already a territorial tribe and weren’t adverse to warfare, however when the Alliance attempted to “secure” their lands, they finally banded with the Horde and became sworn enemies of the dwarves they once had a live-and-let-live policy with.
And also the Highwind are meant to resemble highland cows. That was actually the entire inspiration for them, a tribe of Tauren who resembled highland cattle.
I don’t even care about the fact that Tauren never canonically existed in the Eastern Kingdoms before WoW. I 100% endorse this headcanon and now believe it to be legitimate.
I have little attachment to the Warcraft setting or lore these days. When it comes to RP the game is a glorified chatbox imo. If someone’s character is something absolutely and completely impossible within the parameters of the Warcraft story but they seem interesting - **** it, we ball.
There was a time I cared about the lore’s integrity in RP but idk how anyone could read the Fyrak dialogue in these cutscenes and think “it’s important people adhere to this stuff strictly”
If you want to be a vampire or a dragon or a ninja or whatever, I’ll entertain it. Who cares
What’s really special about WoW is the ability to make your character look like pretty much anything and pull off inspiration from anywhere. I will keep subtly transplanting Malazan lore into my WoW characters because it’s cool and I can
I skipped most of BFA, SL, and most of DF so far… so I’m not caught up on if they actually re-retconned it back or not, but yeah. I take whatever lore comes from SL with a giant, giant grain of salt because a lot of it completely tread all over established lore that had been built for the past 20+ years.
It’s not the only retcon I could drag up, but it was the one that made me just roll my eyes the hardest (and I promptly decided to ignore it because it made -zero- sense).
One of my favorite RP stories ever related here on the forums happened many years ago. The tl:dr version, at least as I remember it, …
a Westfall farmer decided that the pink light up in the sky was all part of a government conspiracy to give them an excuse to raise taxes and expand the military. Some high and mighty character (paladin iirc) who was just wandering by started bragging about how he’d been to Argus. Farmer got real suspicious of the paladin’s motives, as you’d expect. Paladin’s player started insisting that the farmer’s player had to have his character admit that Argus was a real place. To the extreme that he started yelling ooc in open channels. Was threatening to report the farmer’s player. So the farmer’s player sort of rolled with the punches, being provocative but without breaking frame.
3 guesses which person I’d rather rp with. And the first two guesses don’t count.
Regardless of whether or not that incident actually happened in that exact way, it’s a great cautionary tale. What we know about lore doesn’t have to be anywhere near what our characters believe, or how they act on their perception of Azeroth’s history or present circumstances.
If the devs can pull subterranean Arathi holdouts out of their butts I see no problem with something like a lost tribe of Tauren from the Eastern Kingdoms.
I don’t have a problem with it all. I, like Huatar, want to see the fluffy, Celtic cows.
Yeah, yeah, yeah… so technically maybe there weren’t any Tauren tribes there. But some Tauren have wandering hooves and we can be sneaky when we have too. Small tribe, in the right situations who know. I’m not mad about. As Yonara alluded too, after what the devs do it’s hard to call a foul on a lot, A LOT, of things.
