Where Can Lore Updates Go?: Some Thoughts About Blood Trolls

Wyrmrest Accord
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With the soon coming arrival of more class additions to races that are missing them, and certain customizations having accompanying quests, I felt like rambling about this more in-depth. (Note: I do say what the customization and quest are later on, so if you haven’t been exposed to them by wowhead or other sources, tread carefully)

The Blood Trolls and Nazmir Were (Narratively) Done Dirty

This is the biggest issue I have thus far with what is known to be coming, and what trolls have gotten thus far. Which is a race specific set that turned out to be not race specific at all. I’m talking about the Bloodhunter set for this month’s trading post completion reward, for reference.

In the history that we have been told and presented for blood trolls, the summary is this:
A group of Zandalari trolls some thousand years ago were swayed by Hakkar, sought to summon him, and took to blood magic after their failure. While Nazmir was not entirely inhabited by these heretics, their numbers eventually grew substantial enough to pose a threat to the rest of the Nazmani.

Fast forward to several hundred years ago, and the advent of G’huun’s worship makes a violent entrance via these same heretics. Or so it is supposed, the blood trolls do not get their name from G’huun, after all. These heretics grow in number by death of the Nazmani and conversion, until assumedly all of the remaining trolls in Nazmir become some sort of thrall to G’huun. I say thrall here, not devouts and followers, because G’huun’s use of the remaining Nazmani is exploitation. Power to be its weapons and contagions, and nothing else. Literally nothing else to the point that their continued worship and culture in G’huun’s name brings them low and keeps them low to remain exploitable. This is the explanation by blizzard in regards to the blood trolls’ “primitive” state.

I will say that this is certainly… A Choice of Design. Does it make sense that an Old God would seek to regress an entire region of peoples to keep them subservient and exploitable? Yes, kind of. The twilight cultist questline in Hyjal certainly lends credence to this. But is this questionable how it is presented and handled with regards to the blood trolls? I will not lie that I have some bias in regards to the way trolls as a whole are handled in wow’s lore and ingame writing. They are squandered and villainized often, for the sake of having a convenient, consistent punching bag. And I think here with the Nazmani is little different, so it comes as no surprise that I believe the writing of the blood trolls exists purely to do as I said. A convenient, consistent punching bag.

G'huun is to Blame

There is history surrounding the heretics that worshipped Hakkar and became the blood trolls, but all of this is given to the player in easy to miss snippets if one doesn’t engage in activities like reading the dungeon journal blurbs, or that profession that blizzard once again forgot about (archaeology). That’s fine to sprinkle those bits of lore there, but it should be told to the player in other ways, too. As it stands, the most the player character knows is that the blood trolls are subservient to G’huun, utterly devoted and get up to evil savage stereotype things by G’huun’s will. The number of blood trolls that don’t kill you on sight, nor seem to have a desire to, are countable on one hand. And both of them are vendors for collectible items: mounts and battle pets. It’s hardly worth counting, especially when one is a blind troll you can literally rob of her stash, free of consequence.

So very little of the blood trolls needs to be conveyed or matters to be conveyed because they are ultimately there to be another mob in G’huun’s army. I ask this if I am wrong:

What happens to the blood trolls after G’huun’s end?

The answer is, we don’t know. Yet. Though the chances of us knowing or finding out feel rather slim when their literal armor is given to us without a lore update.

Where Can (And Should) Lore Updates Go?

I think it goes without saying that the blood trolls should have a lore update to address a lot of the issues I’ve brought up above. It hardly makes sense, at least to me, that group of space goats that, idk, willingly converted to Man’ari are getting some kind of redemption before blood trolls, an exploited group, have any kind of closure to their lore. I think it’s equally weird and concerning that this is the kind of narrative spun for yet another group of trolls in wow, of which this happens often to the tribes and fallen Empires brought back into relevance in wow’s story.

Should there still be blood trolls seeking favor with other old gods, or falling back to Hakkar worship? Sure, but the issue is when this is a blanket narrative for all blood trolls and subsequently all Nazmani. There should be defectors, there should be care and consideration for their exploitation rather than the callous narrative justifies their deaths as corrupt people beyond saving. And more importantly, blizzard does not need to be perpetuating these kinds of half baked stories that are also filled with problematic themes and portrayals. The warmothers being the only visible diretroll females, linked to corruption and killable, when the only female dire troll for the zandalari empire is a ghost in a dungeon boss fight. The cheeky little reference to Heart of Darkness from the alliance side Nazmir quests, a controversial book that not only depicted Africans as primitive savages, but exploitable by colonizers. I don’t think I need to say more about how messed up that one is, and how little faith I have that it was done with any sort of reflection in mind for how the Nazmani were written, let alone for the issues that book posed from the author’s point of view.

Coming back to the future of blood trolls, there is a lot the Nazmani can grow from, and there are many roads that can be taken. Show the grow of Bwonsamdi’s followers, now that G’huun is gone and Bwonsamdi reigns as the Empire’s Loa. Show the blood trolls turning their blood magic from its dark origins to something that can be beneficial. More than San’layn and any other blood magic practitioners on azeroth (not you venthyr), the exploited Nazmani that turn away from the Old gods and Hakkar would certainly have extensive knowledge of the inner workings of the body, the flow of blood within, etc. This adds options not only for hemomancy to be healing, but to also aid in soothing the corrupted beasts left in G’huun’s wake. Perhaps even other corruptions, too.

All of this is to say: The blood trolls deserve a fair shot in lore at being redeemed, and it would go a long way towards righting the narrative’s failings where it condemned the Nazmani as a whole, despite their exploitation by G’huun. I’m sure, at least I hope, I’m not the only person to talk about these topics in regards to the blood trolls, but with blizzard’s eyes back on them this month, and that redemption for the Man’ari, it feels weird not to bring this up again. If you like trolls and blood trolls, please consider speaking up about this to blizzard, too, respectfully. I don’t have much faith for how and why the blood trolls were written and left this way, but I do not blame the developers as a whole for this. Nor do I envy them, honestly.

And if you read all of this, you have my deepest thanks and also my sincerest apologies. I definitely got lost in blurbs.

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I think it’s just a matter of time before blood trolls get their due and get added honestly

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For being such a long standing and recurring theme in WoW, blood magic is very underdeveloped. Are those Defias Blood Wizards using the same magic as the Nazmani? Or the San’layn? What about those vampirates in Stormheim, whatever happened to them? What about how Death Knights use blood? I wish we had some more context about “minor” magic trees that aren’t on the cosmic chart.

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That’s definitely been a point I’ve thought of, too. Like would it even be classified the same way each time? With the vampirates, the deathknights, and the San’layn, it would be easy to classify it as necromantic in nature because they develop the power in undeath. Surely this could be the case for the Defias blood wizards, if this comes from a place of suggesting that perhaps the defias learned some necromancy from cultists. Or had prior knowledge. Even blood trolls would fit this by nature of both Hakkar and G’huun, but sometimes it feels like… That’s too easy, I suppose? Blood magic has been shown to have more uses than simply being a necromantic force, anyway. It can alter and reshape living bodies via corruption, it can exert control by turn one’s body against itself and at the whim of the caster.

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The only issue I could see with Blood Trolls is that their entire culture revolved around G’huun, and the tendency towards blood sacrifice of the unwilling and outsiders, and turning on other Loa, might make integration or even co-operation a hard sell for all parties involved.

That said, I want to see Blood Trolls spread, even if they start including other races. We’ve seen that Blood Magic has similar narcotic effects to the Arcane and the Fel, with those not possessing a strong will and exceptional self control slowly becoming addicted to the sensation of their magic, but due to the lack of long-term examples In-Game, we don’t know if Blood Magic has the same withdrawl/fatal consequences that ‘overdosing’ on the Arcane, or allowing the Fel to feed off the caster for long periods of time, can cause.

That said, the Blood Trolls were able to easily convince a decorated Alliance veteran to willingly start sacrificing even her own people and a known champion of her Mega-Faction just for more power via granting her the knowledge of Blood Magic. And, while this does come from the Table-Top rules and is thus hella sus, Blood Magic could mimic the properties of a Warlock (health draining, hexes, curses and dark magic), those of a Mage (converting stored blood into arcane power) and even crude mimicry of Priests and Druids (health restoration, elimination or suppression of diseases and afflictions), and it is a purely controllable form of magic, requiring no overt allegiance to Wild Gods, Loa, the Light, the Void, the Legion or the Titans.

What if that’s how we come across Blood Trolls next? They fled Nazmir after the death of G’Huun and the defeats of their Matriarchs, and several new up-and-coming Blood Witches have crowned themselves the new Matriarchs and are duking it out on some hidden islands/island continent(s), and without G’Huun, have worked out a less corruptive, exploitive and destructive way to get the power they need.

Sympathetic magic is rife in Warcraft, especially involving blood. The Frost Wolves of the Orcs never imbibed the blood of Mannoroth, yet because they were still sworn to the Horde, they developed the same green skin and addiction to the Fel as the rest of the Clans who were sworn to Blackhand, and through him, the Shadow Council. Supernatural curses like the Worgen and the Satyr curses are all inflicted via infection of the blood inside a person, although in the case of the Satyrs, it also requires an extended, and excruciating, magical ritual to allow the victim/convert to survive said transformation.

We also know that Loa often demanded blood sacrifice from their followers, although depending upon the Loa, this could be an actual living sacrifice, a token offering of a few drops of blood atop the actual offering, or even just blood from a prey or harvested animal as a gesture of gratitude for the Loa’s protection and guidance. We’ve seen that many Loa are willing to punish a people into extinction, ala the Northrend Loa who did not take the betrayal of the Drakari Tribes well, and Bwonsamdi who is not exactly the nicest Loa, but was willing to let bygones be bygones with the Darkspear not offering the ‘proper’ offerings or even any offerings because he recognized they had literally been blocked by Zalazane’s treachery.

We know that the Loa are coming back now that the Shadowlands are restored to working order, and more importantly, are under new, actually intelligent management. We could see Hireek coming back and deciding he’s going to whip these Blood Trolls into shape, being a vampiric entity himself, and Bwonsamdi is always looking to make deals with his followers, and absolutely adores ironic situations. Turning the former servants of his most hated enemies into his own followers and guiding them to spread his influence outside the domain of the Zandalari, which have failed him on multiple occasions and might give him a fall-back plan if Talanji screws up, would be well within his 4th Dimension Chess shenanigans.

There’s also smaller, less powerful Loa who might see these shattered and scattered Blood Trolls and realise they can swoop in, bend a few minds here and there and build themselves up a loyal and dependant cult-following to increase their own power and maybe start jostling for position and authority within the Big Leagues of the Loa.

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I think they’d probably be okay being redeemed, considering the amount of things that have and are going to be redeemed. Again though, their entire culture revolved around G’huun because they were exploited to be that by G’huun. Like yeah, the lingering effects would be an issue if it hadn’t been about five years since G’huun’s fall. But we don’t even know if they’re still being affected and under the old god’s influence anymore, because we don’t even know what happened to them.

I already said it in a few words, but continuing to put blood trolls in the place of villains post-G’huun is just tasteless given what was done to them and the very real parallel drawn between them and Joseph Conrad’s book, Heart of Darkness. Like my whole point here isn’t to just lore dump, if it looked that way, I’m kind of expecting and also hoping that blizzard practices a little more responsibility than to write something yet again that goes: “Hey these guys are bad and you should kill all of them even though they’re exploited by a bigger bad guy. No, there’s no one trying to escape it or reform, they’re just bad and killable and haha, look at this Heart of Darkness reference, isn’t that funny we’d add that here?”

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My only concern is the very foundation of their society falls onto 3 pillars.

  1. Zandalar exiled them, and I’m not sure if Queen Talanji is offering amnesty to the Trolls exiled to the desert, let alone users of Blood Magic, to which she, and the bulk of the Zandalari, are already hellishly biased towards.

  2. Their whole magical system was based upon the teachings of G’Huun. There’s going to need to be several things happening, mostly involving strategies involved removing individuals and groups from environments and situations toxic to them, before we can see real, actual change on this front.

  3. Their entire culture, or lack thereof, was built up around supplying G’Huun with enough blood and souls to overwhelm the Titanic defenses of the testing facility that contained him. Much like parallels we can see in-universe with the Orcs, the Kaldorei and Mantid, even when they might be able to see that the situation is entirely messed up, the fear of the unknown and the familiarity of the regular, albeit horrible, situation might keep the bulk of them from seeking change.

I’m also fairly certain Talanji is going to see them as a cancer within her Kingdom and take a tremendous amount of effort to either kill them all off or drive them out of Zandalar. Bwonsamdi might spare those who can be changed, but he’s also hungry for blood and souls and those who continue to worship G’Huun or won’t get with the program are likely going to meet a very messy end.

Its important to remember that the Blood Trolls are actually Zandalar Trolls, with a predominantly matrilineal culture that was based as much on magical knowledge as brutality and cunning for social advancement if you were a woman, while the men were slaves and servants at best, and offerings to G’Huun at worst. These are not some maligned people, but addicts and cultists who refused to stop using a form of Blood Magic which was exceptionally powerful, but tended to corrupt non-Blood Magic users around them into mindless beasts. This is part of the reason the males are all hunched over rather than broad shouldered and upright like a normal Zandalari Troll, and why so many creatures within the dismal swamps of Nazmir are so violently aggressive and twisted in nature.

When the earthquakes struck Zandalar and Nazmir began to flood, the corruption only became worse as the ecosystem struggled under the weight of the salt marshes spreading inland, and whole systems of prey animals disappeared beneath the onslaught of hungry Blood Trolls, mindlessly destructive undead and twisted raptors, crocolisks, saurolisks and mutated Loa-spawn.

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They’ve existed for like centuries. The Man’ari have been around since the fall of Argus with a lot more blood and atrocities on their hands, so again, I don’t find the implications blizzard draws here as responsible at all.

Talanji systematically purging all blood trolls, after being the person to see G’huun’s influence and contagions at work, would be pretty tone deaf. Bwonsamdi doesn’t even hunger for blood? His whole reason for bargaining for so many souls was pretty clear, even if some don’t want to ascribe to seeing shadowlands or shadows rising as canon, he’s been pretty clear about not taking more than would disrupt the balance of life and death.

It really isn’t important though, Gentarn, and I don’t say this to be rude. This is my whole point in part of what I wrote is that you don’t even need to know this. Blizzard did not even need to write this as carelessly as they did, because the moment blood trolls were thralls of G’huun, that was it. Their whole narrative and lore serves little more than to be an old god’s minions, except it’s on a region wide scale with no good Nazmani or defecting blood trolls. And if the argument being made is that they’re too far gone to be redeemed, the Man’ari are right there with their customizations and “penitence” are coming in a few days, so.

Actually, I’m gonna add something else here too. The Man’ari have been evil, vicious, and cruel. I don’t think that needs to be explained at all beyond that, they didn’t need to be written as severely gross, stereotypical, primitive savages to get that across. And they are still being redeemed. Does this difference hit my point home a little harder on blizzard’s lack of responsibility in regards to their writing for blood trolls?

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I’m not trying to pick apart here, but I am trying to point out my reasoning.

And she’s an incredibly proud person with a tenuous grip on power, with many hostile forces within her nation who agitate against her alliance with the Horde and her patron Loa, Bwonsamdi. Also, she’s very righteous and frightfully intelligent for a Princess of a nation that has been effectively isolated for thousands of years by the rest of the known world whose first response to encounters with Trolls is “BURN IT WITH FIRE.”.

Keeping the Blood Trolls subdued and unable to offer even token resistance will only cement her position, AND keep Bwonsamdi’s sole remaining temple safe. The shrine in the capital might be fine and dandy, but Bwonsamdi’s best and strongest connection to Azeroth is in Nazmir. That said, she’s not a irredeemable war-hawk and has a sense of justice and mercy as strong as her pride, and knowing that G’Huun has been dominating these outcasts and exiles whose leaders kept them in line with corruptive blood magic and abhorrent cruelty if they ever dared to step a toe out of line would have been made clear to her during her stint in Nazmir.

But the Zandalari are also a heavy, rigidly Caste-based society, with a very much top-down pressure to keep people in line. She’s already working with many would-be rebels within her nation, who may or may not be able to actually challenge her for the throne, or might settle for causing all kinds of mischief to make her look incompetent, weak, or a puppet to the Horde that brought such death and destruction to Zandalar. Even if she does want to help the Blood Trolls, there’s a hard limit to how far she can go before she loses more support, and then it becomes a toss-up between the Trolls of Zandalar with 10,000 years of magic, culture and military might, or the Blood Trolls of a dirty, dingy swamp who use stones and bones as weapons and are entirely dependant upon a corrupt and dangerously addictive form of magic that got them exiled in the first place.

There is no contest that she’s not going to be on their side. Sympathy for them, yes, but not on their side.

At best, I could see Talanji giving the Blood Trolls who want nothing more to do with G’Huun and the Matriarchs some maps, some old ships and giving them the Zul treatment, go find an island chain, go live there, be better, and maybe we’ll work on a relationship when 2/3rds of my people don’t want to set you on fire on principal.

Is it good? No. Does it work with what Blizzard has given us in-game and from the novels? Yes.

I never said that. Bwonsamdi does need blood and souls, especially now that he’s THE Loa of Death for all Trolls across all of Azeroth, and he’s also got to keep the previous Loa of Death under control and in a cage so that Mueh’zala can never escape and start pushing for the same Blood Magic that caused the Blood Trolls to be exiled and outcast in the first place, as well as being one of the primary reasons the Zandalari Trolls moved the bulk of their people out of Nazmir and into Zuldazar.

But he’s also wily, practical and incredibly forward-thinking. If a large chunk of the Blood Trolls can be converted to worshipping him, all the better. He gets followers, defenders and can work on helping the Darkspear Trolls rebuilding and expanding his ruined Temple, and denies followers and sacrifices to the remaining Matriarchs who still cling to the teachings of G’Huun. But at the same point, every Blood Troll that remains that still worships G’Huun is a deadly threat. We don’t know that the Artificial Old God is actually permanently dead, or if it can be revived. Old Gods are notoriously difficult to keep imprisoned, let alone defeat permanently as they are ‘Outside of the Cycle’, meaning that unless physically eradicated down to the last atom from reality, or slain in their own layer of reality (The Void, or realms suffused with this magic to the point the two are blending together), they just go dormant and will inevitably revive and start their nonsense back up again.

The balance of life and death is crucial to Bwonsamdi as, despite his flippancy and clowning, he’s very serious about his role, and the duties that come with that role. Wiping out the Blood Trolls would be a blow, yes, but the other Troll tribes are either on their last legs, aka the Forest, Jungle and Frost Trolls, or are thriving because of their allies, namely the Darkspear, Zandalari and Revantusks. Losing the Blood Trolls to prevent the return of G’Huun would be a lot like chopping off a necrotising limb to save the patient. Gruesome and terrible, but ultimately it will save the whole.

That said, I doubt that Bwonsamdi would give up on followers and encouraging the spread and empowerment of Troll-kind without a fight, and if there was anyone who would lean of Talanji and the Zandalari to back off, it would be Bwonsamdi.

Remember, all of his deals are skewed to favor him in the end. And with no allies, their ‘God’ dead and their leaders crushed and scattered, the remaining Blood Trolls are fragmented, leaderless, despairing of their future and have lost the goal they’ve spent centuries, at the very least, putting every last iota of resources, influence and life’s blood towards. Having the entity who should want you dead more than anyone roll up and politely offer you and your family a way out for some tiny little favor is going to be a hard offer to pass up.

The Man’ari we have faced have been absolute monsters. I’m holding out hope that this Draenei/LF Draenei-only quest that’s been partially datamined will shed a lot more light on this. A bit of a stretch, but Demons cannot reproduce biologically, with the only known example being the Succubi, who go Imp > Succubi > Imp Mother, and presumably fuel their reproduction with Fel Energy and Souls, breaking down Souls with the Fel both to power their own forms and to create hordes of Imps, of which only a handful will survive, consume and grow into Succubi, who can then gather enough souls and power to fuel their own transformation into Imp Mothers, repeating the cycle and giving the Legion a theoretically infinite amount of kamikaze disposable troops to hurl at their enemies.

I’m betting we’re going to be freeing Manari who, just like the Krokul, were trapped on Argus and were captured by the willing converts of the Legion. However, since Sargeras needed lots of commanders, and willing ones at that, for his nigh-infinite army of Demons, they couldn’t just off the Man’ari who refused to join or were too weak to survive the infusion process. Rather, keeping them captive and, pardon the disgusting theory, ‘farmed’ them both for souls and for useable minions.

Those that fit the bill and were capable of the high levels of intellect required for the task were turned into Eredar and further educated on their role.

Those that fit the bill but were not Mage-level intellects were turned into Wrathguards and used as elite shock-troops and unit-commanders for the more common, less intelligent Demons.

Those that didn’t fit either criteria were either pushed back into the prisons to keep the supply chain going or, given how the Legion runs, probably turned into fuel for the infernal war machine.

I doubt we are redeeming all Man’ari, probably a few hundred, maybe a few thousand at best. Likewise, I’d imagine that if we ever did see the Blood Trolls come back as anything other than fodder for the players, it would be a small sub-set of the faction that fled from an untenable situation and need our help to not get dragged back in, and not get murked on sight because of what their kin are up to.

I full agree with your point, but mine is that Blizzard wrote themselves into a corner because “Hurr hurr fat angry women rule this swamp hurr hurr” and called it progressive. You were not the only one face-palming at this, I can assure you. But it is what it is, and now we’ve got to try and make something out of this alphabet spaghetti of a story-arc.

I would like to see Talanji encounter a few tribes of Blood Trolls that are attacking the others, or hiding from them, and explain they were followers of Hireek, who does condone a form of Blood Magic, before the followers of G’Huun rose up, enslaved their master and then these Trolls as well. They’re not Talanji’s allies, but they don’t want to be her enemy either. They just want their lands back, their Loa returned, uncorrupted, and to try to return Nazmir to some semblance of normality. And with Kragwa, Bwonsamdi, Torga and possibly Hireek back in strength and willing to clean up the ‘mess’, we could see the Blood Trolls returning as a valuable trading partner and awkward ally for Zandalar, trading reagents that only grow in the swamps and rebuilding the roads that lead to the Shrines of the Loa of Nazmir, which can only strengthen all of Troll-kind since strong Loa can spread their influence across the world, so long as their primary temples are in good condition and they have strong followers to fuel them. More Loa all working towards a single purpose only enhances the chances of Troll-kind rebounding from 10,000 years of attempted genocide from literally every other race on Azeroth and their own interminable in-fighting.

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I think you’re getting more lost in the blurbs than I was, tbh.

Which I get and know in regards to other people taking issue with the portrayal, but I feel like a lot of lore and lot of what was said made it hard for me to discern if you did agree. What you’re saying now, I don’t see the same way. Blizzard has been willing to change lore as they see fit, there’s no reason, and frankly nothing conducive, in my eyes to keep the writing of the blood trolls forever doomed to be shunned and villainized. Because to me, lore and making lore work is not more important than correcting writing done likely in malice. I just don’t see any other plausible option there, and I think that’s why it gets a little uncomfortable if people are willing to go along with it just. Staying like that.

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Bringing this back because wow I guess I was right about demons getting more attention and redemption than blood trolls.