Guild Stories: Corrupted Brood

Hello, my still faithful (I hope) blog readers. Since we’ve started the guild, I’ve been writing up summaries of our stories there on the guild Discord, but I never published them out to the public. I figured people would be interested in hearing what happened to Krasha since, so I’m sharing the Discord summaries here.

OOC

Krasha came to us with a new job – he needs to craft an insanity-protecting cloak, like the ones Wrathion hands out to the real heroes. However, Wrathion doesn’t like him much for some reason and refused to help, so we had to make our own the hard way.

First order of business, we needed to find a collector in Shadowforge City who had a taxidermied black dragon and gather the scales of that dragon. We delved into the city and went through some rough individuals to find him. After Elranei mind controlled a ruffian who worked for the collector, we finally visited his home, but further attempts to control the collector himself were proving difficult. As we soon found out, the man went to the Twilight’s Hammer to use his taxidermied dragon to transform himself into a drakonid, and then he mind controlled his own wife. Sadly, we had to kill him, since the dragon was fake now, and then skin him, or rather his drakonid form, much to Charlie’s chagrin.

Unfortunately, the scales of the drakonid were not fitting for Krasha’s purposes, as there was neither enough of them, nor were they corrupt in the right way. So we went to Outland to try to skin the dragons hanging off the spikes of Blade’s Edge Mountains. That’s when we were surprised by two very much living black dragons, Sabellian and his consort Samia. We had to abide by Sabellian’s demands and do a task for him first – kill a grandson of Gruul who’s been causing Sabellian trouble. After the gronn gave us quite a beating before dying, the black dragon finally allowed us to skin one of his dead brothers. And that material was finally good enough.

Our last task was to acquire the recipe for the cloak, and we had a perfect target to get that from. A Blacktalon Agent called Sheba was spotted in some shady parts of Old Town and as we went to confront her, she fled using magic, and we apprehended someone we needed for other reasons (see below). When we followed Sheba, we found a strange, red portal below the Pig and Whistle. As Theramas investigated it, it turned out to lead to a parallel universe. We left to prepare for that trip and secured the red portal.

A bit later, we followed through and found an alternate universe where the blood elves were never Horde, and Scarlet Crusade was openly preaching hate on the streets of Stormwind. Following Sheba’s trail, we found her in the library where she set a trap for us, but we managed to convince her to bargain with us. As it turns out, she’s no Blacktalon Agent. She is the Black Queen – the female version of that universe’s Wrathion. After giving us some powerful magical artifacts, Sheba gave us the creepy recipe, calling for the blood of a holy man and the hair of a living unicorn, and we finally had everything we needed for the cloaks.

Character Profiles: Aeresham

Name: Aeresham Alkar
Race: Botani
Gender: hermaphrodite
Age: 100
Class: Not applicable
Professions: herbalism
Religion: Genesaur worship
Alignment (per D&D): True Neutral
Traits (per CK2): quick, gardener, patient, cruel, diligent, temperate

One step closer to the full ‘Dex

I have a certain respect for the mo’arg. The engineer dudes, not the beefy mooks. They’re smart, they’re dangerous and their appearance incites terror. When you see a mo’arg going at you, you know you’re in trouble. Sure, they’re going a little extreme with the whole “replacing body parts with machines” thing, but everyone has got their own little obsession. I must admit, mine is probably collecting. Not pixelated monsters in a tiny hand-held device, not cards or teddy bears – collecting people. The more varied and stranger their races, the better. Just seeing all kinds of creatures working together fills a certain, warped sense of collectorship in my mind. And I always wanted to have one of these – the mo’arg. I worked with, and fought, Sal’salabim so I know what they’re capable of. But only recently I got the chance to get one of them in my employ.

GDE: Dream of Creation, Arakkoa starting experience

Call it build 7.0.0.21600

Welcome back to Game Design Exercise. The first thing you might notice is I decided to shorten the title. “Game Design Exercise” was taking up a lot of precious character space, so I decided to shorten it in case I ever need a particularly long title for one of the sections. The second thing you might notice is that the map posted this time is different from the previous one. I continue working on it and although most of the additions are things I hid from public view (because they spoil future content before it’s ready) there are some zone shape and size changes. They stem from me noticing that Ravenwood and Thornbranch are definitely too small. Most starting zones aren’t much smaller than regular end-game zones, so I thought I wouldn’t be able to realistically squish in a full 1-13 experience in those areas. They are now bigger, partially at the cost of the oversized Verdant Plains.

Another thing I wanted to talk about before the break is a concern that was raised on Twitter recently. Dream of Creation is adopting several fey creatures from Dungeons & Dragons and other fantasy sources and one of those creatures is called a hag. They’re ugly troll-like creatures that undeniably bear some resemblance to a caricature of an old woman, and the term likely comes from there. To me, a person with a certain fantasy gaming experience, hags were just a normal thing that didn’t raise any red light. I was however told that the term is considered offensive. I mean, it’s obvious calling a real person “hag” is an offense, but a person was concerned that using it as a name of a fantasy creature is offensive as well, regardless of the term’s past in the genre. Personally, I don’t see it, but if enough people see it as a valid concern, I will adopt it. So, what do you think? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments below.

So, I invite you to read my take on arakkoa starting experience for Dream of Creation, an Emerald Dream expansion. They are arakkoa from the main timeline, so they continue storylines from the Burning Crusade and only influences from Warlords of Draenor are clarifications about the common past of both timelines and references – such as WoD characters showing up here in their main timeline incarnations. Enjoy!

Game Design Exercise: Dream of Creation

Hello again, we return for another Game Design Exercise post. As promised, we are done with Farahlon (unless I decide to make a proper art map for it one day) and we are moving on to our next topic. You probably already know what to expect from the title and my previous GDE post, but hey, when an expansion announcement at BlizzCon comes we usually know the trademark and the obvious implication of what comes from the trademarked title. So let me put on my best impression of Chris Metzen and “announce” this thing.

Ever since World of Warcraft began, it had a deep, expansive mythology. Although we started with just Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, we always knew there was so much more out there. And we always wanted to bring all of that rich universe to life in the game. Since before the game came out, we had plans for how we would implement various elements of this universe. And as time went by we slowly implemented those realms into World of Warcraft. We visited Outland and defeated Illidan. We went back to Azeroth to go to Northrend and finally deal with the Lich King once and for all. In Cataclysm, we visited the Elemental Planes. And we always knew Pandaria was out there, and Mists of Pandaria we finally got to see it. We even went to Draenor before it was destroyed.

But there’s one element that we haven’t visited yet. One element that we always knew was out there. A special, magical realm underlying all of Azeroth. And we always struggled how to properly represent it, given its vast size and all the lore behind it. But we thought, it’s time to finally get it done. To finally let the heroes of Azeroth into this mystical realm… realm of dreams… and nightmares. A realm that was once again comes under attack by nefarious forces and needs our help. Because if we no longer can find safe haven even in our dreams… how can we ever feel safe?

Ladies and Gentlemen… Dream of Creation!

Spaced out

I cannot pretend I understand what’s going on between my uncle and that ogre, Lunk. Apparently the ogre is popular in some circles for some zany adventures he goes on and the unusual for his race pacifism. In my timeline I never heard of him so I assume he was dead. It’s a brutal world out there and someone who refuses to kill likely did not survive for long. Well, this version of Lunk survives and even thrives, to a certain degree. I even saw two alter egos he donned – the eloquent “Professor Lunk” and “Fel-Breaker Lunk” who was still the same but with special powers. And despite all of that, he likes to constantly try his luck and dare even more ridiculous things every day. One of his obsessions is about going to the White Lady (to which he refers very eloquently as “the moon”), and for that purpose, he recently went off-world to Darfell.

Character Profiles: Gornn & Ling

Look, I told them to make a pose. It’s not my fault what pose they did.

Name: Gornn (and Ling)
Race: Gronn (and Gronnling)
Gender: male (male)
Age: About 150 years (About 10 years)
Class: Not applicable
Professions: None (None)
Religion: None (None)
Alignment (per D&D): True neutral (True neutral)
Traits (per CK2): strong, slow, patient, honest, proud, brave, content (strong, slow, wroth)

Character Profiles: Izzik Shienor

Izzik in the Swan’s lab

Name: Izzik Shienor
Race: Arakkoa
Gender: prefers not to specify ((female))
Age: 20
Class: Shaman (elemental)
Professions: herbalism, alchemy, fishing, cooking
Religion: Holy Light
Alignment (per D&D): Neutral Good
Traits (per CK2): diligent, charitable, kind, patient, gregarious, poet

Character Profiles: Orkan Krasha

Name: Orkan Krasha
Race: Arakkoa
Gender: Male
Age: 20
Class: Warlock (demonology)
Professions: Cooking, leatherworking, minor alchemy
Religion: Atheistic
Alignment (per D&D): True Neutral
Traits (per CK2): Quick, weak, cynical, diligent, patient, honest

The Founding of Veil Krasha

Now after all these people went to Draenor and saw that warped little alternate, they think that our Draenor used to be just like this. Well, you’re squawking wrong. For example, you can find hardly any arakkoa outside of the Spires of Arak, and I come from Farahlon, which you lot didn’t even go to. I mean, I’ve even heard some rumors it doesn’t exist over there. And that’s nonsense again, you can’t have geological differences between different timelines, not without Deathwing to mess the land up for laughs. So people say, how did your family come to Farahlon? How did this Veil Krasha even exist? Well, I’m no Reshad, but let me tell you a story.