Guild Stories: The Huntress

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

While Jonah was leading people around in the hunt for black dragon scales, Hellbourne’s wife, Huntress Swiftriver, became active again and seeing all the crime and corruption in the human city of Stormwind, she could not let it slide. She shot down a noble and the criminals who were selling him pandaren cubs like they were exotic pets, which put her on the trail of a criminal hydra wriggling its tentacles across Stormwind.

With the help of Castillian, Marizsa, Vincent and an occasional help of others, she hunted down the one man who escaped her last time, and discovered he was part of a larger organization. Using the journal of a man named Jesse Hoss, she uncovered more of the criminal underground and followed the leads to the dead noble’s house, where his wife still lived.

In the house, we found Yoon, a cub the Vandermars bought from the criminals years ago, now a young adult, serving them as a cook. Convinced his parents were dead, he didn’t know what really happened. Upon delivering him the news, another servant of the Vandermars interrupted us and turned out to be a Defias Brotherhood agent working to undermine Lady Vandermar. With her help, we broke into the basement and found a shocking discovery – the lady has made one of the other criminals we killed into a ghoul in an attempt to find eternal life. After killing the ghoul and the mad noblewoman, the Defias agent promised us the help of the Defias Brotherhood.

Soon afterwards, Swiftriver used the wealth she inherited from her relatives who died in Teldrassil to buy the Vandermars’ house and establish herself as a socialite to cover up her vigilante activities.

We made good on the Defias invitation and found them in a cave behind a house in Redrige Mountains, where Vanessa VanCleef herself offered us further clues, including a trail leading to another vigilante, the Executioner, and an organization called the Hand of Shadows, which was behind all the recent happenings. In the hideout, we also met a human noble working with the Defias, but secretly trying to pay us off to help him instead, Zoltan Lescovar.

First, however, we acted on a plan made by Castillian and tried to sell him – in his starry cat druid form – as an exotic pet on a Black Market auction. Trying to lure out the Hand of Shadows to buy another “exotic pet”, we almost succeeded. Cass was bought by a rakish noble who wasn’t evil after all, just an idiot, but that lured out the real agent of the Hand. We killed the agent and found a piece of the puzzle.

Unfortunately, also on the auction was “Mr. Tree” – a shoddy disguise of Krasha’s officer, Aeresham, the botani. Aeresham threatened to tell Krasha about our actions, ending them.

However, when Verroak Krasha, Aeresham and Turfang came to intervene and scold us for potentially damaging their own underworld schemes, we were attacked by three of the five leaders of the Hand of Shadows. A brain fog came over us, making us unable to act, but Krasha revealed what he needed all of those artifacts for. He turned into a dread raven Wild God and easily dispatched the corrupt nobles, one of whom had another piece of the puzzle.

We then followed through on the trail given to us by the Defias, staging a mugging to lure out the Executioner. The vigilante paladin, self-proclaimed Judge, Jury and Executioner, came out and a fight ensued on the streets of Stormwind. We were fortunately interrupted by the city guard who thought us all equally bad due to our vigilante activities. However, we used the proof we’ve gathered to unmask corruption within the city guard, leading to the commissioner letting us go, while we ended up having a talk with the Executioner.
Turns out he was manipulated, and was acting on clues given to him by Doctor Lapidis, who has now built an asylum on his remote island, and was allegedly using a psychic to predict the crimes the Executioner was stopping. We parted on friendly terms with the Executioner and left to follow his clue.

We went to the fabled Island of Doctor Lapidis and found the creepy asylum he’s built there, and a number of his unhinged patients, including a mentally handicapped janitor, a dead murderous clown and his (now lobotomized) k’thir girlfriend, and a number of serial killers held within the walls. After getting through all of them, we confronted Lapidis, only to find him with Zoltan Lescovar, and to see he is now controlling the mad paladin George the Fallen.
We managed to beat some sense into George and soon afterwards killed Zoltan and trapped Lapidis inside a tree. Lapidis turned out to have another piece of the puzzle.

We finally followed on our last clue, the pandaren who was selling her own people’s cubs to criminals in Stormwind. A friendly human monk helped us find her in the Jade Forest. As it turned out, Madame Zhao was as bad as everyone thought and after a tough battle with her and her Jade Statue, we cut her down. However, she turned out to have no puzzle pieces on her – and the monk revealed himself to be an agent of the Hand. Dealing with him too, we found our last piece and we were ready to find the real leaders.

As we completed the puzzle box and solved it, we found it to be a map of Stormwind, but we didn’t know where the map was leading. After walking around the city with it in hand, we finally realized it had the icon of a hand in place of the fountain in front of the Stormwind Cathedral. At the pedestal beneath Uther’s statue we found an indent where the puzzle box fit perfectly. Then, the pedestal slid off and revealed a hidden passage leading to underground lair… We left to prepare.

A while later, we called on the help of the Executioner and Vanessa VanCleef to infiltrate the catacombs beneath Stormwind, where we were assaulted by a number of conditioned drones – the result of Lapidis’s experiments on the mental patients. After wading through them, we found the real leader. A woman who claimed to have been the first human ever born to a vrykul, now ancient and kept alive by a Titan sacrophagus given to her, allegedly, by Tyr himself. However, the sarcophagus has driven her quite insane. After destroying it, we managed to kill her and her underlings, putting an end to this criminal hydra.

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.

Infinite Azeroths 2: Home

The outskirts of Stormwind were filled with rickety, provisional homes, draped in multi-colored cloths and filled with ringing and clanking bells and windchimes. Despite what someone from Azeroth Prime would say, it was not a goblin camp. It was a shanty-town built by the vishkanyas when they arrived on Azeroth in this timeline. Azeroth-7, or as some know it, the Illidari timeline. Maiev failed to stop Illidan from cracking Northrend apart. The Lich King died, and the Scourge was wiped out. While some would feel that was a positive change, no one expected what followed. Not only the tidal waves from the melting glaciers destroyed numerous cities and broke ancient dams, Illidan went on to become an unchallenged Lord of Outland. And with this power, he took fight to the Legion and fought them across the stars. Numerous innocent worlds found themselves in the crossfire, including the vishkanya world. A small percentage of their people successfully escaped to Azeroth through one of Illidan’s portals.

Now, they live here, in the outskirts of Azerothian civilization. Cast out, abandoned, unwanted. Although King Varian accepted them and let them stay, most of the humans feel they have enough problems with orcs and draenei “squatting” on Azeroth, some feel the vishkanya are the final nail in the coffin of humanity’s power.

Agam was careful to cover her face when she was crossing the streets of Stormwind. For about ten years she lived in this city and knew what the people on both sides were capable of. Does the perception filter even work when she’s in her own timeline? It does, after all, filter out only the extraordinary and on Azeroth-7 her eyes are not something completely out of place. No, they are just something that could get you in trouble. Luckily, Llore was at her side, showing his face without a care in the world, drawing attention away from her hooded face. Together, they walked right out of the Dwarven District and continued down the path to the outskirts.

Once there, she could finally take off the hood and look at all the lights and bells, and take in the smells of the familiar cuisine. She could finally once again hear the familiar noise of her native language, even if it was the crooked merchants hawking their wares and old women yelling at disobedient brats. For all its issues, this was home.

“Agam,” she heard from behind. She quickly turned around and saw what appeared to be a large, muscular human with a bronzed skin… but with eyes just as serpentine as hers. Llore looked up at the man who was showing a rather forbidding visage.

“Is he trouble?” Llore asked her.

“No,” Agam responded, smiling. Suddenly, the mustachioed man smiled back. “He’s my brother.”

Meanwhile, a human guard was leaning on the walls of one of the houses and looking at the two vishkanyas, and then frowning at the sight of Llore – a human, unusual in this district. He snarled and looked back to another guard, sitting nearby and sipping wine someone left over at his porch.

“You seen him?” The first guard asked.

“Whom?” The second answered, for a moment getting the bottle out of his face.

“That one,” The first guard continued, pointing at Llore. “Looks like we got ourselves a snake-fucker.”

GDE: Dream of Creation, Verdant Plains zone

Call it build 7.0.0.21600

Welcome back to Game Design Exercise, where I try to write up an expansion to World of Warcraft as I would have done it, despite about three or four people total caring about what I post here! As I would have done it, if I had a thousand pairs of hands and a mountain of money to spend. Really, it’s my wish fulfillment fantasy, taking the best parts of various expansions and doing them in the context of the Emerald Dream. Like I said in the last post, I’m in a slightly resigned mood when it comes to these. In the time since the last post I’ve been thinking about various other design options. A Dishonored sequel about an Overseer who becomes the next Outsider! My original game idea about playing as a guild, which turns out to be a lot like Garrisons: the Game! Ultimately, all of those ideas are extremely unlikely to become anything more than ideas and with this one, at least I have a few more people reading it. So I might as well keep going.

Now, to end the rant, today we’ll embarking to the first zone of the expansion proper, Verdant Plains. Like in Warlords of Draenor, I decided to go with an Alliance/Horde split between starting zones. In part because I thought it worked, and in bigger part because I decided the entrances to the Emerald Dream become the racial mini-capitals for the new races. It would be like Alliance players entering the Cataclysm zones through Bilgewater Harbor. So today’s post is the beginning of the Alliance storyline, and involves several factions, including Greymane Crossover (a new Alliance reputation faction), Skettis Exiles (the arakkoa racial faction), a continuation of the Wild Hunt storyline and an introduction to a few new elements.

Character Profiles: Podric

Not written by Podric’s player

Name: Podric, alternatively spelled as Poddric. No family name.
Race: Human
Gender: male
Age: 23
Class: Mage (fire)
Professions: enchanting, tailoring
Religion: Holy Light
Alignment (per D&D): True Neutral
Traits (per CK2): quick, slothful, shy, honest, content, kind, just

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

Prophet Isas

Many modern humans when asked how did they come to worship the concept of Holy Light will answer that it just came naturally, or maybe even that humans always worshiped it. It couldn’t be further from truth, as some other groups would tell you. While the Church of the Holy Light doesn’t stress mythology to the degree some other religions do, there is a canon regarding the origins of the religion and its founder. Even though some priests would still tell you that humans always worshiped the Light and the prophet just gave the religion a form and canon, but as far as we can tell, there was little religious consensus among early humans. The concept of the Holy Light is very old, but it remained an abstract concept not directly tied to any major religions for thousands of years.

Balor

Balor is an island familiar to most for being an important battleground during the Second War and for nothing else. However, it took a much greater part in early human history – one that is rarely spoken of these days, for various reasons. Subject of one of the earliest human myths, like most of pre-Light human beliefs it has been conveniently forgotten or written out. When the Holy Light took over the old human faiths and replaced the myths of their gods with moralizing stories teaching people how to behave according to the virtues of the Light, many of those old stories were dismissed as simply stories sown by malicious spirits that would seek to lead the mortal men astray, away from the purifying Light. What those early priests did not consider was that in many of those stories, there was a grain of truth.

Infinite Azeroths: Blackmoore

Timeline: Azeroth-14
Character: Kel’thuzad, Court Sorcerer of Lordaeron

“I proclaim you guilty!” a verdict sounded across the throne chambers of Lordaeron. “I hereby sentence you to death,” King Blackmoore proclaimed with a hit of his royal scepter against the glided arm of the throne. The peasant threw himself on the floor, begging for mercy on his knees.

“Please, my king, forgive me,” he begged, “I just wanted to feed my family!” Aedelas Blackmoore was never well respected in the kingdom. He was always considered a ruthless ruler who claimed to be just but was anything but it.

“Enough!” Blackmoore shouted, and silenced the whispering crowd with a wave of his arm. “I proclaimed the sentence. There are no more appellations. You will be hanged at dawn.”

Although the peasant protested, he was carried away by the guardsmen. Many in the crowd murmured about the unjustice of this sentence, but I didn’t care. Justice is a term mortal men made up to make themselves feel better. The only thing that really matters in this cruel world is power. And Aedelas Blackmoore had power. By serving him, I would share in this power. But an even greater power evaded him…

On Lothar, Last of the Arathi

It’s a little know fact, Anduin Lothar wasn’t the first man given the title “Last of the Arathi”. The first time this title was used was centuries earlier and the person in question was his direct ancestor, Lothar, whose first name gave the name to the entire line. It’s a little known fact outside of human history classes that the tumultous period after the fall of the Empire of Strom and the death of the last Arathi Emperor saw the rise of multiple kings, all of whom claimed descent – in one way or another – from the Arathi. Some of those genealogies were simply falsified, and some may have mad some genuine, albeit distant, truth in them, but there was one man who was undoubtedly descended from the last Arathi Emperor. There was just one problem – that man was a bastard.