Warcraft Earth: At My Limits

When we landed at Masyaf, we thought we were in trouble, again. We had just lost our disguises, and here we were, surrounded by angry looking men, who probably have never seen creatures like us. But to our surprise… a man came from behind and explained he recognized Yu Gwai. And that I looked familiar too. Turns out… uncle Verroak was walking around them in his true form.

Warcraft Earth: Wandering the Mountains

Our ultimate goal is to find another rift like the one we lost, but getting to places where we could get one… almost requires we already had it. The start of our journey? Earth. A planet so distant even the most powerful mages from Azeroth would find impossible to connect to via ordinary arcane magic. We do however have one… ally, so to speak, that could get past those limitation. The Keeper Melektas, on the nearby Eosphere. It took some… creative license at describing recent events to get the depressed constructs to use his Titanic gateway to shoot across millions of light years and multiple galaxies, but he finally agreed. We were shot all the way to a distant, strange planet.

The Way Forward

Dear officers of the Tower of Krasha, I need to speak to you regarding the recent events. As you know, my uncle and your former employer, Verroak Krasha, has fallen in battle to the vengeful loa, Lehba. Although I have arrived just in time to banish the spirit, we were left with an abrupt void of power. According to the rules of succession my uncle has established himself, as his closest living adult relative, the leadership and ownership of the Tower of Krasha falls to me, Orkan Krasha, son of Tarakan, brother to Verroak. I want to address some concerns.

Guild Stories: The Father of Understanding

It began so very simply. A courier delivering our supplies to a man who lives out of the way in Eastvale went missing with his supplies. Thinking little of it, Hellbourne led a small group to investigate. After a small but heated exchange with a peasant, we found our man. A former warlock who decided to abandon his magic after an accident corrupted his hand, he now lived out of the way with a wife and children. He needed regular supplies from the Tower of Krasha to keep his corrupted arm in check. With a little help from Calaara’s time magic, we followed the courier’s trail back to his landing spot, which is where we found footprints, mixed with murloc prints.
Following the prints, we were saddened to find the courier dead and half-eaten by… zombie murlocs. We dispatched those murlocs with ease, but considering a presence of a ghoul among them, it was a strange occurrence. Furthermore, the courier’s package was taken by someone else onto the Stone Cairne Island.
We naturally followed the trail onto the island where we finished off more zombies assaulting a mysterious high arakkoa. Calling himself Kora Narash, he gave us a dire warning – the Tower of Krasha is in danger, and Lehba, the loa Verroak angered, has returned. If that wasn’t enough, the sky above Icecrown has been shattered and the Lich King is no more. Without its master’s command, the restless Scourge will become an even greater threat to this world…

Guild Information

A page detailing our guild information has been added. Review it under https://arakkoa.wordpress.com/guild-information/

Guild Stories: The Tree of Life

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

Verroak Krasha arrived in Orgrimmar to find his new group of minions on the Horde side and offer them a job people of Alliance races would not be able to do easily – venture into Suramar and acquire fruits of the arcan’dor. His long-standing research attempted to free the blood elf race of their mana addiction for good. Not just substitute it with the Sunwell, or other sources of magic, to cure it for good. To further work on his research, he needed the fruit of the arcan’dor, which he knew cured the nightborne of their hunger.

Our first contact was a slimy merchant named Marian Lulian. As it turns out, a group of corrupt guards just came into his shop and took some of his rare gems “confiscating” it. After being pushed a little by a ruthless death knight of ours, Glysra, he confessed the fruit has been stolen by a group of thieves known as Tunnel Snakes. He’d tell us more, but only if we chase the guards and retrieve the confiscated goods. So we did, and in spite of our best attempts at parlay, it’s come to blows and we massacred the guards at a pier near the market. Once we took the stolen goods back, Marian gave us the information we needed to retrieve the stolen fruit for ourselves.

We delved into an old ruin where the Tunnel Snakes lived, or rather once lived. Now, they were all killed by an assailant that would soon prove to be more corrupt guards, and their blood elven allies. We found the sole remaining Tunnel Snake, Mordial, and as we dispatched his torturers, he offered to help us in dealing with the rest. Deeper in, there was a powerful blood elf spellbreaker, talking to the true leaders of this organization – a nightborne Arcanist Nasadra and a blood elf Magister Renethras. As their projected images dispersed, the spellbreaker attacked and we were forced to kill him. Glysra was now pissed by the interruptions and vowed to kill the two leaders, while we still needed to find more fruit.

First, we left Suramar in pursuit of the blood elf magister. In Silvermoon City we encountered a former apprentice of his, fired for accidentally killing his dragonhawk. As she was quite a mess, we had to bribe her, and our paladin Lillianei convinced her to change her life. However, she did reveal that another warlock who lived nearby was still in contact with Renethras. Once we met the other warlock, a former demon trainer, he resisted briefly, before spilling the beans on Renethras. Turns out they were religiously worshipping Kael’thas as the Sun King who became something far more powerful after his death, and would return one day to save Silvermoon and burn the rest of the world. Then his goons attacked us again to try to stop us, but after we dealt with them, Rommath himself showed up and told us they too want to get rid of the fanatical magister and they’d arrange their forces in a way to help us deal with him.

We went deeper into the blood elf lands, to the Isle of Quel’Danas itself, where Renethras’s Firewing zealots occupied a sanctum. In the middle of it, they were performing some profane ritual, connecting them to Shadowlands themselves. While we dealt with some of the people protecting Renethras, the ritual almost succeeded. Renethras briefly contacted Kael’thas, but as the latter was still undergoing his torture in Castle Nathria, he believed the voice of his former follower to be a phantom summoned by his torturers and refused, as the spell collapsed. The magister was furious and tried to kill us, but despite his powerful magic, we succeeded in destroying him.

While we gathered some fruit from the magister’s room, we needed much more. Glysra got wind of a raffle being held in Suramar, offering four of the arcfruit to the lucky winners, and a chance to avoid their certain withering. Attending the raffle were, among others, our “friend” Marian Lulian, the thief Mordial, and a lady near to withering, Jourie Ravenoak. As it turned out, the raffle was sponsored by our nemesis, Arcanist Nasadra. After we listened to her rant against Thalyssra and the Horde, we bought our tickets, only to be informed by Mordial that the whole raffle is rigged, and the real fruit is behind held above. He convinced us to sneak away to steal the fruit, but Marian noticed us. Luckily, after a brief distraction, Marian was stunned and hidden in the bushes.

Reaching the fruit on the ledge above, we found ourselves surprised by the rafflemaster Shyloque, who warded the area to stop thieves. Thankfully, he was a very simple spellcaster and could not handle our assault. Once we gathered our fruit and Mordial ate one, happy to finally be free of the hunger… he suddenly turned to ice and was shattered. Nasadra was just inside the building and her powerful ice magic could pretty much one-shot anyone. However, Meelah succesfully stunned her long enough for us to run away.

A while later, Glysra followed Nasadra to a building on the Concourse of Destiny, while Meelah brought back an amulet with an enchanted fire elemental essence to protect us from Nasadra’s magic. After confronting the guards, we found out these were not bought off by her and in fact came here with Silgryn. After we informed them of Nasadra’s treachery, we entered the building together, only to find Silgryn already confronting her. Nasadra revealed her true plan – killing half of Suramar, because there would never be enough arcan’dor fruit to save everyone. Silgryn found that understandably insane, but Nasadra was offended and attacked. Although Silgryn protected himself well enough, he was wounded and ran for help, while we confronted the arcanist.

The fight ended on top of the building, as Nasadra summoned ice elementals and a massive hailstorm, trying to ruin the city. Thanks to our protection and the help of Jourie, a warlock as it turns out, she could not easily kill us, and we managed to strike her down and disperse the storm she summoned. Glysra brutally murdered her in the end, and Silgryn came back just in time to see the result. As he promised before, he rewarded us with what whatever we’d ask for – and that’s the arcan’dor fruit.

We departed the city to let it recover from our… activities and succesfully delivered the bounty our boss wanted.

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.

Guild Stories: The Infiltrators

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 arrived in the base one day to inform us somebody has stolen from him. It must have been an expert thief, since they managed to slot in right between security shift changes and remained unseen by anyone, including some of the expert security personnel, such as aldrachi warriors Krasha employs. The group arrived on Krasha home base and immediately went after a strange human who was isolated in the mess hall. The human had an odd appearance, his face twitching and moving in various unnatural ways, and he smelled oddly, like a reptile of some kind. After a thorough interrogation, he was proven to be a shapeshifting saurok of some kind, rapidly regenerating its health and breaking out of polymorphism by tearing its flesh apart.

As the Krasha officers would later explain, all threads pointed to “the Cancer”. A former officer of Krasha’s who left after buying his own freedom. A saurok who has taken control of a mogu flesh-shaping device, a corporius, he has apparently created a new breed of sauroks, shapeshifters who rapidly regenerate all wounds. This “Cancer” must be tracked down and dealt with, but Krasha wants him alive.

After tracking down all the strange “humans” in his home base, Krasha ordered us to infiltrate them in turn and sent us a fungarian to help us with it. The fungarian charged in at a lone saurok scout and once both have been slain, the cloud of spores from the fungarian’s body possessed the saurok and used it to infiltrate the saurok base in the old troll ruins.

However, what we found at the troll ruins was stranger than we all anticipated. The sauroks are conspiring with Bwonsamdi and another troll loa, Lehba, who used to own Krasha’s island base and wants it back. However, after we killed the ubersaurok priest, Bwonsamdi says the sauroks failed and washes his hands off of his involvement and leaves us to our own devices.

One of the biggest mysteries was how is the Cancer creating new sauroks when his original machine is still in Krasha’s possession and remains untampered with. Balerok found a mention of what appeared to be another corporius inside a small Titan facility in the Storm Peaks and sent us on a mission to retrieve it or learn what happened to it. After freeing a small arcane entity called a factotum (dubbed Rosie by Teann), we learned the Cancer was there. After an ambush by another Lesser Evil, Blood-Thane Utarefson, we opened the pulpit for the corporius only to find it gone. Rosie joined us to recover the device.

Now knowing everything that happened, we await more trails that could lead us to the Cancer, as he remains still at large at this moment.

After an evening of scouting, we found out the sauroks were planning on replacing a “human king” with a puppet of their own. Although we did not have the numbers to deal with them at the time, we learned a few things and retreated.
We also met a curious troll, Ati’bon, who claimed to be older than Medivh and to have always lived in the Black Morass. Ati’bon was nowhere to be found the next week.

The week after that, we finally left to dispatch the sauroks. Our attempts at subterfuge have failed as the guards changed their password, and later Teann couldn’t pull herself into the shape of the old troll. After a few clashes, we defeated the small detachment of sauroks left at the tree and arrived within it to find the Cancer himself, hard at work at creating new life. He quickly deduced we work for Krasha and hard negotiations began.

It took some convincing, but we met an understanding where the Cancer made a demand: he must be made Krasha’s equal in the Lesser Evils, not his subordinate, and in exchange, he will share the blood of Anzu he somehow acquired to make Krasha part-demigod. Although we had to wake the boss up (with Balerok’s help) Krasha agreed and we led Ughul to Krasha’s home base for further negotiations.

In the end, we spared the life of one terrible person so that he can make another terrible person into a god. All around, a “success”.

Guild Stories: The Revenge of Azj’Aqir

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

After Hellbourne received a message to call the team to the base and failed to act on it, the minions received a serious scolding. Nevertheless, at the next occasion, they arrived at Verroak’s old tower in Duskwood, the original “tower of Krasha”, and found a strange tauren, Azjan. It quickly turned out it was merely a disguise of the ancient tol’vir sorcerer Azj’Aqir. Krasha wanted us to help protect Verroak himself and Azj’Aqir as they use the tol’vir’s magic to take control of an aqir goliath bound at the tower.

The mission went fairly well, until Azj’Aqir former ally turned nemesis, Guo Shou, turned up and sent his terracotta warrior and a few hopping ghosts to disrupt Azj’Aqir’s plan. We dispatched those too, and Azj’Aqir departed with his new minion, promising to take revenge on the mogu who betrayed him.

Sensing the Krasha minions’ doubts about him, Azj’Aqir joined them one evening at the base above Stormwind for a presentation of his past, trying to make himself look better. He delivered his version of the story, where the tol’vir princess wasn’t an innocent victim, but a seducer who wanted to use the socially inept sorcerer to escape the grasp of suitors she didn’t want. Azj’Aqir claims he imprisoned her to prevent her from spreading false accusations once things went sour, and got killed because they spread in spite of it. He was then tormented for milennia, until his future servant Narmer saved his soul and, with Guo Shou’s help, put it in Moam’s body.
The Krasha minions were not entirely convinced and still saw him as a villain. That only made Azj’Aqir more determined to redeem himself.

Eventually, he invited the Tower of Krasha to join him in taking his revenge on Guo Shou for the betrayal when the hopping mogu ghost controlled the Moam body to get away from a group of heroes. The aqir colossus the group helped him take control of rampaged through a Korune base, slaughtering many mogu and arranging their corpses on an altar in some form of… art, or sacrifice, nobody knows.
Once the group reached Guo Shou himself, the mogu protecting himself proved particularly tough to kill, while the villain was busy engaging the giant bug. After a prolonged effort, the female mogu body was slain with Azj’Aqir’s help, and the emergent hopping ghost started screaming about “the machine of death being broken” and everybody’s soul ending up in the Maw, a yawning chasm of darkness and pain. Azj’Aqir dispatched the evil soul to its final destination and thanked the group for their involvement.

The Tower of Krasha had one final mission from the ancient tol’vir sorcerer. In what he claimed to be an effort to redeem himself, Azj’Aqir decided to poke a dark obelisk of N’Zoth to provoke aqir into emerging. The minions of Krasha were there to kill the emerging bugs in large enough numbers to attract the attention of their master, Prophet Skitra. With Skitra dead, Azj’Aqir theorized, not only would he gain everyone’s favor by dealing with a great threat to Azeroth, but also the aqir from Ny’alotha would be his to control.
Unfortunately, the Prophet proved to be more than everyone’s match. Much more powerful than everyone expected, Skitra kept everyone trembling in fear as he took back the control of the aqir colossus, tore the spirit of Azj’Aqir from Moam’s body, took the obsidian destroyer back, and left the group alive to “bear witness to those who defy the Black Empire”.
With Azj’Aqir “dead”, his minions were left to pick up the pieces and find a new body for their master, but Narmer paid the group handsomely for our efforts.