Filed under: Arts and Crafts

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There's so much in Azeroth (and Outland!) just waiting to be found. Tip us off. If you've found a fabulously quirky landmark, hidden treasure, or special hideaway somewhere in Warcraft, drop me a line at olivia@wowinsider.com with your screenshot. You could be featured in a future edition of Where in Warcraft!

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Right. So the last edition of Where in Warcraft I thought was a little bit harder. None of my WoW-playing friends knew where it was just from the picture -- but you, WoW Insider readers, you're just too darn good! The first correct response was from Marcscgm, who correctly identified the chap's final resting place south of Forge Camp Fear and west of Oshugun, even going so far as to provide coordinates!

Well done there, that man! I salute you for your Nagrand knowledge and would like to present you with a ceremonial book and wine goblet, with a lovely rock plinth to enjoy them on.

But it seems we need to get far more serious here, people. You know your way around too well, and it's just no fun if it isn't difficult (well, no fun for me, anyhow!). I want to be the diabolical quizmaster, OK? So, this next edition represents a little jump up in difficulty; we're creeping up gradually. As the title suggests, it's so on! I will find a place nobody gets, eventually!

This submission is from the lovely Eiji, and it's a cave. Oh, yes. I went there. A cave with a rock outside it with a paladin on it. No more clues!

And I loved the suggestion of blocking out parts of the picture! If I'm not successful in my attempts to confound you, I will definitely start doing that.

So a recap: Guessing an entire zone is no good. I have to be able to find my way to this location with your directions. Coordinates are great, but not a requirement! Happy hunting.

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There's so much in Azeroth (and Outland!) just waiting to be found. Tip us off. If you've found a fabulously quirky landmark, hidden treasure, or special hideaway somewhere in Warcraft, drop me a line at olivia@wowinsider.com with your screenshot. You could be featured in a future edition of Where in Warcraft!

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This is one of those things that makes me jealous I'm not in school anymore. Back in 2011, Blizzard set its University Relations and World of Warcraft teams on a quest to find student artists. The resulting Student Art Contest charged students to come up with a piece of 3D art that fit into the Warcraft universe but was wholly new and unlike anything the art team had seen before. Now, we finally have the winners of the contest, and as Kotaku pointed out, they basically made their own little worlds here.

You should definitely head to the official site and check out the winners. Each of the grand prize winners gets some actual mentoring from a member of the Blizzard World of Warcraft art team. Can you imagine that? That's amazing. Man, where's my time machine -- oh, and some artistic talent, I'd need that too. This is some amazing work.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.

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Don't expect to find a set of rogue tier 9 in the real world, but there are certainly themes, styles, and colors that can be used as inspiration for a more Earthly, less fantastical outfit. Some of Azerothian Appearance's attempts are better than others. Tyrande (seen above), the aforementioned rogue tier 9, and an outfit based on the aesthetics of Crystalsong Forest all look great, but the Stormrider's Regalia ... perhaps not so great.

Go show Azerothian Appearance some love, and come up with some of your own WoW-inspired outfits! I would, but I have the fashion sense of a dog with mange.

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Ragnaros and Deathwing in Minecraft? Yeah, that's pretty cool ... but how about all of freaking Kalimdor in Minecraft? Last night on reddit, RamsesA (Rumsey on the Minecraft forums) showed off his to-scale map of Kalimdor rendered entirely in Minecraft blocks. According to Rumsey, the recreation took him a total of two weeks to complete, from the moment of inspiration to the completion of the project.

This wasn't all done with the base tools available in Minecraft, however. Rumsey needed to use mods for Minecraft that allowed him to build beyond the native height limit of 128 blocks. The continent was not created block by block by hand, either. Rumsey developed custom software to use in mapping out his recreation. Still, this is damn cool. Faulting him for using these tools is like faulting someone for separating their LEGOs using this thing or one of these instead of their teeth.

In collaboration with the Cursecraft project, Rumsey does hope to recreate all of the World of Warcraft in Minecraft one day, including instances and raids. Kalimdor is only the beginning of this architectural endeavor.

We've included a few sampler images of his Kalimdor recreation in the gallery below, but you can view all of them over in his Minecraft forum thread. The limited block options available makes some of the coloration a little abstract at times, but that's nothing a custom texture pack couldn't fix.

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Mother of sweet things! I saw this on Reddit's /r/wow community a few days ago and realized that I'm kind of a slacker when it comes to my own forum signatures (which is apparently the whole purpose of the project). Thovald, the player responsible for the video, wrote that he did it in 3D Studio Max and didn't actually change the female troll model itself. The big difference is an increased polygon count for the robes and (I would assume) the graphics of the fire spell being cast. It reminded me more than a bit of the perennial favorite Blind, and it's all the more amazing that Thovald is apparently self-taught.

We know that Blizzard is working on an update for character models, but it's pretty cool to see what players can do with them in the meantime. They might be old, but as Thovald noted, they're still a surprisingly expressive bunch.

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The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

Imagine for a moment that you are, right now, a human of the same age that you are, but living in Azeroth. Depending how old you are, you either lived through or were born into the aftermath of three of the most devastating wars your world has ever seen. Keeping in mind the trouble with timelines, every human alive in the Warcraft setting has endured loss and hardship on a scale almost unimaginable; many were driven from their homes by invading monsters or demons from other worlds, or were forced to flee in advance of legions of walking corpses that relentlessly tried to kill them and dogged their steps all the way to safety.

The humans who congregate today in centers like Stormwind and Theramore have survived when vast numbers of their people died. Only the former high elves have lost more of their kind. The fact that humanity manages to remain a force to be reckoned with despite the loss of almost all of its former northern domains in the Eastern Kingdoms, the deaths of uncounted numbers of their people and the usurpation of their inheritance is a testament to their origin as a seed race of the Titan's first arrival on Azeroth. Indeed, much like their dwarven cousins (for now humans and dwarves truly know they share a common origin, as do their gnomish relations), humans harbor a stony resolve in the face of adversity that could crush or corrupt another people.

Let us look at humanity's most recent travails.

We return today with the final portion of our interview with Zac, the gifted writer behind Travels through Azeroth and Outland. Today, we've asked about narrative difficulties, the dark parts of Azeroth's development, "fridge horror," and whether player characters are ultimately a good or bad thing for the world.

You can find the first portions of our interview here:

• Travels through Azeroth and Outland: Forsaken narrators, MMO storytelling, and why the draenei are scary.
• Zac's notes on racial characterization.

I've been pretty vocal in the past about my intense love for Travels through Azeroth and Outland. It's a five-year, player-penned travelogue that takes readers on an expansive journey through every zone in the pre-Cataclysm game. Over the years, it's attracted a lot of attention due to the incredible quality of its writing and storytelling. Not only does it have its own TV Tropes entry, but even Blizzard's taken notice, and we've gotten the opportunity to interview its writer.

Even if you're not a roleplayer or all that interested in WoW's lore, Travels has an unsettling capacity to get you thinking about the deeper implications of the game's quests and become absorbed in the narrator's observations. It is, quite simply, one of the best pieces of fan fiction I've ever read and a hugely addictive story. If you haven't read it, please do. You will never see the game the same way again.

But, as with all good things, Travels has reached its end. While Zac, its author, plans to post some story cues related to the Cataclysm expansion on his travelogue's forums, he's wrapped up the main storyline, and our beloved narrator -- a Forsaken named Destron Allicant -- is riding off into the sunset. I was lucky enough to talk extensively with Zac about what spurred the travelogue, how he sees the various Azerothian races, and good versus evil in Blizzard's universe.

Blizzard has updated the comic contest gallery with more leftovers from the community comic contest. You can check out the full gallery at the Blizzard community site. If you go through the gallery, you'll see some familiar art styles from some of the bigger WoW comic artists out there. Plus, the comic that Blizzard linked in the blue post put a smile on my face. Oh, Chimaeron, you are hilarious.

Still in the mood for more WoW comics? WoW Insider has got you covered (as usual) with Amanda Miller's weekly Sunday Morning Funnies and, of course, our very own weekly webcomic by Kelly Aarons. Blizzard knows that there are a lot of WoW comic creators out there and, from their continued support and contests for comic creators, definitely like showing off what the community has to offer.

More World of Warcraft Comics

We have some tasty leftovers from our community comic contest to share. This comic was submitted by Shannon Fowler (Amyiss). Check out the full gallery here.

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I've always been a huge fan of game art in all its forms -- the walls of my house are literally covered in framed game posters, instruction booklets, and fan art. That, in part, is why I was so glad to see Blizzard update its Trading Card Game art gallery today with 10 new pieces of art.

Whether you play the card game or not, the (now) 40-piece WoW TCG gallery is definitely worth taking a look at. This update includes Booty Bay denizen Landro Longshot, a gnome impaling an orc, and (ever a fan favorite) scantily clad women holding weapons.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.

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