Posts with tag character-timelines

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW. Have questions about roleplaying, or roleplaying issues? Email me -- I'm always open to suggestions!

Over the last several weeks we've been going over character timelines as presented in the Warcraft RPG source books. While the life spans listed in the RPG books may or may not be canon -- it hasn't been given a definite yes or no from the story department over at Blizzard -- they still provide a good reference point for players looking to fit their characters into the Warcraft timeline.

More importantly, it serves as a good leaping off point for new players that aren't quite sure where to start -- how old to make their character, what that character would have lived through, or just how the timelines themselves line up. While there are discrepancies here and there within the timeline, hopefully this series helped new players with an overview of what happened when as far as the lore is concerned. Today we're going to answer a few of the questions generated by all this timeline review; some lore related, some timeline related, and some related to character development.

Amaxe asks:

Might I suggest a timeline showing more or less where the books etc fit into the Blizz timeline?

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW. Have questions about roleplaying, or roleplaying issues? Email me -- I'm always open to suggestions!

Short-lived -- it's the best way to describe the life of a troll in Warcraft. Despite being arguably the most prolific race in Azeroth's history, the trolls of Azeroth don't tend to live particularly long or fruitful lives. This is largely due to the fact that most troll tribes spend their time warring and fighting amongst themselves, or with those that dare encroach upon their lands. Yet despite the short-lived nature of the average Azerothian troll, troll history stretches back farther than any other race on Azeroth.

Like the tauren, the trolls of Azeroth were one of the original races -- not of Titan origin, simply present on Azeroth since the dawn of life on the little planet. Troll society is an amazingly complex jumble of lore, loa, ancestral rites and dubious practices like voodoo and cannibalism. Fortunately, the playable race of troll in Warcraft is limited to one tribe; the jungle trolls of the Darkspear. Though the known tribal history of the Darkspear is relatively short, recent events give troll roleplayers much to work with.

Last week, we discussed the timelines of gnomes and dwarves, two races that recently discovered their roots. Though the dwarves and gnomes were originally Titan creations, today we're going to talk about a race that has simply been here since the beginning -- the tauren. Much like the night elves, the tauren have a gigantic chunk of history that is simply ... missing, though the tauren have more of an explanation for that absence of information than their night elf counterparts.

For tauren roleplayers, however, the past isn't really an issue so much as current events -- and the tauren race has a lot to think about. The tauren have often been thought of as the "nicest" of the Horde races, peaceful and generally kind to all. That's what makes what happens to the tauren race in Cataclysm twice as bitter -- their people turned on, their leader killed in cold blood, and their home under siege. Despite all this, the tauren remain staunch allies of the Horde, willing to lay down their lives for honor.

Continuing on with our series on life spans, timelines, and how the different races of Azeroth relate to the timeline from a historical standpoint, today, we're going to look at two Alliance races with roughly the same life span: gnomes and dwarves. However, unlike every other race on Azeroth, these two races share a unique history that was only recently discovered. Even though most Azerothians don't really consider where their race may have originally come from, the dwarves and the gnomes know, unequivocally, where their races started -- and the discovery was a shock for both races involved.

Unlike their human allies, the dwarves and gnomes have been around just as long, if not longer, than their night elf allies. While life spans guarantee that there isn't a member of this race who remembers the thousands of years between their original creation and today, recent events have uncovered the truth behind that history and given the gnomes and the dwarves a unique outlook into just where they've come from.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW. Have questions about roleplaying, or roleplaying issues? Email me -- I'm always open to suggestions!

Sometimes it's easier to work with certain races as far as timelines go, and sometimes it gets very, very tricky. Today's subject is one of the trickiest. The draenei date back to the vanilla days of World of Warcraft -- but the draenei of Azeroth as we knew it then were most decidedly not the draenei we know in Azeroth today. While we mistakenly assumed the draenei always appeared as they do in the Swamp of Sorrows -- misshapen, deformed, and a bit ugly -- the draenei of the Swamp of Sorrows are actually mutated versions of the original race.

None of this was revealed until the announcement that draenei would be the playable Alliance race in The Burning Crusade. Once the draenei were announced, a flurry of speculation as to the race's origins and radical change in appearance appeared, as well as one of the most notorious lore snafus in Warcraft's history. If the draenei seem out of place on Azeroth, it's because they absolutely are -- they aren't even native to the planet Draenor from which their flight and subsequent crash landing on Azeroth originated. You think elves are old? Take a gander at the draenei lifetime, and prepare to be overloaded with potential for more roleplay material than you can shake a face tendril at.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW. Have questions about roleplaying, or roleplaying issues? Email me -- I'm always open to suggestions!

Last week we discussed the life span of elves -- be they night elves or blood elves, the short answer is that elves life for a very, very long time. Elves are one of the native races of Azeroth, predated only by a few different races. But there are races on Azeroth today that didn't originate there, races that traveled to Azeroth through one means or another. Today we're going to talk about one of those races and how they came to arrive -- the orcs of Draenor.

The life span of an orc is relatively short by Azerothian standards. Though elves can live to be thousands of years old, the orcs are lucky if they even get close to 100 years of age. This makes pinpointing timelines for the orcish race relatively simple, and much like the humans we discussed two weeks ago, there's a limit to how far back in the timeline you need to go in regards to age.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW. Have questions about roleplaying, or roleplaying issues? Email me -- I'm always open to suggestions!

Last week, we covered the human race and to a lesser degree the worgen and undead, in regards to where those individual races "fit" into the Warcraft timeline when roleplaying. As far as age goes, it's pretty easy to wrap one's mind around the approximate age of a human character. A Warcraft human may have a bit of a longer lifespan than we do out here in real life, but the basic mechanics of aging and memory stay the same, so long as there aren't any strange magical circumstances involved.

In the case of elves, however, the timeline suddenly goes from being "just right" to amazingly, incomprehensibly huge. For some elves like Malfurion Stormrage, Tyrande Whisperwind and others, it stretches 10,000 years of history -- and only the very smallest fraction of that has been spent with the Alliance and an even smaller fraction of that has been spent with the Horde (in the case of the blood elves).