Posts with tag huojin

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.

We've had new races in two expansions so far -- the alien draenei and the native blood elves, the scheming goblins and the beaten-down worgen. Each of these races had their own quirks and reasons for allying with the Alliance and Horde, and they were good ones. The draenei chose the Alliance because the night elves made first contact with their people, and the ideals of the Alliance matched what the draenei were all about. The sin'dorei allied with the Horde partially because of the help offered by Sylvanas Windrunner and partially because the Alliance had already turned their back on the blood elves in their most dire of hours.

As for the goblins and the worgen, well, the worgen were a natural match to the Alliance as they were an Alliance race already -- human, save for the curse. The goblins allied with the Horde out of sheer necessity more than anything. The Bilgewater Cartel was in ruins, and the Horde helped them out. Each race chose Alliance or Horde, and each had its own reasons for doing so.

But the pandaren pose a different kind of problem for roleplayers, because they can choose either side to ally with. So how do you roleplay a pandaren character who's allied with one side or the other?

Mists of Pandaria brings us an all-new continent with a ton of brand-new races, quests, storylines, and characters. Along with those characters comes a whole host of names that look a lot easier to pronounce than they actually are. With names commonly found in the troll race, it's a simple matter of navigating your way around all of the apostrophes. Old Gods, for the most part, sound just like they are spelled. But with the names you find in Mists, there's an actual precedent for pronunciation, and most words definitely don't sound like they look.

Simon, one of our readers who also happens to be fluent in Chinese, took some time out of his busy day to drop an email in my inbox detailing just a few of the Chinese words, their meaning, and their actual pronunciations. According to Simon, many of the names you'll encounter in Mists are actually written using the standard PinYin system, which, when accurate, is usually pronounced differently than how it looks.