Welcome to Know Your Lore, where each week Alex Ziebart brings you a tasty little morsel of lore to wrap your mind around. Sweet, sweet lore. Mmmm. Have suggestions for future KYL topics? E-mail us! Or, if you have a question for our sister column Ask a Lore Nerd, e-mail us those, too!
Despite how cool Tirion Fordring is, this was is actually one of the more challenging topics for Know Your Lore. It's difficult to write about Tirion without just giving a summary of the book about him, becase there's not much more to him until Wrath of the Lich King. Even after reading this, I'm still going to strongly recommend that you go out and find a copy of the Chris Metzen written book Of Blood and Honor.
At the creation of the Order of the Silver Hand, Tirion Fordring was chosen to be among the first of the Paladins. Alongside him were people such as Saidan Dathrohan, Turalyon, Uther the Lightbringer, and Gavinrad the Dire (who!?). During the wars with the Orcish Horde, Tirion pretty much did what every other Paladin did: Kill a lot of Orcs and save a lot of lives. The real juicy stuff came a bit after that.
Gnomechewer consistently dazzles the crowd with what he can put out in such a short period of time. He has such a gift for rewriting lore and putting a totally new spin on it. Argent Crusade: Salvation is no exception. Is it me or is he getting really good with his special effects?
His latest story centers around Tirion Fordring overhauling the Silver Hand. He uses a voiceover by Caruu, as Fordring, to act almost as a transmission. Tirion voices his doubts about winning the war as the battle is waged on screen.
[Thanks, Gnomechewer!]
If you have any suggestions for WoW Moviewatch, you can mail them to us at machinima AT wowinsider DOT com.
Welcome to Know Your Lore, where each week Alex Ziebart brings you a tasty little morsel of lore to wrap your mind around. Sweet, sweet lore. Mmmm. Have suggestions for future KYL topics? E-mail us! Or, if you have a question for our sister column Ask a Lore Nerd, e-mail us those, too!
There are very few things through all of Warcraft, in-game and out, that almost every WoW player would recognize upon hearing its name. Even if you don't know its story or origins, the name holds some weight. This is one of those things.
The Ashbringer...
The Ashbringer is (supposedly) going to play a pretty large role in Wrath of the Lich King, and what we've seen so far supports that. In addition, in mid-September Blizzard will be releasing a comic to fill in some of the gaps in the story of the Ashbringer. In preparation of all of that, we're going to do a rundown of all we know.
A couple of days ago, it was with a little good fortune and a lot of soul-selling by WoW Insider lead Elizabeth Harper that I finally got my grubby little hands on a precious Beta key. Over 2 Gigabytes worth of installer and patches later, I found myself creating a Death Knight. It is a fair certainty that every player who upgrades to the Wrath of the Lich King will create one. In fact, after playing the class for just a short time, I have to say that every single player should. The Death Knight starting experience is the single most immersive role-playing experience in the game.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not too big on role-playing. I mostly skip quest flavor text and go directly to the objectives. But the Death Knight starting experience -- it's really called that -- is just game design at its finest. Blizzard mentioned that one design flaw in The Burning Crusade was not making Illidan's presence felt early on in the Outlands. In fact, aside from the raiders who managed to set foot in the 25-man raids, a large number of the player base never got to see the bad guys driving the story of The Burning Crusade. Well... when you play a Death Knight, you won't just feel the lore, it punches you in the face and knocks you off your feet the moment you log into the game for the first time.
It's that time again, ladies and gents. Alex here with today's round of answers to your Wrath Beta questions. Keep the questions coming, and we'll keep answering. To everyone that asked about Arena points: We don't know anything about that yet, and Blizzard doesn't either. As soon as they know, we'll know, and then you'll know. Gurluas asks...
How many high elves are there in Wrath, and what are their role now that they have thier own faction?
The High Elves actually have a pretty strong presence, which I'm rather excited about. The High Elves (and Blood Elves to a much lesser extent) are one of my favorite Warcraft races, and it makes me sad I can't play one. Alliance FTW. Dalaran, first of all, is packed full of them. Most of them are under the banner of the Silver Covenant, an Alliance-aligned faction of High Elves that aren't too happy about the Blood Elves being given a sizable section of Dalaran.
There are also High Elves scattered throughout the Alliance forces in Northrend. There are a few of them in the 7th Legion (no, they're not all High Elves), the Argent Crusade, and just the Alliance forces overall. The fellow in charge of the Alliance contingent helping the Red Dragonflight at the Red Dragonshrine is a High Elf. He's a total badass, by the way. Check him out up there. Ashkandi is Draconic for Awesome.
15 Minutes of Fame is our look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes – from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about at 15minutesoffame at wowinsider dot com.
Last week, 15 Minutes of Fame brought you Part I of our exclusive chat with the Leftovers raiding community. The Leftovers are neither a guild nor an alliance. Instead, they're an open-ended uber-community of players on Silver Hand -- both guilded and unguilded -- raiding everything from Old World content and Karazhan all the way up through 7/9 BT.
Check out their phat stats:
The Leftovers run some 70 to 80 raids per week.
Ninety percent of players who sign up get into raids.
Over the past 3 weeks, 661 players (on 1,094 characters) have attended a Leftovers raid.
More than 1,700 players have attended or signed up with Leftovers raids since the Burning Crusade launched.
The Leftovers marked their three-year anniversary in May of this year with eight Magtheridon/Gruul runs, including seven kills, plus four Molten Core fun runs.
This week, we're back with Part II of our interview with the Leftovers. We chat about the advantages and disadvantages of "open" vs. "closed" raiding groups and the custom tools that make such an immense raiding community practically run itself.
15 Minutes of Fame is our look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes – from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about at 15minutesoffame (at) wowinsider (dot) com.
Think you've got a hawt PuG raiding group on your server? You ain't seen nothin' until you've seen what's going on with the Leftovers of US Silver Hand-A -- and they're not a guild but rather a collection of pickup raiders! Check out these phat stats:
The Leftovers run some 70 to 80 raids per week.
Ninety percent of players who sign up get into raids.
Over the past 3 weeks, 661 players (on 1,094 characters) have attended a Leftovers raid.
More than 1,700 players have attended or signed up with Leftovers raids since the Burning Crusade launched.
The Leftovers marked their three-year anniversary in May of this year with eight Magtheridon/Gruul runs, including seven kills, plus four Molten Core fun runs.
With numbers like these, the Leftovers raiding community is anything but leftover players. They have raiding groups of all shapes and sizes hitting content both high and low, hard and soft, casually and on a tight progression curve. We visited with a hive-mind group of their leaders to find out why the Leftovers' pickup raid system has become such a resounding success. Read on for Part I of our exclusive interview with the Leftovers.
As we continue down the road to Wrath of the Lich King, we get more and more information about what factions we'll be coming across. The Taunka, the Tuskarr, the Scarlet Onslaught, things like that. The one that seems to have gotten the most people excited is our beloved Silver Hand. The inclusion of the Silver Hand has even sparked a great amount of debate on the official Wrath forums, yammering for or against the Horde being welcome in the Order. Because of all of this, I've decided we'll take a little look at the Silver Hand this week!
Contrary to what most people believe/know, the Order of the Silver Hand was not founded exclusively by Uther the Lightbringer. At the time, Uther was actually still an apprentice. His teacher, Archbishop Alonsus Faol, was the true founder of the Order, though Uther was at his side, naturally.
Ever since the Burning Crusade came out, the battle cry of many a disgruntled fan has been "lollore," a cry which signifies a disgust with the direction the story has taken and a belief that many of the twists have betrayed the previous feel of the world or fallen short of some expected level of quality. Now honestly, There have been some lore twists I haven't really liked. Certainly, there were ways to give us the Draenei besides besides massively retconning the back story of the Burning Legion and making Sargeras corrupt them instead of the other way around. That said, I don't really mind that the Draenei came to us on a space ship. After all, the Orcs came to us through a Stargate!
I also appreciate that Blizzard has, in the lore arena, learned where they tripped up and tried to correct it. This is very apparent to me in the differences between the Lore behind Zul'Aman and the Lore behind the Sunwell Plateau. Where Zul'Aman's lore felt lackluster and weak, the lore behind patch 2.4 keeps getting better and better.
We really love these player-run parties (how did that AzerothCross go the other week, anyway?), so here's another one for you this weekend. This time around, your host is Kernhoof on Silver Hand (finally, the US realms get their own event), who wants to celebrate his unthinkable accomplishment-- not only did he grind up Bloodsail rep to Honored, but he then went back and killed tons of Venture Co. goblins to bring his Steamwheedle Cartel rep back to neutral. So now he can wear the Bloodsail hat with pride, and walk around Booty Bay without getting stomped on by the bruisers. Awesome.
Sounds like cause for celebration to me. The party kicks off this Sunday, October 28th on Silver Hand at 1pm server in Booty Bay, and since the guards there aren't going to be drunk or anything (like they are on New Year's Eve), it probably won't turn into a bloodbath. Probably. But even if it does, should be a good time no matter what-- sounds like Kernhoof has even invited a few GMs to show up. As always, if you go and check it out, make sure to send us your screenshots!
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