Story-Based Character Changes in D&D

One's class in D&D can come in very different forms. Most are about a player character developing some sort of expertise. A Monk, a Fighter, and a Wizard are all ultimately training and conditioning themselves to perform more effectively. One could say the same about every class. But the route to becoming that class in the first place can vary widely.

Clerics, for example, can come in different forms. Is a Cleric just someone who has tuned their faith with remarkable devotion to the point where they can channel the power of their deity, or are they chosen by their deity, with powers bestowed upon them in order to serve a great destiny?

While Bards are sort of the fourth in this category, generally three classes are considered the "Arcane Casters": namely Wizards, Sorcerers, and Warlocks. When introducing new players to the game, it's important to break these down as the names don't make their differences entirely obvious. Essentially: Wizards gain their magic from study and practice. Sorcerers' magic is inherent to them either from their ancestry or some magical event that imbued them with power. Warlocks bargain for their magic with a powerful entity, forging a pact that grants them their abilities in exchange for some transactional service.

The reason I think Warlocks, and to an extent Clerics and Paladins, are the most inherently story-rich class is that this inherently sets up a potential conflict. The Warlock is forced to perform a duty in order to retain their powers.

Now, to be fair, you can run Warlocks in a less demanding way. In some cases, you can have it so that the Warlock's service has already been performed, and that the transaction is complete, and the patron no longer requiring any further service. I could also imagine running it such that the Warlock has not finished performing the service, but that the patron cannot actually take back the powers - perhaps using the threat of sending monsters after them or something to encourage compliance rather than taking powers away.

But if we assume that most players would find the more compelling story to be one in which the Warlock continually has to deal with their patron's demands, honoring the pact even as it may come into conflict with their own interests, there is a great potential for conflict and drama around the desire, and potentially the need, for the powers the patron grants, and the enormity of the services the patron demands.

I'm going to put up a general story spoiler warning, but I'm not going to say what I'm spoiling given that that would kind of give everything away.

Dragons, Undead, and/or Old Gods

With the end to the Eternal Palace raid now known - even on Mythic - we have the stage set for what, if history's precedent holds, should be the final patch of Battle for Azeroth.

What happens?

Well, in defeating Azshara, we see the power of the Heart of Azeroth used to break the chains in the Circle of Stars, which is a Titan facility that has apparently served as the seal on the prison of N'zoth. Jaina and Lor'themar, representing the Alliance and Horde respectively, may have teamed up to beat Azshara, but this seems a pyrrhic victory at best, given that not only is N'zoth unleashed, but even Azshara does not seem to be dead (or at least isn't dead anymore.)

There's a big question to be asked about where, exactly, the expansion is heading for its final patch.

Two threads need to be addressed in some way:

One is N'zoth, whose release from imprisonment could naturally have disastrous consequences for the world. The Old Gods have not been free since the Ordering of Azeroth, and we don't have any Titans around to build a new prison. N'zoth must be stopped, or the terrible fate that Sargeras wanted to burn the universe to avoid might come to pass.

The other is Sylvanas. We've watched her reign as Warchief snowball into war atrocities and totalitarian tactics that threaten to make the Horde even worse than it was under Garrosh. Sylvanas appears comfortable with genocide, and the fate she seeks to inflict upon the Alliance is one of undead compliance. We are now seeing dissenting members of the Horde rise up against her, but Sylvanas is also playing a subtle game with stratagems and even goals that we have yet to comprehend.

Either of these characters would be logical final bosses for the expansion. The real question, though, is who has the upper hand. Who is the better plotter?

I'm inclined to think N'zoth is, given that his entire identity is that of the ancient master manipulator who always seemed to come out ahead even when he was theoretically losing.

That beings said: who could you trust more than N'zoth to have our killing him turn out to be part of his plot in the first place?

Thus, I'm leaning more toward the belief that N'zoth will be BFA's final boss, but it's not clear that he'll actually "lose" even if we beat him in a fight.

After all, the goal of the Old Gods, even if they had this vast Black Empire and millions of soldiers at their command, is not for themselves. It is to corrupt Azeroth and make a Void Titan. It's not even clear that the Old Gods are expected to survive this process - indeed, given how mad and horrific they are, it might be their goal to go out in one last nihilistic blaze of glory once Azeroth emerges from the planet as the creature of darkness they want her to be.

Now, I don't know to what extent the Old Gods may have evolved past their original purpose, but perhaps they have never strayed from what the Void Lords made them to be, and so N'zoth might have no problem whatsoever with dying.

I've written before about how, one possibility for the expansion's end is that N'zoth dies completing the corruption of Azeroth, and we are forced to mercy kill her (maybe using the Heart of Azeroth itself) and that the next expansion could then focus on the repercussions of living on a literally dead planet - hopefully finding some way to resurrect her free of the corruption, but forcing us to brave the Shadowlands to recover the World Soul.

But a lot of this could happen without Sylvanas, and it would seem narratively wasteful not to do something with her.

One variation on the aforementioned story is that Sylvanas is the one who unilaterally decides to kill Azeroth, and that for this (necessary) crime and her many other (unnecessary) crimes, we pursue her into the Shadowlands.

One theory floating around is that N'zoth will travel to the Shadowlands, where Ny'alotha is (in this theory - its actual location is unknown,) and try to harvest the souls of the dead to resurrect C'thun and Yogg-Saron (and maybe Y'shaarj?) Part of this theory is that Sylvanas has been working with Helya (who might have died, but that's not really a big deal for someone like her, and it's already confirmed in game that she's still active) to combat the Old Gods' efforts - essentially setting up an Undead vs. Old Gods expansion in which we're with the undead.

In this case, Sylvanas' actions might be revealed as part of a greater good effort, though one wonder why she couldn't be more up front about that.

Baine's return to Thunder Bluff has set up the possibility for a major conflict at the Tauren capital. I am, however, skeptical that we'd see another raid based around a Horde capital, given that we've already ended an expansion with the Siege of Orgrimmar, and Dazar'alor is technically also a Horde capital now.

One element that has been particularly conspicuous in its absence is Wrathion, the Black Prince. Given that his warnings in Mists were about the invasion of the Burning Legion, one really has to wonder why he didn't show up at all during Legion. And now, we're seeing the occasional Blacktalon Agent scoping out Nazjatar, which means that Blizzard has certainly not forgotten about him.

Indeed, the dragons' stories seem far from exhausted. We had the Blue Dragons play a role in Azsuna, and Ysera's death was a massive climax to the story of Val'sharah. Also, the Deathlord massacred Red Dragons in the pursuit of their 7.2 class mount, so dragons in general are still an important part of WoW lore. And that's not even taking into account the fact that the first essence you can unlock with the Heart Forge is dragon-themed.

Indeed, since vanilla, one of the areas of the game that has been rumored is the Dragon Isles. There are even explicit references to it in-game as of BFA. Given the five dragonflights, the Dragon Isles would be a no-brainer continent to set an expansion on, with a zone dedicated to each flight. Set it south of Northrend along the Path of the Titans.

Given their primal connection to Azeroth and the Keepers, the dragonflights might be integral in healing or reviving the World Soul if all the previously mentioned stuff happens.

So, to my mind, there are two likely expansion settings to follow BFA.

The Shadowlands could give us a spooky, horror themed expansion in a creepy land - though I'd imagine Blizzard would find ways to break up the monotony of a bunch of different Halloween zones (perhaps leaning into the notion of a shamanistic spirit world in some areas.) Personally, because I'm multiclassed in goth (I've got like two or three levels) I'd love to see this.

The Dragon Isles is, I think, an easier thing to work with conceptually in that it would be part of Azeroth's primary physical plane and you wouldn't have to do much to justify, like, how the sky works or whatever. But I also think the connection to current events is not as obvious.

The big caveat to all of this is, of course, that I'm basically never right. I think BFA is the closest I've come, and that was with a bunch of legit leaks already out. (Humorously, I remember people who found out about BFA and concluded that we were never going to get that South Seas expansion people have been talking about since Vanilla. But when I look at Kul Tiras, Zandalar, Nazjatar, and the Island Expeditions, I have to ask: "in what way is this not that expansion?")

Anyway, I'll look forward to the various "leaks" that come out in the coming months. I'll point out that when I saw some poorly-translated leak from China claiming that we would get Demon Hunters for only Night Elves and Blood Elves, and that we'd see yet another turnover in Warchief, with Sylvanas leading the Horde this time, I called BS. Whoops! Guess I was wrong.

So Blizzard clearly knows how to zig when you expect them to zag. For example, after the Legion-heavy stuff at the end of Warlords, I expected them to go a different direction and focus on Azshara. So for the same reason, I think it's not unreasonable that they might have BFA be the "subtly Old God-themed" expansion while the follow-up will be the real Black Empire one.

Blizzcon is in November, I think, but that means it's only about three months away. Get the red yarn and cork boards ready!

Questionably Evergreen Mechanics in WoW

I don't remember if Blizzard uses this term, but in Magic the Gathering, there is a term the designers use called "evergreen" when referring to mechanics that appear in the game. (By the way, their lead designer Mark Rosewater's weekly article "Making Magic," which he has been writing for over a decade, is really, really interesting if you have any interest in how game design works. Seriously some of the most insightful and entertaining reading out there.)

Magic, like WoW, is an iterative game. In Magic, the company comes out periodically with new sets of cards, often introducing a new chapter in the story, setting things on a new world, and then introducing gameplay mechanics that reflect the themes that they're exploring. Take Ravnica, probably their most popular setting (so popular that they made an official crossover with Dungeons and Dragons - which is also made by Wizards of the Coast - with an official sourcebook for running D&D campaigns set in Ravnica,) which was born out of the idea of making a set that encouraged players to build decks out of two of the five colors - thematic and ideological divisions within the core mechanics of the game. Ravnica built its world around these two-color combinations, imagining a world ruled and fought over by ten mega-powerful guilds - representing each two-color combination.

In Ravnica, each guild was given a keyword ability - a mechanic that is given a shorthand name when it appears frequently enough to warrant such a thing. (There are also "ability words" that are used similarly, but the word itself is not meant to carry the rules of the mechanic within it, but instead point out that the mechanic described afterward is a recurring one.)

Magic has many different types of cards, but probably the most common are creatures - representing anything from human soldiers to massive dragons to semi-real illusionary monsters, all that the player has "summoned" to fight for them. Many keyword abilities are found specifically on creatures, though others will appear on different kinds of cards.

I'd argue that the quintessential keyword ability is "flying." In Magic, when combat begins once a turn, the player whose turn it is chooses a number of creatures they control and declares them as attackers. The defending player then can select creatures they control and assign them to these attackers as blockers. The creatures then assign combat damage to whatever they're hitting, and creatures potentially die and players lose life when they take damage.

Flying is a very easy-to-understand mechanic because one can visualize it. A flying creature can only be blocked by a creature with flying. Naturally, your soaring dragon is just going to fly over the zombie your opponent controls and get to its target. But if your opponent attacks with their zombies, your dragon can easily swoop down and intercept the zombie's advance.

Flying has been in-game since the very beginning, and has appeared in every single card set.

Now, speaking of Ravnica, we can look at a mechanic called Transmute. Each of the guilds in that setting got their own ability (either a keyword or an ability word) and in the first set, the Blue/Black guild House Dimir got Transmute. This allowed you to pay a cost and discard the card with the ability to search your deck (called the Library in Magic) for a card that cost the same to cast. For a guild that was built around secrets and gathering information, it was thematically appropriate.

But while Flying has been and probably always will be found in every set, Transmute was short-lived. Strong or not, the mechanic didn't pop as inherently intuitive or fabulously popular, and so we haven't seen it since then - even in sets that returned to Ravnica and its ten-guild structure.

Now, to pull a bit of an Alice's Restaurant here, I'm not here to talk about Magic. I'm here to talk about WoW.

Just as Magic has card sets that come out in annual blocks, WoW has a two-year expansion cycle. While we are playing the same characters we have been since 2004 (potentially - your Lightforged Draenei Monk might have been very rare in vanilla WoW) there is this cycle in which everyone is basically brought down to zero by raising the level cap and having us do new quests, run new dungeons and raids, and undergo a new cycle of gear progression before we can be the god-slaying badasses we had been previously.

Stuff that had been previously very important, like maxing your acquisition of veiled argunite, is now rendered totally irrelevant.

Some mechanics do involve this sort of a soft reset while remaining basically the same. Reputation, for example, is not lost when one outlevels an expansion's content, but the addition of new reputations means that even if I'm exalted with everyone from Northrend to the Broken Isles, I'm still starting at neutral with whatever factions I'll encounter in late summer or fall of 2020.

Thus, reputation is an evergreen mechanic. Indeed, any iterative game needs evergreen mechanics for it to feel like the same game. If Blizzard were to announce that classes, as a thing, were no longer going to be a part of WoW, it wouldn't be World of Warcraft anymore. It's not apparent how such a transition could even work.

But there are mechanics that are introduced and then left aside when we move on.

Take Scenarios in Mists of Pandaria. While the technology has been used to more effectively allow for big set-piece quests that used to be handled with Phasing (see the Battle of Undercity - or rather don't, because you haven't been able to do that quest since 4.0,) in Mists Scenarios were presented as an alternative to dungeons - being role-agnostic, unlike dungeons that required the standard 1-3-1 mix of tanks, dps, and healers. While the rewards were just randomized and often not great, it was far, far quicker to queue up for these and get a group easily.

But then they went away. Today, we have Island Expeditions, which are, secretly, basically just scenarios, but where the "game" of the scenario is always the same, just in different environments.

But in Warlords and Legion, we had nothing like this 3-player quick gameplay option.

Of course, mechanics and content are sometimes blurred.

Suramar was the most sophisticated max-level zone we've seen in WoW (granted, there was little precedent - the Vale of Eternal Blossoms was the only other such zone to appear in an X.0 patch.) While the zone was not really new in any mechanical way - it had quests like any other zone, and some quests were unlocked by increasing your reputation with the associated faction, similar to Operation Shieldwall or the Dominance Offensive in 5.1 - it seemed to signal a new commitment to long-term, story based content that we'd get after hitting the level cap, when in previous expansions we've tended to simply shift focus to running and re-running instances to gear up.

Perhaps not a mechanic, exactly, but Suramar seemed like an evergreen concept's first iteration. However, even starting in Legion's later patches, with the introduction of Argus, and certainly in BFA's endgame, we've instead tended to get short-term story quests that can be played through in just a week or two, which primarily just serves to introduce areas designed for repeatable content like world quests, dungeons, and raids.

I do wonder if they'll ever do something like Suramar again. I certainly hope they do (and hopefully have a follow-up that is less frustrating for one faction - I know that any player who went through Suramar would feel that they'd earned some personal loyalty from Thalyssra and crew, but allowing Alliance players to have that whole experience only for the Nightborne to join the Horde felt... not great.)

Meanwhile, there are other mechanics that are perhaps more surprising to see returning.

In Warlords of Draenor, the Garrison was pitched with the concept that players had to establish an outpost and recruit allies. While mechanically they couldn't prevent people from going back and forth from Draenor to the rest of the world, story-wise one was meant to be isolated and cut off from support. Additionally, by this point players had been through so much that they were starting to get respect as powerful members of their factions. As such, the idea was that you were actually the ranking member of your faction on Draenor, there to serve the High King or the Warchief directly.

So sending people out on missions made sense.

Mechanically, however, it was a bit dull. And especially given the dearth of really rewarding content in Warlords, and the fact that you could attain raid-quality gear simply by sending followers out on missions, the mechanic is sort of a perfect example of what didn't work about Warlords.

So it was perhaps shocking to see Legion bring the mechanic back. Legion scaled it back significantly, and pointedly made sure that, rather than giving you actual gear, it would instead give you items that pushed you to run content and then give you bonus gear as a reward.

It worked a hell of a lot better, and fixed some of the problems with the original system.

But was it fun? And did it deserve to return in BFA? Is this a mechanic that is actually worthy of being an evergreen part of WoW?

The only real effect that it has is that players can now engage with their WoW game remotely via mobile apps. The mission table system is simple enough to work on an app.

But does that make it good? And worthy?

I sometimes think that Blizzard has a problem of coming up with really good solutions to problems that don't exist. Take the profession buildings you could make for your garrisons. These were meant to allow you to more efficiently craft things with your professions. They even added a mine and an herb garden where you could, daily, reliably get a bunch of resources for most of the professions (leatherworkers and tailors still had to go outside the house, even if they'd get more stuff using the Barn.)

But to make the efficiency of, say, the Engineering Works feel more useful, they then came up with this limitation on professions by having some material that every other recipe would require be limited to a once-a-day production. You could make your Truesteel or whatever the hell it was for Blacksmithing, but simply using the profession would mean that it would take a very long time to simply make a sword. And even getting the recipe for that sword would also mean grinding out some currency that was similarly time-locked.

So now, phew, there was a problem that this great solution could help solve. The Blacksmithing Hut would now let you make more Truesteel over time.

Which wouldn't be a problem if you could just make as much Truesteel as you had the materials for (I might be getting the name wrong, but whatever.)

In Legion, we got artifact weapons. Here's what I loved about artifact weapons - they each had a story to them, and were built to have an iconic appearance. You could unlock new appearances that played with that iconic look, keeping the fundamental aspects of it (usually) while changing elements of it. The Ashbringer, for example, always had that sort of disk of light and the Lordaeron L as part of its crossguard, but you could have a version made of fire, or one seemingly corrupted by the Scourge.

They also came with a sort of talent tree, but to begin with, this was something you'd just fill out eventually. It allowed them to add a new resource - artifact power - that was sort of a godsend for the designers.

As a generic currency that players would always want more of, it was an easy thing that could be tacked on as a reward to any activity they came up with.

In BFA, we got the Heart of Azeroth, which took this idea from artifact weapons, but while we got exciting visuals and world-building storytelling with our weapons, the Heart of Azeroth is nothing but a McGuffin with no history and clearly no real world-building implications associated with it. And every character has, essentially, the same one.

But we now have things like Island Expeditions and lots of World Quests that are built around the idea of gathering this resource.

It seems clear to me that Islands were something Blizzard was excited about. Given that this is the big High Seas expansion, it made sense to go raiding remote islands for treasure. But how to motivate people to do this when they could be running dungeons or raids or doing world quests?

Azerite power (which they renamed artifact power given that it was mechanically so similar) became the solution.

But should this be an evergreen mechanic? Should every WoW expansion henceforth have mission tables and artifact power to grind?

Personally, I don't think so. I loved artifact weapons, and the fact that I managed to get the mage tower challenge appearance on Truthguard is a big gaming accomplishment for me (I am disappointed I didn't get it on any other artifacts.) The mechanic on its own is not really that compelling, and served more to reinforce the thrill of having these legendary (well, beyond legendary if we're talking item quality) items at our disposal.

Basically, just as Transmute sort of worked for House Dimir, artifact power worked for the Ashbringer. But that doesn't mean we need to have it all the time.

Do We Win the Battle for Azeroth?

It's pretty obvious that the title of the current WoW expansion is a play on words. Yes, the Alliance and Horde are fighting for supremacy on the world of Azeroth, but the true battle is for the fate of the Titan Azeroth, and whether she survives the damage she has sustained since Sargeras plunged his sword into her.

As a side note: I know that not every character can be a master schemer - this isn't Dune - but I do sort of wish/hope that Sargeras was cleverer. Legion was my favorite WoW expansion (it's been close to a year since Legion ended but it still feels weird to say that after considering Wrath the hands-down best for so long) but I do feel somewhat cheated out of a full-on fight with Sargeras himself, and frustrated that he only appeared in his full glory during the post-final-boss cinematic. That Sargeras stabbing the planet would just serve the Old Gods' purpose is... I don't know, maybe it's ok. Sargeras is allergic to thinking things through anyway.

I think the Alliance/Horde war is a distraction, ultimately. Even with full-on warfare going, we're already seeing even figures like Jaina, who post-Theramore (really post-Divine Bell incident) has been on the hawk side of the Alliance, deciding that they're going to need to end this conflict and find some peaceful balance given the bigger threats.

It seems that the real question is what will happen to Azeroth, the Titan.

(Other side note: while coming up with my homebrew D&D setting, I decided that the world the players lived on was actually the physical body of one of the proto-god creators of that universe - this was not long before Chronicle Volume 1 came out, so I guess that the folks at Blizzard and I were having similar ideas. Also, we both renamed the Shadowfell the Shadowlands.)

Now, we've been told that empowering the Heart of Azeroth is how we're going to save her, but at the end of the Eternal Palace, we find that instead, it has been used to unlock the seals on N'zoth's prison. Magni has been mislead.

One wonders - was the Heart of Azeroth ever going to help fix the world? And then one has darker worries - has Magni simply been hearing N'zoth whispering to him the whole time?

I'd argue that he probably has been hearing the real Azeroth at least some of the time, given that he shows a similar ability to hear Argus (another critique for Legion - we never really understood exactly what Antorus did for the Legion.)

But what we've been doing this expansion is clearly not entirely good and healthy for Azeroth.

The Titan is dying. Sargeras' sword caused a life-threatening wound. Now, maybe that's been fixed for the most part, but now we have another problem to deal with - for the first time since the Titans ordered the planet, an Old God is loose upon the world.

Now, the Old Gods were not sent there to kill Azeroth. That was Sargeras' initial plan, and while he clearly flirted with the idea of instead converting her to his cause, his final act before his imprisonment looks like a last-ditch effort to kill Azeroth like he did Telongrus (which I'm assuming would also be the name of the Titan who was so thoroughly void-corrupted... it's where Void Elves have their little home base, on fragments of the world destroyed by Sargeras)

The Old Gods are supposed to pump the Titan full of void in the hopes of creating a Void Titan that would spread their madness across the cosmos.

With N'zoth loose, he is probably better-suited than ever to accomplish that goal.

Which raises an interesting question:

What if we don't save Azeroth?

What if we kill her?

Sargeras wanted to destroy all of creation (though mission-creep might have changed his goals to more of a vision of an intergalactic empire of demons) to deprive the void of things to corrupt. What if we realize that we're going to have to do a far more limited version of that.

If Azeroth is corrupted, we might have to destroy her.

And if the World-Soul at the heart of a planet is dead, what does that then mean?

There are a lot of foreshadowing hints that the Shadowlands will play a major role in the next expansion, possibly even be its setting.

If a World-Soul dies, but the world is intact, could that manifest as a massive explosion of death energy? Might we see the Shadowlands become far more powerful, and might we see the undead raging across the world?

And could that be Sylvanas' plan all along?

Sylvanas has decided at this point that she wants to convert all of humanity into the undead. She's started making undead Night Elves as well. If she wants everything united (preferably under her control) as undead, might she even want Azeroth herself to be undead?

Showdown at Teh Hevuarga, Take Two

For the first time, I ran an adventure a second time.

I wrote about the first time I ran this before, but now I've run it with a different group of players, with the same ultimate result (they won, in a hard-fought bout.)

Anyway, it was interesting to see how these players did things differently.

The premise of the adventure is that of a wild west showdown (though ironically, the lawless frontier in the nation of Nephimala is actually in the east) in which the party needs to find a safe place to keep a young aasimar girl and the half-orc nun accompanying her while the party scouts out the town of Teh Hevuraga looking for allies and staying wary of secret gang members who wish to capture the girl and sacrifice her to the infernal powers that lead the Red Rattler Gang.

The first party did a lot of work to meet all the major figures in the town, while the second never explored the Temple of Coran (God of Glory and Heroism) or the local brothel - which is actually where the first group chose to keep the girl during the fight.

Neither group used the dynamite they could buy. Also neither group figured out the owner of the general store (who sold the dynamite) was a Rattler. Both did chase the card-cheat out of town, though neither figured out he was also a member of the gang.

The Sheriff's deputy, who is the third and final town resident with the gang, had very different fates in the two runs. The first time, the tiefling bard seduced him, got him to warn her to leave town before Galero (a Barbed Devil) and his crew showed up, and then tied him up so he couldn't flee. The second group did not suspect him and he wound up shooting the sheriff in the middle of the fight, only for good old Sheriff Tom Clauron to turn around and blow his head off.

Anyway, I think there's tweaking to be done - maybe incentivize the party to explore the town a bit before sundown. I was also a little disappointed that neither group reinforced the doors or buried dynamite in the road to use as a trap. A single stick could potentially take out or at least severely injure one of the eight regular gang members (and half of them are carrying dynamite themselves, which would go off an almost certainly kill them in the chain reaction.) Maybe it needs to be clearer that they can do these sorts of things.

Would They Ever Do Another Cataclysm?

Cataclysm was... different from the previous expansions. And to a large extent, it was different from what came after as well. Each expansion has brought with it a large new continent for us to explore, but Cataclysm was largely about finally revealing certain zones we'd always wondered about - Uldum, Mount Hyjal, Grim Batol (which to be fair was just the dungeon capping Twilight Highlands.)

But Cataclysm's endgame, which is what sustains a WoW expansion for most of its lifetime, was anemic.

I think the disappointment with Cataclysm has been a bit overshadowed by the disappointment over Warlords of Draenor (while I wasn't crazy about its initial patch, I think the jury is still out on BFA,) but its endgame was a letdown after Wrath of the Lich King. For one, Blizzard responded to worries that Wrath had been too easy by blasting the difficulty way higher, which crippled a lot of the more casual raiding guilds that had sprung up during Wrath. But there also just wasn't a lot there, in comparison to what came before.

However, Cataclysm was nonetheless a monumental effort in design. Initially using Deathwing's rampage across the world as an excuse to rebuild the old world for flight, Blizzard also decided to revamp a few quests here and there, which snowballed into a massive redesign of the entire vanilla leveling experience, and one that now, hilariously, creates an odd world in which we're stuck in this strange state where it seems like the Cataclysm is the most pressing matter only for players to then travel to Outland and Northrend, before any of that happened. (And for your Void Elf, it's pretty odd considering your race didn't even exist yet.)

So there's a rumor going around that 9.0 will see a profound change to the game world - the end of the faction conflict. I've written before about what form that might take, but one thing I hadn't even really considered was that, if they were to really do that for real, it might require an alteration more profound than simply flipping a few switches on who can interact with whom.

Might we instead see another revamp to the game world, only this time it would not simply be to allow flight (though maybe adding Quel'thalas and the 'Myst Isles to the existing continents?) but to allow players of either faction to travel lands that were once forbidden to them?

I mean, my Undead Rogue has been back to Stormwind since he died (see the Legion Rogue class campaign and mount quest) but, while I don't RP in-game, I think he'd be profoundly moved if he were able to walk the streets of Stormwind freely once again.

But this raises a few questions:

First, what does this mean for endgame? Cataclysm's suffered for it. Blizzard keeps talking about how the team is bigger than it used to be, but will that be enough? Legion, to be fair, felt pretty huge as expansions go. BFA... is big in some ways and disappointingly thin in others.

Second, one of the big appeals of WoW Classic is that they're restoring the version of WoW that existed prior to Cataclysm (and yes, also Wrath and BC - so no Blood Elves, Draenei, or Death Knights.) Cataclysm came out in 2010, which means that 9.0 will be coming out about ten years later - almost twice the 6-year period between Vanilla and its revamp. Might people not have developed a nostalgia for the Cataclysm version of the world? Granted, this might not be a problem if they just use Bronze Dragon characters to allow both versions to exist in-game.

Third, after all the work done developing war mode, how will world PvP work? Will you opt in to a group of separatists who aren't into this whole lovey-dovey "oh well, I guess the War in Warcraft will have to refer to the wars against the Old Gods, Legion, Scourge, Sha, or other thousand threats this world faces" cooperation brigade. (Side note: I hate it when people say that ending the faction conflict would mean it's not War-craft anymore. Ahem.)

Obviously we won't know for certain what comes after BFA until Blizzcon on November 1st. But they've surprised us in the past, and while my initial reaction to these rumors was strong skepticism, I could be wrong.

Eternal Palace End Cinematic

Big spoilers:

With the Eternal Palace now open, we know what happens after the raid.

But just in case you were worried about spoilers, here's a cut!

Possibilities for a Faction Merge

BFA is theoretically promised to "resolve the faction conflict." Given that, one wonders to what extent the folks at Blizzard are willing to actually do that.

There are a lot of ways things could go, and conservatively, one might assume that the fight will simply end in terms of story - we'll get an uneasy peace like we had in Warlords of Draenor or Vanilla through sort of the first couple zones of Wrath.

But that's boring and frankly I don't think it will be enough for players who are really tired of the constant "I must fight against the evil other, despite the fact that I've time and time again been reminded of how they're just people trying to get along in a difficult world" see-saw.

Let's imagine instead that we see a radical shift in the game - allowing players of the different factions to play together.

What forms could this take? I can imagine a couple scenarios. Let's go through them:

Mechanically Only:

Technically this exists already with Ashran, where players of the opposite faction can go in disguise as a member of their enemy's faction - not as spies, but really more as traitorous mercenaries.

Really it was just a solution to allow Ashran to meets its design goal - a continuous open-world PvP zone, not gated by specific battle times like Wintergrasp or Tol Barad, and allowing players to come and go as they please. To address balance, they allowed this crossover.

For player convenience, it wouldn't be terribly hard to implement this system for the whole game - much as players become members of the other faction for three bosses in Dazar'alor, even gaining new racial abilities, you could simply do that and allow players to basically temporarily race-change so they can play with friends.

But given that this change seems to be built into the story, I doubt that such a change would be relegated to a mechanical-only solution.

Opt-In:

This version might be the most complex to actually implement, and runs the risk of dividing up players even more.

Essentially, in this scenario, you would make a choice for a character (either permanent, in which case all my characters would obviously opt in, or reversible, in which I might consider the RP implications for the way I've conceived my characters' individual personalities) and that would put you among the people who have, officially, set aside the faction conflict in the interest of working together to fight the real threats to life on Azeroth.

Where this could get complicated is how you divide opt-in versus opt-out people. If your group leader is opted in, and they invite that Troll shaman to your party, but you don't heal trolls ("let them regenerate if they're hurt so bad!" you snarkily remark while your healing spells simply don't work on them,) what does that mean? Would you have to effectively make a third faction, where if you're a die-hard "Death to the Alliance" Hordie you can't group with your more enlightened brethren in case they bring along their new Draenei buddy?

A third faction, under the same restrictions that exist now, would just divide players even further. Despite that fact, I think that something akin to this - the idea of an opt-in system - is actually the most plausible - probably with some workaround that maybe allows the group leader to designate how open the party is to members of the other faction, and even if you'd normally not be able to heal that Troll, your group leader has told you it's ok, and that you should.

Universal:

This is maybe more plausible than the previous one, actually. In this case, everyone can group with everyone, and maybe they just broaden War Mode and, more precisely, the absence of War Mode. After all, if you're not playing in War Mode, you don't want to fight the other side. And if you don't want to fight them, why shouldn't you be able to toss a friendly healing spell or group up to take down some bad guys?

Total Dissolution of Factions:

This is the most radical take, and would very likely not really work for older content. But in this case, both sides of the entire game would open up to you. You could stroll from Stromwind to Orgrimmar and have friendly conversations with the guards in both cities.

Obviously, older content would get very tricky here. Consider how, for example, some quest mobs for Horde quests are friendly targets for Alliance players. An Alliance character wouldn't be able to do those quests, and similarly, a Horde player who is friends with the Alliance shouldn't be able to kill them either.

This could of course be handled by just grandfathering in old content and simply having the future of the game portrayed as one in which all settlements and cities are simply neutral territory. Honestly, it wouldn't look all that different from the Broken Isles (minus parts of Stormheim.)

It's really going into older content where this would start to be weird.

Getting Along

I think the most important mechanical change to a post-conflict world would be the ability to group up with players from the other faction for things like raids and dungeons. How we arrive at that, if we do, remains to be seen.

I do think that there needs to be a way for players to keep the faction divide going, especially after all the work they've put into War Mode as a new gameplay mechanic.

But in terms of story, and for a game that's 15 years old and does not have the 12 million players it had at the end of Wrath, I do really think that the game needs to allow individuals to set aside the faction conflict and cooperate with the other heroes of Azeroth.

Super Mario Maker 2

Not realizing it was out yet, I did something I very rarely do, which is that I impulse-purchased Super Mario Maker 2.

So far I've only worked on one course, but like the previous iteration, this game feels like a "staple" one simply has to have if one has a Switch.

Probably the biggest addition is that there's now a "story mode" that encourages you to play through courses to earn coins to rebuild Peach's castle. I don't know how deep this will get, but my sense is that it's primarily to introduce possibilities and concepts for your own levels.

Naturally a lot of people will be building the most absurdly difficult levels possible, but I've always striven to create levels that are beatable but have something clever going on - not that I know whether I succeed at that.

I actually don't know off the top of my head if the Switch can use a stylus - on the Wii U, that was the main way you interfaced with Mario Maker when building courses. My brief experience controlling it via joystick has been not quite as refined, but perhaps that just requires getting used to it.

Like the previous game, you can make courses in original SMB style, SMB3, SMW, and New Super Mario Bros, but they've also added a Super Mario 3D world variant - which is kind of a kludge, as it's still 2D, but uses a lot of new assets that didn't exist in the other games, like glass pipes and trees that you can climb in cat form.

Additionally, there are more world-themes, so you can have deserts, forests, underwater levels, and snow levels.

I'm eager to make some fun new courses!

Who is Playing the Game Best?

In a lot of ways, I think the frustrations I have with the way the Alliance story is told is that they've made the entire faction into Ned Starks - capable in combat, but far too quick to trust, with no real schemers amongst them.

As it stands, I see three potential chessmasters at work in BFA: Azshara, N'zoth, and Sylvanas.

Let's start with Azshara, given that we're dealing with her right now:

Azshara is personally very powerful. She's generally considered the most powerful mage on Azeroth, making Jaina or Khadgar look like novices. On top of that, she's been in power for well over ten thousand years. Her people adore her, as they did when they were all Night Elves. It almost seems as if she has some magical ability to influence people beyond her personal charisma.

We know that 8.2 starts with Azshara drawing the Horde and Alliance fleets into a trap, wrecking them in the drained-for-now Nazjatar.

Azshara has been known to ally herself with powerful evil entities when it suits her - first she welcomed Sargeras, considering a Titan the only one worth to be her consort. But when Zin-Azshari, not to mention most of the world, began to flood, she made a deal with N'zoth, transforming her people into the Naga so that they could survive beneath the waves.

In Azshara's Warbringers short, the interaction seems like one in which she talks her way from drowning with her empire in ruins all around her to becoming the queen of a new empire and a new race. She makes a bold move, bluffing (or maybe just choosing death over servitude) N'zoth so that it will save her on her terms.

She has fiercely loyal subjects and a lot of arcane power at her disposal. But is she actually a master schemer?

See, I could be wrong, but my read of the Warbringers short is that N'zoth made her think she'd won the negotiation. We'll get to N'zoth, but particularly the moment when Azshara is underwater, smugly smirking, only for a look of panic to gradually grow on her face before N'zoth fulfills his end of the bargain and transforms her (in a manner that seems extremely painful.)

See, Azshara is defined by her arrogance. Yes, she's powerful. And one gets the sense that basically no one ever says no to her. Which means that, while she might be a brilliant mind at the arcane, she probably thinks she's smarter than she is.

Comparing Azshara to N'zoth, my money is on N'zoth being the one whose plan is deeper and ahead of everyone else.

Here's the thing: we know less about N'zoth. We barely every interact with him (it... I'm going to use male pronouns given that the game does and his voice actor is a man, even though Old Gods are very clearly something outside of what we understand as gender) but what we've heard about him suggests an entity that thinks in an extremely strategic manner.

N'zoth is famous for being the weakest of the Old Gods - but also for seeming to always come on top. By weakest, one wonders what we're actually saying. My sense is that he had the smallest armies and perhaps the least powerful control of raw magic. But N'zoth's ability to outmaneuver his more powerful brethren suggests a being with a remarkable ability to play the game.

The Old Gods are beings of madness, but they have all shown themselves capable of at least some manipulation. C'thun turned the Anubisath constructs to his purposes. Y'shaarj made of his death an intractable curse. Yogg-Saron created the Curse of Flesh and the Emerald Nightmare. And N'zoth created the Naga, was probably the one to corrupt Deathwing, and even usurped the Emerald Nightmare from Yogg-Saron.

And as old as Azshara is, the Old Gods are older, and insidiousness is their very nature.

It's disturbing that N'zoth seems to be treating us heroes as his allies, even as we strive to defy him. There's something he knows that we don't.

Now, Azshara and N'zoth are allies, but one imagines that Azshara can't really suffer any being, Titan or Old God, as her superior. Does she have a plan to take the reins of the Black Empire?

I imagine she does, but I also strongly suspect that if she does, N'zoth is counting on it, and ready to do whatever it takes to use that to his advantage. Remember, N'zoth played the weak one among the Old Gods - was it that he truly was weaker, or did it just suit his purposes to be beneath the other Old Gods' notice. Of the four of them, he's the one who hasn't ever been killed in any way (and yes, the jury's still out on how dead C'thun or Yogg-Saron are, but N'zoth isn't even partially dead.)

But then there's the wildcard: Sylvanas Windrunner.

Now, to be fair, you can always make someone seem to be running the most complex schemes by simply not telling us what they're doing. It's clear Sylvanas is doing something. We've seen her capable of deception and ambush - she successfully fooled the Alliance into sending troops south to Silithus before her attack on Darkshore. It's even starting to look like the entire coup in the Undercity in which Varimathras turned against her and tried to summon the Burning Legion might have, somehow, been her doing to purge disloyal members of the Forsaken and strengthen the Horde's investment in her people. She also arranged the entire Siege of Lordaeron as a trap to decapitate the Alliance - though in this case she might have failed to account for Jaina showing up.

Sylvanas has been up to a lot this expansion, though we're currently at a stage where nothing is explicitly working for her. But there are strong implications:

First, there's my theory that Sylvanas wanted Baine to break Derek out so as to make it appear that he was freed before his mind was conditioned. Then there are the assassins she sent after Thrall - which again, could be a failure, but do you really send just two assassins to kill a legendary shaman like him? Again, it's speculation, but I think she intended to draw Thrall into the whole fray. And we still don't know what the full terms of her deal with Helya was - a being who, according to a turn-in quest from Island Expeditions, is not nearly as dead as we might have thought.

Right now, Sylvanas has sent Nathanos with the Blade of the Black Empire (no longer Xal'atath, as that entity has left the blade) to the ocean, and the last the Horde sees of him, he's walking nonchalantly into the ocean wall (as a Forsaken, he doesn't need to breath. Though I doubt my Forsaken Rogue could just walk through that wall.)

Which means what? WHICH MEANS WHAT?

Nathanos has not simply failed his mission, and that leaves us to ask what that mission is, and what Sylvanas asked him to do?

So, to put the full tin-foil hat on, I think that the Blade of the Black Empire is going to be used to trap N'zoth - not entirely unlike Frostmourne, it'll be a soul-prison, and in this case it will be a prison for an Old God.

But there are other steps in that plan (if indeed that is the plan) that we don't know.

Sylvanas has to be reckoned with in some way this expansion. I can't imagine that the "faction conflict will be resolved" if Sylvanas remains Warchief, or unless we discover that she's been doing all her horrible deeds for some greater good - though even then, I imagine Tyrande and co are not going to be in a forgiving mood.

So here's my bet: I'm counting Azshara out of the "top manipulator" competition. I think she's powerful and important, but she's the Cersei of this story, and (spoiler alert! If you somehow don't know how Game of Thrones ends by this point and care!) that means that for all her plays, it's not going to save her in the end.

N'zoth is the champ to beat - an eldritch being of unspeakable nature. But Sylvanas is pulling some master moves here, to ends that we haven't been able to discern quite yet.

And here's the bigger tin-foil thing: She's also drawing on powers that we don't fully understand.

Now yes, the Void is the main Lovecraftian, unimaginable, horrible, eldritch force in Warcraft. The Old Gods are clearly beings of cosmic horror, and that genre is all about things that you can never really beat, and generally can't even really slow down - your best bet is to hide and hope they don't notice you.

But Sylvanas is drawing on the power of Death. And we've seen in the past that Death magic doesn't seem to even play by the rules the Old Gods follow. The Lich King built a massive citadel out of an Old God's blood - blood that drives mortal insane just by being around it. But the undead? Unaffected. You go to that mine in Ymirheim, and the Val'kyr there are doing fine. There's a Faceless N'raqi who actually asks us to help him because he can't escape - the Ymirjar captain there cannot be manipulated, even as the captured miners will attack there liberators or jump into a chasm to their deaths.

The powers of Death are the ones we know the least about - like who the hell Bwonsamdi's boss is. And we know that the whispers of the Void flooding Alleria's mind beg her to kill Sylvanas because she works for the "true enemy."

Is death powerful enough that even the Old Gods fear it?

And if Sylvanas is drawing on that power, might she be able to outplay even N'zoth?

Whither Calia?

Calia Menethil, much like Tandred Proudmoore would in this expansion, jumped from apocryphal character to canonical one in Legion.

Arthas' sister, Princess Calia is theoretically the rightful Queen of Lordaeron - if such a kingdom still existed. After Arthas' turn to evil, Calia went into hiding, living as a commoner with a husband and child who would later die to the Scourge. She became a priest, and our first interaction with her is when she joins with priest players and Alonsus Faol to travel to Netherlight Temple, serving as a member of the Conclave.

In the events of the Before the Storm novel, Calia plays an interesting role that has yet to be truly paid off.

One of the big climaxes of the book (which, full disclosure, I haven't read) is the failed peace summit between humans and Forsaken. Anduin and Sylvanas make a deal to allow for a peaceful meeting between family members divided by undeath. The meeting goes well at first - some Forsaken and human relatives get along well, some argue and walk off in a huff, but no one is murdering each other, which is actually pretty good considering.

But when Calia reveals herself at this meeting, all hell breaks loose. Some of the Forsaken decide that they want to go with her to Stromgarde and return to the Alliance. Sylvanas responds to this by first shooting Calia and then all the Forsaken who came along to the summit - even those who were not defecting.

Staying true to what she technically said, she does not kill any members of the Alliance - which counts if you consider Calia to belong to the Conclave instead.

It's a moment that convinces Anduin that he's been too naive, but ironically it also convinces Genn that the Forsaken as a people are not to blame for Sylvanas' evil.

But what happens next is the really crazy part:

Anduin brings Calia's body back to Netherlight Temple, and there, with Alonsus Faol, they infuse her body with the Light in such a way that she rises from the dead - not back to true life as with the Resurrection spell (which, while it's common in-game, is presumably considered a rare miracle lorewise) - but raising her as a kind of Light-touched Undead. Reanimated by the Light, rather than Necromancy.

Since then, though, we haven't really gotten a sense of what role she has to play going forward. This seems like a massive thing to happen, but we haven't really gotten anything concrete.

However, there has been at least one subtle reference to her:

When Derek Proudmoore is returned to Jaina, she (wisely) suspects that Derek may actually be sent as a weapon against her by Sylvanas. While Baine's breaking him out of captivity seems to be foiling Sylvanas' plan, it's all a little too easy and a little too clean. Just as it's pretty clear that Matthias Shaw arranged for the guards in Redridge to conveniently be off duty as Saurfang made his way through, it seems highly likely that Baine's "liberation" of the undead Proudmoore brother was probably just the way she intended to deliver Derek to Jaina, complete with conditioned sleeper agent brainwashing.

But Jaina is suspicious of these developments, and notably we don't see Derek hanging out around Proudmoore Keep. Instead, she mentions she knows someone she thinks could help him. Could she mean Calia?

Notably, in Chronicle it says that when the Forsaken first broke free of the Scourge, they sent emissaries south to the other human kingdoms, but that those emissaries never made it to their destinations. The obvious interpretation was that the humans simply killed these walking zombie people on sight, unwilling to entertain the notion that they might not be a threat. But that interpretation might simply be the version of events the Forsaken have come to believe. And might Sylvanas (or some third party) have had them killed to ensure the Forsaken would not simply reconnect with their fellow humans?

What if Calia represents the chance for the Forsaken to be what they should have been all along? The same people they were in life, safeguarding their brethren and working to restore Lordaeron to its former glory?

Sylvanas right now seems to be a step ahead of everyone - indeed, there's a post to be written about whether N'zoth, Sylvanas, or Azshara have the upper hand in all the plots going on (which I debating writing instead of this post) - but what if Calia is a wildcard she couldn't account for?

It seems very likely to me that Derek Proudmoore is, in fact, a sleeper agent who doesn't realize he's been programmed to kill his family - but he has. Sylvanas is simply waiting until he's properly placed and then she'll pull that trigger when it hurts the Alliance the worst.

But we long to see scheming villains make a single catastrophic error, and if Calia can save Derek from his programming, it could mean Sylvanas finally playing a losing hand.

Given that the Allied Races are based on existing races, it seemed Calia's "lightbound undead" or whatever they wind up being called could easily be an Alliance version of a Horde race, not unlike the Void Elves.

But given the "Crossroads" cinematic, I'm beginning to wonder (hope) about whether Blizzard is willing to seriously relax the faction conflict aspect of the game moving past BFA.

Sylvanas has gone so far down the villain path that it seems hard to imagine her remaining the Warchief much longer. But beyond that, one also wonders if she could even remain the leader of the Forsaken.

Who would take over for her?

Nathanos is clearly her second-in-command. But Nathanos has show no sign whatsoever that he's questioned the Banshee Queen's methods. His contempt for the Alliance and general dickishness, and the fact that he's basically defined by his loyalty to Sylvanas (it's heavily implied that when they were both alive, they were a couple, because apparently Windrunners are really into human men) mean that if Sylvanas goes, Nathanos almost certainly will too.

Which leaves only, like, Lillian Voss to take over, and that seems... possible but not super likely to me.

However, if tensions between the factions give way more than they ever have before, would it be possible for Calia to come and lead the Forsaken in a manner that works given a cessation of hostilities between the factions?

This would be an enormous shift - and imply not just a truce, but a real and lasting peace between the factions. Because Calia is far more likely to align herself with Anduin than with whoever winds up running Orgrimmar.

Calia's resurrection feels like such a massive event that her absence from BFA has been extremely notable.

Now, sure, sometimes characters you'd really think should show up don't. Take Wrathion, who disappeared after Mists and missed the entire Legion invasion he was supposedly trying to help us prepare for. Now, I'm happy to report that I ran across a stealthed Blacktalon Agent in Nazjatar who essentially shushed me when I tried to talk to him, but it's true that sometimes characters you expect to show up don't wind up doing so.

Still, Calia has a role to play.

Granted, that role might not be in BFA.

It's still a big mystery how BFA will end. While I suspect that it'll finish in Ny'alotha, I don't know to what extent we're going to be seeing the Alliance/Horde plot fully resolved. Indeed, there's a possibility that Ny'alotha will actually be a whole continent for the next expansion and that we're going to go back to Sylvanas as the big bad of BFA. But we won't know for a while.

I'm still rooting for a spooky Shadowlands expansion, and Calia as both sister to Arthas and a new kind of undead entity herself would be a good character to explore in such an expansion.

For now, though, she's a name to keep an eye out for.