The Tidepriests of Kul Tiras

The other day I ran Shrine of the Storm, the dungeon in Stormsong Valley. Without getting too much into story spoilers, the dungeon is an ancient shrine where the Tidepriests of Kul Tiras (led by the local nobility, Lord Stormsong) bless Kul Tiran ships so that they can sail swiftly and safely through any ocean weather conditions. The blessings here are what make the Kul Tiran navy so special, and the Tidepriest tradition is pretty unprecedented among human cultures we've seen in WoW - halfway between a shaman and a priest.

I guess we should use a spoiler cut before we talk about what happens in the dungeon and the quests before it...


The Tidepriests have always listened for whispers from beneath the sea, which sounds pretty creepy to anyone who knows WoW lore, but the Old God connection becomes explicit later in the quests, as Tidepriests begin transforming into Kith'ir, which are about as literal a translation of Dungeons and Dragons' Mind Flayers (aka Ilithids) as Blizzard could make without getting sued (and frankly, they're similar enough that I think Wizards of the Coast might be able to do so if they chose, but tend to be laid back about their IPs - possibly there's some legal rights thing that makes it all up for grabs.) Naturally, of course, it all goes back to H. P. Lovecraft and Cthulhu, which is certainly in the public domain.

What's interesting is that there are good Tidepriests. It appears as if this Old God-corruption is considered something new, though I really have to wonder if these guys are just naive and ignorant, because the imagery and style of their tradition seems utterly saturated with Old God flavor.

Their tradition is saturated with Old God imagery - cephalopod imagery is everywhere, which, to be fair, is not uncommon in nautical cultures. But when you have very spooky shrines that look a lot like images we've seen of N'zoth, it really makes you think. Likewise, the tradition is all about listening to whispers from beneath the ocean - and we know that mysterious whispers tend to be the domain of the Old Gods.

There is even an anthropomorphized figure called the Tidemother that the priests listen for. When we get into the dungeon, Lord Stormsong has become a Kith'ir, and when we swim to the final boss (a cool riff on the old Herald Vol'azj fight from Ahn-Kahet) the Faceless ones talk specifically about serving Azshara - indeed, when we kill the final boss, Azshara gives us the classic "enjoy this victory, it will be your last" speech.

So it seems as if Azshara has corrupted the Kul Tiran tradition to introduce Old God corruption into Kul Tiran society. This makes me seriously start to wonder if, rather than Nazj'atar, we might actually be fighting Azshara in Kul Tiras.

But one thing I find kind of fascinating is the idea that maybe the tradition has always been corrupted.

See, while it's all well and good to have evil cults infiltrating established societies, if you want to get the true cosmic horror tone, it's a lot creepier when it's not the outsider, the other that is corrupted, but something you've built your entire society around.

We know that the Kul Tirans were originally Gilnean colonists who arrive on the island to build their new society. There was another ethnic group here called the Drust. It's left a little ambiguous what the Drust were - some flashbacks in Drustvar suggest that they were actually human, though that could also be thanks to placeholder models for some other race - indeed, the only actual Drust figure we ever hear about is their leader, Gorak Tul.

Now, the narrative that Kul Tiras gives us is that they came and settled far from the Drust, intending to share the island, but that the Drust attacked them using Death Magic and barbaric violence, which ended with the early Kul Tirans wiping the Drust out.

It's not impossible that this is the case, but on the other hand, doesn't this seriously sound like history being written by the winners? Perhaps the only reason the Drust turned to this death magic was because of the colonizing invaders? What if the Drust weren't getting along with their fellow humans because they knew that there was something off about them.

Now clearly, if Old God corruption had always been present in Kul Tiran society, it has been subtle. We've seen other examples of such corruption totally transform societies into dystopian nightmares. Yet Kul Tiras is certainly not that. Plenty of people there seem more or less ordinary.

But could that be because there's a subtle hand behind it all?

Azshara has been beneath the ocean since the Sundering - presumably long before the founding of Kul Tiras. While having a bunch of N'raqi hanging around a group of people is probably going to drive them nuts just by virtue of the faceless one's presence, Azshara is clever and capable of subtlety. If she thinks the humans are a threat, why not gradually sink her claws into a new human nation, make the other humans rely on them for their grand navy - a navy that uses magic that she taught them.

After all, who else could be the Tidemother?

It's not just the evil Tidepriests who talk of whispers, of the Tidemother, and who use bells to capture the souls of the dead. These priests use this soul-trapping to send the dead into the ocean, which they consider a good and proper afterlife. But what if they're actually just funneling souls to N'zoth, and they just didn't realize it?

What a catastrophic thing to discover, that your entire proud nation was built on the lies of a eldritch monstrosities?

Of course, one of the major themes of WoW is the way that the mortal races use the very curses and corruptions that supernatural evils foisted upon them to do great things. The Horde was created to be the Legion's battering ram, and yet now it is one of the two major factions that brought the Legion to its knees. The Lich King imbued the Knights of the Ebon Blade with necromantic power, only to see those knights turn on him in defense of the world. Might Kul Tiras take those blessing imparted upon them by the Old Gods and use them to strike at the very heart of N'zoth?