The Shadowlands looks like it will be the most otherworldly expansion WoW has ever done. Even though we have traveled to other planets, even other timelines, and we have had the occasional foray into other planes of existence, Shadowlands appears, so far, to take place entirely in a place that is not even really another "location" but a different type of place one can be.
I've commented in the past about how Blizzard is often vague about the afterlife in the Warcraft cosmos. We've encountered ghosts and spirits of the dead who have come to visit us, and of course we've seen figures like Cenarius and Medivh seem to come back from death fully alive again.
Initially, I assumed the Shadowlands would be much as the Emerald Dream has been presented - as a sort of shadow of the physical world. Indeed, it seemed implied that when we were in our ghost form after dying, and going to retrieve our bodies, we were, in fact, in the Shadowlands.
That may have been the original conception of the place, but in this expansion, the idea is getting profoundly expanded.
In D&D, there are three... places, categories of places, whatever, that we can compare the Shadowlands to.
First, there's the Shadowfell, which is the sort of shadowy opposite of the Feywild. The Feywild is a land of fairies, the original elves, and cruel hags, which are a sort of monstrous race of witches ("Green Hags" are the classic green-skinned witch with a cauldron and such). The key is that the Feywild is bursting with emotion, where emotions and dreams take the form of living creatures. Meanwhile, the Shadowfell is a land of gloomy bleakness, filled with the undead, where the emotional color of the world has been sapped (I like to think that the Dark Souls games essentially take place in the Shadowfell).
(Actually, it occurs to me that you could think of the Feywild as manic and the Shadowfell as depressive.)
Another comparison to make is with the Ethereal Plane. The Ethereal Plane is one of two "transitive planes," and in most games doesn't really have much going on in it specifically, instead serving as a way to get from one place to another, or to simply get around some things on the material plane. However, depending on the writer/DM, the Ethereal Plane can get a bit more complex. First off, ghosts can travel on the ethereal plane, and the way that they pass through objects and fade in and out of existence is that they're actually transitioning to and from the ethereal plane.
The Ethereal is divided into the Border Ethereal, which is basically like the material plane but hazy and invisible. The Deep Ethereal, though, is where things get a bit more complex. This is where other major locations can be found, including the Fugue plane, which is a sort of stop the souls of the dead visit before being sent to their appropriate afterlife. In fact, the Eberron setting, originally conceived to be its own multiverse cosmos, was later retconned to exist as a sort of bubble of more mundane reality inside the Deep Ethereal, along with its own alternate planes, to unify the D&D cosmos.
Finally, we get to the Outer Planes, which are where D&D's most extreme and many of its most powerful entities come from. The Outer Planes are the worlds of the gods, and it's also where angels, devils, demons, and other powerful "outsiders" are from. It's here that the souls of the dead are sent off once they have been judged in the fugue plane. A chaotic evil person who dies might be sent off to the Abyss and transform into a minor demon, with the potential (albeit very low chance) to brutally grow in power and transform into more powerful demonic forms.
From what we've seen of Shadowlands, it looks like they're borrowing a few of these ideas.
First off, I'm still convinced that the "ghost realm" we use in game is a sort of "Border Shadowlands." Given that some Death Knight-themed quests take us into the "realm of shadows," which works like that, not to mention those involving the val'kyr and spirit healers, it seems likely that the Shadowlands have a similar "border" and "deep" divide, and that prior to Shadowlands the expansion, we've primarily seen the "border" regions (though I think Helheim and maybe the Halls of Valor might be Deep Shadowlands realms - Thros, also, maybe).
Admittedly, other than being sort of presented as an opposite to the Emerald Dream, there's less tying it to the Shadowfell (indeed, unless they seriously revamp their concept of the Emerald Dream, I'm not sure it even makes sense to consider them mirrors of one another. Ardenweald itself feels more like the mirror for the Dream. Perhaps we'll find out that the Emerald Dream is just one of a number of "Lightlands?")
The Outer Planes, though, also feel like a strong fit for the Shadowlands... sort of. The diversity of the realms of the Shadowlands enforces this notion, not to mention that it's where the dead wind up after they've died.
However, it's also not quite the same. As far as I know, we're not going to find the true homes of the gods - though that beings said, Warcraft has always been very cagey with what, exactly, qualifies as a god. Elune, as far as I know, is the only 100% god in the setting, though the Titans, the Loa, the Ancients, the Old Gods (it's even in the name) and more seem to vie for that title.
The other thing is that the entities we're finding in the Shadowlands are not the usual "outsiders" we've faced before. The Twisting Nether isn't the Shadowlands, and the Titans seem to be from the physical plane, rather than some Olympus-like other plane (even though they have a very Olympian space-citadel where we fought Argus).
What I'm very curious to discover is what, exactly, the people of the Shadowlands are like. We'll be going to these different realms where death doesn't really mean what it means to us. Is everything we meet there technically undead? Or perhaps undeath isn't even a possibility given that undeath would seem to require the dead to be returned from the land of the dead?
We heard a bit about soul-traders visiting the city of Oribos, but what sort of people are we expecting to see there?
In Planescape, there are humanoids who are from the Outer Planes (and in fact, they tend to look down on "Primes," or those from the Prime Material Plane). Are we going to meet humanoids in the Shadowlands? And if we do, what is life like for them?
This is WoW we're talking about, and thus I'm sure we'll be killing monsters. So what happens when you kill a monster in the afterlife? Does it just, like, wake up later?
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