One of the biggest questions I've had regarding the WoW book for D&D is what a single sourcebook can possibly cover amongst the elements of a 22-year-old MMORPG, one with eleven expansions, each of which brought with it zones with their own questlines, dungeons, and patches that act as kind of mini-expansions.
While the folks from Blizzard and WotC have pitched this book as allowing you to create adventures in any era of WoW, up to the present day (last week, patch 12.1, the second major phase of the Midnight expansion, just launched) I truly don't think that you could possibly cover every plot thread and worldbuilidng element that has shown up in the game in a single book. But beyond that, I'm also inclined to believe that you couldn't really cover every single expansion without giving short shrift to all of them.
So, what are the essentials?
This is a subjective question, but I'll give my opinion. Essentially, what are the expansions that had a giant impact on the overall world, and what elements within them do I think would be essential to fleshing out the world.
Vanilla (aka "World of Warcraft"):
Not an expansion, but the original game. This is an obvious one, and necessary to lay the groundwork. Blizzard was new at making an MMO, but WoW became popular in large part due to the focus on storytelling through questing (where a lot of older MMOs were explicitly grindy). Anyway, we establish the home territories of the Alliance and Horde and the conflicts they find themselves in. If there is anything guaranteed to be covered in this book, it's the overall continents of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. And we'll have elements about the lingering impact of the Third War, from the Scourge to the Burning Legion's devastation of northern Kalimdor, then probably something about the Black Dragonflight and the devotees of Ragnaros, the Firelord.
The Burning Crusade:
WoW's first expansion feels, at least in retrospect, like it was continuing to just flesh out the world. The world of Outland, formerly called Draenor, is a big part of Warcraft lore because it is here that the Orcs come, and where the Horde was originally founded. But BC also established the lands of Quel'thalas (which is also the centerpiece of Midnight) as well as giving us the Draenei (well, an updated version of them that involved an accidental retcon, but boy I'm glad they did because I love the Draenei). Again, I suspect that a lot of the elements of this expansion will be there in the book.
Wrath of the Lich King:
Among the most popular expansions, Wrath both featured Warcraft's most iconic villain, Arthas Menethil (not the original Lich King, but the most notable one) and also did a lot to establish the lore of the Titans, god-like beings who brought order to Azeroth and also created a number of beings who would be the ancestors of a lot of the playable races (or in the case of the Earthen, who would come out far later, just directly created them). Once again, Northrend was established as part of the world back in Warcraft III, so this felt a bit like Burning Crusade just giving us something we were going to need anyway.
Cataclysm:
For the first time, we find ourselves with an expansion that is more, I think, about the specific events taking place in it than expanding the world. To be fair, we do get a bit of established lore territories, like Mount Hyjal, Gilneas, and a brief glimpse at Kezan. Cataclysm saw a massive revamp of the old Vanilla zones to update their quests and in some cases landscape to reflect both time moving on and the devastation wrought by Deathwing, but I actually think very little of what happens in the expansion is truly essential to giving us a world to play in, so this might be touched on only lightly. The main things, here, though, were the establishment of the Goblins and Worgen as members of the Horde and Alliance, respectively, the last of the non-neutral, non-"allied" races in WoW. (Allied races are basically variant races built on existing models, though... it's a little more complicated, like the Fox-like Vulpera aren't actually related to Goblins even if they use the same 3D skeleton, and the Kul Tiran Humans and Zandalari Trolls have, I think, unique skeletons. That's not relevant to the D&D book, though. What is is that the Worgen and specifically the Bilgewater Cartel Goblins become established as core populations within the two major factions).
Mists of Pandaria:
For the first time, this expansion gave us an entirely new continent that had no precedent in the RTS games, with the Pandaren even being treated as a non-canonical joke by some. However, despite the outcries that this was adding a childish element to the game, Pandaria was actually a richly conceptualized region that has left this among the most popular expansions in WoW's history. Historically, this was an expansion that saw the conflict between Alliance and Horde flare up more than we had seen before, here giving us a showcase of what happens when two Great Powers use a foreign land to fight their battles. If nothing else, given the popularity of the expansion, I expect to see the monsters and territories of Pandaria covered at least a bit.
Warlords of Draenor:
Infamously conceptually bizarre, Warlords of Draenor had the disgraced former Warchief of the Horde, Garrosh Hellscream, teaming with a rogue bronze dragon to travel to an alternate timeline version of the orcish homeworld of Draenor to form an alternate-history Horde with all the leaders from his father's generation who could use modern technology rather than demonic magic to invade Azeroth. If there's one expansion I can imagine them just kind of skipping over, it would be this one, an expansion that literally had less content than other expansions, and is commonly held (certainly I think so) as the worst WoW expansion. While it had some plot elements that led to Legion, which is my favorite expansion, we could more or less breeze past this.
Legion:
All about the Burning Legion's largest, seemingly final invasion of Azeroth, this gave us the Broken Isles (a region that was actually established as early as Warcraft II, I believe) which largely centers around the ancient Night Elf city of Suramar (the elves there forced to subsist on pure arcane magic for ten thousand years and are now known as the Nightborne). Interestingly, one of the things we might get here is some really iconic magic items, as one of the parts of the expansion was that each spec (basically subclass) got its own unique Artifact Weapon, which you'd use the entire expansion and just upgrade over the course of the expansion instead of replacing it. This also gave us the world of Argus, the home world of the Draenei (back when they were called the Eredar) and also effectively the home base of the Burning Legion. The expansion sees us deal a massive blow against the Burning Legion, and while it hasn't been explicit, it seems that the Burning Legion is more or less defeated and scattered to the winds. Again, I think that the expansion's popularity is a big part of why we might see a lot of elements from it in the book, but it's also a very big "event" in the history of the franchise.
Battle for Azeroth:
While not a very popular expansion, BFA does have some important elements to include in the D&D book. Lore-wise, it saw the culmination and ending of the Alliance/Horde conflict that flared up again starting in Legion. It adds the island nations of Kul Tiras and Zandalar, both pretty important in the grand scheme of things (Zandalar in particular is basically the oldest humanoid civilization on Azeroth, the original empire of the Trolls). We also had the Naga center-stage with the reveal of the underwater realm of Nazjatar, and got to see the nightmare demiplane city of Ny'alotha (which had been teased for years as essentially the WoW equivalent of R'lyeh).
Shadowlands:
This one's a real big question: among the least popular WoW expansions (though I personally didn't dislike it as much as many did - it suffered a lot from Covid hitting right before its release). Shadowlands takes us to another plane of reality, and therein lies the question: how much time do they want to spend fleshing out these afterlife realms that, sort of by their nature, don't really play into what's going on in the world of the living all that much? The expansion's villain, the Jailer, was meant to be the ultimate chessmaster who had been manipulating everything for eons, but he was far too flat and generic of a bad guy to really feel like he made an impact. So, to be honest, if there's one expansion I expect them to gloss over, it's... well, it's Warlords of Draenor. But if there's two, the other will be Shadowlands.
Dragonflight:
In terms of longterm impact on the game's story, it's still a little early to guess how big a deal Dragonflight will be. Praised as a "back to basics" approach for the game after the problems with Shadowlands, Dragonflight, I'd say, didn't give us anything profoundly new (though it did establish some new, complicated villains with the Primal Incarnates, expanding out the kinds of dragons we might encounter in Azeroth) and might get featured more prominently again because it was just a popular expansion.
The War Within:
The first expansion of the "Worldsoul Saga" trilogy, of which we are now on chapter two with Midnight, this did actually establish some interesting new lore: for one thing, making the Titans seem a lot less benevolent than we had previously been led to see them as (there had been hints). Mainly, we had an expansion largely taking place underground. Now, as I posted about recently, I'm fascinated by the existence of the Hallowfall Arathi, a culture of half-human/half-elf people who do not fit into the lore of the world in a way that makes sense unless they're from an alternate timeline, but that's more of a question that has been posed than one that has been addressed. We also got the world of K'aresh in this, but given that Ethereals are still not a playable race (and won't be a playable species in this book,) I honestly think they might gloss over that. Mainly, though, the idea that there's a route down to the Worldsoul of Azeroth built by the Titans feels like it could be important to establish.
Midnight:
We're still in the middle of this expansion, with the latest patch probably the last major one before the book comes out. I think we might get a bit about Quel'thalas and Zul'Aman, and the underground realm of Harandar, home of the Haranir and also the original location of Azeroth's Worldsoul before the Titans moved her is a fairly big deal. The expansion has fleshed out a bit of the elements of the Void as a cosmic force (which is related to, but evidently separate from Azeroth's Old Gods and their creations).
But let's get real:
Frankly, I don't think even what I've tried to boil down here is going to be covered.
We don't know in quite how much detail the various dungeons presented in the book will be, but if they're even quickies like Dragon Delves, that's going to be a huge chunk of the book. All but one of them are from Vanilla WoW, meaning they're in the Eastern Kingdoms or Kalimdor. This is but one book, and I frankly think it might mean that the book will really only cover the Eastern Kingdoms, Kalimdor, and maybe Northrend (given that Azjol-Nerub is there).
If you covered those three continents and Outland, you'd have covered the main locations that were known to exist by the time WoW first came out (yes, the Broken Isles were established, but the region wasn't known to be as extensive as it wound up being in Legion).
There is plenty in those regions to make a sizable D&D campaign in, and DMs who are familiar with World of Warcraft will easily be able to flesh the rest of the setting out. What we need for the book, I think, is monsters, magic items, and player options that help thing feel like Azeroth.
If I were to run a campaign set in Azeroth, I could just pop WoW open and check the map to get a ton of specific names for locations, and probably could recall what sort of plots were going on there if I want to use them as a basis for an adventure.
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