Wednesday, September 16, 2026

Faction Division and World of Warcraft D&D

 I've been following the WotC-produced "Dungeon Masters" series, which does short (like, less than ten episodes a pop) campaigns with a consistent group of players (including a couple of Baldur's Gate 3 cast members and also someone who is a friend of a friend), basically acting as promotion for the latest D&D book, with a series based in Ravenloft, then one themed around the arcane magic of Arcana Unleashed, and coming up, an Azeroth-based World of Warcraft adventure.

Now, WoW is a game that was built at least initially around a factional divide: the Alliance versus the Horde. While the world of Azeroth is threatened by villains that both Horde and Alliance are equally investing in stopping, the bad blood between these two groups created a perpetual engine of conflict, driving some of the drama and even taking center-stage with the Battle for Azeroth expansion (though that expansion was sort of half-invested in this divide and half in the machinations of the Old God N'zoth).

Starting with 2022's Dragonflight, the barriers between the factions have been loosened and made more permeable, with the resolution of 2018's Battle for Azeroth seeming to establish an enduring peace between the two sides (such that in the current expansion, Midnight, the central capital city is Silvermoon, which is the historical capital of the Blood Elves, a member race/nation of the Horde. The fact that there are still Alliance-aligned High Elves and Void Elves who are essentially the same people as the Blood Elves except for different politics and perhaps a bit of an infusion of different kinds of magic into their physiologies both stirs tension but also gives the Alliance a slightly more reasonable foothold to justify their presence here - something that the Blood Elf NPCs of Silvermoon have very conflicted feelings about).

Generally speaking, I'm a strong advocate of letting players play what they want to play. But I do think it's an interesting and worthwhile session zero discussion to have if you're going to play a Warcraft D&D campaign as to whether you want to make a party that is firmly affiliated with just one faction.

While there are some exceptions - the Pandaren, Dracthyr, Earthen, and Haranir - generally the race (or species, to use D&D's newly preferred term) determines your affiliation. When WoW first came out, the Alliance was Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, and Night Elves, while the Horde was Orcs, Trolls, Tauren, and Undead (presented in the book as Forsaken, which is the term they use to distinguish themselves from mindless servants of the Lich King in the Scourge).

The first two games only had the Alliance and Horde as factions (actually, in the first game it was more accurately just Humans versus Orcs. While the Orcs had formed their Horde, the kingdom of Stormwind stood alone against them, with the Alliance not actually forming until the Second War, aka the second game). Thus, all conflict in those first two games was primarily through the clashing of these two factions (though I think there were opportunities to have Alliance vs. Alliance and Horde vs. Horde thanks to the traitorous human kingdom Alterac, secretly taken over by the black dragon Deathwing, and I believe the divide between the demon-worshipping forces loyal to Gul'dan in the Horde versus the more independence-minded faction under Warchief Orgrim Doomhammer).

While most of the world has always been available to both sides, there have always been territories where one side is welcome and the other is not, especially the major cities, where powerful elite NPCs are there to protect it, and player characters get flagged as valid targets for PvP even if you're on a non-PvP server (or, in more recent years, simply not in "war mode.")

Again, even though both factions are generally heroic (though I do feel that the Horde seems to slip into villainy a little easier) through much of the game's history, there has been a simmering hostility when there isn't outright warfare breaking out between them.

In a lot of ways, though, I think that the exciting possibility of a WoW D&D campaign would be to be able to do the things you can't usually do in WoW. That could as simple as having an Orc Druid (which is honestly probably the best way to realize the more spellcasting-focused Shaman specializations) but it could also mean having the party need to advocate for allowing their Forsaken party member to be allowed to enter Stormwind without being immediately cut down.

The faction conflict could be an interesting source of drama and tension within a party - rather than just assuming a total incompatibility, perhaps lean into the idea that we do, in fact, need to band together to face graver threats.

To be clear, NPCs have often and frequently reached across the factional divide. In Cataclysm, we were introduced to a pair of young paladins, Tarenar Sunstrike and Gidwin Goldbraids, a Blood Elf and Dwarf, who traveled the Plaguelands hoping to join the Argent Crusade (a faction-neutral force dedicated to protecting the world from the Scourge). Or we have Tehd and Marius, a Forsaken Warlock and Night Elf Demon Hunter who go around looking for powerful demons to slay.

The freedom, I think, of running a WoW-based D&D game is that you can really mix things up. Sentinel Hill is the central "town" of the rural realm of Westfall, basically the Kansas of the kingdom of Stormwind, and is basically the second zone that human players are expected to go in the natural quest flow from the human starting area - back in the day, you'd head there around level 10 (remember that WoW originally had a max level of 60, so 10 was really just getting started - I'd say it's basically the equivalent of level 3 in D&D. You started to get talent points/pick your specialization at 10, much as in D&D you get your subclass at level 3). 

But there's nothing saying you can't have an adventure set in Westfall that is far higher-stakes than anything that we've seen in the zone before (ok, to be fair, during the Legion pre-launch event in 2016, there was a full-scale demon invasion, a tier 4 challenge if ever I heard of one).

In other words, if your party is a mixed-faction group, that doesn't mean that firmly Alliance or Horde areas are necessarily going to be safe for everyone, and even if you've got some in-narrative explanation for why that Worgen is allowed to walk around Thunder Bluff without issue, it doesn't mean that hostile factions in your campaign's story aren't going to make these "safe" territories a bit dangerous.

While I don't know that it tells it with profound nuance (it does have its moments,) the overall "message" or "theme" of WoW is that these divides leave lasting scars, but at the end of the day, we're all just people, and when we can recognize that, we can work together toward a common goal (is that goal usually fighting some different "other?" For sure. It is Warcraft, after all).

But also, conflict is where we get drama, and while you want a party that can ultimately find a way to work together, I think having inherent resentments and grievances in a mixed-faction party could make for some really interesting roleplay.

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