Let's discuss Chronicles Volume III!

What would you like to see? What new information do you think we will see? Who will be on the cover? What artwork will we get? What maps?

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Personally, I wish for a Northrend backstory, full of human tribes and small nations, as well as a full history of Azjol-Nerub, with nerubian art to go along with it. I want to know the proper organization of the Fel Horde, as well as the mechanisms Aegwynn used to bring back Medivh.

Seeing how Vol. II ended with wrapping up the Second War, I expect we'll get the story of WCIII and TFT in the first half of Vol. III, and things leading up to it; Ner'zhul being turned into the Lich King, Kel'Thuzad and the origins of the plague, the Alliance of Lordaeron drifting apart, hopefully some information on the Nerubians and Northrend's inhabitants pre-Arthas' landing, the upbringing of Thrall and his eventual reunion with his clansmen, and the shenanigans of Medivh as he discovers what's about to happen. Maybe even some information concerning Maraudon and the Centaurs, and why they were hunting Tauren to extinction, that'd be cool too (unless that's already been explained in some medium, I'm not sure).

Part two I suppose will pick up after the Battle of Hyjal, how the Horde and Alliance's new state of tense status quo shape the years leading up to WoW, the new alliances and unions forged (Night Elves joining the Alliance, Forsaken joining Horde), and new enemies planning to take them down. I hope they don't rush through the events of Vanilla WoW too much, although there's a whole lot to cover, and if rumours are to believed Vol. III will stretch all the way to the end of WotLK, so I'm afraid that's exactly what'll happen. I fear a lot of events taking place during Vanilla (Hakkar-story, Missing Diplomat-story, all the Twilight's Hammer stuff around the world, mainly C'thun n' friends, Black Dragon and Stormwind-story, etc.) will be glossed over and not nearly as detailed as later expansions' events where the story was presented more coherently and direct (they also featured more established characters and faction leaders more prominently). And because of the fact that the expansions' stories were written with a fairly clear beginning and end in mind right from the bat, rather than a loosely related stories of a world with several local conflicts escalating out of control like Vanilla, the expansions' stories are made easier to adapt and puzzle together I think.

Either way I'm looking forward to the future volumes of Chronicle. So far they're impressive and interesting.

I think volume 1 said centaur are just assholes and tauren happened to be weakest in barrens but id have to check

Learning how the hell forsaken joined might be interesting though

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Inb4 the tauren's altruism and humanity's hatred for the Forsaken from the RPG get reinforced thereby awaking Fojar from his slumber.

When there's no more room in hell, Fojar will roam the Lordaeron threads once more.

But as to the actual topic of the thread, I think it doesn't come as much of a surprise that I'd like to hear more to fill in the thousands of years of history that have thus far been left entirely blank in Troll history.

Granted, I've yet to read more than a few snippets from Chronicles Volume 1, and even less from Volume 2, so it's possible there's more to it than I've heard, but it feels like the single biggest chunk of information we've ever had on anything Troll came from the Troll Compendium, which is hilariously out of date, and which Blizzard never bothered to port to their new website.

At this point I'd wipe the Tauren off azeroth and give their land to the ogres

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It will probatly begin with the Second War Aftermath Events like Day of the Dragon, the Allaince Splintering, the Mason's Guild Revolt and the Death of Queen Tifin etc.

Then Pre-WCIII Stuff.

I know. Vol. I basically states that they are the aberration offspring that was the result of an unholy union between two godly/powerful beings, and that they, as you said, were simply assholes who found the Tauren to be easy targets.

But I'm not too fond of that explanation. It'd be one thing if there was Old God influence involved, causing the centaur to lash out so extremely chaotically, driving other races to the brink of extinction. And there might very much be, considering the Elemental Lords have served as Old God's pets, and the centaurs' mother is herself is the daughter of What's-her-face the Stonemother.

You shut your whore mouth, Sky, or so help me God.

Eh, old gods are responsible for too much overt stuff as is. They're better when they're subtle. Sometimes a bunch of races in a barren wasteland just try to murder each other and tauren happened to be low on the totem pole.


The Earthmother can't help you, she doesn't do shit.

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Alright, so here's how I think Volume III will be divided:

It will not have two parts like Vol II, but only one like Vol I.

Chapter I: Northrend, describing the history of Northrend, including small human kingdoms or realms; the artwork is the main temple of Azjol-Nerub.

Chapter II: The Third War, beginning where Volume II left off and going up until the Battle of Mount Hyjal.

Chapter III: The Frozen Throne, spanning everything that happened until Arthas ascends as the Lich King.

Chapter IV: The World of Warcraft, covering vanilla.

Chapter V: The War of Outland, covering the Burning Crusade.

Chapter VI: The Scourgewar, covering Wrath of the Lich King.

BONUS:

Chapter VII: The Cataclysm, covering, of course, the Cataclysm.

I feel like people have a tendency to truncate the WoW installments in their minds, like somehow they're ten sentences of content compared to what came before.

The nature of WoW as an MMO means that just as much if not more stuff is happening as in WC1, 2 & 3; it's just not one linear plot, so a ton of it happens concurrently through countless different NPC & player-represented characters spread all over the continent instead of viewed sequentially through the lens of the player focusing on one RTS protagonist at a time.

For it to at all offer a comprehensive summary and "bringing together" of the lore, I wouldn't necessarily count on a third book getting past Outland, if even that far. There's a ton of stuff going on in Vanilla and TBC (including later-published materials from their time frame like Varian's story), and unless they write off entire patches and tiers worth of story as one-sentence summaries of "Meanwhile, the Dark Irons were a thing and then someone beat Ragnaros," fleshing it all out could easily fill another volume without ever getting into WotLK.

Admittedly it's not impossible that they could just spend a couple of chapters hastily summing up each major conflict in WoW, but that would honestly kind of defeat the whole purpose of the Chronicles.

The thing is, it's been confirmed it will cover the fall of the Lich King, and "probably" the Cataclysm.

Alright, things that I'd like elaborated on:


-Did Thrall's mistrust of Forest Trolls come from fighting them in the gladiator pits?

-What exactly drove the Darkspear out of Stranglethorn? V2 seems to paint the Gurubashi as pretty willing to come together to fight external threats so what made them fall back to infighting so bad that the Darkspear would need to go to islands to get away? Just a lack of outside invasions or what? How'd the Darkspear even get to the islands if Jungle trolls didn't do much travel since Minloths stuff (Remind me, was that in V1?)

-Did Thrall make actual overtures to the Alliance for peace, not just "Give us land or we'll fuck you up again"?

-Who the fuck actually obeyed Blackmoore's Order to Kill Taretha, or did he do it himself in NewCanon?

-How did Grom get captured?

-How did things get so bad that so many people were willing to join the scourge?

-More Detail on the Scourge/Nerubian war of the Spider, and the Scourge's impact on the rest of Northrend

-How far south did scourge and legion push before going to Kalimdor?

-Where the fuck were the dragons when the Scourge and Legion invaded in WC3?

-Whatever happened to the heart of Aszune and was there ever a real oracle in stonetalon?

-More Detail on Hyjal and how the fight went, with all the furbolg and dark trolls and whatnot that helped out

-After wc3, how did the orcs and the nelfs go back to fighting, what did the orcs need all the damn lumber for?

-Whatever did happen to Stromgarde and Alterac and the whole syndicate thing?

-How the fuck did the Forsaken Join the Horde?

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How about some lore on Gilneas, is that too much to ask?

So how do you guys think they'll handle th collapse of the Tomb of Sargeras at the end of the Broken Isles sequence? Or is it more likely to be retconned out completely?

We'll probably get quite a bit in the building of the Greymane Wall, the Northgate Rebellion, and the Gilneas Brigade, perhaps even a mention of Bradensbrook.

Well, who's to say the whole thing collapsed? We only know for sure that the chambers in which Maiev thought she had Illidan cornered were brought down while he escaped. Whether or not the rest of the structure remained intact didn't matter at the time, because Illidan was leaving anyway.

That is, unless there's some designated room in the Tomb raid that's supposed to be where the Eye of Sargeras was kept. Otherwise one could assume that the portions of the dungeon from TFT after the flashback of Gul'dan's final moments (since his remains are found in-raid) are no longer accessible because they were collapse by Illidan.

Woe to us dreamers...

Here is my suggestion:

Did Northrend have a native human population?

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... man I just fucking realized.

Could the Eye of Sargeras be a pillar of creation, or something similar? The other 5 pillars were housed in the Temple of Elune, after all.

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Hmm, maybe. There's a seemingly primary "purpose" attributed to the Pillars; while able to be used for other purposes, they seem especially suited to closing "breaches." We have our efforts to use them on the Legion's portal, the Highborne using them 10,000 years ago for that same purpose, and the Gamescon mention of them being used once to seal some "wound in the world" before even that (the last one hasn't come up again, and may well have changed, but frankly the presence of titanic structures under the night elf ones reasserts that something was clearly going on down there even before the Temple of Elune existed.)

It makes me think the Pillars might have been the actual tools with which the Keepers contained and stabilized the gushing wound left in Azeroth by Y'shaarj's extrication, which would be in keeping with the Eye of Aman'thul being used on a smaller scale to similarly create the Nightwell.

In that vein, perhaps as the Pantheon's champion Sargeras carried around his own such tool for closing breaches on ordered worlds in the form of the Eye of Sargeras, using it to seal portals from the Twisting Nether on wowlrds being invaded and to contain the demons on Mardum.

@ARM3481 I was thinking maybe there was a frontal structure next to the Tomb we see in game that had the lower shape we see in TFT, being connected to the rest of the Tomb underground, and that is what collapsed.

Or, we'll have to explore the actual raid later, trying to find the Scepter and Eye rooms.

Possibly. It's been speculated, based in that the mausoleum (that has distinct human architecture) of Wintergarde Keep predates the Alliance getting there. Moreover, the Lich King must have gotten the army he used to invade Azjol-Nerub somewhere, and some primitive human kingdoms would fit right in.

Marthen has, in his work, three whole kingdoms up there.

Actually, Warcraft III's manual explicitly states that there were human settlements on the borders of the Dragonblight, and that it were the inhabitants of these settlements who formed the first core of the Scourge (that's the basis for those three kingdoms I have there, anyway).

I assumed that when we first learned about the pillars, but with Chronicle putting Azeroth's ordering after Sargeras went rogue I'm not sure.

I also assumed the Discs of Norgannon were but Chronicle gave them a different origin and now Norgannon just doesn't have a pillar for some reason.

Aegwynn said that the pillars served to protect the young world soul " Against madness and corruption "

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"The Azjol-anak resistance cell perhaps, we can always tell ourselves that the rest of the Nerubian survivors (namely the queens) practically dug their way to Plothole to escape the Scourge."

They seem to be multi-purpose. Some of them have unique powers, while together they can power up or create dimensional barriers to ward off the Nether, and that quote about protecting against madness.They were also used to seal a second portal in the WotA. Originally (I think it was retconned before the release, maybe?) they were for sealing wounds of the planet.

She said that about the Aegis specifically. Each one seemed to do something different based on her datamined tomb dialogue.