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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 8231492" data-attributes="member: 11760">The lore is actually more coherent than it may look if you just drop in and out. The Chronicle books are really good at knitting Warcraft 1, 2, 3, Lord of the Clans, the novels and comics, and WoW all together.Thrall's Horde has never quite gotten its crap together until relatively recently, between the various tensions within the Horde and Thrall's own reluctance to be its singular leader. So that's allowed Horde conservatives, like Garrosh, to double-down on the violent (and racist!) tendencies of some of the Horde to escalate hostilities between the Alliance and Horde, which played out over several expansions. (When he was deposed, he escaped his war crimes trial with the help of a bronze dragon, which gives us the time travel adventure Warlords of Draenor.) The Pandaren expansion actually turned out to be a fairly meditative affair focused on the consequences of war and the collateral damage inflicted by it. The most recent Warchief, Sylvanas, has been quietly working with an outside force, which we've known for a while, sweeping the Alliance and Horde into an incredibly bloody Fourth War, which played out in Battle for Azeroth. The outside force turned out to be an imprisoned god of death who is the big bad of Shadowlands. The Horde, tired of playing Warchief Musical Chairs (Vol'jin was briefly warchief before getting killed to put Sylvanas on the throne) now has a war council, which looks to be more stable going forward.Meanwhile, there's been supernatural shenanigans going on, with the Old Gods/Void making their moves, the Titans fighting back and the Burning Legion attacking. A lot of the stuff from War3 has been explained as part of a larger supernatural/multiversal war going on (there's a really cool map of the Warcraft multiverse in the inside cover of Chronicle, which shows that Blizzard has a lot of D&D players in it and that they loved and wanted to improve upon the D&D cosmology). Arthas: Tool, ultimately, of both the imprisoned death god and the Burning Legion. Deathwing: Tool of the void/Old Gods. Illidan: Fighting a good fight against the Burning Legion, tripped up by his inability to get along with anyone for longer than five minutes tops. The end of the war with the Burning Legion damaged the planet, which is where the Azerite resource came from. But for the most part, that conflict is over, at least for now, with the Old Gods dead/put back in their box, the Burning Legion defeated for at least a few years or decades, etc. Now the game is heading out into the multiverse, as high level campaigns do, starting with finding out what Sylvanas and the death god she's working with want.The expansions see-saw back and forth between grounded expansions, like vanilla or Battle for Azeroth, and more out there stuff, like Burning Crusade and Shadowlands.</blockquote>

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