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All the World's a Stage: The voices of every race and class speak in RP

david bowers
Updated ·7 min read

All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles.

All the World's a Stage has been a voice for roleplaying in WoW for over two years now. I didn't quite realize it at the time, but the article entitled "So you want to be a bad guy" was just about at the 2 year mark for this column! To celebrate belatedly, today we'll review some of the other websites about roleplaying in WoW out there. If you like All the World's a Stage, you'll probably enjoy these as well.

In addition, you will find that some of these websites have similar, but unique pages with information about roleplaying the various races and classes of Azeroth. So for those of you who would like to have a reference to all these articles in a single place, I've collected them all together in one list at the end of the article. This list includes my own articles, as well as those of all the other websites I'm about to mention which follow on the same theme.



Blogatelle

The first blog on my list is Blogatelle, started by my one of my friends I met through roleplaying in the game. Even though this blog itself is discontinued, there's lots of good stuff to read there. Probably most notable on the site are the "Play Files," in-depth articles about each of the playable races from a roleplayer's point of view. They're similar to my own "So you want to be..." articles on each race, except that they focus more on the way the different races view one another instead of the history and lore behind each one.

In addition to the Play Files, Blogatelle did a series called "Do it Different," about which was also like another part of my "So you want to be..." series on each class, except that instead of trying to focus on some of the basic things every roleplayer of each class ought to know as I did, they focused on how to try and break the stereotypes that people often got into when they played these classes. Again, scroll down to the end of the article to see a list of specific links for your race and class.

RP Made Simple

Another great website for WoW roleplaying is the famous "RP Made Simple" blog, which has a great approach to roleplaying that really does make it seem simple! If you're a beginner roleplayer looking for inspiration or guidance, definitely have a look at his RP Survival Guide, a collection of articles written just for you, to help you get familiar with all the basic ideas and terminology of roleplaying. There's also a series of introduction articles about each race in this guide, which gives more basic factual information, as well as lots of links to other sources (including some of my own articles) where you can find out more.

He also has some more advanced stuff in there, such as his "What's Lore Got to Do With It?" post, and especially his "Tinkering With Abilities," post, in which he almost makes a new class by combining Rogue abilities with Gnomish Engineering technologies, and coming out with something really clever on the other end, the Gearmaster!

Compass Studies

A new addition to the WoW blogosphere was added just this summer, Compass Studies features a combination of everything from personal thoughts about roleplaying to in-depth tutorials on how to use the latest greatest roleplaying addon, to in-character fiction by the author of the blog.

One article that caught my attention talked about how to avoid becoming a Mary Sue, which is really its own sort of half-demonic/half-vampiric disease that can catch you unawares and cause you to suck attention out of other people at every opportunity. I wrote about the same thing, and it was neat to see Compass Studies' point of view on the matter. To be more accurate, her (or his?) article is actually about how to recover from the Mary Sue disease once you've already been seduced by it without even knowing, and it has lots of good guidelines.

RoleCraft

Jim H. Moreno is another roleplaying blogger who's been around even longer than I have. I originally contacted him way back when I was thinking about writing All the World's a Stage in order to get some other opinions about all those questions I had running around in my head. He was writing his Wordpress blog RoleCraft for a long time until he got hired to write a column of the same name on the Warcry network. His column started out mostly about WoW, but now covers topics related to roleplaying in any MMORPG.

Jim has written not one, but two articles about other WoW roleplaying websites out there, with some good links in there, some of which I haven't seen before. He's written a critique of the way Blizzard handles roleplaying in WoW, how to run instances and roleplay at the same time (here was my take on the same topic), and covered all manner of other topics as well. Have a look and see what you like.

Dramatis Personae

Another site about roleplaying which I've always liked, and which I felt had a lot in common with my own interests, was Dramatis Personae. Their articles about the various races and classes of Azeroth were what inspired me to do my own series on the topic. They have a forum you can join also, which has a lot of great people and ideas in it.

The Race/Class Information List

As I promised, here is a collection of links to lots of different articles about the various races and classes of WoW, by each of the various authors mentioned above:

Alliance

Horde

Classes


Tradeskills:
(As far as I know, the only in-depth coverage of roleplaying tradeskills is what we have in this column)



All the World's a Stage is your source for roleplaying ideas, innovations, and ironies -- we have a lot of ways to help you get started with new characters. Whether you want to start a new goblin or worgen, or play any one of the new race and class combinations, (or even any of the old ones) as you level up in the new world after the Cataclysm, there are lots of ways to get started roleplaying a new character.