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  • Know Your Lore: The origin of goblin and worgen death knights

    by 
    Anne Stickney
    Anne Stickney
    11.07.2010

    The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft. Most of Cataclysm seems solid from a story standpoint, but a few plot holes continue to pop up here and there that cause people to wonder exactly how certain elements and creatures fit into lore. One question that seems to come up more often than anything else is the origin of goblin and worgen death knights. After all, these guys didn't even exist during Wrath of the Lich King -- the Greymane Wall isn't coming down until Cataclysm hits, and the Bilgewater Cartel goblins are still on Kezan, right? Well, not quite. In order to understand where these guys come from -- and they do fit in lore, Blizzard managed to integrate them quite nicely -- we have to take a look at one of the continual banes of my existence: timelines. The timeline for World of Warcraft was pretty straightforward during vanilla and The Burning Crusade. However, with the introduction of the death knight class in Wrath, players were introduced to a much heavier use of phased content, including a phased version of the death knight starting zone that introduced the reason why these servants of Arthas suddenly turned on him and formed their own independent alliances with either the Alliance or the Horde. WARNING: The following post contains spoilers for the upcoming Cataclysm expansion. If you wish to remain spoiler-free, do not continue.