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Know Your Lore: The time-travel fallacy of Warlords
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. Ever since the announcement of Warlords of Draenor, most players -- including myself, to a degree -- have been under the assumption that this is an expansion involving time-travel of some sort. Sure, supposedly we as players aren't traveling in time, but Garrosh Hellscream did so, to an alternate version of Draenor whose history he presumably changed. Now instead of invading Azeroth as we're accustomed to, this altered version of Draenor and its Iron Horde are attempting to invade the here and now. Only there's one key thing we've been missing -- this isn't time travel. Not in the slightest. After playing on beta for a mere few hours, what Blizzard is doing is something entirely different. While we've been focusing on time travel and how this would affect our future, Blizzard has been quietly putting together a story with some far-reaching, drastic implications that may very well take everything we know about World of Warcraft, stand it on end, and knock it over with one well-placed blow. Spoiler Alert: The following column contains a couple of fairly large spoilers for Warlords of Draenor. If you are avoiding expansion information and discussion, do not continue.
Behind the Mask: Between this world and the next
One of the exciting things about writing about Champions Online is that there is a huge amount of lore and backstory behind the game. Although Behind the Mask has a definite focus on concrete game information (that's just how I roll), the lore is always something I'm excited to cover. It offers a look into Champions that can't be experienced with just the online game. This week we're going to look at alternate dimensions in the Champions universe. I was going to take a more indepth look at the background behind the war between Heaven and Hell, but unfortunately there is so much information that paints necessary frameworks for those story elements. It's unfortunate, but the information I have to go over this week is pretty crazy stuff. Before you go through this, you may want to check out some of my other lore articles, including my magic lore article and my general lore primer. I do restate all the necessary stuff here, but having a broader understanding of what's going on can do nothing but help. A lot of the information here is from The Mystic World sourcebook, but there's also a fair bit of stuff cobbled together from ingame lore and some other sourcebooks. Definitely check them out if you want more information on these subjects.
