Lore

What I really enjoyed about Welcome to the Machine is that for a moment it took you out of that role of adventuring hero, and put you in the NPC position. It was an amazing, wonderful, weird quest, and I still consider it one of the highlights of the Cataclysm expansion. As much as I love the quest, though, I didn't really want an entire expansion of it.

From this whirling nightmare, this bloated ruin of the first evil's corpse crawled the demons. The Burning Hells could in a real sense be said to be the blackened corpse of Tathemet itself, and at the center of the Hells lies the Black Abyss, from which rose the Great Evils. Essentially birthed from the seven heads of Tathemet, there were the three Primes -- Mephisto, Baal and Diablo -- and the four Lessers.

What was Kairoz looking for?

The barbarians of Sanctuary are called this by those who do not understand them or their ancient culture, which was a casualty of the schemes of Baal and the actions of Tyrael. In destroying the Worldstone, they destroyed Mount Arreat and with it the very vigil that the barbarians maintained for countless eons.

You know, we spend a lot of time talking about the various Warlords of Draenor as they're presented in the latest expansion's version of history. Lords of War was supposedly Maraad's tales of these old warlords, but the stories were pretty specific. And in some cases -- like Kilrogg's vision of his death -- they seemed like a direct reference to the alternate version of Draenor's warlords, rather than our own.

We've seen that in many ways this Draenor seems to mirror the one we know today as Outland, which suggests that The Burning Legion is coming... but probably not in the way we expect.

It's not just Grommash's character we're looking at here -- it's the entire state of the Horde as we know it. Did the Horde need Garrosh Hellscream? Yes, it absolutely did, and now that he's gone, there's a void left behind that could be filled, oddly enough, by his father from another reality. But before you get me wrong here, I don't mean Grommash should fill that villain role. Far from it.

One could argue that by the end of the events that play out in 6.0 and 6.1, the Iron Horde has been effectively shut down, backs against the wall, leaving them with no other apparent alternative than to turn to tactics they weren't originally going to use. But the one thing we haven't done is really look at the situation and ask ourselves -- why the Iron Horde to begin with?

For today's Know Your Lore, we're putting on our tinfoil hat and speculating about the nephalem of Diablo 3.

In Warlords of Draenor, we meet a different Garona, one whose origins began on this alternate version of Draenor. Oddly enough, no mention is made of her past, a past which was unusual to say the least in our version of history, and it appears that whatever ties she had to Maraad don't exist on this world. Which makes one wonder -- where did she come from?