sport and news: All the World's a Stage: Draenei and timelines in roleplay

Monday 23 May 2011

All the World's a Stage: Draenei and timelines in roleplay

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW. Have questions about roleplaying, or roleplaying issues? Email me -- I'm always open to suggestions!

Sometimes it's easier to work with certain races as far as timelines go, and sometimes it gets very, very tricky. Today's subject is one of the trickiest. The draenei date back to the vanilla days of World of Warcraft -- but the draenei of Azeroth as we knew it then were most decidedly not the draenei we know in Azeroth today. While we mistakenly assumed the draenei always appeared as they do in the Swamp of Sorrows -- misshapen, deformed, and a bit ugly -- the draenei of the Swamp of Sorrows are actually mutated versions of the original race.

None of this was revealed until the announcement that draenei would be the playable Alliance race in The Burning Crusade. Once the draenei were announced, a flurry of speculation as to the race's origins and radical change in appearance appeared, as well as one of the most notorious lore snafus in Warcraft's history. If the draenei seem out of place on Azeroth, it's because they absolutely are -- they aren't even native to the planet Draenor from which their flight and subsequent crash landing on Azeroth originated. You think elves are old? Take a gander at the draenei lifetime, and prepare to be overloaded with potential for more roleplay material than you can shake a face tendril at.

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Filed under: All the World's a Stage (Roleplaying)