What This Is
A Dungeons & Dragons campaign set in the world of Warcraft — specifically, Azeroth as it stood in 2004, at the moment the original game began. Not the version from the last twenty years of expansions. The early one, when the map was smaller and almost nothing had been settled yet.
You don't need to have played Warcraft. Genuinely. Roughly half of what a longtime player "knows" about this era was written years later and doesn't apply here anyway, so everyone starts closer to level than you'd expect.
Where We Are
Four years ago, the world nearly ended.
A demonic army called the Burning Legion invaded. Orcs, humans, and night elves — three peoples with every reason to hate each other — fought together on the slopes of a mountain called Hyjal and stopped it. The night elves spent ten thousand years of immortality to do it. It worked.
Then everyone went home, and nobody agreed what came next.
That's where we start. Not in a golden age and not in a ruin — in the messy, underfunded, badly-organised aftermath, four years on, where the heroes have scattered and the paperwork was never done.
Some things you'd know if you lived there:
- The kingdom of Lordaeron is gone. Not conquered — destroyed from within by an undead plague. Its survivors are refugees. Its capital is a graveyard.
- Stormwind still stands, ruled by a ten-year-old king and a regent doing his best. It is broke, and its outlying provinces have noticed that nobody is coming to help them.
- Ironforge is rich, stable, and quietly running most of the Alliance because nobody else can afford to.
- The orcs have a homeland. For the first time. A red desert on another continent that nobody else wanted, with a city built out of raw timber and iron four years ago.
- The night elves are mortal now, for the first time in ten millennia, and they are not handling it well.
- There is no war and there is no peace. Alliance and Horde raid each other over lumber, land, and old grudges, in three or four places, constantly, while both leaderships insist it isn't a war.
The Two Sides
The Alliance isn't an alliance. It's seven governments that won a war together, never signed anything afterward, and are currently held together by habit and by Ironforge's money. Humans, dwarves, gnomes, and — recently and uneasily — night elves.
The Horde isn't the Horde you may have heard of. The old one was a demon-poisoned war machine. This one is four years old, led by a young shaman who freed his people from prison camps and is trying to build a country out of them. Orcs, trolls, tauren, and the undead who broke free of the plague that made them.
Neither side is the villain. Both have people in them doing indefensible things and people in them trying very hard. If the campaign works, you should at some point find yourself agreeing with someone you're supposed to be fighting.
Who You Can Be
Human, dwarf, gnome, or night elf on the Alliance side. Orc, troll, tauren, or Forsaken — the free-willed undead — on the Horde side.
Each of those has its own page with history, leadership, current conflicts, what they want, and how they talk — start at Peoples MOC and pick yours. They are written for players too.
We're using D&D 5.5E, plus the official Warcraft sourcebook when it releases. Bring a character concept to session zero rather than a finished sheet; we'll settle species, class, and the mechanical details together, and some of it depends on what the book says.
Come with an idea of where your character is from and what they want. That's more useful than a build.
What Kind Of Game This Is
You start small. Level one, in one place, with local problems — a mine, a missing patrol, a farm that can't pay its taxes. The world's larger disasters are all happening, but they're happening somewhere else for now, and you'll hear about them long before you can do anything about them.
Violence is one tool. Several of the campaign's genuine problems can't be solved by winning a fight — and at least one gets actively worse if you try. Expect documents, negotiations, and people with legitimate grievances alongside the monsters.
Your relationships are your resources. The people you help early will matter later. So will the ones you don't.
Death is real. No respawns, no running back to your body. Resurrection exists but it's rare, expensive, and someone will want something for it.
One Request
If you already know Warcraft well: please don't look things up mid-campaign, and don't tell the others what's coming. Several plot threads depend on nobody at the table knowing the answer yet, and a wiki tab will flatten them.
If you know some of it, come tell the DM privately what you know. Being trusted with a secret is much more fun than accidentally spoiling one.
Bring To Session Zero
- A character concept — species, rough class idea, and one sentence about what they want
- Anything you'd rather the game avoid, or handle carefully. This gets asked properly at the table too.
- Questions. Any of them. There's no such thing as a dumb Warcraft question here — half the table is learning it fresh.