A couple of months ago I happened to mention to my players that there is in fact an official World of Warcraft TTRPG, and two of them – WoW veterans both – got really excited. So I dusted off my old PDFs and set about creating a campaign. Hey, you gotta give the audience what it wants, right?
And truth be told, I have my own fond memories of Warcraft. I lived and breathed Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness when it came out, to the point where my first attempt at writing fiction was this weird sort of fanfic based on my vague and incomplete grasp of how the setting worked (having missed the first game almost entirely aside from playing it once at a friend’s house didn’t help). I wasn’t quite as enthused about Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, but I played it through along with the expansion The Frozen Throne all the same.
And once WoW came around, I was deeply hooked. Me and a friend of mine spent hours upon hours running around the lands of Azeroth and doing odd quests. I levelled my Troll Mage first up to 60, then 70 in the first expansion, then 80 in the third before it finally lost its appeal and I dropped out. Over the years I played, I got mauled by bears on the verdant banks of Loch Modan, flung fireballs at centaurs among the kodo graveyards of Desolace, and soared on a flying carpet above the frozen lands of Northrend.
What kept me coming wasn’t the gameplay, which was even at the time somewhat repetitious. No, it was the immersion, the feeling of inhabiting a wide, colourful world that was sometimes melodramatic, sometimes comical, and always lavishly detailed. Everything had lore to delve into if you wanted to – I tell you, questing in Stranglethorn Vale hits in a whole different way when your main is a Troll and you realise that those ruins you walk through were built by your ancestors back when they were the dominant power of the world, before they fell on hard times.
So once I had decided to run a game, I went in for refreshing my memory in a big way. I replayed all three of the RTS games, which still hold up pretty well, and reread all the manuals for the lore bits. I read some of the tie-in fiction, which is pretty bad, and watched the movie, which is worse. I even signed for a WoW subscription so I could level a Human Mage to level 30 in Classic and get a feel for Duskwood (because of course I decided to set the game in the most Gothic part of the setting. Hey, I gotta be me!). It was all a lot of fun, and reminded me of why I fell in love with this ridiculous franchise in the first place.
DEALING WITH THE RULES
Still, eventually I had to stop geeking out and actually look to staging the game. The first thing that needs to be noted is that the rules, which are slightly tweaked D&D 3.5, are really not very fitting to the setting. In Warcraft, even the meanest foot soldier is at least somewhat sparkly, with oodles of stalwartness and pride, and probably a name like Tristian Highcastle. That doesn’t fit too well in with D&D’s tradition of starting you out as someone who is maybe one tiny step above a peasant with a stick and making you spend the next ten years of real time working your way up.
Still, we work with what we’ve got, so I made a few adjustments. Instead of having the players roll for stats, I had them assign stats of 15, 13, 12, 11, 10 and 8 among them, so they could definitely start out decent at their area of expertise. I also ruled that PCs get the maximum amount of HP every level instead of having to roll for it. Even with that, I was swearing bullets for the first couple of levels, knowing that my campaign was always one string of bad rolls from ending with a TPK!
Another issue was XP. The rate at which PCs are meant to earn XP is really amazingly slow, by my standards – a level-appropriate encounter at level 1 is apparently meant to give each PC about 75 XP, with 1000 XP being required to reach level 2. Maybe that works better in real-time play, but I play online, over chat – a single level-appropriate encounter will take literal hours to get through! I implemented some house rules whereby it’s perfectly possible to rake in 500 XP per session, though that lead to some other issues with loot. See, the players are meant to acquire gp at about the same rate as XP, but by my system that put them on a fixed income – they’ll make the same hourly rate at level 5 as at level 1, which makes it seem like no one in Azeroth is willing to pay for expertise. Oh well. I decided I could probably make it work with some improbable windfalls at the early levels (among other things, I had the players accidentally stumble on a submerged treasure chest with magical weapons in it – as well as a cryptic, mostly-decayed message hinting at a possible plot hook that they ignored completely, but oh well) while getting increasingly stingy as time went on.
I also had some fumbles trying to teach my players the rules while learning them myself. The mysteries of the Attack of Opportunity gave me some trouble – for one thing, I missed that unarmed opponents don’t get to make them. I also assumed that the magic system had the same Vancian casting as D&D 3.5 Wizards and Clerics, but as it turns out, it has the semi-Vancian casting as Sorcerers; you still have “spell slots,” but you don’t need to assign spells into them at the start of the day; you can do that the instant before casting them. That certainly fits closer with the video games’ system of tracking Mana, but the wording is a bit confusing and I kind of wish they’d just broken with the D&D nomenclature and called them “mana points” or something instead of spell slots.
WRITING UP THE FIRST ADVENTURE
As usual, I started typing up a really simple adventure, and as usual, it grew on me and turned out longer and more complicated than I meant. This once, though, I don’t think that was a bad thing – it led to a fairly nice and moderate five-session introduction to the game where the players got to try out a bunch of different things.
My original idea was that a Duskwood peasant hired the players to drag his father-in-law, who’s risen as a zombie, back to his grave since he’s gotten tired of the guy hanging around the farm and moaning disapprovingly at him all the time. That seemed like the silly and faintly morbid sort of quest you’d get in the video games. To this end, the players had to first ask around at the local tavern, then search at the zombie’s old favourite fishing spot, before finding the walking corpse and leading him back to the cemetery.
To this, I added some wrinkles. Some drunken louts at the tavern got violent after the players failed a Diplomacy check and prompted a combat tutorial with non-lethal damage. Later, they ran afoul of worgen in the woods and had to flee from them in a panic, something that the WoW veterans proclaimed to bring back all sorts of memories. Heh. At the cemetery, they found an apprentice necromancer unearthing a corpse for some dark purpose and took him down. Having gotten their reward from the peasant, they set out for Darkshire, but along the way they witnessed an ornicopter crashing down in the woods and had to save the injured pilot from one of her automatons, which had gotten its circuits scrambled by the impact and now thought she was scrap metal to be recycled. Finally, now at level 3 and with some money in their pocket, the players made it to Darkshire and stocked up some better weapons and armour and a couple of second-level spells. To be continued.
THOUGHTS
This game is different from any that I’ve run for a while. For years now, I’ve tended towards rules-light, low-prep, play-to-find-out games, games where I just needed a few general ideas to improvise from. That’s not going to work with this rule system. It’s very much a mid-school game, from the Age of Simulationism. Before you run any scene, you need to think through the physical reality that the players will encounter, because just about every part of it will become relevant to some extent.
For example, at one point during those first five sessions, I had the players get attacked by a pair of murlocs while one of them was diving into a stream for that submerged chest I mentioned. I decided that one of the murlocs would attack the player in the water, while the second murloc would try to distract the other two players by throwing nets and javelins at them. So I had to look up the rules for swimming, for holding your breath, for fighting under water, for surprise attacks. I had to check how entangling weapons like nets work, and how ranged attacks can trigger attacks of opportunity. And of course I had to consider how the players’ spells and other special abilities would tie into it all – whether you could use Burning Hands to affect a target submerged in water, for instance (I decided that you probably couldn’t, but that Arcane Missile should work fine).
It’s a lot of work. But I do admit that it leads to a strangely vivid experience. Details matter. The world isn’t just a stage with some cardboard props on it, it’s a rugged obstacle course that insists on its independent existence. It has texture in a whole other way than in my regular semi-storygame fare.
And of course, I still love the setting, and I think my players do too. Quirky gnome inventions going haywire, murlocs gurgling battlecries as they come charging out of the water, necromantic spells making holographic skulls appear over the target’s head – it’s all gloriously cheesy, and as comfortable as a pair of old slippers. We’ll see where it goes, but I definitely hope that we’ll be able to continue this campaign for a nice long while.
