But to start with what exactly is lore? Google informs me that the meaning of lore is:
A body of traditions and knowledge on a subject or held by a particular group, typically passed from person to person by word of mouth.Personally I like this as a definition of real-life lore (think folk-lore) but how does that equate to a virtual world? Well I guess it's the same - it's simply made up traditions etc. and a little more of storyline rather than factual events.
You may also be wondering what this Conspiracy Craft is all about. It is a new show on Gamebreaker TV (which also hosts Legendary). Whilst Legendary is mostly all things WoW Conspiracy Craft focuses more on storyline and lore.
If I'm honest I wasn't paying 100% attention to Conspiracy Craft as I was running dungeons but the bits that I did see/hear mostly equated to gibberish in my brain. Simply because I know very little WoW-lore. I know there's the Alliance and the Horde, several continents, wars and general drama. But [atleast] half the leading characters are no-bodies to me.
There was talk of a troll named Vol'jin whom the boyf informs me is leader of the Darkspears and son of Sen'jin. A what now!?! Searching for Sen'jin in Wowhead does however bring this title up. So yes my knowledge of WoW-lore is crap - there's no other way of saying it. If we were talking Star Wars lore I'm fairly confident I'd be well above the average persons knowledge but were not.
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| Lorewalker Cho praying for someone/thing to help me! |
Well, I'm going to continue watching Conspiracy Craft with the boyf although I suspect it may be a bit over my head for a while yet. WoW Insider has a column named Know Your Lore which I'm going to endeavour to read more of. Additionally, over at To All The Squirrels Leo and Tor (and new to the blog Nak) write lorelettes (snippets of lore in 200 words or less) and I find these really good as they keep my attention! Maybe one day I'll get around to reading some WoW books but being an extremely slow/bad reader I'm not sure if it will be worth the effort and (minor) suffering! Oh and I'm going to try and absorb more from the game in general - like actually reading the quest text!
I'd love to hear where other people get their lore knowledge from and how your knowledge of Azerothian lore stands?
My lore knowledge is still a little sketchy because I just don't like the Warcraft novels, and a lot of stuff happens off the computer screen, between those pages.
ReplyDeleteThaaat said, I suppose I picked up a fair bit of lore just playing the game. I'm that slowpoke who reads quest text and watches all the cut scenes. My lore knowledge really picked up when I swapped to a roleplaying server, however. Being surrounded by people with solid lore knowledge kinda teaches you through osmosis... and is quite good inspiration for reading through Wowpedia.
And, well, it's Wowpedia that'll really help fill out your knowledge. Sadly there still seem to be plot holes left, right and centre, but you can get a fairly good grasp on things by clicking through various links and what have you. I think the trick is to find an area of lore you're really interested in, and branch out from there!
I do watch the cut scenes but I'm terrible for picking up a quest and not reading more than I need to which often results in me looking in completely the wrong places / for the wrong things. So, I think I generally need to read the quest text more & it will certainly help my lore knowledge.
DeleteSee I don't think I'd survive very long on a RP server because I'd be useless at it! (again partially due to not knowing much lore). But I get what you mean about the immersive learning - maybe I should give it a go. And I hadn't really thought about Wowpedia as I moslty use Wowhead (which doesn't really do much lore) so I'll certainly be checking it out more. Thanks!
It's nice to hear I'm not alone, I really have no idea on major lore, and storylines, I know who the kings/important people are and that is pretty much my limit. I have a very good friend who is extremely up on his lore so I tend to focus any questions to him.
ReplyDeleteAh yeah, walking-talking human encyclopedia's are very useful to have around :)
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