Is there much Warcraft lore stuff about the cosmology and astronomy of the planet and whatever else happens to be out there?
Yeah! But it’s a fucked up disaster, so
So let’s start with the Titans.
Nobody knows where they came from. They, like the Old Gods, are primordial. Unlike the Old Gods, they’re just fucking somewhere, and we can’t find them physically. We just keep finding their crap. Especially on Azeroth.
Think of the Titans as like, a watered-down Greek pantheon. None of the fun gods like Dionysus are there. But you’ve definitely got like, Big Scary Fight Man and Ultra Mom feat. Great Hips and The Most Abhorrent Prick in the Universe.
Let’s focus on The Most Abhorrent Prick in the Universe. For brevity’s sake, let’s call him Sargeras.
Sargeras used to look like this:
That’s what happens when you ruin everything. Sargeras’s job used to be fighting evil. Or as I like to call it, murder practice. He got really, really good at murder. A real class act when it came to ending lives. But then he was like, “okay, fuck this, am I really doing a good job, killing all these evil things? At the end of the day it’s just killing, right?”
And everyone was like, “no, Sargeras, that’s the most asinine thing we’ve ever heard,” and he was like “okay” and decided to kill everything.
Which brings us to our first important piece of astronomy: The distant planet of Argus.
You know who lived on Argus? The Eredar.
You might recognize them as slightly fucked-up looking Draenei who love jewelry and spells.
But then Sargeras showed up with a big gang of goons and ruined their fucking planet, and they all had to leave, and ended up looking slightly friendlier and having slightly more relaxed posture in the process.
I guess however many years in a giant airtight spacefaring crystal ship will do that to you. But see, the Eredar started calling themselves Draenei, which means “Exiles” in their language, and landed on Draenor, which should have been called Orctown, but I guess when you land somewhere you just decide to name it after yourself. Sounds a little familiar, doesn’t it?
So Draenor was however many million zillion miles from Argus, and everything was cool for a while. But Sargeras, being the Most Abhorrent Prick in the Universe, didn’t appreciate that something he wanted to kill ran away. So one day he showed up on Draenor, but he’s like, “what if I’m more subtle this time instead of just sticking my bare ass through the upper atmosphere,” and so began a campaign of sneaky bullshit that all came to a head with this guy:
This is Gul’dan, short for Gul’daniel. Danny Hexbang here absolutely fucking loved skulls. And when Sargeras’s demons showed up and were like, “dude, you can have unlimited skulls if you drink this glowing green fluid of dubious origin,” he was like, “holy shit, I love skulls, sign me up.”
And they were like, “okay, but get your friends to drink it too.”
And that’s how orcs became green, because this guy convinced them they’d get massive gains and blast their… glutes, and become invincible, if they drank up.
Unfortunately it also made them extremely angry at everything in their immediate environment, and that included the Draenei. So war happened.
How does this relate to cosmology and astronomy? Well, all that bullshit caused Draenor to explode. A thin, breathable atmosphere clings to the remaining chunks, which still hang somewhere in space.
However many zillion miles it is between Draenor and Azeroth, where we find a whole bunch of shit the Titans left behind, is bridged by a huge sculpture called the Dark Portal.
It looks like this. Nobody knows who those hooded figures are, or what the snake is about. But they sure do pop up everywhere.
The Dark Portal is basically a stargate that nobody knows how to shut off. Which is dangerous because all kinds of bullshit can pour through it at any given time. Over the years, repeated attempts have been made to shut it off, and turn it back on again.
Now, Azeroth itself is basically a beta testing map for the Titans. All kinds of bullshit projects that they aren’t sure about get tested on Azeroth. Some projects don’t work and fuck up, and that’s how we get beastmen like Troggs and Kobolds. But some projects do just fine, and then an Old God intervenes, and turns a perfectly good robot into meat, and that’s how we get Gnomes and Dwarves.
But Azeroth, being a beta test, does come with a template. That template is called the Emerald Dream.
We can’t get there, formally, but shit comes out of it all the time. Druids and dragons, mostly. It’s a useful place, containing a lot of the fundamental elements of Azeroth, and if shit goes totally sideways, the idea would be to just… pull it inside out, presumably. Rewrite Azeroth back into a Dream-state and start over.
But we can’t do that, because of this joker:
So that’s Xavius. Lapsed Night Elf turned satyr, who is so fucked up on dark magic and so unnecessarily ambitious that he hangs out in the Dream, doing his best to reshape it in his image, while druids do everything short of simply beating his ass to keep his nonsense in check.
So think of the Emerald Dream as a kind of magical substrate to Azeroth. Ephemeral, out of phase, a data backup, whatever.
Azeroth itself, however, exists in a comfortable region of space, revolving around a sun, while a moon revolves around it.
Well, maybe. For all we know it might be a functional geocentric model, but somehow I doubt that. As you can see, there are other worlds out there, which- since this is in a Titan laboratory- we can assume have felt the influence of the Titans. We don’t know many of their names, and actually plotting a course to them is really hard, even with portals.
But let’s focus on Azeroth. The Tauren call the sun An’she, and the Night Elves call the moon Elune. The weird thing is, there seem to actually be gods tied to those two celestial bodies, because power can actually be derived from faith in them.
That tends to be how magic of that variety works in Warcraft, believe in the Light and you can swing it. Believe in Elune and you can call down moonfire. It does suggest that there’s something there.
But we basically know jack shit about those gods, except that they aren’t Titans, aren’t Old Gods. They might be Naaru, basically gigantic windchimes made out of crystalline Light, or they might be Loa, ancient spirits which just straight up get more powerful when you worship them.
With regard to the other various stars in the sky, this is a space called either The Void or The Great Dark Beyond. That stuff’s too far away to reach by portal, presumably, because we haven’t messed with it, ever. We have no way of knowing if even the Titans have been out there.
All kinds of weird shit comes from the Void, like Ethereals and Void Lords. …Well, the Ethereals came from a world called K’aresh, but a Void Lord showed up and decided to ruin everything, so they made themselves comfortable in the terrifying expanse of space instead.
Because of the composition of their bodies, we can assume that cosmological background radiation in Warcraft is basically shadow magic. Where light can’t reach, shadow magic runs wild and just starts manifesting stuff.
Now, speaking of shadow magic, I’ve mentioned Old Gods a time or two, and they’re worthy of further discussion.
Uniquely, we’ve only seen them on Azeroth. They’re freakish, fucked up creatures that can’t actually do much mobilizing on their own, so they reach out and influence the Titans’ projects or whoever else happens to be around, whispering in their ear and telling them to like, eat their own lips and kill their neighbor. Not for any good reason, just because they’re rude and seem to be directly, fundamentally opposed to letting the Titans do anything.
They look like absolute dogshit, which makes perfect sense considering how they behave.
Old Gods are like… tumors, that exist underneath Azeroth’s crust. Perhaps they represent something specific, a certain aspect, but they usually don’t. Just an arbitrary assignment of features, like eyes or mouths. But in the cosmological grand scheme of things, they represent a vast sum of shadow magic.
Not fel, which we’ll get into in just a second, but specifically shadow magic.
Which suggest to me that perhaps, given their “otherworldly” appearance, they might have come from the Void too. Why they chose Azeroth is anyone’s guess, but perhaps they sought out the Titans specifically and embedded themselves into the Azeroth project.
Now, Fel is the last fundamental part of Warcraft cosmology worth talking about. And it brings us right back around to Sargeras. Look at the sky above the destroyed Draenor:
See that green shit? That’s the force that blew the planet apart. In some places, the whole atmosphere is fogged up with the lingering remnant of the explosion of Fel that ruined everything.
Now the thing about Fel is that it’s described as “the magic of chaos” and that it requires the destruction of something living in order to be conjured up. Neither of those is necessarily true, but there is something important to be gleaned from this:
Fel has enabled demonic forces to travel through space with greater efficiency than any other form of magic known to any species in the universe.
Look back at the Dark Portal. That’s Fel. That stuff in Gul’dan’s hands? Fel.
If all this demonic stuff starts with Sargeras cutting loose like a complete shithead and literally, physically stirring up chaos by randomly attacking planets and cultures he figured deserved it, then it’s fair to say that Sargeras himself is responsible for the presence of Fel in the universe. And I say “universe” instead of “galaxy” or “star system” because we have absolutely no way of knowing how close any of these planets- Argus, Draenor, or Azeroth- actually are to each other. They could be incredibly far apart, or next-door neighbors. It’s hard to say.
So, if Fel magic manifests due to the presence of both chaos and loss of life, then perhaps it was always there. Perhaps it, like shadow magic, is a fundamental part of the composition of the universe. Shadow magic being a stable constant, while Fel is the underpinning for reactions and random happenstance.
Learning how to conjure up and wield a fundamental part of the universe is a big deal. If we look at it like that, it’s no surprise at all that Shadow and Fel are among the most dangerous and potent schools of magic known to anyone.
Finally, the gray area between Void and Light, space and firmament, is the Twisting Nether.
It’s very pretty, and you die if you end up inside it. The forces at work just shred bodies made of meat if they aren’t in like, two spacesuits at the same time. You’re either born with a body that can weather the Nether, or you aren’t. Ask the Ethereals.
In summary, Uncertain distance bridged by portals, combined with the destructive influence of Sargeras and his demonic army, combined with the tug-of-war between Titan and Old God and the uncertainty of where either party comes from, makes actual astronomy in Warcraft kind of a crapshoot. Stars and planets can move, or be broken into pieces, or be gods. The best we can do is look at what the universe around us is made of, try to name its fundamental properties, and follow the trail of bread crumbs back to the beginning from there, to see who’s responsible for what, where applicable.
All of this is so massive in scope and so terrifying to think about that it’s much easier to just fight each other on the red team and blue team.
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