Wildfire Riders

I would also say this is less of a big deal than most would really think. Considering it's been months already in our "timeline" since Arthas got fatal Ashbringer KO'd, the skip is a relatively small matter, and not hard to work around.

Anyway, far as I'm concerned:

Lans - Doing cleanup work in Northrend, occasionally cloistering himself away now and then for religious and historical study. He's determined to do this "good guy" thing right.

Korin - Finishing her college thesis.

Zoramat (my paladin) - ...questing!

Norvallen - Hanging (skulking?) around Stormwind. Putting on a friendly face. Assuring everyone from time to time that the Ebon Blade is committed to a standing allegiance with the veterans of the Northrend campaign, in much the same way a doctor assures you that yes, a suppository thrice daily is the only solution.

I'm in the "jump what jump" crew. Blizzard has finally caught up to -me-, after trying to insist that the last five years were only two. I applaud them for getting with the times, but my characters are experiencing no time jump.

That said, since I haven't been playing, Shad has been being a good nanny. And occasionally taking mercenary jobs for cash on the side.

It'll have been a busy time for Illi. In the period now known as Catatime, she will;

Leave the lands of man and travel to the southern deserts. There she will pass three gates and then meet the Oracle known as Uyulala, who will advise her of the many quests she will need to accomplish in order to ensure Azeroth's safety (seriously, there'll be like a billion ! marks over the Oracle's head). She'll head north to the snowy wastes, where she will be called upon to aid the new King of the reformed Vrykul, who's hall is plagued by an evil monster. Illi will kill the monster and the monster's mother. Heading back down to Kalimdor, she will befriend a tauren known as Enkidu in Tanaris, whose help she needs in slaying the resurrected Agamaggan who had been resurrected by the Burning Legion in order to kill Illi for all the demons she's slain. She will then head back to the Eastern Kingdoms via Theramore, but not before being asked to settle a dispute between two women who each lay claim of motherhood of the same child. Jaina will be commuting between Stormwind and the Maelstrom for her respective hook-ups, which is why she won't be there to make the decision. Illi will decree that the child shall be split in twain and each woman get half; for Illi knows that the woman who is the more horrified is the real mother. Illi then jet-skis across to the Eastern Kingdoms; there may infact be shark-jumping. She lands in Lordaeron, where the process of restoring the Kingdom is underway. However, an evil noble with aspirations of rule is subjugating all the local lords and baronies, as he once received a prophecy that no man born of a woman may stop him. Illi points out that his biggest rival was born via caesarian section, which means the evil lord is stopped, natch. While Illi's there she pushes over the old Drachmas estate tower, 'cause Laurus is a jerk. Traveling south again, Illi arrives in Stormwind just in time to see Khallar Jh'Talith travel back in time in order to slay the evil Ilarra Stormrunner to protect the future. Unfortunately, Khallar is being mind-controlled by the Infinite Dragonflight, and Khallar ends up slaying Seylon, causing a timeline paradox. The Bronze Dragonflight pick up Illi from Stormwind as the world disintegrates, taking her back to the Caverns of time so that she can travel into the future of the past, and defeat the Infinite Dragonflight as they conspire to corrupt Khallar. The current timeline is preserved, however a spin-off Warcraft comic series is created by these events about a future where the Infinite dragonflight control Azeroth called Flight of the Apocalypse. The Bronzes drop Illi off in Dalaran, where the leaders of the Kirin Tor hold a holiday for her for saving the multiverse. Illi gets drunk and totally hooks up with Ronin - guaranteeing a supporting character spot in the next Knaak novelisation. Illi was also the best Ronin ever had. While Illi is in Dalaran, Varian Wrynn sends word that since Fordragon is all but dead, the King of Stormwind needs a new Hand of the King. Illi travels to Outland and enlists Arator's help to locate Turalyon and bring him back to Stormwind. Illi foils many assassination attempts along the way, all of which were orchestrated by the Old God waking up underneath Tirisfal Glades. Once Turalyon is safely in Stormwind, Illi learns that her old friends the Wildfire Riders have been being pushed out of Old Town by a mysterious Lord in Grey. Seeing as Tarquin and Bricu can't manage to survive the machinations by themselves, they ask for Illi's help. Illi soon learns that the Lord in Grey is the resurrected Lord Aliden Perenolde, being controlled by a Forsaken mage who is in turn enthralled by the Tirisfal Glades Old God. Illi slays them both, re-ensconcing the Wildfire Riders as the premier ne'er-do-wells of Stormwind. Illi also reminds Varian who killed off Onyxia while he was off playing Gladiator (hint: it was Illi) and to leave the WFR alone from now on. Before she leaves Stormwind again, she breaks Shaw's kneecaps, just because. Now, Illi's mad at this Tirisfal Glades Old God, so she swears to end it's threat. She calls upon the smaller of Azeroth's two moons, the Blue Lady, who is actually Mogo from the Green Lantern Corps on a sabbatical in the Azerothian multiverse. Mogo transports Illi to Ahn'Qiraj and then to Ulduar, she in both Titan cities she bests C'Thun and Yogg Saron in single combat, respectively, and absorbs a little of their Old God Nega Energy. Traveling back to Tirisfal Glades, Illi digs up the entrance to a hidden Titan facility - their weapon building facility, the hidden city of Uldulon. After fighting legions of Shoggoth and Mi Go, Illi discovers the Old God Sheb-Noggaruth, and with the Old God Nega energies of the defeated C'Thun and Yogg Saron, defeats Sheb-Noggaruth before it's plan of releasing it's legion of 1,000 demi-Old God warriors into Azeroth reached completion. Realising that Azeroth was not ready for the secrets of Titan weapon manufacturing, Illi closed the entrance of Uldulon again to be kept secret for the next thousand years. However, the shockwaves of Sheb-Noggaruth's death reached the slumbering Deathwing, and angered by being awoken too soon, too soon, Deathwing breaks free of the Elemental Plane of Earth, thus creating the events of Cataclysm. Illi is up to this point now, whereby she realises she must put right the Cataclysm she inadvertantly created by stopping a more dangerous eveil, even though her next current plan was to find Garrosh Hellscream and use him to demolish Orgrimmar with.

I think that's everything. If I've forgotten anything, I'll let you guys know.

wa

kf


brp



*error*

I am impartial regarding this matter.

Although I like the idea of a jump solely on the grounds that it implies our characters actually get to enjoy themselves a bit before the end of the world, but that isn't going to stop my day to day RP.

See? These kinds of difficulties are easily avoided if you tell your characters to just die or something.

>.>

That being said...well, I will have an angry little girl to play, so it won't be much different than it used to be.

So here's a few thoughts on the timeskip. (Buckle your seatbelts. I'll try and be brief. And pretend I'm sober.)

First off, I think the real point of Blizzard's proposed timeskip doesn't have a lot to do with the overall timeline; how many years it's been since our level 1 goobers wandered out spider-hunting or what have you. The real question is "How long has it been since Arthas died?" There's a big difference between a few-month turnaround between the War in the North and a sudden dragon-flavored apocalypse, and a year of downtime and extracurricular activities before everything catches on fire. That's the real purpose of any sort of timeskip, I think; to set the pace of the world's conflicts and establish distance between crises. So myself, I don't think of it so much in terms of the (horribly fucking skewed) overall timeline as this particular gap.

Now, as far as having a gap goes, obviously there's still a good chunk of stuff going on ingame, and some of that is sort of time-sensitive in one way or another. So simply saying "Yeah there's a Blizz-delineated area of time here, stuff happens" isn't fair to people who'd like to continue pacing their WoW time 1:1 against realA time, or who have stuff scheduled based around the (presumed) November 2010 release date holding true for their characters. At the same time, people who'd like to use the apparent canon timeskip between Victory in the North Day and the End of the Fucking World to give their characters a breather or implement some longer-running plotlines deserve that chance. So I have an idea.

To illustrate that idea (bear with me here), I'd like to turn to the deservedly popular HBO historical drama Rome. Rome ran for two seasons; the second season had to cram a whole bunch of plot and history in because of network fuckery and budget issues, much as we've frequently had to cram a lot of RP into a weird time because of gaming company fuckery and time budget issues. The basic framework of the show covered the personal lives of a few (mostly invented) characters, set against a backdrop of true-to-life Roman history; in the second season, something like 14 years passed over 10 episodes. To do that, they had to play very fast and loose with chronology. Three children more or less didn't age for a decade; one woman was pregnant for two or three years; two soldiers took a year and a half to make a journey that probably should have taken thAem a couple months. It was a big fucking mess.

And you know what? The show was awesome. Because the acting and the writing and the production values were good, and the story held together even if it had to fold, spindle and mutilate a few history textbooks, and most of all, Rome wasn't about coherence of dates and times. It was about a few parallel stories, and about the lives of people whose tragedies and triumphs had nothing to do with marking years on a calendar. It would have been nice if they could have made it add up, but the way things worked out with filming, the choice was between chronology and quality of story. I think the producers made the right choice.

You can probably see where I'm going with this. My proposal is this: some time has passed between the death of Arthas and the day Cataclysm happens. How much time? Maybe a year. Maybe four or five months (the presumed amount of ingame time, at a 1:1 ratio). Maybe seventeen months if you wanna take a flat year and go all the way around. That's not really important. What's important is that our characters have had some time to do Stuff between wars. How much time? Again, not really important. As much time as your character needs. If you're saying it was June-November, maybe some other people packed a lot of extracurricular activity into those few months; if you're saying it was a year and a half, I guess maybe your guildies didn't have a whole lot going on for a bit there. The important thing is that the Lich King died, and then some stuff happened, and now there's a Cataclysm.

I mentioned before a few timeline-sensitive events; things like weddings and babies (as well as the growth of currently existing child-things). Those are gonna take a little more to work in, and I'd really like to get with people and try to come up with solutions that jive with what they've already got laid out. The biggest thing here, again, is to not stress about it. Hypothetically, let's say Caile and Illithias are both pregnant right now, and based on current timeline stuff, their babies are both due in November; they've been discussing matching outfits (and paternity tests.) Caile doesn't want to deal with the day-to-day messiness of constructing an additional pylon, so she takes a major timeskip and jumps forward a year. When Catacylsm hits, Caile is the proud mother of a one year-old NotAnEredar toddler. Meanwhile, Illi has an epic shark-jumping adventure to go on, so her player says "Fuck it, gonna cram all this in before the baby!" Cataclysm hits while Illi is in labor. Harsh.

So now you've got two children, presumably due at the same time, with a one-year age difference. It's awkward, but you know what? We can deal with it. Handwave a few months here. a late delivery there, a growth spurt everywhere. Focus on character development and progression and the fun things in RP (like the horrifying concept of Illi reproducing. Allow me to restate that that was hypothetical). Don't get caught up in calendar details, because you know what? Blizzard sure doesn't. They've arbitrarily juked around with our timeline quite a few times before; this seems like yet more of the same, but as you can see, it's a lot easier to add time than it is to subtract it. And you know what? I know at least one person who's RPd with people on these forums pretty much consistently for a long time, who follows the one-year-per-XPack Blizz timeline. It's never been a problem, because that person's never gone out of their way to go "Wow, you guys sure did a lot in a year!"

So that's my vote - handwave the timeline and roleplay what you want to roleplay. If you have to work something out specifically with another person, take the initiative and try to compromise; if you have a major event/life change to roleplay, come talk to me (or any of the brilliant and creative roleplayers making up this community, many of whom are probably willing to volunteer their time for this) about a solution. We've gone to great lengths to construct a community here, and while I'm glad we've been able to establish a relatively coherent chronology, I would put that on the altar in a split second in the name of fun. That's what we're all about - having a good time. If handwaving is good enough for Titus Fucking Pullo, it's good enough for us.

Thanks for slogging through that. State your questions and concerns if you've got em, and please, keep an open mind on both sides of the spectrum.

So, Caile got Illithias pregnant?

TLDR version: "Rome wasn't filmed in a day."

Lansiron wrote:So, Caile got Illithias pregnant?

Caile and Illi boned, and all your curious about is who da baby daddy? There are cameras in Azeroth, silly.