Warcraft Retrospective 26: Redemption Equals Death

As we focused on Thrall and Grom Hellscream, the Burning Legion and their sinister plans sort of fell by the wayside. This is about to change.

The Blood of Mannoroth

All is well in the Ashenvale forest (the part that Grom isn’t currently deforesting, anyway). Furbolgs are hanging out around a magic well.

Suddenly, that peace is disrupted when Mannoroth and Tichondrius teleport in.

On Archimonde’s orders, they’re plotting to kill the demigod Cenarius before the Legion begins its invasion of Kalimdor. Mannoroth fought Cenarius before and would welcome another chance to meet him in battle, but he’s crafty and rarely appears in the open.

Tichondrius suggests a plan. By despoiling Ashenvale, the orcs have incurred Cenarius’s wrath and will soon face him. As they are, they stand little chance against him, but Tichondrius believes Mannoroth’s blood can even the odds. As he once bound the orcs in a blood pact, so can his blood reinvigorate their demonic frenzy, making them unstoppable.

Mannoroth approves of the plan. He approaches the well and spills his blood into it, which gives it an ominous red glow.

So now, seamlessly, another piece of the puzzle is revealed. When Gul’dan enslaved the orcs to the Burning Legion prior to Warcraft 1, it was the blood of Mannoroth that bound them and turned them into bloodthirsty monsters. This shows, once again, that the way the orcs acted in Warcraft 1 and 2 was not their natural state, but a corruption.

Now the demons only have to wait — and let Grom be himself.

The Hunter of Shadows

The unsuspecting Warsong orcs continue to turn the Ashenvale forest into the Ashenvale grassland. As Tichondrius correctly predicted, this attracts the attention of Cenarius, who turns out to be some kind of giant… night elf centaur?

Seriously, what is it with Warcraft 3 and centauroids? We have already seen plain old centaurs, as well as Mannoroth, half-elf-half-deer dryads among night elf forces in the previous mission, and now Cenarius. Dryads are actually called Cenarius’s daughters in the manual, which also claims that centaurs are supposedly his bastard children, but that’s only a legend and is not known for sure.

Cenarius immediately establishes what a serious threat he is by animating the trees to attack the peons.

This mission is one of those that look scarier than they really are when you’re playing them for the first time. To underscore just how screwed you appear to be, you’re not given any quests right away. You start with four bases, but the three in the west are immediately attacked by an overwhelming night elf force and cannot be saved — all you can do is evacuate peons from them to your main base across the river in the east. Once the night elves finish leveling your buildings, they move in their own; they can do that because most of their buildings are animate trees that can uproot and walk.

Once your three bases in the west are done with, Cenarius channels a spell that regrows the forest around all of them.

Wow. Just wow. If he can just casually do that, he really does deserve his title of demigod. We’re so screwed. He’s going to flatten us.

After this cutscene, the night elves launch a pretty massive attack on the remaining base, from three directions. I actually had to restart this mission because I lost too many units and buildings to their flying units. In the second playthrough, I built mostly headhunters and raiders, and researched Ensnare to counter the chimaeras and hippogryph riders.

On this screenshot, you can notice a bug that I was hit with, and which complicated this mission a bit¹. Grom lost the ability to carry items at the beginning of the mission, dropping them all at the base. This bug wasn’t there at release and was apparently introduced in patch 1.31, and also occurs twice in the night elf campaign, so I’ll likely have to downgrade to 1.30 for at least those two missions.

Thankfully, once the initial attack is repelled, the night elves only attack from one direction at a time, and towers are mostly sufficient to defend the base. I still have to keep around some units to take care of catapults, which attack towers from outside their range.

Soon enough, we get our quest. A witch doctor reports that he senses a dark power emanating from the wilderness — from across the entire map, apparently — and that it might be key to destroying Cenarius. Grom and his troops set out north, battling furbolgs, skeletons, and finally… these guys.

These are satyrs. I like them because they showcase one of the key ways in which Warcraft differs from generic fantasy settings and makes itself memorable: it takes classic creatures from mythology and fantasy, and completely reimagines them. In D&D, satyrs are fey beings associated with revelry and debauchery, looking roughly like their prototypes in Greek mythology. These satyrs are actually demons wielding infernal magic, servants of the Burning Legion, and there is absolutely nothing merry or adorable about them.²

It actually goes further than that. Look closely at the speaking satyr’s portrait. You guessed right — they’re corrupted night elves.³ They’re not just random monsters for Grom to fight, they’re thematically appropriate here, as a cautionary tale of what awaits the orcs should they once again turn to demonic power. Eventually they’ll lose their very identity and become little more than pawns for the Legion.

The Chaos Well is secured, but the witch doctor is having second thoughts, as he senses a demonic curse in the fountain. Grom says he’s “cursed already”. One of the orcs offers him one last chance to turn back.

Grom doesn’t listen, and drinks from the fountain. This marks the second character in Warcraft 3 to voluntarily embrace corruption. There seems to be a theme going forward: both Arthas and Grom accept a curse in the name of defeating a seemingly invincible enemy, and both are thus bound in servitude to a greater power.

Drinking from the Chaos Well turns Grom a menacing shade of red⁴, and he invites the rest of his orcs to drink from it. They become red-skinned chaos orcs⁵ and now deal Chaos damage, allowing them to mow down enemy units and buildings alike. Now, the night elves don’t stand a chance.

Once we deal enough damage to one of the bases, Cenarius appears. He’s a very beefed-up Keeper of the Grove hero with 4000 HP, capable of immobilizing units with Entangling Roots and Cyclone and animating treants from nearby trees. He also has Divine armor, which reduces all non-Chaos attacks against him to a negligible amount. Against a full force of chaos orcs, led by a blademaster with critical strikes and Whirlwind, he doesn’t stand a chance.

The demigod falls… but Grom gets an unexpected visitor.

Mannoroth has come to bring the orcs back into the fold and make them serve the Legion once again — and despite Grom’s defiance, he finds himself powerless to resist.

Where Wyverns Dare

Meanwhile, at the footsteps of Stonetalon Peak (though the location shown on the loading screen map is nowhere near), a lone goblin zeppelin is scouting the area, maneuvering between two human bases and actually taking some damage.⁶

Back at the orc base, the scout, a raider, reports to Thrall that the humans have covered the entire way to the summit with their fortifications. Suddenly, Cairne walks in with two tauren.

Thrall explains that these “pinkskins” are called humans, are their enemies from across the sea, and seem intent on keeping the orcs from the peak. Cairne thinks the Oracle’s wisdom belongs to all, and suggests getting help from nearby wyverns, which have no love for hostile invaders.

This is a more relaxed and less hectic mission than the previous one. We only have a single chokepoint to defend, and we get a second hero: Cairne, the tauren chieftain. He can stomp the ground for AoE damage and stun and send waves of earth tremor that travel in a straight line. His Endurance Aura gives bonuses to movement speed and attack speed to nearby units. Finally his ultimate ability is Reincarnation, which makes him come back to life five seconds after death, with a four-minute cooldown.

We also unlock the tauren unit. Each of the four playable factions has a late-game heavy melee unit: humans have knights, undead have abominations, orcs have tauren, and night elves have… a unit we haven’t yet seen for story reasons, but will.

There are two side quests here. One is to restore a defiled fountain of health with a special item that drops off the centaur khan; we’ve had a similar quest before in the prologue campaign.

The other is to free the wyverns, which have been enslaved by local harpies. While optional, the wyverns will prove useful in the assault on the human base inaccessible by land.

The choice of name here is, admittedly, kind of odd. In most mythology and fantasy depictions, wyverns are a type of dragon, and the kind of creatures introduced in Warcraft 3 — lions with scorpion tails and sometimes with bat wings — are more commonly called manticores. In fact, Warcraft wyverns look pretty similar to the depiction of manticores in D&D, though with leaner torsos and bigger wings.

Whatever they’re called, they prove very handy in completing the main quest — destroying the blue human base blocking the entrance to the Oracle cavern. There’s also a light blue base accessible by ground, which doesn’t pose any problems when assaulting it. The blue one, however, is located on a cliff and only accessible by air, and the potential landing sites are protected with patrolling gryphon riders. Wyverns help take care of them.

Just before entering the cavern, Thrall and Cairne see Jaina enter, in the company of two knights. The entrance is surrounded by… a Stonehenge-like structure?

Thrall isn’t too worried. He was raised by humans, and believes he knows all their stratagems. There’s no way they’re going to stop him from reaching…

The Oracle

Thrall and Cairne have entered the Oracle cavern, but soon come across a fork in the road.

This is another dungeon crawl mission, and I love it. It’s rather similar aesthetically to The Fires Down Below, the prologue campaign mission where the orcs and trolls escaped the murloc prison. The twist here is that there are two dungeon-crawling sections, one for Thrall and one for Cairne. On normal mode, the mission is refreshingly easy and I completed it without losing a single unit.

Most of the enemies on Thrall’s side are undead. There are lots and lots of items to find, more than you can actually use, and plenty of consumables refreshing health and mana. For added annoyance, there are two quest items that are mandatory pickups and take up inventory slots.

Unlike the murloc dungeon, which was of unknown origin, this one was definitely built by night elves. Just look at these gates:

There are tons of scripted events. The human peasants on the other side of these gates arm themselves and turn into footmen as you approach. Later, you reach sheep that turn out to be polymorphed footmen lying in ambush.

…Or it would be an ambush, had the script not bugged out. At release the footmen attacked the player, but in my playthrough, the sheep turned into neutral footmen who proceeded to just stand there, and all that was left for me to do was to kill the sorceresses who had polymorphed them. Apparently it was another bug introduced by patch 1.31; I don’t remember if Reforged fixed it.

Finally, you come across a battle between harpies and a level 10 red dragon. As usual in such cases, you can wait until one side is eliminated, and mop up the survivors.

The dragon drops a magical amulet, the Heart of Aszune. (I don’t want to think about where it kept it.) Soon, Thrall comes upon Aszune herself, who is, apparently… a night elf statue.

All right, she was presumably a living night elf in the ancient past, and this is her spirit speaking. When the heart is returned to Aszune, the glow fades, but there is a chasm to cross. Thrall believes that there’s a spirit bridge powered by an enchanted gemstone, which is missing. Hopefully Cairne will find it.

We now get control of Cairne (while retaining control of Thrall). Whereas Thrall and his orcs were navigating hallways, Cairne and his three tauren are navigating caves outside the underground complex. They fight a variety of enemies, including these kobolds who seem to be mining something.

There’s also this cute map secret: the Hungry Hungry Lizard.

It eats its way through mushrooms until it devours so many that it explodes, leaving behind the Lion Horn of Stormwind — basically a level 1 Devotion Aura in item form.

The quest item, the Enchanted Gemstone, is protected by a whole lot of quillboars — and the mission gives you a choice in how to approach this encounter, with different trade-offs.

The easy way is to activate the spike trap, which kills all the quillboars, but you don’t get any loot other than the quest item. The hard way is to go into the pit and fight them head on. This is really hard, and I chose not to do it, but if you do, they’ll drop a Necklace of Spell Immunity.

Cairne picks up the enchanted gemstone, which he recognizes as the spirit stone of Stonetalon Chasm. Legends claim that it will activate the spirit bridge that leads to the Oracle. Cairne then finds a way to Thrall’s section, fights some suits of animated armor, and opens a door that can only be opened from his side, leading to Thrall and the spirit bridge.

Before going in, I redistribute loot and make a short trip with Thrall to Cairne’s section to pick up an item Cairne had no room for. This is because the spirit bridge is a point of no return.

The minimap makes it look like there’s a large unexplored chunk in the southeast, but nope. As soon as you cross the spirit bridge, the mission ends with the final cutscene. And what a cutscene it is!

Thrall, Cairne and Jaina find themselves on the other side of the spirit bridge. It looks like a fight is about to erupt.

But then, suddenly…

Turns out that this entire quest for the Oracle was a ploy by the Prophet to gather Thrall and Jaina in one place, so he could tell them what destiny holds.

First of all, what?

Second of all, WHAT?

This raises so many questions that I don’t know where to begin.

The Prophet urged Thrall to sail to Kalimdor, but didn’t give him any specific directions. Thrall randomly bumped into Cairne, who told him the legend of the Oracle of Stonetalon Peak. We don’t know how Jaina learned of this cavern, but maybe she just randomly stumbled upon some local lore. And then the Prophet flew in here, past all the guards and traps, and… waited for them both in this final chamber as part of some ridiculously convoluted scheme to impersonate the Oracle?

What’s going on? Did he somehow foresee that Thrall and Jaina would both find their way here at the exact same moment? That’s called “reading the script”, and it still doesn’t explain how they went in at the exact same moment. It’s a ridiculous contrivance that requires both a massive coincidence and the Prophet reading the script in advance.

But wait, it gets worse. Since the first mission, the orc campaign has been teasing the mystery of the Oracle. Even the omniscient narrator who writes quest descriptions contributes to the anticipation. Here’s the description for the quest you get after picking up the Heart of Aszune:

Heart of Aszune

Long ago, the Night Elf princess, Aszune, mocked the Oracle’s wisdom. As punishment, she was transformed into living stone. Now, only the retrieval of her gemstone heart can end the curse and allow passage to the Oracle’s domicile.

The Oracle is ancient, dating back to the times when night elves had princesses — that is, to the Kaldorei Empire, over ten thousand years ago. What kind of entity can be that old and that powerful?

And then that mystery just never gets resolved. The game forgets about it. In the Oracle’s chamber, we find not the ancient Oracle of legend, but the Prophet we already know. And while his identity is not yet revealed, suffice to say that there’s a very, very good reason why he cannot possibly be the Oracle who cursed Aszune.

To my knowledge, the identity of the original Oracle is still unknown. Even Chronicle is silent on this matter.

To be clear, the unresolved mystery and the ridiculous plot contrivance leading to this cutscene are the only real gripes I have with the plot of Reign of Chaos. Despite my reservations about the offscreen transformation of paladin Arthas into death knight Arthas, at least my imagination can fill the blanks there, and I understand why they didn’t show it for pacing reasons. Here, the writers have no excuse. The plot needed to bring Thrall and Jaina together where the Prophet could address them, but the chosen solution was a non sequitur.

By itself, it’s not fatal, and the overall story still works. But this sets a dangerous precedent of Warcraft writers ignoring their own setup and established facts — even facts established in the same game — to get the characters where they need them, logic be damned.

The Prophet urges Thrall and Jaina to work together, and Jaina balks at the idea. The Prophet admonishes her and drops this bombshell on Thrall:

Thrall will need Jaina’s help to save Grom, so now he has the motivation to work with her. Unfortunately — and the story glosses over this — she has no motivation to work with him. As far as Jaina knows, Thrall slaughtered his way through lots of her people to get this far — people she worked so hard offscreen to evacuate from a doomed Lordaeron — and Grom’s fall to darkness has just established that the orcs are dangerous, unreliable, and will return to consorting with demons at the slightest provocation. She has no reason to help Thrall except for the Prophet pressuring her into it.

She’s been cornered by a railroading GM who won’t take no for an answer.

By Demons Be Driven

Now comes the time to save Grom.

Jaina formulates a plan. She gives Thrall a soul gem that will let him capture Grom’s spirit without hurting him. If Thrall brings it back to Jaina’s base, they can work together to free Grom from the demons’ control.

While this mission will keep you on your toes — it’s the finale of the orc campaign, after all, — it’s not actually as scary as it looks. But it’s pretty scary, still.

The Warsong orcs have two large bases and a couple of smaller outposts. As chaos orcs, they’re bigger, stronger and meaner than your normal orcs, and can plow through your fortifications if you aren’t careful.⁷ Grom is protected by a whole canyon full of demons.

Finally, shortly into the mission, the screen shakes, and infernals begin to rain out of the sky.

But it really isn’t that bad.

The path to the eastern Warsong base goes past a Fountain of Health guarded by some centaurs. Once I defeated them, I had a natural staging point from where I could lead hit-and-run attacks on the enemy base and pull back my wounded units to heal here. And once I tied up the eastern base, the western one mostly preferred to attack Jaina instead of me, so I only had to deal with infernals — and building a row of towers and setting a peon to auto-repair was enough to keep them at bay.

I didn’t even bother fighting the demons. Defeating all enemies isn’t the objective — coming back with Grom’s spirit is. I led all my units in to distract the demons while Thrall moved closer in, triggering a cutscene where Grom declares Lord Mannoroth his new master. Thrall, apparently, doesn’t even know who that is.

The revelation that Grom doomed his people knowingly further enrages Thrall, who attacks.

I have to admit that I wasn’t entirely thrilled to get a cutscene at this specific point in gameplay. Usually, cutscenes are shown in the beginning of the mission, the end, and after reaching quest givers or completing intermediate objectives. All of these are usually “safe” points, when you aren’t expected to be heavily engaged in gameplay. Here, I was focused on reaching and capturing Grom and getting the hell out, so the cutscene pulled me out of gameplay that I was concentrating on. In the mission designers’ defense, I assume they really did expect the player to clear all resistance on the way to Grom before approaching him.

While Grom is a level 10 blademaster who instantly respawns if killed, you’re not supposed to actually fight him. Targeting him with the soul gem instantly traps him inside–

…Wait, what?

This sounds way, way too convenient. So Jaina can make an artifact that will just instantly capture any powerful enemy of her choice in a Pokeball? It would break the setting if this plot device was remembered again, but it never was, which creates a different problem that plagues Warcraft, where a really convenient quest item is used once and never mentioned again in future situations where it would be useful. At the very least, they could have come up with some magibabble to explain why it only works this once. (For example, it could work because Thrall and Grom had been friends for so long that it created a law of sympathy bond powerful enough for the artifact to work. My point is that the writers should be explaining this, not me.)

Anyway, with Grom’s spirit captured, I pulled back and directed Thrall back the same way he came. Presto, mission complete.

We’re rewarded with a pretty cool ending cutscene where Jaina, Thrall, elven priests, and orcish shamans all work together to cleanse Grom of his demonic frenzy. Eventually, his skin reverts from red to green.

“To hell with your apologies!” says Thrall. “I need you to help me save our people!”

The two then depart to the nearby canyon to face Mannoroth together.

And face him they do. And how.

Mannoroth engages in evil gloating befitting of the B-movie villain he is. Grom, enraged, goes out in a blaze of glory, charging in and burying his axe in the demon’s chest. He is fatally wounded by the resulting explosion, and lies dying as Thrall limps to him.

— Thrall… The blood haze has lifted. The demon’s fire has burnt out in my veins. I have… freed myself.
— No, old friend. You’ve freed us all.

Thoughts

The Warcraft 3 orc campaign is a story of old hatreds threatening to restart a vicious cycle of violence.

It’s a story of an idealistic youth who refuses to give up on his friend, however far gone, and brings him back to the light.

It’s also a story of facing one’s past misdeeds, moving forward, correcting them, and finding redemption in death.

It’s also also, less charitably, a story of settlers from across the sea landing on a new continent and immediately proceeding to kill most natives they meet and take their stuff. But I’m not going to dwell on this particular point now; rather, I’ll save it for the orc campaign in the expansion, where the unfortunate implications will become more evident.

Grom Hellscream shines in his role as a foil to Thrall. Is his storyline cheesy? Absolutely. Have we seen these story beats before? Yes, a million times. If it was a standalone story, it wouldn’t work, but it does work in the larger context of Warcraft 3 and the orc backstory established in Warcraft 1, 2, and Lord of the Clans. The conflict between Thrall and Grom is really a conflict between two different visions of the Horde’s future. Will the orcs peacefully coexist with other cultures and find new allies, fighting when they have to, or will they turn into blood-crazed savages who fight for the sake of fighting? For now, Thrall’s vision has prevailed.

His story also plays into a theme running through all of Warcraft 3: willingly embracing corruption to beat a seemingly unbeatable enemy. Or, translating fantasy terms into real-world terms, willingly crossing a moral threshold and committing atrocities for the sake of greater goals, because, of course, the ends justify the means.

I wonder also if the final scene of the ending cinematic, with Grom dying in Thrall’s arms, was a reference to Aragorn and Boromir. Like Boromir, Grom was the more flawed of the two, more susceptible to corruption, eventually falling to it, and like Boromir, he found redemption in death, fighting to save his close ones.

And Grom got that chance because — unlike Arthas — he had a friend who never gave up on saving him from himself. It really does make me wonder whether Stratholme could have turned out differently.

But Grom’s redemption creates an interesting situation. He’s going to be remembered as the hero who freed the orcs from Mannoroth and the danger of being enslaved by the Legion ever again — but he was also one of the leaders responsible for said enslavement in the first place. He fought on Ner’zhul’s side in a war that doomed Draenor. He committed unprompted massacres against humans and night elves, which went unpunished before his death. As his superior, Thrall bears some of the responsibility, as does the Warsong clan that enabled him.

Whatever come, the name of Hellscream is bound to be surrounded by controversy going forward.

What’s Next?

We have two more posts to go through for the night elf campaign, and with it, the climactic finale of Reign of Chaos. After that, I’ll pause for a bit and talk about the strengths of Warcraft 3’s worldbuilding and the reason it became such a universally beloved foundation of the Warcraft setting as we know it now.

Next up: something is rotten in the forest of Ashenvale.

I couldn’t even pick up scrolls of healing to heal my units. ↩
When Shadowlands, much later, introduces more “classic” satyr-like beings, it will be a sign that they’ve given up on this kind of creative reimagining and are just copying D&D wholesale, from the cosmology to the creatures. ↩
This is revealed in-game in the night elf campaign, but it’s also in the manual, so I might as well mention it now. ↩
And also, in my bugged game, gives him back the ability to carry items. ↩
They were renamed fel orcs in The Frozen Throne, and Reforged backported this name to Reign of Chaos too. ↩
And that damage carries over when you gain control of the zeppelin after the cutscene ends. Attention to detail! ↩
One consolation is that the Warsong don’t build wyverns or tauren, which makes sense because they never befriended either. They also don’t have any troll units, having placed their former Darkspear allies in cages that you can break to free them. Once again, gameplay and story support each other, and the gameplay advantage Thrall has in this mission supports the superiority of his vision of the Horde, going forward. ↩