Speculation on Draenei Fashion

To save a few bits of work from forum creep, here's some of my speculation on draenei fashion.

Re: Attire
. . . . . I've often envisioned the casual attire of the draenei to be a version of the salwar kameez ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salwar_kameez ) modified with pants that either wrap instead of pull on or which are loose enough overall to accommodate hooves. In general, I figure the ladies are often in dresses (many female NPCs are, but this could just as easily be a Western gender norm thing) and that most pants are either wrap pants or lace up the sides somehow.

Re: Ornamentation
. . . . . Gypsies were often covered in gold and jewels because that was all they had. As nomads, they had to carry all their possessions, and so they carried their wealth on their wrists and ears. Argus may have been paved in precious stone, but everywhere else, it's relatively useful and portable currency.
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. . . . . Evidence for why I think Draenei society could reasonably be theorycrafted as highly ornamented and elaborate - drawn from archaeology.
Anklet with Golden Bells Purple metal (khorium?), yellow beads made of blown glass which is usually more ornamental than drop glass, and gold bells.
Carved Harp of Exotic Wood Exotic woods as opposed to common ones indicate a tendency towards ornamentation again, and now we know music included harps and bells.
Dignified Portrait Oil portraiture shows some skilled - if cheeky - painters.
Fine Crystal Candelabra Dripping with crystals, chains, and ornate scrollwork, this is clearly an item more decorative than functional even though it does have function.
Baroque Sword Scabbard "Almost distasteful in its ornamentation" the text says. Again, draenei like their flash. And they had weapons for magical or ceremonial use.
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. . . . . Even if it's "almost distasteful" from a draenei view, it's still heavily ornamented and draenei. Somebody, if just Aunt Nehaanu, liked it. So an argument for a trend in ornamented vs spare could be made. Maybe we've got minimalist modern draenei and fussy baroque draenei.
. . . . . (Hadeon had a friend who wore so much flash that when she told her friends over drinks one night that she wanted to be buried with her jewels, he joked she'd have to hire more coffin bearers.)

Re: Cultural Appropriation in Fashion Choices
. . . . . As a sociologist with some training in facets of cultural appropriation, I don't think what we're doing is so egregious, really. Admittedly, most of my training is in criminology, though. I don't think all parties in this discussion are necessarily from the same cultures themselves, so accusations of cultural appropriation come off as a little excessive.
. . . . . Also, I have no problems with envisioning my characters in the same type of clothing I wear.

Re: Fabrics
. . . . . I would be more comfortable with the idea of cottons if there were any mention of them in game. Instead, it seems that linen, wool, and silk are the natural organics on Azeroth, and whatever passes for fibrous material on Draenor (those reeds in Nagrand?) has to be woven with nether magic of some kind.

Your Character's Loot Table

((Still saving posts from forum creep.))

. . . . . This is inspired by a Moon Guard forum post I saw a long time ago. I'd give credit, but really, it was so long I don't even know who posted it.
. . . . . Whatever the cause may be, your character is slain in battle! Your killer rifles your corpse for loot; post here two/three items which are found on your body. (The stats don't have to make sense for your class, just your character if you design something with stats.)


Hadeon
[Bag of Fire Pellets] (epic)
Trinket
+84 Stamina
+147 Agility

Equip: Chance on taking melee damage to explode in a fiery inferno which does 6885-8490 fire damage to all enemies and allies in an 8 yard radius.

"It's like carrying live explosives, but smaller!"

[Holey Breastplate] (uncommon)
Chest
+226 Stamina
+390 Strength

Equip: Increases your expertise by 172.

Equip: Decreases your fire resistance by 20.

"There's a hole in the back of this armor.

Valdiis 
[Filigreed Orb] (uncommon)
Neck
+ 93 Strength
+ 140 Stamina
Equip: Each melee hit which lands on you has a chance to grant +40 Strength for 35 seconds. This effect stacks up to 10 times.
"A righteous orb wrapped in mithril filigree, this necklace appears to be in pristine condition."
(It would be found around Valdiis's neck, but tucked beneath her breastplate and gambeson to keep it from view.)

[Black Leather Bag] (rare)
Trinket
+ 143 Agility
Equip: Increases your ability to creep others out by +87.
Use: Play knucklebones! (Use will randomly /roll 2d6.)
"When given a light shake, this bag rattles like dry bones - many small, dry bones."
(This would be found attached to Valdiis's belt by heavy leather loops.)

Rosoe
[Headdress of Pearls] (common)
Head
24 Armor
+ 16 Intellect
+ 25 Spirit
Equip: Increases your spell power by 21.
"Each pearl in this very long strand appears to be a different type."
(This would be found wrapped around Rosoe's right horn and dangling down to her shoulder.)

[Pile of Trinkets] (poor)
"This bundle of tangled cords, beads, strings, and wooden charms is useless to you."
(These would be found en masse around Rosoe's neck.)

[Musty-smelling Bag] (common)
22 Slot Bag
"This bag is usable after you dump the pile of musty dead leaves out of it."
Alternate flavor text for herbalists: "This bag is usable after you remove the abundance of dried fadeleaf from it." (Gain 18 Fadeleaf.)
(This would be found tied firmly to Rosoe's belt.)

Diyos
[Bronze Hairstick] (uncommon)
One-Hand Dagger
51-87 Damage
(69.7 damage per second)
+ 38 Intellect
+ 21 Spirit
Equip: If your hair is long enough to wear this and you are male, you feel strangely un-self-conscious about it.
"A dual-duty item - this dagger can also be used to hold your hair out of your face!"
(If not found holding back this priest's mass of curly hair, the item would be found pressed into the back of a golden holy symbol worn around his neck.)

[Scrap of Netherweave Cloth] (poor)
"The owner may have been using this as a handkerchief. Ew..."
(Likely, this was found in a chest pocket sewn into Diyos's robes.)

[Friendship Bracelet] (common)
Wrist
"This faintly-glowing strand of purple beads is well-worn."
(This would have been found on Diyos's left wrist.)

A Little Character Art

. . . . .I was complaining to a friend of mine that I was a sometimes little sad I played a dead character, because dead characters could not be sexy - ever. (And shouldn't be!) She decided to attempt to prove me wrong and drew a picture of Valdiis for me. I got bored and colored it recently, so I decided to share.

Drawn by Kyléa of Moon Guard. Colored by Valdiis of Moon Guard.

Writer's Block

. . . . . I have not forgotten about my stories or stopped playing my characters. I've had some fairly major life upheavals in the last few months and have hit a bit of writer's block with my stories. That said, I do have a collaborative piece with Valdiis and Major Eredis Orill I'm writing with his player mostly finished and the vaguest of plots for a Diyos and Valdiis piece in the back of my head. Hadeon has an outline for another story. Xeremuriis may be a little while before she pops up again. So. Just a lull. ^.^ 

Writer's Block Sucks

On 12/5/09, I will run out of scheduled story posts. At that point, this blog will cease to be updated every three days and will instead be updated only as often as I end up writing something. The concern I have with this is that I have not written anything worth posting since 11/10/09. Sure, that's only twenty days without writing, but I suppose I'm a little afraid that I've already lost my muse again.

I know I haven't - the holidays are upon me, finals for the semester, actual work at work, some hefty guild RP stuffs, and so forth. I've got another Hadeon story beginning to percolate in my brain, plans for another Diyos one as well... It'll come back. But in the meanwhile, posting around here will probably slow down considerably.

Much love to all four or five people who read the blog.

Observations on the Draenei Race

A quick note about these stories: these are all character-development and story-telling moments, but have no special grand, over-arching meaning behind them. They are just to tell about what's in my head, and hopefully entertain some of my friends who role-play with me (which is why I'm not especially interested in throwing myself into the blogosphere full tilt yet).

I recall having read somewhere recently - I don't remember if it was a blog post or a realm forum post - that not enough people RP draenei as an appropriately alien race. While I agree in part, I also agree that it is difficult for a novice RPer like me to get into a non-human mindset, and I would like to point out that the draenei as they are presented in the game have the same drives for revenge and recovery and love and prejudice that other Azerothian native races do. I deeply admire and secretly envy those who can play the draenei as appropriately foreign and near-immortal as they really deserve to be. If I fail at it in my own writing, that is my fault and not a reflection of the race as a whole.

As I have mentioned before, the resilience and recovery abilities of the draenei are part of why I like them. They have been through so much, and so many thousands of years of weirdness and horror and trauma...and yet they seem to come out of it primarily sane, hopeful, mostly happy, and more stable than expected for what they've seen. This resilence of character shows in my own stories through the reactions of the characters to horror and death and fright. While time should probably be spent on a character's terror at seeing a ghoul for the very first time and then being chased by it, it ends up only minutes later that her fear is overtaken by concern for her family and she bounces back. While a character has endured untold suffering and horror at the hands of the Lich King, once she regains control of her self, much of her original personality and concern for life remains intact. Part of this is just the author stepping in to move the story along, and another part of it is an authorial failing at effective dark, angsty stories - and part of it is simply that I want the reactions of these characters to show that amazing propensity for standing tall against all comers, be they ghouls or demons or spoilt-brat frozen princes. But here is fair warning that this flaw of writing may also be very apparent in my stories.

Lastly, I want to briefly touch on what a pain in the ass it is to place events along a timeline which can span tens of thousands of years for a people that, for all we really know, may never actually die and may take thousands of millenia to even appear aged. I can't even figure out exactly how old my characters are because of this fuzziness. I may misplace or mistime events as I go along, and end up having to come back along and retcon the story later to fit actual canon instead of my own conjecture. (I've already done this once with Val's first story.) As of right now - 10/29/09 - I am working out my concepts of draenic time like so: the Prophet Velen appears, now, the equivalent of a fit 78 year-old human. We know he was already a leader among his people when Sargeras approached them; let's say he was a young and robust leader, a visual appearance similar to a 32 year-old human (hey, Alexander the Great had conquered the known world by this point). So over the 25,000 years of fleeing before the Burning Legion, Velen has aged the visual equivalent of about 46 human years of life. 25,000 divided by 46 equals ~543. By this totally made-up and conjectural reasoning, Valdiis is about 16,833 years old (~31). Xeremuriis is about 8,688 years old (~16). Hadeon would be somewhere in the 36,946 range (~67). Diyos and Athos are about 20,091 years old (~37). None of this is actually important to the story - but I wanted to have my reasoning written down someplace.

Edited 11/18/09: Alternately, regarding draenei aging... It has been argued to me - rather successfully for the most part - that the draenei age at a similar rate to other races in the game up until some "peak age" probably in the mid-20s or early-30s, where the process halts. It doesn't make a great deal of sense to have a hundred-year-old toddler. It is likely that the draenei do endure a slightly longer than short-lived races period of adolescence, although not more than perhaps a hundred years or so. I find this argument persuasive enough to sway me to reconsider - again - my draenic timeline. How this will change things, I'm not entirely sure. The only one whose apparent age truly matters is Xeremuriis, since she is meant to still be a young adult.

MRP Profiles

Just to keep them in a safe place where I won't lose them - and, you know, in case anyone is curious - here are the MRP profiles for my WoW characters. Listed, more or less, in order of creation and with all associated personas within each character's section, starting with the default MRP flag for each. Last updated: 4/04/14.

Notes on How the Stories Will Go

I don't currently plan on having a great deal of out-of-character, non-story chatter in this blog. It's meant for sharing stories. I have a LiveJournal for OOC whining. I will - from time to time - have a comment about why something was written a particular way, but I'll try not to do that too often.

In order to help sort the stories, each will be preceeded by a small icon of the character and tagged with the character's name. I will be posting the stories in the order they were written, so the evolution of my writing style can be more clearly observed (and giggled at). Depending upon whim, the stories may be accompanied by a picture or two of the areas in which they occur - inspired by Destron's Travels through Azeroth and Outland (but with a great deal less awesome than he possesses).

Every story will also be preceeded with a link to a song that I was listening to while writing or editing the story. Music is a vital part of the process for me and story titles, images, phrases, and moods can be heavily influenced or outright stolen from a piece of music. Even the title of this blog is taken from two songs I love. (Yes, the Windbringer refers to one character and the Winterborn is another; no, I'm not telling who.) It is intended that the music I link be listened to while reading the story - if possible. I try not to repeat bands in order to ensure that the mood of each story stands alone, although there are certain ones I listen to frequently when writing.

Updates will occur...well, when I have a story to put up. Right now, I have a backlog of thirteen pieces to publish on the blog, and by the time I post them all, I hope to have a few new pieces. I tend to write on Tuesdays and Fridays, as those are days I have free time between classes, but lately I've been writing even at work because I have a lot of free time there now too (and at least typing sounds like working).

Expect first story this evening when I get off work, because there are some links I can't access behind all the firewalls here.

Obligatory Introduction

Hooray! Another small, egocentric World of Warcraft role-playing fiction blog. I feel special.

I hate writing about myself, so I'll make this brief. I am twenty-six years old, female, and an unrepentant geek. I am in college (late!) for a bachelor's in Criminal Justice or Sociology - I haven't entirely made up my mind on my major yet. I also work part time in a typical boring office which allows me a lot of time to sit at a computer and write. My hobbies are hiking, amateur silversmithing, reading fantasy and trashy romance novels, cross-stitch, and playing WoW.

I avoided playing WoW when it first came out, not really being on the pay-to-play bandwagon. Just two weeks before the Burning Crusade expansion came out, I finally got a trial account and tried the game. My first character was a human female warrior on Medivh-US; warriors in most MMOs tend to be the simplest class to learn. At level 12, I got a quest to visit Greatfather Winter in Ironforge. I popped open my map to find out where to go and then my then-fiance and I (he was also playing a warrior) tried to run from Stormwind to Ironforge - through the Burning Steppes... We made it all the way to Blackrock Mountain with a great deal of corpse-running, where several startled level sixty players told us about the Tram.

We didn't like having to sit in the queue all the time to get onto Medivh-US, so we started new characters on whatever server WoW recommended to us - Ysera-US. I made a night elf female priest and my then-fiance made a night elf female druid. We made it to about level 20 in those first two weeks. The game was alright, I was thinking about buying it...and then I saw a Youtube video of the upcoming races in the expansion.

The draenei. Oh my... Horns, hooves, a tail, and a sexy Russian accent? Sign me up!

Thus, the draenei are why I play WoW at all. The majority of my characters are draenei, and so far, all of my stories have been about them. I adore the visual design and the lore of the race, even if they were retconned into the game and drive the spacegoat-haters insane. Their story is that of ultimate survival, of picking back up the shattered pieces - over and over - and emerging with resilience and nobility despite any horror visited upon them.

I was a "casual raider" on Ysera-US for the entirety of TBC and Wrath up to the release of the Trial of the Grand Champion raid - by "casual" on Ysera, I mean 3-4 days a week, 4 hours a day, plus a minimum of 10 daily quests to make enough money to pay for repairs and enchants. By the time ToC25 was released, I was entirely fed up with the raiding scene and the guild drama and the typical idiocy which I encountered on Ysera. I had been toying with the idea of attempting to RP in WoW - I used to do freeform online RP throughout my teenage years - but I have believed for a little more than a decade that my muse had died, abandoned me for the great novel in the sky. But Ysera just annoyed me so much...so I started looking. I'd heard a few rumors about Moon Guard-US being a very big RP server (and also something of a horror), so I created a level one human female warlock and ran over to Goldshire.

Once the terrifying images had been seared into my brain for all eternity and the pain had faded to a dull, persistent ache, I rolled a human male priest instead and went to Stormwind. After a few pitiful attempts at RP, I decided this was actually sort of fun, and at least a nice break from raiding drama. I found the Moon Guard wiki page while looking for information about guilds on the server. And then the magic hit me. I found the entry for the Knights of Menethil guild - all death knights. Now there's a guild I won't have to worry about raiding drama in...and hey, this actually looks really interesting... I can roll a death knight here and see if I can come up with a story...

It turns out that my muse was indeed dead. And rotting. And slaughtering Scarlet Crusaders at the Lich King's command.

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For the curious, the characters I play are as follows (updated 7/29/13):
Rosoe - Division Eighty-Four - level 90 draenei female shaman: enhancement spec - Moon Guard
Hadeon - Shadows of Argus level 87 draenei male death knight: frost spec - Moon Guard
Valdiis - Knights of Menethil - level 85 draenei female death knight: blood/frost spec - Moon Guard
Diyos - Elysium -  level 85 draenei male priest: shadow/discipline spec - Moon Guard
Ilva - Division Eighty-Four - level 85 worgen female rogue: subtlety/combat spec - Moon Guard
(inactive) Kresmira - Brotherhood of the Dawn - level 85 draenei female paladin: holy/retribution spec - Moon Guard
Serathyn - level 79 blood elf female warlock: destruction spec - Moon Guard
Ryule - level 70 worgen male druid: guardian/feral spec - Moon Guard
Cassidy - level 56 worgen female warrior: arms spec - Moon Guard
Xeremuriis - Farseer - level 52 draenei female shaman: enhancement spec - Moon Guard
Zubeida - level 24 human female monk: windwalker spec - Moon Guard
(inactive) Parnel - level 10 human female hunter - Moon Guard


There are some characters in the above list who I take some care with revealing who their player is because I do like to have "retreat" characters, but I never directly lie about who I am and will own up to them being played by me if directly pressed - and that is why I also own up to them here in my personal blog which I realize is not hidden from the rest of the world.