The Shadow Realm

Farelin/Dijie wrote:

Longknife/Decurius wrote:It's tremendously obvious that rogues use basic shadow magic to do their abilities.

I disagree with that. When I SEE my rogue doing something, I don't instantly see it as magic. I believe it can be explained without having to rely on Shadow magic, personally. I will never RP a rogue as a spell-casting magic-user, personally, because it does not make sense to me.

It makes far more sense than assuming everything a rogue does is completely non-magical when several of their abilities would be impossible to do with non-magical methods.

Even if you decided to pretend you're not casting spells when using those abilities, you'd still have to be using magical equipment. You can play it that you aren't actually casting Shadow magic when using, say, Cloak of Shadows, but you would still have to be using a magical cloak or other item to do the effect. Rogues use magic, whether casting it directly themselves or using enchanted items that provide the same effect.

A rogue is a thug, a thief, a spy, a scout...they use basic skills, they don't go to fancy schools to learn tricks. The names and graphics of their actions are misleading, in my opinion. They can call what they do a form of mysticism, but I'll always see it as strictly being some sort of sleight-of-hand/modern-day-like magic tricks.

Don't go to fancy schools? What do you think Ravenholdt is? How about Section Seven? If anything, rogues are the most highly trained and knowledgeable class outside of mages and warlocks. There is nothing simple or basic about rogues.

The names are not misleading at all. They have magical abilities. You can dislike the magic and play strictly sleight-of-hand rogues if you'd like (I personally did that on Saphra, and thus refused to use any of the magical abilities ICly... which meant that she would be pretty worthless next to a proper magic-using rogue, but she wasn't supposed to be a hero), but the class itself as it is developed uses some minor magic. Most of their abilities are not magical, but a few are and you can't just ignore that because you personally don't like it. You can say that you're using magical items instead of directly casting the spells yourself if you'd like, but it's still magic.

Stating they use Shadow magic just makes me feel like someone wants to be a special snowflake. *shudders and flees*

This is WarCraft. The special snowflakes are the ones trying to be normal and mundane in a world of high magic.

*Edit* This isn't to say that playing a normal and mundane character is bad. I've played one myself. But it is bad to start assuming that just because you choose to play a normal and mundane character, that that's the way all other characters should be as well. The lore makes it clear that player characters are anything but normal and mundane, therefore the people choosing to play normal and mundane characters are the ones "going against the grain".

Drustai wrote:

This is WarCraft. The special snowflakes are the ones trying to be normal and mundane in a world of high magic.

QFT.

Don't go overboard trying to make the Wow-universe "normal". It's lorebreaking.

A really interesting topic so I will throw in my own little speculations about it and how I rp it out on my toon.

I think that the shadow realm is in between of the spirit realm and material world, like a shroud howering on both of them. I'd say it's a void place that stores a great amount of negative energy and it's denizens being creatures of shadow that attack the living when perceiving them, but it also acts as a "network" covering the whole landscape and magic which utilizes the shadow realm is called shadow magic. An exampe would be priest using mind vision or mind control the basic idea is to create a link between the target's and caster's mind via the shadow realm. Shadow bolt would be more like drawing the negative energy to the material world and hurling it at the target. However without proper training the mind can be lost in the shadow realm or the negative energy of shadowbolt can consume the user if he draws too much negative energy leaving only withered corpse and yet another shadowy tormentor to the shadow realm.

I'd definitely agree that undeads do have a special relationship with the realm of shadows. There is at least two quests in game that tell the player to go slay some undead so that their souls can have peace. Another quest actually also wants that the player pours some holy water upon the corpse after slaying it. I see that when a person dies in the game world, then the person's soul flies to the spirit realm. But when an undead creature is made it draws the soul from the spirit world using the shadow realm as a connection. Then the undead body becomes an anchor for the soul preventing it from entering the spirit realm. The difference between resurrection and raise dead is that the raise dead uses shadow realm as a medium while resurrection creates a direct link to the spirit realm, of course resurrection is a lot harder to pull in my eyes. Death knights have a stronger bond with the shadow realm than other undead due to the great amount of unholy magics that created them. For example death knights can bring their whole presence to the realm of shadow using the death gate spell and travel there in a blink of an eye. Even more powerful creatures can drag other weaker beings to the shadow realm or pull them away from it. However I'm not sure why Koltira wasn't able to kill his shadowy tormentors in the quest, but it could be that if he entered the shadow realm the lich king could have got him, so using the player to do that was more like win/win option for him.

I rp my rogue as a character who can use the game abilities via the use of shadow magic. Shadow step is for example like death knights death gate, instant travel trough shadow realm, but the distance being only some yards. Wowpedia.org has an article which says that shadow can be a subschool of illusion magic, so my stealth is more like partial invisibility making it harder to see, just like the game mechanic.

Again I'd like to remind that this is all speculations basing on my gut feel, other posts on this topic and a few quests.