Outland and Draenor

Hello lore-masters.  

Can someone sum up where the current lore is regarding Outland and Draenor for me please?   I'm a bit confused.  Any web page where I can just go and read this would be more than sufficient.

Some sample questions:

• Is the Dark Portal actually open currently lore-wise?
  
• If you pass through the Dark Portal now where does it take you? Outland or Draenor?   Or are there two Dark Portals?
  
• Are those two planets the same?  Or different realities of the same place? (I think the latter)
  
• If the latter, how does this work in terms of the Portal?
  

As you can see - I'm finding this whole area a bit screwy in my head.  

My character has never left Azeroth, in-character, but I'm thinking it might be time for him to go and start pillaging the mineral wealth of this/these planet(s) so need to understand how they work in-character.

Thanks for the help from this lore-newb!

1. I'm not 100% on this but the portal on the Draenor (WoD) side gets destroyed so you could say no portal. But then again I haven't really heard much about what suposed to have happened on the side of Azeroth. Least ingame if you try and go through it after you completed the initial quest on attacking tannan jungle I belive it takes you to Ashran, now how are things in lore and if the portal is working or not, i've got no clue. But surely won't take you to tannaan in Draenor (WoD).

2. ^ On Azeroth you only got one and one (destroyed) in WoD and the one in outland which is a bit of a mystery too but probably unactive unless the link to azeroth got reestablished. But if you're asking yourself what about outland? Aparently you can take what they did ingame as fair, basically mages just opened some portals to Outland like in the SW mage tower and everybody is happy and not stuck in outland.
3. Diffrent realities (and times), but yes simply put diffrent places.

4.  I'll let the doc explain it:

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That's sort of the basics. To elaborate things a bit Garrosh with the help of his time bronze dragon buddy Kairozdormu travel back in space and time to "alternative" Draenor which IS somewhat diffrent from the "original" Draenor even before Garrosh arrives, but it's good close enough for them (Things like Ner'zhuls wife being alive when she's dead in "original" version).

And they Garrosh uses the artifact which helped them travel in the first place [Vision of Time] to somehow link "alternative" Draenor portal (Once they did all that stoping the orcs drinking blood thing and made a portal) to "original" Azeroth Dark portal.

So that's it kind of in short. Don't worry if it's confusing becouse Blizzard didn't really care much for it, it just seemed cool as long as you ignore everything about space and time travel and just focus on the "fun" of how seeing Gromash and Durotan and everyone else you ended up being disapointed to see also killing orcs, lots of orcs.

If a massive magical gateway akin to The Dark Portal is closed from one side, the portal on the other side won't cease to exist. Proof of this is The Dark Portal of Vanilla. Said portal did not lead anywhere despite the magical swirl present.

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When the Portal was re-opened by the Burning Legion, it gained a Green hue.

When the Portal was re-directed by the Iron Horde, it gained a Red hue.

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Currently, despite the portals being empowered, neither the Azeroth or Draenor portals do lead anywhere. Their link was severed and nobody's bothered to fix it. I would not imagine that walking into the swirl of energy would be good for your health, however....

However, current date Mages are much more skilled with Portal magics than they were years ago. While likely difficult, they have opened up portals from the major cities leading both to Ashran and the Stairs of Destiny (Outland Portal).

Draenor and Outland themselves are 'technically' the same planet. However, Outland is the 'shattered remnants of Draenor', torn apart by the volatile energies of to many portals opened by Ner'zhul, who had hoped to invade other worlds with the Orcish horde after the Second War since their world was dying and Azeroth had proven to hard nut to crack.

(They are different realities of the same place. Different timeline, different course of history)

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Hopefully this did answer everything. As for websites to read about Lore, I recommend [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] (aka. Wowpedia).

For practical purposes, Draenor and Outland are two separate planets that exist in two separate physical locations in our universe. When you teleport to Draenor, no actual time traveling occours. Instead, the past version of Draenor was brought into our universe and it now exists in the main universe paralel to Outland.

well considering that out land was not effected by things that have happened in WoD.. its safe to say both are independent of each other ... otherwise what happens in WoD would effect outland .. however seeing as they don't.. the only explanation is that they are the same place in different realities

Again, for practical purposes, they aren't the same place. They are separate entities that exist in the same reality alongside each other with no link between them.

Well practically either way they were diffrent places even before Garrosh did the time and space jump.

Thanks all.