I managed to excavate my old d20 Warcraft RPG books, as this concerns things from (gulp!) *20 years ago*, so my memory isn't exactly reliable on details. The peculiar thing is that, after all, I cannot find anything referencing the Scarlet Crusade in the books. Running a campaign with "Warcraft" d20 was peculiar, because the d20 books from Sword & Sorcery were originally the WARCRAFT RPG -- in other words, based on the RTS games -- and the bulk of the sourcebooks I have are for that version of it. Sword & Sorcery rushed out a "World of Warcraft" d20 update while the MMO was still new, but it has only the broadest overview of the setting, and is mostly focused on classes, etc. There were no adventure modules, to my knowledge, and no regional sourcebooks reflecting the world of the MMO. I have a Horde Players' Guide that filled in some more details for Kalimdor and Horde players, but the Alliance Players' Guide -- for whatever reason, I never got a copy of that. (And looking it up online, I'm seeing it priced for ... $252? No way I'm getting that to satisfy curiosity.)
FWIW, the definition of the paladin in the core WoW book says that they are Good-aligned. No exception is given (or any mention made) of the Scarlet Crusade. Honestly, I can't even remember if the Scarlet Crusade were present in the game from the start, or if they were added as later material -- perhaps they didn't exist at this point, and therefore it was a non-issue. Or, it could be as you say, and they're just "misguided." I could definitely see that argument. One problem I suppose about the cosmology of the Warcraft universe is that you don't have a deity (generally speaking) to set you straight and go, "Oh, hey, waitaminute, if you're going to go murdering people, I'm not going to help you do it with MIRACLES, at the very least." Or, if you're playing an orcish druid and you decide to use Summon Nature's Ally to conjure a rhino in order to drop it on someone's head (or summon it atop a precipice and command it to jump onto someone's head, for the same effect), there's no deity to say, "Shame, shame, abusing that poor rhino! No more Summon Nature's Ally for YOU!"
One interesting detail about how d20 went about defining the classes that I forgot about, was that they "genericized" certain classes. For primary spellcasters, there were Healers, and there were Arcanists. If you were a Healer, you'd have a sub-type that was either Priest, Druid, or Shaman. There were some shared Healer spells (the basic healing spells, naturally), but each had its own sub-type-specific spells. Also, the mechanic of "turn undead" was turned into a shared mechanic of "turn/rebuke X," where "X" might vary depending upon your sub-type. For priests, it was still undead -- you TURN them if you're good, or REBUKE them (command them) if you're evil. For druids, however, replace undead with the ability to Rebuke Animals (i.e., command them) if good, or Turn/Destroy them if evil. Shamans replaced X with elementals.
It's just that they also slapped on various class features, such as what kind of armor you can wear and weapons you can use, shamans got totems, and druids still got the bog-standard D&D "druid animal companion" -- even though that had no basis in-game, and I think it was just a product of just cut-and-pasting most of the details from the druid class SRD, without giving much thought that it was intruding upon the domain of the Hunter. I think on a certain level they were thinking, "Oh, the Hunter is just this world's version of the Ranger, and we all know that Druids get the really good animal companion and rangers get the watered-down version." So whereas MMO players would recognize Hunters as the "I have a pet" class, in the d20 game you end up with Hunters getting saddled with the watered-down ranger pet version (you don't get it until level 5, you have to find it yourself, and there's no benefit for befriending a particularly POWERFUL or UNIQUE pet, because it's just going to fit the level-progression "ranger pet" profile from that point on) -- and, meanwhile, you can act surprised as the druid gets a BETTER PET than you will ever have (AND doesn't have to go on a special side-quest to find it).
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2023-10-07 03:15 pm (UTC)FWIW, the definition of the paladin in the core WoW book says that they are Good-aligned. No exception is given (or any mention made) of the Scarlet Crusade. Honestly, I can't even remember if the Scarlet Crusade were present in the game from the start, or if they were added as later material -- perhaps they didn't exist at this point, and therefore it was a non-issue. Or, it could be as you say, and they're just "misguided." I could definitely see that argument. One problem I suppose about the cosmology of the Warcraft universe is that you don't have a deity (generally speaking) to set you straight and go, "Oh, hey, waitaminute, if you're going to go murdering people, I'm not going to help you do it with MIRACLES, at the very least." Or, if you're playing an orcish druid and you decide to use Summon Nature's Ally to conjure a rhino in order to drop it on someone's head (or summon it atop a precipice and command it to jump onto someone's head, for the same effect), there's no deity to say, "Shame, shame, abusing that poor rhino! No more Summon Nature's Ally for YOU!"
One interesting detail about how d20 went about defining the classes that I forgot about, was that they "genericized" certain classes. For primary spellcasters, there were Healers, and there were Arcanists. If you were a Healer, you'd have a sub-type that was either Priest, Druid, or Shaman. There were some shared Healer spells (the basic healing spells, naturally), but each had its own sub-type-specific spells. Also, the mechanic of "turn undead" was turned into a shared mechanic of "turn/rebuke X," where "X" might vary depending upon your sub-type. For priests, it was still undead -- you TURN them if you're good, or REBUKE them (command them) if you're evil. For druids, however, replace undead with the ability to Rebuke Animals (i.e., command them) if good, or Turn/Destroy them if evil. Shamans replaced X with elementals.
It's just that they also slapped on various class features, such as what kind of armor you can wear and weapons you can use, shamans got totems, and druids still got the bog-standard D&D "druid animal companion" -- even though that had no basis in-game, and I think it was just a product of just cut-and-pasting most of the details from the druid class SRD, without giving much thought that it was intruding upon the domain of the Hunter. I think on a certain level they were thinking, "Oh, the Hunter is just this world's version of the Ranger, and we all know that Druids get the really good animal companion and rangers get the watered-down version." So whereas MMO players would recognize Hunters as the "I have a pet" class, in the d20 game you end up with Hunters getting saddled with the watered-down ranger pet version (you don't get it until level 5, you have to find it yourself, and there's no benefit for befriending a particularly POWERFUL or UNIQUE pet, because it's just going to fit the level-progression "ranger pet" profile from that point on) -- and, meanwhile, you can act surprised as the druid gets a BETTER PET than you will ever have (AND doesn't have to go on a special side-quest to find it).
Someone just wasn't thinking.