For a more geopolitical setting, the Scourge needs some subtle changes to make them less an apocalyptic force of death and more a political actor with tangible goals, philosophoical vision, and so on.

That'd ruin the scourge imo, their whole POINT is to be an apocalyptic force.

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My Worldbuilding:
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There's the Legion still if you need an army like that.

The point of the discussion we were having specifically criticized Warcraft for having a bunch of cartoonish evil armies when it would be more compelling to have morally grey nation-states and politics.

If you're not interested in that, then please find somewhere else to discuss and don't derail our discussion. Thank you.

Still, it's notably harder to do that with the Legion compared with the Scourge. Unless you start including post-Chronicle lore where Sargeras is trying to save the universe by conquering it maybe.

I previously suggested treating the demons as the logical extreme of magic addiction. They are addicts, tragic villains.

In current canon, Sarg was trying to “save” the universe by annihilating it.

Yeah, but what are they trying to do? What would they do with Azeroth if they won?

They would tear it apart to sustain their magic addiction, just like they did to their home planet.

If that seems like a stretch, then just look at human history. We commit genocide, pollute the world, and cause mass extinctions with impunity. The demons are an example what happens went a civilization going down that path does not realize their mistake until it is far too late, but somehow survives the destruction anyway.

Just because the demons destroy worlds does not necessarily mean they are some cartoon villain the plot plays like a marionette. Some are intelligent and capable of introspection. They might certainly realize the horrific nature of their actions, but if they did not already commit suicide then they are going to rationalize it. Does the "banality of evil" ring a bell? Tragedy of the commons? Just world fallacy?

If you are going to write a compelling Burning Legion campaign, then these are the sorts of thing you would need to think about. Otherwise the story will be a simple series of "do this, do that" events devoid of any critical thought or literary value whatsoever.

Am I advocating for humanizing the demons? Yes, but using the absolute worst examples of human greed and myopia as a model.

Moving on from the Legion, how about villains to be remade? Like:

A. Blackmoore.

B. Scarlet Crusade.

C. Defias.

D. Deathwing and his brood.

I have not followed the lore extensively enough to make judgments myself on most of these. I think I can provide some advice for Deathwing, but it will be largely original.

So in this alternate universe chronology, Deathwing is Alex's renegade son and leads his band of renegade dragons that roosted in Draenor prior to its destruction. Somehow he survived and made his way back to Azeroth, where he was killed by Thrall under Alex's orders.

There are some inconsistencies in the art between WC2 and WCA. In WC2 Alex's brood were green with red accents and she herself was grey with red accents, whereas in WCA she is only hues of red. In WC2 Deathwing was green, although stated in the manual to be black with armor nailed to his flesh which was only depicted correctly in WCA. We can assume that the WCA art takes precedence in terms what should be true for the chronology.

Although I'm not sure what color Alex's flight should be. Green with red accents? Grey with red accents? Hues of red? All of these above? Why and how?

Anyway, dragon flights don't work the same way in this alternate chronology. There aren't any dragon aspects, so there isn't a fixed number of dragon flights and they can arise through mutation in an existing dragon flight. While Alex was red, Deathwing was black.

Marthen suggested that Deathwing remain progenitor of the black dragon flight, though they aren't very populous.

We will need to make some assumptions about dragon physiology and history. Prior to the orcs enslaving Alex, the manual states dragons were largely distant from the affairs of the other races. The orcs were somehow able to breed dragons in sufficient numbers to assist their war machine, so we can only assume that dragons either breed very quickly or black magic (provided by Deathwing) was used to speed their growth. Considering that dragons are apex predators that in later lore are stated to live for millennia, I guess that black magic was the culprit since there is no way the ecosystem could support fast breeding dragons (at least not without industrial animal husbandry like the orcs practice).

Anyway, although the black dragon flight seemingly came to attention during the Second War and Invasion of Draenor by allying with the Horde, it is entirely possible that they existed prior for centuries or more.

If Deathwing had knowledge of how to breed dragons industrially, then it does not make a whole lot of sense that he did not use this to expand the black flight unless the process had unwanted side effects that would have made the offspring inferior to dragons born without steroids. In that case, Deathwing might be too prideful to subject his own flight to such measures but have no such problem doing so to his clearly hated sibling flight.

In any case, Deathwing would be dead by the time of the Third War and his flight would be the only thing left of him. There are lot of ways they could interact with the Third War. They could try to replicate Deathwing's experiments to breed dragon armies. I cannot see them allying with the New Horde due to Thrall's alliance with Alex and the penitence of the Dragonmaw clan, but I can see them allying with ex-Alliance nations or even the Scourge.

The Scourge has raised frost wyrms from the dragon boneyards in Northrend, and they have probably also been experimenting with a plagued dragon flight too. The vrykul in WoW are stated to train "proto-dragons", so those might play a role too.

There's a lot of ways it could go.

Alright, let's talk about the Alliance. Questions:

1. How should the breakup of the Alliance go? Any warfare between the members?

2. What should be done with the Wynn Dynasty? Or Jaina?

3. What if any post-WC2 races could believably join?

According to the alpha/beta descriptions of the footman and paladin, the Alliance fell apart and suffered civil wars. It seems most likely that the civil wars would occur within nations and between adjacent nations. At the same time, the plague is exacerbating matters. The Knights of the Silver Hand were disbanded and a number of former members vanished in their journey to Northrend.

You mean Wrynn dynasty? I would think they still rule Stormwind Kingdom as things get progressively worse for the alliance. I would expect that, given the longer timeline (i.e. Third War starts in 631), they would have new members to represent the generational shift.

Jaina is probably still involved with Arthas. One of the early ideas was that she would become a banshee, but that was moved to Sylvanas when Metzen realized that was too similar to Kerrigan. I don't see any reason we couldn't recycle that if desired.

According to an alternate timeline in canon, Jaina and Arthas got married and had a son named Uther.

There's not that many additional races in the Eastern Kingdoms added since. One of the reasons the Horde got so powerful was because they were able to recruit the marginalized races against the Alliance, such as the trolls and goblins.

Since we aren't limited to an Alliance/Horde conflict, we don't need to shoehorn any races that don't need to be there like pandaren and night elf. In fact, the night elves could found their own major faction with member races and such. For example, the worgen could join this faction after being rejected by the former alliance nations as monsters.

I can't see many new races joining that would be considered major members. There don't seem to be that many populations.

Draenei? The draenei retcon isn't bad anymore now that Sargeras isn't a fallen titan, but it does require some explanation how the Shadowmoon clan would have the luck to meet the eredar warlock Archimonde when uncorrupted draenei lived on Draenor (even conquered it if the name is any indication). There would need to have been a lot of draenei refugees scattered in that region of the universe. (In this timeline, Kil'jaeden isn't eredar and has no connection to Archimonde.)

So the draenei grew addicted to magic and destroyed their homeworld Argus, becoming the eredar. Some draenei escaped this fate and fled to other worlds, such as Draenor. The draenei of Draenor were conquered by the orcs, and any survivors would have been those who found their way to the Outlands with the other fragments of the planet. Others traveled through the dark portal to Azeroth.

Ner'zhul's portals may have alerted any number of interplanar raiders, not just Kil'jaeden's and Archimonde's agents. Draenei may have been among them and followed the lingering trails to Azeroth, searching for a new homeworld.

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That also reminds me... why did Ner'zhul's throne end up at Icecrown Glacier? Why was that spot chosen? According to the wiki, Icecrown has a magical connection to death itself. That may have made it easier to summon the undead there with the Nerubian's cult's help. (Marthen hasn't said how the throne was summoned in his speculation, but I posit that Anub'arak's priests summoned the Lich King and his forces.)

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Hey Marthen, do you think you could make a google doc with all your speculations in it? Constantly asking you for your ideas seems like it would be tiring.

Marthen has a discord so you'd be better to check around there.

How about Pandaria? What to do with that?

Those of my ideas I've shared are shared on my discord (known as Retrocraft). I haven't shared them here because I've lowered my activity and more importantly, because I do not want them "publicly" shared until my entire encyclopedia is finished.

Also, I think Cacofonix is specifically asking for your ideas, since he's present on my discord amongst others and I answered a lot he's asking there.

Okay.

I don’t have any further ideas for Warcraft. Retrocraft seems to be doing just fine already. I’m more interested in rewriting Starcraft because there don’t seem to be any similar efforts to Retrocraft. ToxicDefiler’s Enumerate is the only one I know of and there doesn’t seem to be any interest.

The obvious plan is to found your own discord.

I've never used discord before, except once to look briefly over the app. I have no idea what I would call the server.

You could call it Starcraft: Reimagined.

Not sure how much interest it would attract. How much interest would you say Retrocraft generates?

If by Retrocraft, we mean a Warcraft II based remake, not that much. Most fans are Warcraft III fans at heart, finding little to no fault with it. A Warcraft III based remake could arguably gather much more traction.

That's too bad. I was introduced through WC3 myself and I still think a WC2-based Retrocraft is interesting. I'm sick to death of Blizzard's "unite the races to save teh world" plots and their absurd hypocritical obsession with an eternal binary Alliance/Horde conflict.

Your ideas regarding the Scourge and the Legion that I've seen so far don't detract from it in my opinion, but make it vastly more interesting from a storytelling perspective. I always felt that they suffered because they were simplistic apocalyptic threats rather than functional societies and cultures.

How do I visit your discord? I was interested in reading your ideas regarding the Legion factions, the Eredar and so forth.

I don't have confidence in my Retrostar proposals. The Starcraft lore has been screwed up to the point that the fandom has been mostly driven away. Most of the holdouts are people who adore SC1/BW, even though the writing is questionable at best and the twenty years since release means that Blizzard will retcon it all to hell and back like they did Warcraft to make up for lost time. Nobody's going to be interested in a proposal that jettisons beloved characters like Raynor and Kerry, even though I'm not a purist who arbitrarily rejects all SC2 lore. I went out of my way to incorporate the UED, taldarim, hybrids, mecha zerg, etc.

You could just ask for a link through a PM.

If by it you mean being apocalyptic and related to "unite the races to save teh world", it does detract from it.

The Scourge is less an army bent on destroying the world and more a totalitarian theocracy that wants to get the world under its rule eventually, and at the end of the day, it ends in a state of cold war with the Alliance and numerous other entities (bound by their more realpolitik outlook in converting the world to their rule and inability to simply conquer it in one swing because of different variables).

The Legion, while technically apocalyptic to Azeroth during the Third War, is but one of countless daemonic groups, and its interaction with the world is quite short term. So, you can essentially say, while there is one moment where one specific daemonic group is apocalyptic to the world, it's but one short moment in the long history where countless groups interact with it (and each other) in a non-apocalyptic way. Furthermore, their defeat is less the world unites against us, and more there are various independent actors who contribute to our defeat, from mortal nations, internal fighting, manipulation, to other daemonic groups who jeopardize our efforts.

Obviously the way to go is to unite the Races to defeat the other united Races.

Warcraft 3 has not retconned Warcraft 2 lore that much. It retconned even less things than WC2 did after WC1. Also except that, I liked the WC3 story so I'm not really up to rebooting anything.
It was nice, comfy High Fantasy adventure. Simple but touching. Dialogs and feeling (and gameplay of course) is what always made up the Warcraft.

This is the reason why I enjoyed Heroes 5 game. The climate of play was reminding Warcraft 3 very much.

As I said before - a beauty of simplicity and symmetry is what Warcraft is. We always had "Orcs and Humans", Alliance and Horde and their both more and more allies counterparting each other: Elves and Trolls, Dwarves and Ogres, Gnomes and Goblins. Horde had Necromancers and Warlocks, Alliance had Priests and Mages. Etc.
And Warcraft 3 continued all of this adding much at the same time.

The only objection I have is that Warcraft 3 action has ignored all the kingdoms close to Lordaeron, not revealing their fate. We have only ambiguous tips (i.e. Cry of the Warsong is chapter 3 of the orc campaign or Blizzard's custom game maps' names and desriptions.
But it isn't that bad and I can understand they wanted to focus on Arthas' story.