Over in the Warcraft lore sub-forum, there are a few discussions on rewriting the lore of Warcraft to be less absurd. There was a huge thread years ago detailing an account of the second war as if it was actual history.

I wonder whether something along the same lines could be done for Starcraft. Is anyone interested in that?

There was a huge thread a couple years ago trying to do something similar for Starcraft, but there didn't seem to be much interest from the fandom. Anyway, I loved the overall premise presented there but disagreed with some of the details.

There are a bunch of different directions I could imagine a realistic reboot going. I went through a bunch of different ideas myself over the last couple years.

If anyone is interested in hearing my ideas or discussing this further, then leave a reply.

I don't see the problem with trying.

I think the difference is that Warcraft ended up as a much bigger franchise than Starcraft and so more are invested in its world then get dissapointed in how the world develops.

Double post, but I'll do it. I think if one reboots Starcraft one should lay down what each faction is like compared with canon, what is to be done about the Kerrigans and Mengsks, etc.

Definitely.

Long story short, the narrative would be faction- and character-driven rather than plot-driven. Instead of Amon arbitrarily deciding to destroy the universe, it would be the Zerg deciding to remake the universe in their own image because that's how they always evolved to work.

So the major differences in the factions compared to canon would be:

• The terrans are composed of a number of nation-states and power blocs that have their own political motives and desires. You can oversimplify it as "Confederacy/Dominion evil, Protectorate/Directorate good," but in truth every faction has members of variable morality. Due to the bureaucracy and politics, it isn't actually feasible for a single person to rule everything with an iron fist. Killing Evil Emperor Mengsk won't magically solve the systemic problems with the Confederate states (every Old Family rules at least one). You need to actually reform the government into a democracy.
• The zerg are the main villains and are so alien that they might as well be evil for all that it matters to everyone else. They are not peaceful space orcs enslaved by space Satan, they are vicious monsters whose natural behavior is to consume and dominate. They are a true hive mind, not a slave race, so it isn't possible for one person to take control of them and change their goals. Anyone who tries will invariably abandon any prior goals in favor of advancing the zerg's domination. You can use drugs and tech to trick zerg broods into doing stuff for you, but this is playing with fire and doesn't change their essential nature. Even so, the zerg do have a highly advanced albeit alien culture that other races simply never see.
• The protoss are not a dying race dependent on stolen xel'naga tech, but rule a galactic empire in the middle of a cultural and technological renaissance. They could mop the floor with the terrans and zerg if they cared too, but arrogance and compassion prevents them from doing so. Their civilization is composed of a dizzying variety of tribes with distinct cultures. Some of these are part of the Protoss Empire, while heretics form their own nation-states living in the shadows.

The first contact war or whatever you wish to call it occurs as a result of the zerg invading the terran sector to assimilate humanity's myriad psychic mutations (which were ironically engineered based on researching protoss/xel'naga ruins) in order to develop weapons against the protoss. The protoss discover zerg probes and send an expedition to investigate the threat. Things rapidly spiral out of control until the terran sector falls into a free-for-all with numerous factions duking it out for the fate of humanity.

I'm working out some timelines that I will post eventually.

Regarding Kerry and Mengsk, they might exist but they aren't going to have arbitrary control over the terran sector like they did in canon. Their story is small-scale and tangential to the sector as a whole. I don't like their canon characters at all because they are badly written, but if I had to then I could try and salvage them.

My latest idea is to retroactively apply their SC2 characterization.

• Arcturus was always an evil villain who personally oversaw the murder of his family and the destruction of Korhal so that he could reform the sub-sector into his Dominion, a member state of the greater Confederacy.
• Kerry was a victim of Confederate experiments with the zerg: she was infested and then injected with anti-zerg nanomachines that restored her humanity. She's terrified of the zerg and distrusts any control experiments.*
• Valerian is now a leader (but not THE leader) of the Sons of Korhal, and he is the one who rescued Kerry and decided to assist the revolt on Mar Sara. As the Sara system is within the Dominion sub-sector, this means that they'll be dealing primarily with Dominion armed forces.

* Remember the tutorial mission in HotS when Kerry said the zerg cannot be controlled while controlling them herself? I thought that was bloody stupid, so if it happened under my watch then it was because she actually lost control during experiments. She's not a mary sue who can control the zerg any more.

As for the UED, a fan favorite, my idea was to place Earth in the terran sector and make them a member state of the Umojan Protectorate. Earth is one of the planets purified in the opening battles of the war, so the UED has a personal vendetta against the zerg swarm and the protoss empire.

The protoss expedition is divided between two factions, one that considers the terrans' lives forfeit and another that wants to rescue the terrans.

A new power bloc, taken from the old alternity rpg, is the Alliance. It is composed of Umojan Protectorate states, sympathizers in the protoss schism, and some dark protoss who decided to help humanity fight for democracy.

I have plenty of other ideas, but those are some big ones.

I see how you'd call Kerrigan bad writing. Same goes for Mengsk. What about other notable characters like pre-retcon Overmind, Artanis, Raynor, the Ghosts?

In general, I would prefer to treat the setting as a sandbox rather than give a particular character epic hero privilege because I prefer a more down-to-earth atmosphere.

More Specifically:

• Overmind is fine as the Zerg’s God. It has a simple, alien and IMO compelling motivation because it represents the Zerg’s basic instinctual drives. Devour all and maximize the Zerg’s existence. Effective.
• Artanis doesn’t have a personality that I can see.
• Raynor was fine as a space outlaw with Tychus, but canon turned him into a mass murdering psychopath. (Several of the cast have this problem.)
• The ghosts are brainwashed super soldiers. What about them?

Moving on from the cast, how about the space magic? Even with no Amon, space magic was still there in first game with Brood War.

Do you mean the xel'naga temple that defeats the zerg even though it was built before the zerg existed? Yeah, I'm tossing all the space magic, plot contrivances, etc in the garbage where it belongs. I proposed a reboot, not a slight tweak to the canon. I am not going to adhere to the canon events, especially since I believe Starcraft has been afflicted with bad writing since the beginning. The purpose of this exercise is to write something good.

I can understand calibrating a terraforming machine to wipe out a particular pattern, like what Stargate SG-1did with its Dakara superweapon, but Starcraft's blatant and lazy use of deus ex machina and macguffin was awful.

There is no space magic, period. There are tools, technology, resources, etc that are useful to the characters, but there is nothing that magically solves all problems. Furthermore, there is such a thing as an "arms race." Whenever you develop something, the other side will develop a counter. If you develop something that cannot be countered, then it will be because of some kind of crippling drawback (e.g. radio jamming works both ways).

Well, do we have anyone notable who gets infested? If not Kerrigan, then who?

Why do we need to?

Kerry was infested in SC1 as a way to make the zerg campaign a continuation of the terran campaign and maintain player investment in the story. However, this came at the cost of turning the zerg characters into one-note side characters who are unmemorable and get quickly killed off or written out of the story without player investment. As a result, the zerg ultimately turned into Kerry's pets and always played second fiddle to the terrans.

That was an absolutely horrible mistreatment of the zerg. I do not want to repeat it, so I refuse to feature infested characters on principle. Not unless extremely special circumstances are involved, as it is very easy for less competent writers who aren't invested in the zerg's unique alien nature to write terrans taking over the zerg at the expense of actual zerg characters.

The reason the zerg are interested in humans is using them as raw materials in their weapons research (i.e. the determinant plot point mentioned in the SC1 manual that was seemingly forgotten later). Not as commanders, especially since managing the zerg is so intensive that it requires specially bred giant brains. Furthermore, the infested are only a transitional state in the assimilation process. They're test subjects, nothing more. Once the terrans are assimilated, the breeds that use them as a core genus will not be recognizable as human.

Remember QoB being a sexy succubus that wouldn't be out of place at a BDSM club? That is really stupid and makes no sense for a combat unit. That is obviously Metzen's sexual fantasies talking, and I refuse to stand for it.

A zerg unit with a terran core genus will look something like the collectors from Mass Effect or the necrophages from Endless Legend.

The proposal written by ToxicDefiler provides a few examples of assimilated terran breeds, like foot soldiers, psychic creep colonies, and giant brain monsters. We could think of plenty more later. They don't look human and they don't act human: they're zerg monsters.

In short, the zerg will be their own faction with their own alien characters, not play second fiddle to the terrans. Their entire appeal is that they are horrifying alien villains.

I see your point. Maybe Kerrigan just shouldn't be a thing? Throw in Raynor for good measure. It's not like we'd have to follow her in this reboot since there are other Ghosts in the franchise as it is.

Canon preferred to focus on a small cast and give them unwarranted control over the fate of the universe. I don't believe that any particular cast should take precedence. The terran sector is unimaginably huge and could easily support any number of stories that don't intersect.

In terms of story structure, I prefer to focus on small scales like specific planets. The plot of the licensed expansions Insurrection and Retribution are examples of what I mean. The SC2 tutorial missions are another.

I said I would post a timeline before. Here is a brief timeline of the events leading up to and during the first contact war, which is the status quo of the setting.

1. The Confederacy wages wars of aggression against their own colonies and neighbors. This sets up opposing interstellar nations like Kel-Morian Combine, Umojan Protectorate, Sons of Korhal and United Earth Directorate. The polities are much more complicated than in canon, consisting of power blocs composed of many nation-states.
2. The zerg invade the sector after their deep space probes return data on the terrans’ utility, subtly at first due to terrans’ noted military capabilities. Because the terrans have engaged in rampant transhumanism, the zerg want to study their physiology and materials sciences to develop new weapons against the protoss. The terrans study the zerg vanguard in turn, with governments trying to keep the xenomorph’s presence secret. Frustration with terran resistance and fear of anti-zerg weapons provokes the zerg into launching a full-scale war, using the warp gates left over from the ancient protoss empire to bring reinforcements. However, protoss activity scares them into taking an extremely cautious stance toward following events, preventing them from immediately overwhelming the terrans.
3. The protoss become involved after observing prior events on the fringe worlds and studying zerg’s deep space probes. An expedition was already dispatched to ascertain the threat and cleanse the sector of xenomorph presence if necessary. Many worlds, including Tarsonis and Earth, are glassed to prevent the infestation from growing. This kills many billions of innocents outright and leaves countless more displaced. Further genocide is prevented by an ethical conflict between one faction who considers the terrans forfeit and another who wishes to rescue them.
4. The terrans’ stellar nations are in chaos. The Confederacy has fragmented severely due to rebellions and attacks by enemy states and rogue states. Koprulu system has reorganized under the Dominion, Mar Sara has declared independence, the KMC is trying to reclaim its former status, UED is trying to overthrow unjust governments, etc.

The backstory of the protoss is more or less the same, except that I made provisions to better integrate the tal'darim and purifiers, and to make the protoss independent from the xel'naga space magic. The tal'darim split off when Khas was reuniting the empire, while the purifiers have existed in some form since the aeon of strife. The first age protoss learned a lot from the xel'naga (and vice versa) and exceeded them in many ways, and as a result the historical record has a very fuzzy distinction between them. The modern protoss have been reverse engineering their ancestor's tech in addition to developing on their own, but they have yet to reach the heights of the first age.

Speaking of purifiers, a radical idea I wanted to implement was mind uploading and cloning. That is, the protoss' telepathic internet (khala? psi matrix?) allows them to preserve their minds within the network infrastructure powered by the psi matrix. After death (or even before, as memories may be uploaded at any point in life), an individual's personality may be downloaded into a clone, a cyborg or a wholly robotic shell. (According to beta previews, the dragoon was originally completely robotic.)

This is all just one possible idea for reboot, though. Mine is based on the premise of the 1998 manual. There are plenty of other possibilities. For example, maybe the terrans and protoss are galactic civilizations locked in a cold war until the zerg invade from beyond. That was the premise of Starcraft back in 1996 on the preview website.

Starcraft is a multiplayer game with three diverse races. The story is an afterthought as far as Blizzard is concerned. They don't put effort into maintaining continuity, as past experience with Warcraft shows.

The gist, I suppose, is recycling what is good about Starcraft lore while discarding the bad. Plot points in isolation seem fine enough, but Blizzard's execution leaves much to be desired.

Good good.

Now, what is to be done with the Cerebrates? They were neat and it's a real shame that in canon they just got supplanted by Kerrigan and her posse.

I had a few ideas concerning them.

An easy way to prevent them from being supplanted is, ironically, to remove their status as special snowflakes. Instead of being created with "cosmic energy" by the Overmind shell, they are a zerg breed like any other. If they die then they can be replaced just like overlords, queens, etc.

You're probably wondering how they can remain characters if they can die and be replaced by another. An easy solution to that is the hive mind and the zerg's genetic libraries accessed through it. The zerg store their knowledge genetically, and this includes memories and personalities. So when a cerebrate dies and is succeeded by another, the replacement will be born with its predecessor's memories and personality. In a philosophical sense they might be different entities, but in practice it seems like resurrecting the dead.

A side effect of this is that killing cerebrates to disrupt zerg operations is now a viable strategy for everyone, not just dark templar. By the same token, however, it is no longer as crippling to zerg as it was in canon. Feral zerg are no longer feral in the same sense, since they would need some kind of swarm intelligence to oversee the spawning of replacements. An easy explanation for retaining the (inconsistent) canonical behavior of feral zerg is to posit that their intelligence scales with their numbers and other factors (like the presence of smarter breeds like hatchery brains, overlords, queens, infestors, etc; other factors like brain damage, mutation, drugs, malnutrition, etc), which neatly explains both the various feral colonies in canon and the canonical instance on Chau Sara in which isolated packs of zergling rewired security systems. (According to the Starcraft website prior to Starcraft's release, the zerg appeared to have a swarm intelligence rather than be a simple slave race.)

So bam! Cerebrates are back in action.

On a related note, another idea I had was that the cerebrates weren't limited to the original brain bug form. Since the zerg's shtick is rapid evolution, it would make sense that cerebrates would adapt their command forms to better suit whatever their brood's directive is. A brood could even have multiple cerebrates, perhaps with slightly different adaptations. In addition to multiple broods working together to perform operations they cannot do alone; such as a mining brood, spawning brood and attack brood working together for an assault on an enemy colony. The games' format reduces all armies to the same RTS economy, but in the fluff it is explained that the zerg have different broods for things like ground warfare, aerospace combat, resource gathering and spawning warriors; just like how the terrans and protoss (and real life humanity) logically have different organizations dedicated to mining, manufacturing, combat, etc.

This would allow the SC2 commanders to be grandfathered in as cerebrate variants (e.g. Zagara, Abathur) or agents of cerebrates (e.g. Queen of Blades, Stukov). You could even posit the zerg hierarchy isn't as simple as often made out to be, maybe with multiple different kinds of synapse creatures like hatcheries, overlords, infestors, cerebrates, brood mothers, etc. I have always been of the opinion that the zerg would be better if depicted as a swarm intelligence, with the overlords, cerebrates, brood mothers, etc served as central hubs for communication and processing rather than arbitrary slave masters. A swarm intelligence might help the zerg to avoid being rewritten by bad writers into space orcs, too. Like a number of other people, I hated that direction. Even Blizzard couldn't keep it straight since they still depict the primal zerg (who are supposed to be the true and uncorrupted zerg) as vicious monsters.

What do you think?

Nice work.

Funny enough, WC ran into a similar problem with the Orcs where we're told they were pristine noble savages before the demons showed up and then kill off the demon who cursed them only for them to still be belligerent barbarians. Doubly by introducing Garrosh. And then Warlords of Draenor happened.

Yeah, I almost forgot that happened. Really glad I decided to get interested in the retrocraft speculations.

Anyway, I put together a public google doc to keep the various ideas I have brainstormed over the past couple of years in one place.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...it?usp=sharing

Nice work all considered. Though, maybe it could use a section talking about the characters themselves and what stayed in canon with what's gone from canon.

I don't want to give them undue attention. That risks making them the main characters of my proposed reboot, which I want to avoid. I don't want there to be main characters of the whole setting, because this is supposed to be gritty scifi not epic fantasy. I prefer to treat it as a sandbox where characters are only relevant in their tiny spheres of influence. Every campaign would have characters who are, for the purposes of that campaign only, the ones of consequence.

If I did reference the canonical characters, then their influence would be limited to the Mar Sara theater. They would not be the heroes of the whole sector.

Even so, I'm trying to devise the setting in such a way that canonical events can be recycled fairly easily. Broad strokes if not details.

For example:

Kerry/Raynor/Mengsk soap opera: the canon characters are basically fighting over Mar Sara within the Dominion polity. The alliance of Raynor, Tychus, Kerry, Valerian, Tassadar, Zeratul, etc are fighting the Protoss Empire, the Dominion/Confederacy, Tal'darim invaders, zerg invaders, etc. It isn't for the fate of the universe, but a small scale conflict about freedom and blah blah.

Brontes: the Insurrection campaign is recycled more or less the same, with one exception. Rather than the New Dresdin Outlaws and Seventh Fleet dying at the end, Andraxxus used hallucinations to distract the zerg while warping his forces and allies to regroup elsewhere in the system. Brontes IV has been claimed by the zerg; Syndrea is still their prisoner.

UED: the UED is currently trying to overthrow the Confederacy and weaponize the zerg. Using reverse-engineered psi-disruptors, they've established various safe zones for refugees from the zerg invasions. DuGalle and Stukov, while childhood friends, argued vehemently over how to deal with the zerg. DuGalle believed they could be enslaved and used for good, while Stukov believed this was playing with fire and advocated anti-zerg weapons. Stukov was later assassinated by secret agents of the Fist of Redemption planted within the UED forces. Autopsies of the dead assassins revealed they were implanted with zerg neural parasites. Realizing that Stukov was right, DuGalle decided to deploy anti-zerg weapons as the primary. (IMO, Duran inconsistently mind-controlling DuGalle was really lazy and did the UED a huge disservice.)

Although DuGalle believed that Stukov was given a burial in space, in truth his body was stolen by the Fist of Redemption and brought to the zerg. Although normally human brains turn to mush upon death, Stukov was a cyborg and his memories were stored within a cyber-brain. The zerg infested his corpse and reanimated it to acquire Stukov's intel and as part of an experiment by the overseeing cerebrate Kaloth. This is where the Stukov co-op commander comes in: Kaloth was created to study terran technology, and created grotesque fusions of zerg and terran to experiment. Stukov now serves as a mouthpiece for the zerg.

Question, have you read this article on Brood War?

https://superior-realities.com/2014/...ing-to-say-it/

It talks about it having bad writing. So bad later games were better.

Of course, it invited criticism:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards...7778185?page=1

Multiple parts are completely wrong.

-Aldaris most certainly did NOT tell Zeratul that Kerrigan was controlling Raszagal. Aldaris got killed by Kerrigan and lurkers right before Aldaris could spill the beans.
-Raszagal convinced Zeratul that the 2nd Overmind was a threat, that is all. Not hard to do considering what the last one did.
-Raszagal was protected by her tribe. It isn't like a bunch of Zerg can come right in and take her away discretely.
-Regarding Kerrigan betrayed Protoss on Shakuras, she killed Aldaris after Aldaris started killing Dark Templar. The main gripe was that it was a "Protoss matter", and if you follow the custom campaign, the Dark Templar+Artanis and co were busy during the "Enslavers" campaign and would have no reason to contact Fenix about anything, and even if they did, all they could say is she killed Aldaris.
-Continuing off the previous part, Raynor/Fenix were put in a tough spot in assisting Kerrigan. They knew she was untrustworthy, but something had to be done about the UED that were preparing to enslave/kill everyone, hence why their alliance happened. Mengsk loathed working with Kerrigan as well, but didn't want to end up in a "8 by 8" cell for the rest of his life, so he had no choice.
-The link greatly ignored the UED threat by the way...saying that UED+Slave Zerg Broods is just another "Mengsk". Mengsk wasn't prepared to enslave all the Terrans and didn't plan or at least wasn't capable of "pacifying"/mass murdering the Protoss. Again, Raynor and Kerrigan knew Earth's history, which apparently was horrendous. Also/Again, the UED had orders to overthrow the Dominion and control all Terrans in the Koprulu Sector and kill all the Protoss. There is no forming an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" situation with that. Kerrigan was also hardly the greater threat for some time, with the PSI disruptor crippling her ability to control her Zerg swarms and most of the Zerg in the Sector under the UED's control through the Second Overmind.
-I already said Degalle was an idiot.
-The rest is complaining about the deaths and saying nothing happened, which isn't true at all.
-Lastly, LOL at saying Starcraft 2's Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm has better storytelling than Brood War. That kills the credibility of the article right there without all the rest I said if you ask me...


Your stance?

There’s a thread on spacebattles “UA Plays: Starcraft” that reviews the writing. Pretty much everyone agreed that BW had big problems. It’s scattered across dozens of pages, but I’ll try to post some links to the relevant posts later.

EDIT: Here it is:

1. X Protoss 1 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9559433/
2. X Protoss 2 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9561229/
3. X Protoss 3 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9579524/
4. X Protoss 4 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9580558/
5. X Protoss 5 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9581391/
6. X Protoss 6 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9584267/
7. X Protoss 7 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9585692/
8. X Protoss 8 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9586566/
9. X Terran 1 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9587467/
10. X Terran 2 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9594402/
11. X Terran 3 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9597922/
12. X Terran 4 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9605059/
13. X Terran 5 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9605196/
14. X Terran 6 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9607122/
15. X Terran 7 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9607553/
16. X Terran 8 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9609228/
17. X Zerg 1 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9612796/
18. X Zerg 2 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9616241/
19. X Zerg 3 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9631434/
20. X Zerg 4 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9632581/
21. X Zerg 5 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9633068/
22. X Zerg 6 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9637096/
23. X Zerg 7 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9637377/
24. X Zerg 8 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9638968/
25. X Zerg 9 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9639604/
26. Secret Mission https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9639909/
27. X Zerg 10 https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/9641027/

Anyway, I'm getting off topic.

Something I wanted to discuss was factions. Back in the halcyon days of SC1/BW mapping, some people made custom campaigns which featured new factions like terran polities, protoss tribes, and zerg broods. I'd like to do more exploration of that.

Since my intent is to promote a focus on small scales, like single planets, there is more conceptual space allocated to spend on detailing factions. Canon has a big problem with treating whole planets as though they were small towns. (See the Quagmire SC2 custom campaign for an amazing rebuttal of how Blizzard misuses scales.)

Something I liked about the Celestial Stories SC1 campaigns was that the planet Dorasida was depicted with no less than three distinct nations on its surface, two of which were the result of a civil war. That's the sort of nuance I'd like to see more of.

Unfortunately, one of the more annoying bits of fandom is that there's a clear terran bias when it comes to storytelling. Both Blizzard and fans are guilty of this, and I lay the blame largely on Blizzard for failing to make the protoss and zerg interesting enough on their own.

Skimming the wiki, there's a huge amount of lore lavished on detailing terran culture, but barely any for the protoss and zerg. Terran squadrons receive vastly more attention than protoss tribes and zerg broods. The SC1 manual only gave about six or so examples of militias, broods and tribes, but logically speaking there could by any number of them in existence.

Much like how Retrocraft devotes attention to the politics of all races, I'd like to devote attention to the politics of the Starcraft races with more detail and nuance than canon. Since the setting is much more vague than Warcraft and I want to be open for collaboration in the future, I'd use these as examples of what could be.

So I have published an accounting of my ideas for an AU that recycles the canon while discarding the ideas that I disliked.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...T3TJW2ehYo/pub

Almost all of the canon factions have been brought over. With the changes I made to the timeline and scales you can now have, for example, a war involving the Confederacy, Dominion and UED.

The only bits that haven't made the cut are Amon and Kerry. Amon and Duran are redundant since the zerg already fulfill the big bad evil guy role. Kerry I didn't bother to touch because I blame her for the zerg's villain decay.

I did mention Tassadar, Zeratul, and Raynor being involved in the Mar Sara theater, but that's a throwaway reference more than anything else. I mentioned Mengsk being the evil emperor of the Dominion, but that is also a throwaway reference. I'm not interesting in detailing them because I feel they already hogged the spotlight for twenty years too long.

I have tons of other ideas, but the basic groundwork is already published.

Since my last post in this thread, I have incorporated the newly introduced Ihan-rii faction. I expanded upon their portrayal because the canon makes them out to be bland tal'darim copies.

Opened a discord specifically to discuss alternate universes: https://discord.gg/qbt2bH4