Talk:Timeline (Warcraft RTS manuals)

Parts
The first part is dates as mentioned in the Warcraft I and II manuals, and ingame quotes. If there is no big changes in refrences made in Warcraft III manual, it may include dates from it as well.

Part 2 is a conversion of the start of Warcraft I, year 593 in the king's calender as Year 1. All negative dates are derived by subtracting earlier dates from 593. For example Year 593 - Year 559 = 34 years difference, and therefore; Year 1 - 34 years = Year -33.

This conversion is done in order to show where the timeline differs in comparison to later timelines. If any of my calculations are off please fix them, but explain the fix in the discussion thread, so others can see if you have made the correct calculations.

Now each date should hold summeries of what occurs during those dates based on what was mentioned in the manuals, however they should not be direct quotes from manuals themselves. Those quotes can be found in the articles linked at the bottom of the page, and there is no reason to post that information twice.Baggins 02:59, 4 January 2007 (EST)

Hourglass
I just made Medivh's hourglass after noticing it's mention in the WC manual and I notice an interesting term here:
 * Medivh awakens and gives the Hourglass of Fate as a gift to the Prince.

Where is the term Hourglass of Fate first used and why is there no article about it? Should we move my new page to that name? I'd like to know the source of the HOF term first before doing so. Tycio (talk) 23:52, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I see the term used on this page, but not in Warcraft I and II manuals, so I'm not sure where is it from. --Morderi (talk) 08:48, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

Baggins fix for math
I'm noticing an inconsistency with the parentheses at this transition
 * 577 (-14)
 * 583 (-10)

The first numbers have a difference of six, the second numbers have a difference of four.

It's definitely a six-year gap (manual "six years passed") so something needs to be corrected in the parentheses.

There is also an error here:
 * 584 (-9)
 * 593 (1)

The first two numbers have a difference of nine, the parenthesized pair has a difference of ten.

I think maybe we should be listing references here regarding how these parentheses came to be.

Also what exactly is the "year zero" which lacks a bullet, meant to signify?

I also see in the example listed in the 1st section of talk page a contrast with what is listed on the page right now:
 * "For example Year 593 - Year 559 = 34 years difference, and therefore; Year 1 - 34 years = Year -33."
 * "559 (-32)"

I would suggest we consider reworking all parentheses from scratch, and emphasizing a 3-digit basis. Tycio (talk) 00:08, 23 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Blizzard hasn't used 3-digit years since WarCraft 2, and the timeline has been heavily retconned since then making it impossible to accurately pin specific years to events. We're not switching. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 00:10, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

alleged retcon
Not sure I understand basis of this accusation on page:
 * the Warcraft II retcon that the First War lasted "nearly five years" total,
 * instead of lasting fifteen years
 * (a combination of the Warcraft manual's ten years with the Warcraft II manual's five years explanation).

References of note here are:
 * Lothar in WC1 in 583 "Six years passed" before attack on Stormwind .. crops fail in best soil, children get sick and never recover, etc (clearly the tiny rift is open! This isn't just Medivh's hourglass!)
 * Lothar in WC1 in 593 "Nearly ten years of skirmishes"
 * Garona in WC1: "Many years passed as the Warlocks sought to unlock the mysteries of this tiny rift .. Orcish Warlocks began experimentation towards focusing the rift, gradually making it larger and more stable. Eventually, they were able to create a small portal"
 * Garona in WC1: "It has been some fifteen years since this costly decision altered the course of our destiny."
 * Aegwyn in WC2: "The arrival of Gul'dan and the Horde War Chief Blackhand heralded a war that tore the realm of Azeroth asunder for nearly five years."
 * Gul'dan in WC2: "It took considerable time to expand the rift enough to send the massive frame an Orc through."

Gul'dan's log actually describes a very discrete progression
 * Warlocks in the Warlocks' tower scream from scary dream, feeling "the Presence"
 * Gul'dan wonders why he can't feel it, consults Kiljaeden, who says he felt it
 * Gul'dan has "fevered flight" through Twisted Nether and is eventually contacted too
 * Gul'dan cuts off contact realizing Medivh is probing him better than he's being counterprobed
 * Gul'dan tries and fails to contact Kiljaeden a second time
 * "several weeks" go by as Gul'dan lurks in the TN some more, getting nothing
 * Medivh appears a 2nd time to Gul'dan in dream
 * Guldan meets with Shadow Council to consult
 * warlocks outside the Shadow Council who got the Medivh visions are murdered to keep it secret from orc society
 * "weeks pass" of Gul'dan failing to contact Medivh a 3rd time
 * rift appears to surprise of orcs (Medivh made the pinprick) too small for anyone to pass through
 * rift is widened by Gul'dan to 1-orc-width
 * "first scouts" sent through, come back through portal insane ("early failures")
 * "subsequent quests" confirm the "seemed to be driven completely mad" failures' accounts
 * Gul'dan gets the Shadow Council to recruit the noun-Council remainder of Orc Warlocks (no longer kept in the dark or secretly murdered) for help with the rift
 * rift is further widened and stabilized to point where Gul'dan now refers to it as Portal
 * now "great number" of orcs moved through (the first scouts obviously less-than-great numbers)
 * "small outpost" is "quickly built" on other side
 * outpost is used to launch further scouts to surrounding areas
 * Shadow Council agents finally educate about "humans" and "Azeroth" (things which the first "early failures" don't appear to have gleaned)

There seem to be two long spans beyond Medivh's rift-pricking that we don't have defined:
 * the considerable time used to widen it to 1-orc size by a small amount of warlocks (just Gul'dan and the Shadow Council)
 * the period of initial scouting
 * more questing
 * the second widening period with the aid of the Warlock clans
 * the short outpost-building period
 * the 2nd period of scouting, probably some village-raiding and stuff
 * Cho'gall and Kil'rogg lead horde against Stormwind
 * humans drive horde back to swamp
 * Gul'dan learns of Blackhand, maneuvers him to be warchief
 * Medivh visage appears to Guldan
 * Garona kills Llane
 * Medivh getting sworded begins to "transmit telepathic waves of trauma" shattering Gul'dan defenses
 * Gul'dan risks trying to steal tomb location from mind, Medivh is finished off and shock puts Gul'dan in coma (kinda like that 6 year nap Medivh took before gifting hourglass)
 * "for weeks I slept" probably not THAT long though.
 * Orgrim ambushes Blackhand, decapitates
 * Orgrim captures Garona, interrogates
 * learning of the Shadow Council, and where they are, Wolfriders sent by Orgrim attack Gul'dan's new citadel near Stormwind ruins
 * mass public executions of Warlocks who survived the assault on the citadel (many were killed outright)
 * Gul'dan wakes up at some point, gets captured, interrogated (still weak from Medivh backlash)
 * "last true sorcerer" implies all other warlocks killed: not just in the Shadow Council but among entire horde.
 * this doesn't include the "Necrolytes" though, unclear if Ogrgrim was aware of them
 * Gul'dan is unimpressed with frail necrolyte physiques and begins collecting Knights of Azeroth (human) corpses
 * Gul'dan murders all the necrolytes in ritual at Ironwood/Blackroot altar
 * summons ghosts of "greater members" of Shadow Council who died (ie not Garona, unclear what % died)
 * gives jeweled truncheon to them to "focus their unearthly powers", I think that thing with the green orb on the tip
 * spirits of Shadow Council remained loyal to Gul'dan

Anyway getting back to the numbers... Aegwyn's five doesn't need to be her describing the entire duration of the war, just the time it tore Azeroth apart.

Garona's "fifteen" on the other hand, I don't think is actually referring to the length of the war at all, but rather the duration of time in between the discovery of the tiny rift which Medivh made an the warlocks' widening it and attacking Stormwind.

The issue here is what Garona meant when she wrote "this costly decision". If she is referring to attacking Stormwind Keep then yeah, it seems like 15 years have gone by between Stormwind Keep getting attack (Anduin watching Garona murder his dad) and the start of the game.

But I think she's going back further. If you notice, her next sentence is "Many called for the closing of the gate", so I think when Garona describes a decision which "altered the course of our destiny" she's referring to the early decision to wrench open the rift to begin with, not the late decision of "hey let's attack Stormwind".

Garona ends with "Age of Chaos is now at Hand" so it might not have actually been at hand when they surprise-attacked Stormwind. Rather I think it refers to Blackhand taking advantage of that failure and their swamp-lurking to clan-unite.

It actually doesn't seem 100% clear the exact point Garona wrote this, since the consolidation of the clans under Blackhand would not have been an instantaneous process. I don't think the true "first war" actually began until AFTER that uniting though.

It seems likely that Medivh opened the rift pretty much right after he awoke and gave the hourglass to Llane, which is why you have the six years of crops/kids problems. If you add that to the "nearly ten" years of skirmishes you get the "fifteen" pre-war years which Garona is referencing: she wrote this at the START of the war, not the end of it. During the war she was too busy actually doing assassinations and stuff to bother writing stuff for the Shadow Council (actually captured)

So Garona's 15 is about pre-war era. Which is probably enough time for her to get sired between an Orc/Human per original text (pre Draenei mom change) if her dad was one of the "first scouts" who came through and everyone thought was insane.

Especially considering later stuff we have about orcs reaching physical maturity in 12 years from the Rise of the Horde novel. If Garona was conceived by the first wave of scouts who made it there within 3 years of the tiny rift being opened (it isn't clear how long it took to widen it) then she still has 12 year to reach physical maturity by the time of the start of the war and go kill Llane in a busty outfit. Tycio (talk) 01:04, 23 February 2021 (UTC)
 * You're gonna have an easier time getting the answers that you seek if you keep ypur questions more concise. Generally speaking, the numbers provided by the first RTS games are not as useful as they once were due to all the retcons of the last 20+ years. PeterWind (talk) 17:36, 23 February 2021 (UTC)