What I would really recommend instead of reading this book is to actually play the campaigns of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne. You will really LOVE all the campaigns and stories as they will perfectly fit into what you’ve seen in WoW. From the story of Arthas, battle of Mount Hyjal, corruption of the Orcs, Illidan and the Blood Elves to the foundation of Durotar etc …

For example: In the book, you get to feel Jaina Proudmoore and Uther’s hearts break as Arthas says that script of text infront of Strat as they leave and refuse to follow – because you understand the significance of the event better. The book made me feel bad about all the times I killed “innocent people” in CoS now… Jaina goes back to Strat after all the people had been killed, and the book talks about things like the smell and the loss of life.

The book also fleshes out some of the Arthas-related quests that you do in places like Dragonblight (ie. at the forgotten shore, where he actually burned his own ships to make his soldiers stay). So, I think reading it helped me understand all the events better.

I’m an amateur fantasy writer myself (meaning that I haven’t been published . . . yet).

I find the Warcraft lore daunting in a bad way. Every piece of material I’ve ever seen on wowwiki and the website reads like the back of one of those bad fantasy books with 70’s era cover art. It’s all much to dense! This event and that event, this personality and that personality, in a cosmos that really doesn’t make too much sense. I wish Blizzard had put more thought and care into the creation of their world.

If you compare two of my favorite games, Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic, to the Warcraft games I think you’ll see a huge discrepancy in how they treat story. In Warcraft the events are much “larger” and “grander,” but they lack in verisimilitude and human feeling. For example, Neverwinter Nights is about a plague. It centers on a single event, and the opening chapter borrows heavily from Boccaccio to really evoke that event with everything your character does and every place she can go. Everyone you talk to participates in that human tragedy. There’s also a plague in WoW, and we play through it in CoT Stratholme. However, there’s never much focus on the human side. It’s an isolated event–a past memory–and all we get is an NPC conversation and one slaughter of an innocent plague-ridden group before we start killing monsters as we always do.

Even Morrowind, which was dauntingly large, had some surprisingly well-written “books” included in game. I spent some two-hour gaming sessions just reading them in the in-game bookstores. I have yet to see anything like that in WoW. Most of the text seems written for sheer density. It’s like 100 Years of Solitude in a bad way–every sentence contains years of events, but it’s not done with much skill or even attention paid. I wish Blizzard would hire me to edit their “lore” tidbits, both in and out of game!

Despite my love of fantasy books (and pre-WoW I spent most of my free time reading them, whereas now it’s about half my free time), I’ve never gotten into the lore of WoW.