Guild Canon: The contents of this page are considered canon within Cobalt Company's "RP bubble". Guild canon may go beyond official WoW canon and is usually inspired by and extrapolated from it. However, guild canon will not contradict official canon.
Magical Healing
Magical healing works along a spectrum of effectiveness from "like you were never hurt" to "not at all," based on the following factors.
- Timing - The sooner after damage is received, the more completely your body can be "convinced" that it never happened.
- Compassion - Especially with Holy healing, the extent to which a priest can summon sincere caring and sympathy for the patient contributes a great deal to effectiveness.
- Skill - With time and training, priests get better at feeling compassion for a variety of strangers, as well as skillfully wielding their chosen form of magic.
- Consent - If the person is consciously or unconsciously unwilling to receive the blessing, that resistance will reduce effectiveness.
Because of the temporarily intense bond that shared danger can create among a group, and the speed at which during-combat healing is applied, a dungeon crawl would work almost as it does in game, with a priest almost instantly negating damage done to those they heal. But outside of that situation, various factors may reduce the effectiveness of healing, so that damage leftover after the spell is cast must mend the natural way over time, possibly leaving scars, etc.
Resurrection
The same factors are involved with resurrection as with healing, along with two extremely mysterious added factors:
- Soul 'Strength' - Priests can ONLY (even given all other factors in alignment) resurrect those rare people whose souls retain a sense of awareness and agency even when separated from the body. These "strong souls" often belong to great heroes, but the cause/effect relationship isn't clear. Some truly rare souls can find their way back to their bodies even without a priest's summons!
- Fate - The most unknowable factor of all. Sometimes it is simply someone's "time," and no matter how strong the soul or skilled the priest, they cannot be resurrected.
A particularly tragic corollary of the "Consent" factor, in the case of resurrection, is that in shocking or traumatic deaths, resurrecting a soul becomes much more difficult. It might even be impossible in the case of a death that so shatters a person's values or morale that they give up on all attachment to their existence. An example from history is the death of Uther the Lightbringer at the hands of his beloved Arthas. His soul immediately and permanently fled the world in heartbroken horror despite his many previous resurrections.
Necromancy
A standard soul departs from its body immediately and loses all awareness and agency until it arrives at the Shadowlands. And even the strongest soul cannot re-enter a body that has begun to decay. Only necromancy can reanimate a body under these circumstances.
Some bodies are simply animated by necromantic energy, and their once-attached souls have no awareness of what has become of their earthly remains. But advanced necromancy allows people to draw a soul back from limbo or the Shadowlands to its own body — or in even more advanced cases, such as certain Death Knights, to another body altogether.
An undead person's soul "accompanies" their body in a similar way to a living person's, though it is always "stitched together" in a metaphysical sense and is never truly united with the body as a living person's is. Physically, this prevents the tissues and organs from returning to a living state. Mentally, this can manifest as varying degrees of detachment, amoral behavior, derangement, or other personality changes.
"Final death" for an undead person amounts to the tearing apart of the necromantic "stitching" holding the soul to the body and the soul once again making its way to the Shadowlands. Under known circumstances, resurrection can only replace an undead person's "stitching," not return the person fully to life.
Druidic Shapeshifting
A common question that arises regarding shapeshifted druids is: "Can they speak?" The simple answer is that yes, they can, but not all do. The more complex answer is that a druid's ability or willingness to speak in their animal forms can vary greatly from druid to druid. It is a skill that can be developed. For some druids it comes very naturally; a handful manage to speak in animal form without trouble, as if simply because nobody told them they couldn't. For most, however, it takes discipline, re-learning how to communicate with different sets of vocal cords and mouth shapes.
There are also psychological factors. For instance, a druid's voice in other forms will sound different from their normal voice, and some can find that unnerving. Feral druids often feel no impulse or desire to use verbal communication when in their animals forms, as they start to think more like beasts when shapeshifted. That said, they can easily communicate with other druids in the same shape, and to some degree even normal animals of the same species.
When it comes to the more unusual forms like the moonkin or the tree of life, the same issues still arise. These are new forms that communicate differently. Previous experience relearning to speak always helps (as does being naturally gifted).
Telemancy
Telemancy is the specific branch of magic dealing with translocation, teleportation, and portals. It is a specialization within the arcane school of magic more broadly called transmutation. A mage that specializes in telemancy is sometimes called a telemancer. Telemancy takes many forms, from a simple Blink spell to the creation of such marvels as the Dark Portal.
The term "telemancy" is somewhat archaic and not widely used outside of scholarly circles. To most, words like "teleportation" and "portals" suffice. "Teleportology" and "teleportologist" have also been coined, but are not widely used.
Regulation of Telemancy
Telemency is extremely powerful magic, and can easily be misused, leading to catastrophic consequences (e.g. the flooding of Ironforge in 24 ADP when a mage removed the liquid filter from a portal from Lake Everstill to the city). As such, the Kirin Tor regulates the use of telemancy much more strictly than most forms of magic.
Of greatest concern are the practices of long-distance teleportation and the opening of portals. In both cases, there is no way for a practitioner to see their destination, meaning they lack the safety of line-of-sight teleportation like a Blink spell. There have been horrific examples of poorly aimed spells causing a telemancer or their portal to appear inside solid matter on the other side. This means certain death to the mage, and likely severe damage to the receiving matter (or far worse if that matter is a living being).
The safest and most reliable pathways for teleportation to follow are along ley lines. For this reason, the Kirin Tor demands that any telemancy that is not line-of-sight must not only use ley lines, but their destination points must align to predetermined powerful ley line nexuses. These are typically established in major cities or important centers of travel. There is a secondary reason the Kirin Tor insists on the use of these telemancy hubs; every use of telemancy causes minor disruption and damage to the ley lines. The Kirin Tor is responsible for maintaining and restoring the ley lines; a task made much simpler when the majority of ley line travel always points to a handful of specific locations.
Hearthstones
One of the most remarkable applications of telemancy is seen in hearthstones. These wondrous items make teleportation available to potentially anybody, if in a limited capacity.
A person who is bound to a hearthstone in their possession can use it to teleport themselves and any carried belongings to a predetermined location. These locations are special and must be established by the Kirin Tor on ley line nexus points. For this reason, it has become commonplace for inns and taverns to be constructed on such nexus points to make them more attractive to travelers and adventurers. It is believed this practice is what led to the items being referred to as hearthstones.
A hearthstone is typically crafted from a rare white stone (but can be made from other materials) with a glyph carved into its surface. This remarkable symbol is more intricate than it might appear at first glance. The details of the glyph indicate both the hearth location and the individual user to which the stone is currently bound. Any hearthstone can be bound to another hearth, at which point the glyph will alter to match the new location. When the Kirin Tor creates a hearth location, they provide the proprietor of the location with the means to rebind stones to their hearth.
Interdimensional Telemancy
At one time, the only known, safe methods of interdimensional telemancy involved the need for the creation of enormous, stable portals, requiring tremendous power to sustain them. One such example occurred during the War of the Ancients, when the Burning Legion attempted to transform the Well of Eternity into a great portal to summon Sargeras. The most famous example in the modern era is the Dark Portal.
In the Year 26, a new technique for small-scale, personal interdimensional telemancy was pioneered by a novice of the Kirin Tor, Gwenivene Whittle, and her team of researchers out of Nethergarde Keep with the assistance of Gerhold Fauntleroy. Miss Whittle calculated a means of creating stable "tunnels" through the Twisting Nether with variable intersection points where they crossed into and out of the Nether. This variance, combined with an application of MacGarvey's Confundment, ensured the security of mages portaling between Outland and Azeroth.