Spoiler: You can smell the peace-smoke of the lodge...
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“You are mad, Ukorz. Ya drunk on ya father’s wine.”
Drunk on ya father’s wine. When Sasani says this, the entire tone of the summit changes. Here, in the heady and mildly narcotic smoke of the Lodge, the peace smoke hadn’t managed to take the edge off the intensity, and Sasani couldn’t help but kick it up a notch.
There are nine of you here, three to a bench around the smoking coals. Chief Ukorz Sandscalp, high chieftain of the Sandfury tribe, leans forward on his knees. The massive power coiled up in his shoulder muscles makes an impressive frame even hunched, partially blocking your view of the trolls to his advisors left and right of him. On the second bench, shaking her head and rolling her eyes, is Chief Sasani Ut’ongo. While Ukorz has technical superiority over all of the Sandfury, it has been an age since Zul Farrak has projected its power across the whole desert, and while a full half of the remaining sand trolls dwell in the shadow of the ancient monuments under Ukorz’s watch, the rest are scattered in villages throughout Tanaris. Sasani has served for fifteen years as the delegate for the nomad clans and villages along the western interior of Tanaris, and its troubled southern regions in constant threat from the vile insectoid remnants of the unspeakable ancient foe. Those groups make up perhaps a third of the Sandfury. Sitting on your bench, to your immediate right, is Chief Haja’rra Shakar; the leader of your village Sunscar village, and since the old Nonos’ko from Fardune Village died last year, the current delegate and representative of the sixth of Sandfury trolls who dwell in the eastern coastal region in villages from yours, butting up against the mysterious hills in which the bronze drakes do their odd magics, all the way up to Steamwheedle port and Gadgetzan in the interior. Each chief has brought his or her traditional advisors; one who speaks with the loa, and one who speaks with the elements; and though you have travelled to Zul Farrak before to see the ancient structures and recite the ancient tales on festival days, you never expected to be here, in the Lodge, speaking for the elements and advising on the wellbeing of five thousand trolls. You’d be honored, if you weren’t so self conscious. Sasani’s shamanic advisor is the regional legend Sul the Sandcrawler, thirty years your senior and somehow as vigorous and imposing as a troll half your age. Ukorz’s shaman you hadn’t met till today and closer to your peer in power and experience, but Shia’ha Stonecaller is clearly more comfortable in these corridors of authority and responsibility than her age would dictate. Sitting across from these trolls, you feel every bit the dazzled, bumpkin spirit-speaker you feared you would appear to be from the moment Chief Haja’rra tapped you to advise him.
At Sasani’s loaded comment, the lodge goes quiet; and Haja’rra’s witchdoctor leans back from her seat on the other side of him, so she can look past your mutual chief’s shoulders and ritually scarred back to see you. Her expression - one of contained alarm but confidence expressly in you - is one you are well used to, and is probably your favorite. It’s the look she gives you whenever some trouble kicks up which requires the steady hand of your village’s spiritual leaders, and presages a project you will have to work on together. The look is composed of the lofting of one delicate eyebrow, indicating uncertainty; a pursing of her lips between her short and shapely tusks, indicating resolution; and a tilt of her head to one side, suggesting she’s ready to follow your lead and expects you to produce the same level-headed wisdom she relies on to free her up as the more dynamic risktaker of your duo. Together, you and Lasha’nah have helped steer your young chief and small village through border conflicts with the Dunemaul ogres, night raids by roaming Silithid packs, and one bizarre summer in which your people were plagued by dune-dervish elementals, spinning backwards and driven insane by weird magic in the dragon-infested hills. All of those things seem like small victories now that you are sitting in a smoke lodge with the most powerful Sandfury trolls alive, trying to find a solution to the goblin troubles. But with that familiar glance, Witchdoctor Lasha’nah, your partner in crime, shears away your sense of smallness and frees you to think clearly about the problems. She certainly thinks you’re capable of making a different here.
And she’s given you four children and sixteen years of devoted marriage. If anyone knows what you’re capable of, it’s her.
You are mad, Ukorz. Ya drunk on ya father’s wine.
Sasani isn’t wrong, you know for a fact. Ukorz has been a strong leader for his people in an era when they had almost no friends at all. The threats on all sides have come close to shattering the Sandfury beyond repair as a tribe while they’ve been on borrowed time for centuries, but Ukorz’s warrior militantism and unflagging belief in the power of your people’s ancient destiny. The ancient Sandfury stood alone and sacrificed their Empire’s whole might to contain the flow of the hideous Qiraji long before the Elves and their dragon allies mustered their might to join battle. Some essence of that long gone glory still shines in Ukorz’s eyes: the same total confidence in the power of the Sandfury that drove the heroic Archmartyr Theka to sacrifice himself, cursing the Qiraji with his death and saving Zul Farrak from destruction.
That is what Sasani means; Ukorz is so obsessed with ancient glory that he has lost touch with the bitter truth: the Sandfury are a small, weak, scattered tribe with barely enough people to sustain themselves in a land so hostile that neither the Horde nor the Alliance want to colonise it. Only ogres and goblins, both who share the troll’s capacity to thrive in any climate, have made real inroads in the Farraki homeland, but it’s the goblins that are causing your people worry now. And not with guns or their angry machines, but with a weapon the Farraki trolls have almost no knowledge of at all: commerce. Gadgetzan, once a dinky little tradepost established by goblins and decent trade partners for the Farraki villages like yours, the coming of the broken remnants of the Horde after the second war, and the founding of the new Horde and Theramore to the north in other parts of Kalimdor, created an enormous new market the exploitation of which the Steamwheedle cartel was born. No longer were the goblins a good source of goods from distant lands with whom you could barter, but a massive operation piping in resources from all over southern Kalimdor and ships from the Eastern Kingdoms. Their caravans built roads through territories that only made it easier for the ogres to attack. Their ruthless profit seekers were turning over ruins and graves of the old Sandfury, heedless of any sense of respect for the dead or the demands of their living kin. And perhaps most troublesome of all, the goblins competed for hunted game, for wellsprings, for the scarce but present bounty of the desert on which your people rely. Without exclusive access to that bounty, your villages are forced to buy the difference - from the goblins. And with the rich factions up north able to pay considerably more than your poor desert folk, the price of survival is becoming cripplingly high. Some trolls have turned to robbing the graves of their own ancestors for trinkets to sell - a crime of which only goblins and human desert raiders were thought capable.
Ukorz’s solution is simple - mass the tribe, as in the older times, and attack Gadgetzan. With a swift enough strike, Baron Noggenfogger will surrender and with a blade to his throat, he will be forced to make his city into a vassalized client of the Sandfury. This will give the Farraki trading power; they can build and restore Zul Farrak with taxes imposed on the goblins, connect the villages with roads to supply each other more easily, and finally mount a campaign to subjugate the Dunemaul ogres and extinguish the human raiding gangs. Theoretically the plan ends there; but you doubt it.
“Mad?” Ukorz’s voice echoed from his throat in a gravelly croak, breaking the silence. “I been called worse by better, Sasani. But you the one wastin’ ya people’s time, diggin ya grave where ya father died; I’m the one whose not ready to fade.”
Somehow, this measured response is more ominous than the outburst everyone was expecting. Your chief Haja’rra speaks up before Sasani can fire back. “None of us want to fade ‘to the sand. But even if we had the power to smack the little green ones about, what then? Wid respect, High Cheiftain - ya don’t understand the Horde, or Alliance, and the power they got. We fought off the demons that came to our sands, but they fought a war against the demons we never even saw. And they won.”
“So we throw in with the Horde, like the Darkspear.” Sasani declares, prematurely guessing that Haja’rra has come around to her position. He corrects her. “We can’t, Sasani; to start, the Horde won’t take us while there’s still flesh-eatin’ in our villages; but if we go to the Horde we’re just another levy to be raised when they fight the humans and elves again. We can’t lose another thousand young trolls in someone else’s war. That be the end of us, mon.”
The remark about cannibalism is a polite dodge, you know. It’s been Haja’rra’s life’s work to eliminate the tradition of cannibalism from the eastern Farraki villages so they will be able to trade with the big civilized neighbors without stigma, but the capital of Zul Farrak, and the western regions are lagging behind in that regard. Old habits die hard.
“So what, den - go begging to the big dogs? Become slaves of de goblins?” Ukorz rumbles, mockingly. “Empires only respect power, mon. Widout it, we got no voice, and no future.”
Thus, the dilemma. The most powerful Sand troll in the world wants a war that you know, even if successful, only buys a short window before the Cartel brings in a mercenary army and specialist loan troops from the Horde and Alliance to smash your people to bloodsmears on the sand. Ukorz is wrong, and you know it. Tyrants only respect power, but from what you’ve seen of these factions, they aren’t tyrants. Indeed, they’re coalitions of unequal partners, not power hierarchies. And Sasani, the second most powerful Farraki in the world, wants the Sandfury to join the Horde. But the armistice between the big factions can’t last forever; and is breaking down in some places already. Formally joining one side is just a way of getting enlisted to die in someone else’s war, and to forever alienate half the people who could help your ailing tribe. It’s the goblins who are thriving amidst the chaos - signed up to neither side, doing their diplomatic and commercial magic to profit both, and profit from both. The goblins have the right idea - they’re just painfully ignorant of the spirits, and of history, and of all the things that matter. But they know a thing or two about being a little guy, surviving in a battlefield for giants.
Haja’rra looks to you as well, now. Your chief, and your wife beside him, are both laying their expectations on you that you will be able to articulate this vision for the future of your people better than anyone else.
The legacy of your tribe, older than the sands, older than the splitting of the land that made Kalimdor, hangs on the strength of your vision.
Everyone waits for you to speak.
Re: World of Warcraft - Interbellum (IC Thread)
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