Awhile ago I made a post to help explain how our characters might fit into the lore of Azeroth.  I mentioned in that post that one possibility to explain our own character’s actions is that our characters don’t actually exist in the lore of Azeroth.  Instead, our characters’ actions represent the actions of a multitude of people from various backgrounds.  Rather than saying one person has performed all of these great deeds, your one character actually represents the actions of a number of different people, each doing what they can to help their own local community.

While this explanation is one possibility to explain our characters’ lore, there is another explanation that perhaps makes more sense in the context of WoW.  WoW is a very quest oriented game.  Each of our characters wander the world helping those in need.  In general, our characters will help anyone who asks, regardless of who they are or what the task is.  We travel often, rarely settling in one place or staying with one group.  While you can imagine that your character is doing this in a completely altruistic way, this isn’t really true.  Every quest comes with its own rewards and every mob is full of yummy loot and gold.

Despite the backstory you’ve made for your character and the personality you imagine your character has, the most straightforward explanation for this is that your character is a mercenary for hire.  This also explains why NPCs seem to have no qualms walking up to you and asking for help with the most random tasks regardless of what you’re doing or who you are.  Maybe you have some sort of mercenary badge on or maybe your character is actively advertising his mercenary status.  Regardless, the ultimate purpose of your character seems to be to accumulate as much gold, loot, and power as he possibly can in whatever way he can.  You do this by traveling the world seeking work and selling your services.  You are a mercenary for hire.  Throughout your character’s lifetime, you sell your services to goblins, trolls, tauren, undead, and even pirates and ethereals if they offer a big enough reward.  The only limit to your characters’ reward seeking seems to be that you will not help NPCs who are explicitly loyal to the opposite faction.

Azeroth has a number of groups, all of which your character has no problem lending his services if the price is right.  Whether the group is the Alliance, the Ebon Blade, the Argent Crusade, The Kul’uak, or the Consortium, your character will travel the world doing tasks for each one, never settling in with one or gaining a permanent position within the organization.  However, there is one large and influential group (or group of groups) that is never really mentioned in lore, but our characters do have great loyalty to:  the great Azerothian Mercenary Guilds. 

Ultimately, our actual in-game guilds could be just that:  actual in-lore mercenary guilds.  These groups of mercenaries come together to tackle challenges that each one couldn’t do alone.  By joining together, these guild members can accept larger jobs, allowing them both greater rewards and the ability to loot larger and wealthier dungeons.  These mercenary guilds compete with each other for jobs… to be the first to loot a dungeon’s treasures.  They also compete with each other for members, advertising themselves in cities and trying to lure top mercenaries out of competing guilds.  There’s in-fighting and politics and re-organization just like what happens in our actual guilds.  Whether you are a rogue, a hunter, a warlock, or a paladin, these guilds need people from all races and classes who may have a more greed-seeking bent to help them achieve their goals or richness and prestige.

Maybe our characters’ guilds are actually the largest, most influential, but also least talked about groups in Azeroth.  Maybe Azeroth is actually a world of mercenaries where which mercenary guild you are in affects how much influence, power, and prestige you have.  If that’s the case, it seems like the Alliance, the Horde, the Argent Crusade, and the other groups you gain reputation with are actually small compared to the total size of all of Azeroth’s mercenary guilds.  Those groups ultimately rely on these mercenary guilds to get things done because that is where the power is.

What this means is that ultimately, it wasn’t the Alliance or the Argent Crusade or the Ebon Blade or any lore figure that has scored the biggest victories on Azeroth and the related worlds.  Those groups may have had major victories, but they weren’t the ones who killed Illidan, Yogg-Sarron, or the Lich King.  It was the mercenaries that those organization hired.  In-game they are sometimes called Adventurers, but ultimately they’re really just mercenaries, traveling wherever gives the best reward, helping those who don’t have the manpower to do it themselves.  The many mercenary guilds of Azeroth are never mentioned in lore, but they seem to be some of the biggest, most organized, and most influential groups in the world.  While your guild could be considered part of the Alliance or the Horde, it certainly isn’t an official part of the Stormwind Army.  It is its own organization with its own separate goals that performs the deeds that will benefit it the most.  Sure, your mercenary guild may also have a altruistic reason for doing what he does.  Of course, the Lich King needs to be defeated and this will benefit everyone.  But ultimately, just like in reality, your guild is doing it for the loot.  You’re doing it for the gold.  And you’re doing it for the prestige.  Maybe our in-game character’s goals are really not that much different from our real-life goal’s for our characters.

So tell me what you think of your character.  Are you just a mercenary for hire?  How do you see your character ultimately fitting into the lore of Azeroth?