Into the Plaguelands

At this point in my travels I have a surprisingly large number of options for adventuring in the open world. There's a few upper end quests in Feralas I should probably consider doing. I still haven't set foot in Un'goro beyond getting the travel point. There's also the Blasted Lands, Azshara, and Felwood with enticing promises of excitement, loot, and danger. So naturally, I avoided all of that and went where I haven't been at all yet: The Plaguelands. Magrom was 52 after finishing off a few quests in Felwood and I felt I was "good enough" to at least die slowly.

Nestled in the northeast corner of the Eastern Kingdoms, it's chunked into two parts: Western and Eastern. In theory, Western Plaguelands is the easier of the two with some mobs being as low as 49 or so, but when you first get there, two of the first quests you get at "Chillwind Camp" have you trooping into the Eastern plaguelands for level 55+ stuff. I added them to my somewhat stuffed adventuring log and set about exploring.

The basic premise behind the Plaguelands is that these are the lands that have succumbed fully to Classic's Ultimate Big Bad: the lichlord, Kel'Thuzad. His plague has suffused the land, blighted everything except the people it hasn't, and hordes of undead scour the land. Standing up to the villainy is the Argent Crusade and, should you be willing to sacrifice a trinket slot for the duration of your stay, you can earn gewgaws that can be turned in for reputation. Ideally you should turn those in once killing undead stops granting experience on its own. Argent Crusade reputation is pretty important as the faction quartermaster sells both mana biscuits that restore health and mana better than mages' conjured food as well as shoulder enchantments. Not recipes...enchantments! (As an aside, this is long before inscription became a thing-- enchantments are normally only cast directly by enchanters. No scrolls.)

Anyways, for me, the Plaguelands is a special place. Not in a "hey, that's the spot where I lost my virginity to an entire cheer-leading squad" kind of way, but special nevertheless. You see, I never made it to level 60 in Vanilla. Throw all the tomatoes you like, it's true. My original long-forgotten Paladin (now renamed and living on a different server) never made it past 53 or so on the PvP server she was on. I distinctly remember playing through a small portion of the quests in both Western and Eastern Plaguelands on her, but I never really finished the zones until years later with Strev on his Eastern Kingdoms Loremaster bonanza. It was the last place I had adventured with my first character and I was about to undertake it again a decade and a half later.

So I ran through and instead of grinding safe(ish) mobs, I made a concerted effort to just do the quests. It was absolutely brutal, but I attempted many of the tasks I did in Vanilla and braved the eastern half of the landscape when required.

Some of the things I tried ended in absolute failure, as the mobs were just far too tough and when another one or two wandered into the mix, it was either touch and go or a corpse run. Regardless, I kept trying at it, despite it all. Through sheer dogged determination, I died over and over trying to get to certain places in the ruins of Andorhal that were covered with dense packs of marauding undead.

Some were total wins: I cleansed the first of four plague cauldrons. I completed a series of tasks for a ghost that led me to Stormwind and back and earned a shadow resistance necklace in the process. I found and assembled a little doll for a ghost girl, which triggered a quest chain as I sought information about her family, which led to the biggest win of all. I finally met Chromie again for the first time.



Chromie, my gnomie homie of the Bronze Dragonflight, Temporal Mistress, She Who Is Unbeholden to Time's Arrow, looked up at me and quite pointedly asked if I was from the future.



"I sure am, baby. I sure am."