One take that dwarves would rather leave, aka the less-than-proud origin of Dwarves

Every well-developed fantasy setting has its share of lore. Often, that extends to origins stories for the various races that inhabit the world. In various incarnations, dwarves have been initial creations of the Old Ones or Aule, crawled out of the rotting corpse of Ymir, or spilled from the pens of animators in Burbank, California.

A common theme tends to be that dwarves are a basic feature of a fantasy world. They were created by divine forces, and other races may have branched off from them in bygone eras.

The Warcraft universe had a different take. I haven’t talked about World of Warcraft since my blog post about Shadowlands, so I think it’s time to explore Azeroth once again. This time, I’m focusing on its unique Dwarven lore, since the current story of The War Within has it in spades.

In Azeroth, the Titans created Earthen. Earthen were mineral-based robotic servants programmed to perform basic maintenance of the Titans’ magnificent creations. When the Old Gods wanted to corrupt Azeroth, they started by weakening the Titans’ lesser creations. They created the Curse of Flesh.

Earthen turned from stone to flesh and blood, from immortal to mortal, from programmed to free-willed.

Across fiction, dwarves are depicted as ancient and noble creatures who, if not as old as the world itself, are among its creators’ earlier projects. Warcraft is the only instance I can think of where a dwarf is a corrupted version of something more primordial and true to their creators’ intent.

Then again, Warcraft’s deities weren’t that great with creating playable races. While the earthen have recently been re-introduced, and mechagnomes were created by Mimiron, who is at least a titan keeper, the other races are a mix of evolved lesser creatures (goblins, tauren, pandaren, vulpera…) and corrupted divine creations (elves, dwarves, gnomes), or corruptions OF corruptions (humans, undead, worgen…), not to mention flat-out aliens (orcs, dranei).

So Warcraft wasn’t so much as singling out dwarves as making them part of the corruption soup of their main world.

In addition to a deeper dive into the lore of the Earthen and their relationship to Dwarves in The War Within, the first major patch, Undermine, plumbs the depths of Goblin lore.

So if you haven’t visited Azeroth in a while, or if you are a fan of Goblins or Dwarves as fantasy races, I recommend reacquainting yourself with World of Warcraft.