Though Bear and I've played WoW for a long time (starting from the near the end of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion) and, as we've mentioned earlier, believe one of the drawing factors to the Warcraft universe being the lore, I honestly didn't know too much about it. I always felt its presence in WoW's world, but I think the idea of doing research was a bit daunting as it would have required a ton of in-depth reading that I don't usually have much time or energy for.

Blizzard recently released the first Hearthstone expansion called Curse of Naxxramas, a solo adventure campaign themed on a forty-man raid from the original WoW. Seeing the expansion material put me into a big WoW mood again and got me curious of all the back story behind Naxxramas and its characters. It's also a bit exciting seeing some elements and characters that I learned about long ago when my brother used to play Warcraft 3 (I guess specifically Anub'Rekhan and Kul'Thuzad).

Blizzard revealing the Warcraft movie title and a few props for display like the Doomhammer and the Dragon Sword at the most recent Comic-Con got me thinking about how little I actually know about the Warcraft universe. In delving, I learned that I didn't even know any of the main characters the upcoming movie was going to be based on, thus I decided to take on the quest to research Warcraft, but if I'm going to study Warcraft lore, I needed to start from the beginning (or at least what I thought was the beginning), the origin of the orcs and draenei.

I really got into the research and spent a considerable amount of time surfing WoWpedia a few nights ago; it was a bit difficult remembering the foreign sounding names and trying not to overwhelm myself with too much branching information, but I really enjoyed myself! =D It was a big surprise to discover that Warcraft has more of an interstellar aspect than I initially thought and that there actually is a big main bad guy. I enjoyed reading about the origins of a number of the big names of the lore, how they grew up, their plights, how they changed, and how events interweave into each other. I've mostly only read material about the orcs up to Grommash Hellscream's death so far and am looking forward to reading more. =) I hope I get a chance to experience Warcraft 3 one day.