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yukieHello, my name is Ishandarr, and I am a Death Knight who is so ravingly mediocre with the Blood discipline that it makes most of the Darkfallen giggle! However, I am very damn good with Frost and also quite adept with Unholy and prone to dorky theorycrafting and research. So, today, I'm going to be discussing that and the Plague of Undeath, since they're related and I have a better understanding than many about their exact mechanics. I'm not exactly sure why this decidedly-creepy topic of conversation has come up, but here it is and here I am, since I'm the one who dealt most with the Plague and its quirks and minutiae.
Hold onto your spine. It's going to be an unsettling ride.
This will give one a vague idea about it, though it's entirely wrong about the nature of the disease with regard to where I come from. It may differ from timeline to timeline (I'd have to ask the Bronzes), but in my here-and-now? It's not fungal. It's not caused by any micro-organism, but rather a warping and distortion of life energy itself. In a sense, this distortion can act like a micro-organism - it self-replicates and turns the host into a means of creating more of itself - but it is absolutely not biological in origin. It's the opposite. It certainly affects biology in a drastic way, but its origin is magical and its vector is life energy and mana.
Ner'zhul did not conjure a virus out of nowhere, nor did he do what Lady Yamamura Sadako does in that one magic lantern performance and psychically trigger a body to create a virus. A virus would be much, MUCH less unnerving than reality. Ner'zhul's psychic influence was ridiculous, and it was really damned easy for him to reach out with his awareness, watch the flow of life-energy and mana within people until he was absolutely familiar with it...and then warp this flow to the point of breaking. The first victims died instantly, but because of the nature of the distortion in their energy, they immediately got back up. That was the beginning of the Scourge. Ner'zhul tweaked the Plague over time to make it as effective and unnerving as possible, and the end result is what we now call the Plague of Undeath.
The way grain and water work as a vector for this thing has to do with how the Cauldrons work as well. How's that? Well! Earth and water energy are stable; they hold things for a long time. Transmitting the plague through grain works like this: corrupt the energy of the earth (this is what the Cauldrons do; they take advantage of ley lines and telluric currents to spread the corruption). Sow your seeds. Make sure the energy of the soil stays corrupt while the plants grow to maturity. They will then contain the corruption themselves, and though it will fade with time, its nature being of earth means this fading takes a long, long time. This is why Stratholme fell so hard and so fast - the shipment arrived ahead of schedule. The fading is why the 'zombie infestation' wasn't worse than it was - that shipment was delayed. The corruption can be reversed and cleansed by paladins and priests of the Light if it's caught soon enough; even when it wasn't, the plagues of Orgrimmar and Stormwind were much, much weaker than the one that took Stratholme, and so the citizens who became semi-undead didn't remain undead.
Water as a vector works similarly, but in that case you cannot ship it. The corruption will get rattled out of the water as it moves! Solution: put your Cauldron by a river. Watch the fun start up downstream.
--I was going to talk about how those work, wasn't I? They DO, and very well, but the mechanics of them can get a bit weird. Is the stuff inside toxic? You bet your pants, but not in the way you might think. It's not poisonous like, say, roots of a plant can be, or a spider bite, or the scales on a butterfly's wings. That would be too ordinary and too nice. Those sorts of poisons are common additives on some of the cauldrons, but the majority of what's inside them is closer to ectoplasm than anything else. They're spiritual toxins. Some people (looking at you, Noth, you loud jackass) liked adding a whack of biological poisons as well, in order to weaken the defenses of the plague's intended targets. Unfortunately, while this CAN work, it also kills all the plant life in the surrounding area and puts the smack down on your ability to use the local plant life to spread ANYTHING. It also makes the cauldron VERY OBVIOUS, since boiling poison has a very disagreeable smell. So do the cauldrons by themselves but you have to get up close and personal to notice and if you're that close, you're probably already dead. At any rate, if you look into one of the cauldrons (you'd be crazy to do so from up close unless you're already dead), what you'll see is a lot of green what-the-hell-is-that, which seems to be unable to decide whether it's solid, liquid or vaporous. And under that?
Bones. Yes, you heard me. Bones (and sometimes flesh, yeugh) of fallen Scourge agents. While you could probably pick up the femur of a downed skeletal warrior type without much danger to you, tossing it into the cauldron flicks the switch on the energy corruption. It goes from dormant to active in zero seconds flat, and the solution in the cauldrons 'insulates' the warping, preventing it from decaying or settling into dormancy again. What the Prof was flinging around at Icecrown was his effort at improving on Noth's method. What he got out of his research was an amaaaazing lime green self-contained super-vector: ectoplasmic plague toxin plus biological poison plus powdered bone. I...I won't lie, viewers, I found it really gross. Bit I digress. Adding more bones, whether they're from the Scourge or otherwise, increases the effectiveness of the cauldrons.
I know my methods really weren't much better but they weren't as malodorous. What I did - how I worked - was similar to the way the original plague did. My Unholy skills deal with that kind of discord, with agitation, with interrupted and warped energy flow. That's why I have several anti-magic tricks. Nowhere near as many as Koltira, but still. What I'm doing isn't the equivalent of sneezing on somebody. Like I said, it's not that simple and not that nice. Unholy discipline gets you doing what Ner'zhul did. You learn to sense the flow of mana and life energy within a person, or the ground. You get to know it like the back of your hand - and then you reach out and twist it out of line beyond all recognition. Unholy energy is in and of itself discordant, which is why Light hurts me so bloody badly when someone who really knows how to swing it brings it down on my head. Light is stability; when I'm using that magic, I'm imbalance. That's how those weird illnesses work. They're Unholy plus another thing. Frost Fever is obvious - unholy/ice. The ice is the carrier and the Unholy element means someone's going to be very damn cold for a very damn long time after the visible ice magic is gone. hat one, I am really good with for obvious reasons. Blood Plague's Shadow/Unholy. Add fire to that and it gets worse. And then there's the Ebon PLague, with which someone who's an expert like Koltira can start doing unkind things to your mana flow too. We don't have germs. What we do have is an ability to mess with the rhythm of your mana and life-energy flow for a given amount of time. How much I can do for how long depends on how long I'm around and on how much of my energy I'm putting into what I'm doing.
If that wasn't bad enough, I get backup in the form of (a) summoned perambulating skeletons (if I'm on hallowed ground, this won't work and trying it hurts me a lot) and (b) familiars. The large, cranky gargoyle's the obvious one, and they show up to expert-types; the ones I use more often are the low-level subtle kind, which Aerionn calls 'evil little moths'. The technical term for them is the Unholy Blight. But...they really do look like very small glowing moths, about the colour of a bruise. They summon themselves when they are attracted to large amounts of discordant energy, so they're attracted to the people I've messed with. They eat energy, too - ANY energy. This means that someone who's already ill from what I've done gets more so as these guys munch up the life energy that would normally be pouring into the body's defenses. It also means you canNOT get rid of them or the illnesses with healing magic for a while. They eat that too - and then they leave when they're not hungry any more. A full-out Unholy knight gets huge ones of these and many MANY more of them. (I - um. I...I think the bugs are kind of cute? I mean, when they're not munching up people's vital energy. I've used them as a sort of reconnaissance thing, and to distract Keleseth too - I don't know if I'm SUPPOSED to, but I can, and I have.)
This distorting's where stuff like the Desecration/Death and Decay area of effect business works. Yes, I'm disrupting the telluric currents temporarily. It's nowhere near the level of the damage the cauldrons can do, though, and a paladin can undo it with consecration. Yes, I have done silly things like go back and forth with a paladin this way. Usually while posing melodramatically.
The anti-magic and mana-tampering effects are a little less - disturbing to the layperson, I guess? I'm still messing with energy flow, but in this case, I'm disrupting the mana composing a spell. This and Dark Simulacrum (spelljacking!) are very similar to what I pulled as a Spellbreaker, so needless to say I picked those up speedily.
Uh. What else...? I'm not sure what else to talk about, and now Koltira's going to roll his eyes at me again. -_Wait, no, I remember now. I talked about the mistaken hypothesis on the one dictionary page there. They think the plague's fungal, and I can see why, but they're not exactly thinking with portals, as it were. Generally, if it has anything to do with the Scourge, you want to assume the presence of the most bent or disturbing factor you can think of. In this case, the Plaguewood is full of mushrooms because mushrooms grow on dead or decaying matter. Ground affected by the Plague for a prolonged period of time will inevitably become toadstool heaven. The dictionary's right about the mushrooms being potential vectors, since they've grown out of corrupt matter. That would also be why you get mushrooms on wildlife. So, in conclusion, DON'T EAT THE MUSHROOM. ...I'm particularly ridiculous tonight, for some reason.
So, in conclusion, Unholy is a bizarre power, the Plague is much creepier than many people imagine, Noth is a jackass, I am very glad the Lich King business is over, and I'm going to go distract Keleseth again now.
-Ishandarr Evenbrooke (the beanpole formerly known as Ebonrooke)
If anyone wants to know more about anything, feel free to demand what I was smoking that I left so much out.
Hold onto your spine. It's going to be an unsettling ride.
This will give one a vague idea about it, though it's entirely wrong about the nature of the disease with regard to where I come from. It may differ from timeline to timeline (I'd have to ask the Bronzes), but in my here-and-now? It's not fungal. It's not caused by any micro-organism, but rather a warping and distortion of life energy itself. In a sense, this distortion can act like a micro-organism - it self-replicates and turns the host into a means of creating more of itself - but it is absolutely not biological in origin. It's the opposite. It certainly affects biology in a drastic way, but its origin is magical and its vector is life energy and mana.
Ner'zhul did not conjure a virus out of nowhere, nor did he do what Lady Yamamura Sadako does in that one magic lantern performance and psychically trigger a body to create a virus. A virus would be much, MUCH less unnerving than reality. Ner'zhul's psychic influence was ridiculous, and it was really damned easy for him to reach out with his awareness, watch the flow of life-energy and mana within people until he was absolutely familiar with it...and then warp this flow to the point of breaking. The first victims died instantly, but because of the nature of the distortion in their energy, they immediately got back up. That was the beginning of the Scourge. Ner'zhul tweaked the Plague over time to make it as effective and unnerving as possible, and the end result is what we now call the Plague of Undeath.
The way grain and water work as a vector for this thing has to do with how the Cauldrons work as well. How's that? Well! Earth and water energy are stable; they hold things for a long time. Transmitting the plague through grain works like this: corrupt the energy of the earth (this is what the Cauldrons do; they take advantage of ley lines and telluric currents to spread the corruption). Sow your seeds. Make sure the energy of the soil stays corrupt while the plants grow to maturity. They will then contain the corruption themselves, and though it will fade with time, its nature being of earth means this fading takes a long, long time. This is why Stratholme fell so hard and so fast - the shipment arrived ahead of schedule. The fading is why the 'zombie infestation' wasn't worse than it was - that shipment was delayed. The corruption can be reversed and cleansed by paladins and priests of the Light if it's caught soon enough; even when it wasn't, the plagues of Orgrimmar and Stormwind were much, much weaker than the one that took Stratholme, and so the citizens who became semi-undead didn't remain undead.
Water as a vector works similarly, but in that case you cannot ship it. The corruption will get rattled out of the water as it moves! Solution: put your Cauldron by a river. Watch the fun start up downstream.
--I was going to talk about how those work, wasn't I? They DO, and very well, but the mechanics of them can get a bit weird. Is the stuff inside toxic? You bet your pants, but not in the way you might think. It's not poisonous like, say, roots of a plant can be, or a spider bite, or the scales on a butterfly's wings. That would be too ordinary and too nice. Those sorts of poisons are common additives on some of the cauldrons, but the majority of what's inside them is closer to ectoplasm than anything else. They're spiritual toxins. Some people (looking at you, Noth, you loud jackass) liked adding a whack of biological poisons as well, in order to weaken the defenses of the plague's intended targets. Unfortunately, while this CAN work, it also kills all the plant life in the surrounding area and puts the smack down on your ability to use the local plant life to spread ANYTHING. It also makes the cauldron VERY OBVIOUS, since boiling poison has a very disagreeable smell. So do the cauldrons by themselves but you have to get up close and personal to notice and if you're that close, you're probably already dead. At any rate, if you look into one of the cauldrons (you'd be crazy to do so from up close unless you're already dead), what you'll see is a lot of green what-the-hell-is-that, which seems to be unable to decide whether it's solid, liquid or vaporous. And under that?
Bones. Yes, you heard me. Bones (and sometimes flesh, yeugh) of fallen Scourge agents. While you could probably pick up the femur of a downed skeletal warrior type without much danger to you, tossing it into the cauldron flicks the switch on the energy corruption. It goes from dormant to active in zero seconds flat, and the solution in the cauldrons 'insulates' the warping, preventing it from decaying or settling into dormancy again. What the Prof was flinging around at Icecrown was his effort at improving on Noth's method. What he got out of his research was an amaaaazing lime green self-contained super-vector: ectoplasmic plague toxin plus biological poison plus powdered bone. I...I won't lie, viewers, I found it really gross. Bit I digress. Adding more bones, whether they're from the Scourge or otherwise, increases the effectiveness of the cauldrons.
I know my methods really weren't much better but they weren't as malodorous. What I did - how I worked - was similar to the way the original plague did. My Unholy skills deal with that kind of discord, with agitation, with interrupted and warped energy flow. That's why I have several anti-magic tricks. Nowhere near as many as Koltira, but still. What I'm doing isn't the equivalent of sneezing on somebody. Like I said, it's not that simple and not that nice. Unholy discipline gets you doing what Ner'zhul did. You learn to sense the flow of mana and life energy within a person, or the ground. You get to know it like the back of your hand - and then you reach out and twist it out of line beyond all recognition. Unholy energy is in and of itself discordant, which is why Light hurts me so bloody badly when someone who really knows how to swing it brings it down on my head. Light is stability; when I'm using that magic, I'm imbalance. That's how those weird illnesses work. They're Unholy plus another thing. Frost Fever is obvious - unholy/ice. The ice is the carrier and the Unholy element means someone's going to be very damn cold for a very damn long time after the visible ice magic is gone. hat one, I am really good with for obvious reasons. Blood Plague's Shadow/Unholy. Add fire to that and it gets worse. And then there's the Ebon PLague, with which someone who's an expert like Koltira can start doing unkind things to your mana flow too. We don't have germs. What we do have is an ability to mess with the rhythm of your mana and life-energy flow for a given amount of time. How much I can do for how long depends on how long I'm around and on how much of my energy I'm putting into what I'm doing.
If that wasn't bad enough, I get backup in the form of (a) summoned perambulating skeletons (if I'm on hallowed ground, this won't work and trying it hurts me a lot) and (b) familiars. The large, cranky gargoyle's the obvious one, and they show up to expert-types; the ones I use more often are the low-level subtle kind, which Aerionn calls 'evil little moths'. The technical term for them is the Unholy Blight. But...they really do look like very small glowing moths, about the colour of a bruise. They summon themselves when they are attracted to large amounts of discordant energy, so they're attracted to the people I've messed with. They eat energy, too - ANY energy. This means that someone who's already ill from what I've done gets more so as these guys munch up the life energy that would normally be pouring into the body's defenses. It also means you canNOT get rid of them or the illnesses with healing magic for a while. They eat that too - and then they leave when they're not hungry any more. A full-out Unholy knight gets huge ones of these and many MANY more of them. (I - um. I...I think the bugs are kind of cute? I mean, when they're not munching up people's vital energy. I've used them as a sort of reconnaissance thing, and to distract Keleseth too - I don't know if I'm SUPPOSED to, but I can, and I have.)
This distorting's where stuff like the Desecration/Death and Decay area of effect business works. Yes, I'm disrupting the telluric currents temporarily. It's nowhere near the level of the damage the cauldrons can do, though, and a paladin can undo it with consecration. Yes, I have done silly things like go back and forth with a paladin this way. Usually while posing melodramatically.
The anti-magic and mana-tampering effects are a little less - disturbing to the layperson, I guess? I'm still messing with energy flow, but in this case, I'm disrupting the mana composing a spell. This and Dark Simulacrum (spelljacking!) are very similar to what I pulled as a Spellbreaker, so needless to say I picked those up speedily.
Uh. What else...? I'm not sure what else to talk about, and now Koltira's going to roll his eyes at me again. -_Wait, no, I remember now. I talked about the mistaken hypothesis on the one dictionary page there. They think the plague's fungal, and I can see why, but they're not exactly thinking with portals, as it were. Generally, if it has anything to do with the Scourge, you want to assume the presence of the most bent or disturbing factor you can think of. In this case, the Plaguewood is full of mushrooms because mushrooms grow on dead or decaying matter. Ground affected by the Plague for a prolonged period of time will inevitably become toadstool heaven. The dictionary's right about the mushrooms being potential vectors, since they've grown out of corrupt matter. That would also be why you get mushrooms on wildlife. So, in conclusion, DON'T EAT THE MUSHROOM. ...I'm particularly ridiculous tonight, for some reason.
So, in conclusion, Unholy is a bizarre power, the Plague is much creepier than many people imagine, Noth is a jackass, I am very glad the Lich King business is over, and I'm going to go distract Keleseth again now.
-Ishandarr Evenbrooke (the beanpole formerly known as Ebonrooke)
If anyone wants to know more about anything, feel free to demand what I was smoking that I left so much out.
