TYI 9: character hometowns

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TYI 9: character hometowns

July 14, 2011 by kamaliaetalia

I must admit that I haven’t been as diligent as others on my blogroll about providing responses to Saz’s delightful Through Your Interface set of prompts because I’ve filed it away as a source of inspiration for those times when I want to make a post, but don’t have anything in particular that I want to talk about. Because I usually do have something to talk about, the moments when I need a filler post tend to be rather few and far between — so I probably shouldn’t entirely relegate TYI to that role.

When I do make TYI posts, they’ll be on whatever topic tickles my fancy at the time. I’m keeping track of the ones I have and haven’t done yet on my “About” page.

There’s a little something for everyone in Saz’s topics, and this one invokes a bit of RP-inclined imagination:

9. Your Character’s Hometown
We all have the same starting zones where we begin our various quests, but where does your character actually hail from?

My characters have varying degrees of story development. Most of them don’t have enough story for me to have thought about their hometowns. For others, I have an idea of the general region they come from, but I’m not quite ready to pin them down to a specific location yet. Only a few characters have sufficiently well-developed backstories that I can go somewhere in Azeroth and say “this place, here, is where she’s from.”

Kivrinne, Kymberlea, and Kimorene all originally hail from a little farming community in western Tirisfal Glades that was one of the first to succumb to the Plague after the arrival of contaminated grain shipments from Andorhal.
When they lived there, that town probably looked a lot like Old Southshore or Old Tarren Mill.

Now, it is called Deathknell.

Only Kivrinne was actually there when the Plague struck; Kymberlea was an apprentice in Gilneas City, and Kimorene was visiting her grandchildren in Southshore.
My original story concept for Kimorene had her coming to the Orphanage in Stormwind as an 11 or 12 year-old after the Orcs destroyed her parents’ village in the Redridge Mountains during the First War, marrying a young returned soldier after the Second War, and settling down on a farm in Westfall for a hardworking, but relatively pleasant, life — until the drought came, and the Defias…. I abandoned that idea when I decided to work her into Kymberlea’s story as a supporting character.

Kregga spent the happiest days of her youth sparring with her age-mates at the Grimtotem camp in Greatwood Vale.

The Tauren of other tribes preferred to camp at Aparaje down in the valley or further into the mountains at Sun Rock Retreat. Kregga and her Grimtotem cohorts had (mostly) friendly competitions with the youngsters of the other tribes, so she was horrified to learn, after she returned from Acherus, of the Grimtotem attack upon Camp Aparaje.
Kregga was in Thunder Bluff during Magatha’s surprise attack. When Baine offered amnesty to any Grimtotem who were willing to forsake that tribe and openly swear allegiance to him and the Horde, Kregga was among the first to step forward.

I have toyed with the idea of making Camp Taurajo the hometown of Kamalia and her family — the place they were most happy to return to during the nomadic migrations of their tribe, and the place where her parents settled down after the establishment of Thunder Bluff.

I’m reluctant to declare it as fact, however, until I’ve played through the Southern Barrens and had a chance to think about how what happened there may or may not fit into the stories I might want to tell about Kamalia’s family.