Karazhan: A primer for Hearthstone’s (fingers crossed) next adventure

Recent leaks hint that Karazhan will be Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft’s next adventure. This story is for the people who don’t really know what that means.

Hearthstone is a digital card game behemoth that makes over $20 million a month. It’s able to keep players engaged because it regularly releases batches of new cards, alternating between expansions and adventures. Expansions add a lot of new cards, while adventures add fewer cards but also give players story-driven, single-player content.

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Besides last summer’s The League of Explorers, Blizzard has based every adventure on a raid from its online role-playing game World of Warcraft (specifically, Naxxramas and Blackrock Mountain). Raids are difficult, long dungeons that require large groups of players to beat. Hearthstone itself is based in the Warcraft universe.

But a lot of Hearthstone players don’t play World of Warcraft, so they don’t really know much about Karazhan. We’re here to help.

The early history of Karazhan

Karazhan is a tower in Deadwind Pass, a small, jagged region in the Eastern Kingdoms continent. A powerful sorceress, Aegwynn, created it. It’s in an area full of magic, and it became a hotbed arcane activity. Medivh, Aegwyn’s son, later came to live in Karazhan. He’s important character in the original Warcraft game and the recent film adaptation, also called Warcraft.

Although tasked as a guardian whose purpose was to stop the Burning Legion (an evil group that conquers world and tries to take over Azeroth, Warcraft’s setting), Medivh became corrupted and helped The Burning Legion invade Azeroth. His former friends and allies later killed him. These events also appeared in the movie.

Medivh would later come back as a mysterious prophet in Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, but Karazhan became abandoned.

Karazhan in World of Warcraft

The tower became a raid instance during The Burning Crusade era, the MMO’s first expansion that released in 2007. Although Medivh was gone, spirits and evil creatures resided in the tower. Inside, players found a lavish setting, complete with a ballroom and opera house.

The area also included some of the game’s most interesting boss encounters. In the opera house, you’d enter a random fight against one of three monsters based on famous stories (either Romeo and Juliet, The Wizard of Oz, or Little Red Riding Hood). You even had a human-sized chess encounter toward the top of tower, where players took over pieces of the board and fought against the Echo of Medivh (a ghostly memory of the sorcerer).

Prince Malchezaar awaited players at the top of the tower. He was a member of the Burning Legion. Despite being the final boss, we don’t really know that much about him.

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How Karazhan could work as an adventure

Even all these years later, a lot of World of Warcraft players look back at Karazhan as one of its best raids. The abandoned, ghost-filled tower stands out, allowing players explore a location famous from previous games. It included memorable encounters, like the opera house fights and the chess event. These could become awesome single-player battles in a Hearthstone adventure.

But Karazhan will have some trouble translating to Hearthstone. Other adventures have at least one character (or, in the case of League of Exploreres, four) talk to players as they go through their battles. For the other adventures based on raids, this was a role the final boss played: Kel’Thuzad for Naxxramas and Nefarian for Blackrock Mountain. Karazhan doesn’t really have a memorable final boss in Prince Malchezaar. Hearthstone’s writers will have to add some personality to the demon if they want to make him a meaningful part of the adventure.

It also stinks that Blizzard probably can’t do much with Karazhan’s most famous occupant, Medivh. The sorcerer is already a character portrait for the Mage class, so it’s unlikely we’ll see him inside the adventure, either in card form or as an opponent. Even the Echo of Medivh, that ghostly version of him that appears during the chess event, already exists in Hearthstone as a card. Of course, Ragnaros was already a card before the raid he appeared, Blackrock Mountain, released. So we could still Echo of Medivh. It just seems a little weird that Blizzard would release that card before doing a Karazhan expansion.

Even considering all of that, Karazhan is such a great raid and setting that it should make for fantastic adventure. Blizzard will just have to use a little creativity to translate it to Hearthstone.

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