Lore

A World of Warcraft addon for Horde and Alliance players that guides you through the story quests of vanilla WoW. Skip the "kill 10 boars" filler and follow the tales that matter: the rise of the Burning Blade, Sylvanas's plague, the Defias Brotherhood, the road to Onyxia's lair.

Lore runs on the WoW Forever client and covers vanilla (Classic Era) content only.

What it does

Lore is a leather-bound book with four bookmarks, bound in your faction's colours: red on brown leather for the Horde, blue on navy for the Alliance.

• Current Tale follows the story you're on, picked up from your quest log. Every chapter is listed in order, with Blizzard's quest text, the objective, who gives it and a button to show it on the map.
• Chronicle lists every tale your race and class can do, grouped into three acts by level. Tales that fit your level are highlighted. Click one to read it and see where it starts.
• Journal keeps the tales you've finished, with the date, your level and where you were.
• Settings turns each feature on or off and lists every command.

Around the game world it also:

• Pins where your tale's next chapter starts on the world map and minimap. It never pins what the game already marks.
• Puts a small Lore badge on story quests in an NPC's quest list, and a tag beside the quest window naming the tale and chapter.
• Adds the tale and chapter to a story quest's tooltip in the quest log.
• Says in chat when a tale begins, moves on or ends.

How story quests are chosen

Nobody picks the stories by hand. A build script reads the full quest database and decides, using the same rules for every quest. It runs in five steps, once for each faction, so the Horde and the Alliance each get their own tales.

1. Drop what can't be story. Quests your faction can't do, quests that aren't really in the game, repeatable quests, and profession, holiday, battleground and reputation-grind quests.

2. Score every quest for how much story it carries:

3. Link quests into chains using the game's own requirements (which quest unlocks which). In each group of linked quests, the highest-scoring route becomes a story. Side quests off that route fall away, and a hub that unlocks many unrelated quests splits into separate stories. Filler steps the game forces you to do stay in, because you can't skip them either. When a chain opens with a quest steeped in lore, its follow-up errands from the same quest giver aren't treated as filler: they serve that story.

4. Keep the best. A story's score is its chapters added up, plus a small bonus for length. Up to 16 stories are kept per 10 levels, so long level-60 raid chains can't crowd out the early game. Importance (minor, notable, major) is ranked within each level range.

5. Fill in what's required. Every quest a kept story needs before you can accept one of its chapters is added to it, even filler, so you're never sent to a quest you can't pick up. If another tale already tells that quest, the chapter says which tale to finish first. A tale is only offered to races and classes that can do every one of its chapters.

The result is 110 Horde tales (50 in the open world, 29 leading into dungeons, 6 into raids and 25 class quests) and 116 Alliance tales (55, 29, 5 and 27). Each takes its name from one of its quests, and a few names were adjusted where the rule picked an errand instead of the story.

The rules can't read. A dull quest with dramatic wording can score well, and a quiet but important one can be missed. If a tale is missing, shouldn't be there, or has a poor name, please open an issue.