The Great Expedition

One life. One road. One Company.

The Great Expedition is a complete, self-contained Hardcore guild-found challenge for WoW Classic Era Hardcore realms. Your guild installs ONE addon and receives the entire ruleset and every quality-of-life tool the journey needs — a self-reliant fellowship, a gold-free economy, survival immersion, and a fair-play watchman, all in one unified pack.

The heart of it is simple: play the game as it first was — without the addons that make it braindead-easy or play it for you.

Choose your path — three modes

At your very first login you choose a mode. It is locked to that character forever, so choose the road you mean to walk:

True Challenge — no other addons at all. Only The Great Expedition may run. The purest test of skill, memory and nerve.
Hard — quality-of-life addons are allowed, but NOT the ones that play the game for you: no questing guides (Questie, RestedXP, Guidelime…), no automation or "brain-off" tools (WeakAuras, TradeSkillMaster, DBM, GatherMate…), and no damage or threat meters.
Easy — all addons allowed, but you walk as an outsider — no kin trade, grouping or mail with the Company — until you reach level 60, when you are welcomed as kin.

Any addon your mode forbids is automatically turned off and the UI reloaded — True mode disables every non-Blizzard addon but this one; Hard mode disables only the banned list below; Easy disables nothing. Your chosen mode is shown to your guild in the status roster.

Hard mode — the banned list (matched by addon name; this list will grow over time):

Questing / levelling guides: Questie, RestedXP (RXPGuides), Guidelime, Zygor, and other levelling routers.
Gathering / node maps: GatherMate & GatherMate2, Routes, gathering bots.
Automation & "brain-off" tools: WeakAuras, TradeSkillMaster (TSM), Deadly Boss Mods (DBM), BigWigs and other boss mods, GTFO, rotation helpers (Hekili, clcret).
Damage & threat meters: Details, Recount, Skada, Omen, ThreatClassic, TinyThreat, KTM.

Everything else — bags, action bars, unit frames, map and quality-of-life tweaks, roleplay addons — is allowed in Hard mode. (True mode allows nothing but this addon; Easy mode allows everything.)

The Charter (the rules you swear to)

After you choose your path you meet the Oath — the Charter of the Company, written as an adventure tale. Accept it, and the Expedition begins:

One Life, One Road — death is final. Every Tribute, achievement and record dies with you and can never be inherited by a reroll, even one with the same name (a hidden per-character seal makes sure of it).
The Law of Kin — no Auction House. Mail, trade and (before level 60) grouping only with your guild and its sworn partner guilds. Outsider mail is returned, outsider trades cancelled, outsider invites declined. At 60, the world opens.
Honest Spoils — the addon keeps a provenance ledger of how every item entered your bags: looted, crafted, mailed or traded — and by whom.
The Unbroken Vigil — the addon must run whenever you play. Switch it off and keep playing, and after ~25 seconds of unwatched play the run is forfeit; a pre-existing character the addon never watched fails too. You cannot quietly turn the watchman off to buy from the AH or lean on a forbidden tool.
The Wayfarer's road — Satiety, Hydration, Vigor, Resolve and Strain track your survival (never your combat power). Exhaustion makes hunger and thirst bite harder; a steady spirit slows the decline. In True mode only, letting Satiety or Hydration sit at zero for more than 5 minutes forfeits the run.

Every rule is explained in plain language — what it demands and why — in the in-game Codex, alongside a full guide to the addon and the credits.

What happens when you fail

If you break the Charter, the run is over: all Expedition progress is void, a permanent on-screen banner marks you, and the Company is notified in guild chat. You are then expected to leave the guild and roll a fresh character to begin again. The addon no longer removes you automatically — that last step is yours to take honourably.

The Exchange — a gold-free guild economy

The Company runs its own auction house on GM-appointed bank-alt stewards (appointed by name, verified against the guild roster, and removable by the GM — no one can appoint themselves):

Earn Tributes by deeds (1 achievement point = 1 Tribute) and by consigning your finds — you are paid only when a companion actually buys them.
A Blizzard-style browser with search, rarity and category filters, quality-coloured items and live bids, strictly validated against your balance.
The Reckoning settles auctions at a random hour — never sooner than 24 hours after posting. The dead cast no bids: if the top bidder falls, the highest living bid wins.
Winnings arrive by C.O.D. courier (the item's vendor value in gold), sustaining the Vault. Stewards list items by simple drag-and-drop — the provenance ledger auto-fills the seller.
The Vault is per guild: each of your characters sees only its own guild's Exchange.

Tribute-keeping is tamper-proof by design. The Guild Master is the ledger-keeper — he closes the lots (the Reckoning) and sorts the Tributes; the stewards only hold and deliver goods. Your balance is never a number you can edit: it is recomputed from source — your verified achievement points (checked against the guild-synced achievement record, not what your client claims) plus what you've sold minus what you've bought. The GM reconciles the whole Vault so every Tribute in circulation equals what was minted minus the sale tithe, and any point-claim mismatch is flagged. Editing your SavedVariables does nothing — the balance self-corrects on the next sync and reload.

Everything else in the pack (one unified look)

Warden fair-play monitor & guild pass/fail roster · Pulse uptime vigil · Covenant Law-of-Kin enforcement & partner guilds · Vigil death alert, playtime, grief protection, epic-drop announcements · Bulwark low-HP/mana & crowd-control alerts · Omen dangerous-NPC warnings · Chronicle guild death feed & world-map death markers · Scout rare sightings with pins · Wayfinder opt-in guild positions on the map · Watchtower world buffs, layers & dungeon lockouts · Almanac guild calendar (server time, with sign-ups & world events) · Laurels achievements with live progress & guild compare · Appraisal Gear Rating & talents on tooltips · Curriculum trainer planner · Pathway attunement chains · Canvas movable frames, coords, junk/repair reminder · Insight extended character stats · Codex the rules book & Oath · Wayfarer survival systems with consumable Tolerance · Herald hardcore-tuned nameplates with your own debuff timers · Cadence weapon swing timer with the five-second-rule & Auto-Shot aim window · Fanfare two-zone floating combat text.

Everything is configurable from one control panel (/tge), every frame is movable and lockable, all in one royal-gold style under the Compass Crest.

Install

Extract TheGreatExpedition into World of Warcraft/_classic_era_/Interface/AddOns/ and log in. Type /tge. Roll a fresh character — the Vigil covers a whole life, so the challenge begins at creation.

Founding a guild — owner characters

To create a guild you need gold, a tabard and a first bank alt — things the rules would otherwise forbid. So a founder may dedicate an owner character whose name starts with Gotge (Guild Owner, The Great Expedition) — for example Gotgeali or Gotgetest. These characters are exempt from every rule — no Vigil, no addon limits, no Law of Kin — purely so you can gather the gold, buy the tabard, found the guild and set up the first bank-alt's bags. They are not part of the challenge and earn nothing; once the Company stands, your real run begins on a fresh character.

Playing solo

You don't need a guild to play — a fresh character can run the Expedition solo forever, and being guildless never fails you. The only things that end a run are the same for everyone: switching the addon off, running an addon your mode forbids, or dying. Be aware: while you are guildless the Law of Kin treats everyone as an outsider, so the addon will block trades, return mail from other players, and (before level 60) decline group invites until you join a guild.

Coming soon

A Discord server for the community is on the way.
We are looking into whitelisting a small set of pure roleplay addons (cosmetic/RP only — nothing that helps you play) so they can run in the stricter modes without breaking the challenge.

The goal never changes: the challenge is to play the game as it first was, without all the addons that make it ultra-easy, braindead, or play it for you.

Fair play & license

Readable, unobfuscated code that only informs, warns and organizes — it never automates gameplay. All Rights Reserved © 2026 Daanoobz & Kravaluk; this addon may not be forked, modified or used as a base. Bundled libraries (HereBeDragons — BSD, LibStub, CallbackHandler) keep their own licenses. Built with gratitude on ideas from the addon community — full credits in the in-game Codex.

Set your seal, traveler. The Expedition awaits.