Zone lore on the world map, for WoW Classic Era.

Open the map and the lore of the zone you're looking at appears beside it. Click a named subzone and you get that place's story instead. Optionally, it's read aloud.

Beta

The lore text is built by reading warcraft.wiki.gg and trimming each article down automatically. Mostly that produces something good, but some entries run long, some are thinner than the place deserves, and a few are cut at an awkward point. The filter that strips post-vanilla content is careful but not perfect. Hand-written replacements are gradually going in for the worst of them.

What it does

World map panel — the current zone's lore beside the map. Dock it left or right, resize it, set the font size.
Subzone lore — click any named area on the map to read about it.
Hover preview — point at a subzone for the first lines in a tooltip, without disturbing the panel.
Lore window — browse zones without opening the map, from the minimap button or /zl window.
Narration — a play button beside the lore, with floating pause/skip/stop controls.
Autoplay — walking into an area you've never discovered narrates it once, tracked per character.

Narration needs a sound pack

The voice audio is a large download, so it ships separately. ZoneLore works fine without one — you read rather than listen — and falls back to a placeholder clip so the controls still behave.

Two packs, same 1353 voicelines, differing only in bitrate:

Pack	Bitrate	Download
ZoneLore Audio	128 kbps	~790 MB
ZoneLore Audio 64	64 kbps mono	~400 MB

Install ZoneLore Audio unless the download is a problem, in which case ZoneLore Audio 64 is half the size and close to transparent for speech. With both installed ZoneLore plays the higher-quality one; /zl audio lists what you have and switches between them.

The voice is in beta

What's in the packs today is a proof of concept. All 1353 lines are recorded, but the voice is being redesigned — better delivery, consistent pronunciation, one pass over the whole script — which means generating every line again. That costs money per line and time to check, so it lands in batches rather than all at once.

If a line reads badly, report it on lore.rusty.one; the re-record follows what comes in. If you'd like it to go faster, supporting the project pays for the generation directly.

Commands

/zl              status for the current zone and subzone
/zl options      open the settings panel
/zl window       open the browsable lore window
/zl panel        toggle the world map panel
/zl hover        toggle the hover preview tooltip
/zl play         read the current lore aloud
/zl voice        toggle narration on or off
/zl audio        list sound packs, or switch between them
/zl autoplay     toggle narrating areas as you discover them
/zl minimap      show or hide the minimap button
/zl help         the full list

Compatibility

Built for Classic Era 1.15.9. Not built for retail or the Anniversary/TBC clients.

ZoneLore and a sound pack work together as long as they share a major version.

Support

The narration isn't free to make — every line costs money to synthesise. If the addon is worth something to you, buy me a coffee; it goes straight into re-recording the voice.

Credits

Zone and subzone lore text is derived from warcraft.wiki.gg and is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, as is the narration generated from it. Thanks to the wiki's contributors — without them this addon is an empty frame.