Filed under: Fan stuff

I have to confess: Scholomance and its spiritual successor Karazhan are still my favorite dungeons in the game. I must just have a thing about creepy castles full of necromancers, undead, and ghosts. Which would also explain why I like Bethesda's Skyrim so much, because everywhere you turn there are necromancers and their undead servants, just waiting for you to put them out of their lifeless misery.

So I can't even begin to explain how pleased I am to see that an intrepid modder has created a version of Scholomance within the world of Skyrim using the Skyrim Creation Kit. Mod-maker AquariusLAD says he tried to stay as close to the original as possible, and, judging by these screenshots, it really looks like he's succeeded. To enjoy Skyrim's version Scholomance, you need to be playing on the PC (sorry, console gamers!), where you download the mod file, unzip it, and drop it in the /data/ folder in your Skyrim directory. Once it's installed, you should find the entrance to Scholomance just inside the Markarth Emporium.

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We've seen plenty of cool WoW screenshots in our day, but these bird's eye view images of Dalaran, Kun-Lai Summit (above), Lordaeron, Stormwind and most recently Orgrimmar still caught our eye. To capture these stellar views, Masserah of Arthas takes anywhere from 65 to 95 screenshots (at 1366 x 768 resolution on ultra settings), which he stitches together using the free app Hugin. This is the time-consuming part of the process, as Hugin can take two or three hours to piece a large scene together. Once Hugin has done its thing, Masserah manipulates the scene to give the fisheye effect and then goes into Photoshop to smooth out imperfections and correct colors.

These aren't the first WoW panoramas Masserah has made -- he has a gallery of panoramas, tilt-shifts, and other cool shots dating back to 2006. "I tend to come and go, and do these in waves," Masserah says. "I'm always on the lookout for the next scene, but I rarely get off my butt to do so."

So why take WoW screenshots in the first place? "I'm from Ireland, and more often than not the weather didn't cooperate with my photography," Masserah tells us. "I realized one day that I spent hour upon hour staring at a virtual world through a camera, and just started snapping scenes from around Azeroth. The small mercy is that a screenshot is about one-eighteenth the size of a professional photograph, and loads and processes much faster."

And, while we aren't professional photographers ourselves, we definitely approve of these results.

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Though we've seen a lot of fan art in our time, the retro charm of Josh Atack's Azerothian travel posters struck us. So far there are two: one for Undercity and one for Thunder Bluff, both styled after vintage rail posters. It's hard to say which of the two we like better, but fortunately we don't have to decide, because they're both for sale on his society6 page. So if you're looking to decorate your office -- or your desktop -- with something that expresses your love of WoW without being too overt about it, Josh's art may be just the thing.

And if you're not fond of Undercity or Thunder Bluff? Josh plans to keep making these as long as he's having fun with them and he's aiming to get all the faction capitals and Dalaran done, plus a few personal favorites like Zangarmarsh and Winterspring.

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Two Bosses Enter ... but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW.com's series of fantasy death matches. Welcome to the quarter-finals of the Original Five-Man Wrath of the Lich King season. Grab a seat, and let's get ready to rumble!

When the magical energies had died down, it was indeed Loken who remained standing in last week's Thunderdome matchup against Xevozz. The Dark Titan fought for every vote, claiming his victory with 52% spectator approval. We'll review how things went down after the break, plus you'll get a chance to vote in the last quarter-finals match of the season: Ymiron versus Krik'thir.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls ... Dyin' time's here.

It came from the Blog is holding its second Battleground Bonanza today:

• When: Saturday, January 16th, 4:30pm EST (1:30pm PST, 2:30pm Server time)
• Where: The Hall of the Brave (where the Battlemasters are), Orgrimmar, Zangarmarsh U.S.
• Who: Any level 10 or above Horde character.
• How: Ask any It came from the Blog Lurker or Robinator for a guild invite.
• What: Battleground premades

We will be forming groups and hitting as many level/group-size appropriate BGs as we can for an hour or so. If you can't make it to the Hall of the Brave in time for the event, you will miss out on the first screenshot, but will still be able to participate. We will also be doing some BG related quests, so there will be some traveling for certain level ranges.

If you are unfamiliar with Battleground play, please do some homework so that it will be more fun for both you and your teammates. Also, if you have any questions about the WoW.com guild, please read our FAQ.

Come join the fun!

We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.

• Youtube superstar MrVoletron has released another remix, which you can see embedded above or over on his channel. Be warned, the beginning of this one is a little ear-shattering. Turn your volume down.
• Here's yet another review of the World of Warcraft magazine, this time from Azure Shadows.
• Empowered Fire compares Icecrown Citadel trinkets for mages.
• Shades of Grey connects a few lore dots and speculates on what the Cataclysm may bring. Is it just the beginning?
• With the introduction of the dungeon finder, could that design be used to improve queueing for battlegrounds? Cynwise thinks so.

Two Bosses Enter ... but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW.com's series of fantasy death matches. Welcome to the quarter-finals of the Original Five-Man Wrath of the Lich King season. Grab a seat, and let's get ready to rumble!

In a barrage of wings, Ley-Guardian Eregos confronted Skadi the Ruthless in the skies over the Thunderdome last week. Let's just say it was no party for Mr. Skadi. Eregos took the match with a stinging 75.3% of the spectator vote, sending the hapless Frost Vrykul plummeting from the match. We'll get a view of the beat-down after the break, plus we'll set up this week's battle between Loken and Xevozz.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls ... Dyin' time's here.

The Classifieds brings you weekly updates on guild recruiting, rankings, splits and merges, progression and more. Have guild news or a Random Act of Uberness to share? E-mail The Classifieds.

Welcome to our first installment of The Classifieds, an evolution of our former Guildwatch feature. As more and more players move into endgame raiding, we thought it fitting that our guild news should evolve, too. The Classifieds gives you more of the news you can use: who's progressing, who's marking milestones, who's recruiting. But it's not only about guilds. Because we're all down there in the trenches of Dungeon Finder groups at every opportunity, The Classifieds lets you send a shout-out to that player who made your last PUG a thing of real beauty (whether through pure technical finesse or a winning attitude). And if you're curious about how WoW intersects with the world at large, we'll be passing along links to academic research studies seeking participants, as well.

Editor's Note: One thing you might notice missing in Guildwatch's new incarnation is the "Drama" section. In the interest of fostering community growth and positive interaction, we're checking the drama and negativity at the door.

Let's open the Classifieds!

World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself; contact our tips line (attention: World of WarCrafts) with your not-for-profit, WoW-inspired creations.

New from the Department of Old News (wait ... wut?): We're still nuts about papercrafting. While we've spotlighted papercraft before on the site, we haven't featured it specifically on World of WarCrafts. Never let it be said that World of WarCrafts left a creative stone unturned!

Papercrafting is not the same thing as origami, which is the Japanese art of folding paper into intricate representations, preferably without cutting or glue. Papercrafting, in contrast, is the process of creating scale models from heavy, pre-printed paper or stock. Craftsy types download patterns rated by difficulty from sites such as World of Warcrafts Unofficial Papercrafts. Site manager Pascal was profiled last year by the Blizzard's official European WoW community site. We talked to Pascal recently for a fresh spin on WoW papercrafting.

Some of the coolest contests happen in the EU, and unfortunately, sometimes completely under our radar. World of Warcraft in Europe recently announced the winners of a contest held between November 23 and December 6, 2009 (that's a period of two weeks, so even the folks in Europe might've missed out on it) which asked folks to design their own World of Warcraft trading card. We told you the coolest contests happen in the EU.

Winners were announced last December 18, 2009, with Blizzard apparently selecting the best entries according to language. Five winners were selected, with J. Hoermandinger winning the top prize for English submissions with the Boo'Yah "Brickhead" card; D. Klenk was the German winner with Shilanya; S. Mariez won the French top prize with Perséphia Tristombe; A. Fuentes Garcia was the Spanish winner with Nairies; and A. Kirsanova won the Russian prize with a thankfully nameless but awesome-looking card (Cyrillic would be a little troublesome to jot down here).

The contest awarded a veritable Upper Deck treasure trove that included a Death Knight deluxe starter kit, a World of Warcraft miniatures game starter kit and booster pack, and the ScourgeWar epic collection which has the Tiny loot card. The loot card enables Horde characters to mount a miniature raptor and Alliance characters to ride a miniature pony to move at unmounted speed. Congratulations to the all the winners! For those of you who missed out on the fun, you can always make your own TCG cards by downloading their Horde or Alliance templates. Enjoy!

It's a new year and that means another opportunity to play oracle and figure out what Blizzard's plans are for 2010. BlizzPlanet has gone ahead and tossed out some of their ideas on what will happen for BlizzCon this year, laying out their predictions and even speculating on the event date. As you might know, there was a bit of confusion stemming from supposed leaked information that pointed to BlizzCon 2010 happening in Las Vegas in July. That didn't go down so well with Blizzard, and the Las Vegas convention center later retracted its statements.

BlizzPlanet points out, quite logically, that Blizzard probably wasn't too thrilled with that. Even if they had planned to do it in Las Vegas, that kind of public relations misstep is a deal breaker. Besides, Eldorian from BlizzPlanet applies simple, sound logic to his sleuthing work and explains that examining the Anaheim Convention Center's Calendar of Events reveals an odd, blank date on the weekend of August 20-21, yet almost all the weekends of the venue are already booked. With Blizzard being the secretive bunch that they are, he figures those blank dates actually correspond with this year's BlizzCon event. It's a pretty cool theory. Read the rest of their predictions as well as a few of our own guesses after the jump.

When the World of Warcraft Anniversary mini-site was unveiled last November, one of its features was a photo-mosaic dubbed the Battlecry which would unlock little art goodies each time a certain milestone was reached. The Battlecry mosaic called for player submissions to submit their pictures with a logo of their favored faction, with a modest goal of 20,000 player-submitted pictures in order to reveal the final artwork created specially for the event.

It's come along rather smoothly, and some really cool player pictures have been submitted, with the seeming abundance of Horde-aligned pictures prompting us to ask where the Alliance pride was. But what really surprises me is how long the whole project is taking. When the site was launched, one of the first questions that actually ran through my head was how long it would take to fill up the whole mosaic. With over ten million active players, you'd think getting to 20,000 would be easy. Out of ten million, that's like a drop in a bucket. But after almost two months of the site being active, we're still only at 32% of the goal. Why?

The first of Tokyopop's class-themed manga hit the shelves early in December. World of Warcraft: Death Knight written by Dan Jolley and illustrated by Rocio Zucchi, the manga is a self-contained 166-page story detailing the life of a notable Death Knight, Thassarian, the first of the Lich King's rune-wielding champions to join the Alliance. I'm a huge fan of Tokyopop's comics made for the Warcraft universe and think that the Warcraft Legends series contain some of the best stories told about the Blizzard franchise.

The Death Knight manga kicks off a new direction in Tokyopop's Warcraft manga series, taking a break from short story compilations and focusing on a lore character representative of a specific class. The story of Thassarian, as previewed in October last year, explores the World of Warcraft in-depth through a biographical story that follows the hero's origins as a soldier of Lordaeron who falls and is raised as one of Arthas' minions. To make things simple, I'll give my thoughts on the book right before the break and explain it afterward -- it's a wonderful, well-written and beautifully illustrated comic that I highly recommend to any fan of Warcraft comics. It's good. Now that we've got that out of the way, let's dive into the meat of the manga after the break.

World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself; contact our tips line (attention: World of WarCrafts) with your not-for-profit, WoW-inspired creations.

Admit it: You thought murlocs were spineless little critters, didn't you? Take a peek inside our gallery, below, and you'll see that even this sweet little fellow boasts his share of backbone -- literally. World of WarCrafts visited with Bradley Barger (aka Monmanteau of US Stormreaver), one of the winners of this year's WoW Holiday Dessert Contest, for a taste of the inspiration behind his winning creation. What we discovered beneath this little guy's skin (a backbone of steel!) was more spine than we ever expected from a murloc.

The creation is based around a metal armature, which Bradley covered with cereal-based cake and butter cream, then finished with fondant for a smooth texture. The spines are made from colored sugar, melted and cut to shape. The pond water is fashioned from a high-temperature molten sugar mixture, poured it into a frame of fondant.



Continue past the break for an interview with Bradley on how he cooked up this sweet success.

Reader comments -- ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week.

Think you've got what it takes to make it through another year in the company of the denizens of [1.Local]? Work your way through the comments on these recent favorite posts at WoW.com -- not only the comments listed here from the "Best of" roundups, but the comments on the original posts, too -- and we'll talk.

Cataclysm, Cataclysm, Cataclysm July 2009 was one long paroxysm about Cataclysm. dextros: I was sad to see the Worgen pets vanish; for a time, every hunter in our raid group had one. =D Sargenus: Ahh. The masks! I remember getting into a fight with a friend who apparently -knew- Goblins and Worgen would NEVER be a playable race and told me to stop dreaming. I guess you can tell, I mock him every day after BlizzCon. :D