World of Warcraft

Between Duskwood and the Swamp of Sorrows lies the dry, desolate region of Deadwind Pass, where jagged, brooding spires of granite loom over petrified, lifeless forests. As its name suggests, it is a land devoid of life. Cast your gaze to the bottom of Deadwind Ravine, which runs north-to-south through this unpleasant land, and you will see a shallow, grey river. This travels to the base of an ornate, gothic tower in the southern reaches of the Pass. Above the portcullised entrance to this grand stone edifice, great raven statues look down upon all who would enter. This is the Tower of Karazhan, formerly the seat of the Last Guardian, Medivh.

But Karazhan is more than a mere building. Formerly, all the ley lines traversing Azeroth converged beneath Karazhan, creating the most magnificently magical dwelling on the planet. Even today, long after Medivh’s death, Karazhan remains haunted by shards of the past; innumerable spirits, phantoms, and spectres, most of whom don’t realise they’re dead, wander the remains of this once-palatial tower amid curtains of cobwebs and dancing shadows, unable to escape.

Karazhan is one of my favourite raids – no, one of my favourite locations, full stop – in World of Warcraft. It is a vast, sprawling feast of exploration and intrigue, magic and enchantment. In fact, there is so much to say about Karazhan that it’s going to take more than one post to cover everything that I want to. I won’t be including a complete, in-depth history of the tower (readers seeking that should consult World of Warcraft: Chronicles Volume 2, the novel The Last Guardian, or the Warcraft Wiki), but I will provide some background on Karazhan and its most famous inhabitant.

Karazhan’s story begins with an explosion that long ago carved out Deadwind Pass and weakened the fabric of reality in the region. A powerful magical nexus was created, atop which a grand tower was built in secret by Aegwynn, the Guardian of Tirisfal. The tower acted both as a refuge from the Council of Tirisfal, where she could work in peace, and also as a conduit for the potent ley lines in the region, through which Aegwynn could siphon power as needed. However, Aegwynn was later forced to abandon the tower when the Tirisgarde – an order of magi formed by the Council of Tirisfal to essentially find Aegwynn and bring her back to the magical city of Dalaran – discovered its location.

The Council of Tirisfal loathed Aegwynn. It had given her the power of the Guardian, but she had refused to return it; instead, she passed it to her unborn son, Medivh, who grew up with his father. When Medivh reached adulthood, he was drawn to Karazhan by unsettling dreams and became its new master. For a while, he invited nobles from the surrounding regions to the tower for lavish banquets, galas, and other exclusive high-society events.

But unbeknownst to everyone, Medivh was becoming increasingly corrupted and twisted by the dark spirit of Sargeras, creator of the demonic Burning Legion, that resided within him. By this point, Medivh had already made contact with the orcs of Draenor, and shortly afterwards, he called upon the full might of his Guardian energies to rip open a gateway between the two worlds, aided by the orc warlock Gul’dan. And so the famous Dark Portal, which allowed the orcs to enter and invade Azeroth, was created.

The sheer scale of magical power required to open the Dark Portal made the event impossible to hide. Aegwynn set out to investigate the source and recognised that a Guardian’s magic had been used to make it possible. She knew that only one person on Azeroth was capable of using this power in such a way: her son, Medivh. Concluding that Medivh had somehow allied himself with the Burning Legion, she returned to Karazhan to confront him.

The tower was crowded, filled with nobles who were expecting another exciting gala. Aegwynn hoped she could convince Medivh to give up his power peacefully, but it was not to be. The creature she fought that day was not Medivh, but Sargeras. The Lord of the Burning Legion seized complete control of the Guardian’s mind, suppressing his thoughts and memories and controlling his every action. Sargeras revealed to Aegwynn that he had transferred a portion of his spirit into her when they’d fought long ago in Northrend, and he had remained hidden with her until she gave birth to a son. Then he transferred himself to Medivh.

Aegwynn decided she would defeat Sargeras here and now, even if it meant striking down her own son. The opening blows of the fight shook the tower to its foundations. The would-be revellers tried to flee. The Legion’s ruler might have had the full weight of a Guardian’s power under his control, but Aegwynn had centuries of experience. As the great duel raged through the tower, Aegwynn slowly gained the upper hand. In his desperation, Sargeras reached out to power one final assault – he ripped the life out of hundreds of humans who were fleeing Karazhan and pushed Medivh to destroy Aegwynn once and for all. A small part of the Guardian’s mind resisted the command. His power, brimming with the lifeforce of hundreds of people, instead banished Aegwynn from Karazhan and hurled her across the world. Medivh didn’t know where he had sent her, but he could not sense her presence anywhere on Azeroth.

With the battle over, confusion rippled through Medivh’s mind. At the moment of Aegwynn’s defeat, Sargeras had retreated into the depths of the Guardian’s soul. Medivh had no memory of the demon lord controlling him, but he knew he had clashed with his mother. He feared that he had lost control of his power again, as he had many years ago when he had killed his own father. Except, this time, as far as he was concerned, he had slaughtered some of the most important nobles in the kingdom of Stormwind. In the aftermath of the battle, Karazhan grew darker, and the spirits of the slain humans would wander its halls and grounds for years to come.

As told in The Last Guardian, Medivh eventually took on an apprentice, Khadgar, who came to reside in Karazhan with him. By this point, the tower languished under a morbid shadow, and Medivh was subject to frightening mood swings. Worse, the tower appeared to be cursed in some way. As a result of the region’s weakened reality, many strange and disturbing visions lurked within the tower, and Khadgar often caught glimpses of wandering spirits and images of the past, present, and even future.

Soon, an unexpected guest arrived at the tower: the half-orc Garona. Khadgar immediately regarded her as an enemy, but Medivh greeted her warmly and insisted that Khadgar treat her with respect. In the days that followed, Khadgar and Garona remained at odds, but they soon developed a bond of friendship. The human came to believe, as Medivh did, that the half-orc was genuinely willing to turn her back on the Horde.

By this point, the First War had begun. Orc and human forces frequently clashed throughout the Kingdom of Stormwind. Karazhan, meanwhile, had become darker and more twisted. Tormented spirits floated through the hallways in greater numbers than ever before, and Khadgar and Garona were subjected to vivid, horrific visions. Khadgar began to suspect this was due to the Medivh. Indeed, as Medivh withdrew from his humanity, the fabric of reality in Karazhan seemed to unravel.

Khadgar searched through the books in the tower’s libraries, desperate to find any clue that would explain what was happening. An obscure tome seemed to hold answers. There was an ancient technique that allowed a skilled mage to evoke visions of specific memories, and Khadgar used it to see the origin of the rift connecting Azeroth with the orcish homeworld. Both Khadgar and Garona watched in horror as a vision unfolded around them. They saw a mysterious, hooded stranger confronting Gul’dan on Draenor. The hooded man convinced the Shadow Council to create the Dark Portal and invade Azeroth by showing that the world was ripe for plunder. Then they saw the stranger’s face up close; it was none other than Medivh.

Khadgar and Garona fled to Stormwind City to warn King Llane and Anduin Lothar, Medivh’s childhood friends, of the Guardian’s treason. Realising that Medivh was a great threat to Azeroth – even more so than the invading Horde – Lothar led a party to Karazhan, accompanied by Garona and Khadgar, vowing with a heavy heart to capture or kill his old friend. Just as he had done during the fight with Aegwynn, Sargeras assumed control over the Guardian’s thoughts and actions. He unleashed the full might of his powers on the intruders. The battle at Karazhan was a maelstrom of fire, steel, and magic. Khadgar was nearly killed in the assault; Sargeras tried to rip his soul from his body, and when that failed, he drained part of his lifeforce. The apprentice was prematurely aged; the young man became old and wizened. But it was Khadgar, in the end, who buried a blade in his mentor’s chest, fatally wounding him. Striking down the Guardian forced Sargeras’s spirit from his body, banishing the Legion’s lord into the depths of the Twisting Nether.

Since Medivh’s death, a terrible curse has pervaded both Karazhan and the lands around it. The gothic tower now stands decrepit and seemingly abandoned; fallen chunks of masonry cluster around the edifice in heaps. As described in The Last Guardian, there is a ‘silence upon the tower, but not a stillness’; indeed, it is still imbued with powerful magic. Strange spectres and phantoms can often be seen within Karazhan – less than ghosts perhaps, but more than memories. These spirits are pieces of the past (and occasionally future) that have been unglued from the natural flow of time by the madness of Medivh, condemned to play out their histories again and again. When he was Medivh’s apprentice, Khadgar theorised that Karazhan was like an hourglass and the visions represented the grains of sand within it. These ‘bits of sand’ moved through the tower at any time, unstuck and sometimes overlapping one another so that the living residents could see them, albeit not clearly. In recent years, these visions, stripped of Medivh’s control and madness, have become more brazen – they grow agitated and active when a living person enters the tower.

And it’s not just spirits that wander Karazhan. Within his macabre study, Medivh summoned all manner of otherworldly beings and researched magics no one else dared touch. With the deranged wizard gone, the monstrous creatures and untamed powers have grown unchecked, waiting to pounce on whoever is brave or foolish enough to enter. Despite the myriad terrors that lie within, adventurers are still relentlessly drawn to Karazhan – tempted by rumours of unspeakable secrets and powerful treasures that may be found within the tower’s arcane libraries. It is said that the vast, magical halls house the powerful spellbooks of Medivh himself. But although Karazhan should be emanating all kinds of arcane currents, it has become an enormous energy vacuum. There are no signals… except for a very faint demonic echo. Could demons await those who brave Karazhan’s haunted hallways?

Karazhan was initially intended to be a dungeon in vanilla World of Warcraft, playable at launch. In fact, the first version of Karazhan was built in early 2001 by Jonathan Staats, one of the main dungeon designers. However, this iteration was far too big – it took 30 minutes to load and couldn’t run properly. Another, more refined version of Karazhan, with improved visuals and textures, made it into the game’s Alpha, but when the gameplay designers got to test it, they realised the dungeon was unusable because it was too small and lacked playable space. A year later, development started on a third version of Karazhan. This one included flooded sub-levels, crypts, catacombs, and a gigantic library, but, once again, it was too large – a massive, rambling dungeon interconnected with multiple instances that could never be reasonably filled.

As such, Karazhan was not accessible when World of Warcraft launched in late 2004. Sure, players could travel to Deadwind Pass and see this important location from Warcraft lore (I sure did), but they couldn’t get inside. It didn’t bother me too much at the time. I knew that Karazhan (along with other inaccessible-at-launch places, like Gilneas, Mount Hyjal, and Grim Batol) would eventually make an appearance in the game – some things needed to be saved for the inevitable expansions, after all. And indeed, the developers continued working on Karazhan for some time, reducing its size and preparing it for release. It was planned to be Vanilla’s last raid, but it had to be put on hold to be included in World of Warcraft‘s first expansion, The Burning Crusade, instead.

Upon entering Karazhan, you will find yourself in the Gatehouse. Like most of the lower level (but unlike the more grandiose, opulent upper floors), it is dim, dingy, and full of cobwebs. Carved wooden horse heads leer down from above. This is not only a reference to the fact that the stables can be found down here, but it is also a subtle nod to Anduin Lothar and the Brotherhood of the Horse, which was the official name given to the Kingdom of Stormwind’s knights before and during the First War, as seen in Warcraft’s first game, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans.

Interestingly, the architectural animal motifs progress from horse heads at the tower’s base to eagle heads a bit higher, culminating in lion heads at the grand opera house. As Chris Metzen said during the construction and design of the Karazhan raid, ‘Just sprinkling them in here and there will really sell the history to the players who are paying attention.’

A door from the Gatehouse leads to the Servant’s Quarters, which have certainly seen better days. I can only assume that when there were living servants within the tower, there were a few more amenities and comforts for them here. Today, however, the Servant’s Quarters is bare, ruined, and decrepit, with huge cracks and gaping holes in the walls, some of which are covered by a thick curtain of spider webbing. Thanks to the low ceiling, this area feels intentionally claustrophobic, lacking the ornate touches of the banquet rooms and opera hall above. Giant spiders, enormous bats, and demonic hounds now inhabit this dark, neglected corner of Karazhan. Hastings, the ghostly caretaker, is trying in vain to rid the Servant’s Quarters of all this vermin.

On the other side of the Gatehouse from the Servant’s Quarters are the dusty, smelly, heavily cobwebbed Livery Stables. Presumably, these are the same stables mentioned in The Last Guardian – Khadgar and Garona turned the empty stables into a makeshift carpentry shop to repair the damaged library cases after they fought a demon. In the raid, ornate wall-mounted lanterns illuminate a flagstone floor and open stalls, which are haunted by the skeletal ghosts of long-dead steeds. Several spectral stable hands go about their business, grooming their undead horses. In the centre of the stables stands a magnificent black mare, fully geared and standing to attention like a statue. This is Midnight, who, according to Calliard, the (now ghostly) nightman, is the fastest, strongest, most temperamental horse he has ever seen.

If you attack Midnight, her master, Attumen the Huntsman, will quickly rush to her aid. Once charged with hunting game for Medivh’s extravagant feasts, Attumen now sets his sights on a very different kind of quarry. Ever wary of those seeking to harm or steal his famed steed, Attumen unleashes his well-honed fighting skills against all intruders.

On the upper floor of the Livery Stables, ghostly guardsmen and sentries train with one another even in undeath. They are presided over by the sergeant at arms, Bennett, who was the supervisor and trainer of Karazhan’s many guards before becoming enslaved as a ghost himself. The bunk beds that the men would have used in life can also be found here.

Once you’ve finished on the ground floor, you can head up a flight of stone stairs from the Gatehouse and into the Grand Ballroom. This is where the tower’s famous galas and balls were held. Its grand, elegant design evokes the style of a regal castle with a slightly eerie, haunted undertone typical of Karazhan’s aesthetic. Even now, decades after Medivh’s death, the ghostly remnants of the tower’s guests, trapped within Karazhan’s walls, continue dancing, flirting with one another, and being annoyingly arrogant. These phantom guests are tended by spectral servants, all under the silent gaze of stone busts situated around the outskirts of the room.

While we’re on the subject of dancing and music, I thought I would take this opportunity to briefly mention the background music in Karazhan, which I really enjoy. I’m no music expert by any stretch of the imagination, so I can’t appreciate or describe the various nuances in the piece, but the dark, descending organ melody and the clanging bell tolls make me feel like I’m in a haunted house. And then there’s the unmistakable sound of the harpsichord. Combined, it creates a soundtrack that is sometimes unsettling and sometimes jaunty, fitting the spooky but often whimsical nature of Karazhan itself really well.

Adjacent to the Grand Ballroom is the Banquet Hall, an enormous dining room with huge windows and rich curtains, which was once used to hold fine, decadent dinners with prominent guests of the kingdom. The nobles of Darkshire were the final ones to enjoy such hospitality as living beings. That night, Medivh, driven insane by the demon within as he fought his own mother, slaughtered all who attended. Like many other locales within the tower, the Banquet Hall is now a scene of macabre revisitation by numerous trapped spirits, who are continuing the party, tended to by wandering skeletal waiters. The undead nobles of Darkshire can also be found here; even as ghostly spectres, they are waiting to see Medivh. Oddly, all of the food on the long tables seems relatively fresh, as if it has all been frozen in time. And even though Deadwind Pass is eternally grey and gloomy, bright light from an unknown source shines through the large orange stained-glass windows.

Moroes, the steward of Karazhan, dotes upon his master’s dinner guests within the grand Banquet Hall. He was the only one to survive that terrible night in which hundreds of guests were killed, though he was driven half-mad by what he had seen. Medivh tried to ease Moroes’ pain by erasing his memories of the event, but even so, the steward was never the same again. To escape the wandering visions that plagued Karazhan, he took to wearing horse blinders over his eyes.

When Khadgar and Garona learned the truth about Medivh, the apprentice told Moroes to leave the tower. However, as he had nowhere else to go, Moroes did not do so. Not long after, he was killed by Medivh, who was in the final stages of madness. Though Moroes was buried in Morgan’s Plot just outside Karazhan, he was later raised as an undead creature, supposedly by his master (although, since Medivh, by this point, had already been killed himself, I’m not sure how this works, lore-wise). In any case, the undead Moroes is now as mad as his former master was. Eternally devoted to the care of the tower, even after all this time, he tends to his ghostly guests and dispatches impolite party crashers with cruel efficiency.

Food for Medivh’s grand parties was prepared and cooked in the tower’s kitchen, known as the Scullery, which can be accessed through both the Banquet Hall and the upper level of the Livery Stables. This long, stone-flagged room has an open fire in the centre, and barrels of wine stacked up on shelves and in alcoves along the walls. Ghostly chefs and bakers slavish away, while skeletal waiters prepare to take food out to the guests in the Banquet Hall. Remnants of the Scullery’s foodstuffs remain, rotting in the neglect of its ghostly denizens. The Scullery is a little superfluous in that you don’t even need to step foot in it to advance further through the raid if you don’t want to, but it’s a nice addition and helps immerse the player by showing where and how the food for Medivh’s parties would once have been cooked.

I’m going to stop myself here before this post becomes too long, but there’s still plenty of Karazhan left to explore. Next time, we’ll be delving deeper into the haunted tower and finding out what awaits adventurers who make it to the very top…