THE WOW FOREVER COLLECTION · DISPATCH · RESEARCH CHECKED NOVEMBER 13, 2026
Short answer: Episode 7 of the WoW Forever Podcast went up on November 12 and it is the lore episode. The headline is one line from Aggrend: "Scarlet Enclave will return. Ashbringer will return at some point. You know, it might be a while, but that's going to come back." The rest is about how Blizzard plans to tell stories: Forever is its own continuity, the team has a rough story plan covering several years, old one-off events like the Scourge Invasion could be stretched over multiple updates, and nobody is fighting the Lich King at level 60. Nothing here has a date attached.
The episode is called "Turbo Nerds Lore-ing Out". The guests are lore YouTubers Nobbel87 and Platinum WoW, and the developers are Aggrend and Sean Copeland, Blizzard's lore historian, who described his job as being "the park ranger of Warcraft". It runs about an hour and a quarter. The first five minutes are Aggrend on the PvP faction lock, which we covered separately in the Horde lock dispatch. I worked from the video's captions and read everything up to the sign-off.
Scarlet Enclave and the Ashbringer are coming back
Scarlet Enclave was the last raid of Season of Discovery, and it ended the Ashbringer questline that season built up. Asked which characters he most wants to work with in Forever, Aggrend named Vol'jin first and then said this:
"I've been fortunate enough that I've been able to touch the Ashbringer a little bit. You know, Scarlet Enclave will return. Ashbringer will return at some point. You know, it might be a while, but that's going to come back."
That is the whole statement. He gave no patch, no level range and no detail on whether the raid returns as it was. Earlier in the episode he said the Enclave was something the team "were able to squeeze in" while already moving on to Forever, and he was frank about the questline it finished: "it doesn't actually fit all that well" with what later expansions established, and works better read as a what-if. That experience is part of why Forever isn't tied to the main timeline.
Wowhead ran the Scarlet Enclave line as its own news story the same day. If you are planning around the launch raids, nothing changes: Barrow Deeps, Hyjal Summit and Onyxia open on December 9, and our raids explainer has the sizes and attunement.
Why Forever has its own timeline
Blizzard had already said Forever is a separate continuity. This episode explains how that happened. The first plan was to put Forever in the main Warcraft timeline and be careful not to break anything in modern WoW. Aggrend said that plan died in a parking lot conversation with Chris Metzen on a food truck day at the Blizzard campus:
"We need to split this thing, man. We're going to create landmines for each other."
Copeland called the result "a branching continuity" and compared it to how Hearthstone handles Warcraft lore. Aggrend's worry ran one way: he wasn't concerned about modern WoW causing problems for Forever, he was concerned about Forever causing problems for modern WoW.
Platinum WoW asked whether that means wild alternate history. The answer was a qualified yes. Aggrend expects the team to take some directions where players say "that's not exactly how that happened", and hopes those land as surprises that still make sense. The baseline is the lore as it stood in 2004, in his words "five years after the Third War", with later additions acknowledged where it suits. Some characters you first met in Cataclysm already have backstories in Forever.
The story plan: no campaign, no single villain
A few things Aggrend said about structure are worth knowing if you care where the game goes after December.
There is "a meta narrative plan for the next several years", but it won't arrive as a marked main campaign. Stories are being seeded in ordinary quests the way a Hellfire Peninsula quest once led to Illidan. He said some of those threads are already in the live game at low levels and connect to higher level content, and that he reads Wowhead quest comments to see whether anyone has put them together yet.
The original raids are the anchors. He listed Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Ahn'Qiraj and Naxxramas as fixed points the story hangs from, with new villains added alongside. He said the team will "try pretty hard to avoid having a central villain" that everything else serves for years, though he didn't rule out an overarching one later.
Cutscenes are not a priority. The model for a big lore moment is the Onyxia chain, and your character stays "a hero, not the hero". On cinematics his wording was "not off the table, but it's not our focus right now".
The tone is meant to match original WoW, including the grim parts. Aggrend brought up the Legend of Stalvan as the reference, and said leadership playtests flag content that comes out "a little bit too silly".
One-off events could become multi-patch stories
Platinum WoW asked whether limited-time events like the opening of the Ahn'Qiraj gates or the Scourge Invasion are coming. Aggrend's short answer was "yeah, absolutely", and the longer one is the most interesting design idea in the episode.
He described Forever's timeline as the first year of World of Warcraft, "ultra dilated". The point of stretching it is to give more room to moments that were over in a flash. His example was the Scourge Invasion, which in 2006 amounted to camps of undead farmed for Necrotic Runes before Naxxramas:
"What if that spawned three different updates and was a huge, phased thing?"
Blizzard told IGN last month that Forever gets a major update about every four months, so three updates would be roughly a year of story. That is my arithmetic. Aggrend gave no schedule, and he warned more than once that ideas the team has already thought of "may not come now, may not come next year".
Races, classes and the elf question
No more cross-faction races are planned. Sky elves went to both factions for two reasons. One was scope: two separate races would have meant two starter zones and probably no Hyjal or Riverglades. The other was population. Aggrend pointed at what blood elves did to Horde numbers and said giving a popular elf race to one side was a real risk to faction balance. Asked whether Blizzard will do it again, he said "I don't think we have too many plans to do something like that again." Given the week the PvP ruleset is having, that history is on the team's mind.
Quel'Thalas has bigger plans. The team first considered high elves or blood elves with Quel'Thalas as a starter zone, then decided it had better uses for the place. No details.
New race and class combinations have to be earned. Metzen's condition for the combos Forever launched with was "you have to earn it", meaning content that makes them make sense. Aggrend pointed to the Sun priest of An'she in Thunder Bluff as the kind of groundwork to watch, and said he would love to see more races get Shaman and more Horde races get Priest. The Tauren mage spotted in a Blizzard overview video was not a hint. Neither, probably, was the NPC with glowing blue eyes that had people guessing at death knights. He thinks it was a randomised face option. Current options are on our best race page.
The Lich King, Outland and Northrend
Arthas is on the Frozen Throne and the team is "not really in a super big hurry" to deal with him. Naxxramas and the Scourge Invasion are anchors, so the Scourge story will be told, but Aggrend recalled an old BlizzCon answer that level 60 players can't handle the Lich King and said "that's still true".
He was careful about the Dark Portal. Not going through it means no level cap increase and no Burning Crusade as an expansion. It "doesn't mean we won't ever go to Outland or we won't ever go to Northrend." Time travel through the Caverns of Time came up as an idea for years from now, once the original raid arc is done, and he framed it as spitballing.
Smaller things worth knowing
- Riverglades began as three small zones in the empty mountains east of the Burning Steppes. World builder Matt Armstrong pitched merging them into one. It was designed as the grounded counterweight to Zephras, built on the Brotherhood of the Horse from Warcraft II. It also has lions, because Stormwind's emblem is a lion and the Eastern Kingdoms had none. The Horde story there follows ogres who walked away from the Twilight's Hammer.
- The torch exists because someone in Blizzard's internal alpha, riding through Duskwood under the new lighting, said they wished they had a light source. Aggrend built the quest within the hour. The team has talked about a dedicated roleplay equipment slot and dark areas that need a light. He was clear that this is not an announcement.
- A lore bookcase for collected books and audio crystals is something Aggrend wants, possibly tied to a profession or a collection system. Also not an announcement. Until then, our dungeon quest pages list the quest chains for each dungeon, new ones included.
- Cormack, the Forsaken paladin from Copeland's short story Unbowed, is going into the game. Aggrend said he decided that on reading the first draft.
- Shaper's Terrace is the dungeon to pay attention to for lore. Aggrend's hint: "look around, look up maybe." Hyjal was declared off limits for spoilers.
- Next week's episode covers systems, classes and PvP. Aggrend said he will probably not be on it and is stepping back from the podcast seat "for a little bit". The captions I had cut off shortly after that, so I can't tell you who replaces him.
How the forums took it
The episode thread on the US forums had 32 replies when I checked on the morning of November 13, small next to the faction lock threads. The lore fans who replied were happy. Most of the rest used the thread to ask about other things: the Oceanic day and night cycle, a dual spec bug that resets action bars, and faction transfers for split friend groups. One reply complained that Blizzard was spending time on a lore chat while those problems are open. That is fair as a mood check, though the episode was clearly recorded as a planned topic and opened with a live-issues segment.
Sources: Blizzard, Turbo Nerds Lore-ing Out, Episode 7 of The WoW: Forever Podcast (YouTube, November 12, 2026; quotes taken from the video captions and lightly cleaned of filler words); Kaivax, Blizzard forums, The WoW Forever Podcast: Episode 7 (November 12, 2026, 17:46 UTC; 32 replies when checked November 13) and the EU copy (November 12, 2026); Jurdi, Wowhead, Season of Discovery's Scarlet Enclave Raid to Return in WoW: Forever (November 12, 2026, headline only).