The first among us met our Warchief years ago, in the Alliance slave camp called Durnholde. Like he, they too were thralls, and like he, they broke free. But this contingent of orcs found renewed purpose in Thrall’s vision and swore fealty of a different sort to him—the sacred Ogar’Regar, or oath of death. These few glorious warriors became an advance force for the nascent Horde, sneaking into enemy territory to gain footholds and scout for resources when the Horde proper had only barely secured Durotar. They were free orcs, but they had fashioned unto themselves a new bond of servitude to the greater brotherhood that had set them free.
Soon tales of their exploits spread, and they acquired new members among the Darkspear and their new allies, the tauren. Sellswords and spellswords and gladiators alike joined this suicide squad, ready to lay their lives on the line both against the fiendish Alliance and the fouler fiends in the deep caverns of the world. Our elite contingent grew in the telling and was among the first in the Horde to formally welcome members of the dread Forsaken, as our spies watched the first arise under the Banshee Queen’s dominion.
Both plain as day and dismissed as rumor, our agents span all corners of Azeroth, probing weaknesses in Alliance lines and mobilizing at a moment’s notice. Strike one among our ranks and forty will reply in blood. No mission is too perilous, no army too numerous. We are the bringers of fortune and calamity. The shapers of the Horde's future, and the doom of its enemies.
And now you seek to join our fraternity: The Harbingers. We have judged you and found you promising. Now you must prove yourself before us and before the Horde. Your trial ends when your life ends. Pray your trial never ends. Lok’tar!
Guild History[]
The Ogar'Regar[]
In the year 17, the first Ogar'Regar of Azeroth was signed in blood.
An old orc had, like many of his brethren, been captured and held in the slave camps of the Alliance. There was still a fire in his eyes, but it would soon go out. Already it had been quenched twice—first when they whipped him into submission, and then when the one among them grand enough to lead a new Horde had, in the dead of night, vanished from Durnholde.
Then, against all hope, the young renegade had returned. He had fled into the east and met with the elusive Frostwolf Clan, and he had come back a champion. His war party laid waste to the camp and its jailers, after the arrogant Lord Blackmoore had taunted him with a severed head. The freed legions of other camps had gathered behind the hero they called Thrall. A fitting name, the nameless orc pondered. There indeed was a thrall freeing thralls, yet never forgetting his own past. That, indeed, was the sign of a Warchief.
The young Thrall had lifted his weapon high, and the nameless orc knew it at once. It was the namesake of the great Doomhammer, and if Thrall wielded it, then even Orgrim had seen fit to honor him.
As the new Horde moved eastward in search of a brighter dawn, the old orc's fire swelled and raged and consumed his waking thoughts, more furious than any future sun. He knew of the old ways and knew too that the young Warchief was still learning. It would take the full measure of devotion for the new Horde to survive in this hostile world they found themselves trapped within. But he was only an old orc. His clanmates were lost to time and war, and he had no great weapon to bestow, except perhaps himself.
In the years of his servitude, the old orc had gathered a select handful of confidants, who like him recalled the heritage of Draenor. The ancient elder shaman, Nithalik. The once-bloodthirsty pacifist, Ardods Windcaller. The Dragonmaw defector, Shaego Dragonsbane. And the tenacious rogue, Goma Grimshank. Four who, like him, would deliver that devotion.
On the eve of the Horde's exodus across the Great Sea, the orc and his companions approached the Warchief's tent. He welcomed them in, and to the old orc's surprise, Thrall recognized them all.
"What could a young man say to calm an old one?" The Warchief smiled, setting down a thin stack of papers.
"The young man need say nothing," the orc replied. "Nothing but zug-zug."
Thrall raised his eyebrow as the five orcs pulled forth daggers from their waistbands. Despite their notions, he sensed nothing but utmost conviction and respect. Perhaps, he thought, not all the love of life is lost among my people. Perhaps there's yet hope beyond the Warsong and the Frostwolf.
"This is a pledge without a word," the orc began. "A ritual with one motion. When we take it, we can never take it back." He looked up at the Warchief. "In the fields of Gorgrond, in the homeland now lost to us, the Blackrock Clan viewed this oath as sacrosanct. It is the oath of true fealty unto death. The Ogar'Regar." He lifted his dagger to his palm. "When my blade strikes my flesh, I will forever after be your blade, to wield as you see fit. To brave the deepest dungeons and face the greatest perils."
Thrall nodded. "Zug-zug."
With that, the five orcs brought their blades down. The deed was done. Their lives were Thrall's. Free men willing to once again become thralls in the service of the Horde, to strike at the Warchief's command. Portents of a bright dawn, and purveyors of a future vengeance. The Harbingers.
The Charge of Durotar[]
The Five had before them their first task: to seek out likeminded fighters among the nascent Horde who would fulfill their charge. And the nameless orc had adopted a new title at his friends' request. He was the orc who saw the winds of change and listened. Who knew the new Warchief before the Warchief himself knew. The man who spoke behind the veil and followed the murmurings of the Horde. He would be Whispers.
Whispers directed the other members of the Five to talk with the Darkspear Trolls, whom they had rescued from a tempestuous sea. And he found among the lethargic masses select candidates who still recalled the fires of their youths. These courageous young men and women were brought before Thrall, one by one, to swear the Ogar'Regar. And when they first hit the shores of Kalimdor, the Harbingers spread out.
As the Horde proper began to collect supplies and build Orgrimmar, Harbinger agents scouted the borders of Durotar. They reported quickly to Thrall the strategic cave systems to the south, and to Vol'jin they showed the Echo Isles. Immediately the Harbingers had proven themselves as a tightly organized reconnaissance network, but the real test would come in battle. Their numbers swelled, yet to most of the Horde they were little more than a complex rumor.
The Harbinger troops trained their bodies beyond the breaking point and then beyond that. They were little less, or more, than Thrall's elite assassin corps, ready at a moment's notice to mobilize against any threat. So when the Kul Tiran humans arrived with an armada at the Echo Isles, they prepared to strike. However, the Mok'nathal champion Rexxar—whom they had begun to regularly interact with—informed them that the Warchief would stay his hand, as a pledge he had made with the curious human sorceress Whispers had once seen in Lordaeron. Instead they were to sabotage the Kul Tiran ships to cut off their relays and reinforcements.
Whispers, Nithalik, and Ardods rallied a contingent to loose the seas and infiltrate the battleships, quickly routing their enemies. And before the Warchief had even had the chance to hear of their exploits, they had moved west. They knew the Horde's trajectory to come, and thus moved into the wide plainslands they would later call the Barrens. Three bands broke apart; one traveled north, one south, and one directly west. As the northern and southern bands took notice of Alliance enclaves, the western band sent an emissary with haste to the straggling Horde force. They had witnessed skirmishes between two strange races—a race of man-horses, and another of enormous bullish creatures. In their clever estimation, they had informed the Warchief to come and give aid to the bulls, for they appeared to have both the camaraderie and coordination to be prime candidates for the Horde.
Thus the pact with the tauren was formed, aided by the secret machinations of an unseen ally.
Forging Pacts[]
While the northern band of Harbingers folded seamlessly into the Horde advance on Ashenvale, the southern band continued its trek through the hostile expanse of the Thousand Needles. Their information network had informed them of a large city run by goblins—curious creatures to whom there was no greater glory than gold. The merchants of Gadgetzan controlled a powerful port system that would behoove the Horde if they could forge a treaty. Goma Grimshank was no fool and knew there would be no hope of a direct allegiance with the goblins. However, a proper war effort needed resources beyond simple manpower. It was there, in discussions with Gadgetzan's illustrious baron Marin Noggenfogger, that Goma secured a steady supply of potions, poisons, and trade ships in exchange for a "fair" compensation the Warchief would only ever vaguely know about.
The last of the Five, Shaego, traveled back across the Great Sea with a small contingent, to keep watch on the rapidly crumbling Lordaeron. She spread her scouts wide, sending a few along the coastline of Quel'thelas to observe the reclusive high elves. They watched and waited for two years, probing Alliance weak points and hoping to establish official supply routes to the Frostwolf exiles, still isolated in the Alterac Mountains.
In the year 22, these long-estranged Harbingers caught wind of the Plague of Undeath and quickly made plans to protect the Horde against it. But a curious occurrence unfolded before them. The undead monstrosities were, simply put, dangerous morons. Any single Harbinger agent would easily fight off twenty of the creatures. But after a few months a new species of undead came forth, dangerously clever and organized. To any normal orc such things would be abominable, but to the Harbingers they were a paramount advantage. They rendezvoused with the Kalimdor segment of the guild and told Whispers's tauren recruits to carry word to Thunder Bluff. It was the tauren, not the orcs, who would most likely trust such fallen men.
True to form, the tauren emissaries urged Thrall to accept the ex-humans called Forsaken under the auspices of helping them cure their affliction. Though to Shaego and the remainder of the Harbingers, the Forsaken were best left unaltered. They were the perfect warriors, for they were already dead and could not likely fear it a second time. Two clever Forsaken in particular stood out as tacticians to rival Whispers and would be introduced to him as such. They had masked their old names in life and went only by code words: Collective and Sunshine. Truly, Shaego suspected, they would aid the once-nameless orc in a manner yet unknown to the brotherhood.
Thus, well before the Horde made an official pact with the Banshee Queen Sylvanas, several members of the Forsaken had already prepared to join the Harbingers. Once more the hidden fraternity had steered their brethren toward a future victory.
The Drums of War[]
The Horde had secured its essential final piece that would give it a strategic foothold in the Eastern Kingdoms, and it expanded rapidly. Military bases and trading outposts popped up across Kalimdor as the Forsaken formally reconnected the new Horde with its oldest allies, the Frostwolf Clan. Forces marshaled toward the strategic battlefields of the Arathi Basin and the Alterac Mountains, and down at the farthest tip of the continent, aided by Goma's hushed dealings with the Steamwheedle Cartel. And at every point—with every new settlement and expedition—there was a Harbinger, carefully guiding and watching over the campaign.
The Quel'thelas scouts kept their positions and stayed their blades, watching a power struggle unfold in the Scourge-ravaged remants of the high elf society. They passed their messages along to Whispers, telling him that the elves had abandoned their old allegiances with the Alliance and fashioned unto themselves a new identity. Keep note of these, they wrote. They could prove to be allies in a few years, if we reach out to them at the precise moment.
Another advance force cleared a pathway through Alliance territory to a familiar sight: the Badlands. Yet in this Horde troop there marched not one or two, but twenty, Harbingers. The area was critical beyond measure, and if they could successfully construct a defensible outpost there, they would both reestablish old military gains but also found a staging ground against both the dwarves of Khaz Modan and the corrupted orc clans who hid in Blackrock Mountain.
All across the world the fraternity was poised. The uneasy armistice between the Horde and Alliance had all but disappeared. To a simple orc, such a turn of fate was an ill tiding. To the Harbingers, it was an opportunity. They above all others had trained through hell and back, and if war was come, then they would be its heralds. The freedmen thralls could hope for nothing greater than glorious death in the maw of war.
Current Events[]
The events of tomorrow have yet to unfold. Return at a later time to hear of the guild's exploits.
Recruitment[]
The Harbingers are a selective organization, focused simultaneously on highend PvP and PvE. We can provide precise raid time and premade details in-game or through Discord chat. Contact leadership for class availability.
If you believe that you can't consistently raid with guilds generally but would like the opportunity to occasionally fill a raid spot, don't hesitate to contact us. We will take people with any gear level or class for our PvE reserve list, so long as they maintain competent specs. Reserve players' loot positions will be judged on a separate basis to ensure that they are still able to get loot; we regularly gear our non-core raiders, and they can attest to this fact.
Regarding Mages and Warriors, we recently had some attrition in both of these roles, so there are immediate openings in core membership for approximately two Mages and two to three Warriors, provided you demonstrate to us that you're parsing adequately and respeccing for raids. We don't require good parsing from established core members who are busy PvP-ranking, but it would behoove you to respec during your trial period.
**The Class Demand list only concerns our PvE core needs, so if you don't intend on being a core raider and instead want to focus on PvP grinding, please send a whisper anyway! We want to collect more dedicated PvPers for our premades and general PvP excursions, and we will endeavor to get those players into non-progression raids when possible, even if they're currently using PvP specs.**