How do Halls of Valor and Maw of Souls exist with Shadowlands?

[Unholyground]

Both were carved out of the Shadowlands as their personal afterlife for the Vrykul after the curse of flesh. The Shadowlands is infinite, we are only dealing with the parts we know about.

[Firedemon]

Perhaps it will be revealed the Shadowlands is much bigger than just 4 playable zones revealed to us.

I thought I read somewhere in the news that the zones we have access to are just a small part of what makes the Shadowlands.

So who knows .. maybe you can buy some land in Shadowlands, decorate it and then populate it with whatever souls you can get.

[Charge me Doctor]

For warriors, the worthy go to the Halls of Valor upon death if they are worthy to join the Valarjar, the unworthy are sent to the Maw of Souls.

I think I have that right.

How does all that work with the Shadowlands? If all the souls are now going to The Maw, does that mean that the Halls of
Valor with Odyn and the Maw of Souls with Helya are not seeing new souls?

Maybe it's been covered and I just missed it, but does anyone know how they all fit together?

You go to these places only when your soul gets snatched by val'kyr on her way to shadowlands

[GreenJesus]

Titan's perspective.

Wow's version of "a wizard did it".

I cant believe they said that. "Chronicles are books written from a titans perspective." When was that ever said before now? I cant believe it only took them a little over a year to leave the chronicles in the trash.

[Soulwind]

Go read up on American history in the textbooks of other countries like Japan, China, Russia, Europe (yes, all the EU "countries" are just states in my textbook).

Why do you think anything you've heard or read is the way you think it is? Nothing is every what it truly seems. Everything in our "textbook" was written by the Titans to further their own agenda.

You will never get the truth. Even your own eyes will deceive you.

Which isn't an excuse for a fantasy world written by a handful of people. The 25.000+ years of history and mythos of Warcraft aren't nearly as complex as a single year of history on Earth, they could easily map it out and plan ahead.

The truth is, they are making this stuff up as they go, and if they have to choose between something that looks cool and something consistent with the existing lore, they'll choose the former. They do try to tie stuff up, and over the years they've intentionally left many "hooks" all over the story that they can tie pretty much anything to, but sometimes it's obvious that they just wanted to tell a certain story, and forced/retconned previous stories to make it work.

[Newname1234567890]

The Shadowlands are infinite so. They'll just make Hellhiem on part of the Shadowlands

[Gasparde]

The lore is a mess, blizzard is just making it up as they go with no sensible planning or coherent story and character progression.

Blizzard will either mutilate the lore again or they will just leave it unexplained.
Gotta wait for shadowlands to find out which...

Yea, just fuck Blizzard for not figuring out where their shit's gonna lead 25 years down the line, especially with a good 500 writers writing on the same story.
Like, seriously, at this point anyone but GRRM should just stop writing at all, not worth the effort.

[hulkgor]

They stated the Shadowlands is an infinite space, with endless 'sections' and areas... they can simply state the Halls of Valor and Hellheim being 2 others areas of it, for vrykulls.

Those 4 areas + the Maw aren't the entirety of Shadowlands.

[horbindr]

iirc the halls of valor aren't in the shadowlands, but just a flying part of ulduar.

odyn just "borrowed" some power from the shadowlands to redirect souls there. and cause it's not actually in the shadowlands, that's why they can act on azeroth (at least until helya fucked them over).

maw of souls is part of the shadowlands. without a retcon it would have to somehow be related to Bastion, since that's apparently where valkyr/spirithealers etc come from. But that doesn't make too much sense since it's closer in purpose to maldraxxus/spooky zone/even the maw.

still wondering what sylvanas deal with helya was. maybe helya is a messenger for the jailer or something?

- - - Updated - - -

What if the "Maw of Souls" is the Maw they reference in Shadowlands?

stuff has escaped from the maw of souls though. notably us + our friends during stormheim questing and the raid.

but i wouldn't be too surprised if it was closely related to the maw in some way, it's a version of hell after all. unlike the 4 major zones which are more heaven/purgatory in style.

actually thinking about it, maldraxxus shares a lot of philosphy ideas with the halls of valor, they are both different flavors of the strong rise to the top idea.

[Kokolums]

Yea, just fuck Blizzard for not figuring out where their shit's gonna lead 25 years down the line, especially with a good 500 writers writing on the same story.
Like, seriously, at this point anyone but GRRM should just stop writing at all, not worth the effort.

Its the same problem comic book universes run into. Years of trying to tell cool stories instead of coherent lore wreck everything to the point where you must create a multiverse of infinite possibilities to explain it. Yeah that part doesn't make sense so we will just say it happened on Earth-2. That part doesn't fit so it happened on Earth-371.

[Skirdus]

I think even outside of the Maw suddenly taking in all souls, characters who have the power to transfer souls to afterlives other than the Shadowlands haven't been affected by it. That's why wild god souls still go to the Emerald Dream, Vol'jin and Rastakhan are presumably still in Bwonsamdi's care, etc.

Or they could just retcon it. Shadowlands is becoming rather infamous for that already

[Powerogue]

Odyn obtained knowledge of manipulating the afterlife from the Shadowlands in exchange for his eye, but it was never really made clear if those locations were in the Shadowlands or just connected to Stormheim. One of the many loose threads I hope they address. I'd assume Helya, being of similar power and part val'kyr, had similar abilities when she created Helheim.

[Boricha]

I just think of it as a sub-plane within the shadowlands for vrykul.

[dimitrov]

For warriors, the worthy go to the Halls of Valor upon death if they are worthy to join the Valarjar, the unworthy are sent to the Maw of Souls.

I think I have that right.

How does all that work with the Shadowlands? If all the souls are now going to The Maw, does that mean that the Halls of
Valor with Odyn and the Maw of Souls with Helya are not seeing new souls?

Maybe it's been covered and I just missed it, but does anyone know how they all fit together?

They kinda forgot about warriors dying in legion

[Tantaburs]

The Halls of valor are very clearly either an extension of of a copy of bastion. From the valkyr to the general building style you can't argue that it is a ret-con or not established in lore that they are of a similar origin

[Bladesyphon]

As Auculd correctly stated - The Halls of Valor aren't in the Shadowlands. They're in Azeroth, literally floating over Stormheim (or, really anywhere for that matter). Odyn literally had Helya take a hall from Ulduar, and lift it up into the sky to serve as Odyn's floating citadel where he could create his own army after he had a falling out with the other Keepers and their desire to let the Proto-Aspects serve as guardians of Azeroth.

Helhiem, on the other hand, is probably just an extension of one of the four known realms of the Shadowlands.

[munkeyinorbit]

TIL

Retcon is lore that you don't like. Especially if there is a perfectly valid explanation.

Blizzard has said we get to interact with 4 of the possible realms in Shadowlands.
Blizzard has said there are more than just 4.
HoV and MoS are two more possibilities.

Pretty simple.

[huth]

Halls of Valor are outside the normal system. Val'kyr intercept souls before they go they go to the Shadowlands and bring them there directly, without being presented to the Arbiter. So this part isn't affected by whatever got broken, since it happens before they ever get there. In a way, Vrykul got lucky.

For Helya, i wouldn't be surprised if she's aligned with the Jailer.

[How dare you]

For warriors, the worthy go to the Halls of Valor upon death if they are worthy to join the Valarjar, the unworthy are sent to the Maw of Souls.

I think I have that right.

How does all that work with the Shadowlands? If all the souls are now going to The Maw, does that mean that the Halls of
Valor with Odyn and the Maw of Souls with Helya are not seeing new souls?

Maybe it's been covered and I just missed it, but does anyone know how they all fit together?

They are basically the same concept, because Blizzard is lazy and recycled this idea. But in universe, those are things created by Odyn and Helya and only concern the Vrykul. Shadowlands are a universe-wide concept, with the Arbiter being in charge and we don't really know where it all came from. Maybe the Arbiter is the god of this universe.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Halls of Valor is its own thing and since Helya was forced to do the whole Val'kyr thing, her skills in creating an entire realm(See Elemental Planes) that sums up Halls of Valor. Helheim seems to be basically Helya's personal little realm of dead but for Vrykul/Kvaldir and since she created the Elemental Planes, its not a stretch to assume she created that.


As for Bwonsamdi, well he deals with Troll souls so any kind of Troll comes his way well its relevant to him. Non trolls aren't his forte.