Quick Overview
The Mossflayer are forest trolls whose effort to reclaim ancestral land brought them into the Eastern Plaguelands. They left the Amani sphere after the Troll Wars, fought beside Zul'jin during the Second War, and later exploited the collapse of human defenses as the Scourge spread. Their recovery became a catastrophe when a hunting party ate deliberately contaminated game and undead trolls were sent back among their kin. Their history gives the plague a terrible second meaning: even people who initially escaped its human-targeted infection could be drawn into undeath.
Full History
The Mossflayer tribe spent centuries being pushed away from places it still regarded as its own. They had broken from the wider Amani world after the Troll Wars, when high elves and humans had shattered the power of the great forest-troll kingdom. Leaving the old centers of conflict did not bring security. Human settlement and military expansion continued to press upon the Mossflayers until much of their ancestral ground in northern Lordaeron was beyond their reach.
When Zul'jin accepted Orgrim Doomhammer's offer of alliance, the Mossflayer joined the other forest trolls in the hope that the Second War would reverse their losses. But the Horde was beaten, and the trolls saw little reason to remain faithful to an army that had promised more than it could deliver. Unlike the Revantusk, who later sought a relationship with Thrall, the Mossflayer rejected their former allies and returned to an older contest with humanity. Their first concern was not building another Horde. It was recovering ground that generations of pressure had taken away.
The plague of undeath changed that contest in a way no troll ruler could have planned. Human communities fell before the Scourge, and the Mossflayer took advantage of weakening defenses to move back into lands in the northeastern Eastern Plaguelands. It was a bitter sort of victory. The forests and wildlife around their recovered settlements were sickening as the region decayed. The trolls had escaped the immediate fate of many infected humans, but they had reclaimed a homeland where ordinary hunting had become perilous.
A Mossflayer hunting party ventured far from home seeking animals that appeared healthy. Unknown to the hunters, a powerful lich had deliberately altered the creatures. When the trolls consumed their meat, members of the party were transformed into undead servants. The danger was not confined to the hunters' campsite. One victim, Hameya, received an order to return to his village and carry the curse to the rest of his people. He resisted long enough to leave a written plea for someone to stop him before he could complete the mission.
Reports of fresh graves and undead trolls hidden among the living made the tribe's situation increasingly desperate. The full extent of the infection was uncertain, and the original historical account does not establish the survival or destruction of every Mossflayer settlement. That uncertainty is part of the tragedy. A tribe that endured the Troll Wars, rejected the defeated Horde, and reclaimed its ancestral forest now faced an enemy capable of using the recovered homeland itself as a trap. Their story binds the forest trolls' ancient dispossession to the more recent horror of the Scourge without pretending that all its victims followed the same path into undeath.
The Living Archive · Subject Chronicle
Through History
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