The Rot Hide — Gnolls Taken by the Scourge

Full History

Lordaeron's plague is often told through its kings, cities and fallen knights. Yet the Scourge did not leave the land's other inhabitants untouched. In the north, gnoll packs that had once lived as ordinary predators and raiders became victims of the same necromantic catastrophe that destroyed human communities. The Rot Hide were among those transformed into undead servants, their former independence replaced by service to powers tied to the Lich King.

That change mattered particularly in Tirisfal Glades. The region around the former capital was crowded with dead and ruined places, from old settlements to burial grounds where victims of the plague had been laid to rest. The Rot Hide occupied territory around Garren's Haunt, and undead gnolls were connected to activity at the Mass Grave. Their grave-robbing was more than grotesque plunder. The Scourge's wars depended upon corpses, and a place containing countless dead was a resource to enemies who had learned to turn the fallen into new soldiers.

Silverpine Forest carried the same terrible frontier farther south. While the Forsaken struggled to establish their own independence from the Lich King's domination, other undead remained under Scourge influence. The Rot Hide's presence in Silverpine showed that Sylvanas Windrunner's victory over her own bondage did not free every creature struck by the plague. Forsaken patrols and settlements could not treat such beings as harmless members of the old countryside. They were signs of a continuing undead war in the shadow of the ruined human kingdom.

The contrast between the Rot Hide and the Forsaken is the heart of this history. Both suffered the corrupting force of undeath, but their fates diverged. The Forsaken developed a political identity under Sylvanas, claimed the Undercity and fought to control their own future. The Rot Hide remained dangerous servants of necromantic power, haunting graves and routes that the new kingdom needed to secure. Undeath, then, did not create one unified people. It fractured the world into factions whose shared condition concealed very different loyalties.

At the original World of Warcraft horizon, the Rot Hide have not vanished from Tirisfal and Silverpine. The struggle against them is one thread in the larger effort to reclaim a country from the ruins of plague and war. Their story takes the reader from the Scourge's destruction of Lordaeron to the Forsaken's uneasy independence, and finally to the knowledge that even the beasts and smaller peoples of the old kingdom were drawn into its catastrophe.