Loch Modan

Full History

Loch Modan takes its name from the great lake held in place by the Stonewrought Dam, a monument to the engineering and political confidence of the Bronzebeard dwarves. The road from Dun Morogh emerges into a gentler country of forests, quarries, and fishing villages, with Thelsamar serving as its principal dwarven settlement. The region matters strategically because its passes connect Ironforge to the northern Wetlands and the eastern Badlands. Caravans crossing here carry supplies and news as surely as any army, and the dwarves depend on the solidity of the dam and their roadworks to maintain those connections.

The land also bears older traces. Archaeological sites and the stonework associated with Uldaman in the neighboring Badlands connect local curiosity to the dwarves' growing interest in their distant ancestry. The rambling excavations are not harmless academic exercises: the same underground disturbances that trouble Dun Morogh help explain the presence of troggs in this region. Stonesplinter trogg communities threaten mines and roads, while kobolds, murlocs, and other local inhabitants have their own territories along the shore and hills. The farther one travels from Thelsamar, the more readily the kingdom's neat roads give way to disputed ground.

To the east, the Dragonmaw orcs preserve a particularly grim memory of the Second War. Their clan enslaved the red dragonflight at Grim Batol in the Wetlands, using dragons in the Horde's campaigns. The orcish presence around Loch Modan is one expression of those lingering conflicts. It also shows why the peace after the Second War did not simply return every former frontier to its earlier inhabitants. Loch Modan's surface is a scene of tranquil water and careful masonry, but its historical landscape is made from the contests of the dwarven clans, the remnant Horde, the creatures of the deep, and the unresolved secrets that drew the Explorers' League into the mountains in the first place.