This most recent Sunday, the Horde hung up their swordbelts and put away their arcane tomes for one night to come together and celebrate the welcome home they have found on Azeroth. The All Hallow’s Eve festival and the burning of the Wicker Man signify that it is the end of harvest season and time for the Harvest Ball. It’s a time for merriment, for alcohol, for gorging on the best of the new crop. A time for old friends to meet once again and for rivals to put away their grudges.

For one night the war is forgotten, and the Horde can act like civilized people. We can celebrate our victories, and mourn our very many losses.

I attended with Whitman, and the students and faculty of Silvermoon University. There was storytelling, drunkeness, a scavenger hunt, and a play performed by the drama club that was a satire of the rise and fall of Sylvanas Windrunner. It was, of course, a comedy.

At one point, an Infernal crashed the Ball.

And here is Faelan, organizer of the ball, on the main stage in Silvermoon city.

With Silvermoon University, but not dressed for the event.

It was often hard to keep track of the conversations flying about.

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The elf masks are very creepy.

The trees have started changing color and their leaves have begun dropping to earth. A chill wind blows in the evenings. The farmers in Westfall and Arathi are finishing up their harvest seasons, whcih must mean tt’s time for Halloween in Azeroth again.

(The always excellent WoW Insider has a great round-up of the quests, but what is it actually like? To me, that is what MetBlogs is about: what is it really like to be there?)

During this holiday season the Horde cities are full of adventurers running around with pumpkins on their heads trying to sell brooms. Wisps and bats, pirates and ninjas run past on all sides. The zeppelin looks like a menagerie of terror. Blind party invites are flying, and if you accept you could find yourself turned into any sort of monstrosity. Pumpkins dot the doorsteps of every house, and huge barrels of apples lay prepped for bobbing.

Outside Undercity stands an enormous Wicker Man–no word on if uptight policemen fill his belly–and surrounding the Wicker Man are dozens of heavily armed sellswords waiting for Alliance scum to ride by. The ground is sticky with blood.

The Headless Horsemen shouts and rides across the sky, burning the towns of Brill, Razor Hill and Farstrider Square. Helpful adventurers carrying buckets run around dousing every flame as soon as possibe. The level of civic involvement would bring a tear to my eye if only they weren’t being paid so well to do it.

The Scarlet Monastery has become an abbattoir. A palace of bone and ash and corpse. You cannot see the flagstones for all the skeletons of dead Alliance. This is as it should be. But Alliance should be wary and be prepared. My guild–the Holy Hammer–spent all evening conjuring up the Horseman and slaughtering him over and over, making him pay for burning our innocent hamlets.

I have not yet made the trip to South Shore to play my pranks, but I expect it will be not unlike running headfirst into a meat-grinder over and over again.

Role-playing is difficult in Azeroth. All around you’re surrounded by players actively not RPing. The chat channels are packed with Chuck Norris jokes, leet speak, epithets. Without a strong guild, roleplay is nigh impossible to find. And most guilds are focused more on raiding and endgame progressions than anything else.

That’s why when you do actually find a guild that is into RP you make note of them. And when you find a guild that does it with as much style and humor and intelligence as Silvermoon University on Twisting Nether does, well that’s when you submit an application.

Silvermoon University is a Horde-side roleplaying guild that takes on the role of an actual university. New members are termed Freshmen, while the guild leadership are faculty. They have field trips to Alliance territory or into instances. Members of the drama department write actual plays, and then perform them complete with costumes and extras.

The website though is what entirely sold me on the guild. The flawless presentation. The conceit of the University being carried through so far as to have a yearbook with quotes and trivia featuring the guildmembers. It’s pretty much perfect.

At last! Something to blog about in WoW! While <Conviction> has been keeping me busy killing Gruul & Mag and working on SSC and The Eye, I’ve felt that I was missing something in my WoW playing. I needed more cowbell Whimsy. Brewfest has brought me just that, I suspect All Hallows will do the same. Dammit, I want my cool non-combat pumpkin-headed lasher! But yeah, I am proud to say I gathered up the 600 tickets necessary to make it all happen. Check out me on my sheep! Suck it, Alliance!

Not sure if this is actually running anywhere, but this TV spot for the Toyota Tacoma created by Saatchi is surprisingly funny.

And disappointing. Here’s to hoping the next event sucks less.

Many players are unable to acquire the quests, especially “Pink Elekks On Parade.” While many other players are unable to repel the Dark Iron Dwarf attack. Sigh. Blizzard, why must you always break my orcish heart?

I completed the Wolpertinger quest and have a new ass-ugly pet, and completed the run into BRD for the off-hand stein of unlimited booze. Nice. Wish I had one of those for reals. But I’m finding the lag crushingly bad in the racing quests. It takes me a solid two minutes just to get to the Goblin with the kegs, even with pushing my poor ram all the way into the red and hitting both apple barrels.

People who want that six hundred ticket ram mount are going to need to be very lucky, persistent and have a better computer than I to get it.