World of Ponycraft
"The world heaves with my -"
Why was it so hard to hate (and thus squash) these damn ponies? Especially when they wavered between adorable and annoying? Curse the Titans for sticking the dragonflights with such a stupid weakness.
"Hey! Hey! Over here! HEY! Neltharion!"
"...The world heaves with -"
"Neltharion the Earth-Warder! Don't pretend you can't hear me! Hey-y-y-y!"
"-with my torment... and...d"
Pausing mid-monologue, the vast black leviathan that PREFERRED to be called 'Deathwing' these days paused.
I know that voice...
Slowly turning to his left, burning eyes zeroed in on a tiny, black, flying -
[Oh, great. It was a -]
[...pony.]
...—Pretty much what would you expect from ponies.
World Of Ponycraft by Cap'n Chryssalid is the recently finished (as of 07-29-11) telling the story of Azeroth. Specifically when the Dragon Aspect Deathwing the Destroyer awakened after his eons long sleep, his damaged body finally reconstructed from being near torn apart after the Titanic fight between the Dragon Aspects. Bringing with him a wave of destruction of apocalyptic levels, sundering the world again, killing untold millions and undoing the most ancient and powerful spells on the planet.
Woes for him, he succeded to the point of removing even his own millenary spell, which he managed to contain the pony race. Now free (forced) to join the races of Azeroth, the powerful but kind equine race must adapt to a new world, new races and new loot right at their hoofs.
Also, it is not a Crossover with the World of Warcraft the world. It's a crossover with the World of Warcraft the MMORPG.
- Acceptable Breaks From Reality: Between the intersection of surprisingly emotionally charged storytelling and standard MMO mechanics that completely screw with it, and the fact that both sides of the crossover are rather known for their warped senses of humor, expect to be ready to nod and go along with it a few times a chapter. By the time you get around to the reveal that Celestia and Luna have alts in the Cutie Mark Crusaders guild you'll probably be game to just roll with the loony.
- Adventurer Archaeologist: Twilight Sparkle.
- Affectionate Parody: Of role playing gaming and self insert fic. Probably.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: Changing races is casually done to the shock of Twilight. One way to know if a pony had always been a pony is if they use more their hoof or their mouth.
- Exclusively Evil: Those who had been touched by The Elder Gods can't be redeemed. The only solution is to kill them before they hurt anybody else.
- Amazon Brigade: The mane cast.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes
- Badass Adorable
- Badass Bookworm: Twilight Sparkle and lesser extent Rarity Voidhorn, A.K.A Night Sky is a fallen version of this.
- Baleful Polymorph: This had become fast Twilight favorite spell or at least the most used.
- Beleaguered Assistant: Morning Star. Most of the Royal ponies, who had gone from defenders of the realms to Mr. Exposition / quest givers to Dungeon Crawlers. They are not amused.
- Boom Town: Ponyville had become this barely a couple of months after Neltharion.
- Call Back: Rocky from Party Of One became the totem for Pinky Elemental of Earth. He is nicer than his original version too.
- Curb Stomp Battle: Twilight decided to fight Trixie to shut her up. Trixie had actually been adventuring and taking levels while Twilight had passed her time studying archeology. The results were not pretty.
- Dark Is Not Evil: Rarity's powers.
- Death Is Cheap: The cheapest, it is based on World of Warcraft after all. In the prologue Deathwing wipes out Ponyville (except Rainbow Dash, who was flying overhead) and Princess Celestia resurrects them all (except Applejack who was rezzed by a passing Dwarf with jumper cables). Later, during one of the first boss battles, Rainbow Dash is killed and almost immediately rezzed by Fluttershy. And in the second to last chapter the entire party is killed
- Deep-Immersion Gaming: Played with. The world function exactly as the MMORPG, down to the levels, quest, forums, bosses and loot. It's better if you'd don't think too deeply about this.
- Druid: Fluttershy.
- Elite Mooks: Blood Driver, Catnip and Sniffles and Gull act like this for the Cult, each with different level of power.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Elder Gods, whom had infested the ranks of the Cult and where the ones who created Nightmare Moon in the first place.
- Expy: As explained by Twilight
The knights of Luna was led by a murderous, undead version of a gender swapped Pinkie Pie.
Giddy App the Insane
Knights of Luna
His Title was The Insane.
That probably wasn't a good thing.
- Fluffy the Terrible: Catnip and Sniffles. A mad sociopathic pony and her slaved tortured manticore.
- It Gets Easier: Killing and fighting had become second Nature for the mane cast around half of the story... against another ponies.
- Weirdly, could also be said for dying. Dash and Pinkie are big PvP'ers and die all the time, and Applejack's warrior trainer specifically warns her ahead of time that as a tank, dying isn't a matter of "if" so much as "how often". When a Total Party Kill happens and everyone's in various degrees of freaking out due to being dead, the three of them take it in mild irritation, embarrassment at having caused the wipe, and admirable stride respectively.
- Kill'Em All: The prologue. Deathwing torches most of Ponyville, who then have to be Mass Resurrected by the princesses. (Except for Dash, who was flying too high to be caught in it. She then grouses that she missed the achievement.) Taken lightly at first, but the various flashbacks to the Cataclysm give rather sobering accounts of the fact that, yes, everypony really did get violently burned to death. Worse still, Sweet Apple Acres was outside the Mass Resurrection radius -- were it not for her family being in town for chance reasons and a surly drunken dwarf with "nipple clamps" passing by the farm as a first responder, none of them would have gotten back up.
- Lampshade Hanging: The story is made of this trope.
- Leeroy Jenkins: Rainbow Dash, at one point she runs in screaming "Raaaiiinnnbooowww Daaaaassshhhh"
- Obfuscating Stupidity: MLP fans will already be familiar with Pinkie's tendency to know more than she lets on, but suffice to say that's the tip of the iceberg. Throughout the dungeon crawl she completely takes Twilight off guard as a perceptive and devious teammate, going as far as to engineer the circumstances of her own death during a bad pull (granted that she caused by accident) so she'll be in a better position to pull everyone back up after the wipe.
- Only Sane Mare: Twilight in a rather specific way: she is the last to adapt to the fact that she is now essentially a MMORPG character. Especially the jargon of Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash has her confused.
- Praetorian Guard: One of the subplots is Luna acquiring her own Royal Guard.
- Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: In the prologue Ponyville is wiped out by Deathwing, fortunately Celestia is there with a mass resurrection.
- Shout-Out: Numerous, and almost all of them done by Pinkie Pie.
- Sure Why Not: At the conclusion of the story, the Manes get an achievement for completing the dungeon, but the author accidentally forgot to show Dash getting it too. When this was brought to the author's attention, he added an epilogue where Dash petitions a GM for it.
- Worth It: WOW tanks know very well that their job is to take hits so their teammates don't have to, but it's very easy to abstract everything into your health bar and not think about that. This story pulls absolutely no punches in detailing that Applejack (and Dash when necessary) are getting skin burned off with magic, swarmed by venomous flesh-eating insects, ribs smashed and limbs dislocated several times in the space of a minute, impaled a few times, and generally getting the ever-loving horseapples beaten out of them. Continually. And yet...
Applejack: "I took a beatin' to high heaven, but Ah gotta say, it was worth every minute ta know every blow Ah took was one my friends didn't have'tah."
- Dash complains a bit about it, but her reluctance to tank is zero parts "oh no, pain!" and all parts "I'd rather be hitting things."