The Burning Legion VS Modern Day Earth

[SpaceMarine93]

As it turned out, apparently after finishing Warcraft II, Blizzard considered doing a sequel which involves the Orcs invading MODERN DAY EARTH. For obvious reasons, they decided instead to work on something else. But it gives me an idea.

Let's imagine Sargeras or Kil'jaeden, while using magic to probe the next world to invade, accidentally punched a hole through the space-time continuum and found our Earth in a different universe to their own, with Humans like the ones on Azeroth living on it. Upon closer examination, they discovered that Earth Humans are somehow play an indirect but key role in the creation of the Warcraft universe due to some weird cosmic phenomena that allows what we imagine (specifically, the Humans working in Blizzard) to manifest in their universe, as well as influencing some of the events that occur, such as the defeat of the Burning Legion on Azeroth, which seemed logically impossible given the circumstances.

Royally outraged by this revelation, the Burning Legion drops their next plan to attack Azeroth and decides to invade Earth and raze it to ashes. They enlarge the hole enough to allow a massive army in, culminating in the opening of portals all over Irvine, California where the Blizzard headquarters is.

Infernals, doomguards and demons of various kinds begin to pour through the portals, slaughtering and destroying everything in their path. Within a day Irvine is in ruins, and the Burning Legion establishes a beachhead. Widespread panic spreads throughout the globe as dozens or more portals begin to form over California as well as a few ones in parts of Europe, Asia, Africa and the rest of the Americas. Realizing the magnitude of the threat, all nations on Earth unite to combat the invasion, and mobilizes. The war between fantasy and reality is on.

Bonus: With all likelyhood, the laws of physics on Earth prevents magic above a certain level from being able to conjure on Earth, thus preventing the Legion's powerful leaders from actually entering the conflict, renders most high power magical spells useless and partially weakens the troops. Nevertheless the Legion can still operate, and are still able to use some medium to low level spells and magic.

Additional bonus: The factions on Azeroth might (or might not) realize what's happening and decides to send aid in form of an expeditionary force composed primarily of magic users to help. However due to lack of resources they could send significantly less than that of the Legion. Nevertheless modern day Earth would get some magic that could be used against the Legion.

(Adding bonus or not is up to reader)

So, who might emerge victorious?

[SpaceMarine93]

What? Is this too silly to discuss?

[Batman]

I seriously doubt the topic too silly to discuss here has yet been created. However, this is a web forum, not a chat room. Four and a half hours isn't exactly all that long you know.

So do we have anything on the capabilities of the Burning Legion outside game mechanics? Because those are notoriously useless for determining capabilities in real world terms. (Note that I'm not saying such information doesn't exist-I simply do not know either way).

[Serafina]

Well there are the War of the Ancients-novels. The Burning legion is basically a large army of big demons who fight mostly in melee - obviously they would get slaughtered by a modern army. Their spellcasters are more dangerous, but they suffer from limited range compared to modern artillery (and the OP disallows them anyway).
The Burning Legion would only have two things speaking for them: Large numbers and their leaders - assuming that you need powerful magic to harm the latter, which is quite an iffy issue (because it relies on game mechanics). The former can be handled quite well by modern armies, the latter is not allowed in this scenario.

Earth winds hands-down after we get our act together.

[fgalkin]

"Balls!" Said Lieutenant Mike Wong.

Yeah, it's going to be a Bart Blade-style slaughter.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[PainRack]

This was done back on SB and there was some attempts to quantify.. along with wankify the Burning Legion.


IIRC, the consensus was that barring uber armour(which some people attempted to argue for), a field army will defeat the Burning Legion field force. However, if there are too many portals or terrain issue, the Burning Legion could do significant damage due to logistics chain. Which might be an issue here.

[1911A1 Cowboy]

One outcome could be that nature itself decides magic is unclean and it has to purged from the Earth. Imagine Joplin-sized tornados slaughtering legions of fantasy warriors. America's gun culture would be a significant plus, as would be the fact our police forces are armed. And of course, tanks and other techno-toys would do max damage to a primitive army.

Another possibility that the Legion sends agents to acquire modern weaponry and other useful technologies, which they use to attack other worlds. Think of the Legion visualizing Earth as a giant Walmart of weaponry. They could trade raw materials for what they wanted, to; who here wants $0.75/gallon gas?

[Guardsman Bass]

Without the higher-level demons and magic, the demons will eventually get slaughtered after the initial chaos*. From what I remember of the Richard Knaak Warcraft trilogy, demons were getting killed in battle by melee weapons (such as swords). Modern weaponry would make short work of them, particularly artillery.

* I would compare it to Slade's two stories, but his demons were actually much tougher than the demons in Warcraft outside game mechanics.

[Imperial528]

Really, the only threat Infernals or Doom Guards would pose would be that of terrorizing and wrecking civilian populace. Once you get to the point where you can bring man-portable anti-tank weapons for the infernals and enough bullets for the doom guards to bear it will be an even mach up. On the scale of major engagements, modern military forces will simply slaughter the demons, especially the fleshy ones. Fel hounds and such don't really enter the equation, because they're at best large animals who are most threatening to magic users, but then there aren't any magic users in modern armies (duh), so they will be meat shields, or more likely, cannon fodder.

The entire point of the low-level demons in WarCraft is to serve as an expeditionary force until the point where high-level demons such as Archimonde, Sargeras, or Mannoroth can show up. After that point the low-level demons are really just there to act as force distribution so the puny mortals can't ever get enough people or magical tricks in one place to actually harm the greater demons.

The most damaging part will only be the initial wave, where doom guards start appearing in the middle of places and infernals rain from the sky. But, since there won't be any follow up, the demons will simply fail and give up. Unless of course you really want to argue that the armor of infernals (divine armor in some cases, usually they just have heavy) will make them immune to modern weapons. If it even works against modern weapons, all it will do is just make them slightly harder to kill, because them being rock and all they're unlikely to survive things like explosives or anti-tank weapons.

Besides, even if things start going badly the people at Blizzard could, in theory, write a quick short story where the Titans get wind of this and decide to help. Que instant legion death.

Also SM93, you do realize that Sargeras was dead/a spirit at this point, yes?