How to justify Alliance and Horde characters in the same party? [closed]

Question

How could someone creating an adventure justify characters from two opposing factions cooperating? In this specific instance we are playing a Warcraft homebrew, so the factions would be Alliance and Horde. And while a Warcraft example is preferred a more generic answer is of course welcome as well.

Preferably the justification would give the characters reason to continue cooperating outside of having a common goal.

To expand on the question the characters are generic characters. They are not directly affiliated to their faction other than their race happens to belong to that specific faction. The characters have no specific goal in the adventure and I don't want to restrict them by saying "you're together because you're on a quest to kill X" since this gives them no reason to cooperate outside of killing X.

Answer 1

In Warcraft III, the delineation between the races was not as strong as it was in World of Warcraft. I personally found that more interesting (I was disappointed that after Warcraft III finally injected some shades of gray into the series, World of Warcraft went right back to Orcs & Humans). I therefore suggest that your campaign world not be as black-and-white, Alliance-and-Horde, as World of Warcraft often seems to be.

In particular, in Warcraft III, Jaina Proudmoore left Lordaeron for Kalimdor, where she ended up allying herself with both the Horde and the night elves, who fought together against the Burning Legion. Notably, prior to World of Warcraft, Jaina’s splinter group were the only members of the Alliance races that the night elves had interacted with in any significant capacity, while the Horde had stood with them to pretect the World Tree—their joining the Alliance always struck me as very odd in light of that situation.

Characters of Alliance races could therefore be from her group, and World of Warcraft’s handling of that band could be revised to have them be a group of humans, dwarves, and high elves (or blood elves, though they left Lordaeron before that change occurred) that were with, or even members of, the Horde. The night elves also had more significant ties to the Horde than the Alliance at the end of The Frozen Throne. That would allow Alliance races who are actually allied with the Horde.

Answer 2

There are many different ways to handle it, especially in Warcraft. Inter-faction team-ups happen fairly often in the later lore, and those are a good basis to having a party made up from different races. They fought together, one saved the life of the other etc. There are a lot of possibilities of making the characters susceptible to mixed party. It might work best if only two characters have a connection like this, because than you can have those problems within the team, which are always nice roleplaying opportunities. So basically choose two people from different factions who have a strong prior connection, and use them to keep the party together in the beginning.

You could play with their enemies being the only familiar thing around, if the game is set in some exotic location. They might dislike each other, but in a foreign place having anything/anybody recognizable could be a breath of fresh air. Getting away from said foreign location (and the locals) could also serve as a basis for the adventure.

Th characters are individuals and their views might differ from the majority's. They could simply not care about the species of the other, because they spent their childhood next to orcs/humans, they were prisoners of war and treated right, are jaded cynics or young idealists. Simple solution, though not very elegant.

I know you said "something else than a common goal", but usually that is the best way to begin something like this. Everything else that keeps a party together, like friendship, reliance on the others or sheer inertia can come with time, but the first steps are the hardest, so you should make sure that they work. Get a third party, maybe a goblin cartel to employ them on a longer quest. Use enemies that attack them both, so survival keeps them together. Sometimes there is no graceful or elegant in-character solutions to problems that come from out-of-character decisions of the players (like playing together with characters from different sides of a war).

Answer 3

Well, to get the party together there will always be some kind of common goal, most notably

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

In case the characters of both parties can understand each other, there is always the chance of them realizing their factions mistake in judgement. This is commonly used as a trope in many stories regardless of genre.

Some kind of terrible hardship, like a difficult battle or war, natural disasters and similar happenings, can bring people of completely opposing world views together, if they survived by working together for a longer time.

Still, if the characters have burning hate for members of the other faction, as it is sometimes portrayed, probably neither of the solutions I posted would work outside of common goals (and even that may be difficult).