In the Terran campaign of StarCraft 1, we start out as Jim Raynor’s blue Mar Sara militia of Terrans (characters occasionally talk to the player character as though they’re a real person, but you also usually have one protagonist character whose perspective you follow for the entire campaign, and for the Terrans it’s Jim) fending off the orange Garm Brood of Zerg. This campaign is spent almost entirely fighting other Terran factions and the plot keeps good track of who is where. After joining the Sons of Korhal to escape the Garm Brood, our units turn red, we recruit the purple Antiga militia to the cause and fight the white Alpha Squadron before recruiting them, too.
We convince Alpha Squadron to defect by saving them from the Garm Brood and the new blue Surtur Brood, but having no insight into how different Zerg broods even work, that’s no surprise, we can assume there is a second Zerg brood around for any number of reasons. In the next few missions we fight the orange Delta Squadron and brown Omega Squadron, still loyal to the Confederacy, before the ninth mission where we use the Confederates’ own tech against their capital world to summon the purple Zerg Jormungand brood to attack them, then have to protect Jormungand from the blue Protoss Sargas Tribe.
The Korhal officer in charge of the mission, Lieutenant Sarah Kerrigan, is abandoned after the Sargas Tribe are defeated and the Jormungand Brood begins an overwhelming attack, which convinces Jim Raynor to defect, turning back to blue Mar Sara militia and fighting against both the red Sons of Korhal and the white Alpha Squadron on the way out.
If any of that seems confusing, I promise it’s because I recapped ten missions in three paragraphs with an emphasis on proper nouns because they’ll be important later. It’s all very straightforward in play.
But then the Zerg campaign starts, and now we’re playing as the Jormungand Brood from the moment of its creation. The premise of the first mission briefing is that you are a freshly spawned cerebrate just now coming to exist and command the Jormungand Brood. You’re on Tarsonis, the Confederate capital that was getting wrecked in Terran mission 9, so you might think this mission takes place between Terran 8, when the Zerg are summoned, and Terran 9, when the Jormungand Brood has a fully developed base that Kerrigan is tasked with defending from the Sargas Tribe. But, no, you’ve already got the chrysalis that will eventually hatch into infested Kerrigan – you and your brood were created specifically to protect her while she’s being infested. Maybe the old purple Zerg got destroyed in the assault and now you’re being created to replace them? But destroying a cerebrate requires a dark templar, that’s a whole plot point later on. So are the dark templar on Tarsonis? That would actually make a certain amount of sense, since the Sargas Tribe met them at some point between now and Zerg 8, but in Zerg 7, everyone is super freaked out that a cerebrate has been killed. If it had happened on Tarsonis, you’d think they’d bring it up.
And the only reason any of this gets brought up is because Terran 9, a mission with 3 teams, used purple for the Zerg brood. There are 8 team colors in StarCraft, so even with the player locked into red and the Protoss being locked into blue, there were six options for what to do with the Zerg. The orange Garm Brood seems to be the main ones in charge of wrecking Terran space, since they show up on both Mar Sara and Antiga Prime. The brown Grendel Brood, white Baelrog Brood, and yellow Leviathan Brood are totally unaccounted for. The timing of the Baelrog Brood’s appearance as an enemy does suggest they were created specifically for the attack on Aiur much later, but even that is speculative, they might’ve just been doing something else before the swarm was assembled for the attack. The purple Jormungand Brood is the only Zerg brood that we know can’t be here.
The team colors stay pretty straightforward through most of the rest of the Zerg campaign. It helps that a lot of them are Terran sub-factions, so if Jim Raynor’s Mar Sara militia showed up in Alpha Squadron white, it would suggest that he’s joined or infiltrated Alpha Squadron or something. Not that this stopped them with Jormungand Brood, but they seem to have it figured out for Terrans, at least. In Zerg 2, we fight some Protoss in orbit around Tarsonis, and they’re still Sargas Tribe blue, so apparently Tassadar’s fleet has regrouped. Infested Kerrigan psionically reaches out to both Mengsk and Raynor to rescue her, and they bring Alpha Squadron white and Mar Sara blue. When we encounter Tassadar again after Kerrigan hatches and goes full Zerg, he’s still wearing Sargas Tribe blue.
We also encounter the teal Protoss Akilae Tribe. This is in the mission where we’re hunting down the dark templar, who Tassadar is now in cahoots with, so you might think the Akilae Tribe are a (or the) dark templar tribe, but the dark templar themselves are all wearing Sargas blue, so I guess not? It’s not really clear how many tribes are in Tassadar’s fleet. He’s always had Sargas blue up until now, and Saragas blue appears here with the Akilae, so maybe both tribes are meant to represent his fleet from Aiur, rather than the Akilae representing the dark templar tribe, since the actual dark templar units are blue in this mission. It would’ve made sense for the teal Akilae Tribe to be the dark templar, since in StarCraft 1 the dark templar are hero units only and teal is the color used for most hero units (Jim Raynor, Tassadar, and leader of Alpha Squadron General Duke all show up in teal to distinguish them from ordinary units, who they otherwise look identical to).
But then in Zerg 9 we encounter the Akilae Tribe again, defending the Protoss homeworld of Aiur. The dark templar were exiled from this place yonks ago and won’t be back until the events of the Protoss campaign, which all occur after the Zerg invasion begins. We don’t know for sure that Zerg 9 is the very first battle of the Zerg invasion, so it’s technically possible that large chunks of the Protoss campaign take place between Zerg 8 and Zerg 9, but for the dark templar to be here in force means that at minimum Protoss missions 1 through 6 have to be between Zerg 8, when the Zerg leave Char, and Zerg 9, the first mission where you’re attacking Aiur as the Zerg. The strong implication is that Protoss 1 is either right after or coterminous with Zerg 9 and 10.
It’s not hard to imagine that the Akilae Tribe is split, with some of them being part of Tassadar’s fleet while others stayed behind on Aiur. It’s also possible that the tribes are intermixed to the point where tribal differences mean nothing – Tassadar’s membership in the Sargas Tribe is never a plot point or even confirmed in dialogue, it’s just the team name associated with the color he uses (when he shows up as an enemy – when he’s on your side, he wears hero unit teal). But why scramble the teams this way? The Protoss only have a handful of sub-factions to keep track of, much less than the eight colors the game provides, so it’s not like they were running out. The Akilae Tribe here are joined by the yellow Velari Tribe and the orange Auriga Tribe, the player is the purple Jormungand Brood, and blue and teal are associated with Tassadar and the dark templar, so that’s five colors that are either already in use on this map or associated with Tassadar. That still leaves red, white, and brown to use instead of the Akilae Tribe. In fact, we see the red Ara Tribe in Zerg 10 – why not use those along with Auriga and Velari and leave the Akilae with Tassadar? It’s not like it’s harder to assign one color instead of another.
You play as the yellow Velari Tribe in the Protoss campaign. Much the opposite of the Jormungand Brood cerebrate, the player executor of the Velari Tribe is explicitly not a brand new creation, but has previous experience with Fenix, who we meet in the first mission. Fenix is hero teal, so not clear what tribe he’s in, although Velari Tribe is a good guess since he fights with us so often. Since we saw the Velari Tribe in Zerg 9 and Zerg 10, this suggests the player executor has fought the Zerg a couple of times right before the player took control, and that they lost at least a bit, although in both Zerg 9 and Zerg 10 it is not required to defeat all enemies, only to defend (in Zerg 9) or destroy (in Zerg 10) a specific spot. I wish they’d have emphasized this by putting the yellow Velari Tribe in the rearmost positions, those least likely to be destroyed unless the Zerg player is completely clearing the map, to help maintain the feel that the Velari Tribe is fighting ongoing battles with the Zerg as we take control of them in the Protoss campaign. As it is, you pretty much have to kick the Velari Tribe’s ass twice in order to complete the last two Zerg missions.
Still, when you get control of the Velari Tribe you’re in the same place you last saw them and playing as someone who’s been around for a while, so it’s not weird that they’re still here. In fact, I wonder if there was originally an idea that you first encounter the future player in the last mission or two of a campaign? The order of campaigns is Terran->Zerg->Protoss and we first see the Jormungand Brood in Terran 9 and the Velari Tribe in Zerg 9. Fighting against a character right before playing as them is a fun idea, but the mission briefing in Zerg 1 is super clear that this isn’t what’s actually going on in the game they shipped.
After blunting the Zerg invasion of Aiur, the Protoss Conclave sends you to Char to arrest your wayward predecessor Tassadar. You switch sides to him pretty much as soon as you meet him, which is good, because we’re late enough in the game’s plot at this point that it’s clear Tassadar is the good guys and having the player character be obstinate about that, while realistic (they’re hearing this for the first time), would be dragging things out. But also Tassadar and Jim Raynor have teamed up, which is kinda neat because Tassadar’s Sargas Tribe blue matches Jim Raynor’s Mar Sara blue.
Then you go down to the surface of Char to rescue Zeratul and things immediately go to shit. In Protoss 5 you’re fighting two Zerg AI and one Terran AI. The Terran AI is Alpha Squadron in their usual white and are largely a sideshow, as far as I can tell they’re only there to make it look like the plot on Char didn’t stop happening just because the player looked away, which is good. The first Zerg brood is Jormungand Brood, which makes sense, they’re the brood most closely associated with Kerrigan, who is the one who stayed behind to hunt down the dark templar while the rest of the Zerg swarm attacked Aiur.
The second brood is fucking Garm Brood. This is less egregious than Jormungand showing up in Terran 9, but only slightly. At least this time there’s no reason to think that the Overmind didn’t spawn a new cerebrate and restart Garm Brood after Zeratul killed the cerebrate back in Zerg 6 and then Jormungand cleaned out the renegade Garm Brood’s primary hive cluster in Zerg 7. It’s also possible that this is meant to depict a four-way battle between Jormungand Brood, the renegade remnants of Garm Brood, Alpha Squadron, and the player’s Velari Tribe. There’s not anything to support that, but unlike Jormungand in Terran 9, at least it isn’t ruled out as a possibility.
Now, the way SC1 AI works does necessitate a second Zerg player here, because the frequency of attacks is tracked separately. Two Zerg attack twice as often as one Zerg with the combined resources of both. So we do need a second brood besides Jormungand here. But also, we’ve got plenty of spare broods to go around here, so using the one brood that’s supposed to be dead is completely unnecessary. Yellow is taken up by the player’s Velari Tribe Protoss, teal is used for the hero unit Tassadar, white is taken by Alpha Squadron, purple is taken by Jormungand Brood and orange is the dead Garm Brood. That still leaves the red Tiamat Brood, blue Surtur Brood, and brown Grendel Brood. We just saw the red Tiamat Brood in the same area in Protoss 4, so that one would’ve made perfect sense, especially since the Tiamat Brood was your closest ally back in the Zerg campaign playing as the Jormungand Brood. Surtur has barely seen any use and could be pretty much anywhere, and Grendel Brood has never been used and could be literally anywhere. Grendel does show up in Protoss 9, but not in a way that affects how it could be used in any context prior to that mission (you kill the cerebrates for both Grendel and Baelrog Broods in Protoss 9, though, which suggests those guys won’t be showing up again – especially since you kill the Overmind in Protoss 10, and as far as we know he’s the only one who can create new cerebrates).
The rest of the game is pretty well handled, the red Protoss Ara Tribe, orange Protoss Auriga Tribe, and purple Protoss Furinax Tribe are used as Conclave loyalists during the Protoss Civil War missions, the only time we’ve seen these guys before is when Ara Tribe and Auriga Tribe were joining Velari Tribe to defend Aiur in Zerg 9 and 10, so that checks out (Furinax has never come up before, so they can do whatever). In Protoss 9 we fight Tiamat Brood, Baelrog Brood, and Grendel Brood. Not clear when Grendel Brood got here but it’s their first appearance so that’s fine, and Tiamat and Baelrog have been the main forces on Char for the entire Protoss campaign. Then in Protoss 10 Tiamat Brood has a few small bases mainly focused on attack surrounding the defensive-focused Jormungand Brood protecting the Overmind. Back in Zerg 10 we cleared the way for the Overmind to plant itself on Aiur, so it’s cool to see Jormungand Brood retains its position as the Overmind’s elite personal guard on Aiur, while the Tiamat Brood remains Jormungand’s closest ally.
In the Terran campaign, they change your team color from Mar Sara blue to Korhal red to indicate a change in allegiance, and have unique team colors for even minor factions like the Antiga militia that shows up in exactly one mission. They could’ve had blue be the player color through all three campaigns, recycle colors for minor sub-factions (for example, use brown for both the Antiga militia and the Confederate Omega Squadron confronted at Tarsonis), and thus signal that team colors don’t really mean anything, their only purpose is to differentiate teams from each other on a specific map.
But instead, they spent the first campaign repeatedly reinforcing that each team color corresponds with a specific sub-faction in the game, that changing sub-factions comes with an accompanying palette swap in future missions, and therefore looking at an enemy’s team color will tell you exactly which sub-faction that enemy is a part of – if you see blue, it means Mar Sara militia, if you see red, it means Sons of Korhal. And then in the Zerg and Protoss campaigns, they just kinda stop paying attention. It’s not like this would be hard to fix: Swap out purple Jormungand Brood in Terran 9 for orange Garm Brood. Swap out teal Akilae Tribe in Zerg 9 for the red Ara Tribe or, if you want to keep the implication that the Ara Tribe are only found at the very core of Protoss holy territory, for the otherwise unused white Shelak Tribe. At that level of consistency it’s plausible that Garm Brood in Protoss 5 is intentionally a remnant of the old brood still rampaging on Char, but you can swap it out for red Tiamat Brood just to tie up all the loose ends.
You can tell how much I like the game, though, because when I sit down to wring a blogpost out of it, these puny nitpicks are all that hold my attention. Maybe I should learn how to talk about liking stuff.
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