Act 1: City of the Dead is the opening chapter of the main campaign in Warcraft III Reforged: Forsaken Kingdom, and it does most of the heavy lifting for the expansion’s setup. It reintroduces Garek Bandarion after the prologue, brings him into the Forsaken as an undead, and spends the rest of its runtime building out the Undercity through a string of small, character-driven tasks. The act closes on a memory hook that reframes everything that came before it.
Quick answer: Act 1 covers Garek’s resurrection beneath Lordaeron, his induction by Anya and Sylvanas, a run of Undercity errands, and ends with him finding a holy book written by Uther the Lightbringer.
Where Act 1 starts: Garek’s resurrection under Lordaeron
The act opens in a crypt. Garek Bandarion wakes up scarred and disoriented while Grand Apothecary Putress and Anya stand over him debating what to do with him. He can recall his own name, but nothing about the life he had before he died, which is the thread the entire act pulls on.
Anya helps him to his feet, hands him a sword, and formally welcomes him into the Forsaken. A camera flyby then shows off the Undercity itself, with its vaulted underground architecture and the green canals of toxic runoff cutting through it.
From there, Anya walks Garek to Lady Sylvanas Windrunner. The Banshee Queen welcomes him personally, then addresses the assembled Forsaken with a speech about survival in a world that wants them gone. Shortly after, the two head to the rain-soaked surface ruins of Lordaeron, where they run into a grieving banshee named Marya.
Act 1 cutscene timeline: City of the Dead
Timestamps line up with a straight run through the act’s cutscenes, including the optional content. Skipping side quests will shift the later markers earlier.
The Undercity work orders: Putress, Keever, Bernd, and Glix
The bulk of Act 1 is Anya and Garek running jobs for the people rebuilding the city. It reads less like a war campaign and more like a settlement getting itself organized, one problem at a time.
Putress and the missing reagents
Putress asks the pair to collect reagents for his research. That sends them to a surface camp, where Apothecary Faranell and Melisara explain that supplies have gone missing along with an undead named Gordo.
Glix and the stolen goblin stock
Glix, a goblin engineer, has had his inventory taken by gnolls. He offers half of it to whoever gets it back. Anya and Garek return the crates, and the payoff is a standing delivery of engineering goods to the Undercity.
Keever’s abomination and the ghoul question
Keever the stitcher needs replacement body parts, since his last set walked off on its own. Once Garek delivers, Keever immediately starts assembling a very large abomination. Later in the act he sends the pair out again to capture ghouls that have been behaving oddly, and confirms afterward that the captured ones show signs of intelligence.
Bernd’s quarry and Edric in the sewers
Bernd, an undead mason, wants ogres cleared out of a nearby quarry so he can pull stone for construction. Down in the sewers, Anya and Garek find Edric, who has lost his only working eye and cannot get himself out.
Sylvanas’s plague order and Varimathras’s arrival
Two beats push the act back toward open conflict. Sylvanas tasks Anya and Garek with poisoning the Undercity’s water supply with plague, specifically to keep living intruders out of the canals. It is a defensive measure framed in the bluntest possible terms.
Then, during a fight against Scourge forces, the dreadlord Varimathras drops in, tears apart an enemy abomination, and orders Garek to finish off what is left of the invasion. It is the act’s clearest reminder that the Forsaken are fighting on more than one front.
Optional quests in Act 1: Widow’s Lair, the vault, and the kart race
Three optional detours sit alongside the main thread, and each one closes with a clear confirmation so you know it registered.
- Widow’s Lair — kill the giant spider to complete the quest and loot the Webweaver’s Gloves.
- Ghoul sentience — bring back the odd-acting ghouls, including one found fishing in a river; Keever confirms the intelligence result.
- Lexingron’s vault — enter the arcane vault in the ruins of Capital City and retrieve the artifact.
- Glix’s racing league — drive a steam-powered kart through a time trial for the Mechanical Engineering Guild.
The vault is not a normal dungeon. It is a pocket dimension, and getting to the artifact means working through portals and guardian constructs rather than a single fight.
The race is played for comedy. Glix only recruits Garek because his previous driver blew up, and the run itself starts with a crash straight into a tree before the time trial is completed.
How Act 1 ends: the Scarlet Crusade cathedral and Uther’s holy book
The tone shifts hard in the final stretch. A cutscene shows Scarlet Crusade soldiers capturing an undead stonemason and executing him, over the objections of Brother Damien, who argues that at least some of the undead might still be saved. It is the act’s first real crack in the Crusade’s certainty.
Anya and Garek find the body and decide to move on the Crusade’s base in the cathedral ruins. The front gate is too heavily guarded, so Garek proposes going in from the side instead.
Inside the captured cathedral, Garek finds a holy book written by Uther the Lightbringer. Reading it sets off fragmented memories of his life before death and his old connection to the Holy Light, which is where Act 1 leaves him.
That memory trigger pays off directly on the prologue campaign, where Garek served under Captain Landen and later fought alongside Uther’s forces at Andorhal. Playing “The Last Days of Lordaeron” first makes the cathedral scene land considerably harder.
Taken together, Act 1 is less about combat than about establishing what the Forsaken are trying to build and what Garek has lost. The errands for Putress, Keever, Bernd, and Glix are the foundation work, Varimathras and Sylvanas set the political stakes, and Uther’s book is the hook the rest of the campaign hangs on.
