Older, fewer, and not human in any useful sense
The Protoss are the third of the series’ three species and the one newcomers most often flatten into “the space elves”. They are long-lived, technologically far ahead of the Terrans, and psionic as a matter of course: thought is a sense they share rather than a private event. They do not speak aloud among themselves so much as be present to one another.
Their homeworld is Aiur, and it is not a detail. Most of what the Protoss do in the series is explained by their relationship to that one planet: they were shaped there by an ancient species that treated them as an experiment in perfection of form — the counterpart to what the same hand later attempted with the Zerg — and their entire culture is organised around not losing what was built there. [A]
Their technology shows it. Protoss structures do not get built; they are warped in, arriving whole, and they need a network of pylons to function at all — cut the power and a fortress becomes ornament. Plasma shields, psi blades, golden alloys, curves where a Terran would weld a plate. It reads as ceremonial because it is: this is a civilisation that has had a very long time to decide what things should look like. [B]
The Khala: a civil war solved by joining minds
Before anything else about Protoss politics makes sense, this does. Their history contains a period of ruinous internal war — brother killing brother across the homeworld — and the thing that ended it was not a treaty. It was the Khala: a discipline, then a permanent psionic communion, that let Protoss share emotion directly. You cannot fight a war against people whose grief you are standing inside. [A]
It worked, and it became the basis of everything: identity, law, mourning, rank. The Khala also organised society into castes, and knowing the three is enough to follow most Protoss dialogue:
- Khalai — the builders, artisans and workers who actually make the civilisation function.
- Templar — the warrior caste. The Protoss you fight, and the ones who fight for you.
- Judicator — the rulers and judges, whose governing body is the Conclave. Serene, procedural and — the series is not subtle about this — frequently wrong.
The cost arrives with the benefit. A communion everyone is inside is also a communion nobody may leave, and a society that settles disputes by shared feeling is very bad at hearing an argument from outside it. That is the pressure the whole Protoss story runs on. [A] [B]
The ones who refused: Dark Templar
Not every Protoss accepted the Khala. Some held that a mind you cannot close is a mind you do not own — and they did something irreversible about it: they severed the nerve appendages through which the communion runs. Unreachable, unjudgeable, and to the Conclave unforgivable. They were driven off Aiur and spent centuries in exile, becoming the Nerazim, whom everyone else calls the Dark Templar. [A]
Exile changed what they are good at. Where Khalai Protoss draw on the shared light of the Khala, the Nerazim learned to work with void energies, and their soldiers are famous for something no Templar can do: not being there. Cloaked, permanently.
Keep two things straight, because coverage routinely garbles both. The Dark Templar are not an evil faction — they are a schism about consent. And their separateness is the reason they can do things the rest of the Protoss cannot, which is exactly why the story keeps needing them. When the Protoss are in genuine trouble, the answer tends to come from the people they exiled. [A] [C]
What happens to Aiur, and to the Khala — contains spoilers
Collapsed on purpose: this is the ending of the original campaign and the shape of the StarCraft II trilogy.
The original game ends on Aiur, and it ends badly. The Zerg reach the homeworld, the Conclave’s certainties fail, and the answer comes from the alliance the Protoss were least willing to make — a Templar commander, Tassadar, working with the Dark Templar he was sent to arrest. The Overmind dies there. So does most of Aiur’s habitability, and the surviving Protoss flee to the Nerazim world of Shakuras through a warp gate.
The trilogy finishes the thought. Legacy of the Void reveals the Khala for what it can also be: a channel that runs through every Khalai mind at once, and therefore a channel something else can seize. Amon — a fallen member of the ancient species that made both the Protoss and the Zerg — does exactly that, and the only escape is the choice the Nerazim made centuries earlier, taken this time by an entire civilisation: they cut their nerve cords and lose the Khala to survive it. Artanis leads the retaking of Aiur, and the Protoss who get their homeworld back are not the ones who lost it. [A] [C]
It is the series’ best structural joke and its best argument: the heresy was the survival trait.
The Protoss in the announced game
What has actually been said is narrow, so here it is exactly. All three species appear. For the reveal cinematic specifically, Dan Hay says Protoss architecture is hidden in it — architecture, not characters, not units. [D]
That is worth taking seriously as a hint about the world rather than about a faction roster. Protoss structures are unmistakable and they do not decay like Terran hardware; a Protoss ruin in the background of a shot is a piece of set dressing that tells you the three-way history of this sector is physically present in the landscape rather than confined to a briefing screen. That reading is ours, and it is a reading — the interview says what it says and no more.
Nothing has been announced about playing as a Protoss, meeting one, or fighting one. And the 70-year gap after Legacy of the Void applies here more sharply than anywhere else: the Protoss finished that trilogy in the middle of the largest change to their civilisation in its history. [D] Which of the arrangements described on this page still stands is exactly the sort of question the new game gets to answer.
If you want the earlier story in the right order, our campaign timeline lays it out with the spoilers boxed off.
Change history
- First published version. The castes and the Dark Templar schism are explained as one story about consent rather than as a faction list, and the developer statement about Protoss architecture in the cinematic is separated from our reading of it.
Read and released by a named editor before publication. This page describes the released games of the series. Where it touches the announced game, the statement it rests on is attributed and dated; nothing here is an account of firsthand play of the unreleased game.