Editing Eberron (section)

==History==
[[File:Khorvaire.jpg|400px|thumb|right|Welcome to Khorvaire, land of awesome.]]
===Age of Dragons===
Basically, in the dawn of time, there were three great progenitor dragons: Siberys (good and/or celestial), Eberron (neutral and/or natural), and Khyber (evil and/or fiendish).  They either created or discovered the Prophecy, which is a cosmic force that seems to equate to destiny and fate.  The dragons fought over the Prophecy, which shattered both it and the world.  Siberys was broken into a thousand pieces in orbit around the world, Khyber was bound into the depths of the Underdark, and Eberron merged with the physical world to heal it.  In the process of this, each of the dragons basically materialized as crystalline fragments that are harvested and used to empower certain magic items and effects.

From their godlike positions in the cosmos, they also create living beings.  Siberys creates the dragon races, which includes the couatls.  Eberron creates most of the bulk of the other beings - beasts, humanoids, etc.  Khyber creates fiends, most notably the rakshasas.

===Age of Demons===
The fiends basically overrun the world about 10 million years back and create a "Hell on Earth" where they keep dragons and other beings subjugated.  After about [[Grimdark|8 million years]], the dragons finally rediscover the Prophecy, which gives them the drive to resist the fiends.  The other common races basically cower at the magical armageddon happening.  In a truly legendary effort, the couatls use powerful magic to permanently bind the most powerful demon lords and other fiends down to Khyber, trapped by the crystalline fragments of that ancient dragon.  The dragons mourn the loss of their allies, and withdraw to Argonnessen to contemplate the mysteries of the Prophecy, leaving the world open to everyone else.

===Age of Giants===
With the dragons and fiends both gone, the giant races of the continent called Xen'drik rise up and start establishing their own civilization.  This is a pretty crazy time of the world, lasting for 40,000 years or so, with the giants creating this vast empire where they enslave elves (and created the drow to hunt down escaped slaves - technically they created all elves from eladrin according to 4th edition but nobody liked that feywild bullshit so it's back to just them creating the drow).  The giants previously learned magic at the feet (claws?) of the dragons, and pass some of that knowledge down to the elves/drow so they can do the busy-work of spellcasting, but they hold back some of the big magic so the elves can't get strong enough to free themselves.

Things are great for a while, and the giants create some amazing shit, including new types of magic items (schema) and even new kinds of magic (artifact spells, plus it is heavily implied that it was giants who discovered and/or perfected [[Artificer]] magic on their own).  In comparison, the ancient giants of Eberron were basically like the Netherese of Forgotten Realms, building floating structures, flying ships, and other vast artifact-level shit using techniques unknown to "modern" spellcasters.

And then they started exploring other planes and it all went to fuck when they breached into Dal Quor, the Plane of Dreams.  That plane, you see, has thousands-year cycles where it switches between light and dark phases where the inhabitants are either good or evil, respectively, and when the cycle turns, every inhabitant basically dies and is reborn without any knowledge of the past cycle.  It was, at the time the giants invaded, about to change phase, and the inhabitants, the precursors to today's quori, had no intention whatsoever of fucking dying. They attempted to flee to Eberron as peaceful refugees, but the aggressive natives botched first contact, so the giants had a war on their hands.

By all evidence in the game, the Giant-Quori War was the first use of magic as a form of mass destruction by the lesser (aka non dragon) races.  The quori actually created the first warforged in this era, as mass-produced mindless constructs used to act as foot soldiers.  Based on the existence of the psionic warforged (aka psiforged), it is also very possible that the quori were attempting to create something that their spirits could possess, in order to anchor to Eberron and ride out the destruction cycle of Dal Quor.

The giants, whose magic was not quite powerful enough to completely and totally guard their minds and spirits as they slept, saw themselves fighting a losing battle against the equivalent of a kind of eldritch horror from an alien plane of existence.  In desperation to close the bridge between Eberron and Dal Quor, the giants decided to do something... creative.  Using (literally) earth-shattering powers, they actually kicked Dal Quor out of its planar orbit, causing it to float off into the Astral Plane and be more or less "lost".  Unfortunately, if you're thinking "but wouldn't destabilizing the multiverse have cataclysmic results?", you'd be correct.  The power the giants unleashed shattered their continent: huge sections slid off into the sea, manifest zones (areas where other random planes seep into the Material Plane) sprung up spreading chaos in their wake, and basically they unleashed an arcane armageddon upon their empire. [[Dungeons and Dragons Online|Hell, one of their cities became well, HELL without demons.]]
[[File:Pulp.jpeg|thumb|left|A robot jumping from an helicopter into a train, [[Magitek]] style.]]
Remember all those enslaved elves who also knew some magic?  They decided this was their best chance to rebel against the giants.  The giants, naturally, decided "fuck it" and started up more magic to basically do total genocide upon the elven race.  The dragons, already pissed as hell about the giants' actually tearing the planescape apart and having no regard for either their own, the dragons', or Eberron's safety, decided enough was enough.  Essentially, every dragon in Argonnessen took to the skies and as a race, dragonkind rained all their destructive power down on Xen'drik.

Let's stop a second and think about that.  This includes '''all''' the ancient-ass dragons with access to epic spells.  As in, the kind you make from the 3.0 Epic Level Handbook.  The ones that can do impossible shit like the Netherese in Forgotten Realms used to do, such as sheering off mountain tops to make them into flying cities.  The dragons basically added to the already-terrible cataclysm the giants did to themselves by throwing down a lot more destruction and stuff.  The shattered planescape, the elven rebellion, and the dragons' wrath basically spent 1,000 years turning the world's greatest magical empire into a bunch of broken, forgotten ruins.

Aside from the strange, twisted landscape of Xen'drik itself (which makes the Amazon, the Sahara, and Siberia all look like a bunch of national parks by comparison), there are two main after-effects of the cataclysm.  The first is the Traveler's Curse, which causes a slight warping of space and/or time when traveling the continent.  It gets less bad if you know where you're going, or have someone who knows where they are going lead you there, but otherwise it's a real crap-shoot whether or not you get somewhere quickly and accurately, or stumble into the hands of a drow tribe who enjoys having you for dinner (get it?).  The second effect is Du'rashka Tul, or "the madness of crowds", which says that if any settlement reaches a certain size or sophistication, the entire population is gripped with homicidal rage and starts killing until they die; there's evidence this is true, but there's also questions about how Stormreach has resisted this effect despite growing in size.

===The Age of Monsters===
After the giants get their collective dicks kicked, the goblinoid kingdoms on Khorvaire start rising up.  They build up the Dhakaani Empire (named for the goblinoid that united the six kingdoms), and while the orcs do rise up in the western areas of the Shadow Marches, they never really threaten the united goblins.  (Keep in mind, alignment is slippery in this setting: goblins and bugbears aren't automatically evil or even frequently Chaotic here; in fact the goblinoids of Eberron tend towards *law*.)  Things are okay with them until they deal with another type of eldritch horror monster, the daelkyr, who created pretty most of the aberrations in the setting. [http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dKAQx_URcKQ/Te0TbZ9aA2I/AAAAAAAAHrs/TDiy2dnMtfA/s1600/John_Byrne_Galactus_POV.jpg And if their herald brought fear, imagine if you can the terror, the blind, unreasoning panic that now rips through Eberron. A million and more eyes look upon they who are Daelkyr, and for each race the vision differs, and each mind that views them struggles as best it can to perceive that unguessable species in a form it can comprehend.]

The goblins try hard, but lack the knowledge of how to actually fight these things, so after the Daelkyr War cripples their empire, it falls apart as various tribes squabble over controlling the remains.  So why wasn't the world overrun with horrific aberrations and madness?  Well, those orcs off to the west, they had some druids called Gatekeepers who knew this shit was about to happen, so they prepared accordingly and marched off in small bands (not unlike some Warhammer witch hunters) to attack, defeat, and seal up the aberrations behind a bunch of mystical seals and stuff.  That's right, boys and girls, '''the orcs fucking saved Eberron from the evil horrors'''.  Nothing like lampshading tropes, huh?  They didn't even try to make much of it; they just fucked off back to the Shadow Marches, where they live quietly waiting for signs of daelkyr shit getting free again.  Eberron orcs are good folks.

While all this was happening, the dragons got a burr up their ass and started attacking the elves of Aerenal.  But here's the weird part: they didn't actually "try" to destroy them, not totally like they did the giants.  This has been happening for, more or less, about 26,000 years.  The elves know the dragons could rightly snuff them out of existence, but why the dragons don't do it is one of the many mysteries of the setting.  In the meantime, the elves built up a fucking strange culture that looks like a mixture of traditional D&D elven and no-shit Aztec-Incan level stuff.  The elves don't use necromancy, but instead create beings called the Undying.  Instead of negative energy that sustains undead, they use positive energy to force life into their withered bodies, creating a type of creature called the Deathless (first seen in the Book of Exalted Deeds).  It's a bit of a strange thing for both DMs and players to wrap their heads around, but it certainly adds a truly unique cultural touch to the game setting.  Oh, also, Aerenal grows all kinds of weird-ass plants, including this unique type of tree called soarwood that is actually buoyant in air... something that will become vitally important a few millennia later.

Oh, and the dwarves migrate from the Frostfell up north down to the Ironroot Mountains, exile some barbarian dwarves to the surface, setting up their little shop while the "civilized" dwarves promptly get eaten by the daelkyr.  But they don't become important for a while; at this point, they're kind of like Conan the Barbarian types, only shorter and beardy.

===The Kingdom of Galifar===
Just over 3,000 years before the official start of the Eberron campaign, various races starting being born with mystical tattoos on their bodies, giving them access to strange powers depending on the complexity of the tattoo.  These dragonmarks were called that because the dragons who actually spoke to lesser beings about them said they were a manifestation of the Prophecy that they obsess about.  However, one of the dragonmarks, the Mark of Death, is wiped out because an elf and a dragon made sweet, sweet love and produce a half-dragon with the mark, which was considered a total abomination.

That's right, kids, all you dragon-kin types who think it would be so cool to be a half-dragon in D&D?  Best keep that shit to yourself in Eberron: you are a living insult to the purity of dragons and the Prophecy (and, apparently, elves if that's your other parent), and you will be ethnically cleansed from the world.  This isn't a joke, it's part of the setting.  Certain other draconic races may or may not be treated similarly.  Kobolds are basically the same (though they come in three breeds based on Siberys, Eberron, and Khyber that only other kobolds can tell the difference of), and spellscales are seen with confusion and annoyance (they are basically a kind of mutation found mostly among arcane practitioners who have kids), but half-dragons are basically a big no-no.  Dragonborn of Bahamut are okay, though the dragons do grumble that Bahamut doesn't really need their kind running around. The template is still used, but it's for things like the fiendish "blessing" of [[Tiamat]] than literal half-breeds.

Anyway, while this dragonmark shit is happening, this chick named Lhazaar leads a shitload of refugees and/or colonists from Sarlona to Khorvaire.  Lhazaar first lands in a bunch of eastern islands (which will collectively be named after her one day), and humans start spreading out.  Fast forward a thousand years, and this human named <s>[[Kharn]]</s> Karrn the Conqueror goes out, kicks nine kinds of goblin ass, and created the nation of Karrnath.  (Making him a much more ambitious sort than Conan.  I mean, I love that goofy Cimmerian, but he did dawdle a bit on becoming king.  Karrn went out and got shit done.)  Karrn tries to conquer everyone else, but they aren't having his shit, so he fucks off back to Karrnath.  But his efforts do basically establish dozens of human city-states and nations around the continent, so there's that.

A thousand years after, a guy named Galifar is born, and at the ripe age of 45 has taken control of the Five Nations and established a kingdom in his name.  His kids each get control of a single nation.  This is basically the "golden age" for humanity, because under Galifar, magic is used not just as a weapon but a kind of utility.  The dragonmarked Houses start to realize they can create magic items that really "do" stuff, like empower vehicles to travel faster, or send messages instantly, or whatever.  Keith Baker keeps saying this isn't a magi-tek society - what he means by that is it isn't the Final Fantasy style of things. They're using magic to do things in the real world we did with mechanical/chemical technology, instead of mashing magic and technology together haphazardly. Stuff like a stone that casts prestidigitation to clean shit - functions like a laundromat would in the real world, but it's a magical solution to the issue. Or using weather control spells to make boats go real fast.

===The Last War===
The sad part is, the Last War started about 900 years after the Kingdom of Galifar was created.  When King Jarot died, three of his five kids rejected the ascension of Mishann, Jarot's eldest daughter and ruler of Cyre (which was basically the most magi-tek nation of that time).  They all fuck off back to their nations and start agitating for war, which lasts 100 years.  No, not constant actual battles that would have rightly ruined the landscape; it's more like they fought a major battle or two each year with different peoples, spend a couple of years recouping their losses, and do lots of espionage and diplomacy, but all while in a declared state of war against one another.

This is where things start getting really dicey with using magic as technology.  Karrnath suffers famine and starts using undead troops as a "temporary" measure that becomes permanent.  This triggers a religious uprising in one of their enemy nations that causes a theocratic nation to splinter off from one of the original Five Nations, while later on back home the halflings of the Talenta say fuck it and secede from Karrnath. Cyre gets it in the worst way. Big on magic but low on actual troops, starts hiring mercenaries from the elves and goblinoids. The elves end up turning stag and fucking over Cyre by creating a new elven nation and they get fucked over in the southwest by a resurging goblinoid nation trying to reclaim the glories of their ancestral empire.  The druids of the western Eldeen Reaches get pissed about Audair not giving a fuck about them getting raped and murder by roving armies of bandits, and splinter off as well into a new nation.  Breland gets it shitty too: A whole bunch of monsters led by three hags claim everything west of the greywall mountains (but thankfully barely anyone lived there), the aforementioned goblin country stole a chunk of their land for their border, and the gnomes decide to secede from Breland and form their own little country. (The gnomish bit wasn't too bad though, it was more of an official acknowledgement of the fact that the gnomes had been running their own affairs for centuries. The country is pretty much a vassal to Breland with very good relations in both directions.) Breland was so fuckhueg before the war though that it's still the biggest and well off country afterwards. Refugees sick of war from all five nations flee east to a colony.  And the original Lhazaar pirates and smugglers basically play everyone and everything off against each other.

During all of this, magic technology continues development.  The gnomes (who also splintered off from Breland, but under much more favorable conditions and terms to both sides) steal the secrets of elemental binding from the Sulatar drow in Xen'drik (and we're all sure that's never going to come back and bite them in the ass, no sir) and begin using those secrets to bind elementals to all kinds of shit.  Then some crafty nutjobs realize if they use soarwood from Aerenal and big fucking elementals, they can "push" a ship faster over water.  Then they realize they can do it right through the air as well, creating the Eberron airships which we all know and love for their fairly unique approach (in both design and concept; Forgotten Realms sort of copied the idea in the game Neverwinter during the Elemental Evil module when the air-elemental forces used dirigibles empowered by air elementals).  There's also levitating trains, self-powered sleds and wagons, etc.

But then, House Cannith, who are the artificers and craftsmen of the setting, did something even more interesting.  In Xen'drik, they find these huge creation forges used to make the ancient quori-made warforged.  They bring them back, tinker with them, and create the modern warforged as sentient living constructs (aka magi-tek droids).  They produce thousands for the war effort, and since they also already were making most of the weapons, armor, and other materials, they become war profiteers on a rather interesting scale.

Who was at war with who shifted repeatedly throughout the conflict. At the time it ended, the following were at war.

Aundair: Karrnath (Unfriendly, but non-hostile to Cyre)<br>
Breland: Cyre<br>
Cyre: Thrane, Breland, Karrnath<br>
Karrnath: Aundair, Thrane, Cyre<br>
Thrane:  Cyre, Karrnath

===The Day of Mourning===
One afternoon in mid-994, Cyre just... went up in a giant ball of mist.

Cyre was fighting a Breland-Thrane combined force for the past few days, near the town of Making (where there may have been some unusual research going on by House Cannith, Cyre, or both).  The Cyrans were actually doing pretty good: they fought well against superior numbers and held ground to bring up reinforcements.

On the afternoon of the second day, after they had fought to a standstill, that's when everything went to shit. A grey mist started emerging from the royal palace of Cyre, moving to cover the capital city and, within the day the entirety of Cyre. Those caught in the mist the first day died instantly, but those who entered the second day onward merely have difficulty healing within the mists in some places. Most buildings remain intact, but some have been turned 90 degrees or found miles away. Making has become a giant, eternal, lava sprout which cools into an obsidian mountain that keeps growing bigger. The mist stands to this day, cleanly marking the former borders of Cyre. Indeed, the mists end so cleanly at the end of Cyre's land that a port city's docks are outside of the mists which led to several of the survivors. Inside the mists, the dead don't decay and in some places healing spells nor natural healing works on those not born within the Mournlands. Spells also came alive, literally, turning into a new type of creature called a [[Living Spell]].  Think about all these shitty spell combos you ever came up with on an optimization forum somewhere.  Now take that awful combo and make it a creature that doesn't age, eat, or sleep, and just continually attacks things on repeat until destroyed or otherwise subdued. But it wasn't just the living spells that were created that fucked things up.  A massive number of its citizens just died, crops withered to nothing, and all sorts of terrible mutations came about as a result of whatever rampant madness claimed the nation. Even years after that event, the land refuses to grow and any life that inhabits it suffers from the land sucking away any life.  Corpses that died on the Day of Mourning still lie there, preserved by whatever awful power was unleashed.  Life practically became uninhabitable, thus any survivors of that terrible event fled and the Mournland is all that is left of that proud nation.

There is no explanation for the Day of Mourning, not even an internal one, and with current policy never will be. The borders of the Mournland matching the borders of Cyre suggests it was no random event. Popular in-universe theories are someone's weapon going wrong (or right), overuse of magic, one of the planes deciding to turn Cyre into a big ol manifest zone, and an Overlord being unsealed.  A popular out-of-universe theory is that Cyre was actually taken by the mists into the [[Demiplane of Dread]].  5th Edition's take on Ravenloft confirms that at least a small part of Cyre, a lightning rail, was taken by the mists but leaves the fate of the rest of the country up in the air.

===After The War===

The aftermath of the Day of Mourning proved just as horrific from another perspective: all of the Cyran refugees were refused to settle in almost any of the surrounding nations.  The Valenar elves - the mercenaries Cyre brought in to help them - actually murdered the shit out of the few refugees who showed up.  The other Five Nations mostly all felt that the Mourning was Cyre's own fault.  Only Breland eventually allowed them to form their own little refugee colony known as New Cyre.  Predictably, the Cyrans have become a little grimdark about this, and basically low-key hate everyone else for their treatement.  (Before anyone starts to chide them as emo, remember that the whole war started because three other nations refused to acknowledge Cyre's leader's legitimate claim to the throne.  They already hated the other nations pretty good; being treated like trash for the Day of Mourning has basically make Cyrans bitter and angry about everyone and everything.)

The terrible and unexplained event was enough to scare all the other nations into settling down for a diplomatic talk. These talks culminated in the drafting of the Treaty of Thronehold, a truce that effectively ended all the hostilities within Khorvaire.  There are a few very interesting points of the treaty that bear looking at.

* Nation Status: The treaty ended up recognizing all but a few of the existing nations as they are in the main Eberron book(s).  The very notable exceptions were Droaam (whom everyone saw as a pack of fucking monsters anyway; even the goblins of Darguun were better organized and in control of themselves), the Shadow Marches (but they weren't really an organized nation anyhow, which suited them just fine), and Cyre (which was simply declared non-existent as of the Day of Mourning).  Aundair squabbled about Eldeen being recognized, until Breland asked them about Old Breland (territory Aundair had seized from them first), and told Aundair to STFU or loose even more territory.

* The Dragonmarked Houses: While the various Houses already operated with some sanction in various capacities, the treaty certified some of it, specifically House Deneith being officially responsible for enforcing the terms of the treaty among various nations.  Cannith got split in three factions when their leader went poof in the Day of Mourning, but aside from the internal politics, they're still the go-to guys for making shit.  The other Houses made out more or less like bandits: their services were needed by everyone, and they suffered no real downside to being involved.  Shit, they still had their unofficial headquarters down in Stormreach in Xen'drik.  The war did little or nothing harmful to them as individual houses or a unified whole.

* Warforged: King Boranel's charisma at the negotiating table got emancipation for the warforged, something that stuck in the craw of Thrane and a few others who felt that they owned those guys (they did, after all, pay for them).

===Current Day===
After the end of The Last War most of the remaining nations are in an uneasy peace. Adventures in modern Eberron deal with cultists whose schemes threaten to send the nations back into war (if not nuked by the dragons again), behind the scenes battles between factions vying for power (which could also threaten to start another war), or play detective/thug in the massive cityscapes.

Others raid the Mournlands to recover lost magic and contend with the growing cult of the Lord of Blades, who some Warforged worship as their god who will eventually kill all meatbags. Some such adventurers are Warforged, but others have found ways around the restrictions on healing: Potions made inside function ''only'' inside the Mournlands, Goodberry works, psionic powers and other methods of healing the don't reference healing spells work implicitly, while quick trips to alternate dimensions also allow for healing. Others sidestep the problems with healing entirely and just don't adventure in the places in the Mournlands where healing is an issue, and have to contend with whatever environmental weirdness those areas of the Mournlands have.

Others still raid the ruins of Xen'drik, either for archeology or profit.