Editing Eberron (section)

===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.