Editing Eberron (section)

===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.