Who's Doomed in Eberron...

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Who's Doomed in Eberron...

Post by Goose Bone »

As all we know, world of Ravenloft contains more than a few characters that are not the native inhabitants of the demiplane of dread. There are characters from Dark Sun, Dragonlance, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Gothic Earth... Sadly, the last official Ravenloft books was released slightly before the premiere of the world of Eberron. I'm not going to write here much about this world for now - theres no sense to write spoilers for those who know this setting - and in someone doesnt know it, he/she will probably find any spoiler to short and plain to be interesting/helpfull...

My question is simple for now: Is anyone here, who knows the world of Eberron and want to talk about creating an Eberron-based domain of dread..?
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Re: Who's Doomed in Eberron...

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Sorry, just found this thread. I'm not too much of an expert on Eberron, but I've read through some of the books and played in a fairly long Eberron campaign. That being said, I think there's some stuff you can take from Eberron. I'm running a homebrew game in a steampunk Victorian campaign about civilization picking itself up a century after the world as mankind knew it fell apart. It draws heavily from Ravenloft, Masque of the Red Death, and Eberron, so with the right mix I think they can work together well.

I'm finding the Eberron modules from Dungeon in particular to be worth mining for source material. Fallen Angel (Dungeon 117) explores the craziness of the Ravers (inbred descendants of a noble district that was destroyed several decades before when the mage towers of Sharn collapsed) has been fairly good for creeping out my players with that "great fallen empire of long ago" feel but still be close enough to be within easy walking distance. You could certainly do a domain with a gritty, post-apoc feel, for example.

Going with more civilized domains that is at the center of Ravenloft, however, I might be tempted to go with Victor Saint-Demain, the fallen Sherlock-Holmes type consulting detective who first appeared in Chimes at Midnight (Dungeon 133). Possessed by a great intellect and understanding of the criminal mind, Victor's fall comes from the only thing greater than his mind: his own ego. Snubbed by the Sharn Inquisitives Guild (sort of like a cross between the Pinkerton Agency and Scotland Yard) for his pompous arrogance and needless showmanship, he goes mad and begins plotting revenge against the Guild by allying with many of the former criminals he put away. Victor goes on to appear twice more in the halls of Dungeon (Dungeon 150, "Quoth the Raven"; and 151, "Hell's Heart"). He becomes increasingly more devious and depraved, so I think he'd make a proper darklord in a niche not quite currently covered by Ravenloft canon. Perhaps he might make for a good substitute for Sodo for rulership over Paridon.

There are of course, other themes you could uniquely explore in an Eberron domain. The status of the warforged is one example, because creation of life is always a suspect thing in Ravenloft. The warforged could add a whole level of nuance to this discussion as a demographic of artificially made people struggle for rights and recognition in an industrial setting. Perhaps their existence is a gray area, much like the legal status of droids in Star Wars or the moral ambivalence of golems in medieval folklore. Certainly, some industrial domains (such as Paridon) have shown a certain quasi-steampunk magical feel (the metallurgist guild has a tin golem in Hour of the Knife, for example).
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Re: Who's Doomed in Eberron...

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It sounds very good for me, reworked Paridon (and probably Timor too) sounds really good for me... I wrote more when I'll had a bit more time, probably this night:D
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Re: Who's Doomed in Eberron...

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Sounds good, look forward to seeing what you come up with. You might also throw in Nosos while you're at it (I included that domain as my homebrew city's Industrial Sector). As a matter of fact, I think somebody wrote did a "Shining Bay" cluster composed of Nosos, Timor, and Paridon in one of the Quote the Raven issue 2 on this website. So you might look to there for some inspiration.
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Re: Who's Doomed in Eberron...

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If we speak about Timor-Paridon, I think the really good Idea may be to say that Paridon is a part of Sharn that was duplicated in Ravenloft, and Timor may be the part of... Cyre. The Cyre description make it a very similar (on the beginning) to the beauty and civilized country of Timor...
As you say, the Victor Saint-Demain may be the Darklord of Paridon and the Hive Queen will be, lets say, a girl that not go for help to a creepy illusionist, but to a vicious Daelkyr lord...

Next funny thing - Nosos. Imagine, that Malus Scleris finds a way to rebuilds humans as a warforgeds (just like in the Thief: Metal Age - btw Thief campaign in the Ravenloft sounds pretty awesome...) and theres literally no biological beign in the domain, or theres only a small guerilla-like group fighting for humanity deep within the city...

Or imagine the Kartakass as a part of Eberron that was transported to the RL after the 12-moons fullmoon, where the lycanthropes plague was the most powerfull since the beginning of the universe...

Daelkyrs in Bluetspur - this comes so simply and natural to me that theres no need to even tal about this.

Next one - in history of Eberron, Quori, the dream-creatures was wiped aut from Eberron and their homeworld was separated from the rest of the world. What, if Dal'Quor was sended to the Ravenloft and become a Nightmare Lands..?

Demise - medusas are a daughters of Daelkyrs, so why not expand this hook..?

It is possible to give Falkovnia a little bit of Karrnath flavour - army of the undead, semi-conscious soldiers? Oh, c'mon, it's too easy:D

And now a little bit risky game - G'henna, where the Silver Flame and Blood of Vol are two faces of Zhakata :azalin:

Markovia - where posessed by Daelkyrs doctor Frantisek d'Vadalis creating the broken ones...

Sebua with Valenar elves...

Implementing Deathless in Sithicus may be an epic move.

Daughters of Sora Kell in Tepest anyone..?

As you can see, theres enought hooks here, to create new book only about Eberron-Ravenloft hooks;) But I'm still thinking about creating brand new domain instead of recreating the already existing one...
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Re: Who's Doomed in Eberron...

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Well, if I were to fabricate a domain completely from scratch, I might try to incoporate a few things that makes Eberron stand apart from other campaign worlds. Here's a few possibilities:

1. Distant gods. The lack of direct involvement of Eberron gods would make its faithful susceptible for impostors who pretend to be "living gods". Besides the obvious candidates (rogue Silver Flame priests, the various dark cults), there are numerous other less obvious angles you could explore this. Examples could include the various Warforged Mysteries (Faiths of Eberron p. 111-120), most likely the Lord of Blades or the Becoming God. The Undying Court are sustained by faith by their descendants, imagine if one of them decided he wanted to capture the worship of a larger body of followers that included humans? Yet one final possibility could be one or a group of Radiant Idols (Sharn p. 180) trying to gather worship for themselves by posing as exiled gods from on high. As they already possess curses of sorts, they would seem natural candidates for darklords or the servants of darklords.

2.Nearly monolithic faiths- Unlike many other campaign worlds, a few, quasi-monotheistic religions dominate Khorvaire. Oddly enough, Ravenloft's own natives within the existing domains are usually too irreligious or secluded to make large scale religious wars too feasible. A domain or cluster dominated by the Silver Flame (or perhaps a pantheistic version of the Sovereign Host) trying to purify itself from various cults within it (like the Whispering Flame heresy) or staving off the advances of other faiths (both bad and good) could make for an interesting domain of intrigue and political feuding, perhaps something like the plot of Final Fantasy Tactics in flavor.

3. Positive energy powered undead. The existence of the deathless (positive energy powered and usually good aligned) allows one to play with the usual assumptions we think about undead. Imagine groups of deathless undead/necromancer hunters who might be a little bit too zealous for their own good? And imagine if you had a group of upstart Aerenal necromancers who embraced negative energy to resist having to serve those whose lives had already passed into deathless existences?

Or imagine an fringe faction of deathless and their followers who embrace the total dominance of positive energy over negative energy, wanting to increase the planar connections of the material plane to the positive energy plane. However, too much positive energy surging into the world might have nasty side effects (such as the nasty effects of the positive energy plane or the object animation of ravids). The positive energy extremists may even attract the attention of the dread elder evil Ragnorra (Elder Evils p. 96) and her Malshapers.

4. Cyre and the Mournlands- Nobody really knows what caused Cyre to collapse and turn into the Mournlands. Perhaps this was some sort of conjunction? In any case, this might be a good excuse to create a post apoc wastelands themed domain.
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Re: Who's Doomed in Eberron...

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Some of your ideas sound really good, i consider few of them tomorrow cause ;)
But maby we could wrote "a lil bi bout all this shi" in next (or next after next) ravenloft magazine, that will be really awesome:>
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Re: Who's Doomed in Eberron...

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Hmm, well, if we were going to further develop combine these ideas; one could make them into a cluster (or just a very elaborate island of terror) with a theme around false gods. Ideally, I think it would be neat, reflecting the ambiguous noir themes of the setting, to have conflicts between power groups that ironically mirror each other. The best of which I can think of are the Undying Court Aerenal Elves and the Silver Flame faithful. Consider:
-Both are known to be aloof and haughty with built in senses of superiority.
-Both fervently hate the undead and use positive energy.
-Both have comparatively distinctive ideologies that separate them from the rest of Eberron.

The only problem is that Thrane and Aerenal are very far apart. Though Ravenloft has a history of bringing together disparate lands by fiat, I'd like to avoid that here. So coming up with a justification for why the two powers would take some explaining. Examining each nation, we can find some possibilities,
-Thrane- expansionistic, wants the Silver Flame to be spread everywhere. The minority element is the most aggressive in pursuing conversion, although there is a lingering desire for many within Thrane to want to go to on a crusade. On another note, the “hierarchy of evils” as it were puts supernatural evil at the top targets.
-Aerenal- dominated by worship/veneration of ancestors who still live on through deathless existences. Isolationist and secure in their society’s superiority, but known to have great natural resources and a source of great woodworking skill. The elves there, not fearing of death and being naturally long-lived, think in the long-term beyond human comprehension, which may imply they hold grudges across generations. There are also a number of elves with ties to the Valenar warriors who idealize the giant-overthrowing deeds of the ancient past.
Now we can see a potential point of contention here. One nation seeks to spread its ideology across the world, while the other has natural resources and a deep-set, long-lasting shared cultural memory. Both have reasons to hate each other if they came into conflict, and both definitely have their more violent and bloodthirsty minority factions.
Taking this into consideration, perhaps a subgroup of the Silver Flame thought it would be good to organize a crusade against the undead worshipping heathens in Aerenal. Nobody likes undead (aside from Karrnath), so perhaps it would be a good cause to rally the rest of Khorvaire (or at least Thrane itself) around. It would also be a good source of resources and income should the time come for a holy war to spread the faith around Khorvaire. So, with or without consent of the rest of the Silver Flame’s leadership, a few ships manned by some of the most zealous set sail to become the first wave in what would be an attempt to conquer Aerenal.
Sadly, these crusaders aren’t quite prepared enough to deal with positive energy using undead, who are resistant to many of the traditional weapons against undeath. This first wave of crusaders are repelled and scattered to the winds, with a few ships escaping elsewhere to Xendrik to nurse their wounds. A few even make it back to Khorvaire, but Thrane chalks the entire thing up as a failure and scraps the whole project. The elves of Aeranal would receive no more trouble from the men of Khorvaire.
However, the fleeting lives of man are different from those of the longer lived elves. The sheer arrogance of the invasion, matched with the memory of domination by the giants this new incursion brought to mind, made the elves hold a grudge. However, their grudge is not immediately acted upon. Rather it seeths and simmers to a boil over several human generations, by which time for the humans it is but a faded memory. Factions within Aerenal society brood and gather resources to make a counterattack on the Silver Flame fanatics, and eventually they set out an attack on Khorvaire. But on his home turf, mankind is much better organized, and the fighting draws in denizens of other nations. So like the Silver Flame before them, the Aerenal elves are repelled and scattered to the winds. And like the Silver Flame zealots generations earlier, some are left behind as this crusade is called off.

Not much of what was sought in any of the conflicts was accomplished. However, you did get some cultural exchange of ideas that sometimes occur when disparate cultures are forced to deal with each other. The Silver Flame, for example, learned of the existence of positive energy undead; while the elves learned more about the concepts of powerful, abstract beings called “gods”. You also now have some very disgruntled and frustrated splinter groups who may feel “abandoned” by their less violent, more mainstream counterparts. Moreover, you have the fringe groups both isolated at home and trapped abroad. So fertile ground for characters for potential darklord status. More details on that to follow.
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Re: Who's Doomed in Eberron...

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Now, relating this to our previous conversations. I mentioned the cultural exchange of new concepts. The interposition of contradictory ideas into unsound, alienated, and/or frustrated minds can make for some interesting plot possibilities. Consider, for example, the direct whisper of the Flame is something directly sought by many of the Flame’s faithful. And Tira Mirron is said to have merged directly with the Silver Flame, the force that powers so much of the faith’s energy, positive energy, to destroy evil. Now, if one comes into contact with a group of seeming savages that seem to be made of that very same energy, well, that’s something that can really curl your toes. However, a seemingly rational reaction might be that, if these savages can corrupt the process Tira used to merge with the Flame but still hold corporeal form, why couldn’t those of the Silver Flame do it while still holding true to Tira and bonding with the true Silver Flame? Thus, we have an entry point for corruption with some of the Silver Flame seeking godhood as new incarnations of the Silver Flame.

On the other hand, the prominent introduction of vast abstract deities who can gather worship from many not even related by blood, well, that could be a quite a temptation for creatures that subsist on the very act of veneration itself. Imagine the power that a member of the Undying Court could get if he set himself up as a god? Furthermore, the story of Tiron Miron is essentially a warrior’s tale, something that can resonate with the warrior ancestry of the Tairnadal and their like. So it’s not entirely implausible that fringe groups within elven society would want to seek out this new opportunity for true power as well.

So here we have the potential for a land(s) of dark opposites. On the one side, we have Silver Flame cultists venerating led by false prophets seeking (or least claiming to) find ways of merging and embodying the Silver Flame while still retaining mortal existences. On the other, we have Aernal elves trying to set themselves up as not merely great ancestors but in fact living gods in their own right to build upon their own power. Both groups are on the fringe and may well be considered heretical by their own mainline faiths. But yet they are so far separated from their wider respective counterparts that they slip under the radar.

And so now you have the breeding ground for potential darklords of a holy war domain or cluster. As far as bringing in the warforged mystery cult thing, I’d have to do some more thinking on that. Perhaps the warforged, used as cannon fodder and growing to hate both sides, turn inward and start trying to build their own metal god (an act of obsession but on a culture wide scale!)
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Re: Who's Doomed in Eberron...

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Well, the holy war is always an interesting thing and war between two good/positive forces sounds tragic enought to put it into the RL setting. And this means we will have an occasion to show the difference between the "Good" and the "Positive", what I found quite rare in D&D - you know, both sites think, they are really good, when they may be "only" positive... When I first thought about SF vs UC conflict i was like "meh" but now when I look at this, this sounds really interesting, I'll try to wrote a simple story about it and DM it to my players, saying them "this is just a regular Eberron scenario" - and wrote to you how it was... For now - look really promising :Brain:
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Re: Who's Doomed in Eberron...

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After a few discussions and the short playtest my players didn't liked this idea:(
They said that this is overthinked idea... Well, not every fight can be win, I am going to still works on the Eberron Domains project:)
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Re: Who's Doomed in Eberron...

Post by Jester of the FoS »

I've been thinking about an Eberron domain lately. I think the selling point of an Eberron domain is the magitech, such as trains and boats and flying ships. And the Mournland, which is an excuse to not have them in good condition.

A living spell might be a fun Darklord,something unique to the world.
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Re: Who's Doomed in Eberron...

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Yeah, this is a really interesting idea to make a living spell a Darklord, but the trouble that I can see is that the living spell are unintelligent beigns:/
Of course - it is possible to create an unique, sapient living spell, but this requires a reasonable ground...

I think that a good Darklord may be someone directly responsible for the Mourning Day - maby a crazy Cannith engineer or - from the other site, a guy that want to do something good, but instead blasted whole country away. Such a person may be surrounded by living spells and other magical distortions. Maby something like that:

A small domain, consisting entirely from a huge magitech workshop/laboratory, where works a lot of magewrites, artificers and so on. The trouble is that there is a lot of magic accidents in this factory - of course most of them are generated by the Darklord, who (willingly or not) creates a living spells around him. Because of that a lot of scientist are crippled and even disabled, but they do not stop they work, because they still think, that they are near of create a device, that will end all the wars once and for all. That way this could be a "last few minutes before the End" preserved to last forever in Ravenloft...

How do you think?
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Re: Who's Doomed in Eberron...

Post by Jester of the FoS »

Goose Bone wrote:I think that a good Darklord may be someone directly responsible for the Mourning Day - maby a crazy Cannith engineer or - from the other site, a guy that want to do something good, but instead blasted whole country away. Such a person may be surrounded by living spells and other magical distortions.
The catch being, Mourning Day is one of the unsolvable mysteries of Eberron, answering it is akin to explaining what the Dark Powers are.
The event was a horrible tragedy and possibly the result of evil actions, but the Dark Powers seldom seem to pick the biggest evil in the land for lordship, often singling out the most tragic figure.

For an Eberron domain, I wouldn't try an single out a big figure or name or massive event but think of a neat idea for a darklord and a domain and just make sure that the land incorporates the Eberron-isms, but in a way that limits their removal otherwise magitech will/would spread.

Cue my idea: the living spell. The interesting thing that makes that idea really cool is the choice of spell. What spell becomes alive and has some sliver of sentience, but is vile enough to warrant a domain.
How about animate dead?
The spell permeates the land and causes the dead to rise, but gains a sliver of intelligence from the bodies it animates although they remain mindless. But it wants more, so it pushes its mindless animated bodies to seek out the remaining living and kill them.

It becomes zombie apocalypse land.
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Re: Who's Doomed in Eberron...

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The catch being, Mourning Day is one of the unsolvable mysteries of Eberron, answering it is akin to explaining what the Dark Powers are.
Yeah, you are right, no arguments against this one.

The idea with living spell isn't bad, but "Rise Dead" that is alive..? C'mon, that sounds like a metagame joke o.O
Zombie apocalypse is a neat thought (Karrnath), but with the "living death" (or living undeath, to be precize) - isn't it too much similar to Necropolis and Death himself..?

Hmmm... Maby a... Warforged Darklord? The one and only really sapient creature within his domain, who creates a shitload of constructs around him to create an illusion of a great society, that works and prosper well? Lonelines, inhumanity, that could be a nice one... And the players that somehow figure out that they are within a huge "Truman show" ant they nice warforged friend is the one who designed all this things - and maby he want to turn them into a warforgeds and stay with him foreeever... Of course if he turns them into a constructs they wont be sapient no more...
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