Canonfire!

Sat Sep 28, 2013 4:50 pm Dragonborn and Warforged in Flanaess

So in our D&D Next Facebook group one of useres posted intesteing note on Steading of the Hill Giant Chief. They remade characters with last public playtest packet and added Warforged Fighter to the party.

Thing is that I know it's totally non-canonical for Greyhawk setting, but I always was envy of Eberron of this living constructs. So how could they be added to Flanaess histroy and where would they be logical to be found?

Edit: I renamed topic to better suit it's content. Cool

Sat Sep 28, 2013 10:18 pm

In my view, Warforged do not belong to the Flanaess and I wouldn't allow them if I were the DM. I can't think of any reasonable explanation for their presence in the Flanaess.

Sun Sep 29, 2013 5:33 am

I've added many races to my version of Oerth, such as Aasimir, Tieflings, and Genasi, but like Sutemi I haven't been able to find a place for Warforged.

A possible origin, if you want to include them, is that they were created by the Suel or Gnomish people.

Sun Sep 29, 2013 6:55 am

How about Blackmoor? Egg of Coot, City of the Gods and all that stuff? (I know City of the Gods was from Arneson's own world, but I always imagined that stuff was up north...)

Sun Sep 29, 2013 9:37 am

Change their appearance slightly and make them a product of Baklunish clockwork magic, like the Apparatus of Kwalish.
Far rarer than they are in Eberron, obviously.

Sun Sep 29, 2013 10:17 am Great minds must think alike

Armitage,

That is exactly what I did in my campaign right after the Eberron setting was released... :)

A player wanted to try out a warforged character so I had the PC be 'found' in an old Bakluni tomb he was trapped in at the time of the Twin Cataclysms. The centuries of confinement had caused his memory to 'reset' and so he started out at 1st level with only vague dreamlike memories of the time before his entombment.

It worked out very well for the most part. And since he was part of a 'Golden Army' (cf. Hellboy even before it was released) he really had it in for the Suel in a big way.

Sun Sep 29, 2013 3:28 pm

I like Gregh's idea the best but Armitage and GreyMage's are interesting also. If you went with Blackmoor you could use Raiders of the Black Ice in DNG #115 as a means of introducing the warforged character. Sort of a combination of Gregh and GreyMage's ideas. Speaking of Hellboy, to riff on something from it, suppose the player who wants to run the warforged character starts the adventure with a regular character, and at some point in the adventure, the regular character discovers the warforged, touches it, and his or her spirit is sucked inside the warforged, melding with its life-force. That way the character could sort of continue, but as a warforged; that is, if the player wanted to do something like that.

Honestly, the only playable race I think I would have real trouble integrating into GH is Dragonborn.

Sun Sep 29, 2013 4:04 pm

Not really. The Oerth is largely unknown, but one known place it makes sense for Dragonborn to be found is the Pinnacles of Azor'alq. Now, that doesn't mean that I am one who would go and throw any of the newer races fully into Greyhawk as common races, but there is a place in Greyhawk for all of them, even if only in a limited fashion.
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Sun Sep 29, 2013 6:20 pm

Sun Sep 29, 2013 6:50 pm

Sun Sep 29, 2013 6:52 pm

Sun Sep 29, 2013 7:29 pm

The suggestions for introducing Warforged into Greyhawk so far are the ones I would suggest as well. I agree with Cebrion that there is room for nearly anything in the Flanaess as long as some of those new races, classes, items, etc. are kept extremely rare. I've allowed my players to try out very odd races recently and it works well - they just have to realize that they are not going to run into any of their kin, so are quite the attraction whenever they enter civilization. Makes for some fun role-playing.

SirXaris
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Sun Sep 29, 2013 11:40 pm

In our campaign, we have Tenserian Nimblewrights forged beneath the Fortress of Unknown Depths. I liked the creature concept, but changed the abilities a little to fit the campaign style and to give the magic leaning party some muscle.

Mon Sep 30, 2013 9:46 am

Whilst not canonical, I think warforged can fit in GH although as others have said, they should be much rarer than in Eberron.

Rediscovered old magic works particularly well and Grey Mage's idea has story hooks galore attached. Wish I'd thought of it. Similarly, new experiments (or rediscovery of old ones) can explain the presence of warforged. They seem like something the mages of the Great Kingdom before its disintegration may try in order to have an edge in the war to come.

As for dragonborn, I placed them as a former slave race of the Suel who were freed by the Twin Cataclysms or escaped their masters in the Flanaess. This opens the door for an exploration of how they were created and some revenge on the Scarlet Brotherhood who may or may not still know how to create loyal dragonborn. Again, though, they need to rarer than they are in the core 4E setting.

Mon Sep 30, 2013 5:56 pm

Warforged could easily be a recent development of the Greyhawk Wars, the product of research in the Great Kingdom. The few warforged that were developed were sent into the thickest and most dangerous combat, in Medegia or Almor, and subsequently lost in the destruction.

Tue Oct 01, 2013 4:13 pm

I see the most common theme there is Warfoged should be "artifacts" before Twin Cataclysms. Very intersting idea is also they relation to Scarlet Brotherhood - next good argument to use one of this in my campaing. Evil Grin

Tue Oct 01, 2013 11:41 pm

Dragonborn are merely the draconians revisited to fit into any campaign world you want them in. I never have nor will I every allow a half-dragon half human in my campaign. My preference as I have a different view of dragons then most people I talk to about this. I would allow draconians in DL though not their equvilent in my GH campaign. Also my preference.

As far as the Warforged go. There are many ways to incorporate them that could work. While I prefer them as NPC, a PC who is a great roleplayer might convince me to allow them in a campaign.

Just use golems and call them awakened golems. Souls, spirits and extraplanar beings are often trapped inside a vessel of Clay, Flesh, Stone, or Metal. Some of these creations shed the trappings of servitude and become awakened. Remnants of their past lives may linger though nothing significant remains. The awakened now live in their current state their years of servitude seem to be the memories from which they gather most of the information from their previous existence.

Awakened golems have often served or existed unawakened for at least a hundred years if not longer. While most awakened accept their forms easily it is those made from flesh that have the hardest time dealing with their new found awareness. Awakened flesh golems often have overlapping histories that may be dredged up from remnant psychic links that remain from the corpses used in the manufacture of the golems body. As such all awakened flesh golems must be of chaotic alignment with chaotic neutral making up over 70% of awakened flesh golem alignments.

This is another way to incorporate warforged with a little bit of tweeking.

Thu Oct 03, 2013 9:07 pm

SirXaris,

Your statement about the rarity of 'noncanon' material, particularly races is spot on to my mind...

I allowed two players to try out the goliath race (Races of Stone) as brothers who had been exiled from their tribe due to their interest in the flatlander ways. It brought a bit of difference into the campaign for a while but overall everyone seemed to enjoy it and ultimately that is what matters most.

I think (in the final analysis) that we should remember nothing was canon until it was published and then we as the Gh community adopted it.

Greyhawk is big, vast, unexplored... that is one of the reasons I have always stuck by it. ANYTHING could be out there... just around the next hill, inside the next cavern.

Sat Oct 05, 2013 9:33 am

In a campaign i was running, I introduced warforged and volodni races via the storyline. They were created in the migration times when the suel arrived near Ratik. The volodni were created when people fleeing a suel witch bent on icing the world over arrived in a valley locked in spring, and a sentient divine tree transformed them (volodni are impervious to cold). The warforged, being made in part of wood, were created by the witch from the bodies of slain volodni, fused with metal by magic. They had revolted due to their own spirit. The characters had no idea how these races came to be until they began having visions after eating a walnut from the tree.
Shifter were also introduced as a remnant of particularly devout Llerg-worshipping people, as a dormant bloodline, just like the aasimar.
It was a suel-thillonrian heavy campaign. Happy

Fri Oct 24, 2014 5:21 am

I really like the idea of Warforged and Dragonborn on the opposite sides of the wars that lead to the Twin Cataclysms. Warforged are buried in the Dry Steppes, forgotten and left behind, but cast into stasis due to the aftereffects of the Invoked Devastation, waiting for someone or something to release them.

For Dragonborn, they were created from dragon eggs ala dragonlance originally, but were separated from their Suloise masters by the Rain of Colorless Fire. Now they have formed a country on the other side of the Sea of Dust, but only a few have trickled through the Passage of Slerotin. :)

Of course, the Suloise method of turning dragon eggs into dragonborn has been lost, but that may not stop the Scarlet Brotherhood from rediscovering the secret and putting it to use!
hmm.

Fri Oct 24, 2014 5:43 am

I had my PCs meet warforged after they went through the gateway to Barsoom that they found under Castle Greyhawk. They also found the dry ocean beds swarming with thri-kreen.

Sun Oct 26, 2014 3:16 pm

For warforged there are a bunch of possibilities:

- They could be creations of the Egg of Coot, who is said to be served by automatons.
- They could be the result of robots from the Barrier Peaks crash adapting to Oerth by creating magical versions of themselves.
- They could be from the City of the Gods in Blackmoor.
- They could be the army of the ancient Queen Ehlissa, which would suggest that her Nightingale artifact is also a warforged.
- A PC warforged could be the unique creation of a single wizard in, say, Hexpools. Maybe it's the only one that exists and ever will exist.
- They could be refugees from another world or plane.

For dragonborn, I don't think there inherently needs to be a special explanation for them any more than there's a definitive explanation for where gnolls, kobolds, or aarakocra come from. They could just be another bestial humanoid in a campaign setting full of them, presumed to be created by the gods in some unthinkably ancient era. In 4th edition's default setting they were given an ancient empire of their own, but that's not really necessary. They could just be a rare wandering monster sometimes found in the wilderness.

There's precedent. The krolli from Dragon #36 are draconic humanoids that appeared a little bit before Dragonlance's draconians did. They were said only to dwell in "remote, less traveled parts of the world, away from humans." The dragon-kin from the Dragon Mountain boxed adventure appeared in the Monstrous Compendium Annual #1 and in the 3rd edition Draconomicon. And 3rd edition's dragonborn are humans or demihumans specially transformed by Bahamut. In general, new monsters are just assumed to have always been there. I think 4e or 5e-style dragonborn are only treated differently because they can be PCs, but I don't think that's an inherent reason that they need a special homeland or ancient empire of their own or any history with tieflings. They could just have a few scattered tribes in the Drachensgrabs and Cairn Hills along with other miscellaneous monsters and humanoids.

If you wanted to integrate dragonborn more closely to Greyhawk, you could connect them to Tostenhca (currently inhabited by unusually intelligent kobolds) or say they were allies with the Aerdi in bringing down the empires of the Ur-Flannae. There were supposed to be worshipers of evil dragons on the Flanmi River in ancient times, and the dragonborn could have been involved with that as minions of the dragons or liberators. I suppose they might play some ceremonial role as guardians in the Pinnacles of Azor'alq, and they might be the primary inhabitants of the Mist Kingdom south of the Amedio Jungle. See also this Sojourner from the Mist Kingdom character card thingy for Living Greyhawk, which was meant to be tied to kobolds but would work just as well or better for dragonborn.