[Story] Musings and ideas

[Fil kearney]

There's a lot going on in Eberron. I'll be putting out ideas about the gameworld here. anyone is welcome to add their own thoughts and play around with other ideas shared here for me to borrow off of

[Fil kearney]

Mror Hold is the dwarven continent loosely connected to Karrnath, west of the Lhazaar Principalities.
Spelljammer had Dwarven Citadels, which were massive asteroids carved into fun dwarvish monuments that became essentially drifting/flying fortresses in space.
I'm going to keep that idea, but these citadels act as the navy of Mror Hold, drifting about the border of the nation topside, as well as patrolling below the horizon at the edge of The Mourn to be sure if anything strange is afoot, it is intercepted before terrorizing the communities topside.
This means friction between Mror and Q'barra as the citadels dip deep south into The Mourn where egg ships float quietly hatching young, as well as the citadels getting up in Lhazaar territory infrequently.. many of the more nefarious pirates like to dip down below Horizon to slip into the Core shipping lanes unnoticed.. Mror is being pressured more and more to exert military actions against the criminal traffic flowing into the Karrnath borders or stirring up trouble along eastern Darguun.

Since the dwarves spread in and down instead of out, they have significantly more awareness below the horizon than anywhere East of the Core Khorvaire.

[Fil kearney]

each continent can be hundreds of miles across, but this is a 3 dimensional space we are occupying, and The Mourn lies below the Horizon of the nations. While the majority of the Nations float at similar altitudes, it is difficult to imagine the colossal depth of the exposed rock hanging beneath.
On Real World Earth, the highest point of elevation is only about 5 miles high in Tibet.... considering there is cloud coverage at this scale, it is difficult to fathom 10 mile drop.. or 50 miles. The sheer depth would be lost in the condensing fog that become The Mourn... so there is no "going under" the continents... they are absolute barriers below the horizon to travel from one side of the continent to another. (or rather, no one has ever come back from a Deep Excursion.. so it's impossible to say. To attempt the expedition, the Death Flag is automatically released and characters could be killed by a random Chain Lighting or Cloudkill storm, aerial abominations, or perhaps slumbering Gods.. it is a rip into the spirit world, chaos, and dark necrotic energies that could one day simply surge awake and destroy the delicate islands drifting above.

Massive cavern complexes are known to exist, though their locations are rumor or kept secrets.. open spaces that could house nations (and some myths exist that they DO.. the True Throne of Droaam, for instance, is said to be hidden away in such a pocket, which is why Bre and Thrane forces have never been able to stamp out Droaam hostility from above the Horizon.
The Gray Wastes are believed to be nearly hollowed out from beneath, incubating a massive evil concocted by the Council of 9 that control the region... that the Wastes are more like an egg that will one day crack open and destroy Khorvaire, consuming all the life force of the population to grow some ancient Dark God, and that the Eldeen Druids are quietly warring against the forces of hell below Horizon with their abominations unfit for normal ecology

[Fil kearney]

On Outsiders, The Mourn, and Killing That Which Cannot be Killed
As first discussed Here:

So, The Mourn which lies Below the Horizon just transitions into the Ether/Astral/Spirit World if you dive far enough.
This is the same as if becoming ethereal, effectively, in the sense that you can travel from Khorvaire directly into the spirit world physically ithout any tools or resources... just fall long enough and you slip free. This is a two way street. For those that know the way, you can move from the spirit world into the physical Khorvaire as though you had Plane Shifted directly from hell... you just gotta fly up.
Either way is nearly suicidal simply due to the fact that it takes days to fall far enough, and the spell storms that buffer between realms is always lethal, except for a few legends and myths of course... so the forces of hell don't just show up and devour humanity.
A demon can possess mortals through the ethereal.

You cannot "kill" a demon tht is possessing.. only it's host. the demon then gets kicked to the Ethereal again.
If you go to the etheral and fight a demon there, it can die foeer.
If you coax a demon through The Mourn into physical Khorvaire, it can die there.

So crafty demons possess and manipulate mortals through possession because its safe unless someone able to affect ethereal creatures is present.. your team happens to be pretty good at that bit.
Thing is, anyone in the ethereal can "Dive" into deep Ether/Astral in 3 rounds of "movement" away from the Ethereal... so you have to be able to capture a demon in the Border or else it escapes into the Deep.
you can follow anyone into the Deep by taking the three rounds of Movement as well, and you can kill anything out there as wel.

Astral Projection is a ritual that Outsiders can perform to create astral constructs that, if killed, send consciousness back to the true body... so if you are trying to kill something in the Ether, you need to be sure it's the True form, to kill it for good.

So its layered, and complicated.. if a demon is strong enough to perform the Projection ritual, killng the projection is not inconsequential, because the ritual takes time, which could result in stalling a demon's plans.
The ritual requires human sacrifices, so there's nasty cults that crop up, yadda yadda yadda.

The best anyone ever hopes for is luring a projected demon out into the open to kil the projectino to require it to either rely on possession, or sending it back to hell to start accumulating resources for another projection ritual.
This works for angels as well as demons.

If it's a little hazy, that's great. this sort of frank discourse requires high level skill in planar knowledge, or religion, or arcane knowledge. the precise mechanics are sketchy, but this is the gist of it.

[Fil kearney]

Spelljammer/Airship Mashups
As first discussed Here:

I'm going with a blend of Spelljammer and Eberron Airboat rules for locomotion; each ship is bound to an air elemental that basically swallows the ship and scoots it about with direction from the Helm.
The ritual to bond elementals to objects is powerful enough that it requires a ritual of separation beyond any simple dispel magic could muster, so it's Safe.
This also means each ship will have it's own personality, and this also means building boats is also in part the business of coaxing/forcing spirits to serve the needs of shipmaker.
Valenar Elves, predictably, have a fey-bonding ritual so the ship itself is considered to be a fairy of sorts, and serving as such is a sort of honor, so naturally their ships kick @$$ even if they are giant butterflies.
Darguun and Droaam tend to bond Fire Elementals to their ships, so they are noxious affairs not much noted for stealth, but can be real terrors in close quarter combat, what with the gouts of flame harrassing daintier ship classes.
Humans for the most part rely on zilargo rituals of bonding air elements, which has resulted in an ever-growing storm around the nation of gnomes.. lets just say druids and shamans everywhere are really concerned about what the end result of this could be.
There's other means of travel amongst the dwarves, lizard folk and rakshasa, but I'll leave that for later.


There's three major languages spoken by the nautical industry aside from Common:
Auran (air elemental ships)
Fey (elvin ships)
Ignan (fire elemental ships)
Pirates are likely to know both Auran and ignan... outside of Valenar, Fey is rare, but the older sky-dogs tend to pick up some despite themselves

Dwarves carve their citadels from free-floating land masses too small to be mapped in the world, but large enough to be a menace. These "boulders" are rocks hundreds of yards across that have air elementals sorta, "fused" into the spirit of the rocks. From a shamanic perspective, they are awkward and misshapen souls, but it is a material Dwarves have an aptitude for... it just happens that they can be directed...slowly... across the sky.
While it is the air elemental that provide the buoyancy, the spirit awoken to guide a citadel is actually Terran, and considered an Earth Elemental... so that is the language of choice amongst Dwarven Helmsmen and Navigators guiding their citadels.

They really are no more than massive, mobile fortresses that are often rigged to drop the bottom half of their structure-- millions of tons of rock-- onto any targeted enemy community or strategic location. Although Breland and Thrane have made some use of similar "floating fortresses", only the dwarves of Mror Hold have mastered their use.
Furthermore, the dwarves live inward.. very little settlement is exposed on Mror Hold, so they are essentially immune to their own weapons, while the other races mostly leave themselves exposed on the surfaces of their nations. This puts Mror Hold in a very strong defensive position, and are generally left alone with very favorable trade agreements.
Raiding Mror Hold is a dungeon crawl nightmare, whereas the dwarves need simply to drift into position and literally drop a rock on the capital of any opposing government-- hiding is the only defense. This is a lesson that the warlords of Darguun, as well as the nation of Droaam have taken to heart, and have been implementing for generations, leaving mostly only weapons and defensive strongholds open for enemy targeting.

[Fil kearney]

Spell Storms and the curse of Karrnath... first posted Here

They are "natural" occurances of The Mourn. Not every storm is a spell storm, but all spell storms brew from within, and always Below Horizon towards The Mourn... these storms almost always run their course before rising Above Horizon, but very rarely some spill inland before sputtering out. Karrnath has taken two on the chin in known history, but no where else Above Horizon.

Further, It is a known myth that the Eldeen Druids have a ritual to summon weather, and if they intentionally botch the ritual they can coax a spell storm from it. there's a few Bard Tales of this being used on occasion when a true invasion was mustered in the western Mourn beneath the Gray Wastes.. the participants don't survive.

Karrnath has bad relations with the Druids because they have in the past accused the druids of summoning the storms to punish Karrnath for their practical use of necromancy... the two storms that affected karrnath were
--First, the 5th level spell, Wall of Stone. This resulted in millions of tons worth of rock to just wink into existence along the southern ledge of the country about 350 years ago. Bizzarre architecture still remains from the bolts of lightning that literally petrified when striking the land... a sort of, "petrified forest" of lightning strikes stretching for hundreds of miles. At points the storm was so strong that the calcified lightning created caverns with odd resonance that snake down the side of the continent into the mourn. Neat tourism spot, but it's like a ladder of sorts extending from Above Horizon into the depths of The Mourn.
--Second, the 4th level spell, Summon Monster IV about 120 years ago, where every lightning strike would permanently summon a fiendish giant wasp into existence... they promptly colonized the lightning forest and ruined most of the practical tourism there, as well as slaughtering a good portion of the southern population.. It took considerable resources to clear any wasps from nesting within several miles of the southern edge, but the stray wasp is still seen even today... the 3rd prince of Lhazaar has a calvary of tamed wasp riders-- the only military unit of it's sort in the world, as far as anyone knows. Taking him out will prove to be challenging.