Eberron-as corny as I think?

[ColonelHardisson]

Looks to me like you're talking about the setting more than about warforged. What do warforged have to do with Indiana Jones, exactly?

The entire point of what I was saying that the tropes of pulp fiction are pervasive - hackneyed, if you insist. The warforged creation story sounds quite a bit like many a "planetary adventure" pulp story I've read from the 20s and 30s. Matter of fact, it would fit very comfortably into such stories. It's not all about Indiana Jones.

 

[Anti-Sean]

I meant that the warforged creation story sounds hackneyed, not the entire setting. See how I quoted a post about warforged right above where I said that?

Edit: Oooh, shiny. I'm back up to 1,501 posts. One post over a quarter of the way to 3rd-level once again!

To flesh out the warforged creation story a bit:

A bloody civil war had been raging across an entire continent for roughly 60-70 years when the first warforged gained sentience. Alliances shifted and reshifted between five major nations, as well as some outliers. Attrition had set in, and plague was prevalent in at least one major nation. The war had already spanned three entire generations of human life. How could the various heads of state continue to sell a war that had cost the lives of so many of their sons and daughters? Enter the warforged.

By this point, House Cannith, an ostensibly neutral mercantile house with a veritable monopoly on artifice had been supplying the various warring factions with golem-like weapons for some time; these more primitive versions were more like seige engines or shock troops than the PC race of warforged. After several iterations of refinement, the warforged acheived sentience... without House Cannith intending for it to happen. The artificiers of House Cannith had mostly jury-rigged and reverse engineered ancient relics from the Age of Giants, eldritch machines of artifact level power. They could make a few changes here and tweak a few settings there to have an effect on their creations, but the bulk of the creation process was a mystery to themselves as well. Of course, they'd never let their clients know that...

Once the warforged became sentient, what should Cannith do with them? Was it a bug, or a feature? Their marketing department was on the ball, and explained that this increased level of sophistication would allow for greater flexibility on the battlefield, and require less and less direct command and control.

Now, none of their schemes to increase their profits even further took into account how and what their creations would feel, if anything, as they followed orders and waged war across the continent; or, for that matter, how these beings, created solely for war, would react to a world that didn't need them any more once the Last War came to a halt after the Day of Mourning wiped out an entire nation in a magical cataclysm.

Seems like a pretty compelling backstory and way to fit them into the setting, but YMMV.

 

[WayneLigon]

Sounds pretty hackneyed to me

If it's hacjneyed, where are all the other depictions of self-aware constructs as PC's in fantasy games? Elves could possibly be considered so, because they appear in almost every fantasy game ever made - taking a different spin on a familiar concept, though, saves it from being trite. As far as I know, this is the first time such a thing has ever appeared in a fantasy game, especially as a mainstream playable race. There are precious little incidents even in fantasy fiction I can think of outside of the Discworld books.

 

[Barak]

Have a golem created by a PC in your game achieve sentience by "accident", and you can tell me if it's something that "makes sense".

 

[ColonelHardisson]

Have a golem created by a PC in your game achieve sentience by "accident", and you can tell me if it's something that "makes sense".

Anything to do with magic makes no sense in the real world.

 

[Barak]

If it's hacjneyed, where are all the other depictions of self-aware constructs as PC's in fantasy games? Elves could possibly be considered so, because they appear in almost every fantasy game ever made - taking a different spin on a familiar concept, though, saves it from being trite. As far as I know, this is the first time such a thing has ever appeared in a fantasy game, especially as a mainstream playable race. There are precious little incidents even in fantasy fiction I can think of outside of the Discworld books.

Now I know this wasn't directed at me, but still.

1-Just because it's new and shiny doesn't mean it's good.

2-Dragonstar.

 

[Barak]

Anything to do with magic makes no sense in the real world.

Perhaps, but you can't make blueberry pies with apples.

What the heck are you getting at?

 

[JohnSnow]

Have a golem created by a PC in your game achieve sentience by "accident", and you can tell me if it's something that "makes sense".

Hard to believe we're debating the unintended side effect of a fictional experimental magical process and arguing that it "doesn't make sense."

I love the internet.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

What the heck are you getting at?

Pretty much what John Snow just pointed out.

Perhaps I should adjourn to go about the deadly serious, completely conventional act of pretending to be an elf...

 

[Barak]

Hard to believe we're debating the unintended side effect of a fictional experimental magical process and arguing that it "doesn't make sense."

I love the internet.

I guess both of you missed my point, intentionally or not.

So we have house Carnath (or whatever) mass-manufacturing golems for the war effort. Eventually, somehow, they become sentient! Awesome! Warforged PCs! This is cool!

But if you are a PC in my game, and you create golems, and, after the third golem, I have it become sentient and his goals aren't totally in par with yours... Well you'd be making a thread on here as to how I'm out to screw with you, since you spent thousands of GPs on making a golem and I didn't follow the book and now it left you to go dig in some dungeons with a bunch of misfits.