Ideas for the Warforged Outside Eberron

[garyh]

Here's my idea...

Dwarves built them for their constant goblinoid wars. This works well with two common ideas:

1) Dwarves are excellent crafters of stone and metal.

2) Dwarves, with their slow reproduction, are always outnumbered by the quick-breeding goblinoids.

Once the warforged gain sentience, there could be tension with the dwarves, or perhaps the dwarves could regard the warforged almost an avatar of the earth.

 

[fba827]

random thought - if you watched much star trek: deep space 9, you could model it after the jem hadaar (sp?) - what would they be like without the dominion war to give them purpose?

 

[SteelDraco]

I'm contemplating a sort of cross between Dark Sun and Eberron, with Eberron being the past (Green Age) of Athas. In that, most warforged would be relics unearthed from the ruins of ancient civilizations, reawakened by the people who found them. Most would be slaves, but some would flee or earn their freedom. Artificers (those who try to learn from the relics they find in the ruins) would also be trying to create new ones from chitin, wood, and bone - a process that is watched quite closely by the sorcerer-kings.

 

[Gez]

As I've said in the MM3 thread, I'm thinking of making them extraplanar. They hail from the factories of the Clockwork Nirvana of Mechanus, along with the Inevitables; but they have a greater free will than inevitables. Their alignment will be always lawful, but any lawful (LG, LN, LE).

Well, I don't use the Great Wheel cosmology, but their place of origin is the same as the Modrons and the Inevitables anyway.

 

[VirgilCaine]

I guess it would depend on the society. Some people might embrace them as equals. Some might look upon them with suspicion (for taking jobs away from humans?). They might have rules put upon them such as the Three Laws of Warforged. (tie back into former slaves?)

Um, no. It's not "taking jobs away from humans" it's "freeing humans to edification instead of backbreaking drudgery." Proving this would invole RL economics (Nobel-prize winning economics, IIRC) but thats a thing Not To Do when debating D&D--involve RL stuff.

Deep in the desert, buried under centuries of sand, stands an army of warforged. Unmoving and statuesque. Long ago a seer had a vision that revealed to him that his people were to combat a great evil, but that the evil would take ages to arrive. So the warforged were created to hold the souls of those that wanted to be in the world to fight the great evil. As a member of the seers order or culture or civilization died, his soul was transfered to the warforged he himself had helped to create. There it stood waiting for the right time to awaken and begin the long journey to the place where the far away evil would be. I got the idea from the terra cotta warriors of Japan.
Perhaps they are inhabited by the spirits of the guardians of a long buried tomb, whos master decided they should be able to stand forever to guard his remains.

This fits really well with an ancient, destroyed desert empire in my homebrew. Sounds like I'll need to detail a lesser-known branch of this empire, the artificers... (The other are the crystalmancers c.f. Crystalmancy, the Powers of Gems)

Warforged...sentient constructs...
Sounds like Lum the Mad mini-sized his Mighty Servant of Leuk-O and figured that allowing humans to pilot it would lead to problems...

The Modron idea also has merit.

 

[Desdichado]

I love the concept of the warforged, but I'd rather stick to my home-brew setting rather than switch to Eberron.

Give me your awesome ideas for incorporating warforged characters into a non-Eberron world.

* Who could create them? How?
* What functions aside from war could they be used for?
* How would common folk react to them?

Hey, Rem, any chance I can convince you to give a quick two or three paragraph description of your homebrew? It'd help a lot in integrating the warforged.

I can think of ways to integrate them into my homebrew, but that's because I know all about my homebrew and how they'd fit without seeming to just be thrown in. For example, in my homebrew, the PC races are all former slaves, bred from a common human stock for specific functions, much the way we've bred cattle, dogs, horses, etc. for specific roles in our society. In my campaign, I could easily posit that these same breeders developed the warforged, and indeed, intended to phase out the human(oid) slaves entirely. This finally sparked the revolt that freed the slaves, but it also leaves wide open the possibilities of warfarged doing all kinds of weird things. Were they also freed, and now have to try and integrate into a human society that fears and distrusts them for what they were intended to be? Do they go their own way and now form their own nations and societies, for the most part? Do they still, mostly, serve the remnants of the former masters? Or some mix of all three?

But all of that is based on my concept of these breeders; it wouldn't work at all in most other campaign settings.

If I had some ideas about your setting; what it's like, what are its themes, etc. I could probably think of ways to put the warforged in there as well.

 

[Fingers Boggis]

i shamelessly stole my warforged integration from Warhammer 40k, the dwarves are a race in decline who worship their ancestors, this worship is led by shamen (OA). They are also a race facinated by mechanisms etc, at the forfront of this are their artificers (ECS). Due to recent pressures from the goblinoid empire abover they're cavernous (spelling?) homes and the extended wars between them the artificers have created mighty mechanical bodies for which the shamen are petitioning ancient heros to inhabit to assist in the war effort. All stolen from the eldar codex entry about the wraithguard

Fingers

 

[joss66]

I think a race created to wage war has a great potential to treat post-war trauma in your setting. The incapacity of soldiers to integrate a peace-time society woul greatly confuse the war-forged, among whom unemployment would be very high. That would lead to desperate bands of Good-aligned thugs, fought against by good-aligned militias slowly falling into some kind of unjustified racism.
This sad (and somewhat realistic) mess would sure make for an interesting background in which to incorporate your urban stories...

 

[Nightchilde-2]

1) If using the Great Wheel cosmology, replace the rather lame Modrons with the rather cool Warforged. :-D

2) They enter the world through a permanent planar rift, offering their help to the world at large. A small band of rebels (PC-worthy warforged) know the truth and join with some other PCs that have also learned the truth: the warforged are a conquering race, and intend to conquer this plane. So the groups join together.

Yes, I did watch a lot of "V" in my youth. Why do you ask?

 

[Remathilis]

My homebrew is basically a traditional PH/DMG/MM world, but moved up to late medieval/rennisance era. High level magic is controled by only a few powerful people, but low level magic is typical D&D level. Age of exploration, the rennisance of ideas, and slight fantastical tech (like airships) exist.

There hasn't been a war in a long time, but a nation is on the move to create an empire. They are doing so through both political and military methods, and they seem to have access to very powerful (epic) level magics, including a small fleet of airships.

My idea was to make them the shock troops of this evil empire as an experimentation of new ways to create/animate golems (in this case, maybe human souls instead of elementals?) but I wanted to see if anyone had an amazing idea cold.

I might yoink their place of origin like from the terra cotta warriors, as some manner of recreated technology. Who knows. Any other suggestions?