On the origin of species: Warforged

[Herobizkit]

Mad inspiration: In the far realms beyond the stars, there is an entity known as Unicron. Unicron devours entire planes of reality, and its MO is to visit the dreams of artificers on a plane and teach them to create Warforged. The warforged then work in secret to summon Unicron.

On this particular plane, one of the artificers managed to retain some semblance of sanity and figured out what Unicron was plotting; he created good warforged to fight against the evil, and the first of these warforged was known as Primus.

The good warforged worshiped Bahamut as their patron and led the battle against their evil brethren. In their darkest hour, Bahamut empowered Primus as his personal avatar, and Primus fought against Unicron, barely managing to banish the elemental evil back to the far realms. Primus was then elevated to the status of a god.

Now, most warforged worship Primus, but there are still some who work to bring Unicron. It is the duty of the paladins of Primus to hunt these heretics down and destroy them.

Been watching Transformers Prime a lot lately, and gotta say, I love this.

 

[Smoss]

Back in 2nd Edition I created a race called the Automatons - Based loosely on the "warforged" style race from the game Ultima 7 Part 2 (Serpent Isle).

There were some serious mine-able ideas from their interpretation. In the game you met the automatons at times, what few were around. They were mindless servants. So you thought... Originally they were the bodies made for the followers of Order. Their warriors had their souls implanted into the stronger automation bodies vs their soft, soft fleshy bodies. Then they went off to fight Chaos. The remaining automatons are survivors who have lost that spark of intelligence they once had over the centuries.

So in short - living people trying to create a super soldier by transferring souls into robots.

I got a good chuckle out of the warforged when they originally came out. When I first read about them and some of their history my first thought was "Hey, they ripped off the same source I did!"
Smoss

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

So there's my two stories... How about yours?

Lunar tinker gnomes built the forged to help them study the crystalline labyrinth under their moon's surface.

 

[pawsplay]

An empire found itself facing a foe with no reservations about undead warriors. This empire, however, considered it anathema. However, they found a solution. While they would not use undead spirits, or trap living souls, they found a way to store life force energy. Using powerful accumulators to store and concentrate life force, they were able to use spells to give that life force a form of intelligence. Inadvertently, their creators discovered that such beings, despite being artificial, also had an immortal nature, leading to a new vein of research into the essence contained in matter. While the new warforged army were not as effective, particularly cost effective, as they hoped, their immunity to undead contagion allowed them to hold the enemy at bay long off to secure a ceasefire. It did not take the necromancers long to exhaust their resources and develop leadership problems; when war resumed, their weakened forces were easily repelled.

After the way, Pa-Ka, the Inevitible in charge of those who created life without the benefit of divine wisdom, challenged the wizards who created the warforged. In response, they imprisoned him, and used his mechanoid body as a template for enhancing their creations. However, his arrival convinced them to be wary, and the warforges were gradually cooled down and turned into research facilities, lest they draw unwanted divine, diabolic, or cosmic attention.

 

[the Jester]

Warforged arose in my campaign during the Great War of Ethics between Law and Chaos. There was a magocracy that started cranking them out to defend itself and to strategically aid others.

Now, 2000+ years later, the warforged were created by an ancient group of mages. It's all a matter of perspective.

 

[FireLance]

Let's see ... one thousand years ago, superstition and the sword ruled.
It was a time of darkness. It was a world of fear.
It was the age of some kind of gargoyle-like magical creatures.
Stone by day, warriors by night, one clan of gargoyle-like magical creatures was betrayed the humans (or maybe tieflings - sounds like the sort of thing they might do) they had sworn to protect, frozen in stone by a magic spell for a thousand years.
Now, here in [insert name of campaign world], the spell is broken, and they live again!
Except that something somehow went awry when the magic spell was broken - they can now move around during the day, but they're pretty much stone all the time, too.
They are, well, defenders of the day and night now, I guess.
And, to avoid confusion, they have also stopped calling themselves gargoyle-like magical creatures.

 

[Colmarr]

According to my DM, Acererak made them.

It certainly put a new spin on visiting the Tomb of Horrors, and on playing through Revenge of the Giants!

 

[S'mon]

In my Wilderlands 4e setting, the Warforged were creating during the War of the Pious and the Philosophers ca 6,000 years ago, when Logic battled Religion for mastery of the world. Warforged were initially created by the Markab-advised Altani Logicians through Technomancy, then copied by the Orichalan Dragon Lords - part of the victorious Pious faction - who substituted a divine spark for the Logicians' technological basis. Ultimately they were used by all factions.

As the war wound down, many Warforged and Creation Forges were sealed in Stasis Vaults, which occasionally breach, allowing 'new' warforged to emerge into the world, and several un-stasised Creation Forges may now be active.

 

[wedgeski]

My warforged have a cylon-like quality about them, and represent the misguided attempts of the now-deceased dragonborn empire to achieve immortality. I haven't yet had much fun with them, as I intend them to be an Epic-level threat, but I'm looking forward to it.

 

[RainOfSteel]

Warforged are unlike most other races in that they're not quite so easy to just drag and drop into a homebrew setting.

A setting would have to go out its way to make it difficult.

1 -- Other Prime Plane: If the Warforged come from some other Prime Plane, then there needs to be no local origin.

2 -- The smith/engineer god (Autocthon, Hephaestus (aka Vulcan)), the dwarves, ancient empire, etc.

There is literally no shortage of explanations for the origin of Warforged in any milieu.