D&D General Warforged? How Long Could One Live For?

[Zardnaar]

Theoretically they're immortal. Last session the players encountered a giant pike. This turned into how old are sharks. 450 million years they're older than trees. See where I'm going with this?

I'm not such a fan of watforged and immortal races. They can be killed but what if a group of them decided to try and survive for a really long time?

They could hide out in the D&D equivalent of Australia, Appalachia or the Sahara and ride out the millenia if not eons. They could theoretically survive things like asteroid strikes as long as they're not near ground zero. They don't do anything physically strenuous, nothing preys on them and even hiking or whatever is considered risky.

 

[tetrasodium]

There are indeed some pretty strongly implied lore nuggets suggesting that it might be unless killed & not repaired with some even seeming to date back to the old giant empire ~39,000 years back. I'd say that the stragglers peg the best by date stamped by the creation forge somewhere around "how long do you want them to be kicking around?". That could easily have one who lived through the start of darksun's blue age all the way to present day (FR & Greyhawk timelines seem much shorter). You could even have one who lived through the draconic prophecy's end & went on to watch the rise & fall of those other three settings if you wanted.

Than their body dragging them down from "physically strenuous" activity is not likely s problem since the rock wood & metal can be regrown or replaced.

Spoiler: 'repair' is relative

I don't remember what 3.5 book this was in, ECS maybe? Think it was beside a blurb talking about repairing them with tools

Their mind breaking down from isolation & such is likely a bigger concern for them. Not needing to eat drink or sleep & potentially looking rather golem or statue-like to those unfamiliar with warforged could make it pretty easy to hole up in a library vault or whatever & just be left alone to do their thing as what seems little more than a particularly adept construct.[/spoiler]

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

If you don't like warforged as an immortal race, you could always imitate the documentary Blade Runner and their replicants and have an 'expiration date'

 

[Steampunkette]

No, but you don't understand!

Sharks are -unfathomably- old! They were apex predators 450 million years ago and stayed that way. You know what sharks are older than? Trees. 420 million years old, at most.

Polaris. The North Star. I don't mean "Since it became the North Star" I mean Polaris is 75 million years old. Sharks are -vastly- older than the North Star!

Saturn has only had it's rings for about 100 million years!

The Pleiades Cluster is somewhere around 100-150 million years old.

Our Solar System's orbit around the Milky Way is about 225 million years. Sharks have seen it TWICE.

Flowers evolved around 150-250 million years ago. Sharks have been around longer than flowers, and pollinators!

The Bootes void, the largest known void in the universe, a space between galaxies where nothing exists? It takes light 350 million years to cross it. At LIGHT SPEED. Sharks have been around longer than it takes for light to cross that massive void.

Trees. 420 million years old, at most. Sharks were around 30 MILLION YEARS before the first tree.

The youngest galaxy in the known universe is only SLIGHTLY older than Sharks at 500 million years old.

... sorry to derail. Just... Sharks are so old it's crazy.

Anyway. Yeah. Warforged -can- live indefinitely, with constant repairs and care, but it's far more likely they can live around 80-120 years before they just stop functioning due to wear and tear.

 

[Stormonu]

If you don't like warforged as an immortal race, you could always imitate the documentary Blade Runner and their replicants and have an 'expiration date'

I came here to say the same thing. Designed to cease functioning after a set number of years.

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

I came here to say the same thing. Designed to cease functioning after a set number of years.

To me, that makes sense if the warforged design premise is/was to be the weapons and soldiers of war, so that 'sentient' creatures don't have to undergo the trauma.

Ceasing to function after a few years seems a military-industrial complex issue. If our current weapons are always designed to fight the previous war, this could mean the warforged are constantly being redesigned and updated. Or, there's probably a built-in expectation, like with the Republic clone army, that attrition will thin the herd considerably.

In the last campaign I ran, the gnome artificers built the warforged to bolster the 'good' forces after an unnatural body crashed to the planet causing impact winter. (It was Ymir's corpse when he died at Ragnarok, planes away - he crashed through space to this planet) The warforged, and the vast population of halflings armed with firearms, made a last stand against the goblinoids to buy time for the other races to fortify. That's why in my world, there are few warforged or the tech to make them - the PC gnome artificer had essentially a warforged St. Bernard he used as a mount - and only two hundred halflings left.

 

[Oofta]

They last as long as it may sense for them to last. A car could theoretically last forever, the oldest car that still runs is from 1769. But on average? They last 12 years.

Mechanical bits and pieces don't last forever, they need to be repaired and replaced. Can you repair every component? What bits and pieces could be replaced? If you can, why can't you do that with a biological entity as well? It might or might not be easier with a warforged, but it's still a creature held together by magic and "alchemical fluids"

From their description, I see no reason to believe they are immortal:

Warforged are formed from a blend of organic and inorganic materials. Root-like cords infused with alchemical fluids serve as their muscles, wrapped around a framework of steel, darkwood, or stone. Armored plates form a protective outer shell and reinforce joints.​

​

It may be that warforged can go into hibernation mode and remain in stasis for a very long time, but otherwise I see no reason to assume they would not age, grow old, and die just like any other biological being.

 

[Zardnaar]

Reason I used strenuous activity is because of risk.

Eg farming you can die in an accident.

My idea is a group of them are going out of their way to last as long as possible. In modern terms they won't cross the road due to risk of being hit by a car.

Maybe not that extreme but you get the idea.

 

[tetrasodium]

To me, that makes sense if the warforged design premise is/was to be the weapons and soldiers of war, so that 'sentient' creatures don't have to undergo the trauma.

Ceasing to function after a few years seems a military-industrial complex issue. If our current weapons are always designed to fight the previous war, this could mean the warforged are constantly being redesigned and updated. Or, there's probably a built-in expectation, like with the Republic clone army, that attrition will thin the herd considerably.

In the last campaign I ran, the gnome artificers built the warforged to bolster the 'good' forces after an unnatural body crashed to the planet causing impact winter. (It was Ymir's corpse when he died at Ragnarok, planes away - he crashed through space to this planet) The warforged, and the vast population of halflings armed with firearms, made a last stand against the goblinoids to buy time for the other races to fortify. That's why in my world, there are few warforged or the tech to make them - the PC gnome artificer had essentially a warforged St. Bernard he used as a mount - and only two hundred halflings left.

They almost certainly were designed to be weapons, the question is more who designed them to be weapons. Like many things in eberron there are deliberately conflicting possibilities implied rather than having facts explicitly spelled out.

Cannith is said to have found the creation forge some where on xen'driik & eventually figured out how to get it working well enough in order to mass produce warforge forces during the Last War after early efforts producing the warforge titans & such.

The Giant empire is pretty strongly implied to have created the creation forge during their war with the Quori invading from Dal Quor (plane of dreams) at some point before or after they blew up a moon to shift the plane's orbit & eventually crumbled without the ability to recover from the war. What is not known is just how primitive the cannith warforged are compared to the ones originally built by the much more advanced & long fallen giant empire

 

[Alzrius]

Theoretically they're immortal.

I just looked at my copy of the 3.5 Eberron Campaign Setting, which is where the warforged debuted. According to it, it's "theorized" that warforged reach "middle age" at 150, and that they have no maximum age, being functionally immortal...but the operational word there is "theorized," since the oldest of them is just over thirty. So there's nothing to say that they won't naturally break down over time.