The Mess in the Mournlands

[Beelzebub1111]

So, I was thinking, Since it's left up to the DMs decision and all, what explanations do you DMs use in your games for what happened on the Day of Mourning?

My favorite explanation that I've heard is that it's Khyber's breath weapon. and He's waiting 1d4 millennia to use it again. Though I'm really debating on what I should actually use in my game, or if to use it at all.

[Dusk Eclipse]

The game I am playing in right now is actually investigating it, so far we have found some clues that poin the blood of Vol direction (actually the emerald claw but IIRC they are the armed arm of Vol).

The one I created was a failed experiment by the dreaming dark.

[Venerable]

It's Eberron, momentarily awoken from its sleep by the Hundred Year War. (Someday I'm going to play a bard who's convinced of this.)

Or it's a coterminous zone with a plane that was lost or previously unknown.

[Dr Bwaa]

This has always been my favorite explanation:
http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/643/mournlandbuttonsmall.jpg

[Infernum]

What is the day of mourning of which you speak?

[Dusk Eclipse]

What is the day of mourning of which you speak?

that essentially finished the great war, in short one day cyre a complete nation was completely destroyed all the cyrans died , the land became a wastelant and an unatural mist settled on the borders, no one's now what happened or why.

[Kalirren]

Some Cyran magewright working on the latest national defense project "conveniently" forgot a negative sign.

[Khorebh]

that essentially finished the great war, in short one day cyre a complete nation was completely destroyed all the cyrans died , the land became a wastelant and an unatural mist settled on the borders, no one's now what happened or why.

...Wait a minute. Wait just one damn minute. Suddenly the nation and its populace are missing... and there's a MISTY BORDER around it?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ce/Rv-logo.png
Hmmm.

[Zeta Kai]

...Wait a minute. Wait just one damn minute. Suddenly the nation and its populace are missing... and there's a MISTY BORDER around it?

Oh good, I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought of that. Yeah, that sounds familiar.

[Coidzor]

And if you wander in there, you mutate horribly. So the robots go in there to build their own independent nation out of the scrap and twisted ruins.

heh. I just got an idea for a fallout-style game set in the mournland with warforged...

But, seriously. It was a nuke. A country-sized nuke. So a small attempt at test-firing an anti-osmium bomb. The safeguards in place that kept it from destroying the rest of the material plane it was on were what created the walls of mist.

[AslanCross]

What is the day of mourning of which you speak?

Not sure if this is sarcastic, but I'll answer it anyway.

In the Eberron Campaign Setting, an entire country was completely obliterated after a cataclysmic hundred-year war. Dead-gray mists shrouded the major cities of the nation of Cyre, the sky caught fire, and practically everyone in the vicinity of the country died.

City blocks in the capital city, Metrol, were mixed up, rotated or teleported to locations miles from their original location.

Finally, a couple of years later, Cyre (now known as the Mournland), is still messed up. Nothing grows naturally in it; everything is toxic. Battlefields littered with bodies of soldiers are completely preserved---no decay sets in. Magic either doesn't work or works unreliably, and it's basically a nasty place.

Nobody knows why it happened.


Anyway, my take on it is that it's either a secret Cyran weapon gone horribly wrong or an attempt at a planar overlay of Xoriat, the realm of madness.

[Garak]

I always thought they were working on a WMD like spell and it blew up in their faces in the worst way ever (hell, it set off every magic item in the kingdom as well just for the kicks). That or someone else used a WMD (that was just the test run to see if it works).

[Tiki Snakes]

...Wait a minute. Wait just one damn minute. Suddenly the nation and its populace are missing... and there's a MISTY BORDER around it?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ce/Rv-logo.png
Hmmm.

I'm pretty ignorant of the setting myself, but I like this idea.

[Yora]

Ravenloft is a demiplane that is apparently controlled by unknown powers that teleport entire countries from their native world and add it to the landscape of Ravenloft. The entire land is surrounded by a sea of mists that will release you at apparently random locations of Ravenloft, at random moments in time. IF the mists ever release you. Also it seems that the unknown powers only steal countries that are ruled by incredibly evil villains, so every country is kind of a crapsack world. And there are LOTS of supernatural monsters haunting the lands.

[Terraoblivion]

It appears to mostly copy the lands or create them wholesale. At least neither Falkovnia nor Sithicus translates to any gaping holes in the geography of Dragonlance. Similarly Hazlan hasn't caused a part of Thay to disappear. Nor has any part of Oerth vanished to make room for Darkon.

[Optimystik]

There's a lot of living spells in the Mournlands - could they be related in some way? Did the cataclysm come about due to mages trying to create them, or are they a byproduct of the catastrophe?

[Tiki Snakes]

Oh, I'm reasonably familiar with Ravenloft. I meant that I'm only passingly familiar with Eberron. :)

[PairO'Dice Lost]

My explanation is fairly campaign-specific, but here goes.

My party was handling your basic Tharizdun's-cult-is-trying-to-destroy-the-multiverse scenario in Faerun when they burst in upon the final ritual to find a bunch of cultists drawing energy from alternate Primes through various portals. The PCs managed to destroy most of the portals and weaken the ritual, but it did go off--however, they were able to redirect the big beam o' death through one of the portals instead of letting it hit the ground. They finished off the cultists, destroyed all the portals except the one used, and then ran into major reinforcements and found their only option was to escape through the last remaining portal.

They walked out of the portal, found a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and thought that they hadn't been able to reduce the power of the ritual enough and accidentally destroyed a whole alternate Prime. Then they saw the shattered husk of an airship scream by overhead and crash somewhere in the distance, with some warforged falling out on the way....

[Djinn_in_Tonic]

I've used the Khyber's Breath explanation (not the breath weapon, but simply exhalations as the Dragon Below begins to stir), but my personal favorite was one of the following:

--Cyre had discovered that the Draconic Prophecy foretold the end of Eberron, and was actively working to break the prophecy and prevent the end times. The dragons of Argonesson destroyed Cyre in a potent magical ritual to prevent the prophecy from being broken.

--Cyre nuked itself, after the wards to the Dragon Below began to fail within the country's boundaries. They sacrificed themselves to keep Eberron whole. Now the PCs must find out what happened and why, and recover the technology before the Dragon Below fully awakens...and hopefully discover a way to use it without destroying half of Khorvaire in the process.