The Mournlands...So WTF Happened? [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

The Reverend

2011-11-15, 08:59 PM

Got to reading about the Mournlands ands got intrigued. Grey Mist, things dont rot , things dont die, living spells, twisted life, only inside the Political Boundaries of Cyre, but no Canon specifics on what happened. The only inside the political boundaries is the weird thing, not a modern circular blast pattern

If this were oWOD Mage I would say someone was messing with entropy, life, prime, and correspondence and messed up Bad. Probably spirit too.

Edit--Should have added this

What are some of the reasons you have seen, used, or theories invented.

phlidwsn

2011-11-15, 09:21 PM

What happened on the Day of Mourning? Whatever the DM needs or wants to have happened. Ebberon has a lot of this type of 'customize to fit' mysteries ready to be used to make a campaign your own.

Given the exact lineup of the effect with the borders, my own theories tend toward "The king is the land" types. Ie horrible curse on king reflected onto kingdom. Either that or a corruption of this particular kingdom-shaped piece of the dragon Ebberon.

Shadowknight12

2011-11-15, 09:36 PM

It's left deliberately vague so that the DM comes up with whatever explanation suits the campaign. There is no answer. It's a mystery without a solution.

Aidan305

2011-11-16, 06:26 AM

It's left deliberately vague so that the DM comes up with whatever explanation suits the campaign. There is no answer. It's a mystery without a solution.

This is pretty much the answer Keith Baker gave me when I asked him. Though my actual question had been what he thought had happened.

Mordokai

2011-11-16, 07:59 AM

I heard something about Traveller and Merith D'Cannith having to do with everything. It may not be Merith, but one of the other Canniths. But Traveller was definetly in there.

Alas, the details escape me.

JonRG

2011-11-16, 01:59 PM

A lot of Thranes believe the Silver Flame was exacting divine retribution on those decadent heathens. :smallwink: I don't have my own theory, but the fact that the event was so precise always bugged me.

hiryuu

2011-11-16, 02:27 PM

It was part of a conspiracy to turn Cyre into a giant prime-material version of Dolurrh so that someone had a giant country-wide craft reserve. To make... something.

Someone dropped a living genesis!

Vampires.

Tyndmyr

2011-11-16, 02:31 PM

Elder Evils has a reference to one of them as a potential cause of this.

Analytica

2011-11-16, 03:57 PM

Somehow, it must be the result of House Cannith trying something too big for them to handle. They got Warforged technology from Xen'drik, which also has Giant magic schemata, maybe including plane alignment things. The matchup of the effect of the borders may imply the attempt was to buff/protect Cyre rather than harm its enemies. The central part of the effect is the absence of some ordinary life functions, and the existence of life in some things (i.e. spells) where there should be none.

My guess, then: somehow cause Cyre to become a modified manifest zone to the positive/negative energy planes, causing an area wherein all damage dealt to one part is instead dealt to the attacker. This would demonstrate the ultimate futility of war, and make it meaningless to battle for the capital and heartlands of Galifar (Gallifrey? :smalltongue:). Somehow they ended up creating a lifeless zone instead, without bonds to the life and death planes. Excess energies left behind produce living spells, and the Cannith lab at the centre of it somehow exploded, possibly by some other cause (Traveller/Doctor?) which then, in turn, caused the attempt to fail.

Thyrian

2011-11-16, 07:49 PM

On behalf of the Southern Cannith branch I would like to make it quite clear that all allegations directed at Cannith are unjust attempts to slander the House's good name, we here at Cannith take our relationships within Khorvaire very seriously and all such slander directed at our house are merely false words spoken by extremists. I would again like to remind the public of our formal announcement last spring in Thronehold entitled "Mournland? What Mournland??" for all future allegations being brought against the House of Making in relation to the Cyre incident, we'd like to remind the public that like everyone else we suffered heavily from the creation of Mournland and are in no way responsible for its creation as only experiments partitioned by the recognized crown are ever undertaken within a nations grounds. We'd also like to point out that House Medani has been awfully quiet on the topic of Mournland and Kundarrak records clearly show out of all the Dragon mark houses Medani suffered the least total revenue losses.

From a non-Cannith perspective, Eberron has a strong theme of 13 becoming 12, this could simply be co-incidence but depending on the 'scale' of a plot you're going for, solving the creation of Mournland, what happened to the 13th moon, how the giants stopped the plane of Dreams, Vol's mark could all simply be clues to solving the 13-12 mystery. I think the most common 'go to' for how Mournland created is definitely (from a DM perspective) is Cannith, somehow.

I feel that from a playing perspective it will also be the 'default' explanation for how Mournland occurred. You could have a lot of fun re-enforcing that idea with statements like above and still have Mournlands origins be from a completely different source then Cannith! (The words in blue are the important ones)

Venerable

2011-11-16, 09:00 PM

I've heard tell that it was a Cannith genesis forge in Metrol. On the eve of a terrible battle in their land, the Cyrans tried to use the forge to drive all foreigners from their land. Didn't work, of course.

Some believe it was caused by the great dragon Eberron itself, stirring in its sleep after a century of war upon its back finally irritated it. So the Day of Mourning was really nothing more than Eberron scratching a flea bite. Well, we hope it's just stirring, not waking up...

That's what I heard.

stainboy

2011-11-16, 11:41 PM

To determine who really caused the Day of Mourning, roll d% on the following table.

1-10 - Vol
11-20 - the Lords of Dust
21-25 - the Chamber
26-30 - the Dreaming Dark
31-40 - the Traveler
40-45 - the Three Hags
46-55 - the Lord of Blades
56-65 - that pit fiend under Flamekeep
66-75 - Merrix d'Cannith
76-80 - Pope Loli I
81-85 - the Dreaming Dark again
86-90 - Tharizdun
90-95 - Mystra (by dying)
96-99 - roll twice, they were in cahoots
100 - all of them

Prime32

2011-11-17, 06:40 AM

TharizdunTharizdun doesn't technically exist in Eberron. But he's too crazy to care. :smalltongue: As for Mystra... it wasn't her dying, it was Elminster getting drunk afterwards.

So, what about the "Cyre was partially pulled into Ravenloft with the Lord of Blades as its darklord" theory?

Dusk Eclipse

2011-11-17, 10:22 AM

Tharizdun doesn't technically exist in Eberron. But he's too crazy to care. :smalltongue: As for Mystra... it wasn't her dying, it was Elminster getting drunk afterwards.

So, what about the "Cyre was partially pulled into Ravenloft with the Lord of Blades as its darklord" theory?

I actually planned to use that theory to pull my players into Castle Ravenloft :smallredface:.

One of my DM's implied it had something to do with the Quori.. perhaps one of their attempts to stop Dal Quor from collapsing on itself.

Kymme

2011-11-17, 10:55 AM

Personally, I think that that vampire king wanted to destroy Cyre, and he hired the order of the emerald claw to do it, and then the order built an eldrich machine and blew cyre up.

Yora

2011-11-17, 11:30 AM

The fact that the borders of the Mournlands exactly match up with the territory of Cyre at the time makes me believe that it was a failed attempt of creating a magical defense to protect the country.
Possibly something that draws on the natural energies of the land, but it went completely wrong and either killed or mutated all life.

If it was a Karnath super weapon, than it would no sense to specifically engineer it so that the affected area exactly matches Cyres territory. However if it was a Cyre defense project, they could only plant the focus items on territory under their control. Also, if it was a secret Cyre project, everyone involved in it would have been killed when it went wrong, which explains why nobody has any idea what happened.

Tiki Snakes

2011-11-17, 11:40 AM

Here's a thought, what if whatever caused it didn't necessarily have to happen at the actual location of the Mournlands?

Say, someone elsewhere performed a forbidden spell, or spoke the true name of something Lovecraftian. Something that would appear to be unrelated, but that had butterfly-effect style implications...

Tanuki Tales

2011-11-17, 12:31 PM

So, what about the "Cyre was partially pulled into Ravenloft with the Lord of Blades as its darklord" theory?

I...think that's my favorite explanation for the Mournland...ever.

GungHo

2011-11-17, 12:45 PM

This is pretty much the answer Keith Baker gave me when I asked him. Though my actual question had been what he thought had happened.
I do this with my own worlds. I don't want to plot/write myself into a corner. I'm never going to publish anything I have (short of posting here on some select topics... I'm considering participating in the worldbuilding forums here, but not there yet), so it's not just a matter of allowing the customer to come up with whatever he wants. Granted, I co-DM my world, so another guy has some input, but I really want to be able to make up some things on the fly so I'll create some mysteries and leave some data gaps purposefully.

stainboy

2011-11-17, 01:29 PM

Tharizdun doesn't technically exist in Eberron. But he's too crazy to care. :smalltongue:

According to ECS p.8 "if it exists in D&D, then it has a place in Eberron." So while he might be a Lawful Good couatl-powered psionic air pirate, Tharizdun does exist. :P

Morph Bark

2011-11-17, 02:00 PM

So, what about the "Cyre was partially pulled into Ravenloft with the Lord of Blades as its darklord" theory?

I love this theory.

The fact that the borders of the Mournlands exactly match up with the territory of Cyre at the time makes me believe that it was a failed attempt of creating a magical defense to protect the country.
Possibly something that draws on the natural energies of the land, but it went completely wrong and either killed or mutated all life.

If it was a Karnath super weapon, than it would no sense to specifically engineer it so that the affected area exactly matches Cyres territory. However if it was a Cyre defense project, they could only plant the focus items on territory under their control. Also, if it was a secret Cyre project, everyone involved in it would have been killed when it went wrong, which explains why nobody has any idea what happened.

This one seems very plausible and one I've also considered before.

I'd probably combine the two should it come up.

Yora

2011-11-17, 02:06 PM

At least at some point one person must have decided that the affected area matches the borders of Cyre. A natural or completely random effect wouldn't do that as the borders exist only on maps but don't correlate with any uniform natural feature.

The Reverend

2011-11-17, 02:12 PM

Yora

2011-11-17, 02:58 PM

And they will return to crush their enemies! That's rather scary... :smalleek:

Prime32

2011-11-17, 05:09 PM

Oh great, as if I wasn't already projecting the Earth Cradle onto the Mournland. :smallannoyed:
("I am the Lord of Blades! There is nothing I cannot cut!" (www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xKOXiQzftY))

The Reverend

2011-11-17, 07:05 PM

Seven words. They've been said before but never fail to be awesome

Golem power armor
Gatling magic missile wands

beyond reality

2011-11-18, 05:34 PM

In my personal game I'm stealing from Chrono Trigger. Essentially Cyre, in a desperate bid to turn around their fortunes in the war find a massive power source in the deepest depths of Kybher. They create a magical engine to tap this well of power, draw too deeply and basically blow themselves to hell.

The source of power is the Tarrasque, the first-born of khyber buried in the depths below. Attempting to activate Cyre's engine once more will break it's bonds and awaken it to rampage across Khorvaire.

Prime32

2011-11-18, 05:47 PM

The source of power is the Tarrasque, the first-born of khyber buried in the depths below. Attempting to activate Cyre's engine once more will break it's bonds and awaken it to rampage across Khorvaire.I prefer having the tarrasque as a House Vadalis superweapon myself.

beyond reality

2011-11-18, 05:49 PM

I prefer having the tarrasque as a House Vadalis superweapon myself.

That is also a good one. Cannith is the main antagonist for my game though, so big magic-machines and warforged dragons are the order of the day so far.

Coidzor

2011-11-19, 03:33 AM

I always felt it was basically a Magical Nuke.

DaragosKitsune

2011-11-19, 05:12 AM

EccentricCircle

2011-11-19, 12:49 PM

I love the Ravenloft theory.
the best one i've heard prior to now is the suggestion that the people in the mournland aren't actually dead, but well preserved, but that they're just frozen in time.

PairO'Dice Lost

2011-11-20, 01:27 AM

My theory I just flung together

It was a Nation sized magical defense project.
It worked exactly as expected and planned.
The mournlands are partially an illusion and partially a summoning on a massive scale.
The actual point of the spell was to move the real nation of Cyre into a pocket dimension and give them peace and respite from the war so they can build their forces and tech in an accelerated timeline which will rejoin the rest of Eberron shortly, 150-250 years has passed foe the nation of Cyre as they girded themselves for war. They will rejoin with a MUCH higher tech level than even Eberron is used to.

I've actually done something like this in a game before. The setting started out as a low-magic historical-ish alternate-earth setting where the major conflict was between fantastic mythological lands (where the myths of Faerie, the Norse gods, and so forth are real) on the one hand and a never-fallen steampunk-ified Roman Empire on the other. Over the course of the campaign, a magical arms race slowly built up, as both sides' mages developed 4th level spells, then 5th, then 6th, and so on, with both sides inventing unique secret magical weapons to counter the others' (the Empire invented symbionts and grafting, for instance, while the "good guys" had lots of fun with circle magic).

Finally, one of the Empire's mages developed epic spellcasting, covered the entirety of Europe in an impregnable shield inside of which 1 decade passed inside for every day that passed outside, granted every single person inside the shell many levels of psion, and churned out massive numbers of custom-built construct and undead troops. The PCs were chasing an enemy back onto European shores when the shield went up, and they were stopped just outside the shield, where they camped for a week waiting for it to fall; before the shield went up they were chasing a bunch of griffon-mounted cavalry, and after the shield went down they were faced with an invasion fleet of steam-powered zeppelins carrying legions of warforged juggernauts, quells, slaughterstone eviscerators, spellstitched death knights...and adamantine golems. Lots of them. :smallamused:

The good guys went from winning against a roughly Dragonlance-level empire to losing hard against an empire whose tech level was roughly what Eberron's would be if every single artificer in Khorvaire had Merrix d'Cannith's genius, power, ruthlessness, and massive amounts of cash. I can only imagine what would happen to the actual Eberron if Returned Cyre had a similarly massive power and tech advantage over the rest of the world.

Coidzor

2011-11-20, 03:54 AM

Finally, one of the Empire's mages developed epic spellcasting, covered the entirety of Europe in an impregnable shield inside of which 1 decade passed inside for every day that passed outside, granted every single person inside the shell many levels of psion, and churned out massive numbers of custom-built construct and undead troops. The PCs were chasing an enemy back onto European shores when the shield went up, and they were stopped just outside the shield, where they camped for a week waiting for it to fall; before the shield went up they were chasing a bunch of griffon-mounted cavalry, and after the shield went down they were faced with an invasion fleet of steam-powered zeppelins carrying legions of warforged juggernauts, quells, slaughterstone eviscerators, spellstitched death knights...and adamantine golems. Lots of them. :smallamused:

Odd, that doesn't sound fun at all, since it certainly sounds like there's no way they could escape and survive against such a foe, let alone find a way to prevail. :smallconfused: Is there something I'm missing here?

AslanCross

2011-11-20, 05:17 AM

Oh great, as if I wasn't already projecting the Earth Cradle onto the Mournland. :smallannoyed:
("I am the Lord of Blades! There is nothing I cannot cut!" (www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xKOXiQzftY))

Don't you mean I am the Sword of the Mournland? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq1qFiS9cTU)

I'm partial to the "Nobody really knows, but they'd really like to find out, and the closest to those solving it are the Mind Flayers of Thoon." You can try to bargain with them, but if you thought bargaining with Illithids was bad enough, try schizophrenic and delusional mind flayers.

Quintessence (with its time-warping abilities) is involved, but aberrations and constructs are practically immune to the Mournland's effects. As such, the Lord of Blades does want.

The Lord of Blades and his minions trawl through the wreckage and corpses searching for answers. The reason why the Lord of Blades's base can't be found easily?

His base is mobile. (http://www.wizards.com/magic/images/mtgcom/wallpapers/Wallpaper_PhyrexianColossus_1024x768.jpg)

PairO'Dice Lost

2011-11-20, 06:37 AM

Odd, that doesn't sound fun at all, since it certainly sounds like there's no way they could escape and survive against such a foe, let alone find a way to prevail. :smallconfused: Is there something I'm missing here?

Probably the fact that 8 PCs taking on an entire invasion fleet by themselves would have been suicidal even for the most gung-ho of parties. :smallwink: They were able to slip away unnoticed and teleport back home to prepare for the assault as best they could over the course of the ~3 hours it took for the fleet to get there, and through judicious use of air cavalry, summoned reinforcements, long-range siege weaponry, and good tactics, they were able to engage the zeppelins on mostly even footing. The rest of the campaign shifted focus from leading army detachments in the field and assaulting known workshops/troop centers/other strategic Empire resources in an effort to cement what appeared to be an inevitable victory over the Empire to infiltration, intelligence-gathering, assassination, and other more subtle tactics against a magically/technologically superior foe.

Morph Bark

2011-11-20, 07:34 AM

Fishy

2011-11-20, 10:26 AM

The Daelkyr have to have had a hand in it. Aberrations and constructs are immune, and most of te badness involves living flesh behaving in unnatural ways.

Funny story, but it turns out you can bind things that aren't elementals into a Kyber shard. You can make holy bows out of Coatls, evil swords out of fiends, and horrible soul-eating devices out of an empty shard, not to mention the Madstone.

What happens when you dig up a Daelkyr, and try to shove it into the magical circuitry that powers your nation's defense grid?

Hazzardevil

2011-11-20, 03:07 PM

Here's what happened:

The Quori have many times tried to make stable ways to and from Dal Quor and one such way created the day of mourning, they found a fallen god and tried using it to power machinery in an attempt to make a machine that could safely take them back and forth between Dal Quor and the metrial plane.
But this fallen god wasn't just any fallen god,
it was Pelor infused with not just his own power, but the power of a thousand solars.
As Pelor was shoved into the machine, the last spark of consciousness from one of the solars broke free and lit a fire, this was a Solar who cursed the sun god for what he was and turned towards the moon, no longer shining with the light of the sun, but a reflection of the moon. The spark form this solar then hit a small splinter of of wood, and it came alight. This light shone with the light of the full moon in a bright silver.
This flame was later found by the little girl in charge of the silver flame.

Now this machine didn't work. No explosions, no malfunctions, just nothing happened and the power within lay dormant.

Now this flame was taken away from the machine, the machine lay buried under piles of rubble, but over time, any rubble that fell upon the flame melted, trickling on top of the machine, burying it forever.

On the 10,000th year of this spark of the solar being separated from the rest, it shone, brighter than ever before, the light reaching the machine from the material plane, to Dal Quor and into the material plane again, in the spot where the machine lay, activating it and setting it into supercharge.
And this then created a path to Dal Quor, forcing everything in Dal Quor down this path to the material plane, through a created portal into solid rock. Breaking the laws of physics in so many ways, with methods that never should have been able to happen.

And that, is what caused the day of mourning.

Coidzor

2011-11-20, 04:40 PM

Probably the fact that 8 PCs taking on an entire invasion fleet by themselves would have been suicidal even for the most gung-ho of parties. :smallwink: They were able to slip away unnoticed and teleport back home to prepare for the assault as best they could over the course of the ~3 hours it took for the fleet to get there, and through judicious use of air cavalry, summoned reinforcements, long-range siege weaponry, and good tactics, they were able to engage the zeppelins on mostly even footing. The rest of the campaign shifted focus from leading army detachments in the field and assaulting known workshops/troop centers/other strategic Empire resources in an effort to cement what appeared to be an inevitable victory over the Empire to infiltration, intelligence-gathering, assassination, and other more subtle tactics against a magically/technologically superior foe.

Against a force that can arbitrarily make their entire populace high-level or even epic-level psions? Whoa.

PairO'Dice Lost

2011-11-20, 05:30 PM

Against a force that can arbitrarily make their entire populace high-level or even epic-level psions? Whoa.

Against a single epic wizard who cast those two epic spells (well, more like interesting combinations of lower-level effects like time stop, mind seed, temporal reiteration, and such, hooked into and governed by some living epic spells, but the point stands), bound enough genies to ameliorate the gold and XP cost of creating all those golems and undead for the Empire's artificers, and then went gallivanting off to other planes in search of more magical knowledge, esoteric spells, and other things more interesting than a stupid little war on one backwater Material Plane.

He wasn't exactly one of those stereotypical introverted high-level wizards who sets up a private demiplane for 24/7 research and casting, but he was close. The only reason he cared about the war at all was that he was one of the emperor's brothers and he was being nagged to help out, the PCs and other Faerie ambassadors had had ongoing negotiations with him behind the scenes to discreetly bribe him to only give his second- and third-best undead monstrosities to the Imperial war effort and to convince him that his prodigious talents would be better used elsewhere, he mostly developed the time bubble as a side effect of his research into giving himself more time to pursue his arcane studies...long story short, the PCs knew about this guy for a while and had been following his progress, so while the particulars of the time bubble and new tech were a surprise, they knew he was going to pull something on a large scale and had been preparing for it for some time.

Prime32

2011-11-22, 07:28 AM

The Lord of Blades and his minions trawl through the wreckage and corpses searching for answers. The reason why the Lord of Blades's base can't be found easily?

His base is mobile. (http://www.wizards.com/magic/images/mtgcom/wallpapers/Wallpaper_PhyrexianColossus_1024x768.jpg)Isn't one of those Brelish mobile fortresses missing?
This flame was later found by the little girl in charge of the silver flame.The Silver Flame already has an explanation though. It's made of the souls of dead coautls.

Hazzardevil

2011-11-28, 05:33 PM

The Silver Flame already has an explanation though. It's made of the souls of dead coautls.

Meh, my idea's more likely to provoke a plot.

NineThePuma

2011-11-28, 11:52 PM

The Mournland was created by someone casting True Resurrection on Aerith.

The life stream welled up in complaint, and Goku had to fight Sephiroth to a stand still in an effort to curtail the effects.

Goku ended up having to go SSJ4 and use the rough equivalent of a nuke in order to kill Sephiroth, but the damage destroyed Cyre.

[/crack]

ImperiousLeader

2011-11-29, 12:43 AM

One of the more interesting theories, penned by Keith himself, was from "The Fading Dream", where the Mourning was actually an attempt to destroy the Eladrin spires, which is why they're now stuck in Eberron. The epicenter of the explosion is the Eladrin Citadel in Cyre. After reading that book, this became one of my favourite theories, there's some fairy-tale logic that I find compelling.

On that note, another theory was the Mourning was caused by a poorly phrased wish by a Cyran royal.

havocfett

2011-11-29, 04:49 AM

Cyre is, in effect, the birthplace of the modern incarnation of warforged. Now, despite what many believe, the warforged have been both sentient and worshipping the Becoming God for a long, long time. Since they were first created at least, possibly since the Giants created the original ones.

Now, what is little known but often speculated is that there are no true gods in Eberron, this is, technically, true. The Silver Flame and the Traveller, a conglomerate of Couatl Souls and a particularly powerful outsider with a sense of humor, respectively, are the closest things commonly worshipped that are closest to the traditional definition of god. The becoming god is the only true god-being in Eberron, though it doesn't exist yet. It is the source of all warforged souls, and they are all intrinsically linked to the god. The true reason for warforged charisma and wisdom penalties is not that they are socially awkward, no, it is that the world has not yet bent properly to the vision of the becoming god, and so the warforgeds intrinsic link to their lord makes them seem off to other races.

The Day of Mourning was an attempt by a House Cannith engineer, who learned of the truth of the Becoming God, to utilize the gods power to defend his country.

Cyre was destroyed, unable to handle the Gods true power, and the energy released by its destruction is accelerating the creation of the Becoming God.