What is your tale of the Mourning?

[EdokTheTwitch]

Hi everyone

Inspired by a recent Eberron related thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?413698-Eberron-campaign-Mass-Effect-flavoured-Advise-appreciated), I decided to start a little DM-related talk. More specifically, what did you do to explain the Mourning event in the Eberron setting for your game? And, if you haven't, why not?

For me, I went with the "power beyond understanding and control" route. As I am DM-ing an E6 3.5 campaign, there's not a lot of high level magic involved. So, I explained away the destruction of Cyre as a type of a nuclear bomb, represented in this case in the form of a Sphere of Annihilation. Near the end of the war, a well-known artificer of Cyre decided to create a new, revolutionary power source for weapons, and he managed to somehow generate a standing Sphere. This was supposed to power wands all throughout Cyre, and he wanted to limit it to the nation's boundaries, as he was only concerned with the protection of his homeland.

The power worked flawlessly, in the preliminary tests. When the wands were brought close to the Sphere, they sapped it's energy, and disintegrated anything touched. However, the range was very limited. So, the scientist came up with a way to spread the effect throughout the nation, but the side-effect was that, along with the power, came the destruction. In essence, before the emanation of the Sphere could be stabilized, it erupted, and for 1 second, the entirety of Cyre was disintegrating.

This led to the mutations, death, destruction of most structures, and the mist wall surrounding Cyre. And as an added bonus, I plan on surprising my players with a Disintegration Wand powered army of demented Warforged once they go into the nation itself.

This description has been somewhat modified to fit into the Eberron setting proper, as I am using a heavily modified one, but the Cyre backstory is the same.... With the addition of a corrupted Warforged army in a glass citadel, that is flying on the back of an Elemental Prince of Taint, the final boss of the campaign :cool:

So, share your stories :smallsmile:

[Actana]

The Mourning is one of those things that I think shouldn't be revealed in the first place. And never explicitly. A huge part of the charm, at least for me, is how the Mourning is mysterious and unknowable. Creating and revealing some reason for it undermines the entire point of the Mourning (and even after the campaign ends the players will keep going with that interpretation whenever you run another Eberron game regardless of continuity). And then it either becomes "yet another evil plot/failed experiment/instrument of divine wrath" that we've seen so many times before or it is something so ludicrously silly or weird that it can't be taken seriously.

The best way I'd use the Mourning's origins is to merely hint towards it, but never confirm it. Let the players think about the hints you've given and come to their own conclusion. Maybe it's right, maybe it's not. They'll never know, and you don't have to conform to it either, since those hints could have been for something entirely different.

[Solaris]

I had it that an NPC's father caused the Mourning when he attempted to bind the draconic god of destruction, Garyx, into a dragonshard much the same as elementals are bound. It may or may not have worked, but it certainly blew Cyre off the map.

Crazy runs in the family; the NPC was working a massive Machiavellian plot to get the Five Nations massing an army in time to deal with a secret Riedran invasion, but in order to keep the Riedrans from knowing what was up he was making it look like he was the threat - him and his army of warforged, with a Mourning-causing superweapon and a demand to restore Cyre.

[EdokTheTwitch]

Actana, I agree, it often can spoil the mystery. And i probably would have kept it that way, but fate wanted otherwise. :smallbiggrin: After we initially ended the campaign in that world, I told my players my future plans for the plot, so when they wanted to continue it later, this was the only way I found to continue, that made sense to me.

But it is a very good point, I'm glad you brought it up. That is actually one of the things I greatly dislike in some literature, the reveal and explanation of all mysteries. For example, the book series Night Watch, with everything after the original trilogy.

Solaris, that sounds like an awesome plot, truly. :smallsmile: Hope the players loved it just as much :smallbiggrin:

[Mr.Sandman]

In my Stargate- Eberron game the Mourning is caused when Cyre's government found and activated a Darkgate, which shares many similarities to a Stargate, but is constructed with Kyber shards instaid of Eberron and Syberus. Not really knowing what they were doing, they randomly started it up, and awakened the Xill on the other side. Some of the Xill came back through the gate with the proto SG team, but were detected by defensive measures built into the gate. House Cannith quickly set up Ethereal Barriers to stop them from escaping the country, but an army of Xill came through the gate and merged everything up to the barriers with the Ethereal plane, making all of Cyre one big manifest zone.

[Solaris]

Solaris, that sounds like an awesome plot, truly. :smallsmile: Hope the players loved it just as much :smallbiggrin:

I never found out what they thought of it. It was a PbP, and - like just about every PbP - it died early on before we could get into the fun parts of the plot.
I've learned my lesson about running play-by-post games, though: I don't do it anymore.

I'm glad you liked it, though. I thought it was fairly clever, myself.

[Ravian]

I've always liked the idea of tying it with the prophecy. In this case, some being of incredible power actually wrote the nation of Cyre out of fate itself (or at least marred itself so badly that it was corrupted into the mournland.)

That explains why it fits so perfectly within the borders, it wasn't an ultra precise weapon or accident, it was more like the perpetrator metaphysically erased the nation of Cyre as a concept in the future.

Who performed such an action I'm less clear on. It's most likely either a particularly destructive overlord (or lord of dust under him) or a rogue member of the Chamber.

[Cwymbran-San]

I let my Players put the pieces together on their travels to Sarlona (learning how the Inspired came to power), Xen'drik (where they discovered that the Quori used Warforged as their first vessels) and along the various battlefields of the Last War.
In my Version of Eberron, the Inspired are behind the Last War. By telepathically manipulating the scions of Galifar, they used the War to destabilize the five nations, so they could afterwards appear as the "Knights in shining armor, coming to restore peace and order".
They did have a problem, though. The Valaes Tairn would not succumb to the whispers of power from the Inspired and could not be influenced in their dreams (being elves they would not sleep). So, the Dreaming Dark planned for massive destruction which would lead to the five nations asking for outside help.
They let House Cannith build a massive hanbalani altas in the Basements of Metrol, suggesting it would be the weapon to end all hostilities. On the Day of Mourning, they pumped massive amounts of psionic energy into the hanbalani, overloading it and causing the destruction of the whole country. The freed life-energy of their victims was used to transform parts of Cyre's soil into solid Crystal (the Glass Plateau), which would later be used to fashion crysteel weapons and armor, supplies for the coming armies of Riedra.
But House Cannith had been successful beyond measure in giving the Warforged, a design delivered by the Inspired, a concience and free will. Now, the Inspired had no army to conquer a bulkhead on Khorvaire and have to resort to the slower humanitarian approach.
So, while all of Khorvaire is clueless about the Day of Mourning, the Kalashtar have some ideas what may have caused it. All the more reason for the Inspired to hunt them. Oh, and kill every elf in sight. If something cannot be controlled it must be destroyed.
And the Valenar would not have it any other way...

[Regitnui]

My personal favourite is that the incident 'overlaid' Cyre with a giant manifest zone linked to Dolurrh. The Mournland was intended to be a magical fortress wall, shielding the Cyrans but allowing them to strike out at their enemies, when they so choose. This scale of magic needed the kind of magic you only find in the Planes, but the Cyran/Cannith engineers building the eldritch machine chose poorly when picking a plane to draw on. Dolurrh was chosen for being relatively harmless; the entrapping effect should have drained the will of the enemy soldiers, until they swore allegiance to Cyre and were freed from the melancholy. However, the planar magic ran wild over the country, twisting or vanishing large portions of the population.

The thing is... This leaves a nation of Cyrans trapped in a dead-grey wall of mist, fighting off devils and worse. They don't know the Last War has ended, and when their leaders fix that machine and reverse the process, what will the other nations do when faced with a battle-ready Cyran nation looking for blood?

[sktarq]

While I never told the players what actually happened for my version I thought it was important for me to have an idea so I could be consistent.
My idea came from book of Eberron's religion. In it they mention that there were attempts to find a way to have clerics that could cast healing spells for the armies that were not loyal to the gods but to various other sources including the idea of the nation itself. So In my version deep in the city of Making the most learned of Cyre and Cannith basically tried to make a god/god substitute. It almost worked but not quite. The proto god of Cyre dies because that's not dieties work in this world. But the link to the nation was real and when the godling dies so did the nation. This was the day of mourning. And the metaphysical "corpse" of this event still exists in the spaces between the planes and is of interest to the warforged trying to make their own god but they know nothing of its history.