Interest Check -- Play-by-Post RPG?

[Urpriest]

Hmm, if Q'barra and the Eldeen Reaches both don't really work...

what about the Graywall Mountains? I figure that after Boranel pulled his people out of Droaam, he'd want to sent the occasional scout up into the mountains to try to gather intelligence and to keep raiders in check. My character could have done some of that scouting, giving him some experience operating alone in the wilderness.

[Adelene]

*nudge JD*

I'm moderately inclined to throw Lurkerforged into a couple sandboxes before we get started, so I have a good handle on her (I think the premise will be that there's a living Plane Shift spell in the mage school that she runs afoul of after she gets sorcerer'd) but I should probably know about any adjustments that need to be made to what I've already figured out about her first.

[Bluelantern]

*nudge JD*

I'm moderately inclined to throw Lurkerforged into a couple sandboxes before we get started, so I have a good handle on her (I think the premise will be that there's a living Plane Shift spell in the mage school that she runs afoul of after she gets sorcerer'd) but I should probably know about any adjustments that need to be made to what I've already figured out about her first.

You know, I was considering asking when/if people wanted to use the Eberron characters to glowfic.

[jalapeno_dude]

*nudge JD*

Okay, so I continue to really like everything, but I have two specific things I want to address:

When House Cannith was first making warforged - and optionally right up to the end to a degree, since idk exactly how JD is going to want to play this - they weren't thinking 'make a suitable artificial body for a soul to pilot around', they were thinking 'magic a golem into being able to do all the things a person can do'. And to start out with, they kind of... overshot. In a fairly specific way, though; it's not that Lurkerforged has a bunch of extra magic power clinging to her or something, it's that she has a bunch of technically-superfluous spells doing things that she'd be better off if her soul was handling, primarily with her speech (such as it is) and senses.

Interesting! You concluded earlier that warforged titans weren't really warforged, and in mechanical terms they aren't (warforged proper are living constructs, titans aren't). But warforged titans *are* called warforged, and they do seem to have been created in creation forges. So this fits into the first paragraph of the warforged description in the ECS:

Built as mindless machines to fight in the Last War, the warforged developed sentience as a side effect of the arcane experiments that sought to make them the ultimate weapons of destruction. With each successive model that emerged from the creation forges of House Cannith, the warforged evolved until they became a new kind of creature—living constructs.

Of course, both warforged and warforged titans differ from just general golems in one big way: as the name suggests, they were created in creation forges (note the figure at bottom for scale).

I found an answer to the warforged-creation question, I think; the example fighter in the Eberron Campaign Setting is a warforged who has a specific creator, and the creator is more or less just some random gnome artificer. (The warforged also has enough information about his creator to go find him after the war, which is interesting but not super relevant to my situation.) It could still be that the physical crafting part is handled by the forge and they just need artificers to run the magic, but that seems implausible to me given they apparently need enough workers that they're hiring outside the house.

See this article, if you haven't already. Two important things: first, the creation forge does (at least) *one* physical thing: it gives each warforged a unique ghulra. Second, Aarren d'Cannith had a team of "dedicated dwarven magewrights" to help him--seems plausible that the "dwarf artificer Thondred" in the example-fighter vignette you mentioned above was one of those (so Cannith did need physical crafters, but it probably was more of a long-term contractor thing than just hiring randomly).

Hmm, if Q'barra and the Eldeen Reaches both don't really work...

what about the Graywall Mountains? I figure that after Boranel pulled his people out of Droaam, he'd want to sent the occasional scout up into the mountains to try to gather intelligence and to keep raiders in check. My character could have done some of that scouting, giving him some experience operating alone in the wilderness.

That could definitely work! I also do think Eldeen Reaches could also work--just because there wasn't overt fighting doesn't mean there wasn't lots of covert stuff going on. It would just make your character more of a spy/black-ops person than standard military.

[Adelene]

Hmh.

That actually reads as two conflicting origin stories, to me? Given a convoluted enough story you might be able to find a way for them to have been accidental in one sense and purposely created to be people in some other sense, but it'd really take some doing. I'd been assuming that their origin wasn't quite either of those, that they were purposely created to be smart - think 'programming humanlike AGI' - and them having souls and personalities and things was an unintentional side effect (for some value of 'side effect'; I don't know how it happened but that doesn't seem like the kind of thing you should be able to do without a hefty dose of divine magic). In any case, I expect the design process to have involved elements from previous sorts of constructs, and probably several kinds; they may in fact draw particularly heavily from the nonsentient warforged in that respect (though I don't actually see a reason to assume so), but that doesn't necessarily tell us anything about how they should be classified; I expect that sentient warforged have significantly less in common with warforged titans than humans do with chimps.

Setting is yours, though; what do you want to do for the warforged's creation canon?

Regarding crafting, I don't think she actually meaningfully made any particular warforged (though I suppose it's not strictly impossible, if you want a plot hook). I'm imagining her in more of a high level assistant role - she's not doing any of the fiddly bits, just turning out large quantities of specific boring armor parts.

[Adelene]

...I just caught that warforged titans are in fact sentient, I'd managed to miss that before. Still, at int 3/cha 1 I think the humans/chimps analogy holds. (And possibly they were an accident and standard warforged were not, in which case Lurker's backstory holds up pretty well as written - trying to go from basically-animal AGI to basically-human is still a process that's liable to have some issues.)

[Urpriest]

*nudge JD*

Hmm, if Q'barra and the Eldeen Reaches both don't really work...

what about the Graywall Mountains? I figure that after Boranel pulled his people out of Droaam, he'd want to sent the occasional scout up into the mountains to try to gather intelligence and to keep raiders in check. My character could have done some of that scouting, giving him some experience operating alone in the wilderness.

That could definitely work! I also do think Eldeen Reaches could also work--just because there wasn't overt fighting doesn't mean there wasn't lots of covert stuff going on. It would just make your character more of a spy/black-ops person than standard military.

Of the options, I think I'll stick with the Graywalls. I want this guy's military experience to be something shady and imperialistic, but still something that he would mention when asked (displaying no awareness that others would think it shady and imperialistic). Spying in the Eldeen Reaches would probably be the sort of thing he'd be told to keep secret, while military intelligence on the border with Droaam wouldn't have the same complications.

[PlainDealingVillain]

I have determined more details about Indiana Gnomes! His name is Odid Doriel Davandi (the runner-up name was Merud Duddedod Davandi which is Important but was not the right name.) He was born in Trolanport to a very political gnome family, and really hated the politics, so he left for the Library of Korranberg as soon as he could (he attended the history specialty college).

He's currently faculty at Morgrave University in Sharn, studies Xen'Drik (I'm leaning toward making his focus the eastern parts of the Hydra, but that can change for whatever's convenient to the setup) and spends as much time as he can in the field (far from Zilargo politics and, most importantly, his extended family). He plans on staying at Morgrave University, but to his family and anyone from Korranberg he frequently hints at the possibilities of starting a Korranberg subdepartment for Xen'Drik studies if he establishes a strong enough reputation as a Xen'Drik adventuring scholar/pioneer. His family may eventually catch on, but he is not an outcast... yet.

[Kappa]

Duddedod! Duddedod! Duddedod!

<3

I'm thinking more about StevenChainsaw. I think Mama was Karrnathi, Daddy was from Cyre, and who knows what surname they ended up with since Daddy must have been going by a pseudonym... okay, lemme quote myself

Mama is the somewhat sheltered youngest daughter of a not particularly interesting noble family in Majority Human Country A. Daddy is a totally normal and definitely not dragonmarked artificer who certainly isn't on the run from Cannith or anything. They meet, fall in love, and run away to Majority Human Country B (Eldeen Reaches?), where they build a quiet life together and have a kid or three. Daddy dies early on, under mysterious circumstances that may or may not be related to how on the run from Cannith he isn't; Mama continues raising the kid(s) alone. Disruption occurs, in a way that either kills off the rest of the family, or at minimum separates StevenChainsaw from them in such a way that he is not willing or able to find them again. Now he's wandering the continent trying to stay out of trouble and looking for work doing what he does best: violence.

Let's call Mama... Marla ir'Amalys, I made that up... and Daddy can be Leon somebody-or-other, his birth surname is irrelevant because he's on the run from Cannith. Now I need a fake surname for Daddy, and I need some idea of what people name their children in any of these places. And then I try very hard to come up with a StevenChainsaw name that sounds right.

[jalapeno_dude]

Now I need a fake surname for Daddy, and I need some idea of what people name their children in any of these places. And then I try very hard to come up with a StevenChainsaw name that sounds right.

For names, you might try here and here (the first of those is straight from the sourcebooks, the second is not).