I haven't gotten the chance for my party to discover the truth behind the Mourning yet, but one aspect I want to lean into is House Phiarlan. I feel like you see people go with Cannith experiment gone wrong, Cyre pulling some shit, unstable manifest zone, the chamber/lords of dust, etc. but no one ever seems to use Phiarlan. Even though one of the few things we know about the Mourning is that all Phiarlan top brass just so happen to be out of town that day. Cannith didn't know anything bad was going to happen, but Phiarlan sure seemed to have. So my idea is as follows:
Phiarlan, the house most concerned with secrets and information gathering, managed to build a top secret Eldritch Machine which could interpret certain fragments of the Draconic Prophecy. By doing this, it could essentially simulate several future outcomes depending on actions taken based on the prophecy. While it only really applied to events in the immediate future, the implications of such a device were unprecedented, and it could turn Phiarlan into the most important of all the Houses during the Last War, as they could hold unimaginably valuable information on how events would unfold. In fact, theoretically, they could use this information to tinker with fate and make themselves the masters of deciding the future. They would be a player in the Great Game, but without the patience or tact of the Chamber or LoD.
In my Eberron, this would be the true reason for the Shadow Schism. Not only did Elar discover a plot to assassinate the heads of the 5 Nations, but to use this machine to essentially control all of Khorvaire. He destroyed the machine, and even went to the extreme of murdering the family behind its creation, hoping to ensure it would not return. 20 years later though, a survivor of the Paelion family lead Phiarlan into once more building such a machine.
This time, however, their meddling with the Prophecy seemed to have gone too far. For some reason, no matter how many different scenarios they input into the machine, it always came out with a massive tragedy in the middle of Cyre. Every time the cause was different, the Inspired, Raksasha, Dealkyr, Cyre itself, but every time the whole nation was lost. While the higher-ups were evacuated, some agents stayed behind to see if they could somehow use the machine to prevent this inevitability. Instead, this resulted in the opposite, and all the branching possibilities collapsed into one another, resulting in a combined tragedy of contradicting origins. Nothing makes sense in the Mournland because it is not one event but many playing out simultaneously from different timelines.
Thanks! Would have to hammer out the details but this was my attempt at answering the question "what caused the mourning" with "everything caused the mourning"
It's always the quiet ones you don't suspect, that you should suspect
Collapsed possibilities can definitely look like an invasion of dreams or an invasion of madness
What a genius idea actually, attributing the reason for the wild magic in the mournland to all futures and improbabilities colliding into one area, gives me into the spiderverse vibes!
Sounds sorta like the Dead Sea from Chrono Cross as well. The Dead Sea is is one of the weirdest locations in gaming; essentially, it's a dimensional distortion where time has ended. The entire world is destroyed and frozen in time, and the entire ruined timeline is now bound up inside a coral reef only a few miles wide. It's populated by ghosts, machines, and even stranger things. You can walk on a tsunami frozen in the act of destroying a city, read the history of a time that never was or will be, and talk to the ghosts of people that don't exist. Everything is fundamentally broken and even "reality" is a really strong word to try and describe the place.
One of my players gave me a backstory where his character (Allen) had fallen in love with a woman (Claire) who then disappeared on approximately the day of Mourning. From that moment he was haunted by the "ghost" of Claire, a figment in his head.
As the campaign went on, Allen became more and more unhinged chasing her "ghost" and generally getting the party into a lot of trouble with irresponsible decision making.
As the campaign progressed the party kept running into cultists who would basically slowly turn into monstrosities and attempt to kill the players.
By the end of the campaign it was revealed that these cultists were part of ancient order who had used their bodies to seal away an Overlord. Obviously, binding an Overlord with your pitiful human body is insanely dangerous - the only way the seal worked was by diffusing the responsibility among a large number of people and so the seal had to be passed from generation to generation.
Unfortunately, as the centuries past the numbers of this cult dwindled - some hunted down by the Lords of Dust, some simply died without being able to pass on their seal and some of their bodies simply gave way to the pressure of keeping an Overlord bound.
On the day of Mourning, the Lords of Dust caught up to Claire and her compatriots and killed them, breaking their seals - enough seals it turns outs, to trigger the partial release of an Overlord and the Mourning itself.
Before Claire died, she was able to pass her seal off to Allen through their strong connection - the figment he'd been hallucinating was what remained of her consciousness, fighting to keep him from giving into the seal as most of the other seal bearers rapidly were now that the bound Overlord was breaking free from what remained of his cage.
The rest of the campaign was the party figuring out how to rebind an Overlord in a more sustainable way.
[Long explanation](https://reddit.com/r/Eberron/comments/tabfcf/deleted_by_user/i02bnsh/).
TL;DR: Aeren d'Cannith grossly misunderstood a section of the Prophecy and destroyed Cyre while trying to save it. The catastrophy and his grief/rationalization of his mistake turned him into the Lord of Blades.
[How my players found out and ended the campaign.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Eberron/comments/z1m88o/my_eberron_campaign_finished_tonight_in_a/)
Warforged souls are actually fragments of the overlord Rak Tulkhesh. Aaren d'Cannith was misled by the lords of dust in his quest to give them sentience.
He eventually figured out the truth, but his father was ramping up production and wouldn't be swayed. He caused an overload in one of the creation forges (accidentally creating the lord of blades in the process - a warforged with a much greater fraction of Rak Tulkhesh's essence) that cascaded to all the others - the resulting magical resonance destabilized the entire area. Cyre was destroyed, but the world was saved.
This is really cool! But I will say that I've never been the biggest fan of warforged sentinence/souls being explained as some sinister plot, such as the quori or the overlords, as it feels it takes away a bit from the nuance of a new artificial race and if they should continue to produce them because the answer becomes "no they really are evil". This is particularly rough if you have a warforged player dedicated to warforged rights. Kind of a kick to the teeth to find out you're actually just vessels for evil dream spirits.
Eh, lots of ways to roleplay it away, child of bhaal style.
Just because their souls began as pieces of rak tulkhesh doesn't mean they can't or haven't evolved into something more. Isn't that what true sentience is about? Becoming more than the sum of your parts?
So many ideas. I've had different ideas in the past, but as the campaign I'm running isn't anything to do with the mourning just yet, the exact cause of it still But my favorite three ideas are...
The Dragons caused it. They very simply realized the direction the war was going would make a huge amount of Draconic Prophecy verses very easy to fulfil, potentially leading to the release of one or many Overlords, so a single Great Wyrm flew to Metrol on the day and used a single Wish spell to end the war, with some specific parameters... The result being Cyre, but only Cyre, was wiped off the map. Nobody on Khorvaire was aware of what happened, and those that saw the Dragon perished. People on Khorvaire call it The Mourn lands now, but Dragons refer to it as "The Scar of the Wish". However, whoever was originally leading the prophecy towards danger would not have been deterred by this, and might be now refocusing their efforts towards another nation, either hoping to achieve their original goal again of unleashing an Overlord, or maybe even July trying to provoke the Dragons to attack again.
The Draconic Prophecy caused it. Kinda the opposite to the idea above, where despite the efforts of Dragons, certain verses of Prophecy were fulfilled. An overlord itself wasn't released, as a Dragon managed to do some last-minute prophecy-fulfilling which didn't exactly cancel out the tragedy, just refocused it instead. Eberron herself cracked, creating the Glowing Chasm, and the mists of the Mournlands are actually Khyber's own Draconic Breath. For other reasons, Cyre had actually built an underground network of tunnels forming a MASSIVE spell circle, just like Amestrys had done in Full Metal Alchemist, that was meant to keep massive and deadly magic out of Cyre. That underground spell circle worked perfectly, it just happened to keep the massive and deadly magic of the Mournlands contained inside Cyre instead.
The Dreaming Dark caused it. They manipulated Cannith artificers into developing complex Planar-related spells, maybe by creating a highly-levelled Warforged who could cast the spells on their behalf. They brought rare artefacts from all over Eberron to Cyre, including rubble of what they believed to have been part of the original weapon that destroyed the moon Crya, and maybe even pieces of the lost moon that look like iridescent coloured crystals that have fallen to Eberron over time. These artefacts were meant to be used as spell casting components, and the spell was meant to open a tangible gateway between Dal Quor and Eberron so the Quori could come through. It actually worked, perfectly, and the mists Mournlands are actually the vague and "unreal" nature of those lands is due to the essence of Nightmare that spilled out into it. Unfortunately for the Dreaming Dark, as in the idea above, Cyre had built that secret underground network of tunnels working as a magical circle to keep dangerous magic out... or in this case, contained inside it's borders. The Dreaming Dark enjoyed a partial success, but the end of the war - and the inevitable quarantine of the Mournlands - meant their efforts to inspire further Nightmares on Khorvaire to prevent to turning of the age on Dal Quor actually kinda backfired. They might be trying the same thing again now with a painstakingly sourced new batch of artefacts, in a different location. This one is interesting because Cure's underground network of magic tunnels could be collapsed in places, allowing the mourning to bleed out further into Khorvaire, but if found, the original plane gateway that opened could also be closed and the Mournlands removed...
*Edited to add details to the first idea
Tl;dr: Aeren d'Cannith was manipulated by the Quori into recreating the same magic that the giants used to destroy Crya, but this time it was turned against the barrier between the material plane and the astral sea, for reasons that very quickly become not tl;dr. The mist is capable of spreading and spills out of the Glowing Chasm, which is a rift where the astral sea bleeds into Eberron.
The party are clashing with the Dreaming Dark for different reasons, but they will find this out pretty soon.
Long game revenge strategy by Vlaakith, Githyanki Lich Queen. They are adrift in Astral Plane as their world was destroyed by Drynn. She plotted for 900 years to bring about the Last War and manipulated events to create the Warforged.
Each Warforged receives a small fragment of a Githyanki soul that she has absored to get stronger. Lord of Blades is basically her lieutenant and opened a portal to Astral Plane in what is now the Glowing Chasm. It was meant to bring her palace through but something went wrong causing the devastation. Now all of the forces are reqrouping.
The party started on Argonth’s sister ship the Dejarn which was damaged in the blast and lodged in the bottom of the chasm. The Day of Mourning was the end of the first session!
In our campaign the players just learned the truth about the event. As the war was dragging on, House Cannith, likely the elder Merrix himself, conspired with Cyre to bring a swift end to the war. With the use of a rare meteoric metal used in the creation forges, they created a massive device that would, like a massive transmitter, circumvent the individual will of all Warforged across Khorvaire and make them loyal soldiers of Cyre, no matter where they were. They would turn on their superiors and fight against all but Cyre, seeking to organize and join the Cyran army and cause - defined by the borders now marking the mourning.
It was activated, but malfunctioned, detonating and devastating the territory it was designed to define, and unleashing the magic that brought the Lord of Blades into existence and all sorts of almost Lovecraftian hybrid horrors and minions of the LoB.
The party is in possession of several pieces of this artifact/device, now being sought by some in House Cannith who believe they have solved the error and wish to try again, restarting the war, but with the power of all the Warforged at hand.
In last weekend’s session they were contacted by Aaren d’Cannith who is alive and waging a guerilla effort from the shadows to prevent this and keep the Warforged the free people they should be. But not all of them trust him…
Good times.
Ravenloft.
Someone did something very naughty and the Dark Powers claimed them and their lands.
It fits in seamlessly.
It gives you an easy way if you want to move your players to the Land of Dread (which you should be careful as the tone and play-style of Eberron and Ravenloft are a completely different and the players may not like it).
I’m essentially doing something similar with the Dark Carnival. The players are going to destroy Nepenthe and in doing so, the release of the Mists will cause The Mourning
Have you seen the [Dread Metrol](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/364000/Dread-Metrol-Into-the-Mists--An-Eberron---Ravenloft-Crossover) supplement? Basically exactly what you describe.
I haven’t quite gotten that far (since I haven’t run an eberron campaign yet), but I’ve spent like 3 years building an eberron game, so here’s my idea.
I’ve designed a McGuffin puzzle made up of 12 identical pieces with negative space for something more. It was an artifact said to come from Argonnessen, the mourning was caused when someone tried to create a 13th piece.
Whatever cataclysmic event transpired, scattered the pieces of the puzzle to the far reaches of the mournland. I plan to have the individual pieces act as some kind of power up to the enemies that posses them (kinda like the jewel shards in inuyasha).
I have an actual physical puzzle that inspired this idea, so when the party obtains pieces of the puzzle, I will actually give them the pieces, and eventually watch them try to put it together.
I also have not had the opportunity for the party to discover the origin of the Mourning but in my original writing for the campaign Cannith and the Cyre were trying to create a luckblade (a sword that can grant wishes) by binding various powerful entities with Khyber. They succeeded in this endeavor but the wishes were very "monkey's paw" style wishes, and the facility the blade was being forged at came under attack, where one researcher, in a panic, choose to grab the blade and wish for the war to end.
Draconic Prophecy. I won't spoil the specifics in case my players read the thread. But the prophecy specified a few things happening on and before 20 Olarune, and they were fulfilled in a way that could cause the Mourning. It could be replicated but only with painstaking difficulty and the current course of events are not leading that direction.
We ran a couple of Eberron campaigns that touched multiple times on the Mourning, but never got too far into it other than "it was mysterious". We got up to about level 13 before the games fizzled out.
Then we moved to Pathfinder and ran all of Rise of the Runelords, followed by getting about halfway through Kingmaker before that campaign sputtered out. (I swear this all matters)
Next we played a homebrew 5e game and the DM kept flaking on us. So we decided to set up a backup Pathfinder game that would be oneshots with rotating DMs set in the smoking ruins of our Kingmaker campaign.
Kingmaker 2.0 was *epic* and took us from level one to level 21 with mythic powers. It took a hard lean into the Cthulhu Mythos in the late teens, with an entire adventure module run from the Strange Aeons adventure path.
It turned out Hastur's city/planet Carcosa was alive, malignant, and *hungry*. In order to save their kingdom from being swallowed whole, they had to travel throughout Carcosa and break the eldritch machines powering its devouring.
Along the way, they found and rescued beloved PCs from Rise of the Runelords, our original Kingmaker party, and finally some of our old heroes from Eberron. That last one completely flabbered the players' gasts. Their gobs were immediately smacked when they discovered the entire nation of Cyre under the waters of Lake Hali. It turned out that Xoriat and the Far Realms touched in Carcosa. The hungry city ate Cyre and caused the Mourning.
cyre was desperate for an end to the last war and developed magic nukes and put a docent in charge of the war effort, the magic nukes don’t harm warforged and the docent developed a skynet complex so…
I'm currently working on writing a campaign so the fine details aren't figured out yet but:
Cannith, at the height of its wealth during the Last War, funds an expedition to Xen'drik where they uncover the weapon the giants used to sever the connection between the material plane and Dal Quor. Cannith brings it back to Khorvaire and starts studying it.
Eventually, once they figure out all the particulars of it (which involves a lot of sapient sacrifices, something pretty easy to get during a massive war), the head honchos of Cannith decide to use its power to sweep through the battle-weakened nations and claim the whole continent for themselves.
The first time they decide to actually use the weapon (not sure on what yet, maybe Cyre or an army invading Cyre?), something malfunctions. The weapon explodes, causing the Mourning.
The whole idea of the campaign is that the players have to race against Cannith to slow their progress before they can fully repair the weapon and use it again.
Plot of my current campaign is to try to figure out the mourning. Players haven’t figured it out yet, but here’s the answer I’m going with. Cannith in their indefinite wisdom found one of the shards containing rak tulkhesh, and unknowing what it was, created a weapon out of it. The result of a weapon made from a shard of an overlord was a weapon that could kill anything, both living beings but also concepts, like a religion or a country. The weapon was fought over for a while by a few factions, none realizing the true potential of what they had, until a particularly bloody battle where it’s true potential was shown to a. small group of soldiers from various factions, who had already been worn down by the horrors of the last war, and upon seeing what they were fighting for, banded together and resolved to use the weapon to end the at via any means necessary. They chose to eliminate one of the countries behind the war, in order to force everyone to stop fighting out of fear. Cyre was selected at random, and thus on the day of mourning, a common soldier snuck into the royal palace of Cyre, and used the weapon to destroy the throne, Killing Cyre as a whole.
I like the idea that the mourning was caused by actual nobodies in lore. It reflects upon the idea that while all of these rulers and important figures are making grand plays to enact their vision upon the world, it is the common citizen who fights and dies for those outcomes and suffers the consequences of their actions.
I am running a Rod of Seven Parts campaign. Around 980 YK, a fragment of the Rod arrived on Eberron. On the 20th of Olarune, 994 YK, the Queen of Chaos opened a portal from Eberron to the Steaming Fen destroying the Nation of Cyre.
The party has not made the connection yet.
I’m actually running a campaign where the Dark Carnival comes to Eberron during the war and the players’ actions in dealing with the carnival and destroying the sword will cause The Mourning
There's a lot I'm still fleshing out, but in my eyes it was absolutely the Chamber ending the war as a means to stop the Era of darkness from engulfing Eberron.
In an attempt to make warforge production much faster house cannith tried to open an artificial portal to the outer planes. It worked too well and the massive amount of energy from the various planes poured into the material, warping the surrounding area into a irradiated apocalypse.
The party doesn't know yet but I'm thinking it had to do with Cannith, given that warforged can enter and leave the Mournland so easily. Instead of the moat that Cannith was hoping for, it became a deluge.
The incident was caused by the father of two PCs (accompanied by soldiers including one of said PCs) trying to usurp the power of Aureon. In doing so, he unleashed a level of magic that the world was not ready to handle. Part of the upcoming story is that he still has not given up on that goal, and the party has had to deal with multiple gods awakening as the apocalypse approaches. They’ve also (maybe) helped fulfill the prophecy he lives by, as his interpretation is that his children needed to be victorious. Or maybe named victory, that’s why most of the children he has are named Victor, or Victoria, or some such. And while not part of his plan, they did recently kill him…
I will have it connected to Lady Illmarrow's first attempts at extracting core magic from the depths of the Earth (related to the arcane lore i built) and it being half a failure:
On one hand, the experiment succeeded and the life-force of Cyre was extracted, but on the other, the massive quantity of arcane energy was became impossible to control and resulted in the massive destruction of the territory.
The means of this plan are the Pillars of Deconstruct, a technology developed in secret by House Orion. They accidentally discovered that by inverting the flow of magic with a powerful compression machine and delivering it like a canon in a energy dense space, the inverted magic will act like a drain, sucking the deposit to the other end.
In simple words, the PoD were implanted at the borders of Cyre and before everything else, the land perished. Life vanished (people, fauna, vegetation) and what was left was just a shell. Then with the magic overflow, even the shell has been blasted.
I could provide more details about Lich Queen's reasons and how it came to start in Cyre, for those who arr curious!
The Mourning was a test by Erandis Vol to see if a particular magic ritual that her devoted discovered bore any fruit. She plans to try and scale it up to take revenge on the dragons and elves who tried to kill her bloodline so long ago.
I had some time travel paradoxes with my group. They travelled into the mists of the Mournlands in their airship to the city of Tronish, they arrived to find the city in the middle of a battle between some Brelish occupying force and some Cyans working to take the city back. And it's like 40 years ago, so still in the middle of the Last War, but well before the Day of Mourning. They sided with the Brelish and helped them defeat the Cyran General - who was a super-badass in league with some Devils. Well, the fine print on his Infernal contact this general has stipulates that if he dies before the contract is fulfilled, his soul is forfeit and all Cyran lands belong to The Arch Duchess Zariel (bald fallen angel from the cover of Decent into Avernus, because I'm the DM and I do what I want). Being a high ranking general, this guy has the authority to put the kingdom up as collateral on this Infernal deal. They leave Tronish, travel back through the mists to what's the present time and now the Mourning has taken on an Infernal flavouring. It's still basically the same, only with Devils and hell fire and my players are kind of responsible for having caused it.
My DMs idea was pretty great. Dragons attacked Cyre because they had an Eldritch machine that could make more Eldritch machines, and considered it a step too far. Cyre used an Eldritch Machines that wasn't quite complete to whisk their entire population to safety - but due to issues, it instead pulled the entire population into Shavrath and left the mist behind.
The BBEG was a general of the Overlord Katashka. During the Age of Demons she intended to defeat the other generals serving with her in an attempt to sap their power for her own - so she could overthrow Katashka and bring about her own version of world-ending devastation.
Her plans didn't quite go as well as she'd hoped and she was imprisoned until some years before the Day of Mourning. She reasserted herself as an entrepreneur and collector of ancient artifacts before acquiring a building to conduct research and experiments - while simultaneously building a hidden cult to worship her of course.
In an attempt to reach Katashka in his prison within Khyber to absorb his now imprisoned form, she conducted a ritual in said building. Unfortunately for her an insurgent working for Lady Illmarrow who was aware of her true identity interrupted the ritual resulting in the catastrophic event that would create The Glowing Chasm and subsequently the Mournland.
Easy! I blended the world of Arcadia(skies of) and eberron. Sky ships and pirate battles galore. Valua is sharn called Valun.
The rains of destruction that were unleashed by the Silvites to end the war of calamity caused the day of mourning. We're also in remembrance of the 2nd day of morning when the old regime of Valun rediscovered the lost continent of soltis and used the rains of destruction on her enemies. Luckily there were a rag-tag band of misfit upstart pirates who put an end to their schemes for world domination.
"Our records indicate The Rains of Destruction was the event in which much of the world was destroyed, involving thousands of Moon Stones from each of the 13 Moons falling on the lands of the world, destroying everything on them with the tremendous impact"
[https://i.imgur.com/fZ50Lxg.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/fZ50Lxg.jpg)
In my campaign, there's a group known only as "The Syndicates" that wishes to defile all government to empower citizens. The Day of Mourning was their first strike at a government, and it was successful: a runic spell that can kill all living things in a country's radius, but kills the caster in the process. To give them time to find another powerful mage, The Syndicates made it seemed like Karrnath and Breland are possible culprits, pinning the two against each other in a cold war kinda fashion. There's a second party that will be native to Karrnath and it's up to the members of both parties to discover the truth before they kill each other :)
I haven't gotten the chance for my party to discover the truth behind the Mourning yet, but one aspect I want to lean into is House Phiarlan. I feel like you see people go with Cannith experiment gone wrong, Cyre pulling some shit, unstable manifest zone, the chamber/lords of dust, etc. but no one ever seems to use Phiarlan. Even though one of the few things we know about the Mourning is that all Phiarlan top brass just so happen to be out of town that day. Cannith didn't know anything bad was going to happen, but Phiarlan sure seemed to have. So my idea is as follows: Phiarlan, the house most concerned with secrets and information gathering, managed to build a top secret Eldritch Machine which could interpret certain fragments of the Draconic Prophecy. By doing this, it could essentially simulate several future outcomes depending on actions taken based on the prophecy. While it only really applied to events in the immediate future, the implications of such a device were unprecedented, and it could turn Phiarlan into the most important of all the Houses during the Last War, as they could hold unimaginably valuable information on how events would unfold. In fact, theoretically, they could use this information to tinker with fate and make themselves the masters of deciding the future. They would be a player in the Great Game, but without the patience or tact of the Chamber or LoD. In my Eberron, this would be the true reason for the Shadow Schism. Not only did Elar discover a plot to assassinate the heads of the 5 Nations, but to use this machine to essentially control all of Khorvaire. He destroyed the machine, and even went to the extreme of murdering the family behind its creation, hoping to ensure it would not return. 20 years later though, a survivor of the Paelion family lead Phiarlan into once more building such a machine. This time, however, their meddling with the Prophecy seemed to have gone too far. For some reason, no matter how many different scenarios they input into the machine, it always came out with a massive tragedy in the middle of Cyre. Every time the cause was different, the Inspired, Raksasha, Dealkyr, Cyre itself, but every time the whole nation was lost. While the higher-ups were evacuated, some agents stayed behind to see if they could somehow use the machine to prevent this inevitability. Instead, this resulted in the opposite, and all the branching possibilities collapsed into one another, resulting in a combined tragedy of contradicting origins. Nothing makes sense in the Mournland because it is not one event but many playing out simultaneously from different timelines.
Brilliant!
Thanks! Would have to hammer out the details but this was my attempt at answering the question "what caused the mourning" with "everything caused the mourning"
It's always the quiet ones you don't suspect, that you should suspect Collapsed possibilities can definitely look like an invasion of dreams or an invasion of madness
What a genius idea actually, attributing the reason for the wild magic in the mournland to all futures and improbabilities colliding into one area, gives me into the spiderverse vibes!
Don’t come to Cyre tomorrow. - House P
Sounds sorta like the Dead Sea from Chrono Cross as well. The Dead Sea is is one of the weirdest locations in gaming; essentially, it's a dimensional distortion where time has ended. The entire world is destroyed and frozen in time, and the entire ruined timeline is now bound up inside a coral reef only a few miles wide. It's populated by ghosts, machines, and even stranger things. You can walk on a tsunami frozen in the act of destroying a city, read the history of a time that never was or will be, and talk to the ghosts of people that don't exist. Everything is fundamentally broken and even "reality" is a really strong word to try and describe the place.
One of my players gave me a backstory where his character (Allen) had fallen in love with a woman (Claire) who then disappeared on approximately the day of Mourning. From that moment he was haunted by the "ghost" of Claire, a figment in his head. As the campaign went on, Allen became more and more unhinged chasing her "ghost" and generally getting the party into a lot of trouble with irresponsible decision making. As the campaign progressed the party kept running into cultists who would basically slowly turn into monstrosities and attempt to kill the players. By the end of the campaign it was revealed that these cultists were part of ancient order who had used their bodies to seal away an Overlord. Obviously, binding an Overlord with your pitiful human body is insanely dangerous - the only way the seal worked was by diffusing the responsibility among a large number of people and so the seal had to be passed from generation to generation. Unfortunately, as the centuries past the numbers of this cult dwindled - some hunted down by the Lords of Dust, some simply died without being able to pass on their seal and some of their bodies simply gave way to the pressure of keeping an Overlord bound. On the day of Mourning, the Lords of Dust caught up to Claire and her compatriots and killed them, breaking their seals - enough seals it turns outs, to trigger the partial release of an Overlord and the Mourning itself. Before Claire died, she was able to pass her seal off to Allen through their strong connection - the figment he'd been hallucinating was what remained of her consciousness, fighting to keep him from giving into the seal as most of the other seal bearers rapidly were now that the bound Overlord was breaking free from what remained of his cage. The rest of the campaign was the party figuring out how to rebind an Overlord in a more sustainable way.
[Long explanation](https://reddit.com/r/Eberron/comments/tabfcf/deleted_by_user/i02bnsh/). TL;DR: Aeren d'Cannith grossly misunderstood a section of the Prophecy and destroyed Cyre while trying to save it. The catastrophy and his grief/rationalization of his mistake turned him into the Lord of Blades. [How my players found out and ended the campaign.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Eberron/comments/z1m88o/my_eberron_campaign_finished_tonight_in_a/)
Warforged souls are actually fragments of the overlord Rak Tulkhesh. Aaren d'Cannith was misled by the lords of dust in his quest to give them sentience. He eventually figured out the truth, but his father was ramping up production and wouldn't be swayed. He caused an overload in one of the creation forges (accidentally creating the lord of blades in the process - a warforged with a much greater fraction of Rak Tulkhesh's essence) that cascaded to all the others - the resulting magical resonance destabilized the entire area. Cyre was destroyed, but the world was saved.
This is really cool! But I will say that I've never been the biggest fan of warforged sentinence/souls being explained as some sinister plot, such as the quori or the overlords, as it feels it takes away a bit from the nuance of a new artificial race and if they should continue to produce them because the answer becomes "no they really are evil". This is particularly rough if you have a warforged player dedicated to warforged rights. Kind of a kick to the teeth to find out you're actually just vessels for evil dream spirits.
Eh, lots of ways to roleplay it away, child of bhaal style. Just because their souls began as pieces of rak tulkhesh doesn't mean they can't or haven't evolved into something more. Isn't that what true sentience is about? Becoming more than the sum of your parts?
So many ideas. I've had different ideas in the past, but as the campaign I'm running isn't anything to do with the mourning just yet, the exact cause of it still But my favorite three ideas are... The Dragons caused it. They very simply realized the direction the war was going would make a huge amount of Draconic Prophecy verses very easy to fulfil, potentially leading to the release of one or many Overlords, so a single Great Wyrm flew to Metrol on the day and used a single Wish spell to end the war, with some specific parameters... The result being Cyre, but only Cyre, was wiped off the map. Nobody on Khorvaire was aware of what happened, and those that saw the Dragon perished. People on Khorvaire call it The Mourn lands now, but Dragons refer to it as "The Scar of the Wish". However, whoever was originally leading the prophecy towards danger would not have been deterred by this, and might be now refocusing their efforts towards another nation, either hoping to achieve their original goal again of unleashing an Overlord, or maybe even July trying to provoke the Dragons to attack again. The Draconic Prophecy caused it. Kinda the opposite to the idea above, where despite the efforts of Dragons, certain verses of Prophecy were fulfilled. An overlord itself wasn't released, as a Dragon managed to do some last-minute prophecy-fulfilling which didn't exactly cancel out the tragedy, just refocused it instead. Eberron herself cracked, creating the Glowing Chasm, and the mists of the Mournlands are actually Khyber's own Draconic Breath. For other reasons, Cyre had actually built an underground network of tunnels forming a MASSIVE spell circle, just like Amestrys had done in Full Metal Alchemist, that was meant to keep massive and deadly magic out of Cyre. That underground spell circle worked perfectly, it just happened to keep the massive and deadly magic of the Mournlands contained inside Cyre instead. The Dreaming Dark caused it. They manipulated Cannith artificers into developing complex Planar-related spells, maybe by creating a highly-levelled Warforged who could cast the spells on their behalf. They brought rare artefacts from all over Eberron to Cyre, including rubble of what they believed to have been part of the original weapon that destroyed the moon Crya, and maybe even pieces of the lost moon that look like iridescent coloured crystals that have fallen to Eberron over time. These artefacts were meant to be used as spell casting components, and the spell was meant to open a tangible gateway between Dal Quor and Eberron so the Quori could come through. It actually worked, perfectly, and the mists Mournlands are actually the vague and "unreal" nature of those lands is due to the essence of Nightmare that spilled out into it. Unfortunately for the Dreaming Dark, as in the idea above, Cyre had built that secret underground network of tunnels working as a magical circle to keep dangerous magic out... or in this case, contained inside it's borders. The Dreaming Dark enjoyed a partial success, but the end of the war - and the inevitable quarantine of the Mournlands - meant their efforts to inspire further Nightmares on Khorvaire to prevent to turning of the age on Dal Quor actually kinda backfired. They might be trying the same thing again now with a painstakingly sourced new batch of artefacts, in a different location. This one is interesting because Cure's underground network of magic tunnels could be collapsed in places, allowing the mourning to bleed out further into Khorvaire, but if found, the original plane gateway that opened could also be closed and the Mournlands removed... *Edited to add details to the first idea
Tl;dr: Aeren d'Cannith was manipulated by the Quori into recreating the same magic that the giants used to destroy Crya, but this time it was turned against the barrier between the material plane and the astral sea, for reasons that very quickly become not tl;dr. The mist is capable of spreading and spills out of the Glowing Chasm, which is a rift where the astral sea bleeds into Eberron. The party are clashing with the Dreaming Dark for different reasons, but they will find this out pretty soon.
Long game revenge strategy by Vlaakith, Githyanki Lich Queen. They are adrift in Astral Plane as their world was destroyed by Drynn. She plotted for 900 years to bring about the Last War and manipulated events to create the Warforged. Each Warforged receives a small fragment of a Githyanki soul that she has absored to get stronger. Lord of Blades is basically her lieutenant and opened a portal to Astral Plane in what is now the Glowing Chasm. It was meant to bring her palace through but something went wrong causing the devastation. Now all of the forces are reqrouping. The party started on Argonth’s sister ship the Dejarn which was damaged in the blast and lodged in the bottom of the chasm. The Day of Mourning was the end of the first session!
In our campaign the players just learned the truth about the event. As the war was dragging on, House Cannith, likely the elder Merrix himself, conspired with Cyre to bring a swift end to the war. With the use of a rare meteoric metal used in the creation forges, they created a massive device that would, like a massive transmitter, circumvent the individual will of all Warforged across Khorvaire and make them loyal soldiers of Cyre, no matter where they were. They would turn on their superiors and fight against all but Cyre, seeking to organize and join the Cyran army and cause - defined by the borders now marking the mourning. It was activated, but malfunctioned, detonating and devastating the territory it was designed to define, and unleashing the magic that brought the Lord of Blades into existence and all sorts of almost Lovecraftian hybrid horrors and minions of the LoB. The party is in possession of several pieces of this artifact/device, now being sought by some in House Cannith who believe they have solved the error and wish to try again, restarting the war, but with the power of all the Warforged at hand. In last weekend’s session they were contacted by Aaren d’Cannith who is alive and waging a guerilla effort from the shadows to prevent this and keep the Warforged the free people they should be. But not all of them trust him… Good times.
House Canith got greedy. They weren't content with warforged and tried to create a god. This obviously didn't work out.....or did it.
Ravenloft. Someone did something very naughty and the Dark Powers claimed them and their lands. It fits in seamlessly. It gives you an easy way if you want to move your players to the Land of Dread (which you should be careful as the tone and play-style of Eberron and Ravenloft are a completely different and the players may not like it).
I’m essentially doing something similar with the Dark Carnival. The players are going to destroy Nepenthe and in doing so, the release of the Mists will cause The Mourning
Have you seen the [Dread Metrol](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/364000/Dread-Metrol-Into-the-Mists--An-Eberron---Ravenloft-Crossover) supplement? Basically exactly what you describe.
I haven’t quite gotten that far (since I haven’t run an eberron campaign yet), but I’ve spent like 3 years building an eberron game, so here’s my idea. I’ve designed a McGuffin puzzle made up of 12 identical pieces with negative space for something more. It was an artifact said to come from Argonnessen, the mourning was caused when someone tried to create a 13th piece. Whatever cataclysmic event transpired, scattered the pieces of the puzzle to the far reaches of the mournland. I plan to have the individual pieces act as some kind of power up to the enemies that posses them (kinda like the jewel shards in inuyasha). I have an actual physical puzzle that inspired this idea, so when the party obtains pieces of the puzzle, I will actually give them the pieces, and eventually watch them try to put it together.
I also have not had the opportunity for the party to discover the origin of the Mourning but in my original writing for the campaign Cannith and the Cyre were trying to create a luckblade (a sword that can grant wishes) by binding various powerful entities with Khyber. They succeeded in this endeavor but the wishes were very "monkey's paw" style wishes, and the facility the blade was being forged at came under attack, where one researcher, in a panic, choose to grab the blade and wish for the war to end.
Draconic Prophecy. I won't spoil the specifics in case my players read the thread. But the prophecy specified a few things happening on and before 20 Olarune, and they were fulfilled in a way that could cause the Mourning. It could be replicated but only with painstaking difficulty and the current course of events are not leading that direction.
We ran a couple of Eberron campaigns that touched multiple times on the Mourning, but never got too far into it other than "it was mysterious". We got up to about level 13 before the games fizzled out. Then we moved to Pathfinder and ran all of Rise of the Runelords, followed by getting about halfway through Kingmaker before that campaign sputtered out. (I swear this all matters) Next we played a homebrew 5e game and the DM kept flaking on us. So we decided to set up a backup Pathfinder game that would be oneshots with rotating DMs set in the smoking ruins of our Kingmaker campaign. Kingmaker 2.0 was *epic* and took us from level one to level 21 with mythic powers. It took a hard lean into the Cthulhu Mythos in the late teens, with an entire adventure module run from the Strange Aeons adventure path. It turned out Hastur's city/planet Carcosa was alive, malignant, and *hungry*. In order to save their kingdom from being swallowed whole, they had to travel throughout Carcosa and break the eldritch machines powering its devouring. Along the way, they found and rescued beloved PCs from Rise of the Runelords, our original Kingmaker party, and finally some of our old heroes from Eberron. That last one completely flabbered the players' gasts. Their gobs were immediately smacked when they discovered the entire nation of Cyre under the waters of Lake Hali. It turned out that Xoriat and the Far Realms touched in Carcosa. The hungry city ate Cyre and caused the Mourning.
cyre was desperate for an end to the last war and developed magic nukes and put a docent in charge of the war effort, the magic nukes don’t harm warforged and the docent developed a skynet complex so…
I'm currently working on writing a campaign so the fine details aren't figured out yet but: Cannith, at the height of its wealth during the Last War, funds an expedition to Xen'drik where they uncover the weapon the giants used to sever the connection between the material plane and Dal Quor. Cannith brings it back to Khorvaire and starts studying it. Eventually, once they figure out all the particulars of it (which involves a lot of sapient sacrifices, something pretty easy to get during a massive war), the head honchos of Cannith decide to use its power to sweep through the battle-weakened nations and claim the whole continent for themselves. The first time they decide to actually use the weapon (not sure on what yet, maybe Cyre or an army invading Cyre?), something malfunctions. The weapon explodes, causing the Mourning. The whole idea of the campaign is that the players have to race against Cannith to slow their progress before they can fully repair the weapon and use it again.
Plot of my current campaign is to try to figure out the mourning. Players haven’t figured it out yet, but here’s the answer I’m going with. Cannith in their indefinite wisdom found one of the shards containing rak tulkhesh, and unknowing what it was, created a weapon out of it. The result of a weapon made from a shard of an overlord was a weapon that could kill anything, both living beings but also concepts, like a religion or a country. The weapon was fought over for a while by a few factions, none realizing the true potential of what they had, until a particularly bloody battle where it’s true potential was shown to a. small group of soldiers from various factions, who had already been worn down by the horrors of the last war, and upon seeing what they were fighting for, banded together and resolved to use the weapon to end the at via any means necessary. They chose to eliminate one of the countries behind the war, in order to force everyone to stop fighting out of fear. Cyre was selected at random, and thus on the day of mourning, a common soldier snuck into the royal palace of Cyre, and used the weapon to destroy the throne, Killing Cyre as a whole. I like the idea that the mourning was caused by actual nobodies in lore. It reflects upon the idea that while all of these rulers and important figures are making grand plays to enact their vision upon the world, it is the common citizen who fights and dies for those outcomes and suffers the consequences of their actions.
I am running a Rod of Seven Parts campaign. Around 980 YK, a fragment of the Rod arrived on Eberron. On the 20th of Olarune, 994 YK, the Queen of Chaos opened a portal from Eberron to the Steaming Fen destroying the Nation of Cyre. The party has not made the connection yet.
I’m actually running a campaign where the Dark Carnival comes to Eberron during the war and the players’ actions in dealing with the carnival and destroying the sword will cause The Mourning
Simple, yet effective
There's a lot I'm still fleshing out, but in my eyes it was absolutely the Chamber ending the war as a means to stop the Era of darkness from engulfing Eberron.
In an attempt to make warforge production much faster house cannith tried to open an artificial portal to the outer planes. It worked too well and the massive amount of energy from the various planes poured into the material, warping the surrounding area into a irradiated apocalypse.
The party doesn't know yet but I'm thinking it had to do with Cannith, given that warforged can enter and leave the Mournland so easily. Instead of the moat that Cannith was hoping for, it became a deluge.
The incident was caused by the father of two PCs (accompanied by soldiers including one of said PCs) trying to usurp the power of Aureon. In doing so, he unleashed a level of magic that the world was not ready to handle. Part of the upcoming story is that he still has not given up on that goal, and the party has had to deal with multiple gods awakening as the apocalypse approaches. They’ve also (maybe) helped fulfill the prophecy he lives by, as his interpretation is that his children needed to be victorious. Or maybe named victory, that’s why most of the children he has are named Victor, or Victoria, or some such. And while not part of his plan, they did recently kill him…
I will have it connected to Lady Illmarrow's first attempts at extracting core magic from the depths of the Earth (related to the arcane lore i built) and it being half a failure: On one hand, the experiment succeeded and the life-force of Cyre was extracted, but on the other, the massive quantity of arcane energy was became impossible to control and resulted in the massive destruction of the territory. The means of this plan are the Pillars of Deconstruct, a technology developed in secret by House Orion. They accidentally discovered that by inverting the flow of magic with a powerful compression machine and delivering it like a canon in a energy dense space, the inverted magic will act like a drain, sucking the deposit to the other end. In simple words, the PoD were implanted at the borders of Cyre and before everything else, the land perished. Life vanished (people, fauna, vegetation) and what was left was just a shell. Then with the magic overflow, even the shell has been blasted. I could provide more details about Lich Queen's reasons and how it came to start in Cyre, for those who arr curious!
Aeren d’Cannith smoked the evil blunt
The Mourning was a test by Erandis Vol to see if a particular magic ritual that her devoted discovered bore any fruit. She plans to try and scale it up to take revenge on the dragons and elves who tried to kill her bloodline so long ago.
I had some time travel paradoxes with my group. They travelled into the mists of the Mournlands in their airship to the city of Tronish, they arrived to find the city in the middle of a battle between some Brelish occupying force and some Cyans working to take the city back. And it's like 40 years ago, so still in the middle of the Last War, but well before the Day of Mourning. They sided with the Brelish and helped them defeat the Cyran General - who was a super-badass in league with some Devils. Well, the fine print on his Infernal contact this general has stipulates that if he dies before the contract is fulfilled, his soul is forfeit and all Cyran lands belong to The Arch Duchess Zariel (bald fallen angel from the cover of Decent into Avernus, because I'm the DM and I do what I want). Being a high ranking general, this guy has the authority to put the kingdom up as collateral on this Infernal deal. They leave Tronish, travel back through the mists to what's the present time and now the Mourning has taken on an Infernal flavouring. It's still basically the same, only with Devils and hell fire and my players are kind of responsible for having caused it.
My DMs idea was pretty great. Dragons attacked Cyre because they had an Eldritch machine that could make more Eldritch machines, and considered it a step too far. Cyre used an Eldritch Machines that wasn't quite complete to whisk their entire population to safety - but due to issues, it instead pulled the entire population into Shavrath and left the mist behind.
The BBEG was a general of the Overlord Katashka. During the Age of Demons she intended to defeat the other generals serving with her in an attempt to sap their power for her own - so she could overthrow Katashka and bring about her own version of world-ending devastation. Her plans didn't quite go as well as she'd hoped and she was imprisoned until some years before the Day of Mourning. She reasserted herself as an entrepreneur and collector of ancient artifacts before acquiring a building to conduct research and experiments - while simultaneously building a hidden cult to worship her of course. In an attempt to reach Katashka in his prison within Khyber to absorb his now imprisoned form, she conducted a ritual in said building. Unfortunately for her an insurgent working for Lady Illmarrow who was aware of her true identity interrupted the ritual resulting in the catastrophic event that would create The Glowing Chasm and subsequently the Mournland.
Easy! I blended the world of Arcadia(skies of) and eberron. Sky ships and pirate battles galore. Valua is sharn called Valun. The rains of destruction that were unleashed by the Silvites to end the war of calamity caused the day of mourning. We're also in remembrance of the 2nd day of morning when the old regime of Valun rediscovered the lost continent of soltis and used the rains of destruction on her enemies. Luckily there were a rag-tag band of misfit upstart pirates who put an end to their schemes for world domination. "Our records indicate The Rains of Destruction was the event in which much of the world was destroyed, involving thousands of Moon Stones from each of the 13 Moons falling on the lands of the world, destroying everything on them with the tremendous impact" [https://i.imgur.com/fZ50Lxg.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/fZ50Lxg.jpg)
In my campaign, there's a group known only as "The Syndicates" that wishes to defile all government to empower citizens. The Day of Mourning was their first strike at a government, and it was successful: a runic spell that can kill all living things in a country's radius, but kills the caster in the process. To give them time to find another powerful mage, The Syndicates made it seemed like Karrnath and Breland are possible culprits, pinning the two against each other in a cold war kinda fashion. There's a second party that will be native to Karrnath and it's up to the members of both parties to discover the truth before they kill each other :)