Warforged

Once used as nothing more than forced laborers, the Warforged later used their skills and long background in labor to forge a colony of their own.

Warforged are a stone-work race made of wood fibers, carved stone, wovenstone runes, fitted plate metal, and powered by mysterious crystals.

Racial Features

Quelmar Warforged gain one additional ability:

• Crystal Core. The Crystals that make up your life energy render you invisible to Dragons.

Description

An internal network of tubes run through the warforged body, filled with a blood-like fluid that lubricates and nourishes their systems. Warforged learn from creation how to generate this fluid using very little more than natural resources around them. Their hands have two thick fingers and a thumb.

Notably, Warforged are invisible to Dragons. Warforged are immune to disease, but since lycanthropy is a curse, Wereforged have been seen at least once in Quelmar.

Additionally, at least some form of warforged has been mentioned in the late PR era that was described as a "little mouse warforged" which helped serve in the kingdom of Thimble Piep-Piep.

Creation

Creation of the races is a job for the gods...until one individual in the dawning days of Quelmar began a quest. Over nearly two thousand years, the individual, began experimentation in his cave in Kiston.

While he made great successes over time, he would later come to the mainland around 650 PR to seek assistance from a team of engineers who had made developments in the work of wovenstone. The other engineers, known as Atnas and Colin, would give the Warforged Lord the final inspiration he needed to finalize the pieces of his millennia long puzzle.

Working out of a secret workshop in Breme (the homeland of Atnas), The Warforged Lord would set himself a laboratory where he worked to create his people. The secret to prescribing life was not in how the stone was worked, but in what kind of stone was needed. Using his crystals, saved and gathered over thousands of years, the Warforged Lord was able to finally spring life into a handful of his people. Teaching them the ways of the Warforged, they began to spread.

Colin, one of the engineers, would also be able to replicate the warforged creation steps after returning to his hometown of Sneerwell, but would be unsatisfied with their free will, and would change gears to shift production back towards non-free-willed labor machines (later known as Automs), though impressed with the Warforged shape, Colin's 3rd generation of Automatons would mimic the Warforged using pure wovenstone power.

Staying in a workshop in Breme, the Warforged Lord would continue to create more of his people until his presumed death in 795 PR.

History

Although Warforged's long creation took centuries, if not millenia, those years were spent endlessly prototyping and adjusting. Warforged simply didn't exist (in any recognizable form) until they started appearing in the 600s PR. Even then, these early bloomers were in small numbers, and were rarely ever noticed, or when noticed were written off as golems.

The Warforged who would emerge into the world by 700 PR would be accosted from locals wherever they traveled due to their alien-like appearance and nature. Still a premature race, it was not long before they had been deceived into serving the races around them, no different than a golem of animated object. By 735, however, the Warforged would launch their own intercontinental fight for liberation: The War of the Forged.

After the war, the warforged race would be welcomed with open arms by The Friends of Kragnux, who were looking for more soldiers to join its crusaders in a realm-wide hunt against Dragonborn and other draconic races.

The church would liberate all of its indentured warforged soldiers after The Battle of Chad, during which Pope Zarachiel would abolish the crusades entirely.

After their independence, the first major Warforged colony would appear in the form of The Sky Net, built on the orbital island of Cof, located just outside of the mainland of Kiston in the center of the realm.

With a colony now in the vicinity of Kiston, the Warforged would spend the last centuries of the PR era expanding their presence on the dragon mainland. Due to their ability to hide from Dragons, they were able to do most of their working and living out of sight, even going so far as to sneak into the Dragon capital, The Crystal City, to harvest more crystals to forge more warforged. Because of their presence and ability to skulk around the island, the Warforged had an uneasy alliance with the Kistonian Institute of Strange Studies, which would occasionally ask small favors of the Warforged to explore and report on the caves. At least 14 missions were assigned to Warforged, usually involving the Crystal City.

Due to the nature of the Kiston Crystals from which they were forged, some Warforged have grown exceptional psionic abilities.

Names

Originally, the Warforged did not use names, as they had no need of them. They were simply referred to as "Soldier 1", "Soldier 8", "Soldier 24", and so on. It has only been recently that they have come to understand that other races have a need to label everything, including other beings, and thus have begun to use names.

Thus Warforged are willing to accept whatever name other people see fit to give them, and Warforged who are traveling with members of other races are generally referred to by nicknames. These nicknames tend to be either descriptors or random words.

It should be noted that a rare few Warforged have retained their previous designation rather than adopt a new name. Others have dropped the "Soldier" and refer to themselves only by their number.

Notable Warforged

• Colin's Original Seven
  • Seven
• "Snow"
• "Sand"
• "Hat"
• Eleven
• Wibble
• The Clockwork Dragon
  • Though not a traditional warforged, the clockwork dragon design was built by Snow, who also devised the original warforged schematics. As such, it can be considered a true warforged right down the Kiston crystals.