Races with Flavor: Gods of the Warforged
In the far realms beyond the stars, there exists an entity of entropy and decay. Ever-hungering, the thing known as Unicron devours entire planes of reality. Luckily for most, even its awesome power is unable to cross the expanses that seperate the worlds of logic and causality from its realm of madness and impossibility. Unable without help, that is…
When its terrible hunger wells up, Unicron reaches out to the worlds of the mortals. It cannot go there directly, but it can play in the dreaming minds of the insane. There it delivers unto them terrible inspirations to create a type of artificial life, a being known as a starforged. The starforged, in turn, act as agents of Unicron and work in secret to summon him, to feed upon the world.
It so happens that on this world, there was a man the legends call Shaynis. Shaynis was an artificer of the greatest caliber, and none since have ever matched his ability. None could have suspected, though, that Shaynis got his inspiration from his dreams, from Unicron.
Shaynis was no fool, however, and saw Unicron’s plan. He used the knowledge that had been gifted upon him to create another line of beings, like the starforged, but in these he imbued the eternal light of goodness. He dubbed them the lifeforged, and set them to their task of preventing Unicron’s summoning.
The first and greatest of the lifeforged was known as Primus, and he lead the rest in battle against their kin. Collectively, the lifeforged and chaosforged were known as warforged, for they were forever fated to be locked in bitter war with one another. The lifeforged fought a losing battle, though, and were forced to the edge of extinction.
As the starforged prepared to summon Unicron, Primus rallied the few remaining lifeforged to stage a final, desperate attack. All seemed lost, but things are not always as they seem.
The great dragon god Bahamut had been following the plight of the lifeforged, and saw that they were a noble people fighting a selfless fight. In the darkest hour, when only Primus remained, Bahamut intervened. He transferred a bit of his divine essence into Primus, elevating Primus to the status of a god.
Even so, the battle was hard-fought, for Unicron had already begun to enter our world. Primus only barely managed to banish Unicron back to its foul home, and used the remaining bit of his power to destroy the spark of life animating the starforged. Spent, Primus faded away from the realm of mortals, to the realm of the gods.
In time, new artificers would find the inert warforged, star- and lifeforged alike, and learned to create new ones. Most of these new warforged worship Primus, but a few have rediscovered and reclaimed the banner of Unicron, which they believe to be their true father.
The mantles of starforged and lifeforged are a thing of the past, though, for modern warforged are all physically the same. Some choose to go by the old names, but most don’t even know of the names, never mind their significance.
That’s very good. It’s well written and it has no plotholes that I can see. I assume that Unicron can’t directly meddle with a warforged mind because it never sleeps? By all physically the same do you mean that the warforged alternate body feats are unavailable or do you mean that they all have a general model type that gets modified from there?
The latter. The idea is that the starforged and lifeforged were actually created slightly differently, by different processes, and were different enough to be distinct species. Kind of like high elves and drow. If you were to stat up the life- and starforged, you’d give them different sets of stats.
On the other hand, all the modern warforged would use the same stats, unless you really want to make seperate star- and lifeforged racial statistics.
Of course, if you did that, it might require some other adjustments to be made. I personally prefer that it not be so easy to tell if a warforged is good or evil just by looking at them.
It’s simple enough to just say that the star- and lifeforged no longer have the inherent theological differences built in and can now make up their own minds… in that case, the distinction becomes less like the high elf/drow split than a high elf/wood elf split.
And as to the matter of Unicron directly meddling with the warforged, that’s really a matter up to the game master. I’d probably say that the Warforged “souls” literally come from the chaos stuff that is Unicron, so he can still try to contact or influence them.
It would explain why some warforged still worship him, but at the same time they’re not built like they used to be, as a conduit of his will, so all he really is is a tiny voice in the back of the warforged’s mind urging it to acts of depravity.
Just out of curiosity, are you Dan?