MOURNLAND TRINKE TS
dlO Trinket
The favorite childhood toy of one of the adventurers,
floating in midair
2 A tin whistle that makes beautiful colors and patterns
magically appear when it's played
3 A toy lightning rail car
4 A glass eye
S A silver lapel pin of a finely detailed gorgon's head
with ruby eyes
6 A monocle that can be used as a telescope
7 A six-inch-tall mechanical marmoset in need of minor
repairs
8 A small medallion made of silver, depicting a tower
with an eye at the top of it and other smaller eyes em
bedded in the sides
9 A cloak pin made of iron in the shape of two hammers
joined by a semicircular haft
10 A wooden dinosaur toy that has movable legsWARFORGED COLOSSUS
Mere weeks before the Day of Mourning, House Cannith
unleashed its mightiest creations: the warforged colossi.
Hundreds of feet tall, these gargantuan warriors thun
dered across Cyre, crushing everything in their path
and leaving ruin in their wake. Meant to end the war
decisively, these arcane war machines could pulverize
soldiers beneath their feet and incinerate entire legions
with beams of red light radiating from their mouths. But
as the colossi were beginning to turn to the lands out
side Cyre, the Mourning came, and the colossi perished.
Now their remains lie, like mountains, in the Mourn
land, filled with secrets and waiting to be explored.HISTORY OF THE COLOSSI
House Cannith spent much of the war working on var
ious kinds of constructs that could serve as soldiers,
siege engines, or other weapons of war. Their earliest ef
forts, which lumbered onto Cyran battlefields in the late
930s YK, were barely more than golems with limited
sentience, difficult to command in the field. The war
forged titans were developed over the next twenty years,
and the modern warforged-often perceived as the pin
nacle of Cannith engineering-first saw battle in 965.
Successful as the warforged were, though, House
Cannith never lost interest in building a better titan.
Cyre didn't lose its desire for deadly weapons that
could give it an edge over its enemies, and tremendous
amounts of gold flowed from Cyre's coffers into the
vaults of House Cannith as research and development
continued, working toward a new kind of warforged that
would bring an end to the war once and for all, and es
tablish Cyre's martial supremacy for centuries to come.
With Cyre's immense wealth fueling its effort, House
Cannith called upon the ingenuity of its best artificers
and magewrights. Construction began on enormous
new creation foundries, hundreds of feet tall, carved
into the sides of mountains or secretly nestled within
remote canyons.
The project succeeded beyond Cyre's wildest dreams.
When the original warforged colossus took its first
thunderous footsteps, it was met with a reaction of equal
parts awe and horror-and it was almost immediately
sent north toward Metro!, where armies from Karrnath
were menacing the Cyran capital.OPERATING A COLOSSUS
A warforged colossus is part warforged and part vehicle.
It stands between 200 and 300 feet tall. For optimal per
formance, a colossus required an active crew including
a captain with the Mark of Making, a weapons officer
with the Mark of Storm, and a helmsman with the Mark
of Passage. When absolutely necessary, though, the
colossus could direct itself but at diminished power. A
colossus also carried a sizable contingent of elite troops,
who could ride in safety within the colossus while it
crushed through enemy lines or smashed through a
wall, then pour out through hatches once the colossus
was in position.
Docent Network. Controlling a construct of such size
proved to be a great challenge for the Cannith artificers.
The solution entailed creating a large number of docent
nodes and joining them together in a single network
distributed throughout the body of the colossus. Docent
nodes are modeled after the ancient docents found
in Xen'drik (described in chapter 5), and though they
lack the full sentience or functionality of a true docent,
collectively they can guide and control a colossus. The
network converged at one place, where the captain
could stand and control the colossus's every movement
through the use of a mithral helmet with hundreds
of semi-organic tendril-wires attached. By way of the
central master docent-a true docent recovered from
Xen'drik-the whole network fed information back to
the operator. Several smaller "hubs" of the network
gave other operators access to the relevant parts of that
information and enabled them to control parts of the co
lossus as well. The techniques and tools used to create
docent nodes were lost in the Mourning. The various
branches of House Cannith are sending adventurers
into the Mournland in hopes of salvaging some or all of
the network inside a fallen colossus.
Colossus Power Core. The power source of a colos
sus is a Khyber dragonshard of unusually large size, cut
into a specific pattern that allows the dragonshard to
contain raw magical energy without exploding. A single
power core is about the size of a wine barrel, hooked up
to an elaborate harness that distributes power through
out the colossus.
Weapons of Mass Destruction. Warforged colossi
were physically powerful, but their principal weaponry
involved the use of bound elementals. Some expelled
blasts of elemental fire from their hands or mouths;
others wielded adamantine swords they could wreathe
in flame. Some colossi also used bound elementals for
defense: manifesting shields of elemental rock, blasting
out elemental air to deflect ranged attacks, and so on.
The captain of the colossus could control all this weap
onry through the docent network, but for optimal perfor
mance the captain relied on a weapons officer with the
Mark of Storm to employ this elemental weaponry.CHAPTER 4 I BUILDING EBERRON ADVENTURES