Note: this is official background information for the campaign. It serves as both a primer to Eberron, and some changes to the setting specific to this campaign.

Five years have passed since the Last War ended.

That's what people call it. When they're being optimistic. Because nobody thinks the world can survive another.

Civilization was mighty once. The long-lived can attest to that. Everyone else takes it on faith, as the war lasted over a century, and was therefore long since raging when the oldest humans were born. It began when the grand, unified empire of Galifar split--a succession crisis that quickly escalated, until all original parties were long dead, and every new dispute was over what had been done by the other side of the previous one.

Legends speak of wars conducted by small units of a few thousand men, wielding halberds and crossbows, or perhaps riding horseback and charging in with lances. Not so was this Last War. Magic and Artifice had reached such heights in the Old Empire that war could be mechanized to an unthinkable degree. Machines churned through bodies faster than they could be replaced, so in the end, machine fought machine. The Warforged were born in the fires of the Last War: constructs of Artifice, animated with sentience, built only for battle. From the great forges of House Cannith, they surged forth to do battle for whoever paid the most coin.

For some, life simply went on. The mighty cities of the realm, such as Fairhaven, Wroat, and Sharn, saw occasional siege, but the war was largely "out there", fought along stale, entrenched battle lines in the countryside, each army fighting dearly to advance a few miles, only to be pushed back another day. It was a war of attrition, and when the combatants can be forged or animated with magic, it takes a long time to run out of resources.

The scramble for resources was perhaps the true driver of tragedy--insatiable hunger for iron, wood, food, and dragonshards led the powers of the Last War to spread beyond their borders, to violate ancient treaties, to uproot communities and disperse settlements, anything to find another day's feed for the beast. While the battle lines between factions moved at a snail's pace, the true fronts swept across the countryside, into realms never ruled by Galifar, into tribal lands guaranteed by this or that ancient King, until nothing within reach of the hands of men was spared. Though no citybound scholar ever bothered to catalog it, it is quite likely that more lives were lost to resource conflicts than on the front lines those resources fueled.

And what was the war about? Well, here we need to tell a few new stories...

Differences from canon

In this campaign, there are some alterations to the baseline canon of Eberron. Here are the basic bullet points, followed by some elaboration:

• The Five Nations are a creation of the Treaty of Thronehold, reflecting the status quo of the fighting forces left standing at the time. They have little to no resemblance to any internal power structures of Old Galifar.
• Old Galifar was much smaller for most of its history, reaching its pre-crsis size only after a century or two of rapid expansion enabled by exponential technological growth. This expansion left the interior sparsely populated (by Galifarans), with huge pockets of subject peoples and refugees not of the "preferred" races. Think Trail of Tears.
• Sharn is much closer to the center of the Five Nations than in the canon map--not geographically central, but it remains the only "spoke" in the lightning rail network that reaches all corners of the realms.
• Breland does not "own" Sharn. Nobody does. It is too valuable a prize to have gone to any claimant. The Treaty stipulates that it should stay independent, although it subject to partial rule by a sort of "time-share" system, and currently Breland sits in that position. A little bit like post-WWII Berlin.
• The Mournland is not just Cyre. The Mournland is everywhere. Five miles from every town, twenty miles from the big city...it is the vastness that the lightning rail plows through. It was created not on the Day of Mourning, but continually throughout the war. Of course, the capital of Cyre is particularly Mournlandish.
• Cyre is still pretty much destroyed. They were actually close to winning the war outright, despite suffering heavily in the early exchanges, because of their advantage in creating warforged. The WMDs set off on the Day of Mourning destroyed their greatest cities, and triggered the horror that led to armistice and the eventually treaty...too late for Cyre. Those weapons created the most severe parts of the Mournland, but everywhere magic and artifice was used at scale is permanently scarred.
• Without any ancient tribal land claims, Old Galifar was fairly uniform in societal and cultural terms. There were no lines along which the precursors to the Five Nations may have been drawn. Instead, the Twelve Houses (or their precursors) were the primary oligarchy of the day, the true second tier of power after the throne. They used to clash with one another within and without the lands of the crown, far more so than any lesser lords of Galifar might have.

History, New and Old

Everyone knows that Galifar is the greatest achievement of Man. From humble beginnings on the shore of the Scion Sea, a grand civilization flowered, stretching across the vastness of Khorvaire, from northern to southern coast, and spanning much of its width. Everywhere the King's colors fly, enlightenment, justice, and prosperity reign. For a thousand years, everything was super chill. It's a shame the succession crisis ruined it all.

That's what "everyone knows" because the people in power want you to know it.

The official histories carefully chronicle every battle in the Last War. They provide names and dates for every failed peace summit. They provide copies of correspondence between claimant states. They painstakingly list the genealogy of claimants back into the centuries, agonizing over every detail, so they can argue about who truly had the best claim. Of the battles, they might say "one hundred thousand men met at the Kryzen Hill on the first of Therendor--sixty for Aundair and forty for Karrnath. They clashed for seventy-two days and nights, and Karrnath yielded, losing twenty-six thousand to Aundair's thirty-one." As if that captures the atrocity, the utter insanity of the months-long battle, the constant bombardments, the killing gases, the living spells seeking out unprotected soldiers.

Bards sign tales to thunderous applause, tales like the Hero of Charon's Rest, a farmer's boy who alone held off the mechanical onslaught of Cyre's warforged at the bridge to his small town, long enough for relief to arrive from the Thranish lords along with the sun. They spare few chords to describe the long, slow death to hunger and disease of the civilians trapped inside for months, prisoners to the cold, strategic need for Cyran access to the Alembar river to better provision their fall offensive against Kennrun.

And so go all wars--the glory and the honor, the flags and the numbers, never the human element, never the suffering, the blood, the senselessness. This is nothing new, and this won't be the last war so unjustly chronicled.

But there was something quite special about this last one, and the expansion that made it inevitable.

The Old Kingdom

Galifar was indeed founded in the first Year of the King (when else?), according to sources easily verified by independent observations. The earliest settlements of humans that can be independently verified date back over a thousand years before the kingdom was founded, and virtually all of them are found within a few miles of the shores of the Scion Sea. Settlement was especially strong on the isle that would eventually house Thronehold, as early humans won the island from its goblinoid lords, and found it more easily defensible than the seaside settlements they'd left behind.

Descended from the same groups of settlers, there were yet some minor differences between the humans of the Scion Sea, differences that needed to be overcome by a powerful motivator. That motivator was the threat of the goblinoid tribes of the area, long annoyed by the human settlements in their midst, but growing a unity of their own in wishing the interlopers out of their affairs for good. Galifar unified the disparate peoples of the region and won major victories, pushing back the goblinoid tribes. In the wake of his victories, he founded a kingdom, which, at the time, comprised a small portion of what would be northern Cyre and southern Karrnath, tiny in comparison to their modern borders. At its height in Galifar's own lifespan, the largest contiguous portion of his realm could be crossed in a single day by a man on horseback, although to be fair, it included many small settlements, such as the home island, and some inlets into modern Thrane and Aundair.

Within a few generations, the kingdom "closed the loop" around the Scion Sea, on the back of a strong naval force, which wasn't the strong suit of the goblinoid tribes of the time. Progress inland was slow-going, but each city was all but invulnerable to the much larger populations of goblinoids that could muster against it, because all the other cities in the realm could reinforce them quickly across the unconsted waters.

Cities close to the ancient core, such as Metrol and Korth, and other major coastal cities quick to access across the water, such as Aruldusk, Thaliost, and the city that would become Flamekeep, can trace their lineage to these earliest days. Lands closer to the interior of the modern borders of Aundair, Karrnath, Thrane, and Cyre took centuries to conquer, bit by bit, on the back of the coordination and logistical supply of the kingdom, lacking any significant military or magical edge on their neighbors.

Then, a little over two centuries ago, things began to change, if slowly at first. Dragonshards had been known to exist as long as anyone could remember--a novelty often found in noblemen's jewelry. But the magical potential inside them was first harnessed in these times. Few saw the potential for anything but parlor tricks, especially the wizards who would be threatened by the industrialization of magic, but those few steadily advanced the technology. As Artifice yielded concrete advancements in travel, communication, and warfare, so did the borders of Galifar spread. With exponential growth, Artifice catapulted the realm forward, and soon it was expanding much faster than it could settle. Armies could win quick, easy victories against barbarian tribes, claim their land, and barely have time to plant a flag before advancing further. It nearly came to a point where it would simply be unfeasible to project power far enough from the capital to defend all of their conquests.

That is, until the lightning rail. As with all things, it grew slowly at first, but its potential was clear. The frontier may be expanding in terms of size, but in travel time, it was shrinking dramatically. The day might come when the king could send an entire army all the way to the southern sea in a single day, with supplies flowing freely behind on an inassailable iron train. How could any barbarians oppose them? Indeed, they could not.

Galifar absolutely exploded in the last century before the war. At the start, with a population of about 5 million crowded into an area of 50,000 square miles, they were a fairly typicaly medieval kingdom, on the prosperous side. At the end of the century, with a population of only 6.5 million "citizens" and millions of "protected civilians", in an area of 500,000 square miles, they were spread incredibly thin. Soldiers and materiel could move lightning-fast through the overblown realm, ensuring no barbaric force could last long within its borders (or at least near its lightning rail stations), but the light and glory of civilization lagged far behind the movement of the borders across the map.

The mechanism of the kingdom's expansion was, naturally, conquest. It would begin innocently enough, with the barbarian tribe Such-and-Such, led by warlord So-and-So, harassing settlers in the frontier region of Who-knows-Where. Talks would be attempted--perhaps--and inevitably fail. Soldiers would thunder in, battles would be fought (or slaughtered), and the rebellious tribe pushed back. To ensure against immediate resumption of hostility, soldiers would follow them to their strongholds and "disperse" them. Defensible locations would be identified, fortifications built, and logistic supply chains established to keep them in supply. A small garrison force would remain, often drafted from the nearby settlers, to keep the flag flying. The region formerly claimed by the tribe of Such-and-Such was now a safe place to build a home, plow some fields, and raise a family. All hail the king.

What this summation misses is the masses of non-Galifaran citizens who never raised a sword against the king, never sent an ambassador to the court where the "treaty" was drafted, and never knew what hit them. The expansion of the realm enveloped massive lands fully populated by tribes of intelligent, sentient humanoids who had little notion or care for grand politics, but quickly found themselves on the wrong side of an unstoppable force. Initially, these "casualties of war" or "secondary barbarians" could be easilly ignored--a quick oath of non-agression after a demonstration of force ensured they weren't a threat. But as the settlements expanded, their need for resources grew, and when the "true" citizens of Galifar asked the Powers That Be for help wresting this mine, that field, or such-and-such water source away from the indigenous people, said powers almost invariable sided with the more "civilized" folk, ushering the barbarians away from the important resources they didn't know how to properly exploit in any case.

In this manner, millions of people were displaced, disenfranchised, and made into second-class citizens, people with no rights, no representation, and in many cases, no legal existence to speak of. In some cases, when their number and unity was enough to garner notice, they would muster some force, make a demonstration, and eventually sign a treat guaranteeing certain autonomy within a region--a "reservation" if you will--as long as they didn't impeded the path of all-important progress. Whether or not they did was pretty much irrelevant in the long term. These people were inconvenient when they bothered to show their faces, with their "wrong" colors and features, and they were trampled and paved over when necessary to secure the glory of the King's colors.

Trails of Tears

An Industrial Revolution

Cities of Industry

• The modern Five Nations have little relation to the internal subdivision of power in old Galifar. They are a creation of the Treaty of Thronehold, and are all quite young, even if certain monarchs may claim (rightly or wrongly) a long lineage of royal blood within the old kingdom. The Treaty renders all claim to Galifar null and void in any case.

• Galifar is about as old as scholars say, but for the majority of its existence, it was much, much smaller, crowded around the Scion Sea. Khorvaire was already well settled when humans arrived, and they did not at first have the means to expand far. However, in the last couple centuries, technology has accelerated exponentially. By the time of lightning rails, airships, and warforged, the Kingdom of Galifar easily outmatched their neighbors, and had spread vastly in all directions. However, it is relatively takes far longer to conquer lands, plant flags, and build

Random Gripes

• According to the official map, Khorvaire is roughly 80% the size of Australia. Hmm. Yes, I guess it's a "continent" at that scale, barely. But even if Xen'drik is twice the size, and Sarlona twice that, with Argonessen somewhere in the middle, the total land area of Eberron is about 10% that of Earth. Is this a Waterworld? Shouldn't a world with mountains this high, with such a high sea level, consist entirely of island chains? Where did these plateaus come from? Grumble grumble.