Magical Arms Race

No nation entered the Last War expecting it to last a century. Each expected a short campaign, a decisive battle, a negotiated settlement on favourable terms. What none of them planned for was the problem that actually emerged: the war was too large, too expensive, and too costly in human lives to be won by conventional means — and yet too politically impossible to end through negotiation. The result was a hundred years of military research conducted under conditions of existential pressure, with the goal not of winning the war but of surviving it long enough for something to change.

That research changed everything. It produced the warforged. It systematised necromancy. It turned cantrips into military doctrine and dragonshards into ammunition. It made House Cannith the most powerful single institution on the continent, and then it tore the house apart. And when it was finished — when the Mourning brought the war to an abrupt and unexplained halt — every weapon, every formula, every technique that a century of escalation had produced was still there, filed away in the archives of nations that are not at war but are not at peace either.

House Cannith and the Neutrality of Profit

House Cannith was officially neutral throughout the Last War. It supplied weapons, constructs, siege engines, and expertise to every nation that could pay. This neutrality was not an ethical position — it was a business model, and an extraordinarily profitable one. The gorgon-marked forgeholds of the House of Making used streamlined forms of production to supply common goods across the continent, and the war transformed that industrial capacity into the single most important military asset in Khorvaire. Every nation wanted weapons and warforged, along with mundane arms and armour. The war raised the house up. Then it tore it down.

Cannith's manufacturing capacity made it the fulcrum of the entire arms race. When Cyre poured gold into Cannith's coffers and received warforged titans in 959 YK, the arrangement gave Cyre a temporary advantage — the titans were tireless, devastatingly effective against fortifications, and capable of serving as mobile bulwarks for infantry. Then Cannith sold those same titans to Cyre's enemies, along with the blast disks and siege staffs needed to fight them. The same cycle repeated with every subsequent innovation: a breakthrough bought at enormous expense by one nation, then sold at standard rates to every other nation with the resources to purchase it. This dynamic ensured that no single Cannith-supplied advantage could ever be decisive. It also ensured that the war kept generating demand for new and more powerful innovations, because every advance immediately became available to the enemy.

Cannith's creation forges — the eldritch machines that produced warforged — were originally inspired by quori technology discovered during expeditions to Xen'drik. House Cannith found the ancient forges, the docents, and the first constructs in the ruins of the Shattered Continent, and replicated the basics of the technology in Khorvaire using concepts and items brought home. Their versions were smaller, partially improvised, and only partly understood, with the Mark of Making serving as a mystic shortcut that replaced the original connection to Dal Quor. By the war's final years, Cannith had creation forges running in Eston and elsewhere, shipping warforged via Lyrandar-flagged neutral vessels to whichever nations could pay. As Cyre's treasury flagged in the final decades, those ships increasingly carried warforged toward Aundair, Breland, and Thrane — the nations that could still afford them, which were precisely the nations fighting against Cyre. The neutrality of the dragonmarked houses meant that the nation which had funded most of Cannith's warforged research was eventually outbid for its own creation.

The Mourning destroyed Cannith's leadership and primary facilities in Eston, along with whatever creation forges were still operating in Cyre. What remained were three competing barons, incomplete records, and a house that had been the unspoken leader of the Twelve now fractured into branches that agree on nothing except that each of them should be in charge.

The three branches that survive reflect how the house adapted to the war's demands and to the geography of the fragmented continent. Cannith West in Aundair, under the alchemist Jorlanna d'Cannith, developed expertise in alchemy. Cannith South in Breland, under Merrix d'Cannith — the innovator of warforged, grandson of the artificer whose expeditions to Xen'drik produced the original creation forge designs — built its edge in general industry and scale production, operating from the Forgehold in the Ashblack district of Sharn's Cogs. Cannith East in Korth, under the weaponsmith Zorlan d'Cannith, specialised in artillery — and dabbles, quietly, in necromancy. Zorlan's current research blends Karrnathi necromantic techniques with traditional artifice methods. He is preparing, with professional diligence, for whatever comes next.

Whether one of these barons will unite the house or it will shatter under the strain is one of the defining questions of post-war Khorvaire. If you are an heir of House Cannith, you should decide which of these barons you serve — or whether you have other ideas about the house's future entirely.

FROM THE KORRANBERG CHRONICLE — Business Section, 997 YK: "CANNITH QUARTERLY EARNINGS EXCEED EXPECTATIONS — Despite the loss of its Cyran headquarters and the ongoing leadership dispute, House Cannith's combined revenue across all three branches has increased for the sixth consecutive quarter. Analysts attribute the growth to sustained demand for reconstruction materials and the house's monopoly on warforged maintenance services. 'The war destroyed their head office,' notes one Zilargo-based market observer. 'It did not destroy their customer base.'"

The Warforged Question

The warforged were created to fight the Last War. House Cannith designed their bodies — root-like cords infused with alchemical fluids wrapped around a framework of steel, darkwood, or stone, with armoured plates forming a protective outer shell — and trained them to suppress emotion, to function as weapons or tools. What Cannith did not design, and could not have designed if the scholars who study the question are correct, was their minds.

The creation forges do not generate warforged consciousness. They appear to summon it. Cannith gave direction to the bodies they built, but they did not design the minds that inhabited them; if they could have, they would have made warforged without emotion and without the capacity for true independence. Many arcane scholars theorise that the creation forges do not create the warforged mind but rather summon it — that a warforged soldier may be infused with an essence drawn from Shavarath, the plane of eternal war. Others suggest the forges may be recycling husks from Dolurrh, the Realm of the Dead, and that the reason a warforged sometimes knows things no one ever taught it is because those memories belong to someone else. The Xen'drik connection complicates the question further: the original creation forges were quori technology, designed to dream constructs into existence using the magic of Dal Quor. Cannith's versions severed that connection and replaced it with the Mark of Making — but the unexpected sentience of the warforged may be a legacy of those ancient designs. No one knows. What is clear is that Cannith artificers could not have made warforged without emotion even if they had wanted to. The capacity for independent thought appears to be inseparable from whatever the forges are actually doing when they produce a living construct.

This is the core of the warforged question, and it is not a philosophical abstraction. The Treaty of Thronehold granted the surviving warforged the rights of sentient beings and ordered the destruction of all creation forges. That order acknowledged, implicitly, that the war had produced living people — not weapons — in sufficient numbers to require a legal framework for their existence in peacetime. The warforged had been built to fight a war that was, by the time they achieved full awareness, already ending. They were given their freedom at the precise moment when their purpose had been revoked.

The warforged who were created, survived, and were freed are now navigating a world that built them for a specific function and then told them that function no longer existed. Some seek a new purpose with the same intensity they once brought to war — protecting allies, completing contracts, exploring lands, building communities. Others struggle with emotions they were trained to suppress. Some have found religion: the Becoming God, a warforged movement that believes their consciousness comes from a construct deity and is working to build a body for that god to inhabit. A warforged priest named Smith tends the Pool of Onatar's Tears in the Blackbones district of Sharn's Cogs, convinced that the Sovereign of the Forge guided Aaren d'Cannith to create the warforged race. The Lord of Blades has gathered a following in the Mournland, preaching warforged supremacy. The answers are as varied as the warforged themselves — which is, of course, the point.

SCRATCHED INTO THE WALL OF THE RED HAMMER INN — Blackbones, Sharn. The Red Hammer is the only inn in the city maintained by and for warforged. "I was made in a forge. I was given a sword. I was told to hold a trench. I held it for three years. Then they told me I was free. They did not tell me what free means. I am still working on that."

Karrnath and the Other Path

Karrnath's approach to the arms race differed from Cyre's in a way that reveals something important about how the war changed each nation's character.

Cyre bought its advantages. Karrnath made its own — at a cost that is still being calculated.

When plague and famine crippled Karrnath in the war's opening years, King Kaius I accepted the Blood of Vol's offer: Lady Illmarrow of Farlnen promised to end the famines and plagues in exchange for the Blood of Vol becoming the state religion and the establishment of the Order of the Emerald Claw as a knightly order. The priests brought relief — the famines had been exacerbated in part by the disruption of Seeker rituals that had long managed the Mabaran manifest zones in southern Karrnath, channelling and diffusing the death plane's energies to allow the land to bear food. Once those rituals were restored and given state support, the agricultural crisis eased — and the dead became soldiers.

The Odakyr undead were not cannon fodder. The necromancers Malevanor and Gyrnar ir'Shult spent years in the powerful Mabaran manifest zones of Fort Bones and Atur developing the Odakyr Rites — rituals that granted the resulting undead the capacity for independent tactical decisions, the ability to operate in complete darkness, and freedom from the need for food, rest, or morale management. The Ministry of the Dead was established to collect suitable remains from battlefields and, in peacetime, from the nation's morgues — prioritising the bodies of elite soldiers for the most capable undead. The royal corpse collectors became a branch of government, their work sensationalised by the foreign press but understood within Karrnath as a practical necessity.

What Karrnath could not purchase from Cannith, it manufactured from its own dead.

The arms-race dimension of Karrnath's necromancy was less about initial development than about escalation. Thrane, which viewed necromantic warfare as an abomination, developed radiant-damage ballista ammunition — Tira's Tears — specifically to counter Karrnathi undead. Karrnath developed deathbolts that dealt necrotic damage and harmed only living creatures, ideal for a force that fielded undead and living soldiers side by side. Thrane worked on dawn disks to extend the undead-disrupting properties of radiant light into area ordnance. Each advance invited a counter. Neither side could permanently neutralise the other's advantage.

Cannith East in Korth has noted the opportunity. Zorlan d'Cannith's current weapons research — blending Karrnathi necromancy with traditional artifice — represents a post-war continuation of the same logic that drove the arms race during the war. He is combining two of the war's most significant innovations to see what they produce together. Zorlan, who surprised even Regent Moranna by sincerely adopting the Blood of Vol faith during the war, carries that faith forward into his research with a conviction that his counterparts in the other Cannith branches find unsettling. The treaty does not specifically prohibit this work. The ethics of it remain unaddressed.

"The other nations call our dead soldiers an abomination. We call them volunteers who are still serving. The Karrn who gave his bones to Fort Bones gave them willingly, knowing they would stand guard after he could not. That is not an abomination. That is duty." — Karrnathi officer, speaking at a diplomatic reception in Korth, 997 YK

What the Houses Did That No One Confirmed

The canonical record of the magical arms race focuses primarily on what was publicly known: the warforged, the Odakyr undead, the blast disk variants, the arcane artillery systems. But the war also produced research that was never fully disclosed — and some of it has never been officially denied.

Rumours persist that House Vadalis — which breeds and trains exotic creatures and has pushed magebreeding to produce magical animals with enhanced capabilities — conducted research during the war into biological weapons and creatures that went beyond conventional magebreeding. The house neither confirms nor denies this. Tyris d'Vadalis, who heads the house's operations in Stormreach, is surrounded by dark rumours and hidden motives; the magebreeding techniques of the ancient giant civilisations of Xen'drik are the dreams of every Vadalis researcher made manifest, and the heads of Foalswood would do a great deal to possess them. Separately, House Jorasco — whose healers served in every army — is rumoured to have cooperated with both the Karrnathi state and the Blood of Vol to research and weaponise diseases. Karrnath suffered repeated plagues throughout the war, and the persistent rumours that Jorasco was involved in both causing and curing them are unflinchingly denied by the house's leader, Baron Uladra. The rumours persist.

Within House Cannith itself, the Forgehold in Sharn's Ashblack district conceals a shrine to the Traveler — the Sovereign of chaos, change, and innovation — revered by the early Cannith tinkers and maintained to this day. Traveler cultists within the house reportedly pursued innovation at all costs during the war, creating weapons or tools that could shatter existing balances of power regardless of other consequences. Some outside observers blame these cultists for the airship, whose development caused serious friction between Houses Orien and Lyrandar. Some blame them for the warforged. Some blame the Traveler for the Mourning itself.

None of these attributions can be proven. The Mourning has no proven cause. The biological weapons research has no confirmed documentation. The Traveler cult's specific activities within Cannith are by definition secret. What can be said is that the arms race created the conditions in which all of these things were possible, and created the incentive structure in which they would have been pursued: urgency, secrecy, the absence of oversight, and the understanding that every innovation had a buyer.

GRAFFITI — Cannith Enclave wall, Dragon Towers, Sharn. Cleaned and repainted monthly; reappears within days: "WHO MADE THE MOURNING?"

The Ratchet That Didn't Stop

The magical arms race was self-sustaining in a way that conventional arms races are not, because magic compounds. An advance in blast disk technology prompted advances in blast disk countermeasures. Advances in undead tactics prompted advances in radiant ordnance. Advances in warforged design prompted advances in anti-construct siege weapons. But each of these responses was itself an advance — it could be captured, studied, reverse-engineered, and sold. The cycle did not approach equilibrium. It accelerated.

By the war's final decades, the research programmes of all five nations were producing innovations faster than military doctrine could absorb them. Commanders received new weapons before they understood how to deploy them effectively. Some innovations — the warforged colossi that appeared in the war's final weeks, standing two to three hundred feet tall, requiring crews with the Marks of Making, Storm, and Passage to operate at full capacity — arrived too late to be tested against prepared defences. Others arrived in time to change specific engagements but not the war's outcome. The Arcane Congress perfected the wand of magic missiles barely twelve years before the Mourning. Cannith has not yet replicated it.

The Treaty of Thronehold mandated the destruction of creation forges. It did not mandate the destruction of anything else. The blast disk formulas still exist. The Odakyr Rites are still practised, maintained by the priests of the Blood of Vol even without state sanction. The Ministry of the Dead, under Count Vedim ir'Omik, continues its research. Cannith East is blending necromancy and artifice in Korth. The Arcane Congress advances battle magic under Queen Aurala's Arcane Initiative. Thrane's Crucible crafts items drawing on the power of the Silver Flame. Every nation retains its research programmes. The magical arms race did not end with the war. It paused, adjusted its objectives from winning to preparing, and continues in a lower register that is invisible to everyone who is not looking for it.

And in the deepest chamber of the Cannith Forgehold, hidden behind illusions and arcane seals in the Ashblack district of Sharn's Cogs, Merrix d'Cannith has preserved one of the original creation forges — operated by warforged, guarded by the elite Darkwood Watch, its existence known only to his closest associates. The Treaty of Thronehold ordered all creation forges destroyed. This one was not destroyed. Merrix has been quietly continuing his grandfather's work, producing new and improved warforged designs, convinced that the secrets of the creation forges — secrets that may trace all the way back to the quori ruins of Xen'drik — have not yet been fully understood.

The arms race continues. It has simply changed address.

"Everyone asks about the next war. Nobody asks about the next weapon. Those are the same question. The weapon comes first." — Aundairian war researcher, now at Morgrave University