Warforged

Warforged are basically an excuse to play a robot in a fantasy campaign without having to deal with level adjustment. They are similar to golems but differ in the fact that they are actually sentient creatures, created by magically coagulating metal and wood in a vat, and count as a special type of creature known as a "living construct", meaning they still have a constitution score and various other properties not possessed by other constructs, at the expense of sharing a lot of vulnerabilities with living creatures that plain old constructs don't.

This player race came about with the advent of the Eberron campaign setting for D&D and since then gained considerable popularity amongst the gaming community (which Dragonborn will never live to see). Surprisingly enough, Warforged are generally quite popular on /tg/. Warforged were originally used as mass produced soldiers in the big "not World War I" of the Eberron setting.

Mechanically, while they do come with penalties to two mental stats, built-in spell-failure chance, and half-healing from spells, they also come with a shitload of immunities and some fun robo-feats no one else gets.

Nentir Vale Warforged

One of the good things about the Nentir Vale setting was that A: as a new setting, it could develop in its own way, and B: it wasn't afraid to tinker with racial backstories to justify the addition of races originating from other settings, like thri-kreen and muls. Thus, Dragon Magazine #364 debuted the article "Playing Warforged", all about the Warforged of the Points of Light.

In the Nentir Vale world, warforged were born of the empire of Nerath, under the wisdom of King Eothyr III. A visionary man, King Eothyr founded the Society of Imperial Artificers, an organization of learned arcanists, and set them the goal of creating a adaptive artificial being - one that could autonomously learn and adapt, but which didn't require the imprisonment of an immortal spirit or an elemental to serve as the spark of its sentience.

The Society labored on this task for many years, working tirelessly to succeed. Sadly, King Eothyr died only a short period before they succeeded. When his son, Prince Elidyr, ascended the throne, he told the Society they had to make some changes: rumblings of unrest suggested that war was coming, and he had no need for his father's Utopian vision of a sapient construct. He needed soldiers, and he told the Society that their artificial lifeform was to fill that need.

This prompted an ideological split within the Society; some were appalled at the idea of turning these artificial beings, naive and innocent, into living weapons and fodder for the wars of man. These rogues took copies of their notes and left.

Still, it wasn't enough to stop progress; the Society created their first creation forge, and soon the first of their constructs, the warforged, walked the earth. And just in time; a massive force of demon-worshipping savage humanoids launched itself against Nerath.

Warforged went on to prove significant to Nerath's battle. The empire's own treasury paid for the formation of legions of artificial soldiers, whilst nobles were offered the chance to eschew battlefield duties by paying for warforged soldiers to take the place of their men. Even some of the rogues succumbed to patriotism or pragmatism and used their private creation forges to support the war effort.

The warforged weren't numerous enough to prevent the loss of King Elidyr, his heirs, and many of the most influential leaders of Nerath. But, still, their strength and sacrifices kept Nerath from being totally annihilated; even though the former empire crumbled into a series of independent city-states after decades of factional war and territorial squabbling, the slaughter could have been far worse.

In fact, warforged continued to play a role in the fighting, and still do today. The Society of Imperial Artificers still exists today, turning out warforged troopers for profit. Some creation forges still remain in the hands of other artificers, churning out new warforged for their own ideological reasons. There's at least one creation forge that remains in the hands of a band of warforged veterans, ensuring the race has some control over its destiny. And those are just the known ones.

A sidebar addresses other possible ways of incorporating warforged into your campaign. For example, they could be an ancient race of self-propagating people, or an experiment in immortality that didn't quite work. They could be exoskeletons for some limbless species of sapients, perhaps constructed by human, dwarven or other "tinker race" allies. They might be a race of human-like beings that convert themselves into artificial creatures at certain age, or implant themselves into armored exoskeletons as part of their maturation cycle. Or your warforged could be unique; some wizard's special experiment that has either escaped or been loned to the party by their patron.

See Also

• Beeforged
• Rood

Gallery

This section contains PROMOTIONS! Don't say we didn't warn you.

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  Artificer.

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  Will stab a bitch.

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  Pimpin ain't easy.

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  Reforged.

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  Robots have no -4 STR.

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  Watch out for splinters.

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  Forged for war, and mouth fucking.

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  How it's done.

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  Warforged bards play heavy metal, techno, and love to rock out. Too bad they have a tin ear.

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