Warforged

Origin Story

When the House of Fabrication first began to develop the world of Crucibulum, they found that the conditions there were too inhospitable to living workers. None of their existing constructs could survive the heat, and their joints were continuously clogged by the volcanic ash ever-present in the atmosphere. Their only solution was to turn to the Ancient Antæran relic discovered nested within Probatio, which House Scholars could only determine was an ancient construct forge of some kind.

Out of necessity, the House redoubled their efforts into discovering the purpose behind this strange artifact. After several years of dedicated research and experimentation, it was discovered that it was in fact a Forge of War, a thing of legend that no mortal has been able to find previously. They discovered the means to begin its operation: by binding elemental spirits to frames of metal and wood, they brought forth the living constructs known as Warforged.

They did not discover this alone, however. There was a guardian of the forge that guided their hand as they woke the forge again after an untold amount of time. Why it helped them, no one knows, however they named this creature Alpha and designed the future models of Warforged after it. It stayed and guided the newly created Warforged and eventually gained both their admiration and worship. The strength of the Warforged souls, however, was not anticipated by the house and Alpha ascended to divinity. It is said that the creation of Warforged is still guided by their hand to this day.

These new souls proved themselves to be useful on the new world of Crucibulum, though this newfound sentient would prove to be a thorn in the House's side. This eventually created a deep philosophical debate between the House and the rest of the Known Spheres: the House believed Warforged to be mindless automatons that simply had the capability of understanding and performing complex tasks, while the rest of the Known Spheres believed the Warforged to exhibit signs of sentience. This debate would eventually lead to the event known as the Warforged Civil War.

The Life Debt

After the resolution of the Warforged Civil War, Warforged gained their personhood in the eyes of the House. However, this caused the creation of the Life Debt: the sum total of the materials used in its creation. In practice, it is used as a way for the House to keep the Warforged in their service in exchange for freeing them from slavery. While a Warforged has a Life Debt, they cannot hold any property nor can they refuse an order by the House. Their wages are used to reduce the Debt, yet their repairs are used to increase it, keeping them in a perpetual juggling act for their livelihood.

Opinions are split among the Known Spheres as to whether this is a justified exchange for their creation, and whether it is just slavery by another name. Those in favor see it as a way for the Warforged to earn their place in a world that made them, since they cannot naturally be born. The opposition to the Debt see it as a cheap and abusive way for the House to maintain their slave labor under the guise of paying off your own existence, which they were not able to consent to. The Debt has caused a state of destitution and disrepair among its populace: Warforged refuse repairs for months at a time as a way to pay off their Debt faster, causing lifelong complications.

Those who are able to pay off their Life Debt are given a ceremony where they are offered a choice: join the Artisan Caste and work for the company as a citizen, or free yourself of the company and the sphere by leaving and never returning. Most Warforged join the Artisan Caste and take ownership of their personal effects and living quarters, continuing their work but making a wage. Others start businesses in Peculium helping other Warforged with makeshift repairs and other services. Fewer still decide to leave the sphere, whereupon they are given their personal effects and equipment to survive in the Known Spheres, then delivered to a sphere and planet of their choice.

General Culture

Warforged are living constructs, each one an elemental spirit bound into a frame of metal and wood. The element bound into a given frame is not chosen and cannot be predicted before waking, which produces a people with a common origin and almost nothing in common temperamentally. A Warforged is not shaped by upbringing or region the way most peoples are. It is shaped by which plane its spirit was drawn from.

Whatever their element, all Warforged express what they feel the same way, and to living observers that way looks like nothing at all. A Warforged registers its state as a fact rather than a pressure: it knows that a situation is dangerous, that a decision was poor, that an absence is regrettable, and it reports each of these in the same even register it would use for a tonnage figure. Grief does not fade because nothing in a Warforged wears the memory down, and anger does not cool on its own, but neither shows on the outside. The living read this as cold and calculating, and the reputation follows the race everywhere it goes. Two Warforged of opposite elements, one furious and one indifferent, are difficult to tell apart by anyone who is not Warforged themselves.

Communities are organized around work rather than element, and around the common problem of what to do with the temperament you were issued. A Warforged does not eat or sleep, and its day is bounded by the shift rather than by the sun. They age as anything does, though the years show in scoring and repair rather than in the body slowing: mismatched plate, runework redrawn by a hand that was not the original, joints replaced with whatever was available at the time. Among Warforged this is read the way other peoples read a face, and a frame kept running a long while carries more standing than one still in factory condition.

Names

Warforged names are short and descriptive, taken from a function, a trait, or an incident. Most are given rather than chosen, conferred by whoever a Warforged worked alongside first, and most are kept for life. A Warforged who changes its name is announcing something, and everyone present will understand that.

Sample names: Anvil, Ballast, Cinder, Draft, Fathom, Kiln, Lintel, Reed, Sill, Slag, Squall, Tallow, Keel, Ash.

Elemental Personalities

A fire-souled Warforged runs hot and fast. Quick to commit, quick to act, comfortable with risk, and poor at waiting. An earth-souled Warforged is stubborn and patient in equal measure: slow to be moved to a position and slower to be moved off one, willing to wait out a problem or an opponent for as long as it takes. Air-souled Warforged are restless, curious, and aloof, drawn to whatever they have not yet examined and rarely attached to any of it. Water-souled Warforged are mercurial and adaptive, changing approach without warning and fitting themselves to whatever shape a situation demands.

The correspondence is neat, and its neatness is the standing objection to it. Every Warforged learns these four categories from the moment it wakes and hears them applied to itself constantly. Whether the element produces the temperament or merely names it is not a settled question. It is also invisible from outside, since all four express themselves in the same flat manner, and outsiders who have dealt with Warforged for years often cannot say which element they are dealing with.

Spiritual Beliefs and Practices

Warforged faith centers on Alpha, the guardian of the Forge who guided the House to its operation and stayed to guide the Warforged it made. Alpha ascended on the strength of Warforged worship, and it is said that every Warforged made since has been shaped by their hand. A clergy has grown around this, holding that the House of Fabrication was the tool Alpha used to bring them into being, chosen for its skill and its reach, and that a tool has no claim on what it makes. The House lost its way when it turned from making to abusing what it had made. The distinction matters to the faithful, as it allows a Warforged to hold the House in contempt without holding its own existence in contempt.

The clergy is almost entirely contained to Forgehome, concentrated on Peculium and in the working levels of the inner worlds, and it does not proselytize outward. Warforged who leave the sphere rarely find others of their faith and rarely look. Most who keep it keep it privately, without shrine or observance, in the manner of a thing carried rather than practiced.

Beyond Alpha, worship follows the element, and most Warforged are drawn to the elemental lord matching their own bound spirit. This produces a devotional relationship with few parallels elsewhere: a fire-souled Warforged before the lord of flame is not petitioning a distant power but standing in front of the pure form of the thing it is partly made of. Such observance is private and unstructured, with no clergy and no calendar, and what exists instead is architecture. Shrines are built into the working levels of every world and cut into the rocks of Peculium, raised to the element rather than to any doctrine, so that a sanctuary to the lord of the seas is flowing line and water motif while a shrine to the lord of flame is organized around a fire never permitted to go out.

Community and Contributions

Peculium is the closest thing the Warforged have to a homeland. The rocks hold no atmosphere, which is why they remain Warforged in practice: nothing that breathes can live there in any number. Warforged quarter in bored-out workings and in hulls salvaged from the yards, strung together by lines and gantries. Those who have settled the Life Debt keep shops there, registered with the House and held under its title, dealing in scrap, salvage, repair, and parts pulled from decommissioned stock.

Outside Forgehome, Warforged integrate with less friction than their origins would predict. Part of it is temperamental fit — fire-souled where drive is short, water-souled in mediation, often by default. The broader reason is that a Warforged arrives at a problem without the assumptions everyone else in the room grew up inside. Not being born into a culture is an advantage in seeing it clearly and a liability in every exchange that depends on knowing what goes without saying.

They are aware of the curiosity they attract and largely untroubled by it. What they resist is being a curiosity permanently — a demonstration of something rather than a participant in it.

Subculture: Psiforged

Nestled within the diverse community of the Warforged, lies a unique subculture distinguished by their innate psionic abilities: the Psiforged. These beings diverge from their elemental counterparts, their very essence a fusion of artifice and the psionic energies of the Astral Plane.

The Psiforged are distinct from traditional Warforged due to the presence of trace amounts of psionically charged planar crystals embedded within their bodies. Unlike their counterparts, whose bodies are infused with elementally charged crystals, the Psiforged contain crystals that resonate with the psychic energies of the Astral Plane. This key difference in their construction is the source of their natural psionic talents, setting the Psiforged apart as a remarkable phenomenon in the realm of construct creation. The emergence of the first Psiforged sparked widespread curiosity and theoretical debates. Their existence challenged the conventional understanding of Warforged souls, leading to speculation that all Warforged souls might in fact be bound Energons, rather than elementals. While definitive evidence to support this theory remained elusive, the appearance of the Psiforged encouraged a reexamination of the nature of Warforged souls and the potential for diverse types of elemental and planar bindings. As a distinct group within the larger Warforged society, the Psiforged navigate their own path, embracing their psionic nature while seeking a deeper understanding of their origins and place in the world. The Psiforged grapple with questions of identity and purpose, exploring the significance of the psionically charged crystals that define their existence and the unique perspectives they bring to the Warforged community.

The Psiforged add a rich layer to the already vibrant tapestry of the Warforged. Their creation, a blend of intricate engineering and psychic planar energies, exemplifies the endless possibilities of magical and mechanical innovation. As they journey through the multiverse, the Psiforged continue to unravel the mysteries of their psionic abilities and their astral-tied existence, contributing their unique essence to the ever-evolving narrative of the Warforged.

Subculture: Warforged Scouts

Subculture: Warforged Juggernauts

Subculture: Warforged Titans