Now, I know that Eberron does away with a lot of assumptions, so I don't begrudge them any for not keeping Tiamat and Bahamut's relationship a close as it is in other settings. What bothered me, though, was how Tiamat got her "cool Eberron version" treatment, but Bahamut got nothing.
Now, some might think that Tiamat got the short end of the stick, because Bahamut remained a full-fledged god, and Tiamat merely became an Overlord of the Age of Demons. But with the nature of divinity in Eberron, this basically means that Tiamat has more "screen time" in the setting. Tiamat is real. Her prison is an actual location on the material plane, and enemies can try to free her. Bahamaut is a god, so he may not even actually exist. ALSO, the book pretty heavily implies that dragons will try to eat you for worshipping him because he's THEIR god. Look, but don't worship.
So I've been trying to come up with a way to include Bahamut a little more prominently in my Eberron games, without resorting to trying to make him Tiamat's equal. Here's what I came up with, and it still leaves the question of Bahamut's existance unanswered (just hinted at).
During the first age of the world, the demons ruled the world. Khyber, stirring inside the world, spawned it's greatest children, the Overlords, and all their lesser kin. The dragons lived in fear of the demonic hordes.
Now, according to canon, what turned the tide in the war was the dragon's discovery of the Prophecy, by a dragon who may or may not have later ascended to become Aureon, Sovereign of Lore and Law. That's all well and good, but the demons are fully capable of manipulating the prophecy as well. Another major factor in the dragon's victory were their allies, the couatl.
My idea is that there was one leader of the couatl race, a being on par with a demonic overlord, but birthed from the remaining essence of Siberys. He wasn't truly a couatl, but a being of pure radiant energy, barely contained in a titanic scaled body. He seemed to be the epitome of what both couatl and dragonkind could become. So awesome and noble was he, that the dragons named him after Sibery's most virtuous son. "Paladine ex Bahamah", or "The Righteous Breath of Bahamut".
As the dragon-demon war raged on, "Paladine" never faltered in his courage or valor, and many individuals on both sides of the alliance began to believe he was the earthly vessel of Bahamut's will.
It was also "Paladine" who suggested sacrificing his physical body to become the spiritual energy necessary to bind the overlords. The couatl all agreed with him and among mutual agreement, decided to exclude a small number of their race to maintain a vigil on the physical side of things. At first, the dragons who fought alongside Paladine despaired that they could not join in the sacrifice. Upon seeing their need to become something greater than themselves, even the lofty ancient dragons, Paladine promised that all noble souls who died valiantly would join him and the couatl in their sacrifice, and their souls would fight evil for eternity as one.
So... yeah. I decided to make the Silver Flame more or less Bahamut's breath weapon sent to Eberron to aid the dragons in their fight. :P And more specifically, this entity is a "Voice of the Flame", sort of Tira Miron's counterpart for dragonkind, allowing them a condiut to channel the silver flame. (I imagine that several dragons in the Light of Siberys must be dedicated to the Flame, even if it's never actually stated.)
You can always state that Tira Miron is the humanoid version Bahamut. The followers of the Silver Flame will probably not worship a dragon (for whatever reason you want, but having a humanoid religious hero is way cooler when you're a humanoid), but they might instead have personified Bahamut as Tira Miron.
My little edit to canon here is to say that a Rajah-level being existed for the forces of good, and that it was his idea to create the Flame, rather than the couatl race as a whole. (I figure even without my edit to history, someone among the couatl had to have gotten the idea first.)
So Tira Miron might have been the latest being called to serve as a Voice, but I'm not connecting her with Bahamut at all. In my Eberron, she was still a normal human girl, who grew up to be a paladin of Dol Arah, and was called to serve the Flame by a couatl, who helped her bind the freed Overlord, the Shadow in the Flame.
What I meant by Paladine ex Bahamah being a "Voice of the Flame" was that he was the original one, there at the creation of the Flame, at the turning point in the Dragon-Demon War. Millions of years later, Tira Miron, a completely seperate entity with no prior connection to Bahamut, would become another "Voice of the Flame" that speaks directly to humans.
As for why I wanted Bahamut to have a "cool Eberron version", it's simply a case of personal taste, not a percieved lack of a need being fufilled. Bahamut is my favorite god since before I even started playing DnD (when I read the Dragonlance books), and I merely desired a cool place for him in my favorite setting. Or at least to fix the implied "You can't worship him or dragons will eat you" vibe for my own personal games.
And like I said, for me he wasn't "fine where he was" in the pantheon, because in Eberron that means he might not even actually exist. So you couldn't even definitively say that Bahamut was in the setting, becase he might be a figment of draconic imagination. Where as Tiamat, even if not a true god, definitively exists. You can try to free her. Her prison is a geographical location in the material plane. So even if you percieve her as being "inferior", she isn't. Because explicitly existing, even not as a true god, is superior to Shroedinger's Bahamut, who has never acted directly in the world and may not even be a real entity at all.
I'm sharing my thoughts on the matter here, just in case there's any other Platinum Dragon fans out there who wanted Bahamut to be more involved with Eberron and were maybe looking for ideas.
I was thinking about the "Don't worship him or we'll eat you." aspect of the Bahamut religion amongst dragons. I haven't read up about that aspect anymore, but suddenly it occured to me that it would be very cool to have an active church for Bahamut even though the dragons dissaprove greatly. It could make for some pretty awesome intrigue and battles.
The dragons would not be able to just go all out on the church and annihalate it, since it would probably mean disrespect towards Bahamut and the entirety of Khorvaire suddenly would perceive the dragons as a threat to be dealt with. So subtle approaches are needed and there is space for skirmishes between the brazen, younger dragons and outposts of the church.
My excuses if this is highjacking your thread
I agree that there might be some weird tension between the dragons and humanoid Bahamut worshipers. Because part-and-parcel to worshipping Bahamut is an understanding of empathy and compasion, not just righteous zeal. So dragons dedicated to Bahamut might be a bit less likely to eradicate a humanoid Bahamut church.
But that doesn't mean the rest of the Dragons will like it. The Bahamut-worshipping dragons might try to defend the humanoid Bahamut church as much as possible within draconic society, vouching for it, trying to downplay the heresey, but the mainstream worshipers of Thir (where Chronepsis-worship is dominant) would still be against it.
What would be the reason for humanoids to worship Bahamut though? It seems like there'd need to be an explaination why these humanoids turned to the Platinum Dragon rather than the Sovereign of Sun and Sacrifice, Dol Arah, or the Sovereign of Honor and War, Dol Dorn. Or for that matter, the Silver Flame. My idea above about making the Silver Flame pseudo-Bahamut-worship was to imply that Bahamut was wise enough to forsee the prevailing draconic attitude toward humanoid worship of him, so he circumvented it by sending an emissary they could worship in his stead that upheld all the same values as him: Compassion, Honor, Righteous Battle against the forces of Evil.
So, any ideas for how a more obvious form of Bahamut worship might have arrisen in humanoid history in Eberron?
As a side note, in my Eberron, Tiamat remains a true god. She merely aped Bahamut's involvement in the material plane by sending her own emissary, because deific law allowed her the opportunity to intervene when Bahamut did (which is why gods usually don't do so, because they think it too risky to allow their counterparts the same level of access.
But in Tiamat's arrogance and vanity, she merely made a copy of herself, whereas Bahamut chose to create a life and work through it only by proxy, trusting it to make the right decisions. Bahamut didn't forsee his emisarry creating the Silver Flame, but he's extremely proud that he did.
(To add even more, the Traveler seems to have found a loophole around this deific law allowing him to walk the world uncontested. Or he is inherenly exempt from the law. Or he may not have even set foot in the world at all. Even the other gods aren't sure.)
The same could occur in the case of a church of otherwise-ordinary Khorvaireans - whether it's because of a perceived divine sanction or that it appears to be part of the prophecy, Argonessen has concluded that it should hold its nose and let events unfold as they will.
I don't really favor the idea of making Bahamut and Tiamat equivalents as per other settings, essentially just two meddling gods having a spat by proxy in the mortal world. Keeping Tiamat as a rajah (and not a deity), while making Bahamut something else entirely, would be my approach.
Rather than 'Bahamut came up with the whole idea', perhaps he was merely the first non-couatl to willingly give himself to the flame to help bind it to and provide a voice for it in the world (even if his 'voice' didn't speak quite as directly as the current one).
This event continues to echo in the prophecy: others (like Tira) who have since followed that path, even though they did so as self-willed individuals, were essentially re-enacting his sacrifice on a mythic level and in that sense became his symbolic incarnations rather than literal ones.
This lets Bahamut remain a Thir-style archetype that others emulate without being a stereotypical meddling god or the type of absent god that you dislike seeing him being portrayed as. He's also distinct from Tiamat while still remaining opposed to her.
As for keeping Tiamat and Bahamut seperate beings entirely, I can appreciate that approach, keeping them distinct from other settings. It just doesn't work as well for my campaign since I have Eberron's cosmology connecting to other settings, where Tiamat is a true god. I had to explain her existance as a Rajah in Eberron somehow, should my PCs ever get involved with her and ask questions.
It just doesn't work as well for my campaign since I have Eberron's cosmology connecting to other settings, where Tiamat is a true god. I had to explain her existance as a Rajah in Eberron somehow, should my PCs ever get involved with her and ask questions.
I do this by having each setting's dragon deities being lesser avatars of universal ur-beings (mainly a reaction against them being labeled 'lesser deities' in 3e when I thought they should be the top of the totem pole). In Eberron, Tiamat's avatar happened to manifest as a demon.
An idea trickles into mind... suppose Eberron's Bahamut is, rather than being a 'maybe-or-maybe-not' ancient god, instead an emergent force: in other words, all those super-powerful dragons believing in him causes him to come into being. And since Tiamat is a creature of Khyber, it would be appropriate if her opposite were, say, to hatch from the Heart of Siberys dragonshard...
I like the idea of Bahamut being an emergent force. It reminds me of something.... I remember hearing once that there's a theory (maybe in a sourcebook, a dragonshard, or just a forum post by someone on these boards) that the couatl didn't create the Silver Flame, but their sacrifice merely acted as a beacon that summoned a pure force of good. If we take that approach, and Bahamut's generally more subtle actions, perhaps the couatl's sacrifice summoned Bahamut into the material world.
But Eberron remains a world that the gods seem to be locked away from. So his divine essence in purest form arrived as the Flame, a disembodied force of Good. That's how he got around the divine sancation from action in the cosmos. And Tiamat, the more direct of the two, got around it by siezing some essence of Khyber and using it to create her demonic avatar.