| #1TectormanNov 01, 2010 8:19:08 | Well, after looking at the EPG merely as a convenient source of races, feats, and so forth, the Trekkie in me has made me take another look at Eberron, this time (for the first time ever) as a setting to use for my very own. At which point, I found that the cosmopolitan nature described by the setting, as well as the globalized outlook of its inhabitants, matched quite well what I would create with a campaign setting of my own. So instead of going to all that trouble, I'll just use what's already there.
In doing this, I also need a place within the setting for the race of beings originally conceived by Bernard Doove and translated into D&D (first 3.5, and then 4E) by myself. The below is my attempt at finding an appropriate niche for the race to exist, created from what I understand about Eberron so far.
The thread where the race itself is being hammered into being (never mind the original fluff, if you will) is here:
community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/758...
The History and Present State of the Chakat Race in Eberron
Origin
Approximately 1500 years ago, the War of the Mark broke out on Khorvaire. The war was eventually resolved, but not before certain things came to light. The Seryan line of House Vadalis was revealed to have experimented on drawing out the raw power of the natural world to create powerful war beasts. The conclusion of the war resulted in the destruction of these creatures and the ban of the processes by which they were created. However, these laws were not entirely adhered to. A group known as the Feral Heart continued to experiment with the techniques first explored by the Seryans. Most of the members of the Feral Heart persisted with the goal of creating even more awesome war beasts. But not all.
The Turner family of House Vadalis could trace its line all the way back to the first appearance of the Mark of Handling. From the get go, members of that family felt the bond their mark fomented was not so much one of creature and trainer, but of kindred spirits yearning to emerge. Therefore, the Turners have passed the task of learning to awaken their animal companions from generation to generation. When the Seryans first emerged, enraptured by the idea of drastically improving upon the natural design, the Turners, seeking to gain knowledge for their own goals from the Seryans at the same time, lent their efforts to the cause; some of the hardiest of the creatures fielded by House Vadalis were those that received the direct benefit of the Turners’ research. When the War of the Mark ended, the Turners had to once again resign themselves to the slow process of generations-spanning study, sometimes comparing notes with the Feral Heart, but mostly just within the family.
That is, until the Inspired came along.
Approximately 1500 years ago, on the birthplace of the human race, the continent known as Sarlona, the quori have arrived and have begun their slow process of capturing the continent and its peoples by inciting wars all over. Being methodical, the quori focused most of their efforts on Sarlona at this time. However, being capable of engaging in multiple avenues to succeed at their objectives, the quori also made sure to send scouts out into the world, including pre-Galifar Khorvaire. Such it was that one such scout came across the Turners and their knowledge of magebreeding animals.
The quori decided to recruit the Turners. They had resigned themselves to many decades or even centuries of war on Sarlona in order to set the stage for their reign, but here was a new asset with the potential to expedite the process. Create war beasts to strengthen the warring factions they favored, provide a convenient common villain to unite the humans of Sarlona under their guidance, the possibilities soared. So after much flattery and bribery, the quori convinced the Turners to relocate to Sarlona, where much funding and resources were promised to help the Turners create the ideal creature, making sure to keep the term “ideal” as loosely defined as possible.
Sequestered in a secret facility in a part of Sarlona where the fighting had ended and the quori’s dominion was already secured, the Turners worked diligently and feverishly until finally through a long and involved combination of ritual magic and magebreeding, Charles and Katherine Turner d’Vadalis had five newborn cubs, the first of Chaz & Kat’s kids. The first Chakats.
At this point, the two conflicting goals began to come to the fore. The Turners’ dream was to introduce to the world a new race of creature, the wilderness given a voice to the urbane, sentient but with a wild ancestry, and with traits and qualities that would certainly make them the envy of others, but always with a focus towards giving the creature the best chance at survival. The quori, on the other hand, wanted a race of war beasts, savage destructive monsters to be loosed on the world according to their design. Of course, the Turners were not going to let their children be used to such ends, but at that point, the quori had what they needed: five live test subjects, the research notes on the processes necessary to create more if need be, and other facilities in the process of being built, to take the so-called “Chakats” and modify them with their own mental powers.
That’s when the kalashtar struck.
Over time, kalashtar infiltrators became aware that their nemeses, the quori, were soon to be the proud owners of an entire new race of beings, creatures honed and focused to be juggernauts answerable only to the Inspired and the Dreaming Dark that governed them. Rumors held that these creatures would be intelligent and adaptive, and most importantly, the ultimate survivors. The ideal creatures to pierce the planar rifts that simultaneously hound and shield Adar. Although the kalashtar never had the numbers necessary to pose a significant threat to the quori, still they had to try to put a halt to this new menace.
They pierced through the holdings of the quori and found the facility still housing the Turners and their Chakat children. Revealing the true nature of the quori to the Turners, the kalashtar helped them to destroy what materials were kept there and then worked to spirit the Turners and their family to Adar. Unfortunately, agents of the quori arrived on the scene and a dreadful battle ensued. Psionic energies raged back and forth and shield and sword clashed. The kalashtar were able to hold the Inspired back long enough for the Turners and their kids to escape, but they unfortunately died in the struggle. No longer able to navigate the journey to Adar, the Turners fled to the Tashana Tundra north of the warring lands of Riedra and took refuge with the nomadic tribes that lived there. Sadly, Charles and Katherine Turner died a few years later, leaving the care of the now-preteen Chakats to the shifters they had been living with.
Decades passed, and the Chakats began to grow restless within the tribe. They appreciated the care given them by their adoptive parents, but a call to revisit the land of their birth came and grew too strong to ignore. They would soon find out that the quori were able to utilize the Turners’ notes to recreate the process and tweak it a bit, creating more warlike Chakats known as Chakamils. In addition to a diminishment of intelligence and an increase in aggression, the quori also attempted to infuse the Chakamils with certain psychic abilities, organized in different facilities known as houses. When the original Chakats arrived, they found three houses, Redpaw (for the development of telepathy), Bluepaw (focusing on telekinesis), and Blackpaw (producing Chakamils capable of astral projection); between the three houses, the Chakats found about forty Chakamils in total. And it was from these Chakamils that the Chakats had received the empathic distress call.
The Chakats immediately set to work. With help from the inside, they freed the Chakamils and retreated to safety. However, by this point, the quori had determined that the Chakamil project was too costly to continue and sent wave after wave of Riedran soldiers to erase the failure once and for all. The Chakats and Chakamils were driven to the coast, where those that survived stowed away on departing ships. Thus, approximately 1300 years ago, the Chakat race left Sarlona and began to inhabit the rest of Eberron. In the years to come, the race would grow from 40 to thousands, and the distinction between Chakat and Chakamil slowly disappeared.
Chakat Lands
Chakats have few, if any, lands to call their own. Chakats in Khorvaire tend to live either in large, extended-family clan-households in the more cosmopolitan of human cities (mostly Sharn, certainly other cities in Breland, as well as in other major cities within the five nations) or they dwell in vast regions of the wild, typically in the same areas where one can find large communities of shifters. On the continent of Argonessen, Chakats exist in small, roaming tribes from the Sea of Rage to the DarkSea and from Seren to the BarrenSea, with populations growing larger towards the Frostspur to the south.
When the Chakats arrived on Xen’drik, they immediately succumbed to the Traveler’s Curse. However, this proved to be a blessing in disguise, as it kept wandering giants and drow from posing a permanent threat to the newcomers. As for the land itself, the Chakats fell back on their wonderful penchant for enduring challenging environments and not only survived, but thrived. In fact, when Chakats from Khorvaire first arrived at the newfound city of Stormreach, they were met with rumors of a full-fledged nation called Chakona. Alas, even after nearly two hundred years of searching, no expedition (not even all-Chakat parties) have found this country and returned.
It is unknown if any Chakats are still native to Sarlona. The quori were certainly disappointed by the lack of benefit garnered from their efforts to create a race of living weapons. However, even though the original Chakats managed to successfully rescue the Chakamils from the three houses, they deemed it unlikely that those were the only facilities the quori devoted to this project. In fact, there was at least one rumor to that effect, regarding a house dedicated to the exploration of teleportation abilities. Unfortunately, the Chakats were unable to pursue this rumor after the rescue of the Chakamils. Descendants of this fourth house, if it exists (as well as other houses, if they exist), could still live on Sarlona. It is also possible that some Chakat families returned to the Tashana Tundra in the centuries to come; the same holds for the country of Adar.
The Chakats’ Involvement in the Last War
For the most part, Chakats in Khorvaire played a minor role in the Last War. As a people, they abhor violence and bloodshed and thus did Chakat clans stay out of the fighting, participate in other services (medical relief, scouting, counterespionage, and so forth), or in extreme cases, uproot themselves from their homes and move to territories far from the fighting (joining Ven ir’Kesslan’s expedition to settle Q’barra, lending what voice they could to support the creation of the Eldeen Reaches, roaming the Talenta Plains, and even traveling as far east as the future Lhazaar Principalities).
However, on the individual level, it became very common for a Chakat to join any of the armies of the Five Nations in response to the war spilling into their homes and affecting their loved ones. Karrnathi soldiers warring against Aundairian troops, Brelish warriors versus crusaders of Thrane; sooner or later, a Chakat homestead would find itself in the middle and suffer casualties, and one or all of the Chakat survivors would join the side less responsible for their suffering for the remainder of the battle. Then the remainder of the battle would extend to the remainder of the campaign and eventually to the remainder of the war.
There was one case, however, where the Chakats broke with this attitude. When House Cannith created the first warforged, the Chakats immediately felt a kinship with this race of creatures created artificially, much like they were. Upon hearing of how these sentient creatures were sold to the Five Nations as soldiers to exist only to die on the battlefield and visit the same fate on others, the Chakats became outraged. After a few skirmishes that did much to annoy the dragonmarked house and its apparent slave trade but little to actually hamper it, the Chakats finally managed to build an army of their own, gathered across the entire continent. They set out in force for the headquarters of House Cannith in Eston in Cyre. The next day saw the rise of the gray mists and the destruction of the entire nation, the Day of Mourning.
Chakats, Dragonmarks, and Dragonmarked Houses
Chakats do not have any dragonmarked houses of their own, but they can still sometimes develop a dragonmark, more often than not the Mark of Handling. Of course, detecting a dragonmark on a Chakat is another story entirely; being a member of a fur-covered race has a tendency to disguise skin-deep features, and it can be difficult to distinguish some dragonmark-related abilities from their own natural empathic and psionic abilities.
The Present-Day Reception of the Chakat Race
The citizens of the Five Nations are not entirely aware of the origin of the Chakats. It is commonly known that they aren’t native to Khorvaire, and as historical texts have no mention of them anywhere in the world prior to 1300 years ago, it was easily deduced that the race was artificially conjured into being. The involvement of House Vadalis, however, is still an unknown factor (even to House Vadalis itself).
Despite the race’s youth, the Chakats were granted the same rights as other sentient creatures under the rule of the kingdom of Galifar, and they retain these rights under the Five Nations today. However, Chakats are still sometimes viewed with a wary eye, as their bestial appearance belies their gentle demeanor. A few minutes tend to serve to allay any qualms a human or member of a dominant race may have about them, but Chakats aren’t always given a decent chance for a first impression.
In particular are the members of the Naturalist’s First group, an underground movement that directs actions both petty and great against members of races that they deem unnaturally made, such as shifters, tieflings, Chakats, and, recently, warforged. Recent actions taken against revealed kalashtar may indicate a quori hand behind the organization.
Incidentally, the Chakats themselves are not entirely aware of their origins. They’re aware that the first Chakats were created on Sarlona, and that their creators were Charles and Katherine Turner, originally from Khorvaire, but that’s it. If the first Chakats were ever fully aware of the involvement of the quori, they must have kept that knowledge to themselves, possibly to spare their offspring a terrible burden. It’s also likely that the quori incorporated a form of mental block in the Chakamils that safely keeps their connection undiscovered. |