Hi, everyone!
I'm in the process of starting a new campaign, which I'm calling "Five Nations" for convenience's sake.
As decided by the players at an initial brainstorming session, the four PCs will all be experienced former agents of the Cyran secret service; they'll be starting at 5th level. I've only got details on two of the four so far, but we're all getting together for a character creation session tonight so hopefully I'll have more to report this weekend.
The two characters I have so far:
My wife Lexa is playing a halfling chaos sorcerer with at least the basic rogue multiclass feat. She was originally a professional thief, but after being arrested for a fairly serious theft she was given the option of avoiding prison by putting her talents to work for Cyre - with the implicit understanding that her handlers would look the other way if she happened to pocket anything valuable on her missions.
On the Day of Mourning, she was racing back into Cyran territory with foreign pursuers hot on her heels when the grey mists engulfed her. When she regained consciousness, she felt a strange energy surging in her veins; this energy erupted as deadly magic as she fought those of her pursuers who had found the courage to enter the mists in search of her. Now she's trying to figure out her place in the world, with her homeland gone and her magic too hard to control for her to return to her old profession.
My friend Alan is playing a human assassin. In the core rules, assassins and other users of the shadow power source pledge a portion of their soul to the Shadowfell in exchange for their power; since this doesn't really work for this setting, we settled on the idea that his character was born during a time when Mabar, the Endless Night, was coterminous with Eberron, and bears a strange connection to that plane in his soul. His eerie nature meant that his noble family - distant cousins of the Cyran royal family - kept him secluded from society.
That changed when another nobleman, secretly one of the heads of the Cyran secret service, approached them. This mentor trained the PC to employ his connection to Mabar as an assassin, and introduced him to noble society and the court as his protege. Unfortunately the PC was out of the country when the Day of Mourning occurred, and he's in a kind of crisis; he's done so many terrible things for Cyre, encouraged this frightening and terrible connection between his soul and Mabar, and now his country is gone - so what was it all for?
I'll have more to write about after tonight, I think, including the other two PCs. I haven't done any work on figuring out the initial hooks for the game, because I want them to be things that will motivate all of the PCs. I do know that the PCs would at least know each other by reputation, and perhaps from one or two missions where they worked alongside each other, and that the first session will involve one of them setting out across Khorvaire to track the others down and convince them to work together.
A fairly strong influence on the tone of the group is the TNT series Leverage with a little less outright humour - each character will have their specialty, each character will have professional respect for what the others do, and there's this world of espionage and intrigue inhabited by characters much like the PCs who will cross the group's path from time to time.
For instance, The Forge of War mentions a woman named Shaldra Antarielle, Daughter of Lies. She was a Cyran artificer lauded as a heroine for her contributions of mystical tools and weapons to the war effort, until documents proving that she had fed information to Karrnath about troop movements and advancements in magical research were uncovered. If the PCs receive some information that suggests Antarielle's magical expertise was put to work on some kind of eldritch weapon that destroyed Cyre . . . well, that sounds like a possibility worth investigating.
I do now have information on the other two characters.
My friend Gareth will be playing a human battlesmith artificer with a very different backstory from the others. He was a citizen of Karrnath, from a family that was devoted to the Sovereign Host and hence at odds with the majority's belief in the teachings of the Blood of Vol.* I'm not sure if the PC was drafted into the army or volunteered, but eventually he was placed in command of a unit of undead soldiers, which forced him face-to-face with the reality of Karrnath's use of the dead for the first time. It proved too strong an affront to his sensibilities; the first time he led the unit out into the field, he destroyed them all and fled to the closest Cyran encampment.
Though he is technically a traitor, he believes that Karrnath betrayed him and the gods, so he had no compunctions revealing everything he knew to the Cyrans who captured him. Eventually he was claimed by the secret service, working for them for several years even though he could never be trusted the way another agent might be. Years of bitterness towards his homeland warped his faith, so by war's end he prayed more often to the Fury than to the Host. After the Day of Mourning, he drifted back into Karrnath, where he found himself exacting retribution on those among his former countrymen who abuse and exploit Cyran refugees, although he has no place among the Cyrans himself.
My friend Sarah's character is perhaps the most traditionally heroic of the four PCs. She's playing a longtooth shifter paladin, who grew up in hard circumstances on the streets of Metrol and volunteered for the army as soon as she could to escape poverty. It seems, however, that she had a greater destiny awaiting her; several times, her entire unit was annihilated in combat, but she staggered back to her own lines. Her reputation as a survivor grew, and she began to find a new purpose in life - fighting for the safety of her comrades, protecting them by placing herself in harm's way and trusting in the Sovereign Host to preserve her. As her faith grew, she began to walk the path of a paladin, giving especial reverence to Dol Arrah and Dol Dorn as patrons of honour and duty in war.
Eventually her skills grew to the point where she was hand-picked to join an elite unit attached to the secret service; the dangerous missions she was sent on meant that once again she was often the lone survivor, but she always fulfilled her duty. Her devotion to the Host was matched only by her devotion to Cyre; in service to her nation she had found the acceptance and respect that she had never known as a desperate street rat. Consequently, the destruction of Cyre on the Day of Mourning shook her faith to the core, and she has been in a state of depression ever since; deep down, though, all she needs is for someone to tell her that her duty to Cyre isn't over and give her a mission, and her old resolve will come back with full force.
I'm not sure when we'll have the first session of the game proper; most likely, it will be in two weeks' time. That should give me plenty of time to figure out how to kick the game off the right way.
* In my games the Blood of Vol is the majority religion in Karrnath, but there is a sizeable minority of followers of the Sovereign Host. Their numbers have been growing since King Kaius III proclaimed it the faith of the royal family.