1. Kyiersin's Folly
Date: 959
Belligerents: Breland and Cyre vs. Thrane
Conceived during a short-lived Brelish/Cyran alliance, this was an ill-fated attempt to disrupt Thranish supply lines and set the ground for an invasion of Thrane. The Cyran General Hieron Kyiersin conceived of the operation: an elite force of soldiers, mostly Brelish, would teleport past Thranish lines straight into Arythawn Keep, which was lightly garrisoned, seize the fort and its supplies, using their fortified position to hold the fort temporarily, while the main front of Brelish and Cyran troops would press against the Thranish front lines and eventually relieve the force holding the Keep.
The force successfully seized the fort, which was lightly garrisoned as promised. However, they quickly discovered that the fort was no longer the nexus of Thranish supply lines to the southeastern front. This left the force both short of supplies to requisition for their own use, and meant that the Thranish front lines would not be significantly weakened so as to allow the Brelish/Cyran forces to advance. Stranded behind enemy lines, the joint force held out for several weeks before being killed or captured, but Thranish front lines were undiminished in strength.
The waste of life and resources involved in the operation lead to a great confrontation between the Brelish parliament and crown. Parliament demanded to know how Brelish soldiers had been handed over to a hare-brained Cyran general like lambs to the slaughter, while the Brelish royal court refused to release any information on security grounds and accused the parliament of treachery. For a time, the long-term dissolution of parliament or a parliamentary coup against the crown seemed likely. Only the mediation of Crown Prince Boranel successfully averted either outcome.
2. Operation Adamantine Gorgon
Date: 907 Y.K.
Belligerents: Karrnath vs. domestic Purified
Before the sundering of Galifar, Thrane was notable for its concentration of members of the Church of the Silver Flame. All other parts of Galifar, however, were notable neither for their abundance nor scarcity of Purified. Today, Karrnath, standing apart not only from Thrane but from Aundair, Breland, and the remants of Cyre as well, is notable for the virtually complete absence of the Church of the Silver Flame.
The establishment of the Blood of Vol as Karrnath's state religion lead to increased tension between the Karrnathi crown and the Church of the Silver Flame immediately, especially once state-sanctioned necromancers began to animate large numbers of Karrnathis as undead. Some young members of the Church of the Silver Flame insisted that they be granted an exemption from reanimation -- that they could wear some medallion or symbol which would ensure that they not be reanimated after dying in service of their king. When Korth refused, many young members of the Silver Flame simply rejected conscription (and were subsequently executed).
When a Sivis gnome worshipper of the Silver Flame defected to Thrane with copies of secret information he had handled in 906 Y.K., matters reached a breaking point. At first, an undead regiment was marched through a Silver Flame-centric neighborhood of Rekkenmark, in an attempt to provoke a confrontation. It was later discovered that none of the Purified rose to the bait, but the Karrnathi military reported that they had attacked Karrnathi soldiers. With this fabrication as a pretext, Operation Adamantine Gorgon went into full swing -- an all-out attempt to cleanse Karrnath of the Church of the Silver Flame. Kaius feared mutiny from living troops, so undead forces were primarily used in this operation.
Most worshippers of the Silver Flame in Karrnath were killed, but some escaped to Aundair or Cyre, or went into hiding. At any rate, however, the Church of the Silver Flame as an institution throughout Karrnath was crushed for a century, even well after the Blood of Vol was disestablished as Karrnath's state religion.
3. The Battle of Passage:
Date: 972 Y.K.
Belligerents: Breland vs. Aundair
A Brelish fleet launched from Silver Lake, sailing to Lake Galifar, hoped to make a landing in Passage, seizing a critical Aundairan town. Although the Brelish fleet ultimately succeeded in destroying the far smaller Aundairan fleet guarding the port of Passage, Brelish losses were too great for any hope of making a landing and seizing the city from the water to be viable.
The extensive arcane upgrades to the Aundairan fleet gave each Aundairan ship far greater effectiveness than the less supernaturally empowered Brelish ships. While this was not enough to save the badly outnumbered Aundairan fleet, the pyrrhic victory lead to the parliament initiating a Brelish/Zil project, with extensive Brelish royal funding of Zil artificers, to develop some form of magic that would allow Breland to have naval ships as or more powerful, one to one, as those of Aundair. This project eventually bore fruit in the form of elemental airships (as well as elemental seaships, somewhat earlier).
4. The Angwar Keep Massacre
Date: 989 Y.K.
Belligerents: Cyre vs. Thrane
Lead by a vicious warforged commander known to its terrified subordinates only as Commander, a unit of Cyran warforged laid siege to the Thranish of Angwar Keep. After a long siege during which Angwar Keep's food supplies declined to nothing, and the Thranish were reduced to eating only what food could be conjured by their most powerful clergy (about 1/8th the amount needed to keep the fort alive), the commander of the Thranish forces surrendered, seeing no way the fort could hold out any longer.
Commander accepted the surrender, its soldiers standing by as the Thranish laid down their weapons, armor, holy symbols, and other implements and marched out of the Keep. Once the Thranish forces were completely disarmed and in Cyran custody, however, Commander ordered a massacre, slaughtering the surrendered and unarmed Thranish.
Commander was later "dismantled" by the Cyran military in response to the massacre. Those few warforged among the Cyran unit which had refused to take part in the massacre, or who were particularly helpful to the investigations, were promoted, although they were generally promoted into positions removed from the front lines. This lead many, especially Thranish, to view it as a way for the Cyrans to remove potentially troublesome, questioning soldiers from the field of battle while nominally rewarding them.
The incident lead to a significant increase in both anti-Cyran and anti-warforged sentiment among the Thranish, and influenced the Church of the Silver Flame in doctrine that warforged were soulless machines.
5. The Karrnwood Raven Incident/Black Zol
Date: 922 Y.K.
Belligerents: Aundair vs. Karrnath
In 922, Aundair and Karrnath had agreed to a temporary truce, pending talks of a more permanent peace or even alliance. Aundair's Royal Eyes suspected that this was a ruse, however, and especially feared reports unusual activity in the western part of the Karrnwood, near Aundair, fearing that some wondrous location might be under construction that would serve as a staging ground for further attacks on Aundair.
What happened next was unclear, but at any rate, Sarla Aung, a druid from the Eldeen Reaches (then loyal to Aundair) had flown around the Western Karrnwood, disguised as a raven. Eventually, a Karrnathi diviner was checking the area of the Karrnathi construction project, and he saw the druid perched atop a nearby branch in her true form. A hidden patrol tracked the Sarla back to the isolated clearing in the wood where she slept and ambushed her, capturing the druid and disabling her powers by forcing her into a suit of crude metallic scale armor.
The druid was brought back to base and interrogated. Under torture, she confessed to being a member of the Royal Eyes, and was subsequently executed -- oddly enough, no lie-discerning or truth-forcing spells or rituals, or mind-controlling effects, were used to force her to reveal whether or not she was a Aundairan agent.
For their part, the Aundairans vehemently denied that Sarla was a member of the Royal Eyes, claiming she was simply a renegade druid who had flown into Karrnathi territory for her own inscrutable reasons. However, the Aundairans believed that the incident had doomed talks of permanent peace: they secretly mobilized their armies while continuing to hold talks with the Karrnathis. On the second Zol of Rhaan in 922 (known as "Black Zol" from then on in Karrnath), the Aundairan delegation abruptly broke off talks, declared an end to the truce, and were teleported out by a just-arrived Orien dragonmark heir.
Less than an hour later, the fully mobilized, waiting Aundairan army launched a ferocious strike, involving a massive expenditure of magical spellpower, against Karrnath's western border, in an attempt to pre-empt what they believed to be imminent Karrnathi revenge for the Karrnwood Raven Incident. The war between Karrnath and Aundair soon resumed in earnest, and the temporary advantage Aundair gained with its flashy first strike was soon lost in the endless ebb and flow of war. The prospects for Aundairan-Karrnathi peace were doomed until the Mourning.
But teleporting? Isn't that something that hardly EVER happens in Eberron, is EVER?
And it's already been used in two of these incidents?
I mean.. if the armies of Khorvaire had access to teleporting.. wouldn't the war have been a bit different? Seem to remember something about teleporting not being an option.. Could just be me.
ANd seriously, please don't take this as flaming.. iI really think this is good and I want to use it. I just have these ruleslawyer players who would pick at anything out of context, so I have to make sure before I use it.
Kyiersin's Folly, for instance, did not involve wizards or others actually capable of teleportation -- it involved the creation of expensive, single-usage items by crafters using cooperation and wondrous locations to create magic items with spell/ritual powers above what any of the individual crafters were capable of. Even there, the expense of the one-shot teleportation items meant that this was a one-way trip -- hence why once the teleportation turned out to be a strategic blunder, they couldn't teleport out, and were left stranded behind enemy lines. Even just using one-shot teleportation items with no return ticket, though, it was an extremely expensive operation, which is part of what scandalized parliament as much as the loss of life. (This was a scandal big enough to destabilize the Brelish government.)
On Black Zol, hiring the services of a level 4 Orien Dragonmark Heir or a similarly rare equivalent 4e character would be a costly matter, but I think it's one that the Aundairan crown would be capable of for something as important as getting their diplomatic delegation out in preperation for a sneak attack, especially considering that functionally House Orien headquarters is in Aundair, in Passage. Teleportation is reserved for bigwigs, but high-level diplomatic delegates are bigwigs, and furthermore the Aundairans had some time to plan breaking the truce in advance, and making logistic arrangments to that end.
Karrnath, as all of the nations did during the war, took a large number of POWs and dumped them in camps throughout isolated regions of their territory. After the signing of the treaty, all POWs from all nations were officially returned to their country of origin unless they were specifically charged with war crimes. Karrnath, however, maintains a secret camp to this day with large numbers of officers, decorated soldiers, mages, and other individuals that were deemed too dangerous or knowledgeable to allow them to return to the enemies' ranks, in case hostilities resume. Hardliners in Karrnath's government supply this camp in secret and deny its existence to the rest of Khorvaire.
The camp is located on a godforsaken island about a hundred miles north of Karrnath. The weather is always bitterly cold, the sea is unforgiving and full of dangerous predators, and the only way on or off the island is the supply ship that comes once every three months. The inmates were powerful members of the military in their former lives, but have been brutalized and dehumanized, in some cases for decades. They toil cutting into the ocean cliffsides searching for Khyber shards, which are found perhaps a dozen per year. The work is meaningless and back-breaking and slowly kills off the prisoners, who have learned the futility of resistance.
The prisoners do not know that the war is over, and the rest of Eberron thinks they are dead. If it ever became known that Karrnath was operating this facility, the diplomatic fallout would be enormous. Not only that, but important NPCs of note from all the other four nations can be found here. The possibilities for PC involvement should be self-evident ;).
Karrnath, however, maintains a secret camp to this day with large numbers of officers, decorated soldiers, mages, and other individuals that were deemed too dangerous or knowledgeable to allow them to return to the enemies' ranks, in case hostilities resume. Hardliners in Karrnath's government supply this camp in secret and deny its existence to the rest of Khorvaire.
Its an interesting idea, but wouldn't it be easier for Karrnath to just kill them then risk exposure?
It could be The Prisoner kind of island tho any intelligence spies may had during the war is probably invalid now.
Another option could be 'scientist' POW camp (magewright, artificers etc) that worked on military projects in the other nations (maybe even some Karrnath 'scientists' that worked on the undead related projects which the king doesn't care to make public) they may have access to labs and can continue their research.
Its an interesting idea, but wouldn't it be easier for Karrnath to just kill them then risk exposure?
True, but many countries have maintained secret POW camps long after hostilities ceased, despite the potential for great political fallout if they were discovered. You could go a few routes for explaining this; perhaps the prisoners are subjects in a necromancer's long term experiments. Maybe many of them are royalty or otherwise highly placed individuals, who were subsequently replaced by Karrnathi Changeling spies. Karrnath keeps them alive in case there is any personal information they need to extract to keep up the spies' disguises. You could have it be a pet project of a sadistic and vengeful Karrnathi colonel who rules over the camp like his own pitiful barony. Some very high ups in the Karrnathi bureaucracy could be maintaining the camp precisely because it could spark another war, which they desire. They cover for this by insisting that they simply do no want to release potentially dangerous individuals into enemy hands.
And other possible explanations. I don't know, it just seemed an interesting adventure possibility to find an out-of-the-way camp where people still thought the war was going on, and organizing a great prison escape.
The perception that I get of the Last War (without having ever read Forge of War) is the image of a sort of endless grind -- all five nations are fighting each other, in an endless, nondescript battle. No one ever gains an advantage. The only real distinctive events within the Last War are when an outlying province breaks away (the Eldeen Reaches from Aundair, the Talenta Plains from Karrnath, etc) or when some new development (like warforged) are introduced. My objective is to create a sort of more lively, dramatic image -- where alliances among the five nations are made and broken, where innovative tactics might lead to great success or humiliating failure, where specific commanders make choices. History isn't just the Last War -- it's that infamous battle that took place on the second Sul of Zarantyr in 948 Y.K., in three feet of snow. Do you remember Colonel ir'Paskan's famous ambush?
There's nothing wrong with the Karrnathi prison camp in its own right, but it doesn't do anything to contradict the "endless grind" view of the Last War which I'm trying to fight against here. That's my ultimate objective here.