My intention is to use:
the green age world map (areas D6-7 on brian's grids)
ideas presented by pennarins illithid project
and...
historical info presented in penn's writeup for the screaming maw (which also draws upon info from aphgan's silt archaelipego project)
My particular interest lies in ideas for what sort of creature an athasian goblin should be, and what adventure ideas come to mind for this setting.
anyways....brainstorm away
for the illithids good ol' pennarin posted the following a while back (hope its ok to repost -pen?)
Free Year/Event
-13,920 Illithids settle the salt-water marshes south of the Sunrise Sea. They lay eggs in the water and feed the tadpoles masticated food while adults hunt at night.
-12,895 With their increasing mastery of psionics comes domestication of insect colonies that can produce food for the tadpoles, freeing the adult population for other activities.
-12,885 Illithid psions discover on the Hiriman highlands a Nature-Bender retreat from the Blue Age.
-12,884 When those studying the base do not report back, a group is sent to investigate.They find the brains of their comrades absorbed into a rhulisti construct, which is now imprinted with the illithid’s intelligence and personality. Illithids bow to the great intelligence and wisdom of the construct and make it their greatest leader, the Orekam.
-12,801 The Orekam makes great strides in the Way of the Unseen and starts deciphering the lore contained in the retreat, written in the ancient halfling language. An illithid civilization rises up from the marshes and highlands.
-12,698 The Orekam creates the first elder brains, inspired from its own structure and budding from its substance, as a means to produce life-shapes. The experiment is a success.
-12,315 Trading roads are constructed through the marshes, opening economic ties with the rising powers of the Green Age, leading to fruitful cultural exchanges. Illithids emigrate to the centers of Green Age civilization.
-11,154 Start of the height of illithid civilization; will end with the advent of Barien.
-10,912 An enormous earthquake rocks the land as fire and ash can be seen rising north in the Sunrise Sea. Parts of the highlands collapse and the Nature-Bender retreat, the anchor point for the Orekam, is lost.
-3,542 Cleansing Wars begin. Barien starts his war on illithids everywhere.
-3,535 The sea begins turning to silt, rain makes itself increasingly scarcer and the marshes are drying up. Illithids begin a massive construction project and exodus to subterranean nests cloistered around sources of water.
-3,306 Barien’s war machine reaches the former marshland’s area.
-3,301 Elder brains devise ceremorphosis as a mean to bring tadpoles faster to maturity to increase soldier numbers. Over the years all other Rebirth races in the region become known as thralls as illithids enslave all that do not flee and capture enemy soldiers to obtain living bodies for ceremorphosis. A vast program of enslavement is carried on the neighboring savage dromite clans, whose members make formidable psionic warriors.
-2,310 The Sea of Silt expands and swallows part of the ancestral lands.
-2,012 Illithids are slowly but surly losing the war. In an attempt to find a weapon that could decimate their enemies, the greatest elder brains delve into the Nature-Bender memories the Orekam left them. They accidentally unleash a terrible plague-weapon that spreads far before dying off, but not before rendering sterile all intelligent creatures in the region.
-2,011 In the chaos and confusion that ensues the plague, Barien pierces the front’s defenses and makes his way to the greatest city-nest, Oshul. In desperation the elder brains of Oshul make a last attempt at salvation: they pool all the illithid’s minds of their city-nest together and connect them to their own, forming a hive mind. Their combined psionic might decimate Barien’s army and mortally wounds the champion. With his last breath Barien curses the illithids with powerful sorcery. The curse makes its way through the hive mind to all its components who waste away in the ensuing days.
-2,010 With half of what remained of the race annihilated, the remaining illithids and elder brains relocate to farther areas. Of the nests that existed, only a handful remain and their oldest and greatest cities are gone. A few dromite thralls escape to their lands and spread civilization to their race.
-2,002 The end of the Cleansing Wars.
-1,990 In the ensuing years, the surviving elder brains devise a mean to procreate again by creating new tadpole-producing elder brains. The old elder brains divide their own gray matter amongst the new, imparting knowledge. The populations of the other Rebirth races in the area slowly dwindle to nothing after a few decades as their members grow old and die without progeny.
-1,923 The illithid race rises from the ashes of destruction. With the help of the elder brains the illithids try to recreate their pre-war society, but much knowledge as been lost. Illithids will never again be as great as they were. Over the hundreds of years that follow, they maintain isolation from the other Rebirth races even as their feelings of hate fade away.
-1,752 Dromite clans become united castes that initiate savage gorilla warfare to protect their borders from further illithid intrusions.
-1,737 Illithids build fortified camps on the border between illithid and dromite lands from which they lunch punitive strikes and collect dromite thralls.
[...]
Screaming Maw
History
This minor artifact was crafted for use in a genocidal war against the goblins of Athas, part of a larger campaign to cleanse the planet of non-humans. These Cleansing Wars were imagined by a mad prophet and sorcerer, Rajaat, and executed by his immortal Champion followers. The mace was enchanted by Daskinor, Goblin Death and 14th Champion of Rajaat, whose task was to eradicate the goblins of Athas.
Crafted of drake ivory from the distant Drake Dominions and of iron from rich Tyr, the assembly of the Screaming Maw marked the first decade of war against the goblins. It took the better part of a decade to gather the materials to craft the mace, but only a few days for immortal Daskinor to turn it into a weapon fit for slaughter on an immense scale. He imbued it with some of his hatred for the goblins, which would sustain him through the King’s Ages that would pass to complete the task of eradication.
The mace’s completion, in the year of Desert's Fury in the 144th King's Age (FY -3,532), was just in time to celebrate the downfall of Gamarok the Wise, third goblin king of the goblin kingdom south of Daskinor’s seashore home of Bartigar. Daskinor, already a powerful manifester and spellcaster before his elevation to the status of Champion, had chosen the southern goblins for his first campaign, acting on long lasting hate between the Domain of Bartigar and the goblin Islands Kingdom.
From that point on, the mace served as a symbol of war throughout all of the conflicts, for Daskinor fought side by side with his human armies. Goblins fell by the thousands at his own hands, his forces invading and burning all goblin lands, settlements, and holdings, laying siege to the mightiest of Green Age cities until its goblin populations were expulsed from their walls. Among the great battles Daskinor fought were the destruction of the Dhuurghaz Empire after a two year siege, and the crushing of the hordes of the Scorpion Plains in a fifty year campaign. One of Daskinor’s last battles, on the shores of the distant southern Inner Sea, was fought against the remnants of a goblin kingdom that had spanned the Sunrise Archipelago. The goblins of that kingdom had long been displaced from the archipelago to the continental shore by the armies of Ebe Blackhand in the year of Silt’s Defiance in the 42th King’s Age (FY -11,347). Daskinor built a vast fleet to cross the Inner Sea from the west, forcing the goblins to flee its shores, only to be met by land troops flanking their numbers from the north and south, effectively corralling the goblin hordes on the strip of land separating Inner and Sunrise Sea. In less than a score of days, nothing remained of the proud people who once forged the Barkka within the fires of Mount Orcys.
Daskinor’s cleansing war against the goblins went on for nearly 900 years, years during which he became more and more hate-filled, for the hate born of his immortal mind was nourished by the urges of the mace, drawing Daskinor into an ever-increasing spiral of genocidal rage, the dividing line between weapon and wielder blurring.
Then, one day, goblins everywhere were no more.
In the year of Priest's Defiance in the 155th King's Age (FY -2,695), Daskinor laid down arms, dismantling his massive war machine. Troops which were not requisitioned by those Champions fighting nearby wars were retired from service, recalled to the north to build a new home for themselves, for in Daskinor’s absence the goblins had retaliated, pillaging the once proud Domain of Bartigar. Daskinor brought the Screaming Maw to the former goblin Islands Kingdom, and built a new city over the ruins of the goblin capital, which he renamed Eldaarich, the goblin word for defeat. All of his preservation and genocidal instincts quenched, Daskinor succeeded at last to partake of his weapon. But he discovered to his greatest shame that he could not bring himself to destroy it, instead settling to storing it into the deepest vault beneath his city, the ruin of a goblin temple dedicated to the elements.
Now a living god for his people, and freed of most of the hate that filled his heart, Daskinor set out to fortify his small kingdom against the ravages of the Cleansing Wars. This world-spanning campaign of ethnic cleansing his Champion brethren were undertaking would leave the world free of the blights that were gnomes, lizardmen, orcs, pixies, and many more races, each fouler than the one before. The world, however, was paying a high price for their zeal, as the Champions’ defiling magic shattered the land, turning forest to desert, sea to silt and fertile plain to barren waste. The Champions, themselves humans before they became immortal, raised human armies to wage their vast wars, for only man had been deemed by the Champions’ master and maker, the prophet Rajaat, to be worthy of existence in the coming new age.
But after 700 years of life as a monarch, years filled with an uneasy unrest whose source he could not identify, Daskinor was contacted by his fellow Champions and told grave news: they had uncovered that their master Rajaat did not intend to deliver the cleansed world into the hands of humans. The Champions realized that Rajaat would not cease until the entire world they knew was unmade. Humans, like all of the other races already cleansed, would have to be eradicated. The Champions agreed that rebellion against their master was the only way to save their race before Rajaat crafted a new Champion, this time to cleanse man.
After thousands of years, the genocidal wars that raged across Athas came to a halt abruptly. In the year of Desert’s Vengeance, in the 164th King's Age (FY -2,002), the Champions imprisoned their master in an otherworldly prison of their making, and cast aside his folly that had overtaken them. Daskinor returned to Eldaarich, his status as a Champion of Rajaat, and his affiliation with the goblins, eventually forgotten like so much dust in the sea.
Two thousand years later, and now known as a sorcerer-king to his people, Daskinor’s unrest has slowly turned into bouts of madness that threathen to fracture his mind and endanger his people’s very existence. Already, edicts have been decreed that make the people of Eldaarich uneasy, and a strange pale sometimes overtake the population, seamingly timed with the madness of its king. Daskinor is growing restless, yearning for a time long past. He no longer trusts his templars and advisors and has turned away from them, instead focusing on the whispers from his past, whispers coming from far beneath Eldaarich, in the deepest of underground passages, where the human-built city gives way to the goblin ruins of old. His servants have reported that Daskinor is often seen going down in the cold and dark beneath his palace, guided by whispers only he can hear.
― Historical document found in the Public Library of New Kurn, compiled by generations of spymasters with contributions from Oronis
Eberron's contient of Korvhaire once was under control of the Empire of Dhakaan, a goblinoid empire that lasted for thousands of years. Not unlike the goblins of the Silt Archipelago, these goblins had a high society and built many an artifact.