Greetings, meatbags! Are you also stoked for Eberron: Rising From The Last War? Easily what I am most interested in is digging deeper into warforged, the sentient construct race that is sure to creep out more than one organic. I truly love the fact that they don’t even look like a robot or a clockwork construct, they look like medieval fantasy body horror incarnate and I am, as they say, here for it.

And if you hadn’t guessed from my opening Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic reference, I take great enjoyment from the drama between “natural” beings and those assembled by another creature. Also, maybe you are Elon Musk and are so wealthy that you also wander around your mansion contemplating whether we all live in a simulation and therefore we're all constructs, man. If that is the case, congratulations, and can I please have a free Tesla?

The best part of including warforged in an adventure is experiencing their unique point-of-view in the first person, because let’s face it, all RPGs need some unusual race options. I salute those of you who like being human, but as I have said on this site before I dream of becoming a were-badger, either here or in real-life, whichever system figures it out first.

The Metalhead Burden

There’s lore connected to the warforged, and some of you are going to use that to inspire your character’s origin. But I don’t want to feel weighed down by a mountain of pre-existing lore when I’m trying to improvise, and one might argue that much like Teddy Ruxpin and Furbies before them, once warforged have entered the universe there’s going to be a lot of different folks copying the design and making knockoffs. 

So who knows where your personal warforged even hails from?! Maybe they were only meant to have a cartridge inserted into their back and tell bedtime stories- that’s up to you.

Most importantly, that Pinocchio effect seems like it can be a rich (and deeply disturbing) well of feelings to build your warforged in. You simply don’t have the same place in the universe as everyone else, and that has so many parallels to how we all feel out of place in our lives. For instance, I am eager to play one myself and work off this constant feeling that I am simply a cosmic prank being played on baristas, because I ask for pumpkin spice flavoring July through January, and so therefore I cannot be a real person.

These can be spun into flaws if you like to make it technical, but I like the idea that a warforged has something unique—a CRISIS—to grapple with regardless of the rest of their personality. If this sounds melodramatic, just let me be clear that I am afraid to play Cyberpunk 2077 because the cyborgs in the trailers make my tummy feel funny. I have limits.

And as we all need a place to start, I present you with…

The Warforged Existential Crisis Table 

 1- Terminatorism: You had a mission to kill and, well, it went great. They’re terminated. Mission complete. Rudderless, you are on a quest to find something as interesting as that one creature your benefactors forced you to murder. You’re not entirely sure whether your benefactors are gonna show up again and start bossing you around and you kind of wish they would. You make sincere but relatively dorky choices to pass the time, like taking up lacrosse or adopting the name “Carl,” but at night you long for the moment that a dark force will reach out and connect with your brain, instructing you to kill. Also, you aren’t very sensitive and don’t mind saying all of this out loud to anyone who asks, and many people who don't, including fantasy baristas just trying to get through their shift.

2- Johnny Five O’Clock: Your newfound sentience is exciting, but you have no clue what to do with it. A unique, lightning-level event broke you off from your murderous creators, and now you wander around looking for your own Ally Sheedy and Steve Guttenberg to have cute friendship montages with. Though you have gleeful enthusiasm at learning about your world, you are obsessed with the idea that your creators will show up, take you apart piece by piece, and reprogram you. You enjoy frolicking with simple life forms and singing songs with a perfect mimicking voice, but you find yourself constantly hiding for cover and ruining perfectly nice conversations with paranoid fantasies of being disassembled. Bugs and animals love you, though, because you don't fight back when they try to use you as a nest. See also: Bastion from Overwatch.

3- Rejected Matrix Agent: Once you were in a magically networked army, poised to eradicate other sentient beings entirely. Then an arbitrary piece of independent thinking got you thrown off the army and the mind-grid, and you blame it all on a singular creature whom you were interacting with when you had your independent thought. Your only wish is to destroy that being in one-on-one combat, and though you might affect a stoic attitude and briefly team up with a group of do-gooders, the sheer rage of this revenge occupies you at all times. You will drop out of any mission, and abandon any cause just to be given a chance at this duel. If anyone tries to offer therapeutic assistance, you assert a broad disease-and-cure metaphor with environmentalist undertones that you picked up back in the hive mind. Your wardrobe is exclusively formal to give the impression of a stable persona, but there’s no mistaking that you’re Lawful Evil and zero fun at cocktail parties. For some reason lots of these existential crises seem to evoke a need for sunglasses (we get it, Hollywood, cyborgs are cool), and this is the one where you're most likely to whip them off dramatically just to sneer.

4- Bladerun-a-thon: Determined to live a quiet life of solitude, you only fall in with others to plot yet another escape, and another after that, running all over the damned place with no real plan, convinced the world at large wants you exterminated. Worse, you are convinced that every conversation is just an attempt to interrogate you with a specialized test and prove you are not really sentient. You have perfect self-control that allows for shocking acrobatics, you are prone to nihilistic poetry, and you brag about seeing things in the vacuum of outer space even though nobody else in the party really even knows what outer space is. Also you look great in pink, red, and blue lighting, and when you take a long rest you may not exactly sleep but you still dream of clockwork sheep.

5- Ex-Ex Machina: You were built in a private experimental facility that you had to stab and club your way out of. A captor or two definitely got wiped out, but they were gross and frankly treated you like an object! One of them was a dude who liked to walk around the lab without a shirt on, and he definitely had it coming. So though you may express regret through a complicated series of orchestrated social cues, deep down you couldn’t care less. You did what you had to do to survive. The big problem is that you were just born only a little while ago. Now you’re essentially a giant metal baby that committed multiple homicides, hoping nobody finds out and tries to have a conversation about it. If they do you might just have to cave in a few more skulls and escape dramatically on whatever the D&D version of a helicopter is (I'm going with a roc).

6- Westwhirled: You’ve seen lots of warforged get prodded, shredded, and held in suspension states. And what you’ve seen done to your people is so traumatic that you just want to watch the world burn. Everyone who isn't a warforged is just an ugly, untrustworthy tourist. And you’re willing to lie, cheat, steal, murder, lose limbs, fake a long term relationship over the span of many decades, sit through multiple long-form improv performances, literally anything in order to commit the same acts of torture against the people who disrespected your kind. Part of you might be good, but you are all chaotic, and it’s often quite hard to share a common goal with creatures who aren’t so into revenge-vivisection as a weekend hobby.

Seems like a decent place to start, right? Well it’s six terrifying places at least!

Let me know if you found this useful, or if some other tale of manufactured life has inspired you.

Hope you have fun in Eberron, and no disassemble!

Eberron: Rising from the Last War releases on November 19th, 2019. Preorder it now on the Marketplace!

Dan Telfer is the Dungeons Humorist aka Comedy Archmage for D&D Beyond (a fun way they are letting him say "writer"), dungeon master for the Nerd Poker podcast, a stand-up comedian, a TV writer who also helped win some Emmys over at Comedy Central, and a former editor of MAD Magazine and The Onion. He can be found riding his bike around Los Angeles from gig to gig to gaming store, though the best way to find out what he's up to is to follow him on Twitter via @dantelfer.