Project SB-11

Project SB-11, also known as Project 11 or the Soul Project, was a secret scientific project carried out within the military of Verdonne that developed and created the Warforged, subsequently deploying them in the Great Iribalt War.

Manufacturing

The Warforged were created in secret underground laboratories and military bases throughout Verdonne. There were three primary manufacturing facilities, however. One south of the naval base in Asoton, one deep beneath the Therren Forest southeast of Ornessa, and the final being somewhere in the rolling plains in the west of the country. Their specific locations have either been forgotten, destroyed, classified, or some mixture thereof.

Inventor(s)

The engineer most often credited with their invention is Theodred Alderre due to his position as the technical lead for the project. In reality, much of the science behind it was developed by his fiance and fellow researcher, Jessica Adnet. Jessica was the first person to discover a breakthrough in the creation of artificial souls. Fragments of notes recovered from the fires where the team's notes were burned revealed that this breakthrough regarded "neurocrystalline matrices." Anything beyond this has been lost.

Access & Availability

Warforged, as the products of Project SB-11 are now called, are relatively rare. There were a limitied number made during the war, and the majority were destroyed in it.

Complexity

This secret project was one of the most technically complex undertakings in known history. It required an intimate and advanced knowledge of engineering systems and the arcane, and necessitated the interweaving of both.

Discovery

Several years prior to the Great Iribalt War, researchers and scholars within Verdonne began developing the Warforged. Automatons and golems, even ones with some amount of intelligence, had existed for a long time before this, but the researchers were attempting to go a step farther. They were attempting to make their automatons truly sentient; they wanted to give them souls.
The first number of attempts relied on the placement of souls within the core of the machines, a capacitor crystal. Such a feat was soon found to be impossible, however, since it would require either the harvesting of unborn souls from the heavens or from damned souls from Baator. Either way, this would have simultaneously been incredibly difficult and impractical, but it also would have caused major backlash from the public and religious organizations alike. Regardless of this, it was attempted and failed.
From that point, they attempted to circumvent the need for a soul entirely, attempting to radically improve the programming and intelligence of traditional automatons. Ultimately, this also failed, as the researchers managed to generally improve construct intelligence, but not to the desired extent. Their final, and ultimately successful, attempt was the fabrication of artificial souls. This attempt took the longest to be fully tested, as the researchers had to find a way to manufacture artificial souls. They ultimately did so, although the exact method they used has been lost, being destroyed by the very same researchers towards the end of the war. In the final days of the war, when it became clear that Verdonne was going to lose, the Verdonne military panicked. They did not want to risk any of their enemies uncovering how they had created the warforged, and thus began destroying all records of their creation. This included a campaign of assassination against anyone who was involved in the project led by the project's lead, Theodred Alderre. He successfully had everyone involved, including his fiance and fellow researcher Jessica Adnet, murdered. He himself was found in what remained of his laboratory, delirious and confused after imbibing a potion of memory modification, surrounded by the burnt and broken remains of his long and prestigious career. During tribunals following the war, Theodred was found guilty of crimes against sentient peoples for his role in creating and effectively enslaving the Warforged, in spite of his lack of any memory regarding it. He was sentenced to death and hanged in Balathir. As a part of the peace negotiations, the practice of soul manufacturing was condemned and banned as part of the Treaty of Dûnhark.