Warforged Colossus

Mere weeks before the Day of Mourning, House Cannith unleashed its mightiest creations: the warforged colossi. Hundreds of feet tall, these gargantuan warriors thundered across Cyre, crushing everything in their path and leaving ruin in their wake. Meant to end the war decisively, these arcane war machines could pulverize soldiers beneath their feet and incinerate entire legions with beams of red light radiating from their mouths. But as the colossi were beginning to turn to the lands outside Cyre, the Mourning came, and the colossi perished. Now their remains lie, like mountains, in the Mournland, filled with secrets and waiting to be explored.
History of the Colossi House Cannith spent much of the war working on various kinds of constructs that could serve as soldiers, siege engines, or other weapons of war. Their earliest efforts, which lumbered onto Cyran battlefields in the late 930s YK, were barely more than golems with limited sentience, difficult to command in the field. The warforged titans were developed over the next twenty years, and the modern warforged—often perceived as the pinnacle of Cannith engineering—first saw battle in 965.
Successful as the warforged were, though, House Cannith never lost interest in building a better titan. Cyre didn't lose its desire for deadly weapons that could give it an edge over its enemies, and tremendous amounts of gold flowed from Cyre's coffers into the vaults of House Cannith as research and development continued, working toward a new kind of warforged that would bring an end to the war once and for all, and establish Cyre's martial supremacy for centuries to come.
With Cyre's immense wealth fueling its effort, House Cannith called upon the ingenuity of its best artificers and magewrights. Construction began on enormous new creation foundries, hundreds of feet tall, carved into the sides of mountains or secretly nestled within remote canyons.
The project succeeded beyond Cyre's wildest dreams. When the original warforged colossus took its first thunderous footsteps, it was met with a reaction of equal parts awe and horror—and it was almost immediately sent north toward Metrol, where armies from Karrnath were menacing the Cyran capital.
Operating a Colossus A warforged colossus is part warforged and part vehicle. It stands between 200 and 300 feet tall. For optimal performance, a colossus required an active crew including a captain with the Mark of Making, a weapons officer with the Mark of Storm, and a helmsman with the Mark of Passage. When absolutely necessary, though, the colossus could direct itself but at diminished power. A colossus also carried a sizable contingent of elite troops, who could ride in safety within the colossus while it crushed through enemy lines or smashed through a wall, then pour out through hatches once the colossus was in position.
Docent Network. Controlling a construct of such size proved to be a great challenge for the Cannith artificers. The solution entailed creating a large number of docent nodes and joining them together in a single network distributed throughout the body of the colossus. Docent nodes are modeled after the ancient docents found in Xen'drik (described in chapter 5), and though they lack the full sentience or functionality of a true docent, collectively they can guide and control a colossus. The network converged at one place, where the captain could stand and control the colossus's every movement through the use of a mithral helmet with hundreds of semi-organic tendril-wires attached. By way of the central master docent—a true docent recovered from Xen'drik—the whole network fed information back to the operator. Several smaller "hubs" of the network gave other operators access to the relevant parts of that information and enabled them to control parts of the colossus as well. The techniques and tools used to create docent nodes were lost in the Mourning. The various branches of House Cannith are sending adventurers into the Mournland in hopes of salvaging some or all of the network inside a fallen colossus. Colossus Power Core. The power source of a colossus is a Khyber dragonshard of unusually large size, cut into a specific pattern that allows the dragonshard to contain raw magical energy without exploding. A single power core is about the size of a wine barrel, hooked up to an elaborate harness that distributes power throughout the colossus. Weapons of Mass Destruction. Warforged colossi were physically powerful, but their principal weaponry involved the use of bound elementals. Some expelled blasts of elemental fire from their hands or mouths; others wielded adamantine swords they could wreathe in flame. Some colossi also used bound elementals for defense: manifesting shields of elemental rock, blasting out elemental air to deflect ranged attacks, and so on. The captain of the colossus could control all this weaponry through the docent network, but for optimal performance the captain relied on a weapons officer with the Mark of Storm to employ this elemental weaponry. Finding a Colossus When adventurers discover a colossus, it might be in any state. Some have fallen or collapsed and become overgrown with vegetation to the point where one could be mistaken for a small hill. One was engulfed when the rock under its feet turned to liquid and swallowed it up, encasing it in a stone prison when the rock hardened. Some are buried—except for the head, perhaps, or a hand, which serves as a clear indicator that something lies underneath.
Adventurers might even stumble upon a reality the world isn't ready to face: an operational colossus (see the stat block in chapter 6).
Entering a Colossus Map 4.8 shows a fallen colossus. The mostly hollow interior of a colossus is large enough for the crew and soldiers to travel in safety. The area features tunnels, ladders, hallways and crawlways, control rooms, storage rooms, arbalest turrets, and observation decks. With comfort a low priority, only minimal crew quarters are provided, and the inside has no kitchen or dining areas. Normal operating procedure called for the crew to exit the colossus at night and camp outside it.
A colossus usually has multiple hatches to allow entrance and egress: on the legs, on the back, in the chest, in the mouth or on the back of the head, and so on. But entering the remains of a warforged colossus is not a task to be taken lightly, since the Mournland can have bizarre effects on the colossus's docent network, power core, and weaponry, as well as its mind.
Elemental Life. Even though a colossus has fallen, its docent nodes and elemental defenses might still be active. The dragonshards that once bound the elemental that powered the colossus's main weapon might have been broken, allowing the elemental to escape from its bondage and roam the body of the colossus, which has become its lair. Or perhaps it has come under the control of the master docent and now does its twisted will, defending the interior of the colossus and giving voice and form to the docent's otherwise disembodied intelligence. A Deadly Dungeon. House Cannith's artisans lined the interior of each colossus with magic wards and traps in case enemy soldiers breached its defenses. As long as the primary operator remained connected to the master docent and in control, the traps were inactive, but if the operator gave an alert (or simply left their station, or died), the master docent would send a signal through the network to seal the doors, activate the arcane wards, and arm the traps in any area that was under attack. A Grisly Tomb. Most colossi are tombs, filled with the bodies of the crews that perished in the cataclysm. But the Mourning affected everything in bizarre ways, so a venture inside a colossus is often terrifying. A horrific monster might have made its lair in a colossus's interior in the years since the Mourning. The master docent in another one might speak through the brass horns that the crews used to communicate, growing increasingly incoherent and/or sinister. The crew of a colossus might be undead—zombies lumbering through the colossus's interior, or spirits doomed to haunt it until they can find blessed release.
Map 4.8: Fallen Warforged Colossus