The City of Stormreach is Established in Xen’drik

Founding

The Kingdom of Galifar, in cooperation with the dragonmarked houses, funded the upgrade of the trade city of Stormreach on the northern peninsula of Xen’drik in 802 YK.

The Kingdom of Galifar, in cooperation with the dragonmarked houses, funded the upgrade of the trade city of Stormreach on the northern peninsula of Xen’drik in 802 YK. The city of Stormreach had a fascinating history. Forty thousand years before the present time, Stormreach had been a city of giants and served as the capital city of the Cul’sir Empire. That city’s remnants were still visible throughout modern Stormreach, including the great statute of a giant ruler known only as the Emperor that looked out over the harbor, the rings of standing stones that continuously radiated magic, the colossal, cyclopean walls that divided the city’s districts and the floating edifices that defied gravity throughout the city. Over the centuries after the fall of the giant civilizations on Xen’drik, communities of sahuagin and thri-kreen had also made their homes in the city before being wiped away by an unknown force.   Stormreach is relatively small—its population could live in a single ward within Sharn—but it is a free city; for all intents and purposes, it is an independent nation with its own customs and traditions. The Code of Galifar does not apply here, and the rulers of Stormreach consider themselves the equals of any king in Khorvaire. To understand the culture of Stormreach, one must look to its history. Stormreach is haunted by its past. Born in the current age, the city is a human creation, but the region’s history stretches back long before the rise of human civilization. The giants of Rushemé say that the region is cursed and point to the ruins of a half-dozen civilizations as proof. Scholars from the Library of Korranberg and Morgrave University have studied these ruins for decades and have created a simple map of the region. But many of the greatest secrets remain. Uncovering the truth is a challenge for adventurers—and a task that has already claimed the lives of hundreds.   The great Library of Korranberg in Zilargo is filled with books written about Xen’drik andAureon himself, the Sovereign of knowledge, could not condense its full history into only a few paragraphs.   The history of Stormreach begins in the Age of Demons. Much about this age eludes modern scholars. The dominion of the demon Overlords stretched across the face of Eberron. There is no question that fiendish Overlords ruled domains in Xen’drik and that the dragons and couatls opposed them and might have drawn the titans, the giants’ mythic ancestors, into the struggle. Explorers have occasionally found traces of the past: the magic blade of a rakshasa warrior or a brass spire in the style of Ashtakala, the citadel of the Lords of Dust in the Demon Wastes. According to the storytellers of Rushemé, it was in this age that a curse was placed upon the land near the northern ocean. Some scholars believe that a terrible secret is hidden deep beneath Stormreach, below the most ancient ruins of the giants.   Although some believe this land to be cursed, others have always been drawn to it. The titan Cul’sir made this region the center of his empire during the Age of Giants. Many sages believe that the Emperor, the statue towering over the present city’s harbor, is a representation of Cul’sir himself, set to guard the city against the demons of the past. Researchers are still struggling to reconstruct the events leading up to the devastation of the original giant cultures of Xen’drik. It is clear that elves lived among the Cul’sir giants, most likely as slaves; many tools and structures from this period are designed for use by the smaller elves. What records have been recovered emphasize that the city played a critical role during the quori invasion of Xen’drik and was a focal point for arcane research tied to the giants’ war effort. The historical records are obscure about what the city’s wizards were researching but hint at a tremendous power source beneath the city. Whether it was a creation of the giants or a force they were trying to tap into is unknown.   The defeat of the quori set the stage for the elven uprising against the giants. Relics found in the jungles around Stormreach suggest an elven campaign of guerilla warfare lasting for centuries. This quiet struggle was punctuated by pitched battles. According to Tairnadal tales, the great elf heroDyrael Morain led an attack on Stormreach in an effort to “destroy the greatest evil in this dark land.” Dyrael and his forces, the largest elf army ever seen at that time, were annihilated, but the Tairnadal still honor his bravery and sacrifice. Many elves of the Valaes Tairn have come to Xen’drik and searched for Dyrael’s bones and his legendary magical blade in the fields south of Stormreach.   The Age of Giants came to an end in a wave of epic magic and dragonfire. Compared to much of Xen’drik, the ruins of Stormreach are well-preserved; the colossal watchman of the Emperor is almost untouched. Other sections of the city were partially buried but otherwise left intact. The giant inhabitants were slaughtered, but some sages believe the dragons held back in dealing with Stormreach itself—that for some reason they were afraid to unleash their full power against the city.   The devastation of Xen’drik left a continent in chaos. The archeological record suggests that a number of cultures found footholds in the region around Stormreach. But each of these settlements collapsed, and by the time humans came to the area, all that was left were ghosts and shattered stone. Scholars have confirmed that the following cultures inhabited Stormreach in the past thirty thousand years. The first group to return to Stormreach was the giants, the ancestors of the modern giants of Rushemé who live near the city. The loremasters of Rushemé say that their ancestors were gripped by the Du’rashka Tul, a homicidal madness that forced them to turn on one another and destroyed their nation.   Thousands of years later, the sahuagin of the Thunder Sea came to Stormreach. The sea devils constructed an amphibious community in the flooded sewers of the original giant city. Modern sahuagin will not speak of this fallen culture. Some scholars believe this silence is due to shame— that the old sahuagin were corrupted by a dark force below the city. Others assert that the sahuagin civilization was destroyed so long ago that the modern sahuagin simply know nothing about it. The sahuagin were ultimately driven from the city by a group of giants called the Fallen Stone. Evidence suggests they were either storm giants or some sort of amphibious stone giant—perhaps a missing link between the two races. The Fallen Stone was short-lived; following their victory over the sahuagin, they apparently fell prey to a plague that resisted all forms of magical treatment. Within a century, the region was abandoned again.   The next civilization that left a clear mark on the region of Stormreach was that of the thri-kreen. In the modern age, the intelligent mantis folk of Xen’drik are few in number and largely avoid human contact. But there was a time when tens of thousands of thri-kreen inhabited the region, carving twisting tunnels into the giants’ foundations and sculpting strange monuments beneath the city. The fate of the thri-kreen remains one of the region’s greatest mysteries. The other cultures fell to battle or plague. As far as researchers have been able to tell, the thri-kreen culture came to an end instantaneously, as if the bulk of the thri-kreen population simply vanished. The thri-kreen refuse to discuss their history with humans, but the answer might be found in Stormreach’s depths.   These four cultures left clear marks on Stormreach, while others passed through with barely a trace. The Library of Korranberg has records of a gnome effort to build an outpost in Stormreach sixteen hundred years ago (around -1600 YK). After mere months, a handful of survivors returned to Zilargo. They blamed their failure on hostile giants, but in recent years the scholar Hegan Del Dorian has advanced the theory that this was a cover story hiding what really happened; he points to the written testimony of a gnome sailor who speaks of a “darkness that gripped both body and soul.”   But the history of modern Stormreach itself is much less of a mystery. In the decades before 802 YK, Riedra had already been exploiting Xen’drik’s natural resources for centuries and smugglers from Breland and Zilargo had long probed the mysterious continent’s northern coast. As trade began to flourish in the Thunder Sea after the human settlement of Khorvaire, pirates from Breland, Cyre, Zilargo, and even the Lhazaar Principalities began to prey on the Galifaran shipping in the region.   The first Khorvarien humans to make landfall in the Stormreach region were pirates. They wanted an outpost to repair and resupply their ships, and the crumbling docks of Stormreach seemed a good foundation for such a hideout. They found a city in ruins, marked by the civilizations that had come before. The pirates clashed with giants, drow, and sahuagin, but they were mysteriously spared the strange horrors that befell previous settlers. A century passed without plague or warfare, and the pirates prospered. They began searching for opportunities on the continent and discovered both valuable relics in the interior and the power of kuryeva, a potent form of gin fermented from the berries of the kuryeva bush endemic to northern Xen’drik.   Piracy and smuggling grew ever more profitable in the Thunder Sea and these outlaw captains needed a base to resupply their ships. Smugglers established hideouts along the northern coast of Xen’drik, but most were quickly destroyed by monsters or the marauding Vulkoori drow clans of the interior. The rogue captains needed a truly secure refuge. Some claim it was Delera Omaren, the pirate-queen of the Thunder Sea, who laid the first stones of modern Stormreach. Others say it was Kolis Sel Shadra, the wily gnome smuggler said to own a fleet of spectral ships. Whoever began the settlement, it soon became a joint venture, with many pirate captains contributing resources to the new town in return for sanctuary within its harbor and access to its businesses. The walls of the ancient Cul’sir giant ruins provided simple fortifications for the settlement and for some reason, the predators of the jungle seemed to shun the city.   The small outpost grew and prospered, as did the piracy it supported on the Thunder Sea. Delera Omaren and the dwarf pirate Korchan Amanatu left bloody wakes in its waters and the newly-emboldened pirates began preying on Zil, Aereni, and even House Lyrandar’s shipping. House Tharashk saw the shiploads of dragonshards the pirates were capturing from the Riedrans and wanted to establish their own prospecting operations in the shattered land. Scholars and artificers seized the relics retrieved from the interior of Xen’drik and wanted more. But between harsh weather, the sahuagin, and the constant threat of piracy, travel was simply too dangerous. And all the while, the other dragonmarked houses also became increasingly interested in both Xen’drik’s natural resources and the hidden magical secrets of the lost giant civilizations that lay within its forbidding interior.   The Twelve, acting on behalf of the dragonmarked houses, finally appealed to the throne of Galifar to end the pirates’ depredations and establish an official Galifaran port in Xen’drik. In 800YK the king took action. Galifar’s greatest military strength lay in its land forces, but the Royal Galifaran Navy was still a force to be reckoned with. After a few sea battles in the Thunder Sea that resulted in deep losses for both sides, a gnome smuggler appeared in Thronehold to petition the court of Galifar. Kolis Sel Shadra was known by his reputation as the smuggler who had never lost a cargo—either to the Galifaran Navy, the Galifaran customs service, or other pirates. Sel Shadra came to Thronehold as the representative of the four most powerful pirate captains of the Thunder Sea: the human Delera Omaren, the dwarf Yorrick Amanatu, the human Moluo Lassite, and himself. Sel Shadra offered the king of Galifar a truce—if the king would offer these captains an amnesty and recognized political authority over Stormreach, the four would use their influence to disperse the pirates. After extended negotiations, the king agreed in 802 YK to an accord called the Stormreach Compact that would end the war between the pirates and Galifar, and even promised that the Galifaran Crown would join the dragonmarked houses in funding Stormreach’s expansion as Khorvaire’s primary port of call in Xen’drik. But the king insisted on one condition: that he and his successors appoint a fifth lord over the city who had the Crown’s trust. There was much debate, but in time, the four captains—now called the Coin Lords of Stormreach—agreed to grant the privateer Jolan Wylkes the title of Harbor Lord and for the five of them to collectively rule Stormreach together as an oligarchy called the Storm Lords. Wylkes was a sailor, as opposed to the Galifaran nobles who had first been proposed by the Crown. The king and his descendants held to their vow and the Storm Lords lived up to their end of the bargain as well, bringing an end to the rampant piracy.   For nearly two centuries now, Stormreach has grown and prospered. Several dragonmarked houses have established sizable enclaves within the city and the kuryeva of Molou’s Distillery is prized by connoisseurs across southern Khorvaire. There have been times of trouble—the Omaren Revolt in 890 YK when one of the Coin Lords sought to take over the city and the attack by an army of enraged giants in 946 YK—but the city has always persevered. Today, with the Last War over, Stormreach has become a preeminent destination for the more intrepid merchants, explorers, and adventurers of the Five Nations, swelling the city’s population to over 11,600 people of every race and creed found on Eberron. Stormreach has also become a major center of intrigue between the dragonmarked houses, the Five Nations, the Inspired of Riedra, and many other organizations, all of whom desire a chance to gain access to the many hidden secrets of the ancient past that lie deep within Xen’drik.