The Rise of the Dhakaani Empire
Founding
The Goblinoids solidify their hold on Khorvaire but the Orcs are given powerful gifts by an unlikely source.
The culturally advanced goblin clans of the Dhakaaniunited the other goblin nations of Khorvaire sixteen thousand years ago to create the Empire of Dhakaan, the greatest civilization the goblin peoples of Eberron had ever known. The foundation of the empire was the Dhakaani’s great martial skill, which allowed them to forge a goblin state that stretched across most of central and eastern Khorvaire and was ruled by a powerful dynasty of hobgoblin emperors and empresses. The empire had come into existence when the most skilled of the goblins’ duur’kala or “dirge singers,” a hobgoblin bard named Jhazaal Dhakaan, convinced the six greatest hobgoblin warlords of the time to unite their clans and choose her as their first empress. Out of respect and admiration for Jhazaal’s vision of a glorious future for the goblin people and leadership in creating the new goblin state, these warlords, immortalized in Dhakaani legends as the“Six Kings,” agreed to name the empire after her. It is said that Jhazaal could win the heart of a listener with but a word, or bring down an army with a scream. Whatever personal powers she possessed, she crafted many powerful magical artifacts that were used for centuries by the warriors and duur’kala of Dhakaan. The Dhakaani were able to come to terms with the gnomes of Zilargo through an accord in which the gnomes promised obedience and tribute to the Dhakaani monarch in return for continued autonomy in their own homeland. The goblins had less cordial relations with the lizardfolk clans of the Talenta Plains, who resisted the imposition of Dhakaani rule over those lands. The lizardfolk were subsequently forced to flee by the Dhakaani’s greater numbers and superior steel weapons into the jungles of Q’barra where the goblins did not bother to follow. Their clans still reside there to this day.
One of the major differences between the Dhakaani and the other goblins of Khorvaire that allowed them to achieve such success was the degree of interracial cooperation within a clan. Among the other goblin peoples of this time, the strong ruled the weak. Leadership was founded on fear, and the weaker races hated the stronger tyrants.
Among the Dhakaani goblins, this situation was not the case. Each species had a role to serve in society, and each embraced this role. The hobgoblins ruled not through force of arms but because the goblins and bugbears respected their ability to maintain structure and discipline. The strength of the bugbears was turned against the enemies of the clan while the goblins served as the heart and soul of the society’s economy.
Hobgoblins had always formed the foundation of Dhakaani society, from its beginnings to the present day. They were the most disciplined of the goblins, both in battle and at court. The hobgoblins ruled the Dhakaani state as the nobility and in the person of the emperor, and their power was rarely contested; their leadership skills had been proven over the centuries so that the bugbears and goblins accepted their respective and subordinate political roles in Dhakaani society.
A Dhakaani army was both tightly structured and surprisingly flexible. Their military was based around small units of goblin infantry that could quickly adapt tactics and formations to evolving combat conditions. Hobgoblins were trained to work together, using techniques like flanking and pincer movements to maximize their effectiveness against powerful opponents. Dhakaani hobgoblins rarely adhered to any sort of code of honor in battle (unless they belonged to a special Dhakaani warrior sect known as the samurai), nor did they seek glory like the bugbear berserkers. A common hobgoblin soldier took pride in his skills but in battle his only goal was to achieve an objective as quickly and efficiently as possible, whether it was killing the enemy, seizing agate, or scouting a location. While there were a few exceptions in goblin folklore, military service was traditionally seen as a role solely for male hobgoblins.Females, however, had many important roles in Dhakaani society.
The most common form of arcane magic among the Dhakaani was that of the bard, and this innate talent typically manifested mostly among the females of the clans. In the Goblin tongue, Dhakaani bards were known as duur’kala, “dirge singers;” they were treasured both for their abilities to inspire troops and to perform healing magic. The duur’kala were the spiritual leaders of the Dhakaani. They used tales of past glory and ancestral deeds to bind goblin communities together and inspire them to a greater future. Alchemy, healing, and diplomacy were also seen as female arts; the male hobgoblins fought battles, and the females healed their wounds, both physical and political.
From an early age, bugbears were raised to think of themselves as the heroes and martyrs of Dhakaani civilization. They were taught to believe that their strength was the single greatest weapon of the Empire. Most were eager to prove their mettle and worth in battle. In combat, bugbear barbarians served as skirmishers and shock troops, smashing into the ranks of their enemies and using their immense strength to scatter and break formations while the strictly disciplined hobgoblin ranks moved up behind them.
With their prolific rate of reproduction, goblins formed the largest segment of any Dhakaani community. Dhakaani goblins received far more respect than their counterparts in other goblin culture; most filled the roles of peasants and tradesmen, performing non-combat tasks that supported the hobgoblin and bugbear soldiers on the Empire’s front lines.
Thousands of years before humans came to the continent of Khorvaire, one of the greatest cities established by the Dhakaani Empire was the hobgoblin metropolis of Ja’Shaarat (Goblin for “Bright Blade”), which was nestled by the Dagger River in the southern region of what is now the kingdom of Breland. The early Dhakaani architects carved their city into the stone instead of raising towers above the ground. As a result, the halls of Ja’shaarat extended beneath the surface of the world. The goblin miners pushed into the Raven Below and discovered that a vast lake of molten magma that burned with a supernatural heat blazed beneath the metropolis. The blades and armor of the greatest Dhakaani warriors were forged there and tempered in khaar draguus, the “blood of the dragon” as the magma lake became known. Later, the Dhakaani architects raised monolithic buildings that covered each of the plateaus over the Dagger River, where a manifest zone to Syrania, the Azure Sky existed. These constructions would later serve as the foundation for Sharn, the City of Towers, the largest metropolis of Khorvaire in the present age.
When the alignment of the planes brought the daelkyr and their army of horrific aberrations to Eberron, the Material Realm centuries later, the Dhakaani Empire fell before them and Ja’Shaarat, like the other goblin cities, was utterly devastated in the fighting. The goblin empire never recovered from the conflict and its greatest city was never restored. The goblin tribes that hid in the city’s ruins following the Daelkyr War renamed their desolate home Duur’sharaat, “Blade of Sorrows.”
At the same time that the Empire of Dhakaan was beginning its rise to power, the Gatekeeper sect of druids first appeared among the orcs of western Khorvaire. Vvaraak, a rogue female black dragon of Argonessen, was a Child of the Pheonix, a dragon dedicated to the service of the Progenitor of all life. Vvaraak had foreseen in the draconic Prophecy that another great disaster like the Quori-Giant War would threaten the very existence of Eberron, the Material Realm at some time in the future. When the Conclave of Argonessen showed no interest in acting to prevent this potential catastrophe, Vvaraak abandoned the continent of her birth and traveled to the Shadowdeep Marches in western Khorvaire, the home of the orcish peoples. She taught the orcs the basics of druidic magic and how to channel the primal power of the Pheonix herself, an alternative to the arcane and divine powers already known to most of the peoples of the world. Vvaraak became the founder of the first true sect of druids in the world.
In time, druidic lore became the spiritual heart of orcish culture. The orcish druids who formed the Gatekeepers eventually passed on this knowledge millennia later to other peoples like the shifters and humans who called the Elderbourne Reaches home. This spread of Vvaraak’s teachings led to the gradual development of other druidic traditions in the Reaches, such as those of the Wardens of the Wood, the Ashbound, the Greensingers, and the Children of Winter. But Vvaraak warned the Gatekeepers that the druidic knowledge she had taught them was intended for a specific purpose— one day, the Prophecy foretold, the Gatekeepers would save the world.