Frontiers of Eberron is coming out in September! I am holding a live Q&A at Noon Pacific time TOMORROW, Saturday August 17th, to discuss the book. This is on my Patreon Discord channel, so you have to be a Threshold patron to participate. Even if you can’t attend live, the session will be recorded and shared for patrons. So, that’s a thing. Another benefit of being a Patron is that you get to ask me questions. Questions like…

What are your thoughts on hellfire weapons, lemures, and the River Styx in Eberron?

The principle of Hellfire Weapons is that they catch the souls of creatures killed by them and turn them into lemures on the River Styx, where they are recruited to fight in the Blood War. Eberron doesn’t have the River Styx or the Blood War. So what’s the point of Hellfire Weapons? Off the top of my head, I have three ideas.

One option is to tie them to Shavarath. Say that they’re tied to the Legion of Tyranny and that they catch souls and turn them into devils fighting for the Legion. On the surface, this fits the core idea—recruit you into an army of devils fighting an extraplanar war. But there’s a few issues, notably that mortal souls ALREADY fight in Shavarath. Every mortal projects a conscript into Shavarath, the same way you project a dream self into Dal Quor when you dream. In this very moment, you ARE fighting in the Eternal Battleground. Which makes Hellfire Weapons slightly redundant. The catch is that your conscript-self is recruited by whichever Legion most closely matches your values and nature; the Hellfire weapon would catch your soul and force it into service for Tyranny. If I ran with this idea I’d make it an extremely new development likely initiated by a mortal: the immortals of Shavarath have been fighting their war since the dawn of creation and don’t do dramatic innovation. The idea would be that a mortal (Warlock? Artificer? Dragon? All of the above?) came up with this plan, theorizing that this would be a way to slowly but inexorably shift the balance of power in Shavarath.

Having said that, this isn’t an option I’d use. The whole point of Shavarath is that it’s AN ETERNAL BATTLE. Everyone comes back. It’s not really an interesting backdrop for a CAMPAIGN… and also, again, it’s not really SUPPOSED to be a situation driven by dramatic shifts. Which brings us to option two. What I’d do is to keep the core idea of the hellfire weapon—if it kills you, you are reborn as a devil in a hellscape, stripped of memory and forced to fight—and dump the part where the battle takes place in another plane. That’s right: I’d say that hellfire weapons are manufactured by the Lords of Dust, and you don’t return to the River Styx, you return in THE DEMON WASTES. I’d say that this was a recent breakthrough in Ashtakala—facilitated by Hektula and Sul Khatesh—and that Rak Tulkhesh and, say, Eldrantulku are recruiting forces into the Demon Wastes in this way. In theory they are going to raise a vast army of corrupted mortal souls and roll over the Ghaash’kala and into Western Khorvaire… but for now, they’re mainly fighting each other. So as a campaign, you get killed with a hellfire weapon and find yourself as a lemure in the Demon Wastes, assigned to fight alongside one of the Carrion Tribes against rival Carrions. If this sounds interesting, check out this recent article on the Demon Wastes!

A third option—and the one I’d personally use—would be to say that the weapons are forged by Mordakhesh (albeit with the help of an innovative mortal artificer) and send your soul to the Bitter Shield, the heart demiplane of Rak Tulkhesh, which is another realm of endless war. In theory, again, Rak is building up a massive horde of soul-soldiers who will on day emerge to terrify Eberron, but in the meantime you are in a realm that is the heart of an overlord of war. There could be a river of blood there where you wash up that washes away some memory, filling the Styx role. You’re adjacent to Eberron, but is there any way for you to return to it? Unlike the other scenarios, in the Heart of Rak Tulkhesh the war truly is pointless; the “enemy” might change every day. But this could also be an interesting opportunity to explore a series of epically impossible conflicts, because this is essentially the dream of an archfiend of war. You and your fellow adventurer-recruits are assigned to a squad, and while everything around you changes from day to day, your squad sticks together. Today you need to sneak into a citadel mounted on the back of a tarrasque and kill the commander. Tomorrow you need to hold a narrow pass against a swarm of berserkers. What fresh terror will come up the day after that?

I haven’t read Descent Into Avernus, where Hellfire Weapons come from. so I don’t know how it handles the idea that the adventurers have been recruited into an endless, immortal war… specifically, how it handles death. If you return after you die, then why does any of it matter? Why is it exciting to try and infiltrate the Tarrasque Fortress; why not just jump off it and die? If I was running the session, I’d run with these principles…

• Your soul has been bound to this battle. The arc of the campaign is about finding a way to escape and become mortal—or to choose to abandon mortality and try to make a real difference in the hellscape. To succeed on either path, you need to hold onto your mortal identity.
• When you die you return. But each time you return, you lose a fraction of your identity and become a little more fiendish. I would have a little set of fiendish boons, and each time you die you get a new fiendish boon—possibly tied to the sort of fiend you’re becoming. But you’d also lose a fraction of your mortality… and I’d also have tasks and tools that respond to that mortality. So aside from your mortality being necessary to escape, it has a practical benefit if you can hold on to it. The main point here is that there is an end: if you lose all of your mortality and fully become a fiend, your character has been lost and you’ll become an NPC.
• When you die you don’t return right away; essentially, you are reborn in the downtime between adventures. So an early death is going to hurt the odds of success for your party, potentially leading to a total party kill. Which is possible in this scenario because there will always be another war tomorrow. You will all lose some of your mortality, but failure is an option. I’d most likely recruit players whose characters have died to play NPCs for the duration of a session.

With all this in mind, a thing I’d at least consider is to not run this as a D&D campaign at all, but rather to use my own RPG system, Phoenix Dawn Command, which is all about death and rebirth. I’d just tweak the Phoenix system a little so that the schools represent different types of fiends; add the “mortality” element; and say that if you die seven times, you fully become a fiend and you’re lost.

Anyhow, I know this is very different than how they work in Descent to Avernus, but that’s how *I* would use Hellfire Weapons! And in case it’s not obvious, in all of these cases the soul is being diverted from its proper path—Dolurrh and whatever lies beyond. So it’s possible the Queen of the Dead might eventually take an interest once this hits a critical mass…

But wait! I thought that immortals couldn’t reproduce! Does this change that?

It is a basic principle of Eberron that immortals cannot be destroyed, but that they cannot reproduce—that an overlord is a finite pool of energy, and it supports a finite number of fiends. It’s possible that Hellfire Weapons are a new development that changes that, and there’s a simple precedent for how it would work: It’s a core belief of the Church of the Silver Flame that virtuous mortals join with the Flame after death and strengthen it. If this is actually true, it means that mortal souls are an energy source that can merge with and strengthen a source of immortal power. So it could be that a brilliant mortal artificer—and I say mortal because this is where I’d highlight that mortals are more innovative than immortals—has studied this and figured out a way to do the same for the overlords, binding mortal souls to strengthen the overlords. But even then, mortals bound to the Silver Flame don’t become full fledged celestials. And with that in mind, I’d say what’s happening with Hellfire Weapons is something entirely different. What APPEARS to happen is that a mortal killed by the weapon awakens in a new place as a weak fiend, and with each death they become more and more fiendish until they are full fiends. To an outsider this LOOKS like a new fiend is being born. But that’s not what’s happening at all. Remember that MOST of the fiends tied to an overlord were bound along with it; rakshasa are the most common native fiends because they were best able to escape this binding. What’s going on with Hellfire Weapons isn’t the creation of a new fiend; it’s that the mortal soul is being connected to a fiend bound by the Silver Flame and used as a means of escaping the Flame. Which is why you don’t want to die even though you’d get more power, and why the final fiend becomes an NPC—because it’s NOT the adventurer, it’s an ancient fiend who has hollowed out their soul and used it to escape.

So again, the point is that fiends ARE finite — Hellfire Weapons are a way to bring more fiends into the world, but it’s done by freeing them from their bonds.

Thanks again to my Patreon supporters for interesting questions and the support that makes these articles possible!