Soldiers of a war that began before human civilisation existed, still holding the line in places the world has forgotten
Tens of thousands of years ago, the dragons of Argonnessen created the dragonborn — not as a people, but as a garrison. In the aftermath of the Age of Demons, when the Overlords were bound and the world was scarred from a war that had lasted for a hundred thousand years, the dragons needed sentinels: soldiers who could be stationed far from Argonnessen itself, tasked with guarding against the stirring of fiendish powers in regions the dragons did not wish to occupy permanently. The dragonborn were that garrison — warriors shaped by draconic magic, bearing the blood and breath of their creators, assigned to watch over the places where the darkness was deepest.
The largest dragonborn garrison was established in what is now Q'barra, where the influence of the Lords of Dust ran deep and the ruins of the Age of Demons lay thick beneath the jungle. For a time, the dragonborn held their post. Then, as centuries became millennia, they drifted from their original mandate, building communities, establishing a nation, and clashing with the goblinoids of the Dhakaani Empire. The dragonborn became a people rather than a military formation — and when one of the ancient Overlords stirred beneath Q'barra, unleashing fiends and corrupting many dragonborn from within, the nation fell. The survivors retreated into the deep jungle, chastened and diminished, and resumed the watch they had abandoned. They have not abandoned it again.
Most citizens of the Five Nations have never seen a dragonborn. The few humans who have encountered them in Q'barra — settlers, prospectors, Tharashk agents — typically assume they are an exotic variety of lizardfolk. This is incorrect. The dragonborn of Ka'rhashan are older than humanity, older than Galifar, older than the Dhakaani Empire, and their mission predates every political institution on the continent. They know things about the Age of Demons that no library in Khorvaire contains, and they have no particular interest in sharing them.
THE DRACONIC PROPHECY, AS RECORDED IN THE MAR'SAVAL SCROLLS "...and when the age turns and the stars align with the deep places, the children of the dragon will scatter into shadow, keeping their eternal watch."
Dragonborn are imposing: six to seven feet tall, with muscular, scaled bodies, long tails, and draconic heads that include prominent snouts, ridged brows, and eyes that gleam with reflected light. Their scales come in the colours of the chromatic and metallic dragons — red, blue, green, black, white, gold, silver, brass, bronze, copper — and scale colour typically determines the nature of their breath weapon: a cone of fire, a line of lightning, a cloud of poison, or a blast of cold, among others. The breath weapon is a biological function, powered by an internal organ that produces and stores elemental energy, and it is physically taxing to use — most dragonborn can deploy it only once before requiring rest.
Dragonborn stand upright on digitigrade legs and possess clawed hands capable of fine manipulation. Their tails provide balance and, in close quarters, can serve as a bludgeoning weapon in extremis. They are significantly heavier than humans of comparable height, owing to their dense musculature and the weight of their scales, which provide a degree of natural armour — not enough to replace manufactured protection, but enough to turn a glancing blow.
Dragonborn reach maturity around fifteen and live approximately eighty years — a lifespan comparable to humans. They hatch from eggs, and clutches of one to three are typical. The Trothurkear of Xen'drik are an exception to normal dragonborn reproduction: they are produced by bolatashi, biological engines created by the dragons of Argonnessen, which generate dragonborn and other draconic creatures as needed. Whether bolatashi-born dragonborn are biologically identical to naturally hatched dragonborn is unclear; they appear the same and possess the same capabilities, but their origin raises questions about individuality and purpose that bolatashi-born dragonborn themselves may struggle with.
Dragonborn possess darkvision and a resistance to the damage type associated with their breath weapon — a fire-breathing gold dragonborn is resistant to fire, a lightning-breathing blue dragonborn is resistant to lightning. Their senses are sharp, with particular acuity in detecting temperature changes, and many dragonborn report an instinctive awareness of draconic presences that may reflect their manufactured origin.
Dragonborn populations exist in two major locations, separated by an ocean and connected by a shared origin as draconic servants.
The dragonborn of Ka'rhashan in Q'barra are the largest known population on Khorvaire. They inhabit the deep interior of the Q'barran jungle, maintaining communities that most human settlers have never found and would not be welcome in if they did. Ka'rhashan is not a single city but a dispersed network of settlements — clanholds hidden beneath the jungle canopy, fortified positions near sites of known fiendish activity, and watchposts along boundaries that the dragonborn consider inviolable and that the human settlers of Newthrone do not know exist. The dragonborn coexist — uneasily — with the lizardfolk of the Cold Sun Federation, a culture that blends druidic traditions with beliefs that scholars of the Silver Flame would find recognisable. The Poison Dusk lizardfolk are a different matter entirely: a hostile confederacy with ties to fiendish powers, sometimes described as a cult devoted to a dragon and sometimes as an army gathering in the name of an Overlord. The dragonborn of Ka'rhashan have been fighting the Poison Dusk for millennia, and the arrival of human settlers — with their dragonshard prospecting, their treaties they do not honour, and their utter ignorance of the forces that lurk beneath their new frontier — has complicated an already dangerous situation.
FIELD REPORT — EXPEDITION TO THE Q'BARRAN INTERIOR, MORGRAVE UNIVERSITY, 997 YK We encountered the scales on the fourth day past the Whitecliff River. The settlers call them lizardfolk, but they are not lizardfolk — the proportions are wrong, the posture is wrong, and the eyes carry an intelligence that is not reptilian. One of them spoke to us in a language none of our translators recognised. When it became clear we could not understand, the creature studied us for a long moment, then turned and walked back into the jungle. Our guide refused to follow. He said the deeper jungle belongs to Ka'rhashan, and Ka'rhashan does not welcome visitors.
The Trothurkear — the "Night Guard" — are the dragonborn of Xen'drik, stationed around the Ring of Storms to guard the ruins of Qabal Mordas, the necromantic capital of the ancient Qabalrin elves.
The Trothurkear were once a single empire, but the Du'rashka Tul — the Madness of Crowds, a curse that destroys civilisations that grow too large on Xen'drik — collapsed their nation in a matter of days, killing many and scattering the survivors into small, isolated clanholds across the mountains of the Ring. The clans are highly martial: copper dragonborn scouts fly through the Ring's lightning storms on flying mounts, silver warriors patrol the border between jungle and mountain, and gold dragonborn paladins incinerate the undead that still crawl from the Qabalrin ruins. The Trothurkear know little of the wider world — the drow and giants do not encroach on their territory, and Khorvaire is a rumour at best.
Other dragonborn populations are scattered across Xen'drik in smaller numbers, serving the Ten Watchers — individual dragons assigned to guard specific giant ruins against misuse. A dragonborn character from Xen'drik might be a Trothurkear exile, a guardian in the service of a Watcher, or simply the last survivor of a clan whose bolatashi died.
Dragonborn religion is inseparable from their purpose. The dragonborn were created to serve the dragons and to guard against fiendish corruption, and their spiritual life reflects this mandate rather than the theological diversity of the Five Nations.
The dragonborn of Ka'rhashan revere the dragons of Argonnessen as something between creators and gods — not in the devotional sense of the Sovereign Host, but with the practical respect of soldiers who owe their existence and their mission to a higher authority. Their religious practices focus on vigilance, purity, and resistance to corruption, reflecting the lesson their people learned when an Overlord stirred and tore their nation apart from within. The specific forms of worship vary by community, but the common thread is a deep wariness of fiendish influence and a conviction that the watch must never again be abandoned.
Dragonborn who leave their communities and enter the Five Nations sometimes adopt the faiths they encounter — Sovereign Host, Silver Flame — but they tend to interpret these religions through the lens of their original purpose. A dragonborn who joins the Silver Flame, for example, is likely drawn to its mandate of combating supernatural evil, which resonates with the mission they were literally created to fulfil.
Dragonborn are extraordinarily rare in the Five Nations. Most Khorvairians have never seen one, and those who have often didn't recognise what they were seeing — a dragonborn walking the streets of Sharn would be assumed to be a lizardfolk, a Droaamish immigrant, or simply something exotic that the observer has never encountered before. Eberron is a world where people deal with dozens of different peoples daily; a dragonborn is unusual, but a citizen of Sharn is more likely to say "well, that's new" than to panic.
A dragonborn who has left Q'barra or Xen'drik for the Five Nations is, by definition, someone with a story. The default dragonborn experience is to remain with their people, guarding against threats that the wider world does not know exist. Leaving that post requires a reason: a quest to find weapons or allies against the Poison Dusk, a search for information about the Lords of Dust that cannot be found in Q'barra, exile for a failure of duty, or simple curiosity about a world that has changed enormously since the dragons first placed the garrison. A dragonborn who served as a mercenary in the Last War is another possibility — recruited by an enterprising Tharashk agent or a desperate military commander who cared more about the dragonborn's combat abilities than their origins.
The dragonborn's relationship with the wider world is defined by distance and mutual ignorance. The people of the Five Nations know almost nothing about them. The dragonborn know almost nothing about the Five Nations — and, critically, they do not consider the Five Nations to be particularly important. From the dragonborn perspective, the human nations are recent, transient, and largely irrelevant to the struggle that matters: the eternal vigilance against the Lords of Dust and the stirring of the Overlords. A dragonborn does not look at Sharn and see a wonder of civilisation; they look at Sharn and see a city built on top of ancient foundations without any awareness of what lies beneath.
The human settlers of Q'barra, who call the native populations "scales" without distinguishing between lizardfolk, dragonborn, and Poison Dusk, represent a more immediate friction. King Sebastes ir'Kesslan of Newthrone has forged a treaty with the Cold Sun Federation, but prospectors violate the treaty regularly, Tharashk mining operations push deeper into the jungle, and the dragonborn of Ka'rhashan have not been consulted about any of it. The settlers are digging up dragonshards on land the dragonborn have guarded for tens of thousands of years, and the dragonborn's patience is not infinite.
TROTHURKEAR CLAN PROVERB — RING OF STORMS, XEN'DRIK (TRANSLATED) "The great mother gives us form. The storm gives us purpose. The dead give us memory. We are the watch that does not end."
The dragonborn are sitting on the oldest active conflict in Khorvaire, and nobody outside Q'barra knows it.
The Poison Dusk is not a minor threat. Whether it serves a corrupted dragon or an Overlord gathering strength beneath Q'barra, the forces of the Poison Dusk are growing, and the dragonborn of Ka'rhashan are fighting a war that has lasted for millennia with no resolution in sight. If the Overlord stirs again — if the corruption that destroyed the dragonborn nation the first time returns — the consequences will not be confined to Q'barra. The human settlers, the dragonshard prospectors, the Tharashk agents — none of them understand what is beneath their feet, and the dragonborn have not told them, because the dragonborn do not trust them to act wisely with the knowledge.
For a dragonborn player character, the tension is simple and profound: you were created for a purpose, and that purpose has defined your people for tens of thousands of years. The watch does not end. The corruption does not sleep. And the world you are protecting does not know you exist. Whether you have left your post to seek help, to gather intelligence, to fulfil a specific mission, or because you could no longer bear the weight of an eternal vigil — the mission follows you. The question is not whether you will return to the watch. The question is what you will bring back with you when you do.