Infopost V: Infopost This!
The Thirteen Houses and their Twelve Dragonmarks, Continued, Continued
-It turns out the coats of arms of the houses are *also* available in the same place as the depictions of the dragonmarks. I've edited them into the earlier posts as well.
House Phiarlan: Just a Jolly, Innocent Group of Circus Performers
On the Surface: The elves of
House Phiarlan bear the
Mark of Shadow and run the Entertainers and Artisans Guild, Eberron's premier network of, well, entertainers and artisans, taking advantage of their Mark's powers of disguise, illusions, and shadow conjuration to produce the finest artistic entertainment. Over the more than two millennia since the House relocated from its ancestral home in Aerenal to Khorvaire, the House has specialized across the artistic disciplines; it has five Demesnes, one for each of the heads of the Hydra in its coat of arms, each a center of excellence in one particular art: Memory (specializing in the written word, e.g. novels, poems, and plays) in Fairhaven, Aundair, Motion (specializing in the arts of the body, e.g. dance, gymnastics, massage, and "massage"), in Wroat, Breland, Music, in Flamekeep, Thrane, Shape (physical objects, e.g. sculpture, architecture, and propmaking), recently reestablished by the House in Thaliost, Thrane after the the previous Demesne of Shape struck out on its own (see below), and the heart of the House, Shadow (deception in its broadest sense, ranging from illusion to oratory to acting), located in Metrol, the capital of Cyre.
Deeper: The hydra has five heads, but it also has a shadow, and so too does Phiarlan have a sixth Demesne, the Serpentine Table, whose location is either variable or an incredibly closely-guarded secret (or both). The Table coordinates House Phiarlan's true profession--espionage. In Aerenal,
phiarlan used to be the name of a profession, a sort of combination of ritual storyteller and the elvish equivalent of an agent of the Trust. These days Phiarlan's services are for sale, but only to those worthy of purchasing its services: the aristocracy, both landed nobility and dragonmarked heirs, and royalty itself. Phiarlan claims to be scrupulously neutral, its services available to all who can afford to pay, but of course everyone else claims that too...
House Thuranni: Just Another Jolly, Innocent Group of Circus Performers with a Blood Feud against the Other Ones
On the Surface: The elves of
House Thuranni bear the same
Mark of Shadow as their Phiarlan cousins, and indeed until 972 YK Thuranni was just one of the families within House Phiarlan. In that year, though, the Demesne of Shape in Atur, Karrnath developed irreconcilable creative differences with the other demesnes and split from them, declaring a new House and themselves the True Shapers. Indeed, if you're a serious student of architecture, painting, pottery, or the like (and able to cross national borders despite the War, as most such serious students, being members of the idle nobility, generally are) you'd certainly prefer to study in Atur rather than Thaliost.
Deeper: The shadowy elves don't share much, but it's clear that while Phiarlan used to consist of five major families who bore the Mark of Shadow, the Shadow Schism left them with three: one of them, Paelion, the House's assassination specialists, was (supposedly) exterminated and then the perpetrators, Thuranni, were expelled from the House. Presumably both sides decided they couldn't take the risk of a war between them dragging their activities into the War, and though Phiarlan grumbled it didn't resist Thuranni's entry into The Twelve when Tharashk sponsored them. Thuranni's equivalent of the Table is the Shadow Cabinet, and it takes a blunter approach than Phiarlan: it doesn't restrict its choice of clientele to the proper sorts and it makes no pretense of neutrality...
House Medani: The ones with Detective Vision
On the Surface: The half-elves of
House Medani, based in Wroat, the capital of Breland, bear the
Mark of Detection, which, straightforwardly enough, grants its bearer the ability to detect things ranging from magic to poison to, some say, the true nature of reality. House Medani operates the Warning Guild, which provides the services of bodyguards, sentries, and the like. But it's best-known for its inquisitives, widely agreed to be the best in the business, who sell their services as detectives and investigators to all who can afford to pay its rather hefty fees.
Deeper: The Twelve almost lost the War of the Mark fifteen hundred years ago, though they don't like to admit it. It was (one must assume) pure good fortune that the Mark of Detection emerged during the War; without its powers, it would have been immeasurably harder to hunt down the bearers of aberrant marks. But House Medani doesn't get much credit for this, because that origin makes an upstart, the youngest house save for Tharashk, which is hardly a proper house at all. Even in the years before the Last War when the Twelve maintained a more-or-less united front, House Medani frequently flouted it, in two ways in particular. Firstly, the families that make up Medani were all located within Breland, and the House has not had time to diffuse geographically throughout Galifar like most of the others have; in the Last War, Medani has barely kept up a pretense of neutrality, and it's an open secret that King Boranel ir'Wynarn of Breland and Baron Trelib d'Medani are fast friends. Secondly, Medani is a House of half-elves, and very consciously aware of this: it shuns both the numerous human houses, who frequently stick together, and the shadowy elves who frequently find themselves on the opposite side of the law from the inquisitives. Yet at the same time the House's idea of what it means to be a half-elf focuses on integration into the wider society of Khorvaire, very different than the strident racial ideologies of Lyrandar (see below). In short Medani has no allies among the Twelve, and Tharashk has shown no hesitation in taking advantage of this (see above).
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And that's tonight's Thousand Words on Eberron, folks. One more post to finish up The Twelve (taking us to thirteen total, of course), than another to discuss the Once and Future Thirteenth Houses and, I guess, the Twelve itself, and then we should be good. (I will probably also want to write some posts about Stormreach, your starting point in Xen'drik, but I think I can do that after we talk character creation.) Sound good?
