Dragonmarks: The Demon Wastes vs The Mournland

Over on my Twitter (@HellcowKeith) I received a question that seemed worthy of a more-than-140-character response.

Demon Wastes vs Mournland: what are the key differences? When would I choose to set an adventure in either one? Both have similar elements: magical wasteland, “edge of the world” vs “apocalyptic” feel, manipulative villains scheming from ruined cities. Roaming savages & arcane horrors prey on PCs; devastated landscape, unnaturally hostile weather; both are essentially nation-wide dungeons.

Tldr: What kind of encounter/challenge/adventure/story would fit in either one, but not the other?

The Demon Wastes and the Mournland are both nation-sized dungeons, but they are different in many ways.

  • The Demon Wastes are ancient; the Mournland is brand new.
  • The ruins in the Demon Wastes are cities built by demons. They have been ruins for tens of thousands of years, and they hold magic that humans can’t begin to create… and anything perishable has long since perished, unless preserved by magic. The ruins in the Mournland are ruins of human cities. They were only ruined two years ago, and they contain everything you’d expect to find in a human city that was suddenly depopulated… including things that may be precious to people who survived the Mourning.
  • The inhuman threats of the Demon Wastes are fiends and the creations of fiendish power. They are ancient and innately malevolent; it is a place that is fundamentally EVIL. The inhuman threats of the Mournland are mutations seemingly created with no rhyme or reason. It may be dangerous, but it’s not evil.
  • The mortal threats of the Demon Wastes are well-established and have been in places for hundreds or thousands of years. The Carrion Tribes are themselves ancient. The Ghaash’kala have been defending the Labyrinth longer than human civilization has existed. This things have history and customs. By contrast, nothing in the Mournland is more than two years old. If there is any sort of organization or culture – IE followers of the Lord of Blades, Eladrin, Mournland Magebred – they’ve either come from the outside or only just sprung into existence. The Mournland has no history.
  • The Demon Wastes are peppered with portals into Khyber that led to demonic demiplanes. This means that you can find all sorts of bizarre wonders and worlds in the Demon Wastes, if you can find the portals. In my recent post on the Ghaash’kala I mentioned the Abyssal Forest of Khar and the battlefields of the Ironlands. A point here is that THESE places are ancient and have their own histories and structures, even if they are entirely new to the players… and again, they are fundamentally shaped by evil and filled with demons. By contrast, the Mournland is random and unpredictable. You can find all sorts of strange environments, but you won’t find ancient cities populated by demon warriors.
  • The Demon Wastes are a great place to find ancient magic humans could never create – artifacts and strange tools. The Mournland is a great place to find treasures people CAN create, left behind when they were killed.
  • The Demon Wastes are off in a corner of the world and hidden behind the Labyrinth, and have been essentially stable for tens of thousands of years. The Mournland is right in the middle of the Five Nations and is a mystery; people fear that it could suddenly start to expand.

With that in mind, here’s a bunch of adventure hooks for each that I am literally making up on the spot, so no promises that they are good.


  • The adventurers must steal a scroll from the Library of Ashtakala. Perhaps it reveals the true plans of Bel Shalor, the only way to defeat Rak Tulkhesh, or exactly where Sul Khatesh is imprisoned. While in the Library, they could find entirely new arcane magic spells and rituals created by the rakshasa, or details of a new threat tied to the Draconic Prophecy.
  • Someone near and dear to the party (perhaps a PC) has been slain by a Keeper’s Fang dagger. This leads the adventurers to go to the Lair of the Keeper in the Demon Wastes to see if the soul can be reclaimed. Is this just the laid of a mundane dracolich (perhaps the FIRST dracolich), or is it a portal to another plane? Can the soul actually be found there and reclaimed?
  • An unnatural plague is sweeping through Aundair and the Eldeen Reaches. It’s definitely come from the Demon Wastes – can they find the source and a cure in the Wastes? Is the source in the wastes proper, or must you find a path to the Abyssal Forests of Khar to find that cure?
  • Take the same idea but make it personal: a PC is afflicted by a curse or disease that is tied to the Age of Demons. Perhaps they found a cursed artifact that they can’t get rid of, or dealt with a fiend or fiendish ruin elsewhere in Khorvaire. The only way to solve the problem is to go to the Wastes. It could be that this is the only place that artifact can be removed or destroyed (a la Lord of the Rings), that they need to bargain with a fiend, or just that it’s the only place that information can be found.
  • A great paladin of the Silver Flame went to the Demon Wastes and never returned. Can you discover what happened to him and reclaim his holy relics?
  • You need to do something tied to one of the planes, and the only being who can tell you what you need to know is the ancient night hag who served as ambassador to that plane during the Age of Demons. Can you find her in the Demon Wastes, and if so, what will she demand in exchange for her services?
  • The couatl sent Tira Miron to the Demon Wastes to find her sword Kloijner, the only weapon that could harm Bel Shalor. Likewise, a PC could be sent to the Demon Wastes by a vision or through lore to recover a powerful artifact from the Dragon-Fiend war.
  • Scholars are always curious to discover more about the ancient prehuman civilizations. You can blatantly rip off At The Mountains of Madness: The PCs accompany a scholarly expedition seeking to delve into the prehuman history of the Wastes, but the ruined city they explore isn’t quite as dead as they expect…


  • One of the Cannith factions hires the PCs to recover house secrets from a forgehold in the Mourning. This can be entirely straightforward… or the work may have evolved or mutated, or may be something Cannith doesn’t want the world to know exists. This could also be critical to the power balance between the Cannith factions – will the PCs change sides, or be opposed by another faction? Alternately, someone OTHER than Cannith could be trying to steal these secrets…
  • As above, but with ANY Dragonmarked house: a house enclave in the Mournland holds an important artifact that must be recovered, but that may have mutated or evolved in an interesting way.
  • Prince Oargev needs you to recover family tools or secrets from Metrol. Did Cyre have a secret weapon or plan that they never had a chance to deploy because of the Mourning? If so, does Oargev want to ensure that this doesn’t cause anyone harm, or does he want to use its power for New Cyre?
  • If any of the PCs are Cyrans, they could simply want to recover family heirlooms from their homes, or to try to discover the fate of their home town.
  • Inhuman raiders are striking from the Mournland and then retreating back into it. Can you find them in the Mournland and end this threat?
  • Something new (Eladrin, Magebred, Warforged) has set up a base in the Mournland, and you must go into it in order to negotiate with them.

I’m short on time so I’ll stop there, but the critical thing with the Mournland is that it’s filled with things that people want: family heirlooms, treasured works of art, secret weapons or plans from the war. It has museums, forgeholds, palaces – and people know that these things are there, in contrast to the ancient and mysterious secrets of the Demon Wastes. Consider if Washington DC was suddenly warped by magic: there would be people who would want to recover artifacts from the Smithsonian, plans from the Pentagon, family treasures, etc. By contrast, the ruins of the Demon Wastes are entirely unknown; we have no idea what rakshasa civilization even looked like, let along what treasures or dangers their cities hold.

A few more questions have come up…

Any tips on what a rakshasa city looks like? 

An important point here is that fiendish cities were created, not constructed. They were made by the Overlords, for whom it was a trivial matter to shape reality within their sphere. So the first main point is which Overlord created the city? There’s no common style here. Katashka might build a city from bones, while Rak Tulkhesh’s followers would live in a fortress of steel and stone. The city of Sul Khatesh would be a spectacle of magic while also being filled with secrets. Tul Oreshka might not have a city… or her city might exist as a shared delusion that overtakes anyone who comes upon it.

In general, things to consider:

  • These cities were formed by epic magic as opposed to mundane labor. You can have floating towers or monuments. You can have structures made out of impossible substances – a living tower, a house made from mist that somehow never drifts apart. Need light? Buildings could simply glow, or anyone in the city might find that they have darkvision within its confines.
  • Magic still lingers in these places, but that doesn’t mean it’s as strong as it was. You might have one floating tower that’s standing while another has come crashing down. A fountain of fire or blood could still be running, or it could be scroched or dried up. We’ve said of Ashtakala that the memories of the city linger even though the city is ruined – and that anyone who enters it will be cloaked in those memories.

So go deep alien and feel free to use impossible materials and designs… as opposed to the Mournland, where things may have been warped, but the FOUNDATION is entirely familiar and mundane.

What did demons like to do before the Overlords were trapped?

Immortals are ideas given form, and the primary thing they like to do is embody that idea. The demons and archons of Shavarath have been fighting since the dawn of time, and with a few remarkable exceptions they never grow tired or question the struggle; it is their PURPOSE and sole interest. During the Age of Demons, lesser fiends were essentially an extension of their Overlords. The minions of Rak Tulkhesh delighted in spreading war, and if there was no war to spread they would simply fight one another in an endless cycle of pointless violence (as they’d eventually reincarnate after death). The fiends living in Eldrantulku’s domain surely had an incredibly elaborate bureaucracy and series of houses engaged in endless schemes and vendettas. Not all Overlords HAD rakshasa or other fiends as their primary minions; Draal Khatuur is called out as preferring the company of her own icy spirits and creations to the rakshasa, and Katashka the Gatekeeper would likely rule a realm filled with undead (with a foundation of fiends specializing in necromancy and slaughter).

As I’ve said before, in Eberron immortals generally have less free will than mortals do. They don’t decide what they want to be; they KNOW what they ARE, and know it with absolute clarity. Because they’ve been so long separated from their Overlords, some rakshasa have drifted a bit – but even a rakshasa who seeks to usurp her master’s power instead of trying to free him seeks that power so SHE can become the Overlord and embody that concept. But looking to the height of the Age of Demons you can almost think of the rakhsasa as actors in a play, endlessly playing out the roles defined by their Overlord. It’s not entirely scripted, but the direction never changes. The minions of Eldrantulku are always coming up with their own new ideas and schemes – but they couldn’t just decide “Why don’t we all work together and NOT betray each other for once?”

I wonder why, if that is the nature of the cities, there aren’t demon ruins spread everywhere in Eberron. And WHY do demons need cities?

First off, demon ruins aren’t confined to the Demon Wastes. Page 20 of the 4E Eberron Campaign Guide described demon ruins as one of the types of places you can find adventure, noting in part “Fiendish strongholds are likely to be found at the edges of civilization, in places such as the Demon Wastes and Q’barra, but a subterranean ruin could lie hidden anywhere in Khorvaire.” Krezent in the Talenta Plains and Ha’katorvhak in Q’barra are both ruins from the Age of Demons. So these ruins ARE spread across Eberron. It’s simply that very, very few have survived. The Age of Demons was over a hundred thousand years ago. What hasn’t succumbed to time was often intentionally destroyed, either in the conflicts of the time or leveled by dragons in ages after. Those places that have survived are generally extremely isolated, incredibly durable, and generally infused with immensely powerful magic – like Ashtakala.

But let’s take a moment to look at the question of WHY these cities existed in the first place. Demons don’t need cities in the same way that humans do. They don’t need food. They don’t sleep. They aren’t concerned with shelter from the elements. Their numbers are static, so they don’t create NEW cities to house a growing population.

Now, the greatest cities would be the seats of power of Overlords. The city is a reflection of the Overlord; they don’t NEED it, but it is a representation of the Overlord and their power. Let’s call these citadels. There were a limited number of Overlords and not every Overlord would have a citadel, so that’s a concrete limit right there. An Overlord wouldn’t and couldn’t make more than one citadel; it literally is the heart of their power. Thus, Haka’torvhak is the seat of the Cold Sun. These places are the most likely to survive in some form, because they are suffused with the power of an overlord. But the fact that we haven’t mentioned, say, a citadel of Sul Khatesh suggests that even these could be destroyed.

Lesser cities serves a different purpose: they’d house mortals. Because most of the Overlords feed on mortals. Not literally – but it’s through mortals that the Overlords express their nature. Rak Tulkhesh is the Rage of War and yearns to create conflict and bloodshed. He can get his demons to fight each other just as a way to pass the time…but it’s not real. They’re immortal. They don’t feel rage and loss and death the way mortals do. Tul Oreshka needs mortals to experience her madness. An Overlord of Tyranny exists to dominate mortals. Tiamat is the darkness in dragons – which is meaningless without dragonsNot all Overlords need mortals. Draal Khatuur embodies the killing cold, and she is happy to lord over a desolate frozen waste. This was the point of the PC warlock in one of my campaign who was working for an Overlord of Tyranny. He didn’t WANT his Overlord to escape, but if one of them HAD to escape, at least his Overlord needed to keep mortals around… while Draal Khatuur would be happy to kill them all.

So it was these mortal cities that would have been spread across Eberron, but there WEREN’T made to last for a hundred thousand years and most are ash and rubble… hence the surviving demons assuming the title “Lords of Dust.”

And with all of THAT said: the current cities like Ashtakala do survive a concrete purpose. They are places for the rakshasa to meet and scheme. They are places for them to store their lore and their treasures. The Lords of Dust DON’T have the transcendent power of the Overlords, and they do value their artifacts and lore. So they don’t need cities the way humans do – but they still need places to keep their stuff!

Do the dead grey mists cover the sky? Or do they merely act as walls around the perimeter of the Mournland? 

They form a dome over the Mournland. We’ve put the ceiling at around 150 feet in the past; we’ve never said how deep the mist layer is. This also means that you never directly see the sun while in the Mournland.

What would happen if a flying airship entered the Mournland?

Like many things in Eberron, the primary answer is what do you want to have happen? The defining trait of the Mournland is that it is unpredictable. There are many things that could happen…

  • The powers of the Mournland interfere with the elemental binding. The elemental is unleashed and the airship crashes in the Mournland.
  • The airship is attacked by a flying creature. This could be a living spell. It might be something like a warped dragon; there were surely some Chamber observers in Cyre at the time of the Mourning, and they could have been twisted by its power. It could be some sort of transformed elemental – originally part of an airship, it was released and transformed during the Mourning, and now it seeks to free all other bound elementals it senses.
  • The airship is attacked by some sort of entrenched defenses still in place from the war.
  • The airship encounters unnatural weather that could bring it down.

All of these are the reasons people DON’T take airships over the Mournlands, of course…

I always hear that the Mournland is full of mutants, but it’s never been very clear to me what that actually means. Are we talking normal beasts and monsters with some extra bits on them? Unique monstrosities from obscure sourcebooks? Aberrations, but somehow distinct from the creations of the daelkyr?

All of the above. I generally say “warped” or “transformed” instead of “mutated”; to me, mutation suggests that there’s some sort of genetic logic behind things, while the Mournland doesn’t follow any predictable patterns. I’ve said before that you can use the Mournland as a place to add any unusual creature, because you don’t have to explain its evolution; if you want to drop a city of Abeil (bee-people) into the Mournland, you could say that it’s a village of humans who have been transformed into abeil by the Mourning… or a hive of bees transformed into abeil! You have altered animals like the carcass crab. You have undead, like the glass zombies. You also have natural or supernatural forces that have been transformed, like living spells or the razor wind (a warped elemental) in The Fading Dream.

To me, the only predictable thing about the Mournland is that it’s not predictable – that if you find one city of abeil, that’s not an indication that there’s going to be any more.

If you’re reading this, what have YOU done with the Mournland or the Demon Wastes?

In case you haven’t heard, I’ve started a Patreon to fund content for this site. The Inner Circle gets to vote on what topics are covered in the future. This one was spur of the moment, but the next Dragonmark will be about Planes and Manifest Zones! Thanks to all of you who are already supporters!

21 thoughts on “Dragonmarks: The Demon Wastes vs The Mournland

  1. I think a demon wastes adventure is tendecially heroic. You know demons are evil. Totally, completely evil. If you go there you are outnumbered and ready to suffer and sacrifice yourself OR to bargain with something terrible, a Faust like choice.
    Mournland is more cynical post-apocalypse scy-fy. You see dedoletion and madness where there was civilization. People like you did that. In some way you as humsn/elf/dwarf are part of the problem. If you are a wargorged, you have lord of blades. You are part of that problem.

    Btw: any tip on how a rakshasa city look like? Or what demons enjoyed to do before the overlords get trapped?


      Now answered at length in the post.

      • Interesting point about the cities. I wonder why, if that is the nature of the cities, there arent demon ruins spread everywhere in Eberron.
        And WHY do demons need cities? It’s not that obvious too

  2. My only experience running the Mournland was the section of Shadows of the Last War that dealt with it. I have to admit that I struggle with coming up with hazards and encounters that are appropriately terrifying and twisted. The Demon Wastes are much more familiar territory for me!

    I do, however, plan on running it later on in my current campaign (an Eberron port of “Princes of the Apocalypes”; the temple of Earth is set up in a Cannith Forgehold) and I have a couple ideas, inspired by the Wheel of Time and to a lesser extent by Pitch Black.

    One question that’s always bugged me: Do the dead grey mists cover the sky? Or do they merely act as walls around the perimeter of the Mournland? I’m wondering what an airship passenger would see if they flew over the place, if such a thing is ever even attempted.


      Answered in the post. Most pilots prefer to avoid flying over the Mournalnd, as you have do deal with threats of unnatural weather, unknown hostile flying creatures, and the potential that a localized fluctuation in the rules of magic will simply break your binding. Note that while the mist ceiling is around 150 feet, that doesn’t mean that magical fluctuations can’t occur at greater heights or that predators might not emerge from the mists to attack.

  3. I’ve always liked making the Mournland to inspire more fear and dread in both the outside world and those who dare to venture in it so I’ve always had the dome be about 12 km because the Tsar Bomba mushroom cloud topped out at 210,000 feet high (mesosphere territory!) and I figured the Mourning was more of a Hiroshima/Nagasaki and Nagasaki’s mushroom cloud topped out at 40,000 feet high so I just round down a bit to 12 km. It makes the Mournland that much more intimidating to the rest of the world, and makes it so Lyrandar DEFINITELY has to plot courses around it since that’s like 10,000 feet higher than Everest.

    I like to advise the players of the height of the misty dome and this difference between Fat Man and Tsar Bomba whenever there’s a plot containing, for example, a rumour of (whether the rumour’s a red herring or not) someone they’re seeking being an artificer or wizard involved in Cannith or Cyran top secret projects, just to lay on the pressure that maybe the urgency to find this person is to prevent a Tsar Bomba-level Mourning event. Pretty much any time the threat of a second Mourning looms, whether it’s just paranoia in the mind of an NPC with a job or information/misleading set of clues that actually point to something different when the final clue clicks into place/etc…or a genuine threat? I like those comparisons, and usually the first time the Mourning is a plot point a second Mourning scare isn’t part of it so by then the players already know how huge and ominous it is even from the outside, not in comparison to Nagasaki but in comparison to Everest. I save the nuke comparisons for SPECIAL occasions, cuz I’m a devious DM like that.

  4. If I wanted to have a demon city with M.C. Escher architecture – impossible stairways with gravity going at all angles and the like, would Sul Katesh or Tur Oreska be more appropriate as the “architect”, or would I be better to create a canonically-unnamed Overlord for the purpose?

    • Either could work.

      If it’s the citadel of Sul Khatesh, it works that way because it employs arcane techniques that humans could possibly replicate. She’s using secrets of magic and architecture that EXIST but are extremely advanced.

      If it’s the citadel of Tul Oreshka, it doesn’t physically exist; it’s a shared delusion. As such, absolutely anything is possible.

  5. I’ve had my group go into the Mournland twice now. The first time they encountered all sorts of horrific weirdness, from the washer at the ford (a faceless woman washing human skins at the river) to grass that screams and bleeds when you walk on it. Eventually they just started saying “I do not see that I am running past whatever fresh hell you have cooked up”.

    I ran them through the old Castle Amber adventure, changing the scenario to be that Stephen saw the Mourning coming and tried to move his Castle and Family to Thelanis but was caught like a cork in a bottle when the Mourning washed over them.

    The second time they got caught in the middle of a war between Warforged and Magebred while going to a floating city. Not so much horror this time but lots of politics.

    Each time they go in they have problems with magic. Arcane magic incurs a roll of a Wild magic table each time a spell is cast, there are a few different wild magic tables online for this. Divine magic works at half it’s effectiveness and Primal magic (Druids, rangers, etc) doesn’t work at all. Haven’t had to work with psionics as yet.

  6. My last finished campaign (ie, that didn’t ended in TPK) has ended with the party finding out the changeling player was responsible to kickstart the Mourning (but not on purpose, he thought it would “only” blow up Cannith HQ), and that the Lord of Blades is actually all souls of every mortal that was in Cyre at the moment of the Mourning, including the soul of Queen Dannel (which is why they were unsuccessful raising anyone that died in the event). Our cyran Fighter was living a forbidden love with the queen, and once she discovered that, she did her best to not destroy the Lord of Blades, but contain him long enough so that the group could awaken or release Dannel from inside him.

    Also, our bard was a magebreed human that thought she was a kalashtar because she had natural telepathy since her earlier years in the orphanage. And in the end, after defeating the real villain (LoB was a side-quest), she took the power of the Mournlands to herself and initiated global mind control when I was expecting her to release the few paws the villain had under control using that power source.

    All in all, it was an interesting campaign. We even commissioned a group shot from a friendly artist. (link in my name)


    (I’ve been trying to put together a wilderness encounter table for Mournlands expeditions, but it feels kind of incomplete and speculative.
    Link in my name; if any of my players are reading this, KEEP OUT)

  8. On the plane of Eberron, manifest zones to other planes might alter a region in some way. Does the same hold true for the other side? Are the Cyre-turned-Mournland manifest zones having effects on the planes they open to?

  9. I had a citadel in the Demon Wastes that I never got to use. It had mortal watchmen who were bound to be reborn every morning, Phoenix style, who kept watch in a fabled (and cursed) city of gold which was the prison of a demon. They’d been keeping watch for millennia, but for them it felt like no time had passed because they didn’t retain their memories when they were reborn (a security measure/flaw in the process that stopped immortality seekers).

    • Nowhere, I’m afraid. I first mentioned them on this website in my article on the Ghaash’kala. It’s one of those things I’d love to write about when WotC unlocks Eberron.

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