Mournland

Keith Baker is about my age. I think he may actually be a couple of years older than me. So, I'm sure when he wrote the Mournland as a rather obvious allegory for global thermonuclear war that he did so on purpose. He would have grown up with the spectre of that looming in the public consciousness due to the news and media constantly trying to make us be afraid so that we would submit to the Soviets, and probably watched WarGames in 1983 with Matthew Broderick in theaters. I wasn't ever really afraid of global thermonuclear war, but you couldn't avoid being exposed to those who were during the 80s. (Today, the bounds of their hysteria seem to be nonexistent. We've been in semi-lockdown across most of Western Civilization because of a bad flu season that still wasn't quite as bad as it was in 1969 when the coronavirus variant known colloquially as the Hong Kong flu was worse than the Wuhan virus that has people acting like paranoid morons today. But that's neither here nor there, other than that it informs the public consciousness in ways that are unavoidable.)

Now, why he had an allegory about it in 2003, when it was the better part of a decade and a half out of date is unclear other than no doubt he would have grown up with it and had it ingrained in his psyche, like all of the rest of us Generation-Xers. In the nearly twenty years since Eberron was first published, it's only become progressively more and more irrelevant since. That said, there's still a market for the idea, and it works, sorta, to explain the end of the Last War and the current interbellum period that the various nations of Khorvaire find themselves in. At a high level, I'm not going to change the Mournland too much. However, there's really no explanation for it in my magic system that could possibly make sense. To be fair, I'm not sure that there's an explanation in D&D that makes sense either, but the setting book offers no explanation anyway, and both Baker and his Wizards of the Coast colleagues have repeatedly said that no explanation should ever be expected, at least not officially. There are a few aspects of the Mournland that feel very "D&Dish", like the living spells idea. I imagine, actually, that the Mournland is a bit more like the Plane of Shadows from the 3e Manual of the Planes book, and while crawling with mutated beasts of some sort or another, it probably also is crawling with undead and daemons who are either an aftereffect of whatever caused the Mourning, or possibly lingering elements of what caused it altogether. I do have some ideas of a root cause for the Mourning, but whether I get around to really exploring it and making that an important part of any game I'd run in Eberron Remixed or not is still debatable; like I said, I think Cold War doctrines of Mutually Assured Destruction are not really very relevant anymore, and it's questionable if they were ever even as relevant as we were told that they were during the Cold War, or if it was just a hysterical attempt to discredit Reagan by the usual suspects.

So rather than remixing much of the Mournland, other than to note that, I'm going to leave it alone, I think—the remixing will need to come when (if) I ever use it as a plot element, because it needs to be a surprise. The Mists of the Mournland are corrupting, but people can withstand them for a time. I don't know that coming up with mechanics to represent this is a good idea, unless you want to suggest a game that focuses heavily on incursions into the Mournlands, so I won't bother. If you do need mechanics for it for some reason, some kind of rules-lite adaptation of the Taint rules from Unearthed Arcana might be good. I haven't reviewed the m20 master list to see if something like this already exists, but it probably does somewhere in one of the many dozens of m20 games. Because of the nature of the Mournland, constructs (and probably undead) are immune from further degradation due to this taint; undead already being tainted to the point where it's pointless and constructs (like warforged) simply immune to it.

The Mournland has very little in the way of population, as noted in the original setting book, but here's the slightly revised breakdown of what does exist.

The Mournland population remixed

Warforged: 85%

Undead: 12%

Other: 3%