u/onecurlywitch

Spoilers for Threshing Day and Onyx Storm. This is more of a prompt for discussion than an argument or theory.

It's pretty clear by now that the Empyrean is some aspect of dragon government. But what exactly do we know about it? This is about what we know about the Empyrean itself, not general dragon culture.

• Dragons are represented in Empyrean leadership by elders, of whom only one represents each den. We assume, and it's probably a fair assumption but I don't believe we have been told, that a den is a breed/color, meaning there is only one representative of each color for a total of 7.
• Empyrean ruling/representative members are called Elders. Codagh is the Elder of the black dragons, and so represents the entire breed on the council. What it means, however, to be the Elder is unclear. For example, we don't know if the Elder must be the oldest of the dragons of that breed, the most powerful (in terms of magic), the biggest, or even just the most willing.
• We only know the identities of two of the seven Elders: Codagh and Andarna.
• We do not know the power of the Empyrean as an organization with the ability to enforce any of its rulings. (In fact, I suspect it's actually pretty weak, since the Empyrean decided to allow any dragons who wanted to leave Basgiath in Iron Flame to leave-- this would be a huge loss to any military force, but I suspect they had no choice, but this is an aside.) We don't know if it purports to be the government of all dragon existence, or simply the head of the "military" or what. We simply don't know what it is at all, or how it interacts with any other sect or aspects of dragon living.

So what does any of this mean? What questions do we have? Here are some of mine.

• How did the Empyrean become what it is? How long has it existed, and why?
• Is it literally just something the dragons made up so that they could deal with humans more easily?
• How big is the anti-Empyrean contingent? What are they interested in? Are they organized, and if so what for?
• How much do different humans (cough Kaori cough) know about the Empyrean? What does it mean for humans to be loyal to their dragons vs. the Empyrean vs. dragon kind?
• When dragons say they are loyal to other dragons first, where is the Empyrean on their priority list?

Threshing Day gave me so many good, fun, interesting questions. Thank you so much Rebecca!

Okay now it's theory time. I have one!

Cradgh is the brown Elder. No further comments.

Spoiler tag so that non DMs stay away, or at least think twice before reading.

Hey friends, I think I'm mostly looking for inspiration here, trying to come up with an explorable concept for the Corruption. What have you done with it? How are you thinking about it?

My current idea is that it could come from Giant Dreamwalkers (In Volo's, so more classic dnd) who, in Obojima, are spirits convinced they are dreaming rather than in the physical world. But I feel like that might not actually explain everything very well, and I guess I'm interested in how others are handling it. Any idead?