Silver Crusade
Lycanthropes have always existed in Eberron, though their origin is unknown and up for debate, but they have rarely acted in any sort of coordinated fashion. For most of the history of the Kingdom of Galifar, it seemed that only those born with lycanthropy could spread the affliction to others, and those natural lycanthopes would generally avoid doing so. They were monsters and often dangerous, but nothing that couldn’t be handled by templars or the odd paladin of Dol Arrah.
This changed in the ninth century. Lycanthropes began banding together and terrorising communities in the Eldeen Reaches and western Aundair, leaving their victims alive and somehow spreading the curse. The nature of lycanthropy had shifted, something that was confirmed by the Church of the Silver Flame’s diviners, and it seemed that the raids being committed had a logic to them. The lycanthropes were recruiting, targeting lightly defended population centres and leaving more victims alive and afflicted than dead.
In 832 YK, Keeper Jolan Sol announced the beginning of the Silver Crusade. They decreed that lycanthropy was a curse of the soul, and that those afflicted were beyond help and had to be destroyed. He called for the immediate extermination of all lycanthropes in Khorvaire, calling on all followers of the Flame to take up arms. As the lycanthrope activity seemed to be coming from the Eldeen Reaches, most of the initial lycanthropes were shifters, which led to a belief amongst the templars that shifters and lycanthropes were one and the same.
What followed was a brutal guerrilla war, localised mostly in the west of Khorvaire. The forces of the church had numbers and discipline, and they were fighting for their lives and the lives of their communities. They were up against an unpredictable foe however, a threat that could hide in plain sight and recruit more soldiers for the cause with a bite. Thousands died in the conflict, on all sides, and the lycanthropes were organised and clever enough to deliberately sow suspicion between the templars and shifters.
In 835 YK, Keeper Jolan Sol clarified that shifters weren’t the same as the lycanthropes and instructed the templars to hunt only the evil lycanthropes. The damage was done, however, and thousands of innocent shifters had already lost their lives in the three years it took for the church to realise it’s mistake. Information couldn’t be easily disseminated throughout the communities of the Reaches, and hunting of shifters wouldn’t come to a stop for some time.
The lycanthropic threat was insidious, and there were several moments of reprieve where it seemed that whatever power was pushing them had broken. This was proven to be a false sense of security several times, however, as the lycanthropes surged again, and the conflict began anew. It was in these later years of the crusade that zeal overtook communities and allowed the Pure Flame to take root.
Whilst the threat eventually did pass, it had seemingly done so many times before only to resurge and cause more damage, take more lives. So, when the power of the curse did finally break and lycanthropes were no longer able to spread their affliction, nobody knew for sure if it was real. It was here that the Crusade began to shift from a genuinely heroic effort to save the world from certain destruction, into something more akin to a witch hunt. Mobs of Aundairians began roaming the Reaches and western communities, trying to find the lycanthropes hidden in their midst. Tensions continued to grow with the shifter communities, who were an easy outlet for the mob’s anger and fear.
At this point, most of the violence wasn’t being committed by templars from Thrane, but by Aundairians that had taken up the Silver Flame over the course of the crusade. For these new followers, the Silver Flame was more than just the shield against the darkness, but a weapon to be used to root out and destroy evil, much as Melysse Miron had argued. These faithful became what is now known as the Pure Flame, an extremist sect of the church.
In 880 YK, Keeper Jovor Daran announced an end to the Silver Crusade, and the church pulled all of it’s forces out of the Eldeen Reaches. Schools in Thrane teach children of the crusade, both the heroic struggle against a seemingly unstoppable evil, and the gradual fall to the evil within and the atrocities committed by the faithful in the later years of the purge. Thrane has taken the approach that the only way to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past is to learn from them, whilst the faithful of Aundair continue to assert their actions were justified.
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