Dragonmarked Houses

Dragonmarked houses are organizations in the fictional Eberron campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game that are based on bloodlines descended from families that first manifested dragonmarks. Not all members of the Houses have dragonmarks; nor is it an assurance of power. Talent is considered a better choice. Most common people have at least a small amount of House blood in their ancestry, usually unnoticed.

In the fictional world, the Dragonmarked Houses are the cornerstone of the economy of Khorvaire. Most banking, security, communications, transportation and fabrication are run by the Dragonmarked Houses. The Houses use their exclusive access to the powers of dragonmarks to sustain their economic empires that extend far beyond arcane powers of the dragonmarks themselves. The houses can attribute most of their success to their meticulously crafted reputations for standardization and quality that have elevated bearers of dragonmarks with a status that mundane wizards and artificers cannot possibly match.

The source material states that each of the houses are not traced back to a single member bearing a certain mark, rather that certain marks manifested in certain regions on specific races and families. After several generations these families began to understand the significance of each individual mark and came to see certain marks as "true marks", marks that breed true in a bloodline. Aberrant marks are those that manifest as a consequence of interbreeding of bloodlines.

Ultimately the true bloodlines would wage war on those with aberrant marks in a conflict known as the War of the Mark. The results of this conflict would unite the true bloodlines officially into the current houses represented and lead to a founding of the council known as the Twelve. The Twelve would become responsible for codifying the traditions of the dragonmarked families and set forth the standards by which the current houses are governed.

Eventually a man who famously became known as Galifar I would succeed in uniting the continent together into the nation of Galifar, the house leaders would come together in the city of Korth and make arrangements with the would-be-king that would limit their political power in exchange for assurances of their continued economic strength. These would become known as the Korth Edicts and would last for a thousand years and were designed to prevent members of any of the dragonmarked houses from creating standing armies (excepting House Deneith to provide mercenary services), disallowing members of the houses from marrying into the aristocracy of Galifar, and insuring that no house could hold a grant of land.

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