An Eberron/World-Building Tangent

[Fizban]

Split off from the undead energy thread:

my overall point was that a published setting (which needs its own flavor and visual identity and should support different play experiences than the generic rules to give people a reason to play in it, and really should do magitech/magicpunk in a novel way) has very different needs than a homebrew setting (which needs to work for a single campaign and doesn't tend to hugely diverge from the core rules because that's a lot of work for a single DM, and generally wants to do magitech/magicpunk in a way that can heavily draw on the rules and real life), and faulting Eberron for being the former and not the latter is unfair.
Why does a homebrew setting not need its own flavor and "visual identity?" Aside from a probable lack of artwork, a homebrew setting that is actually a setting still needs to do those things. You're describing a setting versus a lack of setting.

Further, Eberron does not hugely diverge from the core rules or inherently produce a different play experience. The ways in which it cleverly does not are indeed quite notable, and they specifically make the claim that anything published can have a place there (which is more of a non-setting than one which actually makes the effort in drawing lines and extrapolating from the available material). What are its divergences? Some new feat lines, some new items, and a class that doesn't care about spell lists for crafting, none of which are anything a homebrew setting couldn't or shouldn't do. An article lowers the levels of city NPCs. Most of what makes Eberron Eberron is the fluff and the presentation. It's tied together by big publisher values, but that doesn't actually make it significantly different. IIRC, wasn't it a contest entrant? Literally something a non-WotC person came up with that was then given the big makeover?

Why should a published setting *not* want to draw upon the rules of the system it's written in? Settings are full of big fancy NPCs that use the existing rules, why shouldn't their world-changing tech also be rooted in existing rules? Ignoring that all and just fiating a solution isn't the "high work published way," if anything that's the true "low work single DM" way. Not defining what classes and magic are available, not thoroughly investigating what that means for the setting, just picking one thing and brushing over the rest.

Heck, Forgotten Realms? Yeah, it might actually be a more integrated setting. Since they decided to make the edition changes canon, you've got lots of old artifacts and now literally impossible or Epic magic. But Mythals have creation rules for Epic caster, and Mythallar have an artifact entry that says "flying mountains use this +lol gold." The previously mysterious (pretty sure you couldn't make items in 1e/2e) and now simple item creation isn't well represented in sweeping world-changes, but Thayan enclaves setting up shop to make money and connections by selling items is a thing and I'm fairly certain the 2e/3e change is supposed to have been fairly recent so that may be the most appropriate change for the time frame. And the fact that they have tons of high level NPCs with unlimited cash actually justifies lots of recently created hugely expensive magic items.

I've actually had a realization about magitech/punk/whatever settings in general, but I'm not sure if I should put it here only to be buried under Eberron talk.

[Nifft]

1 - To me a homebrew setting benefits from having visuals, so having a distinct visual identity would be a minus, since you'd be unable to use most easily available fantasy art. This changes if you are personally a prolific artist and you want to make distinct visuals for the setting, and frankly that would be awesome, but I expect it's not often the case.

2 - IMHO what needs to be distinct for a homebrew setting is your palette choices -- which monsters, which playable races, which classes, which overall genres -- what have you included and what have you excluded.


Eberron had sufficient budget to get distinct visuals for a lot of its elements. They didn't need to get distinct visuals for everything, though -- many core monsters in Eberron worked fine with the MM1 pictures, for example -- and they decided to include every mechanical feature of D&D while excluding many previously-explored societal and flavor choices.

For example, the elves aren't some elder race chosen by the gods who are ebbing and fading away. They're escaped slaves who worked hard and became either cowboys or mummies. Drow aren't cursed exiles, they're descendants of loyalists who benefited from the magical knowledge of their former masters. Goblins aren't primitive monsters, they're displaced natives whose empire got Daelkyr'd and then the remnants got human'd.

All the core mechanical elements, not much of the former flavor palette.


Eberron could get away with including all the mechanical elements because they had the budget for staff to work on integrating everything. It's arguable whether they succeeded, but at least they had the manpower to try.

For a homebrew setting, I would not try to compete with that level of manpower. I would pick and choose what to include, what to exclude, and what decisions to defer ("there's none of that round here, but maybe over yonder ...").


IIRC there were settings where major tagline were about exclusions: Talislanta ("Still No Elves"), Darksun ("Best Gnomes"), anyone remember others?

[NotASpiderSwarm]

Split off from the undead energy thread:

Why does a homebrew setting not need its own flavor and "visual identity?" Aside from a probable lack of artwork, a homebrew setting that is actually a setting still needs to do those things. You're describing a setting versus a lack of setting.

A published setting exists for two reasons: First, to give a canon location for tournaments, published modules, tie-in books, classes/PRCs/feats that need attached worldbuilding, etc. Second, to give DMs a set of material to mine for their own games. A noob DM can pick up FRCS and a couple modules, run their players through a module, and then have the nearby city for the players to go to next with a minimum of effort on the DM's part, along with major organizations and a random table of plot hooks. If you're not ready to roll up your own setting from scratch, that's big. Even if you are making a homebrew setting, a city map and a bunch of "influential figures" already statted up can be a big help when your players screw up and have to flee the country to parts unknown.

The thing is, Eberron occupies a very specific genre slot in terms of D&D settings. It's mostly low-level, magitech/steampunk. That's very different from apocalyptic Dark Sun, Sci-Fi Spelljammer, medieval fantasy Greyhawk, or high fantasy Faerun. Especially in 3rd Edition, which was Greyhawk and Faerun-focused for a while there, Eberron felt different. Warforged, Artificers, Dragonmarks, Airships, dinosaur-riding halflings, the whole deal with the elves...when people started looking at Eberron and running games in it, there was a definite "we're not in Kansas anymore" reaction. There were obvious stories that could be told there that no one had thought to tell anywhere else. It increased the possibilities.

A homebrew setting exists so that your DM and group can tell the story you want to tell. It needs it's own identity, sure, but that identity can be tied much more to the story and characters than any details of the setting. Look at OotS: There's a whole cosmology there that I've never really seen the like of before, an extensive backstory, varied locations, all sorts of good stuff. In 10 years, I'm going to remember Haley and Belkar, not anything involving the Snarl. That's not a knock on the Giant's worldbuilding, it's just the reality that the story is what matters to the final experience. In a published setting, there isn't a story for your table until you create one, so a setting that lets you tell more stories and more varied stories is a good thing. The ECS is extremely distinct, which meant new stories, and that's what makes people love it.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by PairO’Dice Lost
…[a homebrew setting] needs to work for a single campaign and doesn't tend to hugely diverge from the core rules because that's a lot of work for a single DM….

No reason why a homebrew setting can’t be used for several campaigns. Make it big enough and flexible enough, and you can support a variety of stories and playstyles within the same world, while still giving it a unique flavor and identity.


Originally Posted by Fizban
IIRC, wasn't it a contest entrant? Literally something a non-WotC person came up with that was then given the big makeover?

Yes. Out of something like eleven thousand entries, Keith Baker’s concept made the short list, and he survived several more rounds until he was asked to write about 100 pages as a preliminary “bible” for the setting. I think there were only a handful that made it to that stage, and his was chosen as the winner.

[Noxangelo]

Further, Eberron does not hugely diverge from the core rules or inherently produce a different play experience.

that would be the fault of the DM not correctly understanding or portraying the differences of the setting.

where the forgotten realms is medieval in feel, the world of ebberon is more industrial revolution edging into modern in places.
1.) it has a reliable postal service
2.) it has secure banks
3.) it trains, cars and planes
4.) it has kingdoms with secured borders requiring the correct paperwork to cross
5.) it has mega-corporations whose presence should be all pervasive, every blacksmith should be registered with cannith and be able to provide up to date certification on request and display their crest on their sign
6.) it does NOT have halflings riding dinosaurs, it HAS dinosaurs. it never had an ice age, so while you won't find very large dinosaurs outside of zoos or remote areas, smaller dinosaurs are part of the local fauna. want to drive home how different the setting is to the players, for their first mission, have them be hired by a farmer to kill a pack of compsognathus who are killing his chickens.
7.) it has kingdoms with organized and competent watch forces and secret services and while private investigators are a thing, called inquisitives, unless the inquisitive in question is being consulted by the watch, they will take a dim view of him poking his nose in their business.
8.) despite being a magipunk setting, it is (supposed to be) a low magic setting, with high level magic being exceedingly rare.
9.) its is also a low power setting, the speaker of the flame can draw on the full power of the silver flame to make herself an 18th level cleric
10.) its gods are distant. they don't really speak to their clerics even their high priests rarely talk to them
11.) characters don't go to a temple for healing, they go to a house jorasco enclave, because the chances of there being a cleric at to temple is remote. true clerics are very rare, most priests in eberron are experts.

i have certaining missed some things and i'm no expert so i may have made some mistakes.

in general, eberron campaigns aren't meant to be typical fantasy hack and slash affairs, they are supposed to be more murder mystery or political intrigue, or cat and mouse with hidden threats like the dragon bellow, the emerald claw or the dreaming dark.

[Fizban]

that would be the fault of the DM not correctly understanding or portraying the differences of the setting. . . .
[list of things]. . .
in general, eberron campaigns aren't meant to be typical fantasy hack and slash affairs, they are supposed to be more murder mystery or political intrigue, or cat and mouse with hidden threats like the dragon bellow, the emerald claw or the dreaming dark.
I suppose I'll need to clarify- none of those things are unique to Eberron or published settings, any or all of them could be done in a homebrew setting, or another published setting. These are not things that need to be done, but rather writing huge reams of setting detail is much easier for a team of writers that are getting paid to do it.

My initial response was in the previous thread when a different poster pointed out that "Y'all are just creating Eberron," and I responded that no, we're not- because Eberron fails to justify most of its fluff with mechanics in the way that one does when calculating undead control pools or the energy output of Walls of Fire or noting the exact number of casters even capable of casting x/y/z. What Eberron actually does is add a small number of new mechanics, some magic items with arbitrary prices, state that a bunch of these things are in use, and then bury it under a mountain of fluff and setting details. This makes it all sound far more significant than it actually is, and does an excellent job of selling it as a setting, but does not change the fact that the DM just wrote that stuff. Saying all the high level characters just died in a war is a great conceit for making the PCs important, but again not a unique mechanic or extrapolation, just writing.

Which is fine. But you could build the same setting using ground-up mechanical extrapolation, justifying on the ground level why things work, and have the best of both worlds. But PairO'Dice seems to take exception with this. The quote provided above suggests a more thorough explanation of those quoted points, which I would be interested to see. Because as it stands, it sounds to me like they're getting caught up in exactly all the stuff you just wrote, the stuff that got that entry to win the contest- pure coolness factor and presentation. If it really is all just down to "Eberron put rings of fire around their airships so your argument is invalid," then I'll take that as a "win."

Because none of those points are actually rooted in mechanics, original or added.
Postal service, banks- no reason you can't establish those. Trains, "cars," and planes- fiat and/or non-existent pricing, apparently all but no living creators, fluff ignores actual rules of creation. Secured borders and paperwork, again nothing special (sorry, Arcane Mark spam is not a world-shaking revelation when the world got by fine on carved seals for hundreds of years). Huge guilds, whoopie. Dinosaurs are in the MM to use if you want them. City generation already fails to support NPC spamming of high level spells, that's not unique. For all the supposed activity of the gods in other settings, there is no mechanical effect except when a module says so, they're as "distant" or non-existent as you want.

The one thing on the list that is actually unique is the mention of dragonmarks increasing the number of magical healers, and yes, that is good ground-up change. Except that the 1st level dragonmarks don't actually do squat that you couldn't do with magic items, even published magic items, sorry. This is by their very nature as low level spells. All you have to do is say "these items are widely in use," and it's done, same as the trains and airships. The only reason to *not* do that is because you want to "source" the value from NPC wealth or taxes or some other thing, but it's not like Eberron does that either. The least Mark of Healing heals hit points or ability damage, both of which recover on their own, and you have less than a minute for one of them to reach you to prevent bleed out from damage (and higher level effects still require higher level NPCs, which are still limited) They're actually the perfect example of why low-level magic doesn't significantly change a setting.

The vast majority of the dragonmarked houses' setting alteration comes from. . . magic items that let them do arbitrary things (and often not very well), at often arbitrary prices. They had all those writers, and yet rather than integrated mechanics, a bunch of it runs on fluff-first fiat.
But then, I suppose the single DM actually has a huge advantage for deviating their setting with actual mechanical justification, because they don't have to wrangle a whole team of writers with different ideas of game balance and what effects magic has on X. Eberron is held together by fluff because as a new published setting blitz, that was the only thing they could hold it together with. So in that way, I suppose I shouldn't "fault" them for lack of mechanical justification- it's just not a question of needs, but rather logistics restrictions. As I've said, I do find much of it quite clever.

It still doesn't excuse blatant mechanical contradictions like the elemental binding fluff vs item creation mechanics, or saying there are fewer high level NPCs without actually changing the table for generating them in your main book, however (seriously, until I saw that article I thought it was a clever scam that their "fewer high level NPCs" actually fit reasonably well with DMG city generation, if they just didn't use a bunch of metropolis's). There's not being able to get a dozen people to agree on exact magitech rules, and then there's just shooting yourself in the foot.

[Noxangelo]

TBH. I'm not sure what you want. I'm getting lost in the wall of text and I just can't seem to find the point you are trying to make.

Would you kindly lay it out in a bullet point form for those of us who are a little slow on the uptake.

[NigelWalmsley]

The issue with "few high level NPCs" isn't that they didn't justify it. The NPC generation tables are already inconsistent with assuming people follow the advancement rules. It's that it makes the campaign setting incredibly unstable, because eventually the PCs are going to become high level. For a campaign setting to work, it needs to have an answer for "what happens when a 20th level Wizard shows up", because at some point the people using the setting are going to ask that question.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

No reason why a homebrew setting can’t be used for several campaigns. Make it big enough and flexible enough, and you can support a variety of stories and playstyles within the same world, while still giving it a unique flavor and identity.

It's not that a homebrew setting can't be used for multiple campaigns, it's that it only needs to be used for one campaign--the initial one you're building it for--and anything else is gravy, and since the setting only needs to support that single campaign you don't need to consider different genres or level ranges or party compositions or whatever else when building it. A published setting, meanwhile, needs to be usable for the number of campaigns that will be run by anyone who buys the splatbooks and decides to give it a whirl, and so has to be able to support an incredibly broad range of possible genres and party compositions and potential campaigns and so forth.


What Eberron actually does is add a small number of new mechanics, some magic items with arbitrary prices, state that a bunch of these things are in use, and then bury it under a mountain of fluff and setting details. This makes it all sound far more significant than it actually is, and does an excellent job of selling it as a setting, but does not change the fact that the DM just wrote that stuff. Saying all the high level characters just died in a war is a great conceit for making the PCs important, but again not a unique mechanic or extrapolation, just writing.

Which is fine. But you could build the same setting using ground-up mechanical extrapolation, justifying on the ground level why things work, and have the best of both worlds. But PairO'Dice seems to take exception with this. The quote provided above suggests a more thorough explanation of those quoted points, which I would be interested to see. Because as it stands, it sounds to me like they're getting caught up in exactly all the stuff you just wrote, the stuff that got that entry to win the contest- pure coolness factor and presentation. If it really is all just down to "Eberron put rings of fire around their airships so your argument is invalid," then I'll take that as a "win."

The disconnect here seems to be that you're saying that a setting that extrapolates everything from first principles is a good thing and think I'm saying that extrapolating from first principles is a bad thing. What I'm actually saying is that extrapolating things from first principles is a good thing, and to be preferred where possible, but that you can't do that in all cases, and a published setting can't afford to be limited to what's already in the base books and so has to prioritize "being different from core" above other concerns.

Let's pretend that neither Eberron nor any other settings exist and imagine we're trying to build both Eberron and, say, the Forgotten Realms from scratch with the 3e rules (minus any FR-isms that made it into 3e core, of course) as a regular ol' DM. FR is, just like Eberron, just a bunch of new mechanics, some arbitrary magic items, and a bunch of setting flavor papered over the top that a DM or designer "just wrote." A notable difference, however, is that with a House Lyrandar airship or House Orien lightning rail you can do some math with wall of fire+decanter of endless water and work out vaguely-steampunk-y magic ship and magic train equivalents, with House Cannith magic item foundries you can do some back-of-the-envelop math with DMG gold piece limits and NPC wages to figure out how widespread minor magic items could be, and so on, because Eberron is a vaguely-modern setting with lots of real-world inspiration...but with FR there's literally no way at all you can do the same with Circle Magic or Silver Fire or the Shadow Weave or Mythals or 10th-level spells or any other unique FR-isms because no possible combination of core stuff would let you arrive at the new setting material.

Now, let's pretend Eberron and FR are being designed as published settings. Do we want to have everything simply be an extension of the core rules? Heck no! The designers want people to buy their splatbooks, and importantly, to buy them for the mechanical trappings and flavor inspiration even if they don't want to actually run a game in that setting--setting fragmentation caused the downfall of 2e because neither mechanics nor fluff were really transferable between settings or useful in a homebrew-setting context, and you definitely don't want that to happen again--and if you can make airships and Nar Demonbinders with PHB and DMG material then there's no reason for people to do that. In the same way, DMs want to pick up setting splatbooks for the new mechanical goodies and flavor ideas that they didn't already extrapolate or invent themselves, not just to get a random list of proper nouns and a few maps and have everything else be stuff they could have done on their own.

Importantly, every mechanical doodad in the PHB and DMG is also pure fiat just like the new setting stuff--they weren't a direct mechanical extrapolation from the 2e versions, after all--and even if your new setting is fairly handwavey when introducing new mechanics, each such new mechanic is a new pure-fiat building block from which more can be extrapolated. It doesn't matter much if the, say, speaking stone magic item doesn't obey the normal DMG pricing rules for an item that does what it does, what matters is that (A) the speaking stone itself is a new tool for building e.g. a magipunk phone system in a homebrew setting and (B) the pricing differences for the speaking stone compared to the standard rules can be used as guidelines for more item price eyeballing (for things like "pricing an item that requires expending a limited-use ability to activate" or "pricing an item that improves the range and speed of a communication spell" or whatever).


The one thing on the list that is actually unique is the mention of dragonmarks increasing the number of magical healers, and yes, that is good ground-up change. Except that the 1st level dragonmarks don't actually do squat that you couldn't do with magic items, even published magic items, sorry. This is by their very nature as low level spells. All you have to do is say "these items are widely in use," and it's done, same as the trains and airships.

The key point about dragonmarks vs. magic items from a setting lore perspective is that anyone can use a magic item (where "anyone" can mean "actually anyone" or "any arcane caster" or whatever) but dragonmarked items are limited to specific bloodlines to grant those Houses a natural monopoly on the use of that magic in a way that mass-production of certain magic items can't.

This is where the designer hat gets put on again. If you want a setting where only people in a certain family can use a certain kind of magic item, there's lots of ways to do that, some more mechanical and some more fiat-based. You can use the Cursed Item rules to make all of those items "cursed" to only work with that family, for instance (until someone hits it with a remove curse, anyway, and to get around that you run into fiat territory again). But a big priority for a designer is making people want to use the material you make (and therefore buy the book), so an option that gives fancy toys to PCs (like dragonmarks) is going to be better to publish than one that gives fancy toys only to NPCs or doesn't give anyone to fancy toys at all.

The whole setup where the Dragonmarked Houses rely on both actual 'marked heirs and also dragonmarked items, and the dragonmarks are mostly toys for PCs while the items are mostly setting background, is a fantastic idea for a published setting because it gives the players something to make them happy, it does some worldbuilding to make DMs happy, it mechanically ties the PCs to setting flavor to make both players and DMs happy, and the interaction between those two parts gives the setting depth (even if you consider it fiat-ed or illusory depth) in a way that purely going with either "some people have genetic tattoos that give them magic powers and they make the setting go" or "tons of artificers make tons of items and they make the setting go" does not.


It still doesn't excuse blatant mechanical contradictions like the elemental binding fluff vs item creation mechanics,

You keep saying that the flavor and mechanics contradict each other here, but that's not actually the case. Again, a mechanic can be fiat-based and still used as an item in a player's or DM's toolkit, and that's the case with Elemental Binding mechanics: the airship and lightning rail costs happen to be eyeballed based on existing costs rather than derived from some kind of formula, but once you know those costs and you also know the Elemental Binding mechanics you can do something with those, like players custom-building an airship with a larger-than-normal elemental for a cost discount or going crazy with elemental-bound vessels to build a mobile base, or DMs running an adventure based on an airship crash because an Eberron airship can be crashed by releasing the elemental where a basic boat+overland flight solution requires destroying the whole thing so the plot hook makes more sense in the former case.


or saying there are fewer high level NPCs without actually changing the table for generating them in your main book, however (seriously, until I saw that article I thought it was a clever scam that their "fewer high level NPCs" actually fit reasonably well with DMG city generation, if they just didn't use a bunch of metropolis's). There's not being able to get a dozen people to agree on exact magitech rules, and then there's just shooting yourself in the foot.

In the same way that Eberron has lower-level NPCs across the board than the DMG indicates, FR has a lot more low-level NPCs and a lot more high-level NPCs with fewer mid-level NPCs, but they don't have FR-specific tables for random NPC generation. The same applies to Dragonlance and Dark Sun and pretty much every other setting.

An important thing to note about the town generation mechanics in the DMG is that, as with custom magic item creation, they're guidelines, not hard rules. The Generating Towns section specifically opens with "When the PCs come into a town and you need to generate facts about that town quickly...", and while the preceding section talks about population distribution among settlements of different sizes and distribution of settlements relative to geographic features and other larger or smaller settlements, there are no actual rules for generating such. Likewise, the Power Centers section is all suggestions and examples, not actual procedural generation or hard rules. That whole section is closer to being improv prompts than statistical formulas, and specific settings' basic "here's what the demographics look like" advice should obviously override, and holds just as much declarative authority as, the DMG's basic "here's some quick tables if you're in a pinch" tables.

[Troacctid]

The issue with "few high level NPCs" isn't that they didn't justify it. The NPC generation tables are already inconsistent with assuming people follow the advancement rules. It's that it makes the campaign setting incredibly unstable, because eventually the PCs are going to become high level. For a campaign setting to work, it needs to have an answer for "what happens when a 20th level Wizard shows up", because at some point the people using the setting are going to ask that question.
There are plenty of high-level NPCs in Eberron. It's just that they aren't heroes. The heroes are the PCs. But if you need a high-level wizard for them to fight, it can certainly be arranged.

[Fizban]

What I'm actually saying is that extrapolating things from first principles is a good thing, and to be preferred where possible, but that you can't do that in all cases, and a published setting can't afford to be limited to what's already in the base books and so has to prioritize "being different from core" above other concerns.
You're focusing on "first-principles," while I'm specifically calling for *mechanics-based* first principles. Further, I did get to the point that they probably couldn't have used generated much worldbuilding via mechanics on account of the multiple writers' interpretations. But you seem to be reading my calls for mechanics as far more limited to the base books than I am. If anything I'm pointing out all the published material that could replicate Eberron's feats specifically to emphasize their lack of mechanics- not that they should have used something specifically, but the places where they just didn't.
Edit: re-reading, my OP here does specify existing system and take aim against just fiating things in, but in the previous thread I did point out that elemental energy calculations are also effectively fiat, and did later here clarify the lack of mechanical justification either original or setting unique. The exact order is blurry in any case- whether you create an idea from mechanics or filter one through them, the point is that a fantasy setting should be defined by how its fantasy elements affect the world, and in order to do that in dnd it needs to have more than just concept fluff as far as I'm concerned.

Let's pretend that neither Eberron nor any other settings exist and imagine we're trying to build both Eberron and, say, the Forgotten Realms from scratch with the 3e rules (minus any FR-isms that made it into 3e core, of course) as a regular ol' DM. FR is, just like Eberron, just a bunch of new mechanics, some arbitrary magic items, and a bunch of setting flavor papered over the top that a DM or designer "just wrote." A notable difference, however, is that with a House Lyrandar airship or House Orien lightning rail you can do some math with wall of fire+decanter of endless water and work out vaguely-steampunk-y magic ship and magic train equivalents, with House Cannith magic item foundries you can do some back-of-the-envelop math with DMG gold piece limits and NPC wages to figure out how widespread minor magic items could be, and so on, because Eberron is a vaguely-modern setting with lots of real-world inspiration...but with FR there's literally no way at all you can do the same with Circle Magic or Silver Fire or the Shadow Weave or Mythals or 10th-level spells or any other unique FR-isms because no possible combination of core stuff would let you arrive at the new setting material.
No, you can't do any of that stuff with Circle Magic or Silver Fire (though you can with Mythals, because epic spells made by long-dead casters justify anything). But you can do it exactly the same way you just said for the Eberron stuff. The DMG gold piece limits and NPC wages apply to FR exactly the same. The item creation guidelines apply (or fail to apply) exactly the same. There is zero difference. I think you may be mistaken or have missed the part where I confirmed that even Wall of Fire hacks and boxed elementals are still DM fiat in the end, just with more justification. To be clear- the handwaving that a fire elemental can somehow lift and fly a ship outside their capabilities in every way does annoy the crap out of me (as does the inconsistent cheap hack of "soarwood"), but that's not the worst part.

In the same way, DMs want to pick up setting splatbooks for the new mechanical goodies and flavor ideas that they didn't already extrapolate or invent themselves, not just to get a random list of proper nouns and a few maps and have everything else be stuff they could have done on their own.
And using ground-up justification for world building has nothing to do with that. You still put in whatever PRCs and feats and yes magic items and other goodies however you want. Also- you know there's tons of published content that is just that right? Organizations that are nothing but fluff and a single line of benefit (often a mere 5-10% discount on certain items), Dragon Mag articles that take existing things and build out the fluff, entire books about FR and even Eberron that are 90 or 95% fluff. Reams of proper nouns and maps and stuff a DM could buil out on their own from just the base setting book. Even the monster manuals started providing more monsters that were actually just NPC builds, as polarizing as they were.

and even if your new setting is fairly handwavey when introducing new mechanics, each such new mechanic is a new pure-fiat building block from which more can be extrapolated.
Yes, I have said this.

And Eberron fails to do so in many places, by failing to actually introduce a new mechanic. What is the mechanic for creating conductor stones when they have no price? What is the mechanic of uniting a team of artificers to produce an item that is beyond any of their individual abilities to build? What is the mechanic for creating Karnnathi undead? You could say it's not fair to focus on just a few things they didn't fully detail, but those are all supposedly critical to the setting.

Also, speaking stones as a magic telephone network is a poor example. The message travels at 60mph, which is not instantaneous, and you have to wait for the return message. It's certainly an upgrade over horse messengers, but tell me- does this limit actually matter in any way? Are the effects of the speaking stone on the setting rendered based on what it does, or on an idea that doesn't match the item? I'd actually forgotten that Eberron uses this specific item- I'd thought it was Sending Stones, which with their 25 words 1/day are terrible, but at least instant, and with such a harsh restriction it's easy to see what happens when those limits come into play. I'm told they've given two different sizes for the world map, heck of a thing when you're making a big deal of 30mph trains.

You can use the Cursed Item rules to make all of those items "cursed" to only work with that family, for instance (until someone hits it with a remove curse, anyway, and to get around that you run into fiat territory again).
Remove Curse/cursed items doesn't work that way- the thing to complain about there is UMD and identification spells.

But a big priority for a designer is making people want to use the material you make (and therefore buy the book), so an option that gives fancy toys to PCs (like dragonmarks) is going to be better to publish than one that gives fancy toys only to NPCs or doesn't give anyone to fancy toys at all.
Sure, but that's not what noxangelo was arguing. They seemed to be responding to "not a different play experience," by listing a bunch of the setting feel differences, so I attempted to recap.

The whole setup where the Dragonmarked Houses rely on both actual 'marked heirs and also dragonmarked items, and the dragonmarks are mostly toys for PCs while the items are mostly setting background, is a fantastic idea for a published setting because it gives the players something to make them happy, it does some worldbuilding to make DMs happy, it mechanically ties the PCs to setting flavor to make both players and DMs happy, and the interaction between those two parts gives the setting depth (even if you consider it fiat-ed or illusory depth) in a way that purely going with either "some people have genetic tattoos that give them magic powers and they make the setting go" or "tons of artificers make tons of items and they make the setting go" does not.
Indeed, tying everything together with feats a character might theoretically take at 1st level does make it feel like it matters more even when it actually doesn't. An effective presentation which I'll have to add to the list of remarkable ploys.

You keep saying that the flavor and mechanics contradict each other here, but that's not actually the case. Again, a mechanic can be fiat-based and still used as an item in a player's or DM's toolkit, and that's the case with Elemental Binding mechanics: the airship and lightning rail costs happen to be eyeballed based on existing costs rather than derived from some kind of formula, but once you know those costs and you also know the Elemental Binding mechanics you can do something with those, like players custom-building an airship with a larger-than-normal elemental for a cost discount or going crazy with elemental-bound vessels to build a mobile base, or DMs running an adventure based on an airship crash because an Eberron airship can be crashed by releasing the elemental where a basic boat+overland flight solution requires destroying the whole thing so the plot hook makes more sense in the former case.
Now you've got confused over the pricing guidelines and creation mechanics, I'll explain-

The fluff for Eberron claims that the airships were created by teams of artificers working together to create something they couldn't have alone, something something elemental binding. But the fact is that an airship is a 92,000gp CL 15 item. It cannot be created without at least a 13th level artificer*, a 13th level artificer can create one without any help, and adding more creators does not let them do anything they could not before. The only way this fluff statement is mechanically supported is if you retroactively decide that NPCs cannot create magic items without the Craft Reserve ability to provide the xp. Or, potentially, if you explicitly state that what the teams did was use the (vague) research rules to invent a non-published magic item, which I've never seen anyone actually require. The fluff says X, which is in direct contradiction to the existing item creation mechanics, with no supplied mechanical justification.

As for the others- if you don't provide a mechanic, your ground-up world building is not rooted in mechanics. You just praised the dragonmarks for mechanically connecting possible PCs with the fluff of the world. Shouldn't the other aspects also have mechanics the players can connect with? Isn't that why people love undead creation and trap pricing and planar binding and so many other things that are really there for the DM but can technically be done by players and thus make them feel like part of the world?

*Unless you're aware of the language holes and precedents that suggest an item's caster level might not actually be a prerequisite (until MiC overwrote it, IIRC).

but once you know those costs and you also know the Elemental Binding mechanics
Know what costs? The prices they've assigned with no breakdown for why? What Elemental Binding mechanics? They added various mechanics that amount to some discount if you jump through the hoops (not even very much), but those aren't in the main setting book. They're added based on the concept, not a mechanic that was used from the beginning. And that's not even added buyer benefit because they published them, thus implying that those are the only benefits.

or DMs running an adventure based on an airship crash because an Eberron airship can be crashed by releasing the elemental where a basic boat+overland flight solution requires destroying the whole thing so the plot hook makes more sense in the former case.
Says you who just decided all other magical flying boats are single-piece items that are either destroyed or not. Meanwhile the Cloud Keel in Arms and Equipment Guide is an added magic item which could be destroyed separate from the rest of the ship, the Halruuan Skyship explicitly says that the number of plates is significant, implying a possible partial disabling, Stronghold Builder's Guide's mobile strongholds can include a control point that could theoretically be sabotaged, my elementals in boxes in boilers obviously have a weakness, and you also seem to have skipped the possibility that someone could just crash the ship on purpose (which for a normally un-crashable ship adds an immediate layer of mystery).

Why do you presume that another path taken to reach an airship will be inherently worse?

In the same way that Eberron has lower-level NPCs across the board than the DMG indicates, FR has a lot more low-level NPCs and a lot more high-level NPCs with fewer mid-level NPCs, but they don't have FR-specific tables for random NPC generation. The same applies to Dragonlance and Dark Sun and pretty much every other setting.
Citation needed?

An important thing to note about the town generation mechanics in the DMG is that, as with custom magic item creation, they're guidelines, not hard rules.
And when your setting mentions a town and fails to provide a list of all leveled NPCs, the DM will turn to what other guideline exactly?

and while the preceding section talks about population distribution among settlements of different sizes and distribution of settlements relative to geographic features and other larger or smaller settlements, there are no actual rules for generating such.
Yes, a significant failing, as I said.

Likewise, the Power Centers section is all suggestions and examples, not actual procedural generation or hard rules.
They're at least as detailed as rolling for magic items, what more do you want?

That whole section is closer to being improv prompts than statistical formulas, and specific settings' basic "here's what the demographics look like" advice should obviously override, and holds just as much declarative authority as, the DMG's basic "here's some quick tables if you're in a pinch" tables.
No, vague statements that there are "more" or "fewer" NPCs of a certain level than "normal" hold almost zero declarative authority. Eberron suggests a certain cap on most NPC levels, which actually isn't even that far from the DMG's city generation. Unless there is a line in ECS that explicitly tells the DM to ignore those tables, you will not convince me that it has overridden them. At best is has told you to put a cap on the levels provided, and expecting DMs who need levels for their important NPCs to just make them up based on vague statements rather than using the table in the DMG, is untenable.

[Powerdork]

Citation needed?

When someone says something isn't there, and you're insisting it is, it's good form to direct people to the thing you insist is there.

[NigelWalmsley]

I don't understand why you would think Eberron needs to explicitly override the settlement rules. Those don't actually get used, and aren't even consistent with the rest of the rules.


The key point about dragonmarks vs. magic items from a setting lore perspective is that anyone can use a magic item (where "anyone" can mean "actually anyone" or "any arcane caster" or whatever) but dragonmarked items are limited to specific bloodlines to grant those Houses a natural monopoly on the use of that magic in a way that mass-production of certain magic items can't.

Dragonmarks have a lot of problems.

First, they don't actually give you a monopoly on anything. The Mark of Making doesn't stop Wizards from learning Repair Light Damage, and it actually gives less uses per day than a Wizard would get. You could imagine that Cannith beats up anyone who offers to cast Repair Light Damage for people without being associated with them, but that doesn't require a Dragonmark at all.

Second, the abilities they give you aren't particularly useful for industry much of the time. You're not building a continent-spanning business on the back of people who can use Detect Magic or Detect Poison a couple of times per day. Where's the Wall of Stone mark? The Animate Dead mark?

Third, the basic paradigm of Dragonmarks doesn't really work for an industrial revolution setting. The industrial revolution was about using capital improvements to increase productivity and raise standards of living, and Dragonmarks fundamentally do not do that. There's no way for House Spy Elves to improve their per-capita output using Dragonmarks, because the Mark of Shadow does the same thing it did a thousand years ago. They could build Dragonmarked items, but that's not especially better than just building regular items that anyone could use.

If you want to use Dragonmarks as-written for the kind of setting Eberron is trying to be, your setup needs to be "the Dragonmarked Houses held power for centuries, but in the wake of the Last War new techniques are allowing upstart Artificer cabals to displace them". And that honestly sounds like a pretty cool setting, but I never really felt any of that in Eberron.

[Aotrs Commander]

It's not that a homebrew setting can't be used for multiple campaigns, it's that it only needs to be used for one campaign--the initial one you're building it for--and anything else is gravy, and since the setting only needs to support that single campaign you don't need to consider different genres or level ranges or party compositions or whatever else when building it.

Eeh... Depends on whether you build a homebrew campaign world with the intention of running a specific campaign there. I did that with the one I built back in AD&D, but Dreemaenhyll (my current one which replaces it, which is so much better than old Caranda is isn't funny) was designed without a specific party or metaplot at all (other than in the broadest strokes). I guess you could say I approached it more like I would a published campaign in that regard.



(Hell, my on-and-off Entirely Alien No Humans Even Distantly Tide-Locked Campaign World has not yet even had a properly defined RULES system yet, and only one half-considered idea about one campaign I might run which would likely have an idosyncratic set of rules, as it would be more like X-Com meets forced-migration-palelithic-alien-tribe...!)

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
…my on-and-off Entirely Alien No Humans Even Distantly Tide-Locked Campaign World….

Aha! So that was you after all.

I’ve been thinking about that setting here lately, and trying to remember if you were the one who had come up with it. I was about to PM you about this.

From what I recall, you went a long way into detailing the orbital physics, and you had some interesting ideas about nonhumanoid races that would serve as PCs. Did you ever get much further on this project?

[Nifft]

Dragonmarks have a lot of problems.

First, they don't actually give you a monopoly on anything. The Mark of Making doesn't stop Wizards from learning Repair Light Damage, and it actually gives less uses per day than a Wizard would get. You could imagine that Cannith beats up anyone who offers to cast Repair Light Damage for people without being associated with them, but that doesn't require a Dragonmark at all.

Second, the abilities they give you aren't particularly useful for industry much of the time. You're not building a continent-spanning business on the back of people who can use Detect Magic or Detect Poison a couple of times per day. Where's the Wall of Stone mark? The Animate Dead mark?

Third, the basic paradigm of Dragonmarks doesn't really work for an industrial revolution setting. The industrial revolution was about using capital improvements to increase productivity and raise standards of living, and Dragonmarks fundamentally do not do that. There's no way for House Spy Elves to improve their per-capita output using Dragonmarks, because the Mark of Shadow does the same thing it did a thousand years ago. They could build Dragonmarked items, but that's not especially better than just building regular items that anyone could use.

If you want to use Dragonmarks as-written for the kind of setting Eberron is trying to be, your setup needs to be "the Dragonmarked Houses held power for centuries, but in the wake of the Last War new techniques are allowing upstart Artificer cabals to displace them". And that honestly sounds like a pretty cool setting, but I never really felt any of that in Eberron.

I'm guessing you read a summary of Dragonmarks from someone but haven't actually read through the source material.

Dragonmark SLAs are the part which PCs can take adventuring.

Dragonmark Focus items are what enable the continent-spanning empires, and they do often involve large capital expenditures. They're beyond the means of PCs to take on adventures, so they're not what you see in PC CharOp threads.

Those focus items are things like a Cannith Creation Forge or a Jorasco Resurrection Altar.

Sounds a bit stronger than 1/day detect magic, eh?

[Aotrs Commander]

Aha! So that was you after all.

I’ve been thinking about that setting here lately, and trying to remember if you were the one who had come up with it. I was about to PM you about this.

From what I recall, you went a long way into detailing the orbital physics, and you had some interesting ideas about nonhumanoid races that would serve as PCs. Did you ever get much further on this project?

Sadly, not really - not yet, anyway. (But for me, these sorts of projects are often long-term; Dreemaenhyll was several year before I started using it.) It's still there, still floating around and occasionally I have another think about it. I have nebulously started to think about how I would do the mechanics of what I have termed "The Long Road," (the aforementioned primative migration)- which means it moves more towards a functional purpose and thus actually will be motivation to press further. We need to have something to replace the 22-ish year-old Rolemaster party I did the finale of in October for its more typical Christmas slot, and that was nominally on the slate for a serious go-over - before it all hit the fan.

Problem being, I often do this sort of rumination when we have day-trips out or holidays and I have lot of thinking time... Which of course, we have not had this year because lockdown.

Functionally, Andorlaine has made the one appearence in the start of the Aotrs exploratory team (but that (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?462170-The-Myst-Project-Aotrs-Myst-Exploratory-Team-Mission-001) was frighteningly five years ago) - which has provided the point-of-view for the in-character world write-up, as what is discussed within is not going to be known to the world's inhabitants. That was also the year the Aotrs Shipyards became my full-time job, which, I suspect, has eaten time that I previously might have devoted to it (which often came in otherwise wasted time dealing with the dole office and such).

Having a bit of writer's block on what ACTUALLY how to do the nonhumanoids hasn't helped, since the elenthnars (the answer to the age-old problem of "aliens only have one culture/power") swiped the four-legged spider-centaur-ish body plan. (Nor the problem that after all the physics, I had no way aside from hand-waving to deal with stellar wind no blowing the atmosphere off, since calcualtions to look at that proved impossible for me to attempt, which was slightly disheartening.)

[Troacctid]

I'm guessing you read a summary of Dragonmarks from someone but haven't actually read through the source material.

Dragonmark SLAs are the part which PCs can take adventuring.

Dragonmark Focus items are what enable the continent-spanning empires, and they do often involve large capital expenditures. They're beyond the means of PCs to take on adventures, so they're not what you see in PC CharOp threads.

Those focus items are things like a Cannith Creation Forge or a Jorasco Resurrection Altar.

Sounds a bit stronger than 1/day detect magic, eh?
To add to this, since the obvious question is "Why not make a magic item that doesn't require a dragonmark"—magic items are made with dragonshards. There are three different types of dragonshards. One of the three, Siberys shards, can only be used for crafting dragonmark focus items. (Also psionic items, but most of the psionic characters live on a different continent.) This allows the dragonmarked houses to make use of a resource nobody else can.

Using a dragonshard in the construction of the magic item requires it to be attuned first. Attuning an Eberron shard requires special training, labor, and a material cost. Meanwhile, a Siberys shard becomes attuned automatically after a day in the presence of a dragonmark. So not only are they only usable by the dragonmarked houses, they're also easier to use than Eberron shards are.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
Having a bit of writer's block on what ACTUALLY how to do the nonhumanoids hasn't helped, since the elenthnars (the answer to the age-old problem of "aliens only have one culture/power") swiped the four-legged spider-centaur-ish body plan.

If you’d like to start a thread about this over in homebrew, I’d be glad to offer some comments.


Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
…I had no way aside from hand-waving to deal with stellar wind no blowing the atmosphere off….

A strong magnetic field is usually the go-to for preventing sputtering. I don’t recall the details of your system, so I’m not sure if there’s some other reason precluding a magnetic field. Also worth discussing in homebrew.

[Aotrs Commander]

If you’d like to start a thread about this over in homebrew, I’d be glad to offer some comments.



A strong magnetic field is usually the go-to for preventing sputtering. I don’t recall the details of your system, so I’m not sure if there’s some other reason precluding a magnetic field. Also worth discussing in homebrew.

I'll have a think about it, I might put it there or maybe on where I occasionally blither about stuff on Fimfiction's website (where they have a blog feature), and if it's the latter, I'll give you a PM and a link. Though it might be a bit yet, I want to get this 3.Aotrs stuff done first. (That being like, nine months of pretty solid 5-6 days a week some after-work hours has not rather eaten a lot of time as well!)

I probably WILL, after training myself to do Rules Stuff for months, find myself a bit of a loose end when 3.Aots is "finished..."

[NigelWalmsley]

I'm guessing you read a summary of Dragonmarks from someone but haven't actually read through the source material.

Well, that guess would be incorrect. I own a fairly large number of Eberron sourcebooks, including Dragonmarked. My disappointment with the setting is a product of deep familiarity with it.


Dragonmark Focus items are what enable the continent-spanning empires, and they do often involve large capital expenditures. They're beyond the means of PCs to take on adventures, so they're not what you see in PC CharOp threads.

Dragonmark Focus items aren't really any better than regular magic items, and they still require you to have Dragonmarked operators. You can't get the people from the field to the factory if that factory is a bunch of Sky Forges and Speaking Stones they can't use. It's fundamentally not an industrial paradigm. Eternal Wands kind of are, but again that's pointing you to a very different setup than what the setting claims is going on.


This allows the dragonmarked houses to make use of a resource nobody else can.

So what? They still work on the same pre-industrial paradigm that regular magic items work on. Also, Eberron is still using the standard magic item creation rules. You certainly could imagine a system where we tracked factors of production and input availability, and in such a system having access to cheap supplies might be useful. But Eberron doesn't do that. Which is another problem with the setting: it centers a bunch of economic questions without addressing the steaming pile of nonsense that is the standard economics rules (or rather, lack of rules).

[Troacctid]

Dragonmark Focus items aren't really any better than regular magic items, and they still require you to have Dragonmarked operators. You can't get the people from the field to the factory if that factory is a bunch of Sky Forges and Speaking Stones they can't use. It's fundamentally not an industrial paradigm. Eternal Wands kind of are, but again that's pointing you to a very different setup than what the setting claims is going on.
Factories in Khorvaire are controlled by House Cannith. They don't have a problem staffing their facilities with dragonmark heirs to operate any forges that require the Mark of Making. Most items are still produced by hand, either by experts or by magewrights. House Cannith offers training and certification for independent magewright crafters. Because of the Korth Edicts, they are allowed to regulate their own industry, making them a state-sanctioned monopoly. What's the issue here?


So what? They still work on the same pre-industrial paradigm that regular magic items work on. Also, Eberron is still using the standard magic item creation rules. You certainly could imagine a system where we tracked factors of production and input availability, and in such a system having access to cheap supplies might be useful. But Eberron doesn't do that. Which is another problem with the setting: it centers a bunch of economic questions without addressing the steaming pile of nonsense that is the standard economics rules (or rather, lack of rules).
Dragonshards are a big deal in Eberron. They're a major part of the economy because they represent most of the material cost in magic item creation. With the current postwar economic boon, demand for dragonshards is one of the setting's main adventure hooks. It's a universal MacGuffin; you can justify an expedition to any remote location by placing a cache of dragonshards there.

[NigelWalmsley]

Factories in Khorvaire are controlled by House Cannith. They don't have a problem staffing their facilities with dragonmark heirs to operate any forges that require the Mark of Making. Most items are still produced by hand, either by experts or by magewrights. House Cannith offers training and certification for independent magewright crafters. Because of the Korth Edicts, they are allowed to regulate their own industry, making them a state-sanctioned monopoly. What's the issue here?

The issue here is that the mechanics don't back that up. Cannith is in charge not because they have some particularly meaningful competitive advantage, but because they have been arbitrarily declared to be in charge. There's a tension between the setting and the mechanics that causes dissonance. And Cannith is actually one of the best-justified houses, because their items and abilities are actually pretty good. Try figuring out why "moderately more effective detectives" is supposed to be an international power.


It's a universal MacGuffin; you can justify an expedition to any remote location by placing a cache of dragonshards there.

Yes, it's a MacGuffin. It's a plot device, not something you can meaningfully interact with.

[Troacctid]

The issue here is that the mechanics don't back that up. Cannith is in charge not because they have some particularly meaningful competitive advantage, but because they have been arbitrarily declared to be in charge. There's a tension between the setting and the mechanics that causes dissonance. And Cannith is actually one of the best-justified houses, because their items and abilities are actually pretty good.
Where's the mechanical dissonance here? How do they not have a competitive advantage? They're the only ones who can operate creation forges, they have innate magic that's perfect for crafting, and they have a +2 bonus to ALL Craft checks. Who exactly is competing with them?


Try figuring out why "moderately more effective detectives" is supposed to be an international power.
Both House Medani and House Tharashk have inquisitives. House Medani also does private security, which can be pretty lucrative, or so I'm told. Tharashk rose to prominence by prospecting for dragonshards, which, as previously mentioned, are the biggest driver of Khorvaire's booming economy.


Yes, it's a MacGuffin. It's a plot device, not something you can meaningfully interact with.
It's a MacGuffin because it's a nigh-universal magical component. It can take the place of almost any magic item's crafting cost or any spell's expensive material component. (Dragonshards were the direct predecessor of 4e's residuum.) How is that not meaningful?

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by NigelWalmsley
It's a plot device, not something you can meaningfully interact with.

These aren’t mutually exclusive. All it takes is a little imagination.


Originally Posted by PairO’Dice Lost
…and since the setting only needs to support that single campaign you don't need to consider different genres or level ranges or party compositions or whatever else when building it.

This seems to represent a very narrow view of world-building, and not everyone will be limited by this approach.

If done right, it’s a world, not just a stage spray-painted a single color. If you’re devoting the time and energy to developing a detailed and believable setting, then the process of creation will organically unfold in ways you never expected. One consequence is a world far more intricate and diverse that that required to support any one campaign—even a campaign which moves through a variety of regions and moods as the story progresses.

Thus the ability to support a whole range of campaigns is an emergent property of the process of developing the world. The more thought and effort you put into it, the more possibilities will appear.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

And Eberron fails to do so in many places, by failing to actually introduce a new mechanic. What is the mechanic for creating conductor stones when they have no price? What is the mechanic of uniting a team of artificers to produce an item that is beyond any of their individual abilities to build? What is the mechanic for creating Karnnathi undead? You could say it's not fair to focus on just a few things they didn't fully detail, but those are all supposedly critical to the setting.

What's the mechanic for creating a Netherese mythallar when they have no price? How do the Guild Wizards of Waterdeep set up a spellpool to share spells between themselves? Why are Telthors unique to Rashemen?

Leaving things mechanically undefined in settings, even fairly central things, is not at all unique to Eberron. If anything, Eberron is better about using statless things because when it provides DM tools like eldritch machines or the Mourning it explicitly notes that they're meant to be fill-in-the-blanks plot devices for the DM to use to customize the setting, as opposed to, say, all the elves-are-special-snowflakes stuff in FR that's unstatted without that note.

And it's not even necessarily the case that certain things being left statless was intended to be a permanent affair. Perhaps airships get stats while conductor stones don't because Lyrandar lets non-House members use them but Orien doesn't let anyone else make conductor stones, so they prioritized giving airships stats and left conductor stones for later in the same way that they left the elemental binding rules for a later book.

Something else you have to keep in mind with Eberron is that it's the newest setting, and written by someone other than the initial creator. FR, Dark Sun, and the rest have been churning out lore and mechanics for literal decades and it's easy for authors to pull pricing information, material information, and so on from prior editions; Ed Greenwood was the initial creator of FR and he basically infodumped a full setting on TSR and then stuck around to continue contributing, and all the other settings were written in-house at TSR, whereas Keith Baker provided the initial setting prompt and collaborated on 3e splatbooks but good chunks of those books and all of the post-3e material was written by other people. That doesn't mean it's a good thing or excusable that conductor stones never got stats or anything, but it's definitely understandable in a way it wouldn't be for FR or DS.


It's certainly an upgrade over horse messengers, but tell me- does this limit actually matter in any way? Are the effects of the speaking stone on the setting rendered based on what it does, or on an idea that doesn't match the item?

Yes they are--speaking stones are telegraph analogs, where you send a message down the wire, wait for it to be interpreted and sent to the recipient, then the recipient might send one back, and so on, as opposed to real-time communications, Sivis "message stations" are analogous to US telegraph stations (centralized buildings with a handful of skilled operators to whom you give a message to send) rather than any sort of home phone or pay phone system, and the setting does indeed reflect that.


I'm told they've given two different sizes for the world map, heck of a thing when you're making a big deal of 30mph trains.

It's not that they gave two different sizes, it's that 4e Eberron changed the size of the continent for no apparent reason. All of the worldbuilding details anyone cares about come from 3e Eberron, which is internally-consistent on scale.


Remove Curse/cursed items doesn't work that way- the thing to complain about there is UMD and identification spells.

It does, actually; you can use the Dependent or Requirement parameters of cursed items (specifically, "Only functions in the hands of/within 10 feet of a character with the Mark of X" or "Character must belong to House X") to mimic the dragonmark requirements of dragonshard focus items, certain cursed items (like the cloak of poisonousness) can be destroyed by remove curse (which is terrible for the economy), and UMD doesn't have a "Emulate Curse Parameter" use in the same way it has Emulate Race or Emulate Class.

The point is, existing ways of saying "only X can use Y" have existing counters; if you want to say Thou Shalt Only Use These Items If You Are An X, No Ifs Ands Or Buts, you need to introduce something novel like dragonmarks.


Now you've got confused over the pricing guidelines and creation mechanics, I'll explain-

The fluff for Eberron claims that the airships were created by teams of artificers working together to create something they couldn't have alone, something something elemental binding. But the fact is that an airship is a 92,000gp CL 15 item. It cannot be created without at least a 13th level artificer*, a 13th level artificer can create one without any help, and adding more creators does not let them do anything they could not before. The only way this fluff statement is mechanically supported is if you retroactively decide that NPCs cannot create magic items without the Craft Reserve ability to provide the xp. Or, potentially, if you explicitly state that what the teams did was use the (vague) research rules to invent a non-published magic item, which I've never seen anyone actually require. The fluff says X, which is in direct contradiction to the existing item creation mechanics, with no supplied mechanical justification.

Now you've got confused over the airship creation flavor, I'll explain:

Airships need "teams" of artificers for two reasons. First, airships are a collaborative effort between Zilargo (who know how to do the elemental binding) and Cannith (who provide the raw materials and do the actual enchanting), as per the Explorer's Handbook:


From House Cannith came plans for the first elemental vessels, crafted by a Zilargo workshop affiliated with the house. Between the Mark of Making and the binding techniques of the gnomes, the dream of elemental-powered transportation became a reality in 811 YK.

...which is why you need at least two artificers to make an airship. Second, binding an elemental to a vessel is more difficult than binding one to a normal item, so more people need to be involved, as per Magic of Eberron:


Binding an elemental to a vessel is in some ways similar to, and in some key ways different from, binding one to another type of item. The sheer size of a vessel requires that the process be approached differently, but the early stages share some similarities.
[...]
More spellcasters are required to transfer the elemental from its prison inside the magic circle to the vessel. As with other items, only one shak’krek is necessary to temporarily hold the elemental between the circle and its final destination, but the hevrae must have assistants. All told, the hevrae and assistants must have a combined caster level equal to twice the elemental’s Hit Dice. Usually, a master crafter acts as the lead hevrae, accompanied in the process by several acolytes or apprentices. Unlike with the transfer of an elemental to an item, this transfer takes 1 hour per HD of the elemental, minus 1 hour per caster level of the hevrae and assistants that exceeds the elemental’s HD (minimum 1 hour). The hevrae’s assistants still use the aid another action to help the hevrae with the Charisma check, as described above.

Huh, wouldja look at that, mechanics to explain why creating an airship needs at least 2 mid-level artificers (or 1 mid-level artificer and 1 mid-level arcane caster) and at least 21 HD worth of lower-level casters assisting, and couldn't have been done by a single artificer working alone. Whodathunkit?


As for the others- if you don't provide a mechanic, your ground-up world building is not rooted in mechanics. You just praised the dragonmarks for mechanically connecting possible PCs with the fluff of the world. Shouldn't the other aspects also have mechanics the players can connect with? Isn't that why people love undead creation and trap pricing and planar binding and so many other things that are really there for the DM but can technically be done by players and thus make them feel like part of the world?

For the umpteenth time, yes, giving a mechanical basis for everything and letting the players play around with everything is a good thing and in an ideal world everything would have equal amounts of obsessive mechanical detail. But not everything has equal priority. Dragonmarks are highly-detailed because they're player-facing things the PCs are expected to use all thetime, the Karrnathi undead creation process is undefined because it's a secret process known to a handful of individuals in a single nation and PCs are only going to get access to that through explicit DM approval.

This whole line of reasoning is basically one big Nirvana fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy), where you're basically saying that unless everything is derivable from first mechanical principles then the whole setting is bad. There's only so much page space, so much writing time, so much useful detail you can include, and the fact that ECS gave scant details on e.g. airships and lightning rails and then they put out a whole Explorers Handbook to clarify and got into much more detail shows at least a good-faith effort on the designers' part to include that detail, but you can't expect them to have known in advance that the setting would last a grand total of 4 years (no, 4e Eberron doesn't count because it's a contradictory retcon-y mess) and know that they wouldn't be able to get around to fleshing out a bunch of thiings.

One can imagine that if the devs had had a chance to write up splatbooks focused on certain parts of Khorvaire in the same way FR could do Silver Marches, Mysteries of the Moonsea, Serpent Kingdoms, and so on, then maybe there might have eventually been a "Secrets of Karrnath" book that went into great detail about the creation process behind Karrnathi undead, the capabilities of the Mark of Death, and other Karrnath-specific lore that didn't make it into the ECS. If that had come out, would you then be complaining that they fleshed out Karrnath's undead but the setting is bad because they didn't flesh out the mechanics behind Aundair's flying fortresses or the exact mechanisms of Sharn's manifest zone?


Says you who just decided all other magical flying boats are single-piece items that are either destroyed or not. Meanwhile the Cloud Keel in Arms and Equipment Guide is an added magic item which could be destroyed separate from the rest of the ship, the Halruuan Skyship explicitly says that the number of plates is significant, implying a possible partial disabling, Stronghold Builder's Guide's mobile strongholds can include a control point that could theoretically be sabotaged, my elementals in boxes in boilers obviously have a weakness, and you also seem to have skipped the possibility that someone could just crash the ship on purpose (which for a normally un-crashable ship adds an immediate layer of mystery).

Every kind of ship, from Stormwrack ships to Halruaan airships to Eberron airships included, use the general "ship sections" rules which can make damaging the ship sufficiently to crash it can take a long time, and not every weak point can be attacked to disable the sails/cloud keel/whatever providing lift and motive power (cloud keels, for instance, don't have listed stats). An Eberron airship, meanwhile, has specific weaknesses that can disable the ship in one round (banishment/dismissal, Turn/Rebuke Elementals) that the others don't, and those are what I was referring to.


They're at least as detailed as rolling for magic items, what more do you want?

What in Shavarath do you want? Why is "here's a basic d% improv prompt for justifying why the town is ruled by rakshasa" in the core DM book of the edition met with "Eh, it's no worse than a completely arbitrary set of d% tables for core magic items, can't be helped!" but "here's a specific description of a magic item for justifying how the lightning rail rail works" in a setting-specific book is met with "But where's the pricing information!? Significant failing! DM fiat!"?


Third, the basic paradigm of Dragonmarks doesn't really work for an industrial revolution setting. The industrial revolution was about using capital improvements to increase productivity and raise standards of living, and Dragonmarks fundamentally do not do that. There's no way for House Spy Elves to improve their per-capita output using Dragonmarks, because the Mark of Shadow does the same thing it did a thousand years ago. They could build Dragonmarked items, but that's not especially better than just building regular items that anyone could use.

If you want to use Dragonmarks as-written for the kind of setting Eberron is trying to be, your setup needs to be "the Dragonmarked Houses held power for centuries, but in the wake of the Last War new techniques are allowing upstart Artificer cabals to displace them". And that honestly sounds like a pretty cool setting, but I never really felt any of that in Eberron.

That's the thing: Eberron is specifically not an industrial revolution setting, and it's not trying to be. Magic items are still individually hand-made, not mass produced. The Dragonmarked Houses maintain a monopoly on their areas of influence because an un-'marked artificer can't just make an item that does the same thing as a 'marked item without requiring a dragonmark because that's how dragonshard-based items work, so they don't need to worry about outcompeting non-House artificers or staying on the cutting edge or anything, they can just rest on their laurels and keep the galifars rolling in.

Despite its superficial resemblance to WW1, the Last War didn't kick off an era of magi-technological advancement at all. Elemental binding and creation forges and the rest of the supposed "new" magical doodads are all reverse-engineered from ancient Giantish technology in Xen'drik, and modern artificers don't actually understand how it works, to the point that warforged coming out sapient was a complete accident that Cannith spun in a "we totally meant to do that" kind of way.

Playing in Eberron is much closer to playing in FR during the Imaskar/Netheril/Jhaamdath/era than in any kind of steampunk setting, it's just that the train analogs and robot analogs and so on plus the "pulp adventure" atmosphere make people fill in the mental blank and assume that all the steampunk tropes apply when they manifestly do not.


This seems to represent a very narrow view of world-building, and not everyone will be limited by this approach.

If done right, it’s a world, not just a stage spray-painted a single color. If you’re devoting the time and energy to developing a detailed and believable setting, then the process of creation will organically unfold in ways you never expected. One consequence is a world far more intricate and diverse that that required to support any one campaign—even a campaign which moves through a variety of regions and moods as the story progresses.

Thus the ability to support a whole range of campaigns is an emergent property of the process of developing the world. The more thought and effort you put into it, the more possibilities will appear.

Again, I'm not saying that you should limit yourself to thinking only about one campaign with one plotline and one party, I'm saying that the minimum bar is much lower for a homebrew campaign.

I'm currently running a game that's basically "Game of Thrones meets Eberron" (and if that sounds like a tonal clash it would be hard to build a setting around, well, yeah, I'm never letting my group talk me into that again :smallwink:) where my group and I did some collaborative setting-building upfront for the major countries, the Seven Kingdoms or Five Nations equivalents: I basically wrote up a bunch of Mad Libs-style prompts for various aspects of the nations (economic, military, cultural, magical, etc.), the group assigned everything to the various countries and added things like names and major races, and I came up with coherent countries based on those prompts.

Now, the campaign begun shortly after a three-way war (along the lines of the Last War meets the War of Five Kings) between nations T, R, and M1 called a ceasefire, and the current status is that parts of T are occupied by M1 and the government of T is working with R to liberate those territories. Because the party is based in T, has taken several missions to M and R, and frequently interacts with movers and shakers of all three nations, I've written and shared a lot of lore on those three nations at this point. The other four nations (G, Z, M2, and K) have featured much less prominently; they recently interacted with a bunch of M2 nobles without actually going there, a few characters have come from G backstory-wise, and K and Z are still basically total mysteries.

Because of the way things are shaping up, it's entirely possible that I could go the entire campaign without doing more than dropping the occasional tidbit about K and Z every few sessions and everything would turn out fine, and if T ends up more detailed than M1 and R end up more detailed than M2 and G then that's totally fine as well. I want to detail them more, since that lets me use more plot hooks involving those nations, lets PCs come from those nations, and so on, but I don't have to. And if I were to run a second campaign in the same setting I could start in T again and slowly flesh things out again as needed.

Whereas if I were writing this up as a published setting, I'd have to write up all of the nations with roughly the same level of detail since I have no idea where a DM might start their campaign, which nations DMs and PCs would gravitate to more, and so on. I'd need to have things like secret foreign factions all figured out ahead of publication instead of just one session before I introduce them to the party. I'd need to consider building in a few dozen (at least) antagonist factions and associated NPCs and plot hooks at various levels and appealing to various player types, as opposed to the handful I'm using for this particular campaign. Now, I happen to have come up with a bunch of antagonist factions--including a half-dozen continent-spanning assassins guilds--in the course of play, but those weren't necessary for this particular campaign--the players could have chosen to pursue a different mission and the assassins would have come up much later, if at all--in the way they would be for a published setting.

[Nifft]

Well, that guess would be incorrect. I own a fairly large number of Eberron sourcebooks, including Dragonmarked. My disappointment with the setting is a product of deep familiarity with it. I guess you need to go deeper.


Dragonmark Focus items aren't really any better than regular magic items, and they still require you to have Dragonmarked operators. The fact that they need Dragonmarked operators is what justifies the continent-spanning trade empires made up of people with those Marks.

The items are significantly better than regular magic items, especially the big immobile ones (e.g. Creation Forge).


So what? They still work on the same pre-industrial paradigm that regular magic items work on. Dragonmark Focus items are unlimited-use, since they are powered by daily SLA charges, not by limited-use charges.

Eberron is about infrastructure which can be built up.


Also, Eberron is still using the standard magic item creation rules. You certainly could imagine a system where we tracked factors of production and input availability, and in such a system having access to cheap supplies might be useful. But Eberron doesn't do that. At the PC scale, it certainly does do that.


Which is another problem with the setting: it centers a bunch of economic questions without addressing the steaming pile of nonsense that is the standard economics rules (or rather, lack of rules). This doesn't really make sense though... it's like you're looking at Vampire: the Masquerade, and you notice that vampires can drive cars, so you want the Vampire book to go into detail about how to build a car, and how to create the financial infrastructure to support an automotive industry, and to go into oil prospecting and petroleum refining.

The Vampire game does have cars and petroleum, but it's not intended that you nit-pick everything about those elements in your vampire game. You can travel and do stunts with a car, you can take damage from a gasoline fire, and that's the sort of stuff the game should discuss.

The D&D game does have airships and Dragonmarked Houses, but it's not intended that you nit-pick everything about those elements in your D&D game. You can do exploration and swashbuckling with an airship, and you can interact politically with a Dragonmarked House, and that's the sort of stuff the game should discuss.