D&D 5E Eberron Is Here Today!

Eberron: Rising from the Last War hits local gamestores today. Eberron creator Keith Baker talks on his blog about what's changed!

So, what's changed? The Mror Dwarves, races, Dragonmarks, the Mournland, Lady Illmarrow, monsters... but not guns!

And what's new? The artificer class, group patrons, warforged colossus, and scary monsters!

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Explore the lands of Eberron in this campaign sourcebook for the world’s greatest roleplaying game.

This book provides everything players and Dungeon Masters need to play Dungeons & Dragons in Eberron—a war-torn world filled with magic-fueled technology, airships and lightning trains, where noir-inspired mystery meets swashbuckling adventure. Will Eberron enter a prosperous new age, or will the shadow of war descend once again?

• Meld magic and invention to craft objects of wonder as an artificer—the first official class to be released for fifth edition D&D since the Player’s Handbook.
• Enter the world of Eberron in a 1st-level adventure set in Sharn, the City of Towers
• Dive straight into your pulp adventures with easy-to-use locations, complete with maps of train cars, battle-scarred fortresses, and fallen warforged colossi.
• Explore Sharn, a city of skyscrapers, airships, and intrigue and a crossroads for the world’s war-ravaged peoples.
• Flesh out your characters with a new D&D game element called a group patron—a background for your whole party.
• Explore 16 new race/subrace options including dragonmarks, which magically transform certain members of the races in the Player’s Handbook.
• Confront horrific monsters born from the world’s devastating wars.
• Prepare to venture into the Mournland, a mist-cloaked, corpse-littered land twisted by magic.

 

[ChaosOS]

The abbreviation I'm seeing most for the new book is RftLW or RFTLW.

Missing two arti subs plus the now-important Dwarf-Daelkyr connection makes it awkward to reccomend WGTE as a pure player book, but essentially yes this is WGTE++. It would've been nice if WGTE owners could get a discount code, but it's also worth recognizing that D&D at its core is a damn cheap hobby compared to many others and that WOTC isn't swimming in profits from D&D. Also, high sales on RFTLW mean it's more likely we could see more officially supported Eberron content/Keith could get better deals on his future Eberron supplements and not be purely dmsguild.

 

[Von Ether]

Maybe this is the end result of what I was afraid was going to happen with 5E and the emphasis on the Realms -- the setting is inseparable from the game in some people's minds.

Slight tangent from 17 years ago. A DM wanted to spice things up and thought if he put the next game up for a vote he could get buy in from the players for Savage Worlds. I told him that we'd end up playing FR. It gets better.

One player said he prefer his three game choices be; FR, Dragon Lance, or Greyhawk. When I told him that was all the same game just different settings, he got offended.

FR won the vote and the same player brought in boxes of FR stuff, just grinning that he was still getting play out of his 15 year old books. I left shortly after that since I had reached peak generic fantasy burn out.

 

[ChaosOS]

Slight tangent from 17 years ago. A DM wanted to spice things up and thought if he put the next game up for a vote he could get buy in from the players for Savage Worlds. I told him that we'd end up playing FR. It gets better.

One player said he prefer his three game choices be; FR, Dragon Lance, or Greyhawk. When I told him that was all the same game just different settings, he got offended.

FR won the vote and the same player brought in boxes of FR stuff, just grinning that he was still getting play out of his 15 year old books. Left shortly after that as I was in generic fantasy burn out mode.

Speaking of Savage Worlds.. Have you heard of the Eberron setting conversion by Kristian Serrano? (Guy that hosts the Manifest Zone podcast with Keith)

 

[Von Ether]

Speaking of Savage Worlds.. Have you heard of the Eberron setting conversion by Kristian Serrano? (Guy that hosts the Manifest Zone podcast with Keith)

Not that one, but to be fair it's a semi-popular conversion among my fellow savages.

 

[Seramus]

Eberron is 100% part of The Great Wheel in 5E.
The gods are real. Make of that what you will.

 

[Bolares]

Eberron is 100% part of The Great Wheel in 5E.
The gods are real. Make of that what you will.

that's not what the book says...

 

[ChaosOS]

Eberron is 100% part of The Great Wheel in 5E.
The gods are real. Make of that what you will.

I've seen that thrown around and I'm just not persuaded it's a terribly big deal - Ye old planescape faction that accuses great wheel gods of being fat outsiders is mechanically basically correct. The Sovereigns are still firmly mythology. Furthermore, the multiverse is presented as basically optional - you only have to include that if you want to! It'd be stupid for WOTC not to spend two paragraphs explaining how you could hook all their published material up via the multiverse for people who want to.

 

[tetrasodium]

A lot of what made Eberron in 3E so incredible was the singularity of vision forged through the contest with Keith on top of everything. Having read a lot of his Eberron posts through the years I was hoping he'd be given free reign to show that level of love.

Sounds like this might be closer to the 4E Eberron book which diluted the verve and energy of the 3E original and generally had poor art.

That's fine, as long as someone else did all the rules lifting for 5E conversion, I still have all of the 3E books. Kind of a lot of reading but... =)

No, it has a lot of awesome art, but it could have zero art & still could be one of the best eberron books so far.

• The patrons solve the problem of getting the group to have a reason to be working together and do so in a way that gives the gm all kinds of meaty hooks while giving the players some interesting avenues to explore/make use of while helping to shape things.
• There is about 75 pages of advice on writing good/interesting villains, using different group/organizations/individuals/etc in a campaign & the various ways you could do so that shows just how horrifically lacking the dmg is in so many areas
• There are no "spoilers". it doesn't say kaius is a vampire, it has a newspaper clipping about some scandal, how it was handled, & who caused it. Many of these news articles are things that might have been simple sidebars, but the newspaper clipping format to them is sort of a 4 dimensional thing packed with flavor that shows an issue/thing/bit of fluff developing in the world, shows how people view & react to it, and in many cases it shows what everybody "knows".
• It takes a lot of stuff that would previously require knowing this section of one book this section of another book, & a third section that may or not be in one of those first two books in order to put it together into a form where the implications click & does so in an easily digestible format a gm or player could quickly sink their teeth into.
• There are a lot of maps & descriptions of the stuff in those maps that show common things. One of the difficulties with eberron is that sometimes it can feel like trying to describe a mechanichs garage if cars were just fiction. Some examples are a planar observatory (think telescope observatory), an arcane workshop, an old dhakaani fortress, & many more. In addition to the maps, they all give a paragraph or six about all of the various interesting features you are likely to see in those kinds of places that are worthy of description (ie the dhakaani fortress has a cistern but there isn't much that needs to be said about a well.)

Keith's Influence is incredibly well felt throughout the book. Back in 4e I can remember an interview with one of the wotc folks (who shall remain nameless) where there was a line like "working with Keith has been great, he was always willing to make changes when we asked" & it showed. Rising however might as well be the opposite of that. I've had the book for about 4 days now & even though I hate FR with the passion of a thousand suns because of how it forces it's lore into places that it has no business being, I've not noticed any instances of eberron stuff being shifted about or getting stomped to make room for the FR way.

 

[Mistwell]

The abbreviation I'm seeing most for the new book is RftLW or RFTLW

Can't we just use Eberron? Must we use this silly string of letters which isn't faster to type than the actual word everyone knows without the insider baseball jargon?

 

[Azzy]

Can't we just use Eberron? Must we use this silly string of letters which isn't faster to type than the actual word everyone knows without the insider baseball jargon?

But then, to play devil's advocate, there will be those confused that it could reference Wayfinders or an older edition book, or just the setting itself rather than a book.