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.

 

[Onslaught]

Feedback on the test material, plus math, mainly.

I can't believe there was such a rarsh feedack on those things. Actually, they were an evolution from what they published in the first UA, more in line with the setting, and I remember mostly positive feedback online when Wayfinders was released.

Also, I don't get the "math".

I'm not a terribly big fan of the race changes, but I also see that they wanted to unite mechanics and get everything to cohere to 5e design standards.

So... now we have new Sacred Cows in D&D 5e, I guess.
Some of the changes are for the better though, when they just reference a spell that does what an ability was doing and point out differences.
However, the bads outweight the good IMHO.

Changelings IMO got hit the hardest because there's too many DMs that don't know how to handle at-will-but-weaker disguise self. Makes me want to write something for the dmsguild, stick in some feats that add back the persona expertise and unsettling visage, call it a day.

Yes... one of the main complains about Changelling from UA was that the race was way weaker than other races. The revised version from Wayfinders kinda fixed that.

I think changelings probably work better for a game heavy on the social tier, light on combat tier.

They do. But now they kind suck in combat tier.

This was covered in a recent Manifest Zone podcast with Keith Baker.

I wasn't aware, thanks for sharing!

Essentially, the version of warforged seen in Wayfinders was the result of a last-minute change.

That's sad.

Integrated Protection also interacts awkwardly with any other game element that references armour.

I think they sorted that out well in various Sage Advices and Twitter.
Integrated Protection really doesn't work well with Magic Armor... but shouldn't be that hard to write a way to improve IP magically, in a way similar to Docents.
That's why I call it bad game design.

Ypu can always use the UA Warforged as a unique model of the species.

I use D&D Beyond in my campaigns, both as a player and as DM.
There I won't have this option, because the great UA Warforged is going to be substituted by the bad one from Rise.

Plus changes in Dragonmarks... I somehow feel they got more stuff than they should with expanded spell list, don't know how that affects the game ballance. I think that wasn't even tested.

Also, lore wise, Dragonmarks should be focused in daily stuff and not combat stuff (like Hunter's Mark), so powers should improve the character's abilities in Exploration and Socialization.

 

[Shardstone]

Question: is the Ring of Siberys visible in the sky of Eberron? I wasn't able to find a clear answer in the book.

 

[Von Ether]

This was covered in a recent Manifest Zone podcast with Keith Baker. Essentially, the version of warforged seen in Wayfinders was the result of a last-minute change. Originally, Integrated Protection was going to be tied into each subrace, so that Envoys had the equivalent of light armour, Skirmishers had medium armour (I may have those two the wrong way round), and Juggernauts had heavy armour. At the last minute they separated out Integrated Protection, but kept the subraces, and that left the subraces significantly unbalanced.

Integrated Protection also interacts awkwardly with any other game element that references armour.

The solution they went with was to remove the potential imbalance by removing the subraces, and to make warforged armour interact more easily with the rest of the game by explicitly making it actual armour.

Tweaking armor for 5e (and D&D in general) is tricky for a game designer.

Esper Genesis, a scifi game based on the 5e engine, has the high velocity weapon damage for guns. To stay 5e compatible, natural armor and any armor negates it. (Most home games house rule that to natural and pieces of modern/scifi armor negate it.) Either way, to make sure Esper casters don't become Swiss cheese, there's also a cheap shield gizmo that gives no AC bonus but also negates high velocity. Thus keeping D&D armor sacrosanct.

 

[Onslaught]

Question: is the Ring of Siberys visible in the sky of Eberron? I wasn't able to find a clear answer in the book.

Yes it is : )

Here's some art:

 

[ChaosOS]

Question: is the Ring of Siberys visible in the sky of Eberron? I wasn't able to find a clear answer in the book.

Yes it is. The night sky is pretty wild and I'm sad we've never gotten official art for it - twelve moons plus the Ring.

 

[Onslaught]

Yes it is. The night sky is pretty wild and I'm sad we've never gotten official art for it - twelve moons plus the Ring.

There's some interesting fan art revolving around it, like this:

 

[Von Ether]

I can't believe there was such a rarsh feedack on those things. Actually, they were an evolution from what they published in the first UA, more in line with the setting, and I remember mostly positive feedback online when Wayfinders was released.

I'm not surprised. Warforged seem to be one of those concepts that really make some DMs nervous and thus the more mechanically weaker the better - they hope. Just last week, I chatted with a fellow who despised 3.5 warforged for deactivating instead of dying. He felt that "taking the fear of dying away" undid any "tension" (I think he meant suspense) from combat. I tried to explain how there's not much difference if a warforged's pal can't bring the body parts home. (Also nothing says, "Run!" like a new monster that rips into the Warforged fighter, and then there's the fun of watching PCs scramble to pick up most of the pieces before GTFOing.) I'm sure he's much happier with the new rules.

Just a month ago, I bumped into a guy who hated guns in D&D with a fiery passion. Then hearing his tale of woe, his BEG being one-shotted by a gun, I realized he was talking about an AD&D game. Thus all guns, forever, shall never be in his D&D.

To round out the list, I think you could put psionics in there too. (Drow PCs dropped off this list ages ago -- mostly because lots of today's GM used to run Drow PCs.)

Yep. I'd say the list is Guns, Psionics and Warforged in that order. These three will always have nervous armchair theorist, over thinking and over nerfing more out of the fear that such things will ruin their games because they can't say "no" to a player. OTOH, lots of players are really pushy.

One GM I knew, handled such things oddly. He said if he had to have one "new" thing that wasn't bog standard D&D, he'd have to admit all things from the setting into his game. Thus I couldn't have a Shifter, even when there was a sidebar for explaining where they could come from in a non-Eberron world -- because he didn't like airships?!?

 

[Parmandur]

I can't believe there was such a rarsh feedack on those things. Actually, they were an evolution from what they published in the first UA, more in line with the setting, and I remember mostly positive feedback online when Wayfinders was released.

Also, I don't get the "math"

The math comment was about their design process of balancing the options: their process involves designing things a bit more powerful, and pairing back as they collect data and crunch the numbers. UA releases are fairly early in the balancing phase of design, so tend to be a bit overpowered (easier to Nerf based on feedback than to buff, basically).

Don't get confused by forum or Reddit chatter: WotC has huge survey data that helps them in their refinement process, in addition to their rigorous number crunching process. I recommend listening to the old Happy Fun Hour with Mearls for more insight into their process.

 

[Weiley31]

What the guy SHOULD'VE done, if he was that butt hurt over the BBEG getting taken out by a gun, was have the BBEG fall down, but then before completely going prone, spin around and reveal in the up close camera shot, that the bullet grazed his cheek. Then the second phase of the boss fight would've commenced from there.

Just cuz the dice say a bad guy is SUPPOSED to die due to a lucky hit, doesn't mean you let the dice rule the direction/outcome of the planned story.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I was looking at google news which took me D&D Beyonds website for the book and as of about 3PM EST people were still having trouble. Might be fixed now I cant say. Ive had problems with the free version before so I dont use it anymore.

I mean, day one bugs are literally common across all software types.

The program is solid and incredibly useful.