doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
See, to me, stuff like this veers too far into dystopia for dystopia’s sake to lead to a believable world.No it's not dark at all for eberron, there are a lot of extremely dark aspects like that either implied, explicitly called out, or just easy to string together if you spend a second thinking. IMHO the problem is less the dark direction than the fact that it omits the role of magewrights and such.
Lets say farmer macDonald breaks an axle on his wagon & as a result breaks his arm or leg while his farmhand Mick cracks his skull. The broken arm is going to a village herbalist magewright or similar where he gets a magic cast* that lets him function with pain until the limb can heal. First the Farmhand gets an herbal paste* applied to his broken skull that will help the bones knit back together. Second he's given teas* & maybe even potions that will help with the fact that he has a major concussion & possibly brain damage, those teas & potions* have no effect on anything else & might even have some nasty side effects. A week of bedrest & drinking these brews later Mick goes back to work but still has side effects from the treatment itself.. Maybe he'll have weak muscles & arthritis till he dies or visits a jorasco branch with a coupon. Jorasco doesn't print those coupons in the newspaper out of the goodness of their heart... They print that full page coupon because they literally bribed the paper not to print a story that shows them in a bad light and it's the slow season. Jorasco knows that Mick & others like him will never look at the price and say "I want to fix this more than I want to take the magewright's asprin equivalent for this side effect"... but a coupon that bring it down from a month's pay to a week's pay is enough to give a Jorasco heir who might otherwise be doing nothing productive something to do for a few minutes or hours.
* Possibly outright made by Cannith Jorasco or vadalis if not with components that were likely made by one.
Even an (good) actual cyberpunk world has stuff that is just good and useful advancement, because if it doesn’t it ends up like 1984. Ie, so dystopian and bleak that it comes across as purely an excercise in creating a wildly hyperbolic version of a dystopian future in order to make a point.
There is 1st level magic that can help the farmer’s hand without lifelong side effects. The implication that Jorasco and their cohorts instead supply local guild healers with medicine that sucks to use and barely works so that they’ll take the bait on newspaper coupons, and the local healers just go along with it, is just...conspiracy theory level stuff.