D&D 5E (2024) What's New with the Artificer in Eberron: Forge of the Artificer


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They are basically all Humanoid NPC stat blocks. Ones for each Dragonmark house, the Drow from the one jungle area I can’t remember the name of, some Boromar and Daask enemies, etc. Pretty sure every stat block in the book is humanoid.
Which fits well enough considering this is meant to pair with Rising from the Last War: that book had a lot of stat blocks that hold up well, and the campaign frameworks here are fairly humanoid-centric.

Interesting that we get both Llolthite Drow and the totally different Xen'drick Drow in quick succession, with neither being core in the MM.
 


There’s some very cool new facilities, including an Artificer specific forge that can craft magic items and another forge that can even craft a Warforged Titan.

And yes there’s rules for having an Airship or even a Lightning Rail be your bastion.
How...does the Lightning Rail Bastion work?
 

Like what, in this case?
Eberron encouraging mobile bastions is a strong fit with the setting.
Forgotten Realms Feats are quite storybased, not mere power nobs.
Eberron leans even heavier into the House concept for Backgrounds and Feats, where Realms did similar for Factions.

There are two forge Bastions that fit Eberron.

While core 2024 is rather bland when it comes to story, the setting books do an excellent job demonstrating how a home game can add story through simple mechanical functions.
 


Artificer

1st: Tinkers Magic: The ability to create minor items is ok but if you have your tinkers tools then I assume you will have everything else you need so I doubt this will be used. The big win here is the mending cantrip. While I have used the ability to leave messages from the previous version of Tinkers Magic, I find the mending cantrip more useful.

2nd: Replicate Magic Item: This is the major place where I feel that they dropped the ball. The lowering of recipes known from 12 to 8 is a misstep. They need the ability to learn new recipes from either studying magical items themselves of swapping recipes with other Artificers. This would give them a great deal of versatility and ways for the DM to give them extra treasure rewards.

3rd: Right tool for the job: This has been completely removed and turned into a recipe for a magical item without giving you an extra use of said ability.

6th: Tool Expertise: Tools already grant you advantage when used with a skill, so this ability was removed.

6th: Magic Item Tinker: Gives you the ability to spend spell slots to recharge magical items, to swap out a magical item for another once per day, and the ability to get a spell slot back by sacrificing a magical item once per day. Overall, this is a good upgrade at 6th level. Swapping out an item for a different one is ok but with such a small number of recipes known it is circumstantial. Since in my opinion it is more than likely that that you will have a charged or limited use item being able to get a spell slot by sacrificing that item once you have used it is means that at 6th level you just get an extra 1st or 2nd level spell. It would be rare that recharging a charge is worth a spell slot so I doubt this will see that much use.

10th: Magical Item Adept: The loss of the reduced gold cost and time required is another misstep with the new Artificer.

14th: Magical Item Savant: Once again we lose a nice quality of life feature, the ability to ignore requirements for magical items, for an additional use of Flash of Genius per short rest. While there are only 9 magical items that I could find that have such restrictions besides scrolls, I still feel that this was not necessary.

20th: Soul of Artifice: The ability to add +6 to all saves was too powerful so I understand needing to reduce it. Instead getting back all uses of Flash of Genius at a short rest instead of just one does mean that as long as you can use your reaction you will probably succeed in all saves you make.

Overall, I do find this to be an improvement over the previous edition, but the loss of 4 recipes (infusions) known as well as the need to replicate your previous 3rd level ability costing you a recipe an item slot and an attunement slot means that you lose almost as much as you gain. - note I believe the 20th level ability needed to be weakened so don't count this as a lose.
 

There’s some very cool new facilities, including an Artificer specific forge that can craft magic items and another forge that can even craft a Warforged Titan.
If it doesn't say everything about the 2024 Artificer that they get a specific facility solely to get other people to actually make things instead of themselves...
 

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