Eberron: Forge of the Artificer is a new kind of product for Wizards of the Coast - an expansion to an existing Dungeons & Dragons rulebook. The new Eberron sourcebook is billed as an "exhaustive supplement" to the 2019 Eberron: Rising From the Last War and frequently references the book when mentioning Eberron lore and locale. Although billing the new book as an expansion frees the designers from having to rehash old lore, it feels like a bit of a misstep to not reintroduce the campaign setting for new players jumping into D&D for a first time thanks to the 2024 revised Fifth Edition ruleset. However, Forge of the Artificer firmly sticks with its intended scope of rejiggering Eberron specific player options for 2024 rules, while also introducing new Bastions material, beefed up airship rules, and some campaign guidelines. The book isn't a home run like the pair of Forgotten Realms rulebooks released last month, but it's still a solid investment provided you're already familiar with Eberron or have ready access to Rising From the Last War.
Eberron: The Golden Stepchild of D&D
As someone who discovered D&D in Fifth Edition, Eberron has always had a strange fit to D&D. I'm familiar with Eberron's history - it emerged as the winner of a contest seeking out a brand new Fantasy Setting for the game and was supported extensively for Third Edition and Fourth Edition. Eberron is very different from other D&D worlds, but not in a bad way. The fantasy steampunk/noir themes allow for very different stories to be told within D&D, and it also birthed the Artificer, a unique class that stands apart from other D&D classes because of how tied it is to the Eberron setting. While the Artificer can be used in non-Eberron campaigns, it's hard not to bleed elements of Eberron into a campaign that features an Artificer character. Eberron is a unique jewel within D&D's catalog of worlds, with Wizards' treatment of the world holding it apart from other D&D worlds.
However, I do feel like Eberron hasn't evolved or grown much since its 2004 debut, and that remains true for Forge of the Artificer. The fact that the book so extensively references a 6-year old book when referencing its lore speaks pretty clearly that Eberron is a rather static pattern. While other campaign settings (such as the Forgotten Realms or Ravenloft) have seen plenty of updates, but Eberron's 2025 updates are rather muted by comparison. Dragonmarks, once largely confined to certain species, can now be found on characters of any species, and the Khoravar species has emerged as a way to further scrub the idea of "half-species" from D&D without discarding any of Eberron's rich lore.
I am curious how Wizards treats Eberron in the future. It seems doubtful that we'll ever get an Eberron-specific adventure, but it does feel like there's still a lot of meat left on the proverbial bone, even if Wizards doesn't want to advance the world in any way. The addition of a much needed fifth subclass for the Artificer is a start, but I can't help but wonder whether Wizards will leave the Artificer to languish for another five years, similar to the stretch between Tasha's Cauldron of Everything and this book. It would nice to see Eberron receive continued support, especially as Wizards does treat the campaign setting differently than anything else in its catalogue. However, I'm a bit doubtful given that Wizards has limited design resources and only so many physical releases per year.
Don't Call Them Campaign Frames
I wish I could really provide more substantive thoughts on the player-facing options in this book, but everything here seems just fine to me. The Dragonmarks feats all follow a specific design pattern (add a D4 when making a specific kind of check, plus cast two spells without a spell slot once per Long Rest), and the Artificer looks to be largely in line with what we saw in the Unearthed Arcana. The Cartographer received some tweaks in response to the playtesting, although I feel it's still an underbaked subclass in terms of power level. The updated species seem to be pretty similar to the 2019 versions, just shifted around to fit within 2024 rules. Everything here seems just....fine, mostly because (save for the Cartographer and a couple of Backgrounds) it's all very similar to what we've seen before.
As for the rest of the book, the thing that jumped out to me most were the campaign outlines found in Chapters 4-6. The overall chapters provide some deeper guidance on how to run various kinds of campaigns within Eberron, ranging from pulpy investigators to conflict between Dragonmarked houses to archeological discoveries. Each chapter has a few condensed outlines of potential campaigns that lays out the general story beats of a campaign while leaving the specifics up to the DM to run. We saw something similar in Forgotten Realms: Adventures in Faerun. I can't help but wonder whether these are going to be a hallmark of the revised 2024 rulebooks alongside the new plug and play one-page adventures we've seen in the Dungeon Master's Guide and Adventures in Faerun. I like the example campaign idea, as it shows the general pace of an extended campaign without actually dictating too much of it. The Rival Adventurers outline is probably the most useful of these, as it lays out how a team of rival adventurers grows in power (via example statblocks) as they progress through the campaign. I just hope they don't replace the full length campaign product, which are valuable tools even if the quality of the campaigns have dipped in recent years.
All in all, Eberron: Forge of the Artificer is a weird product. It's not bad by any stretch, especially for the $30 price point, but I hope products that lean into 5+ year old products don't become a trend in D&D's catalog. I also think that this half-book demonstrates that Wizards doesn't really know how to build off of Eberron beyond the Artificer class itself. In a perfect world, Eberron would be getting a treatment similar to the Forgotten Realms, with video games, books, and RPG products helping to grow it. However, I don't feel Wizards sees Eberron as anything more than a curiosity, given its treatment this year.
