Eberron inconsistencies

[Aaron]

You all seem to have missed this.

That nicely solves the matter.

I'm satisfied for the PrCs question too.

So, where are the other (supposed) inconsistencies?

Did you find some in your Eberron campaigns?

 

[TarionzCousin]

You all seem to have missed this.

To be fair, if [MENTION=607]Klaus[/MENTION] would just write in English instead of Brazilian Portuguese, it would be easier to understand him.

To the OP, it sounds like maybe your players want to play in Epicberron™ instead.

 

[RainOfSteel]

They aren't called 'conductor stones' for nothing... anyone attempting to mess with them will get a nice electrical shock for their trouble.

Eberron Campaign Setting, p.271, "Alone, a single conductor stone has no peculiar properties except for glowing with a bright internal light (the equivalent of a sunrod). When two conductor stones are within 5 feet of each other, they create a magical conduit allowing rapid travel through the space between the stones."

The rest of the description strongly implies that the stone-stone interactions at five feet, along with associated lightning arcs, come when a train and its coaches glide over the top of the rail, not between stones on the rail itself.

So, people can walk up to the rail and remove a single stone without risk; unless there is additional information somewhere about this.

Of course, there is always the remote possibility that the stones on the rail are all five feet from each other, arcing lighting between each other all the time up and down the rail. I just somehow doubt it. One thousand miles of rail would require 1,056,000 conductor stones. Also, it would imply massive continuous energy generation on an immense scale; I did not find anything that implies there is lightning going up and down the rails when no train is present.

 

[Bluenose]

House Orien's Lightning Rails, the rails themselves, are primarly built using conductor stones, wondrous magical items. Laid out along thousands of miles of tracks. Magic items. Out there in the wilderness along the rails.

People would steal them. In droves. They would steal entire lines. Just to sell back to House Orien through fences, or to anyone who didn't want the rails running. No matter how many examples House Orien made, there would be hordes of desperate people willing to do it because the act of the theft itself, out in the middle of nowhere, was very low risk. That would pretty much be the end of the rails.

I did not see where the Eberron Campaign Setting book explains why this does not occur. Did I miss it? Did some other book mention it?

Are they big? They have to support the weight of a lightning rail car, which can carry a lot of people. So it wouldn't be like removing a paving slab, more like taking one of the sarsen stones from Stonehenge; a stone that's also been buried in the ground so only the top shows. This is not something that's going to be easy to do. And if you do a lot of it, House Orien has security guards of it's own, who can teleport around the countryside, and can probably get help from the other Dragonmarked houses to track you down.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Stealing conductor stones would wreck the local economy, and I think they're too big to be moved easily, so only a few criminal conspiracies would steal them.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's a protection racket against Orien going on. Threaten to steal a few, which would disrupt the trains, and make some cash. Actually disrupt the system with lots of theft, and expect to be hunted down by mercenaries, like sentinel marshals, monsters... or PCs.

 

[RainOfSteel]

Check the art on p.132 of the Eberron Campaign Setting book to see some conductor stones. They're easily small enough for one person to pick up.

They do look like they're fairly close, but lightning only occurs between the stones and the train.

I guess House Cannith has some factories that churn out truly amazing numbers of magic items.

EDIT---------

The people stealing the stones wouldn't care about the economy, local, or otherwise.

 

[megamania]

Maybe it's just me but the issue dosen't seem to be the campaign world but the players. It sounds like they just enjoy "breaking" worlds.


It's your game. Make it work.


I had a player with an insane pick pocket ability. He was making a killing in the richer areas of Sharn.

So I decided House Kundarak created a security coin. It was expensive to make but only the rich would have it. If picked, it allowed security to track the coin. It also, if merchants paid the price, could alert them if a picked coin was on the person of a "customer".

After an hour of constantly dodging the law I explained the coin. Ended the stuff immediatly.

 

[Bluenose]

Check the art on p.132 of the Eberron Campaign Setting book to see some conductor stones. They're easily small enough for one person to pick up.

Yes, but is that just the tip of the stone, with the rest buried under the ground? They've got to support the weight of multi-ton vehicles, and while we can say, "yes, but magic!", there's actually a perfectly sensible reason to make them large and bury most of them. It makes stealing them a much harder job. And it helps explains why House Orien is having difficulty replacing the bits of line that were broken in the Last War. Yes, it's expensive, but they had millions of the things before the war so they can't be too expensnive. The cost and difficulty comes from shipping thousands of heavy conductor stones to the new sites and paying the engineers and labourers needed to set them in place.

 

[jimmifett]

People would steal them. In droves. They would steal entire lines. Just to sell back to House Orien through fences, or to anyone who didn't want the rails running. No matter how many examples House Orien made, there would be hordes of desperate people willing to do it because the act of the theft itself, out in the middle of nowhere, was very low risk. That would pretty much be the end of the rails.

Until the fences are hung, flayed along the tracks by Orien as an example to the theives. Orien would hire inquisitives to hunt down the thieves from the site of the missing stone. Flay them and nail them up. Lets not make the mistake that a house is a modern earthbound corporation. It is a guild, or several guilds merged together, run by a family that only the dragonmarked can join as made men, that survived centuries of competition before they emerged on top. The houses are essentially unions run by the mob. They put on a nice public face, but it's all about control and money.

Sure, you may steal a conductor stone or two, but the next thing you know, one moment you're laying in bed, the next you're teleported in your jammies to a secret enclave by Mr Kobayashi to meet Keyser Sozey, and he is very disappointed with you.

 

[MarkB]

House Orien's Lightning Rails, the rails themselves, are primarly built using conductor stones, wondrous magical items. Laid out along thousands of miles of tracks. Magic items. Out there in the wilderness along the rails.

People would steal them. In droves. They would steal entire lines. Just to sell back to House Orien through fences, or to anyone who didn't want the rails running. No matter how many examples House Orien made, there would be hordes of desperate people willing to do it because the act of the theft itself, out in the middle of nowhere, was very low risk. That would pretty much be the end of the rails.

I did not see where the Eberron Campaign Setting book explains why this does not occur. Did I miss it? Did some other book mention it?

Good steel was reasonably valuable in the Old West. Cut and shaped timber was a nice resource too, for that matter. That didn't stop the railroad companies from successfully laying track across an entire continent, through hundreds of miles of wilderness, without having people coming along and ripping it back up.

In the end, the railroad companies could bring force to bear upon saboteurs, and for most communities, access to the railway network was by far the more valuable commodity, so they'd police attacks upon it themselves.

I don't see any reason why those factors wouldn't apply equally well through most of civilised Khorvaire.

Funnily enough, it's more of a problem these days than in older times, as metal prices continue to climb. In Britain, the railway companies are finding it expensive to keep some stretches maintained and functional, because thieves rip out the copper cabling attached to signals and controls, to sell as scrap metal.