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.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

I hate FR with the passion of a thousand suns because of how it forces it's lore into places that it has no business being, I've not noticed any instances of eberron stuff being shifted about or getting stomped to make room for the FR way.

That's still not the case Tetrasodium. The Baselines are not FR, FR just uses most of the baselines.

 

[Azzy]

Why do we have to have FR consume every Eberron thread?

 

[R_J_K75]

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

The program is solid and incredibly useful.

I understand the whole bugs, patches and fixes are a necessary evil based solely on the fact that theyre building one software for a customer base who are using different OS, hardware, software and browsers on their machines. But Im not big on re-buying material I own already because I still buy mostly hard copies. But for the price of the core books I may give it a chance if its really as good as people here have said. Does anyone now if the problem with the new Eberron book is fixed and if the paid version is more stable than the free version?

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Why do we have to have FR consume every Eberron thread?

It tends to be a habit of Tetrasodium. He did the same thing thing on the Giant in the Playground forums. He's really into Eberron and really against FR.

 

[R_J_K75]

Why do we have to have FR consume every Eberron thread?

If I had to guess its probably because it probably has the most material of any campaign setting so its what everything else will be measure against, compared to or used as an example when talking about other settings.

 

[Vael]

Ok. So it wouldn't change how the game plays. It just messes with the mystery of "Are there really gods out there... somewhere?"

The gods who are the basis of the religions of Eberron may or may not exist (except for the 3 dragons, apparently).



Ok. This really is a thing that would only bother previous Eberroners... Eberronites?... Eberroneeze? hrmph.

Which, admittedly, is a thing.

One of the features for me, with Eberron, was its different take on everything DnD. I don't want to start a setting war, but I'll fully confess that I find Eberron feels fresher than FR or Greyhawk. And one of those features is the ambiguity of the setting, which filters into the religion itself. Do the Sovereign Host exist? Which form is correct? Are the legends of Eberron's creation true, or just a story?

Now, because of this built in ambiguity, and there's a buy in to disregard anything that I find really vexing. And the book itself points that out. And I get the desire to fit Eberron in with the larger Multiverse, if there is going to be a multi-planar sourcebook/adventure in 2020, it'd be a shame to leave Eberron out.

 

[ad_hoc]

From what I understand, the DM plans the ‘beat’. But only the players decide the ‘response’.

The players ‘response’ becomes a new context. A new beat might or might not make sense now.

So, when the DM takes the player-decided response into account, it can alter or even interrupt an upcoming planned beat.

But that isn't what Weiley is saying.

They said that they do not allow planned beats to be interrupted. They change the results of actions and rolls so that their story remains intact.

 

[Perun]

The Great Wheel wasn't even FR canon in 2004 when Eberron was created. FR had a "Great Tree" planar model of its own during 3e, totally at variance with the Great Wheel which still remained the default for Greyhawk and the edition as a whole. In fact, in the last 20 years, FR has only used the Great Wheel in the last five, and before that the Great Wheel was its own setting in Planescape. Furthermore, Dark Sun and Ravenloft were slotted into the Great Wheel during those Planescape days.

As a result, I'm curious at what date FR "consumed" the Great Wheel.

It couldn't have been in 1e, as FR only existed as a setting at the very end of the edition.
It couldn't have been in 2e, as Planescape was its own setting.
It couldn't have been in 3e, as the FR had a planar system of its own that wasn't the Great Wheel.
It couldn't have been in 4e, as no one used the Great Wheel at that point.

You could potentially say it's happened over the last few years (although that's highly debatable), but all the settings you mentioned were created either at times where Planescape (which is very different than FR in theme) was the default for the Great Wheel, or FR didn't even use the Great Wheel at all. If anything, it's nostalgia for Planescape, Spelljammer, and before them, Greyhawk, which was the progenitor of the Great Wheel after all, that causes people to want to fit square pegs of settings into the round holes of the Great Wheel.

The Great Wheel was the default cosmology in 1e and 2e. I'd go so far as to say that it was the only supported cosmology, but I'm not 100% sure about DL (I'm thinking of Dragonlance Adventures harback here -- a sort of 1e/2e hybrid, IIRC).

I'm fairly sure that no D&D setting in 2e used anything other than the Great Wheel. Later 2e did some cosmetic changes to the GW (mostly names of the planes -- Nirvana becoming Mechanus, Plane of Concordant Opposition becoming the Outlands, Happy Hunting Grounds changing their name to Beastlands, etc., and adding more native planar races (guardinals, eladrin, rilmani, etc.), but in essence it was the same Great Wheel of 1e AD&D.

As far as I know, FR only started using a different cosmology in 3e. I seem to remember mentions of how the "original" FR (Greenwood's) used different comsology, but got shoehorned into the Great Wheel when it was published as an AD&D setting.

 

[Parmandur]

This is why some settings need to explicitly wall themselves off from the great wheel. does it bother you that much that a setting explicitly makes it hard for the "default setting"(lets be honest, that is FR) to poison its own lore with lore from the "default setting" of FR instead of explicitly accepting that some other setting that makes no attempt at compatibility says that all other settings have a welcome mat down for it... or are you just debating for debate?

The default setting is Planescape, really, the one setting that gets detailed extensively in the PHB and DMG.

I don't mind that people have the option to have their version of a particular Setting be separate, but I like stupid comic book-y crossovers, same as I like magic robots and dinosaurs.

 

[Weiley31]

But that isn't what Weiley is saying.

They said that they do not allow planned beats to be interrupted. They change the results of actions and rolls so that their story remains intact.

Next thing ya know, your gonna say that the one party member, who is supposed to defeat his sworn blood enemy and rival at that point of the story, can't be given an auto natural 20 critical hit to emphasis the point that it's the final strike that kills the rival.

Especially after said rival gets two second winds to refill his health at the start of each boss phase when you deplete the rival's health each time.