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.

 

[Azzy]

BTW, I can't wait until this is delivered to my doorstep. I'm chomping at the bit to read this and start plotting a campaign.

 

[DWChancellor]

I'm hearing a lot of good things about this book! I can't wait for mine to arrive in the mail.

Then I can get started reskinning My Little Pony (River 7) adventures into a magebred unicorn campaign for my kids... my daughter has hit the unicorn phase hard.

 

[tetrasodium]

@Mistwell @Azzy , I've just been calling it "Rising" & the eberron discord seems to mostly be doing the same thing. Sometimes acronyms are just unneeded & an abbreviation is better, this seems like one of those cases & rising works well since there are no other books that it could be confused with.

Eberron is 100% part of The Great Wheel in 5E.
The gods are real. Make of that what you will.

Your wording is extremely misleading. The disasters inflicted on eberron & darksun in 4e*, their respective communities pushed back in outrage. While there may have been some fans of FR who liked it for being easier to adapt those settings to be like FR , the setting pollution had the significant downside of ruining too much of what made those settings special.

In 5e wotc is taking a different approach where they accept certain settings have baselines that are too violently antithetical to FR & given that the great wheel at this point is massively colored or polluted by how FR handles various things it's best to just seal those settings off. Eberron has the ring of siberyis that makes its crystal sphere too distant/hidden/locked away/etc & the unique isolated planar structure it has always had.

* I don't care to argue what those disasters were or if any in particular were enough to qualify as a "disaster", their respective communities could cover that best if it's a topic of curiosity,

 

[Mistwell]

But then, to play devil's advocate, there will be those confused that it could reference Wayfinders or an older edition book, or just the setting itself rather than a book.

As this includes everything in Wayfinders, and Wayfinders has a handy abbreviation that everyone understands known as WAYFINDERS, I am pretty sure we can keep everyone well informed.

The problem with claims of confusion is I seriously think more than 50% of people gloss over the long string acronyms and just don't really know what book is being referred to. The idea that, in a 5e board discussion, more people would be confused by "Eberron" or "Rising" than RftLW or RFTLW, is kinda silly.

There is too much use of jargon already in this hobby. It becomes a form of gatekeeping, "Writing full of unfamiliar jargon is a struggle to parse, and perpetuates the curse of knowledge — the phenomenon where only insiders that know what you know can understand what you wrote at all."

 

[Azzy]

There is too much use of jargon already in this hobby. It becomes a form of gatekeeping, "Writing full of unfamiliar jargon is a struggle to parse, and perpetuates the curse of knowledge — the phenomenon where only insiders that know what you know can understand what you wrote at all."

This is certainly true. It's so extreme in Warhammer 40K boards that one forum automatically creates popup text for abbreviations to show what they're abbreviations for—and it still hasn't accounted for some abbreviations, leading even a longtime player like me to try and to suss out what a particular abbreviation is supposed to represent.

 

[Azzy]

@Mistwell @Azzy , I've just been calling it "Rising" & the eberron discord seems to mostly be doing the same thing. Sometimes acronyms are just unneeded & an abbreviation is better, this seems like one of those cases & rising works well since there are no other books that it could be confused with.

That works for me.

 

[Parmandur]

There is about 75 pages of advice on writing good/interesting villains, using different group/organizations/individuals/etc in a campaign & the various ways you could do so that shows just how horrifically lacking the dmg is in so many areas

Good post overall, but...this part amuses me, because the same guy is responsible for both the DMG and this section of RftLW (and Ravnica, which is also fantastic): James Wyatt did all of those charts and advice...

Thing about the DMG, it is trying to stick to a fairly generic stereotypical D&D set of tropes: Ravnica and Eberron are getting more specific in genre, and can therefore dive deeper.

 

[Yaarel]

that's not what the book says...

What does the book say? How does Eberron relate to the Great Wheel?

Personally, I hope the Great Wheel lacks existence.

 

[Parmandur]

What does the book say? How does Eberron relate to the Great Wheel?

Personally, I hope the Great Wheel lacks existence.

It is definitively states that Eberron exists in the Great Wheel cosmos, but is a sort of "pocket dimension" that is difficult to reach from other parts via normal means.

 

[Bolares]

The book puts Eberron in the Multiverse, but leaves the question of if it's acessible to the DM.