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.

 

[ChaosOS]

Fwiw, I think the 4e Eberron Campaign Guide is much maligned - outside of the planes section, it does a better job of conveying themes (SF is mostly a force of good! BoV isn't all just a crazy cult! Last War really scarred stuff!) than the original ECS, plus the dragonmarks chapter is indisputably better than the ECS' coverage, and I'd say even better than Rising's. 4e core races (Dragonborn, Tiefling, Eladrin) were handled well. Dragonmarks on any race is pretty explicitly a "You'd be the first person ever to break the trend", so I'd point more to bad design (shying away from asymmetrical race-restricted feats) than trying to break the setting.

 

[Parmandur]

Fwiw, I think the 4e Eberron Campaign Guide is much maligned - outside of the planes section, it does a better job of conveying themes (SF is mostly a force of good! BoV isn't all just a crazy cult! Last War really scarred stuff!) than the original ECS, plus the dragonmarks chapter is indisputably better than the ECS' coverage, and I'd say even better than Rising's. 4e core races (Dragonborn, Tiefling, Eladrin) were handled well. Dragonmarks on any race is pretty explicitly a "You'd be the first person ever to break the trend", so I'd point more to bad design (shying away from asymmetrical race-restricted feats) than trying to break the setting.

The 5E Dragonmarks as Race approach is pretty brilliant, and elegant.

 

[Vael]

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.

* 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,

I don't care to go deep on the issue, but I was pretty happy with 4e Eberron. Introducing the Feyspires to bring Eladrin into the setting was actually something I quite liked, and probably my favourite Eberron novel was the final book of the Thorn of Breland series which involved visiting a Feyspire.

And while I'm still digesting the Rising From the Last War, I'll point out that those Feyspires are on still on the 5e map.

I'll be back with a more in-depth review, but as a big Eberron fan, I gotta say, Xmas came early.

 

[tetrasodium]

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.

I wasn't saying the dmg was bad, just that the section in question shows a giant blank spot in the dmg.
No matter how many times people say it, "In the forgotten realms" is FR not "setting neutral", when they have to publish things like the "serving a pantheon, philosophy, or force"sidebar on xge18 because that section of the DMG* avoided making any references to settings where those things are not only common but "Completely Normal", it doesn't get to say that it's "Setting Neutral". Rising has some setting neutral stuff like "An espionage agency is $words$words$words" before launching into examples of specific ones & the benefits/kinds of quests/type of campaign/etc they create, but FR's baselines are too different to even pretend that a lot of those setting neutral sections are capable of fitting cleanly in FR. Put in perspective, it's such an obvious blank spot that the person doing the Rising preview kept saying things like "all this stuff should be in the dmg", "why is this not in the dmg", "this is awesome for dm's", etc

*There are many other examples, but that one happens to be the one so unflinchingly biased for FR's baselines to the exclusion of all else that you can see that glare from mars.

 

[Parmandur]

No matter how many times people say it, "In the forgotten realms" is FR not "setting neutral", when they have to publish things like the "serving a pantheon, philosophy, or force"sidebar on xge18 because that section of the DMG* avoided making any references to settings where those things are not only common but "Completely Normal", it doesn't get to say that it's "Setting Neutral".

XGtE is paraphrasing the DMG, which does discuss that...?

 

[tetrasodium]

XGtE is paraphrasing the DMG, which does discuss that...?

While true that those sections exist in the "gods of your world" section, the dmg examples in the types of religions that are normal in eberron but nonexistant in FR switch to real world examples rather than pointing at the eberron ones.

 

[dm4hire]

Am I the only one not happy with how the map was mounted in the book? My binding is horrible and if the book sees too much play that is where it will fall apart first. Annoys me when they bind an insert into the binding. There's no reason for it. Hot glue doesn't ruin the binding. Just saying.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

From what I can gather from Eberron Rising, I've devised a crude diagram of how the default interaction between the planes work:

 

[dave2008]

Lots of people missing my point, but I have a head cold and a stye and don't feel like typing out a long explantion of what I meant, so except this tldr and move on to something else pls.

FR is billed as the "You can include ANYTHING in this setting" in terms of types of magic, races, etc.

Eberron is much the same, but with a lot different flavor. ORcs are there, Elves are there, Dwarves are there, but everything is a lot different.

Has nothing to do with being generic. Pls stop trying to deconstruct my argument and then rebutting things I never said...

I don't care about Eberron or FR as settings, so I don't have any skin in this discussion; however, I will agree that your point comparing Eberron to FR is confusion. Instead of telling people to "get over it" you might consider that what you wrote is not getting across the intended information and think about revising it. I know that is what I do sometimes in similar situations.

 

[Zardnaar]

Nice blocking Eberron off into it's own multiverse.

Originally it wasn't part of the great wheel. 4Es take was the least offensive of the 3 settings the butchered but still.

I have the wayfinders guide I'll redownload it and maybe change the Christmas present list which is currently the essentials box.