Need campaign advice

[Otterscrubber]

Gonna start a 15th level solo campaign and I am the DM. I may rep an NPC for my solo player, who is playing a lvl 15 wizard. We are planning to use the Eberron campaign.

My player wants to get a little more attention, so I'm going to do a solo campaign in the hopes of meeting some of his characters needs to develop a mage tower, build cool items and do some mage things that might interfere with the other PCs in our regular group. Also having a smaller group to manage I think will be fun as a DM as I only have to cater to the needs of a single player and we can meet more often and it will hopefully take less work.

On that note, it's been awhile since I've DM'ed and I'm not that famaliar with the world of Eberron. I figured I'd let our mage have his tower, but I'm not sure where would be good for him to have it, which area in Eberron would be a hotspot for an up and coming human mage to work his mojo to becoming an arch-mage. What NPC groups would be good to work with?

I was impressed with the Eberron campaign book. We jokingly call it Disneyland for D&D as it seems most things in D&D can fit in there reasonably well. Very few limits in terms of having to suspend disbelief. Thanks for any advice those of you with Eberron wisdom have to share.

Also, trying to find a good magic item generator. The piles of magic items avaialble now make it hard for a DM to provide some relevant items.

 

[Spatula]

What are you looking for in NPC groups? Patrons? Enemies?

Eberron is full of sparsely inhabitated areas, if that's what your player is looking for, even within the remaining major nations. 100 years of war will do that. So it really depends. Does the mage want to be a friendly village? Surrounded by inhospitable terrain and/or inhabitants to keep away nosy adventurers? Mixing it up in the big centers of arcane learning?

 

[Otterscrubber]

I guess looking for both patrons and enemies. Ideally a good paragon NPC group to challenge hiim and foil his plots with perhaps an epic level specific NPC who is part of an Epic level group that will not be fully introduced until he hits lvl 20+.

As far as whether or not his location should be remote or in a city? Good question, I will ask him and see what he feels like. I have a feeling he is going to want a semi-remote location that he can be a local big shot, but be close to an arcance urban center for research and whatnot. That mix of both settings would also help me on a DM standpoint for adventure hooks as well I guess. I seem to recall Sharn was a big city and there was another magical kingdom in the Northeast as well but I do not recall the name of it or any other geography to see if there would be a spot that would help with this. Need to pull up my eberron map....

 

[Spatula]

There's not a tremendous number of epic-level NPCs hanging around in Eberron. Depending on your definition of NPC, I suppose. I think I read in one of the books that the PCs are supposed to be the first in a long long time? if they get that high. There are the Daelkyr, trapped underground, the fiends trapped in the silver flame and their followers (the Lords of Dust), the dragons (the Chamber is an organization of dragons that actively meddle in humanoid affairs), and the Inspired/Dreaming Dark over in Sarlona.

The main magic school is called Arcanix and is located in Aundair. There's also a place in Karrnath where the 12 dragonmark houses have set up a magical research institution. Those are the two famous ones, but I would imagine most big cities (especially Sharn) would have at least one magic school.