Eberron Musings

The latest 5th Edition world setting book, Eberron: Rising from the Last War, has been released by Wizards of the Coast (or WotC), and I like many others am pretty excited by it. You should find this interesting, as you may know that I prefer creating my own worlds to run D&D in, but here I am interested in a published setting. Do not mistake me, I do find the published world settings as interesting, just not the entire settings, only the parts I like to steal for my own worlds. Eberron is different, though, and it is because of my shared history with the setting. As you may or may not know, Eberron is the youngest of the official D&D settings (excepting those brought over from other IPs, like Ravnica from Magic the Gathering), having been created in the early 2000s after WotC purchased D&D from TSR and put out 3rd Edition D&D. WotC had gotten all of the various world settings with their purchase of D&D, but decided they needed a campaign setting of their own and had a competition (the Fantasy Setting Search) to see what us the fans could come up with. Roughly 12,000 of us D&D nerds submitted to the competition, and yes, I was one of them.

Let us get this out of the way right now - my entry sucked, it was way too bland, boring, and generic. No, while I did find my submission, I am not sharing it. I do have a bit of the world my group was creating and using at that time, and it is not as bad as my Fantasy Search Setting, though much smaller than an entire world as it only covers one small continent/large island, may have to resurrect it and share it here. Or use it in my current world. I have no delusions on that original entry, seeing what did win the competition at the time, that I had even smidgen of a chance of winning, and was definitely not as good in my world building as Keith Baker was at the time. Or maybe even now, but I am good enough my players keep coming back for more. Anyway, as a result of competing in the Fantasy Setting Search, I still feel a connection to the eventual winner. As you have already guessed, Eberron won the competition, though it came into the final with two other settings, one of them by Rich Burlew of The Order of the Stick fame, so I think it was a hard fought final round and Keith Baker still came out on top with Eberron. That is part of what still interests me to this day about the setting - the addition of arcanepunk (which I have talked about recently) plus the fact that the main political entities had just come out of a major war and the next war simmers always in the background, ready to flare up again.

Having said all of the above, and while being perfectly willing to run Eberron games (should I italicize "Eberron" when I'm not talking about the book, but talking about the world itself? I'm going to not italicize it for now and see how I like it) as laid out in the campaign setting (no, as I am typing this, I have not read completely through Rising from the Last War, but I am working on it and do remember quite a bit from previous books) with my usual minor modifications - look, there are some classes and races that just do not make sense to me, narratively, and I do not allow them in my games, at least not unaltered - I have been thinking, since they announced Rising from the Last War, how I would adjust Eberron to better suit me. I know, I know, why cannot I just leave well enough alone and run the world as they have it set out in the setting book? As you know or may have guessed, I am a difficult, old, gaming bastard and like to modify things to suit my tastes. Plus, I saw some pictures online, specifically a couple of maps, that I found rather intriguing and I have been plain itching to use them somehow for a campaign setting. Specifically about two years ago, I saw these maps:

And:

Neat, right? Those two have been rattling around in my brain, just begging me to set up a campaign setting based on them. Obviously, something with flying mounts or airships is going to be needed just to get around, and it hit me earlier this year when WotC announced Rising from the Last War - what if the Mourning not only turned Cyre into the Mournland, what if the world split into the different layers? That setting already has airships and halflings riding flying dinosaurs, Eberron is most of the way to a good fit for a map that looks like the above.

As a responsible gaming blogger who does not simply jump online and type out whatever rant strikes my fancy without at least some forethought (I'll just pause here for the laughter to die down), I did my due diligence and searched to see if I could find the originator of the pics. I had first seen them in a Google Plus group dedicated to fantasy maps, back when G+ was still a thing, and I immediately saved them as being "interesting". No links to the originator, just some random fellow fantasy enthusiast sharing an interesting find, so I had little to go on. However, my Google Fu is strong, and I found not only the originator, but also the comic he wrote and drew set in this very world in the pictures. The comic, by the way, is known as Skyheart by Jake Parker, and while I unfortunately missed the Kickstarter for the deadtree edition and he is completely sold out of the extras, he is selling the first chapter in pieces via .PDF from his website. It is what I would consider cute, more young adult than adult, definite inspirations from anime (the anime Last Exile sprang immediately to mind), with an anthropomorphic bent. Does this change my plans for turning Eberron into something that looks more like Airth, as it is called in Skyheart? No, not at all. I am not copying that setting, I am plagiarizing (plagiarism is the highest form of flattery) the map idea, but the rest of the setting - the steampunk airships alongside the arcanepunk weapons of the bad guys, the anthropomorphic races - I am leaving alone. They do not fit my idea of Eberron with floating continents, and besides, Mr Parker is doing them justice without my help. I think though that I will borrow the winged whales, but that interest started, at least for me, from an old comic book entitled The Chronicles of Corum #6:

Michael Moorcock's Elric Saga makes for great D&D fodder.

Yep, that is a winged shark you see on the cover, and ever since reading that comic back in the '90s (the comic came out in '87 but I didn't run into it until the mid '90s) I have wanted to put in one of my D&D settings an ocean or sea that had disappeared through magical means and the remaining animals - fish and aquatic mammals - have been altered to have wings and be able to breath air, though they seem to want to remain in the air where the salt water used to be. I would definitely add those into my version of Eberron, which I am calling Airberron, because I am just chock full of originality.

Now that I have Eberron: Rising from the Last War in my hot, little hands, I will be writing more on Airberron in the near future. I am excited because I think the base setting, Eberron, is unlike anything else out there, at least when it comes to D&D settings, and setting it to a map full of floating continents for myself sets it even further apart. Stay tuned, loyal Truncheons & Flagons readers, I will be breaking out the Campaign Cartographer I got from the Bundle of Holding oh so many months ago to use in my current campaign setting (and never have), rewrite some history, and change up some of the other settings.