The Gaming Den

Eberron is one of my favourite settings. Fantasy pulp is something I really love, and so is steampunk and magitech. Call it kitchen sink if you like, but any world that has barbarian fucking halflings murder-raping off the backs of dinosaurs is a world I wanna play in.

'But it isn't DnD!' you argue. Well, fuck you, and also, I agree. But then again, none of the published settings actually realistically function under 3.5 rules (except maybe Dark Sun, but I've never read that.)

The failures of a coherent setting in 3.5 is well-documented on other places in this forum, and most of us have probably read the Tomes. Eberron is not the Tomes, and DnD 3.5 is not a good system for having adventures in Eberron once the party passes a certain level.

So, given all that, it's pretty obvious that you can't /really/ use 3.5 to represent Eberron. Instead, I decided to go the age-old path of making my own goddamn system, using Frank's handy-dandy Game Design Flow Sheet.

(Thanks for that, by the way. It is, unlike most things, actually fucking helpful. Also, I've never designed a game before, so there will be much suck and fail. Make fun of the suck and fail if you like, but please don't forget to actually include real criticism. And if you don't care, then skip the fucking thread.)

Design Goals: Create a functional, mechanical system that can be used to tell stories in a fantasy pulp setting like Eberron. All the usual caveats apply - the mechanics should encourage by their nature fantasy pulp-like stories instead of force the players and MC into mental gymnastics to try and justify them.

Name the PCs

It's an adventuring party. Hey, that was easy.

Six Person Party
Hey Fred, are you sure that the dragon only had fifteen crowns? What happened to that enormous horde of gold?

Next, we need the actual character that'll make up said party. Since this is still DnD-inspired, let's have the usual layout of two beatsticks, a pair of casters, a healbot and a skillmonkey.

Wandslinger
You wanna know what's better than a sword? A sword that fits in a small pocket, shoots lightning, and doesn't need years of training to use. No, I've never heard of this gun thing.

The Last War lasted about a century. Like many wars, it spurred a wave of innovation and progress across Khorvaire, introducing new techniques of warfare. The first, and probably most obvious, is the wand. Magic's always been a thing, but the handicap was the inability for the common populace to use it safely and effectively. Of course, the discovery that one could in fact encapsulate a small spell in an Eberron dragonshard, and make said dragonshard rechargeable, changed that little facet forever. Even a peasant can kill a knight with a wand, it's a simple little point and click. So it's a bit slow, takes forever to recharge, and you better carry along a shitton of them. They're cheap, available, and don't take much to use, and are pretty much superior to swinging a sword in nearly every fucking scenario. They are, however, relatively new, only coming into wide-spread battlefield use in the last twenty years, with qualities ranging from eternal wands of ray of frost to eternal wands of fireball.

The Wandslinger is a veteran of one the nations that participated in the Last War. He can make wands, summon them near-instantly into his hands, even dual-wield the bitches. He's also a soldier, with the experience and tactical expertise decades of surviving hellish combat gives you. His role is tactician and damage-dealer, tapping into the mystical properties of wands to perform feats of wandslinging that rivals any quick-thinking sorcerer.

Artificer
Can you make it go up to eleven?

The artificer is another product of the near-industrial revolution Khorvaire experienced during the Last War. As time and death worked their toll on classicly-trained wizards, Artificers discovered that you didn't really need to mutter in long-dead languages and wave your hands like a moron during combat. It's counter-productive to living. An Artificer is a magical engineer, preferring to work the pure essence of magic into devices that'll do the work for him. Artificers craft the wands, brew the alchemical mixtures, and generally work as buffers.

Their understanding of magic lets them forge death-rays, shiny magic armour, and more. Their training and schooling allows and artificer to identify the functions of any magical items, traps, or doodads that they might happen to come across, not to mention constructing little personalised homunculus helpers.

An artificer's role is buffing and crafting.

Cleric
No one expects the Thranish Inquisition!

Despite religion having a bit less of a role nowadays, after nearly a century of war, people yearn for a higher power to reassure them. And the fact that these higher powers do seemingly allow adherents to straight up cause miracles through prayer tends to give good old atheism a hit. I mean, no one's actually ever seen a god, but that's never stopped anyone from believing in them.

The cleric is a member of one of the myriad churchs and faiths that pervade Eberron and Khorvaire. Perhaps he's a member of the feared Inquisition of the Silver Flame, tasked with eliminating heresy wherever he finds it, or a more laid back cleric of the Sovereign Host who actually believes in making life better for the poor peasantry. Regardless, he uses the magic of his gods to work their will upon the world.

The Cleric's role is healing, dispensing religious wrath on the unbelievers, and navigating Church bureaucracy.

Warmage
Kill it with fire. Actually, fuck that. Kill everything with fire.

Even though most wizards and sorcerers died fairly quickly at the start of the Last War, no nation was stupid enough to allow all of their casters to die off. The rigors and demands of war forced wizards and sorcerers from their more leisurely, scholastic pursuits into causing death, the more the better. While a warmage still requires years and years, often decades of schooling and often-times apprenticeship, the capability of a single warmage to double as mobile artillery and change the tide of a battle cannot be overlooked.

Beyond the standard flashiness of waving your hands and causing a fireball to rain down from the heavens, warmages have also adopted the tricks of their less martial forebears, shaping the very land into hollowed hellholes to trap entire divisions while the warmage rains fire from above. Unfortunately, wands tend to have a bit better range than a bow, and warmages still sort of stick out, what with all the hand-waving and muttering in long-dead languages. Still, the abilities of a warmage are far more versatile than the finest-crafted wand.

The warmage's role is environmental control and damage.

Extreme Explorer
What does this button do? It couldn't possibly be a trap, the last fifteen buttons were traps! No one's that sadistic!

Eberron is fairly littered with the remains of ancient empires and civilisations. From the giants to the goblins to the fiends, it's hard to go /anywhere/ without stumbling across a ruin or dungeon of some sort. Extreme Explorers the idiots brave and stupid enough to run into these ruins and dungeons for loot, glory, and power. No ruin is too foreboding, no dungeon is too lethal for these courages idiots to dive right in.

The Extreme Explorer has seen a great variety of traps, puzzles, and monsters in his day. That's because he's lived long enough to experience that variety, and that makes him good at running. Very good at running. He's also a master of manipulating the very traps that threaten him, pairing cowardice with quick-thinking ingenuity and a fondness for danger and trivia. Luck lets him avoid deaths that would otherwise be final, and a lack of honor or shame allows him to use any and all tactics in order to survive.

The Extreme Explorer's role is environmental control and puzzle-solving.

Psion
I know what you're thinking, and honestly, I think you need therapy.

Psychic powers have never really been well-seperated from magic, but as any Kalashtar will tell you, the power of the mind is far more reliable than waving your hands and muttering useless words. They're a fairly new addition to Khorvaire, coming from the psychic dictatorship of Sarlona either as refugees or mercenaries, and saw little action in the Last War.

But a Psion's true strength not in the mind-fuckery he can cause his enemies, but the internal strength he can grant himself and his allies. Not to mention the ability to psychically dislocate himself from his own body and scout, nearly unhindered, through any given structure. Reading minds and glancing into the future are some of the many tricks psions possess - of course, their focus on their own minds has left them with a markedly odd worldview, making it hard for psions to really connect with non-psions.

A Psion's role is buffing and utility.

vagrant wrote:Eberron is one of my favourite settings.

I... don't understand that.

Eberron has always struck me as a paint by numbers 3.5 setting. Nothing less, nothing more. It addresses some of the weirdness of 3.5, but it does so in a really half-assed and unsatisfying way. The game breaks down at high level, so all the high level people died recently in a big war. Level Allowance rules don't work, so there are some half-assed "new" races that are depowered versions of popular monsters you can play at Level Allowance zero.

And that's pretty much it. The rest of the setting is mostly just a paint by numbers map telling you where the stuff in the 3.5 books can be found on their modest sized map.

What about Eberron is actually new or interesting enough to care about one way or the other? Dragon marks? Dragon shards? The Ultima-style moon gates? What?

I mean, I knew a guy who was such an Eberron fan that I ended up playing in an Eberron campaign. I was literally unable to tell the difference between it and any other randomly chosen 3.5 setting or arbitrary home brew for that matter. Except for the names of gods and towns, we could have been in Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk for all I could tell or care.

So bottom line: what does Eberron even offer that a randomly chosen DM's homebrew 3.5 setting does not?

-Username17

Paint-by-numbers 3.5? Yeah, it's got elves, orcs, dragons, yadda yadda. But in tone, I'd paint it closer to something like The Straight Razor Cure by Daniel Polanski. The typical fantasy tropes exist, but they're presented in a manner that makes far more sense than FR or Greyhawk.

Monsters aren't just there to be killed, in many instances they've got real political power and establish actual nations (like that one nation ruled by a trio of Hags.)

The game breaks down at high level is a fair point, which is one of the issues I'm attempting to address. Most games in established settings break down at high-level, that's the nature of 3.5 mechanics and people thinking medieval fantasy applies in a game where people can spy, teleport, and summon eldritch monsters with near-impunity.

The part of Eberron that's interesting for me personally (YMMV) is in fact the magical post-World War 1 setting, a world recently forced out of typical fantasy bullshit into technological advancement.

Or tl;dr to answer your question, Frank, Eberron offers a non-typical view of a fantasy world coping with industrialisation. Maybe some GMs play it as a standard DnD setting with magic robots - to me that's not really what Eberron is about, but sadly what 3.5 mechanics encourage.

Three-Person Party
There's three of us and fifteen of them. I knew I shoulda brought more grenades.

Dragonmarked Scion
Running a multi-national monopolistic corporation is such a drag. I think I'll be a murder-hobo instead.

There are twelve Dragonmarks in Eberron, and thirteen Houses. Each mark corresponds to a specific set of magical abilities given to the bearer, a magical tattoo of sorts. Luckily for the Houses, these abilities are nearly always familial, and the dragonmarks allowed the bearers to effectively monopolise whatever area of commerce their mark expedited.

A Dragonmarked Scion is a high-born child of one of these Houses, one born with a Dragonmark. This gives them money, access to favours...and of course, magic. However, they aren't quite the special snowflakes that they'd hope for - just being born with a silver spoon in their mouth isn't enough to guarantee effectiveness in keeping that silver spoon there, and other members of their own House would like nothing more than to slit their throat for a bit of extra pull. Still, Dragonmarked Scions are a force to be reckoned. Not only do their Dragonmarks allow them to compete with specialised wizards, they're the only ones who truly benefit from the use of Siberys dragonshards, allowing them to enhance their already formidable personal power even more.

A Dragonmarked Scion's role is usually determined by their House, anything from a damage-dealer if they're a human of House Deneith to the master spies of House Phiarlan. However, all Dragonmarked Scions are good at manipulating people to get their way - anyone can bribe a guard, but it's quite another trick indeed to convince the head of your House to give you an airship.

Master Inquisitive
See, if I tell you how I solved the murder, it wouldn't be impressive anymore.

Master Inquisitives are a relatively new profession in Eberron, as constant war left little time for leisurely sleuthing. Still, now that the Last War is over and the burgeoning metropolises have greater populations than at any time in history, a position opened up for those people that specialise in unravelling the myriad mysteries of Eberron.

A Master Inquisitive can range anywhere from an ex-spy to a member of the City Watch, but most are found in cities large enough to require their services. They're consummate liars, actors, even thieves, in addition to being crafty tacticians and plotters.

A Master Inquisitive's role is social and puzzle-solving, applying their near-mystical abilities to sort out the truth in even the most-convoluted of cases.

Warforged Optimal
Let's see. I don't need to eat, sleep, am made of metal and can upgrade myself at will. Why do I need to keep the fleshbags around?

Warforged were created or discovered, depending on which rumour you believe, in the last days of the Last War. They could have possibly turned the tides of war by themselves, as their sentience and resilience made them comparable, if not superior soldiers to both living and undead. After the end of the War, they even managed to gain freedom and recognition as actual sentients instead of simple slaves.

Of course, while many warforged try and ape the mannerisms of the living, Optimals are a wholly different breed. They embrace their artificial natures, determined to forge their own, new way. Some are openly genocidal against the fleshbags, while others are simply wish to explore this 'individuality' business everyone keeps harping on. Of course, being Warforged means that this individuality, a somehow organic growth of even more construct-like traits, manifests in better ways to kill things.

A Warforged Optimal's role is as a damage-dealer, using their construct resilience and ability to upgrade themselves to truly embody the name 'Warforged.'

[/i]

It's not super original, or anything. And I guess if you just play it without background knowledge it's easy to miss all of that.

I like the magic used as technology angle in Eberron. It really bugged me in the Forgotten Realms that they had magic out the wazoo and still slept in their own shit.

This barely matters in gameplay, you still play murder hobos most of the time. You just rarely exterminate orcs and goblins for reasons of them having the wrong color of skin and no law protecting their goods. You still have your flavors of cultist to kick out of dark ruins, though... so... yeah.

Onto the next step, outlining a simple five-hour adventure.

The Adventurers and the Cult of the Dragons Below!
Those aren't Nazis, they're a completely different type of racial mystic fascists! And they're robots, duh.

Hour One - In Which The Party Gets A Quest
So you want to us, a completely random group of morally dubious murder-hobos, to embark on a possibly lethal quest we picked off a beer-stained messageboard in a tavern? What makes you think we're at all intereste-Oh, massive amounts of gold. That seems legit.

The party arrives in Sharn, the City of Towers, in the country of Breland. All being reasonably proficient murder-hobos, their arrival is noted with interest by the spymaster of the Dark Lanterns, Breland's intelligence service. The spymaster arranges a meeting between one of his lieutenants and the party to investigate a reclusive new merchant who's bought out a old, condemned tower on the city outskirts to transform into a merchant-utopia. The spymaster doesn't expect the party to all survive, of course, but hopes that one of them lives long enough to pass along useful intel. He offers massive amounts of money and possibly employment if they complete the task.

No minigames, simply plot-hooks and character establishment.

Hour Two - In Which the Party Discover The Rabbit Hole
Is it really realistic to wander around the city and just start up conversations with random strangers about a predefined list of topics? I dunno, it's sort of straining my suspension of disbelief.

The party, intelligently decides to do some recon on this tower before walking in. They obtain maps, buy a few rounds for the menial workers at a nearby pub, see what the underworld thinks (probably by beating some guys up.) They discover that the tower has an odd record of menial workers disappearing, and the labourers report rumours of strange screams and terrifying monsters rising from the depths of the tower. They learn that the reclusive merchant claims to be an ex-adventurer from Xen'drick, and made his fortune peddling forgotten relics of the Giants that once ran an empire there. If they dig deep enough, they might even discover that the 'relics' that the reclusive merchant peddled all have a marked connection with Khyber, the Dragon Below.

The minigames required are social, investigation, and combat. Assuming the six-member party above, the party would probably split into three two-man crews. The Wandslinger can use his knowledge of tactics and strategy to formulate an infiltration plan with the warmage. The Psion uses his psychic tricks to scout the tower along with the cleric, who goes around the common people see what the layman thinks, and possibly hits up his church for intel. The Extreme Explorer hits up the less-savoury parts
of the surrounding neighborhoods and bribes/cheats the local criminal element for clues with the Artificer, who wants to obtain some not-completely legal reagents for his crafting.

Hour Three to Four - In Which the Party Finally Get to be Murder-Hobos
Seriously, Boris, you don't need to poke every five foot block with a stick. We don't even /have/ standardised measurements!

The party thinks they've got all the information they can get without going inside, so it's time to dungeon-crawl. The figure they can blackmail a minor noble with information the Extreme Explorer obtained from a loanshark to get in, and do so, going in from the top of the tower with plans to make their way down, as the maps obtained by the Wandslinger and Warmage suspiciously end a few levels down. Thus starts the dungeon crawl, a five level affair. In the first level, where the rich and powerful make their abodes, they'd encounter standard anti-theft measures (traps and guards). As they head down, they discover several cultish seeming chambers, culminating in a fight between them a few cultists of the Dragon Below performing a ritual.

Beating information out of the hapless cultists, they slowly discover the 'reclusive merchant's' true identity and goal - an Inspired from Sarlona who was driven made scoping out Giant ruins in Xen'drick and decided to use the power found there to create a power-base in order to take over the world, starting with Sharn. The artificer, in conjunction with the cleric, find devices invented for the express purpose of changing Sharn's manifest zone from Syrania, the Azure Sky to Xoriat, the Realm of Madness. They fight twisted organic-eldritch monstrosities that could have only spawned from the sick minds of the overlords of Xoriat - the Daelkyr.

Mostly combat minigames, with a bit of lore here and there.

Hour Five - In Which the Party Fights the Boss
Can't we just call in the military? You'd think they're care more, right?

They finally reach the last level of the tower and confront the big bad in his hellish Frakenstein-esque laboratory. First they fight their way through a few more cultists and monsters, before disabling the traps and locks in the room the big bad had retreated to. Interrupting the big bad in the middle of finishing the ritual, they finally defeat him, thus saving Sharn and possibly all of Eberron.

Returning to the spymaster, they're paid, hired, and having probably not all died, happily hired by the spymaster as they've proved they're somewhat competent.

The magitech industrial revolution might have gone somewhere if, y'know, the mechanics had actually supported it. As it is, dragonshards are just glowing rocks that you apparently need to enchant certain things; that's demonstrably worse that being able to enchant things without requiring special glowing rocks. As it is you're still putting the same amount of XP into everything, so dragonshards are useless except for dragonshard-specific items, most of which are also fairly useless compared to the vast numbers of other magical items D&D already has to offer.

Now, if you had a system where you could use dragonshards in place of XP, then you'd at least be a step above what Eberron actually was.

People have made eberron-based computer games in the past. There's a MMORPG, and at least one real-time strategy game. They might have lootable ideas.

vagrant wrote: Monsters aren't just there to be killed, in many instances they've got real political power and establish actual nations (like that one nation ruled by a trio of Hags.)

So now instead of wandering murder hobos killing arbitrarily evil creatures, you're wandering terrorist hobos.

Big improvement.

Ancient History wrote:The magitech industrial revolution might have gone somewhere if, y'know, the mechanics had actually supported it. As it is, dragonshards are just glowing rocks that you apparently need to enchant certain things; that's demonstrably worse that being able to enchant things without requiring special glowing rocks. As it is you're still putting the same amount of XP into everything, so dragonshards are useless except for dragonshard-specific items, most of which are also fairly useless compared to the vast numbers of other magical items D&D already has to offer.

Now, if you had a system where you could use dragonshards in place of XP, then you'd at least be a step above what Eberron actually was.

How crazy, that sounds suspiciously like the point of this thread! 3.5 is shit for Eberron. This is established, so I want to make the setting actually playable, which unfortunately means creating an entirely new system to support it.

Also, I'm bored and have nothing better to do.

I rather thought it was a failing of Eberron rather than 3.5 that the setting failed to account for capabilities of the system.

And it sure wasn't 3.5's fault that Shifters, Warforged and Kalashtar are lame.

I don't know why you are blaming 3.5 for Dragon Shards. They're created especially for Eberron, they didn't have to suck because of 3.5.

3.5e doesn't allow for all that many types of stories. There's only so many ways to make a coherent economy, governance, etc. Yes, Eberron's implementation in 3.5 sucked. Dragonmarks don't do shit and are horrible feat taxes. Dragonshards are just sort of tacked onto crafting, and myriads of other useless shit that just doesn't work well under 3.5.

FrankTrollman wrote:So bottom line: what does Eberron even offer that a randomly chosen DM's homebrew 3.5 setting does not?

IT BREEDS TRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

vagrant wrote:3.5e doesn't allow for all that many types of stories. There's only so many ways to make a coherent economy, governance, etc. Yes, Eberron's implementation in 3.5 sucked. Dragonmarks don't do shit and are horrible feat taxes. Dragonshards are just sort of tacked onto crafting, and myriads of other useless shit that just doesn't work well under 3.5.

Wait, do you want other types of stories for fantasy games or do you want to recraft the Eberron countries governments and economies? Unless you want to really dig deep into Logistics and Dragons, I do really see how 3.5 or a specially designed system means fuck-all to either.

What kind of stories are you looking to tell that you can't? I've seen a lot of different types of stories told with D&D, and aside from shit where spells make it trivial (like murder investigations), most editions of D&D (prior to 4th) do them well enough. And sadly 4th can do murder investigations if you take it offroad, since no one has any noncombat abilities to allow players to jump off the railroad.

It's not much the stories I can't tell (though it would be nice to tell a murder mystery or have any sort of mystery at all without just asking why the legal system doesn't force Zone of Truth and Detect Evil all the fucking time).

It's more that the setting, as written, doesn't work under 3.5 mechanics. Look at the dragonmarks - they are so shitty it's not even funny. How they would actually gain and keep economic power for centuries on end is mystifying to me, since a wizard can do all that shit and more.

Hell, just basic transportation is made obsolete with teleport and like effects - why bother even inventing an airship when people can seriously just pop from one end of the world to another? How does the economy work if wizards can just cast wish? And etc.

The issue isn't that 3.5 sucks or is bad or anything, it's that there are certain elements of 3.5 that restrain the setting quite a bit if you take the mechanical consequences of spells to their logical end. And those restraints make Eberron frankly unplayable in 3.5 unless you pretend the characters never make it past level 9.

Are you sticking with d20? Or maybe using a dice pool of some kind?

You may do better staking out what magic can do than what it cannot do, unless this is very closely D&D based.

I'm planning to stick to d20 - I'd like to be able to easily convert with minimal hassle monster stat-blocks and shit, but we'll see how that works out. Ditto with magic and shit. Eberron is still a DnD setting, and you've got monsters like Living Cloudkills and another fun stuff that won't exist in a recognizable form if I just toss 3.5e magic out the window.

...Which I honestly might have to, though maybe I can come up with something clever and elegant.

Have you looked at any of the other D&D hacks out there?

Legend might make a decent starting point for you. There's basically no rules for using your powers creatively out of combat, but if you want to emphasize magitech, that might be a plus.

I am curious, as someone who does like Eberron, about what you're trying to get this new system to do. Eberron could be served better if it had a system dedicated to it, but not only that, it would make for a better setting if it were not so "kitchen sink".

If you 'want' Living Cloudkills then you should know why you want them. If you're doing your own thing then "It's in DnD" is no longer an idea you have to chain yourself down by.

I want living cloudkills because it's fucking cool that some unknown magical A-bomb made malicious sentient spells. I want magic robots cause fuck, magic fucking robots. I want undead-worshipping elves that are slowly undergoing economic collapse because they haven't noticed that Khorvaire is technologically progressing while they're busy playing 'Who has the bigger pen0rz' with dragons.

Simply, I want the cool shit Eberron has because it's cool shit. It's ambiguous enough that you're not restrained by metaplot, and yet specific enough to give you a nice geopolitical sandbox to fuck around in. I don't care what DnD has, specifically - I do care what Eberron has specifically, and a lot of that shit is intrinsically tied to DnD.

Legend has spells, tracks for robot-themed powers, and basic fantasy races that could be easily refluffed.

How attached are you to letting PCs have out-of-combat powers beyond their skills?

They should be able to - hell, that's the point. This isn't a goddamn 4e clone or an MMO. Here's an example of what I see gameplay being at low level, medium level, and high level.

Low level - The PCs serve as the spymaster's personal bitches and generally do what they're told, anything from rooting out cultists to sabotaging trade conveys.

Med Level - The PCs are spymasters themselves, and dig deeper into the conspiracies in the world, from plane-hopping and participating in the eternal war in Shavarath to overthrowing the corrupt bureaucracy of the Church of the Silver Flame.

High Level - The PCs travel to Xoriat and Dal Quor and overthrow the Inspired dictatorship in Sarlona.

vagrant wrote:I want living cloudkills because it's fucking cool that some unknown magical A-bomb made malicious sentient spells. I want magic robots cause fuck, magic fucking robots. I want undead-worshipping elves that are slowly undergoing economic collapse because they haven't noticed that Khorvaire is technologically progressing while they're busy playing 'Who has the bigger pen0rz' with dragons.

Simply, I want the cool shit Eberron has because it's cool shit. It's ambiguous enough that you're not restrained by metaplot, and yet specific enough to give you a nice geopolitical sandbox to fuck around in. I don't care what DnD has, specifically - I do care what Eberron has specifically, and a lot of that shit is intrinsically tied to DnD.

I'm of the opinion that Living Cloudkills are better as "Death Elementals". I do agree with you otherwise. I like the setting and what I'm asking is not so much about the metaplot but about exactly what are you going to do differently? Are you going to remove unnecessary elements that only exist to serve D+D? How are you going to redo Dragonshards/marks? Are you going to allow the magitech to take a more firm hold on the setting? Are you going to lower the top tier power level for the setting? What, in essence, do you intend to do different?

Right now, I'm more interested in having something that works rather than stroking my epeen by being horribly unique. I want PCs to be able to fight Daelkyr - CR20 monsters - but by the time they're at 20th level, Daelkyr are a fucking joke, and the setting has shat itself trying to accommodate high-level characters.

So that's what I want to do differently - the ability to in fact punch a Daelkyr in the face and make Dal Quor hide in boxes out of fear, but without the setting breaking in two on the way. Mysteries that mean something instead of casting wish or divination. Make the speciality abilities of Eberron - namely dragonmarks and dragonshards not just be poorly-implemented tacked on additions to the existing 3.5e system. And so on.

It's not that Living Cloudkills are Living Cloudkills that makes them cool, it's that they're living spells and that is a cool concept. Conceivably they could be turned into Magic Elementals which occasionally spontaneously generate from the casting of spells which are able to mimic the effects of the spell that spawned them. But the difference, at that point, is pretty much academic.