Eberron, With a System That Actually Fucking Works

[Parthenon]

That's something I'm struggling with. On one hand...melee is shit. Eberron is a post-WW1 setting, pretty much, so wands (or guns) are the big kahuna. At the same time, dudes hitting each other with swords are cool, so...I'm not sure. Honestly, using a wand is seriously preferable to using a sword - one of the scenes that sticks out in my head is the one in Indy and the Raiders of the Ark, where some huge bloke is swinging a sword around and Indy just shoots the fucker.

You do realise that in real life it is often faster to sprint at and shank a guy than it is for the guy to pull out his gun and shoot you? Look at Fighting Jack Churchill who went through WW2 with a claymore and longbow, using bagpipes to sound the attack. Then remember that this is fantasy and any melee guy should be bigger, more badass and more flamboyant than him.

You're only half-arsing the Game Design Flow. If you want melee characters, put down a melee class as one of the six, come up with ideas how they can contribute during a 4 hour adventure and during a campaign and then decide if you need to throw out the melee.

The reason I was talking about with Characters rather than Classes is because of step 5- when writing up a campaign arc you write up how the characters you created in step 1 advance. That is possible when you have Characters, but almost impossible if you have Classes.

You were just talking about having three classes that advance in a certain way while the template advances in another, before you talk about how the Wandslinger advances and how the Artificer advances. Please work out the descriptions of how the characters advance before you jump to the mechanics.

EDIT:

I've just realised what was so wrong with your six people- you are supposed to write up a six person party and how the different characters contribute.

If you just write up the classes, then you are saying that the races do not contribute to the story or action. That the races do not matter in Eberron.

[Username17]

Roughly, I mean. I see as the Industrial Revolution occurred during the Last War, so tech went roughly Standard Medieval Fantasy->Magitek->1910-esque. Guns are shiny and new, trains connect the world. Perhaps Russia in the early 20th century, pre-Bolshevik? There's new tech, but the world is only just to coming to grips with it's civilian applications.

No. That's still the thirty years war.

Feudalism is declining, there are newfangled ways of travel coming about, most of the old empires are collapsing, ways of murdering people are getting way better, and new manufacturing techniques are taking off. Thirty years war.

Now, if you actually insist on there being an actual industrial revolution going on, then I suppose we're taking about the seven years war. But we still aren't out of the 18th century.

Nothing in Eberron is fucking mechanized. There is no refrigeration, no internal combustion engine, no cotton gin. People still farm and cut their grain with sickles. There are no combine harvesters, and if there were any they'd be a one-off Gnomish marvel rather than a mass produced device with serial numbers on the engine parts.

Eberron doesn't look like the early 20th century when you're drunk. It doesn't look like the early 20th century in Bumfuckistan. It doesn't look like the 19th century. You can have a perfectly reasonable argument as to whether it's the 17th century set just after the thirty years war, or the 18th century set after the seven years war. You can't even make an argument that it's the early 19th century after the first Napoleonic war. It just isn't happening.

No one in Eberron has 19th or 20th century problems, attitudes, or equipment. All firearm equivalents are still hand crafted master pieces rather than assembly line devices with interchangeable parts. Homespun cloth still competes against factory cloth, indicating that the mechanical loom hasn't converted the economy yet. The Luddite uprisings simply have not happened yet, which means that the dawn of 1811 simply has not come.

You should be looking at the Golden Age of Piracy, not the Boer Wars.

-Username17

[vagrant]

I'd argue that things in Eberron are more mechanised than they appear, just not in an immediately recognizable way. You've got skycars in Sharn, the Lightning Rail uses elementals instead of an internal combustion engine, magebred animals replace the cotton gin, and so on.

There's seriously a new NPC class called the magewright, who's basically a shitty artificer and just makes minor magic items all day fucking long. Geopolitically, I'd say it resembles more the fall of the Holy Roman Empire and the dissolution into separate nation-states.

So yeah, not really the Great Game sort of thing - that was what the whole Last War was about. Undead also take the place of mechanisation in some nations, specifically Karrnath, while clothes are probably less homespun than churned out assembly-line style by magewrights.

The Arrowsmith comic book by Kurt Busiek is a pretty accurate simulacrum of the setting, really, so is Arcanum.

[vagrant]

That's something I'm struggling with. On one hand...melee is shit. Eberron is a post-WW1 setting, pretty much, so wands (or guns) are the big kahuna. At the same time, dudes hitting each other with swords are cool, so...I'm not sure. Honestly, using a wand is seriously preferable to using a sword - one of the scenes that sticks out in my head is the one in Indy and the Raiders of the Ark, where some huge bloke is swinging a sword around and Indy just shoots the fucker.

You do realise that in real life it is often faster to sprint at and shank a guy than it is for the guy to pull out his gun and shoot you? Look at Fighting Jack Churchill who went through WW2 with a claymore and longbow, using bagpipes to sound the attack. Then remember that this is fantasy and any melee guy should be bigger, more badass and more flamboyant than him.

You're only half-arsing the Game Design Flow. If you want melee characters, put down a melee class as one of the six, come up with ideas how they can contribute during a 4 hour adventure and during a campaign and then decide if you need to throw out the melee.

The reason I was talking about with Characters rather than Classes is because of step 5- when writing up a campaign arc you write up how the characters you created in step 1 advance. That is possible when you have Characters, but almost impossible if you have Classes.

You were just talking about having three classes that advance in a certain way while the template advances in another, before you talk about how the Wandslinger advances and how the Artificer advances. Please work out the descriptions of how the characters advance before you jump to the mechanics.

EDIT:

I've just realised what was so wrong with your six people- you are supposed to write up a six person party and how the different characters contribute.

If you just write up the classes, then you are saying that the races do not contribute to the story or action. That the races do not matter in Eberron.

I don't think races should matter mechanically. That might be a flawed viewpoint, though, and I'd like to see why they should beyond minor differences and flavour.

Didn't I show how they could contribute by stating their roles? Someone buffs, someone scouts, someone does damage, etc.?

[Username17]

There's seriously a new NPC class called the magewright, who's basically a shitty artificer and just makes minor magic items all day fucking long.

Yes. Exactly. You still have craftsmen with non-interchangeable skills who make specialty objects with non-interchangeable parts by hand all day. You know, pre-industrial labor.

-Username17

[vagrant]

Wouldn't the end result be the same? A lot of magitek just doesn't really have that many parts to interchange - but you could have an assembly-line style factory that just has magewrights enchanting Eberron dragonshards into eternal wands of ray of frost of whatever. One dude weaves one layer of a spell, another dude weaves another layer, yadda yadda yadda.

EDIT: Actually, I do see wands as being relatively interchangeable, or at least part of Wandslinger advancement - his 'ammo' the dragonshard on the tip of the piece of wood, which he can eventually just swap out (or throw as bombs or whatever).

Fair, it's not complete industrialisation, because the nature of magic makes that a lot of that shit personal - you /have to/ have a Dragonmark in order to command bound elementals, or perform some core economic function.

But that doesn't mean that a fantasy magic-land Industrial Revolution has to look like ours, it just has to make high-quality tools relatively available to the general populace instead of being rare and special masterpieces. Whether that's done through mechanisation or discovering new ways of mass-enchanting Dragonshards, what matters is the end result.

[Username17]

Wouldn't the end result be the same? A lot of magitek just doesn't really have that many parts to interchange - but you could have an assembly-line style factory that just has magewrights enchanting Eberron dragonshards into eternal wands of ray of frost of whatever. One dude weaves one layer of a spell, another dude weaves another layer, yadda yadda yadda.

No. The end result is nothing like the same. First of all, when you have individual craftsmen doing shit, production improves when individual people get better, and has sharp drop offs when masters die or retire. And most importantly, it doesn't get any better. You can double production by doubling your amount of human capital, but there isn't any physical capital that would increase the rate of production.

The industrialization advantage is that you can continually invest in capital and continually improve the productivity of the workers you have. Nothing like that exists in Eberron.

And from a consumer standpoint, interchangeable parts means that you can make one working Colt from two broken ones. Nothing like that exists for magic items in Eberron.

It's simply not an industrial society. It's a late Renaissance society that happens to have some pretty cool magitek in it. But for fuck's sake, it has guilds who successfully restrain trade internationally. In many ways the economy isn't even as advanced as 16th century Europe.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Yeah, for Eberron to really pull off the magitek bit, you'd need to make a lot of magitek a sort of steampunk nightmare built out of bits of copper piping and dragonshards which anybody (not just mages, magewrights, or artificers) could theoretically put together and can be built factory-style.

Which is pretty much dragonshards == ghostrock or M:tG-style powerstones.

[vagrant]

The Campaign
Hey, when our party conquers the world, can I have the part with the Amazonian tribal women?

It's time to flesh out a campaign and see what advancement should look like conceptually. Let's keep it simple for now.

• Part One - PCs get hired by the spymaster of the Dark Lanterns of Breland to serve as his personal bitches. They go cultist-hunting and perform general acts of terrorism.

• Part Two - They discover in course of their cultist-hunting that a Daelkyr from Xoriat has corrupted an influential group of Inspired from Sarlona and is using that influence to realign Xoriat with Eberron. This takes them to the druid sects in the Eldeen Rangers to court politics.

• Part Three - The PCs head to Sarlona to help the totalitarian government there survive the oncoming Daelkyr-led rebellion. This adds some fun moral ambiguity, especially if they join the Kalashtar rebellion instead and try to work the Daelkyr rebellion for their own benefit.

• Part Four - The Daelkyr invasion occurs, and the PCs help/hinder/subvert the invasion and face off with a Daelkyr themselves.

So, we can see that the PCs have to go from being a challenge to cultists to a challenge for psychic overlords and horrific outsiders from another plane of existence. What should advancement look like?

• Wandslinger - The Wandslinger should probably get better wand-y tricks, like supercharging an attack, dual-wielding, swapping wands for free and the like. He should probably be able to make and refine his own wands.

• Artificer - The Artificer should be able to craft better gear and make more of it, and probably be able to swap enchantments on the fly or something, or maybe have a small construct army.

• Warmage - The Warmage gets better spells. He's a caster, so he probably won't need anything else.

• Extreme Explorer- The Extreme Explorer would get better lore abilities, maybe even explicit cinematic abilities like the ability to dodge fireballs and grenades and shit, and make better traps.

• Cleric - The Cleric would need to get better at healing people, along with the ability to smite people harder, and cause debuffs with said smiting, or maybe he gets to summon minor outsiders and shit.

• Psion - The Psion would probably get more party buffs, or maybe just more powers and that would be enough, given that he's also a caster.

[Rawbeard]

Are we talking about the same Eberron with magicaly powered factories and corporations? They actually mass produce magical version of household items, like instead of plumbing portals to the plane of water. Not made by crazy high level wizards. Not even artificers.

The rules don't really support that, they handwave that by "yeah, McGuffin magic stuff, pretend it works, we don't care about rules for that". And so we are back to the point of this thread.

[Krusk]

You're doing it wrong.

Eberrons biggest problem isn't 3.5, its that its inconsistant and poorly defined.

Step 1 - Fix the setting so it makes sense, and is clearly defined.
Step 2 - Use d20 +house rules, but strip out classes, races, and feats and replace them with good ones.

Dragonmarks
Magitech
Arcane Magic
Divine Magic
Psionics

are your 5 power sources. You want 2 classes for each. Caster and Noncaster. (Fighter and skill guy aren't classes)

Dragonmark caster = Sorcerers (fluff wise)
Dragonmark noncaster = Dragon shamans (barbarians maybe)
Magitech caster = Artificer
Magitech noncaster = Little brother from full metal alchemist
Arcane caster = battlefield control wizard.
Arcane noncaster = wand gunslinger
divine caster = buff priest
divine noncaster = paladin
psionic caster = professor X
psionic noncaster = unarmed ki martial artist.

Now crank out 10 classes, 10 per level * 9 levels * 5 casting classes = 450 spells, and the following races. Human, Lycan, Robot, Halfling, Orc, Elf, Zombie, Dwarf, hag, (Other eberon important race). You are also going to want to crank out enough feats so everyone can take 6 over 20 levels for each class. 120. But really, you want enough so there are some choices, so people honestly have to make a tough choice between "Killing fools" and "Stabbing bitches" and its meaningful and distinct. So really 360.

10 classes
450 spells
9 races
360 feats

I recomend you import from other content like the SRD and Tomes, but also keep in mind you can't just wholesale import stuff or you run into weird stuff.

Make it happen.

--------
Also, why eberon and not your own magitech steam punk setting?

[vagrant]

You're doing it wrong.

Eberrons biggest problem isn't 3.5, its that its inconsistant and poorly defined.

Step 1 - Fix the setting so it makes sense, and is clearly defined.
Step 2 - Use d20 +house rules, but strip out classes, races, and feats and replace them with good ones.

Dragonmarks
Magitech
Arcane Magic
Divine Magic
Psionics

are your 5 power sources. You want 2 classes for each. Caster and Noncaster. (Fighter and skill guy aren't classes)

Dragonmark caster = Sorcerers (fluff wise)
Dragonmark noncaster = Dragon shamans (barbarians maybe)
Magitech caster = Artificer
Magitech noncaster = Little brother from full metal alchemist
Arcane caster = battlefield control wizard.
Arcane noncaster = wand gunslinger
divine caster = buff priest
divine noncaster = paladin
psionic caster = professor X
psionic noncaster = unarmed ki martial artist.

Now crank out 10 classes, 10 per level * 9 levels * 5 casting classes = 450 spells, and the following races. Human, Lycan, Robot, Halfling, Orc, Elf, Zombie, Dwarf, hag, (Other eberon important race). You are also going to want to crank out enough feats so everyone can take 6 over 20 levels for each class. 120. But really, you want enough so there are some choices, so people honestly have to make a tough choice between "Killing fools" and "Stabbing bitches" and its meaningful and distinct. So really 360.

10 classes
450 spells
9 races
360 feats

I recomend you import from other content like the SRD and Tomes, but also keep in mind you can't just wholesale import stuff or you run into weird stuff.

Make it happen.

--------
Also, why eberon and not your own magitech steam punk setting?

This is actually helpful and much better than my conceptualisation. Going off the five major power-sources is definitely a better step.

Dragonmarked Casters would just be Dragonmarked Scions, there wouldn't be dragonmarked non-casters. (Since a dragonmark gives you spells by definition.)

I've no idea what a magitek non-caster would look like - possibly a dude in elemental-bound armour or something, while artificers are more interested in making death-rays and tiny construct armies?

But the rest of it looks pretty much how I see shit panning out.

As for why I'm using Eberron and not my own steampunk/fantasy heartbreaker, it's because there's already books and books of fluff and geopolitical musings and the like. There's gonna be a shitton of feats, spells, etc. already, so I want to keep the damn thing manageable.

[TarkisFlux]

Dragonmarks giving you spells does not make you a spellcaster unless they give you mother fucking sorcerer loads of spells. Which you could totally do, but it seems like there would be space for both dragonmarked who pursue spell research independent of their marks and dragonmarked dudes who don't but use their mark abilities to assist with their other shit.

[vagrant]

Dragonmarks give you a range of abilities and spells based on the mark - so a mark of sentinel gives you (in standard 3.5) some piddly shit like +2 to Sense Motive and the amazing ability to cast Mage Armour 1/day. Better dragonmarks gives you more piddly shit like protection from energy 1/day or lesser globe of invulnerability.

Which is bullshit, but you get the point. Dragonmarks give you abilities in some field that your House has leveraged into an economic monopoly. I'd lke to remake the marks into shit that doesn't suck and could conceivably be a reason that a certain dragonmarked family managed an economic monopoly (cause being able to casting mage armour 1/day does not a monopoly make.)

I might seriously just make dragonmarks give you either shitloads of spells and minor ability boosts for casters, and major ability boosts but only a few spells for the non-caster variant. Or ignore the non-caster/caster divide for dragonmarked characters entirely.

[Wiseman]

I'd like to see a working version ebberon that actually simulates at least up to the industrial revolution, but using magic in place of science.

How would that look?

[vagrant]

Re-reading some of the setting lore of Eberron made me realise some things - namely, Frank was right. The setting isn't really early 20th century or even mid 19th. It's seriously more Renaissance Europe with guns, monopolistic guilds, and the birth of a merchant middle-class.

However, they also do seriously have magic robots, schema, sending stones for telecommunications, airships and a rail system. So yeah.

Schema is apparently Eberron's answer to mass-production. (Not a very good one, mind you, so we should probably aim to make that better.) Minor schema are just reusable 1/day scrolls of up to 6th level, with the caveat that they don't have ability score minimums and if your caster level is lower than the schema's CL, the check to use it is simply CL+1.

Major schema are literally just Macguffin plot devices and can apparently function like legos, taking fragments of other schemas and jabbing them together to make cooler shit. Presumably the intent was to make 'piece together the artefact' stories relevant, but...yeah, the execution does not impress.

The fluff assures us that a single schema can let a magewright quickly crank out 'hundreds of stones of continual flame', though unless their definition of quickly is 'once per day', the mechanics don't add up.

Baker also had an article on magewrights themselves - they apparently make up 1% of the adult working population, and in conjunction with the vaunted economic ability to cast magecraft or mending or other cantrips a massive three times a day. This somehow has created a functioning and growing middle class.

Dragonmarked Houses, on the other hand, seriously function less like guilds with the whole ranking systems of master->journeyman->apprentice (though that ranking seems to be preserved in the subdivisions of the Houses) and more like modern corporations. They do hire non-dragonmarked individuals, even non-family members, run for-profit and have distinct legal entities, to the extent that they nearly resemble cyberpunk Japanese zaibatsu. They are, though, vertical monopolies and not horizontal ones, which each House controlling a specific facet of commerce.

That said, a look through the Sharn, City of Towers book reveals a seriously medieval version of production, with horrible specialisation of labour prevalent as such. They still have frickin blacksmiths and barrelmakers instead of being made obsolete by interchangeable parts and mechanisation (though wikipedia tells me that it was the screw-cutting lathe, invented in 1790, that led to blacksmiths being replaced by machinists, though it also says that blacksmiths were still in use during the American Civil War.)

However, Sharn does seem to have an industrial center - the Cogs, at ground level (Sharn towers go up to a mile in height, so groundlevel is pretty shit.) The Cogs also don't have mention of mass-production or factories, but plenty of foundries and forges.

[vagrant]

What I gather from all this is that Eberron isn't really steampunk - it's on the cusp of an Industrial Revolution, but hasn't /quite/ reached it. The ability to mass-produce textiles isn't there, though steam-power is replicated by dragonshards and iron/steel production is replicated by elemental-bound forges.

[Ancient History]

Schema and Dragonmarked are mostly useless because, again, you need XP to make magic items. Eberron is really just a setting where magic-based is more ubiquitous, but it gets all hand-wavy when it comes to the details of how shit works because the system does not mechanically support a 1st level magewright making any number of items because they have zero XP. Every magewright needs to spend the morning killing rabbits just to have enough XP to make a really shitty magic item.

Now, the setting information suggests that dragonshards make magical item manufacture easier, and schema and artificers and magewrights mean that you have more magical item manufacturers per capita, and that Dragonmarked are mutants with superpowers that can be improved by magic devices. But of course the dragonshards are just an additional requirement, schema and artificers and magewrights still need XP badly, and Dragonmarked feats take up value feat slots while giving rather moderate spell-like abilities and opening up a few truly shitty prestige classes.

So what you really want is to make dragonshards actually power magic items, and artificers and magewrights use schema and dragonshards to really pump out magical goods to the point that you can go out and buy a wand or +1 sword like you were in a Vlad Taltos novel, and Dragonmarked are mutants whose innate powers are bonus feats or something that they can automatically improve as they level up.

...and even then, it's probably just going to be a shitty d20 clone, because it's an inherently silly setting when you get into the supplements.

[DragonChild]

Where the hell are all of these "with guns" coming from? Since when did Eberron have guns? Eberron is big on wand-wielders, who need to be skilled and not just anybody can pick up a wand. But what Eberron book mentions guns AT ALL?

[Prak]

One of the things I found while working on Anno Raptus is that mile high towers are pretty absurd. Even with our modern tech our tallest skyscrapers go about half a mile tall.

[vagrant]

I can't see the sillyness, but the fixes you recommend are correct.

[vagrant]

Where the hell are all of these "with guns" coming from? Since when did Eberron have guns? Eberron is big on wand-wielders, who need to be skilled and not just anybody can pick up a wand. But what Eberron book mentions guns AT ALL?

Wands, really, instead of guns, especially with eternal wands, but the fluff seriously states that near the end of the war, nations just fielded regiments of peasants with wands.

One of the things I found while working on Anno Raptus is that mile high towers are pretty absurd. Even with our modern tech our tallest skyscrapers go about half a mile tall.

In Sharn, the towers are that high-up because it's linked to Syrania, the Azure Sky, and flying magic and structural hand-wavey stuff works better there.

[codeGlaze]

You're doing it wrong.

Eberrons biggest problem isn't 3.5, its that its inconsistant and poorly defined.

Step 1 - Fix the setting so it makes sense, and is clearly defined.
Step 2 - Use d20 +house rules, but strip out classes, races, and feats and replace them with good ones.

[ ... ]

Dragonmark caster = Sorcerers (fluff wise)
Dragonmark noncaster = Dragon shamans (barbarians maybe)
Magitech caster = Artificer
Magitech noncaster = Little brother from full metal alchemist
Arcane caster = battlefield control wizard.
Arcane noncaster = wand gunslinger
divine caster = buff priest
divine noncaster = paladin
psionic caster = professor X
psionic noncaster = unarmed ki martial artist.

[ ... ]

10 classes
450 spells
9 races
360 feats

I recomend you import from other content like the SRD and Tomes, but also keep in mind you can't just wholesale import stuff or you run into weird stuff.

Make it happen.

That's a pretty sweet break down.

Where the hell are all of these "with guns" coming from? Since when did Eberron have guns? Eberron is big on wand-wielders, who need to be skilled and not just anybody can pick up a wand. But what Eberron book mentions guns AT ALL?

I liked the wandslinger idea. ROUGEZ WIT WANDZ FO LYF!

One of the things I found while working on Anno Raptus is that mile high towers are pretty absurd. Even with our modern tech our tallest skyscrapers go about half a mile tall.

But.... Magic!

[Wiseman]

One of the things I found while working on Anno Raptus is that mile high towers are pretty absurd. Even with our modern tech our tallest skyscrapers go about half a mile tall.

Aren't there spells that can reinforce the hardness of structure and make it more stable?

[Prak]

On the towers: yeah, magic, I guess.

Originally I edited this in, but then people posted, so here it is where people will see it:

Oh, and thinking about a song earlier made me realise what one of the bigger effects of a magitech revolution would be on a fantasy world- prophylactics suddenly become vastly more available, especially in Eberron, even with minor schema. If you're a magewright with his choice of major schema, you don't even give a shit about continual flame and such, what you do is get a minor schema of Fabricate and set up your workshop next to a slaughterhouse. You buy up all the sheep intestine each day, and pile it up in your workshop. Even a minimum caster level Fabricate schema turns 90 cubic ft of sheep intestine into 90 cubic feet of pre-rubber condoms. You can probably get all that sheep intestine for maybe a couple gold or so, and then you have roughly 3,110,400 condoms. Even if you sell them to brothels two to the copper so that the brothels can then sell them for a copper each, you're making 15,552 gp. I cannot fathom 90 cubic feet of sheep intestine costing anywhere near that much. At the very least, you're profiting 15,452 gp for not even 10 minutes of work each day (ok, more if you include going around to the brothels to drop your wares).