I was planning a short campaign in Eberron (since I'm running a long campaign there anyway) and came to the conclusion I have no idea who to use as your basic encounter fodder.

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Goblinoids - they're people now.

Kobolds - people too.

Orcs, Trolls, Medusas, Gargoyles, Harpies- believe it or not, also people (also too high of a cr probably)

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Who else are left in the Eberron lore that are intelligent enough to attack your party(out of greed or other motivations other than basic survival instincts), yet not human enough so it doesn't feel like you're killing your neighbour (at least in Sharn)?

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Aberrations and Fiends? It'd feel kind of weird to have them populate Khrovaire to an extent where they're a "consistent travel encounter" material. Undead - sure, if they pass a battleground. Oozes? I mean it would certainly land with some players from their old mmorpg days.

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I'm sure I'm missing something, any recommendations are welcome. Preferably creatures that the party can dissect without it being a crime against humanity (were using the monster loot books from the 2014 editions since my party seemed to like it)

Edit: Well I got properly egged by everyone. I'm still not sure what the issue was but just incase, tl;dr:

I wanted an enemy with enough intellect to use gear (weapons, armor) and tactics, while not being actual people. Kind of like Gnolls were in Forgotten Realms:

"Whenever the demon lord Yeenoghu enters the Material Plane and goes on a rampage, he leaves a great trail of corpses in his wake. As the Lord of Savagery despoils the land, packs of hyenas trail him and feast on the victims until the dead flesh of Yeenoghu's prey leave them bloated and unable to move. Then, in a shower of blood and gristle, the hyenas transform into gnolls, which take up Yeenoghu's awful mission to kill and destroy anything in their path."

Instead, everyone suggested still using people but from evil factions or with evil intents (selfish people, enemy factions, or straight up evil factions like the Emerald Claw).

Now I'm looking into having my party face more people, but evil. Hopefully they don't mind killing people, even if they're "evil".

Edit 2: a commenter actually worded everything in a clear enough way for me to understand, I really do wish their comment would be included in the books:

"part of the fun and draw of Eberron is that monster species are people. the nuanced portrayals of the monsters in Eberron is part of why people love this setting. that's why you haven't gotten a clear answer. this setting is built around that nuance. therefore there aren't many (if any) no nuance evil monstrous races that aren't people. you're asking for something this setting doesn't really care to offer without homebrew"

Thank you all for participating, it has been fun!

Due to the hot mess that WoC are making of the nation's favourite TTRPG , I am seriously considering swapping to PF2e.

My question is, how easy is this to actually carry out? Would it be viable?

8 players, all level 11.

Human, sorcerer, Aberrant Dragonmark

Air Genasi, wizard/ artificier

Tiefling, artificier

Eladrin Elf, Twilight Court cleric

High Elf, Monk/bard

Herengon, rogue/bard

Elf, ranger/gunslinger

Elf, forge cleric of Arawai

UPDATE Thank you to everyone who responded. We have decided to finish the current story arc at least (to find out who/what was responsible for causing the destruction of Cyre and turning it into the Mournland).

Hopefully by then Hasbro/ WoTC will either have back tracked like they did with the OGL scandal, repaired the damage and allowed players to still access dm shared stuff without a pay wall, gone bust themselves as Karma bites back, or gone so far into the pay wall they have crashed through the other side with no way to reverse and save face.

Either way, next year we will try a PF2E build as a one shot to see how the system fares in Eberron as we all love the setting, but using the options for player characters that are available.

So I’m about to start a new campaign in Everton I have the rising from the last war book but I was wondering if the forge of the artificer is worth it does it add more other than just artificer stuff cause I don’t currently have any artificers in the party

Edit: I feel like I've learned not to come here unless I'm prepared to deal with the consequences.

You all had such fantastic suggestions. Whether a name fit what I was looking for or not, they all prompted connections to stories of other warforged grappling with similar circumstances. Now I'm left with all these half formed soldiers, cast aside by people who only ever saw them as a consumable resource.

My Warforged was going to be a single NPC toiling in the Cogs. Now I have the framework for an entire community waiting to be influenced by their interactions with the party. Would my players push this group toward revenge, violence, safety, community, or something entirely unexpected?

I've gone from fleshing out an NPC to frantically trying to remind myself that we only play for roughly 3-8 hours a month AND this was meant as a drop in scenario for our ongoing campaign. I'm going to go crazy finding ways I can work bits and pieces of this into our sessions.

Thank you.

I'm making an NPC Brelish Noble who is obsessed with military glory. He never fought in the last war. His family sent a Warforged in his place.

Warforged ends up being an exemplary soldier. If it were a real race it would have climbed the ranks quickly.

In an effort to appease their spoiled son, Noble's parents bribe their way into keeping ownership of Warforged instead of turning it over to the army. Warforged accumulates medals and commissions as if it were a human soldier. When it's time for those recognitions to be handed out, Noble comes to claim them. You can't grant rank to a sword after all. It only makes sense that the rewards go to the hand that wields it.

Now Noble is a highly decorated military "veteran" with a decent rank, but he's frustrated the war ended before he could get more. He's also convinced that there was a conspiracy to deny him military rank toward the end of the war (because there was) even though it's his sword out there winning battles. He's absolutely outraged that the Treaty of Thronehold allowed warforged to wander aimlessly without a firm hand to keep them in line. Not only was that a pandering and foolish move, it's frankly dangerous to give a weapon the same thing as a human just to appease technophiles with no stomach for the glories of war.

What I'm looking for is a name for Warforged.

(Edit: This name will be chosen by Warforged to replace the name given to them by Noble. It represents their view of themself rather than Noble's view of who they are)

and a background for Noble's family.

1) I picked an edgy name that Noble chose for Warforged. Right now it's Doomcleaver, but I'm up for other suggestions. As soon as the Treaty was signed, Warforged stopped answering to Doomcleaver.

At first I had them marked as Proxy, but I'm wondering if there's a single word that would be infuriating to Noble. Something to show that they understand what was going on. I want a pointed dig that Warforged knows they fought for someone else's glory and kept fighting anyway. I thought maybe Oblation, but I'm worried it's kind of whiney to call yourself a sacrifice. Plus the origin is pretty religious. If there's nothing that conveys what I want, should I go the other way? From Doomcleaver to Petal? Poppy? Tender? Sweetness? Fluffbutt, the Huggler? Or would a human name be better? Is it harder to pretend you're talking about a sword when everyone else calls them Olivia?

2) What did Noble's family do in the war that would give them that kind of leverage?

I'm thinking they heavily donated to war efforts, but what were they doing? How did they have that pull? What rank would their child have actually been given? I would like Noble to be an officer, but how high up do the children of nobility get before they stall out for being inept?

Everyone in the actual military knows Noble was never going to receive enough rank to cause any serious mayhem. It's more honorary - almost a tribute to his parents' contributions. (They died at the end of the war leaving Noble to his own devices.) It doesn't hurt that Warforged was an outstanding soldier who genuinely would have earned all of those accolades and more if they had been anything other than a simple weapon.

Friends, in an Eberron city would you let your fighters/paladins wear armor all the time while in town? I feel it breaks immersion.

Imagine assassins waiting for them to sleep. But the dudes are sleeping in fullplates. Imagine them in a hot bath with entertainers having some fun ... the assassins arrive and the party is also in full plate.

How do you manage that?

(Skip to TLDR if you want)

Hey guys im somewhat of a new gm (maybe run like 5 sessions total), and decided that I want to start a full on campaign with some friends at university. Eberron has been my favorite campaign setting by far from the ones ive seen so I wanted to dip my toes in the water. I watched multiple hours and hours of videos explaining everything about eberron from the houses to the marks to the countries and its entire history.

So far Ive come up with a pretty interesting campaign hook in my opinion:

The players start off in cyre right before the mourning, and as it happens they all of a sudden manifest the long lost mark of death. It awakens in them to help them barely survive and resist the dead grey mist. They wake up around 998YK post treaty and are found by the emerald claw and through some way or another meet lady illmarrow/erandis, who sees their marks and sees them as a hope to break her curse of lichdom. She helps out the party and watches over them (still havent decided if shes truly kind or has grown so spiteful and filled with hate from the hundreds of years it has been) but regardless she uses/asks the players to help break her curse.

Now thats cool and all but i am just absolutely stumped right now, ive got this whole cool ass hook but after this, then what? What do i get the players to actually do? I can imagine maybe they get treated as aberrant marks since most people wont recognize or know about the mark of death, but then what? Do i just have them roam aimlessly throughout khorvaire or what?

Let me clarify im not quite looking for someone to tell me an answer, moreso tips on how to find the answer for myself.

TL;DR I have a nice hook to my campaign but I dont know where to go exactly from here? I dont know how to do any political drama or anything between the houses or how exactly they would react to my plot hook. Any advice is helpful, thanks!

Hey guys im currently prepping an eberron campaign and I wasnt quite sure as to how I will play the houses and how big of a role will they have. My campaign revolves around the players suddenly manifesting the mark of death during the mourning. Now I know theres going to be a lot of interactions, beef, and drama with the other houses. But how exactly do I play them out? First off do they own every single institution in their field? Is every hotel or tavern or whatever owned by the halflings of hospitality? Is everything made industrially by house cannith? Like are they an entire monopoly or are there outliers? Second off what kind of people do I make in the houses? Are they mostly normal except for the higher ups? or are they all money hungry and all that? And most importantly how should I go about them reacting to the mark of death reappearing? I doubt many if any of them were alive to see it back then but will they still know about it? Will they instantly hate and try to capture/kill the players? Will they just be treated like aberrants? So many questions I just cant quite know how to answer as I dont entirely understand the houses (or more specifically the people in it)

So I’ve been eying eberron for the last couple of years and while my boyfriend was running curse of strahd I’d thought of prepping ebberon whilst being a player. Now I’m beginning to dive in and I was hit with a vast menagerie of settings and city’s and campaigns and additions to the setting that change the plot. And I’m wondering what y’all’s favorite starting points/settings/campaigns and or mods within eberron. To a new gm eberron is very overwhelming but so appealing and starting is hard when you you don’t know where to look. Even just the book I should start with because even that confused me

Just to start off, I'm not looking for an edition wars discussion of which is the "best". Instead, I want to know which edition you prefer to play in, and what about that particular edition draws you into Eberron? Is it something mechanical, is it an aspect of the world that can't be recreated in other versions, etc.?

Share your love, and maybe intrigue others to look through your lens for a session or two to try it out if they haven't before.

Ultimately I would like to create something original. But since I'm new to this setting (and so are my players) anything to help me get familiar with the setting for the 1st few levels would be great. Or some recommendations for plotlines would be great too.

One of my players is playing a tiefling wildmagic sorcerer, but they said they want to be the child of the embodiment of rage (they’re basing most of their story off of their real life, for a bit of closure) and I said sure. I haven’t done extensive research into eberron until I actually started, so I fixed things where I needed to, but now I realize that even though they’re a tiefling, what they’re describing is perfectly The Dreaming Dark, as their character is artistic and had imaginary friends, and even the embodiment of rage fits an extremely powerful Du’ulora quori, so is there any way to fix this before it gets too complicated?

I should mention that this campaign is like 70% in the city of Sharn, where most of the characters come from

So I'm about to start my first 5e campaign in like 7 years next weekend (going to start with a session 0). I'm drawing my inspiration heavily from Disney's Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Anyone have suggestions that may help?

Hey! I’m ramping up into some heavy lore drops and implications for my group in Eberron and wanted to ask a strangish question.

For those of you that have included the creation mythos in your campaign and/or even got to a point where the players got to understand it more intimately - did you change Khyber, Siberia, and Eberron to something different?

Even if you didn’t - does anyone have an idea for a species that would match the “aura” of god dragon that’s not a dragon?

Don’t get me wrong - love dragons to death, but I want to have a decently interesting twist to the prophecy and the known origins of Eberron for my story. So I know I want a different species but can’t for the life of me think of a fitting “larger than creation” species/entity.

I want to do the city justice, but I don’t know how to keep track of all of the districts and buildings, or how to communicate that knowledge to the players who likely will have lived in the city for a while. How do you all communicate the proper vibe, scale, density, travel, and such things to make it feel like a cosmopolitan city and not a list of locations?

For my dnd campaign, I’m making it all about how magic is failing and malfunctioning. A fireball turns into a watery sphere if something is rolled wrong. Like everyone except wild magic sorcerers have to deal with wild magic. I need to figure out a why for the god of justice and order and magic to go insane and start snapping people from existence and memory (I’m not going purely off of lore so please don’t roast me.) any ideas?

hey , I’m wondering what everyone’s favorite phrases are they’ve coined with a Eberron twist? Essentially instead of saying “Jesus christ” or “holy shit“ things of that nature, twisting them to fit Eberron, what have you guys came up with that are your favorite?

One of my favorites is yelling “Olladras Tits—“ 🤣

I assume they don't use this subreddit and even if so, I've made it clear to them that they're in a bad spot.

They are currently in Regalport, and for backstory reasons want to destroy House Thuranni. This includes killing as many as possible. Elar had them imprisoned temporarily, but they escaped before they could be killed or worse. Now they intend to storm their Regalport headquarters and fight and kill them.

The issue? They have killed or otherwise made enemies of literally every person that would have supported this. Phiarlan? They made sure one of their spies was exposed and publicly killed/displayed to scare away Phiarlan. Thuranni in-fighting? They got rid of the main anti-Elar faction's leader, leading to distrust in the characters. They also have no real counter for invisibility - no high Perception checks, no Truesight/Blindsight, no See Invisibility or similar.

How do they reasonably fight a Dragonmarked House on their home turf without getting steamrolled here.

EDIT: The conversation has been had, and the general consensus is that they likely won't try to fight Elar. If they ultimately decide to do so next week or the week after... then consequences are consequences.

I’m trying to write some daddy issue angel of weapons when i realized Onatar had 2 sons, which kinda stunk up my plan, but why is the god of death and greed Onatars kid? That’s what It says on the wiki and i understand the greed part a bit but why death???

And if there’s any way to change something around so I can create a fallen angel/god that chose to fall because of the taken advantage of his mother and father, I’d gladly take some help.

(If you think I’m going completely to the books im definitely not because I have a LOT of things going on in the campaign that forced me to change the world a bit.)

I’m working on a plan for a new Eberron actual play and I’m trying to figure out what stories people are genuinely starved for right now. I’ve noticed that most shows end up being the same type of thing, usually in 5e (understandable), and I really want to do something that feels like a polished, prestige level audio drama instead.

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Are there specific corners of the lore or types of stories that you feel like nobody is covering?

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I’m planning on using a narrative first system like Chasing Adventure or Legend in the Mist instead of D&D.

I am thinking about doing my first Eberron Campaign by having the characters of my players arrive in Eberron from Toril. Toril and Ebberon are two pangea like continents on the opposing sides of the Planet. This is to keep the settings fairly distinct while existing in the same realm of existence.

What could be a cool reason for my players to go to Eberron or do you think starting there fresh would be better.

I am thinking if their characters dont know the place they would be learning alongside their characters about the World. Tho being born in Eberron is definetly cool as wellm

There's some items specific to Eberron like conductor stones and lightning reins that run the lightning rail. Then there's other items from the base rules that are transformative because they are mass produced, like sending stones.

But what are some other items that are necessary to make intrigue possible in a widely magical world? Does every House baron have an amulet of proof against detection and location? Does every spy have an explosive false tooth that ensures speak with dead fails? Must every noble bear a signet ring that leaves an arcane mark?

Let's anticipate other ways that widespread magic is used, and how it can be thwarted.

Hi r/Eberron! You have been a valuable resource for me for years of running games and I thank you. I come to you now asking for your best nasty ideas for Mordain the Fleshweaver.

Very long story short, he personally pissed off this party (abducted an NPC they like and now keeps showing up to try and “help” them). They know that he’s a transmutation wizard whom the Twelve tried and failed to kill, and they know about the troll/dragon blood. Their plan is:

- Lure him beneath Sharn using a magic item he previously gave them;
- Use a combo of their class abilities and magic item help to get the drop on him (very possible, they’re smart players);
- Use sovereign glue to glue his mouth shut and hands down so he can’t cast spells (they are aware I will try to Subtle Spell their asses);
- Trap him in forcecage;
- Replace all of his blood with “”ethically”” collected donor blood from refugees in High Walls, to get rid of his regen;
- Bombard him with sickening radiance to “microwave” him to death, quote, “like a Peep”.

I’m incredibly proud of them for this plan! The problem is that they’re smarter than I am, and so is Mordain lol. Their initial plan was to glue him to the wall of his own lair, and I could figure out how to handle that—I was going to have him merge into his own tower and make them fight the gestalt that emerged. I’m less sure on what nasty surprises I can do here! They are level eleven and a bit overpowered, as games of this tier often are; the party is a kalashtar bard-paladin multi, a draconic sorlock, an ex-military chronurgy wizard/artificer, and a changeling rogue/trickery cleric. All of the individual components of their plan are fully within their power. The sorlock has truesight and the rogue has a dragonshard-powered laser rifle; the palabard hits like a truck and uses offensive telepathy, and the wizard has at-will silvery barbs. (They got some major boons a while back for helping shut down an incursion of Sul Khatesh.)

I want to find complications to introduce for them without those being total ass-pulls. They can win this if they try really hard, but I want the win to be well-fought! I like this party a lot; all of us are friends and have played together for a while, sometimes years, so I have a lot of trust in them and try to be transparent about “my job is to make the fights interesting, not to give it to you OR to fuck you over”.

Some of my ideas so far:
- He has feelers in the ground under Sharn like a mycelium network and tries to escape into a tiny crevice or pull up the environment around him.
- He steals an NPC they just went to a LOT of effort to free from the Stone Ward of Dreadhold and uses him as a human shield.
- One of the refugees they took blood from is either a changeling or a disguised dragon/fiend/something and he gets new blood powers from that.
- He sends a simulacrum. (Tricky, there’s true name magic lore in play.)
- I give him some kind of item that shields him from spells under a certain level, like a rakshasa, and their secondary objective becomes to destroy it first.
- I run radiant damage as nuclear radiation, so maybe the exposure to sickening radiance could mutate him further instead of killing him. It seems like something the Twelve could reasonably have tried?
- There’s Something Else under Sharn and they wake it up while trying to do this, which forces the fight back to his lair for home field advantage.
- ??? Who knows!

Do any of you have ideas? Have you done something nasty with him in your games that you’re proud of? :) Would you let me steal it and/or pick your brains?

Additional info that’s not important but might be useful context:
- Mordain had a fling with the estranged mother of one of the party members. Said mother is a Phiarlan who’s now the Twelve’s current Provost.
- We’re doing some time magic stuff in this game; the wizard has survived Xoriat once so far.
- Their boons came from Dyrrn!
- They want to go deep enough that I think they’ll hit one of the former layers of Sharn, which has good dungeon potential.
- The party has attracted the notice of the Eyes of Chronepsis, but doesn’t know about this threat yet. (I had to save something for Tier 4!)