I’m currently developing a new fantasy setting. I’ll be talking about this more in the months ahead, but one of the key elements is that I’m designing it to be system neutral. I will be launching with RPG support for at least one system, but unlike Eberron the world itself isn’t integrally tied to the mechanics of a particular RPG – and I want to make it as easy as possible for people to adapt the setting to the system of their choice. As this is a topic I’m wrestling with on a daily basis, it’s a great time to address questions about adapting Eberron to other systems.
If you are adapting Eberron to other systems, what is important to have mechanically? (besides dragonmarks and races)
It’s a difficult topic to address without knowing anything about the system in question. You could use Eberron with 13th Age, Dungeon World, or Dread – but obviously in a rules-light system like Dread, you’re going to approach the conversion in a very different way. I’m going to use Dread as an example throughout this article simply because it is so different from any edition of D&D. For those who aren’t familiar with it, in Dread characters are defined by a basic concept and the answers to a list of questions the gamemaster asks the players; they have no numerical statistics. All challenges are resolved through Jenga; when a person tries to do something that involves risk, the gamemaster decides how many tiles they must move in order to succeed.
So, I think your basic guide is the Ten Things You Need To Know About Eberron, found on page 4 of the 4E Eberron Campaign Guide and page 8 of the 3.5 Eberron Campaign Setting. I’m not going to go through all ten points, nor am I going to reprint the full text of a point, so you’ll want to refer to one of the books for full benefit.
- Tone and attitude. Eberron “combines traditional medieval D&D fantasy with swashbuckling action and dark adventure.” This section mentions that we added action points to support this flavor – that they allow “players to alter the course of dramatic situations and have their characters accomplish the seemingly impossible.” Some systems out there already have something similar built in. If not, one option is to simply lift the 3.5 or 4E action point systems and use them as is – spend an action point to take an extra action, add an extra die, or do something remarkable. For Eberron Dread, I would give each player a token and allow them to use that token once to knock five pulls off of a particular action… which means most things are automatic, but as GM I do still have the ability to say “That’s a 20-pull action, but hey, it’s only 15 with your action point.”
- A world of magic. Read what it says in the book. The key here is that magic is a part of everyday life. Magewrights are specialists who can cast a handful of spells or rituals, and who have turned that mastery into a job – the locksmith who can perform arcane lock and knock, the oracle who can cast augury and divination. A critical point here is that fully-powered wizards, artificers, and clerics are rare and remarkable; Eberron is a world of widespread low-level magic, and a magewright locksmith can’t simply pick up your spellbook and learn to cast fireball. For the most part this is about the world around the players and the services that are available to them. If the players are in Sharn they should be able to find an arcane locksmith, whether it’s D&D or Eberron Dread.
- Dragonmark Dynasties. I know you said “besides dragonmarks”, but my point is that there’s more to dragonmarks than the simple mechanics of the mark itself. The dragonmarked houses are influential forces in society because of the magical services they offer. Even if no player character has a dragonmark, they’ll go to House Jorasco for healing, rely on Orien and Lyrandar for transportation, send a message through House Sivis, and take advantage of House Cannith’s services any time they purchase magical goods. House Tharashk’s powers are reflected in their presence in remote places – the fact that their gift allows them to locate veins of precious resources that would otherwise go undiscovered. To cut to the chase: when translating the world to a new system, don’t simply think about the dragonmarks as they will be used by the players; think about how you will represent the primary services and gifts of each house, and how PCs will feel the influence of those houses.
With both this and the previous point, I want to emphasize that if the RPG you’re using has its own magic system, feel free to dramatically change the services available or power of the mark. Don’t worry about directly mimicking the powers of the 3.5 Mark of Creation; consider how creation works within this system, and what magics exist that facilitate it. Then place those powers in the hands of House Cannith. Jorasco heals. Cannith creates. Sivis communicates. The precise powers they wield don’t have to be identical from system to system, as long as they are the masters of those fields.
- The Last War has ended… sort of. The impact of the war is one of the most fundamental themes of Eberron. Mechanics aside, you should always consider the impact the war has had on your characters and plot. Mechanically, are their any aspects of the system that lend themselves to magical weapons of mass destruction or other things that would have been harnessed to the war effort?
There are many other points you could consider; for example, I will look at the influence of the planes, and the effect of manifest zones, coterminous and remote periods, and the like. However, this isn’t as important as those basic ten points; review that list, and if you feel like you’ve got them covered, you’re on solid ground.
Of course, one of those ten points is “new races.” So…
If creating homebrew Warforged, Kalashtar, Shifters, or Changelings in other systems, what about each race should I focus on?
It’s a difficult question to answer without addressing a particular system, but here’s my take on the core of each race.
- Warforged. The warforged are constructs. They don’t eat, breathe, or sleep. A warforged soldier is a weapon; his armor is fused to his body. It’s up to you how far to take the construct element. 3.5 provided the warforged with a host of immunities, while 4E scaled them back. Regardless, durability is a core theme: the warforged are bad from leather and steel, and have fewer vital points than a human. A second thing to consider is that the warforged are magical beings; they are living constructs and can evolve beyond their original design. A warforged juggernaut literally grows heavier armor and spikes. While it may not come up in a game, another key fact is that the warforged cannot reproduce; there’s a finite number of them, and if they want to thrive as a race, this is something that will need to be addressed.
- Kalashtar. A kalashtar shares its mind with an alien spirit. This allows it to resist psychic attacks and enhances its personal psychic abilities. If you’re not using a system that supports psionics, you can mimic this with other forms of magic, or simply emulate it by granting the kalashtar the ability to form simple mindlinks, bonuses to checks to influence people, and the like. At lest it go without saying, kalashtar don’t dream normally.
- Shifters. I wouldn’t worry about the precise shifter abilities presented in either book as much as I’d try to capture the basic idea of the shifter: a being with a strong primal spirit, who can call its animalistic nature to the fore for a brief period of time. The primal characters fit shifter nature quite well; the druid’s ability to shapeshift is an extension of its inherent nature, while the barbarian calls on feral instinct to fuel his rage. When looking to civilized shifters, it’s a question of how they harness that animalistic spirit for their urban endeavors, and whether they feel trapped in the city or have adapted to it like a rat. But in short, animalistic characteristics that can be enhanced for a brief period of time.
- Changelings. Obviously the first challenge is the shapeshifting ability, and making it work without unbalancing your game. Note that by default it doesn’t change clothes. Beyond this, changelings are related to doppelgangers (or are one and the same, if you’re using 4E) and as such has a latent gift for telepathy; in 3.5 this is reflected by their bonuses to Bluff and Insight, as they are capable of subconsciously picking up surface thoughts and using them to influence people.
All of this really just scratches the surface; the warforged Dragonshards, Kalashtar DDI article, and other resources delve more into what defines each race. But these are some key things I’d take into account when converting the race.
Are you using Eberron with a system other than Dungeons & Dragons? Tell me what you’re using and what you’ve done with it!
I love using Mutants & Masterminds for my Eberron games. I love being able to let my players define what makes their characters awesome, whether that’s from learned abilities, racial advantages, dragonmarks, or cool toys. Plus Hero Points do an even better job than Action Points of letting players feel like their characters can do really special things.
I’ve been running campaigns and one-shots with PL 4 through 8 with a great deal of success.
Plus Hero Points do an even better job than Action Points of letting players feel like their characters can do really special things.
I agree that straight out of the box, action points don’t really accomplish their original purpose; they do let people “beat the odds”, but they still fall a little flat. Originally there was a more expansive set of uses for action points in 3.5; this ended up being dropped into Unearthed Arcana, IIRC. Personally, my default is always “Action points let you do something that wouldn’t normally be possible according to the rules; if you’ve got a cool cinematic thing you want to do, an action point can make it happen.” In the last game I ran, a wizard used a magic missile plus an action point to blast an undead wizard right in the gem embedded in its forehead, temporarily dispelling the otherwise unbeatable opponent. There was no concrete rule for it, but the gem was its power focus; a magic missile “never misses”; and it was a cinematically appropriate thing. If he hadn’t tossed in the action point, I probably would have given him a few extra points of damage for clever thinking; with the action point thrown in, I was happy to give them the temporary victory.
This is almost identical to the approach I took with adapting 3.5 Eberron to Savage Worlds. http://goo.gl/ew7Vl
It’s been a work in progress for a couple of years. I started with the most common mistake, atempting to convert D&D game mechanics directly to Savage Worlds. It was a painful learning process to understand that certain rules were just D&Disms, or mechanics designed from D&D’s rules history and internal sense of game balance. I eventually learned to adapt the setting rather than convert it by bringing over the flavor and intent instead of the rules.
Some aspects were incredibly easy to adapt. Bennies are like Action Points on steroids which are much better suited to making the PCs big damned heroes and enemies worthy adversaries. The flexibility of Savage Worlds’ classless system eliminated the need to convert any classes or prestige classes. The Weird Science Arcane Background and the Gadgeteer Edge are all that is needed to create an artificer or magewright. The former assists with making permanent magic items, although there are other Edges that facilitate that as well, and the latter is an improved substitution for infusions (create a temporary magic item that expires only after its power points are spent for any power available to the artificer even if it’s not a known power).
Admittedly, warforged were a very dificult aspect to adapt. Constructs in Savage Worlds aren’t as distinctly defined as in D&D v3.5, and in some settings they still need to “recharge” as a substitution for eating or sleeping.
I haven’t figured out how to distinguish deathless from undead in Savage Worlds, but I’m not sure it’s really necessary to define. I also struggle a bit with an adaptation for minor schemas. Various 3.5 sources define their uses differently. In some cases it’s to create magic items. In others, its to activate a spell/power. I’ve tried to marry the two concepts via the idea of using it to create an additional weird science device, sort of like gaining a new power without having to take the New Power Edge; this is how tomes from the Savage Worlds Fantasy Companion work for those with an Arcane Background of Magic or Miracles.
Back to a more general level, I ultimately focused on capturing the feel of the races, dragonmark powers, and even some feats that still converted almost effortlessly to Edges.
I think the adaptation I’ve found to be most successful is my borrowing of the Deadlands Fate Chips mechanic as Prophecy Shards in Eberron which matches the effects of different colored bennies to Eberron, Khyber, and Siberys shards. http://goo.gl/tcqV0
In summary, I’ve often felt that Eberron might have been written for the wrong system. I find Savage Worlds to be a stronger fitting for Eberron’s sense of pulp, noir, and horror than D&D v3.5 really could be. Savage Worlds is much more empowering for characters to perform daring actions. With minor adjustments to the rules governing wounds, combat can be pulpy or gritty depending on your desire. The Savage Worlds Horror Companion adds a lot in the form of Rituals, Sanity tables, new powers for darker characters as well as a binding power (a must for Eberron). Savage Worlds really captures and supports the inherent to Eberron quite well.
We’ve just recently converted our D&D 4e characters to that of the Leverage RPG system. In our 4e campaign, our band of misfits are members of the crew of the Lyrandar airship – Ravenstorm. The 4e crew of the Ravenstorm included: The captain – a business man, named Devlin Sain d’ Lyrandar (half-elf warden). His first mate is Beatrice Amnell (human ranger/cleric). His quartermaster, Koh (changeling artificer). The rest of the crew included the strikers Migs d’ Cannith (Aberrant dragonmarked human warlock), Timothy o’ Rourke (human wizard/monk) and Zai (drow rogue/warlock). They basically take on odd jobs for the right price. The Ravenstorm ship allows them to travel from one point of Eberron to the another. They have made a notorious name for themselves – including crashing the first Ravenstorm ship into the middle of Sharn – taking down more than a couple dozed buildings in the process.
The group wanted to test a more role-playing based game system so we looked for a game system which would allow easy transfer of the game concept/storyline to a heist based game set predominantly in Sharn. In Leverage, Devlin served as the Mastermind in charge of coordinating the party’s actions. Bea and Migs served as the grifters, capable to mingling with their marks. Koh served as the team’s hacker which provided support with gadgets. Zai served as the team’s thief. Rourke as the team’s hitter.
It took a bit of free form role-playing to keep the Eberron/D&D theme but so far it worked fine. The flexibility of the Leverage system allowed us to use Eberron/D&D elements in role-playing while using the system. Ex., Rourke still has his scorching bursts spells but he rolls his hitter dice to see how many of the Boromar clan henchmen he fried.
I’ve done some preliminary work to convert Spirit of the Century to something that would work with Eberron. SotC is Aspect driven, so race, class, alignment, specialties, dragonmarks, affiliations would largely be handled through those. Most of the skills are easily converted, but I found that the Arcana skill becomes a catch all for quite a bit. Maybe that makes sense for a setting in which magic is an everyday occurence.
I haven’t tried it yet, but I think it has a lot of potential.
I considered running Eberron using the old Alternity RPG rules. I myself was never a fan of the system, which can be extremely complicated. But I do value some aspect from Alternity and they lend themselves well to Eberron.
The system is very skill-oriented. This means that what your character IS is defined less by a character class but by what s/he does. In D&D 3e it is hard to break away from the concept that a bard is a foppish cad, even when playing a machiavellian gnomish historian. I think any Eberron game benefit from taking steps away from such stereotypes.
Alternity has a health system which is much more deadly than D&D’s hp system. You get stun points and wound points, each equal to your Con score (human max 14 btw) and they do not improve by much. Stun points are restored at the end of an encounter but wound points often take days to heal. You also have mortal points and fatigue points equal to half your Con. Taking mortal points causes you to accumulate large penalties to most actions and can only heal through medical intervention. Fatigue points do them same but are recovered quickly. I like this aspect of Alternity for how it more realistically creates mortal characters. Eberron is best when the characters are vulnerable and have limits.
Magic is the hardest part to convert. Alternity does have a system for it, but it isn’t vancian. It is based on skills. But that can be remedied by simply creating new skills with categories tied to dragonmarks. Alternity has a perk/flaw system that lends itself well to elements like having a dragonmark, Favored in House, or Right of Counsel. Thus anyone can learn a magic skill and improve it, but having the right dragonmark allows the skill to be used untrained and gives a bonus on the checks.
Warforged can simply be immune to fatigue damage and have natural armor. Changelings can have their shapechanging power, mechanically its still just a fat bonus to disguise checks. Shifters are harder, but simply converting the D&D claws/bite, armor bonus, what-have-you to Alternity equivalents is simple enough. Kalashtar just get the Telepathy skill, straight from the source book.
The best part is that Alternity was designed for modern/futuristic games. That makes all of Eberron’s magitech just a matter of reflavoring things that are fully statted in the rules.
When adapting Eberron to my own homebrew system, most things run smoothly, but there are a few features which just seem irreconcilable. I’ve mentioned before the difficulty with certain types of monsters.
Two other problem areas are changelings and warforged. Changelings are difficult because in my system PCs receive a spell-like ability at generation – like change-self. So changelings are ultimately indistinguishable from ordinary humans. I’ve played with some ideas to flesh them out to become more than human, but most have fallen short.
More problematic are warforged. As a balance, magic in my system feeds off life, making it an inherently hostile force. Typically this would result in magical beings like warforged becoming robot vampires – which just seems stupid. An alternative is to make them elemental creatures – which in my system aren’t magical but natural flesh and blood creatures.
Another problem is that viscerality is a key component in my system – fatigue, hunger, privation, pain, sickness, etc. – things to which warforged are immune. This typically leaves warforged characters out in the cold for much of the game. A solution I’ve come up with is to make warforged more machinelike. They need to regularly consume fuel to keep going (typically alchohol alla Futurama, but players can choose other energy sources – protein, wood, energy, etc.) and require regular maintenance – an oil change once a week, a regular supply of spare parts.
This also provides a lot of interesting elements for roleplaying. Warforged characters must spend as much time as most characters take to rest to perform daily maintenance. Some parts may be hard to replace, producing interesting side-quests. Different types of fuel may affect the warforged differently – pure medicinal alcohol may give the character a temporary boost at a higher cost, low-alcohol content drink could actually produce an effect similar to intoxication, etc. Other parts might be monopolized by syndicates seeking to control warforged, forcing them to obtain them illegally.
Nevertheless, they still introduce many other problems which make them somewhat of a pain in the ass to deal with as a DM.
I think the big question is why you need to add all of the races to the system you describe, Newb… at the least, why add them as player characters. If the visceral element is key, you could get around it by putting various physical handicaps on warforged. But is there really a driving need to have warforged as PCs? If you keep them as NPCs, then those immunities actually help to highlight the frailty of the creatures of flesh and blood; you’re starving and exhausted, while the relentless warforged just keep coming. This ties to the reason the warforged exist in the setting in the first place. Eberron is a world where magic is an industrial tool, used for the same things we use technology for. The warforged are tools of war. They are meant to be more efficient on the battlefield than people; that’s one of the key reasons you buy them. If they require eight hours of maintenance a day and lots of rare parts, I’d want to know just what advantages they possess that makes them worth the purchase as opposed to just relying on human soldiers. Likewise, if magic is an inherently hostile force in your system, do you have the magical economy which is the basis for the warforged in the first place?
With that said, I think the got-to-work-on-myself-for-eight-hours-to-keep-from-falling-apart-and-I-need-a-foreign-muffler construct has some humor value as an individual PC; I’m just not sure I see its value as an entire race. It seems to me that it might be a prototype that wouldn’t get mass produced until it was a little less labor-intensive.
Looking to the Changeling, it depends on the details of your everyone-gets-a-spell-like-ability system. If EVERYONE gets one, I definitely wouldn’t include changelings in the world. Instead, I’d focus on the cultural impact of these magical abilities. “Changelings” would be people who had change self as their power, how might well be ostracized and distrusted because of the ease with which they can deceive people – and thus more of a cultural group that the people-with-Tenser’s-Floating-Disk. On the other hand, if only PCs possess these powers, we’re back to the warforged point; I don’t see a need to have changelings as a PC race. Doppelgangers can still exist in the world, because they have other distinguishing abilities (such as telepathy) – but I think trying to create artificial distinctions between the human with at-will change self and the changeling is more trouble that it’s worth. Personally, I prefer to have fewer races and give them more depth than to cram races in for the sake of having the most flavors of ice cream. It’s why the Valenar and the Aereni are one race, instead of being Brony Elves and Dead-Guy Elves. If I was giving EVERY human in a setting a spell-like ability, I’d definitely focus on the subcultures that creates and jettison most other races, because I think there’s a lot of story and setting potential in that.
I see the point with changelings, but warforged to me seem to integral to Eberron to leave out.
Eberron is a world of magical technology – this is one of its most integral features. But so what? There are a dozen steampunk settings out there, and what is really the difference between a wind propelled ship and an elemental bound ship. Not much in gaming terms, so why bother?
What sets Eberron above the rest for me is that in Eberron technology is not merely another game device, but becomes roleplaying tender, a building block for stories. Technology is pretty boring on its own. What makes it interesting is how it relates to us flesh and blood human beings. This is one of the things I find most arresting about the setting, and what keeps me coming back.
And the warforged is the capstone metaphor which makes it all fit together. It is the place where technology and humanity converge, the story inspiring synthesis between man and machine.
As for the advantages of frail machine warforged. I’d say it lies not in their mechanical nature but in their human nature. As machines they’re no better than ordinary humans. The advantage lies in their personality, which as man-made constructs can be moulded and shaped, to be utterly loyal, to suffer none of the weaknesses like ambition or family which makes humans prone to subversion, so suffer none of the distractions like the need for recreation, esteem, personal morality or ideals. A warforged might have to perform maintenance for eight hours a day, but besides that it can work for sixteen hours straight, seven days a week on even the most menial tasks, twice as much as the most industrious humans. And due to their nature they can work in conditions flesh and blood beings couldn’t withstand. If you think about it, even with many frailties to weigh them down, warforged are still pretty superhuman.
As for the other questions :
Hostile magic necessitates a magical economy – what better to fight fire with than fire.
Does everyone get a magical ability? Yes and no. Everyone has the talent, but it is only activated through training, i.e gaining levels in a class. But is this any different from changelings? Surely they have the innate ability, but also have to learn how to use it.
Your idea of a game-system universal campaign setting is interesting, but it sounds like something I would find extremely daunting personally. Though, given the contemporary scene in the tabletop industry I can see where you’re coming from.
But one question immediately comes to mind. What makes every game system different the rest is their individual flavour – each are built with a different kind of game in mind. Some are designed for action, some for intrigue, some for horror and suspense, some for human relations, some for atmosphere, some for strategy, and so on. If you try to satisfy every taste every gamer imaginable might have, what keeps your setting from becoming so diluted or mixed up that it becomes completely flavourless?
The advantage lies in their personality, which as man-made constructs can be moulded and shaped, to be utterly loyal, to suffer none of the weaknesses like ambition or family which makes humans prone to subversion, so suffer none of the distractions like the need for recreation, esteem, personal morality or ideals.
And yet I’d argue that this is untrue of canon Eberron warforged. They can be given life, but they aren’t programmed. Their initial behavior can be more easily directed than humans simply because they come into the world with a very limited frame of reference, but they are fully sentient beings and as such will search for their own answers to the importance of esteem, personal morality, and ideals. Looking to Pierce, he doesn’t fight for Cyre because Cyre as a concept has no meaning for him; unlike the humans, it’s NOT the land of his family and forefathers, the place he has a farm, etc. Instead, he fights because of the loyalty that he develops to his unit; he is protecting the only family that he has. Another warforged might embrace the concept of Cyre as the country that created him and thus be willing to die for it. A third might come to hate his creators – see The Lord of Blades.
This ties to the point that warforged per canon possess traits that Cannith would undoubtedly eliminate if it could. But Cannith has a limited say in their design. They are living beings. They are grown, and they can evolve – physically and mentally – beyond their initial design. They have souls. A warforged can pursue a moral ideal and become a paladin, or be captivated by art and become a bard. And as they have souls, perhaps this is because they were paladins and bards in former lives.
All that’s neither here nor there, just sayin’.
But one question immediately comes to mind. What makes every game system different the rest is their individual flavour – each are built with a different kind of game in mind. Some are designed for action, some for intrigue, some for horror and suspense, some for human relations, some for atmosphere, some for strategy, and so on.
And yet most systems are flexible enough to handle multiple genres. Look at D&D. It’s horror if you’re playing Ravenloft; action, intrigue, or human relations if you’re playing Eberron; potentially strategy in a setting such as Dragonlance. Eberron was designed to be pulp-noir, but that had nothing to do with the fact that it was designed for 3.5 D&D. And people play it today in 4E D&D, Spirit of the Century, GURPs, Savage Worlds, Over The Edge, Mutants & Masterminds, and more. My point is that in creating Eberron, I was starting with a system and designing the world around it. This is how arcane magic works. These are low-level spells that should have the greatest impact on society. Magic items can be created using this item creation process. Paladins and clerics exist and follow these rules. People can convert it to other systems, but the basic structure of society is oriented around the D&D system. For Codex, I’m designing the world first and then translating it to the system – which means in a D&D translation you may have new classes unique to the world and not actually have other classes represented at all.
Now, the key here is that I’m not promising that this will make the world suitable for all systems. Going back to your example, let’s say it’s a world of suspense. I’m going to launch with support for a system that does suspense well. But I’m still building the world independently, not intrinsically tying it to that system. Thus, you may not want to convert it to Toon. But as long as you’re using a system that does handle suspense, it should fit.
The last thing I’ll note is that Eberron was intentionally designed to support a wide range of genres. You have over the top pulp action. You have political intrigue with the Five Nations. Want strategy? Play during the Last War, or start the next one. You have gritty noir stories in Sharn. Want gothic horror? Set your story in Karrnath or the icy north of Lhazaar. Eberron is a “pulp-noir” setting, and certain mechanics were added in specifically to support that (notably action points). But the world is broad enough to support a wide variety of genres. The RPG Dread is designed for horror and suspense. And I could easily make a Dread scenario in Eberron – it would simply be an adventure based on horror & suspense. The setting is broad enough to allow different flavors of stories (which may work better in some systems than others); the same is true of the new world. There are places for horror, places for intrigue, and places for action.
It’s an interesting field of discussion, one which really boils down to “What is an Eberron?” What parts of D&D are a part of Eberron because they make Eberron Eberron, and which parts of D&D are a part of Eberron because of necessity of being D&D?
Like the races. If you made Eberron human-only in a human-only RPG, would it be Eberron? If, say, you were running Eberron in an RPG that had slug-people and rock-people and cat-people as its primary races, would using those instead of the European Folklore / Tolkien races still make it Eberron?
Or the mage-tech. What if your system/setting is in the modern world with no magic? Or is an alternate generic fantasy system that doesn’t limit the amount of magic you can cast, or how powerful weak casters can get? Or what if the setting was steampunk instead of mage-punk? Could you still make an Eberron?
Dragonmark houses, too… come to think of it, aren’t giant morally-gray megacorporations the domain of cyberpunk? Damnit, Eberron is the convergence of steampunk, cyberpunk and magepunk
Anyway, could you run a game without those factions and call it Eberron? What if they exist but the nations don’t exist, like in an apocalypse, or corporate takeover of the planet?
Or the dragonmarks themselves… must they exist to create a true Eberron experience? What if the system allowed people to add magical tattoos, of which dragonmarks were included. Or didn’t have any analogous rules to allow dragonmarks, so they couldn’t be converted. Eberron?
Many people also enjoy adding guns and cannons and things to Eberron, for the sake of making it a bit more steampunk. I actually prefer my worlds this way: I like having some races prefer magic, some prefer technology, and have there be this uneasy tension when one race marches to war with bombards and primitive rockets, and another goes with magic missile and fireballs… is that making it not-Eberron, to have guns? What if we weren’t even medieval, would a stone-age Eberron work?
I’ve thought a lot about converting Eberron over to an RPG I’m writing. I think if I wanted to grab the core elements of Eberron necessary to make it feel Eberron, and in the process drag a few elements of D&D along with it… Having a huge cast of races is a must, but I don’t think they need to be Tolkien races. Elves and goblins and dwarves? Might as well be catfolk, rockfolk and angels. In European Folklore, even shifters are just a werewolf analogue, changelings a… changeling analogue… and kalashtar an asian/gypsy analogue. The big exception though is warforged: I think in whatever conversion I made, something like the warforged would have to exist. And with them, probably the undead and magic capable of producing colossal superweapons. One of the big elements of Eberron is that there was a point in the world’s history where wars didn’t last forever, because eventually everyone died of being speared to death, and then the kings ran out of money, so everyone declared a truce. Then suddenly (as it happened in the 20th century) war became a lot scarier, because instead of being exhausting, it was possible to mount massive forces of machines and chemicals and bombs that could obliterate entire NATIONS before the armies even began to get tired of coffers began to run out. Warforged are at the center of that massive fear, that massive realization that the apocalypse is near: warforged do not sleep or tire, they can be mass produced, they do not care about living people because they are not living people, and they will crush entire nations. Also, undead are the same. Then Cyre blew up. One of the big themes of Eberron is a fear that mages and technologists are going to create a new kind of war, one which ends the world, and Warforged are at the crux of that. Eberron needs warforged.
Magic, well, I think the setting needs magic, and I think Eberron could still be Eberron in a modern setting, like in New York instead of Sharn. As long as there was a layer of magic and multiple races.
I think the cyberpunkish megacorporations are also a key feature. I’m not sure that you can’t run an Eberron game without the nations though–what if the world was just an open playing field dominated by the dragonmarked houses, except for some druid and monster nations on the outskirts? I think such a setting could still feel very much Eberron. I wouldn’t limit myself by nations or modernity.
Dragonmarks are an interesting part of the conversion. One that I think requires a lot more creative energy than any other part: these marks have never really expressed well the power of the dragonmarked houses. If I were to convert them, I would rewrite them from the ground up, giving them their own cool effects that perhaps took a half-page or a page to describe, making each carrier of a dragonmark unique in his abilities, making sure that everyone knew that they could take magic if the ywanted, but if they took magic but no dragonmark they were only taking a pale imitation of REAL magic…
Anyway, so yeah. That’s my opinion. I wouldn’t mind an Eberron placed in a modern New York with a thin layer of magic and ‘secret societies’ of dragonmarked, as a sort of mega conspiracy theory hidden-magic setting. And I think that’d still be Eberron at its heart. I could also see myself writing a more exotic fantasy setting, like a world made only of sky, with floating islands and rivers of clouds, and if I added those key elements I described–dragonmarked houses, magic, and a history of war + warforged/magic superweapons… I think it’d still be Eberron. It could easily be something else with different names on the factions and whatnot, but that coat of Eberron paint would fit well over the setting.
As a parting thought, one kind of random and potentially tangential. Sometimes, mechanics ARE part of the setting. As I described warforged–they are a game mechanic (race) that use game mechanics (construct rules) to express a very key element to the fantasy world. It’s important, when porting over rule mechanics, to keep an eye out for mechanics in Eberron that ARE setting. Like how magic works in D&D… it might just be easy to say ‘eh, my system has magic, I’ll just use my system and forget the Vancian stuff’. But HOW does the magic effect the setting of Eberron? The limit of castings per day, the divide of divine and arcane, how artificers break those rules, spell lists and forgotten spells enscribed on schema, how there’s an entire class (magewright) dedicated to providing mundane spell lists to NPCs, instead of those NPCs simply being adepts or wizards and having the ability to take magic missile. Even the most powerful magewright won’t be able to fireball you… which means that magic, in the game world, is perceived of as a very safe and respectable thing for a workman to pursue, since it’s not at all dangerous like it might be in a standard magic seting. Think about those sorts of mechanical-setting interactions when converting…
I agree with your last point, Jacob. That’s what I was saying in my previous reply: Eberron was specifically designed with D&D mechanics in mind. The contrast between a wizard and a magewright; the construct immunities of the warforged; the impact of specific low-level spells; all the way to the fact that dragons can shapeshift and thus the Chamber can have agents scattered within the world. You can obviously convert these elements to another system, but it’s designed with a particular system in mind.
As regards my next project, the fact that it’s “system neutral” doesn’t mean it’s automatically easily transferred to any random system. On the contrary, it means that the WORLD has a magic system of its own, and no single rule set is specifically designed to model it; thus there’s going to be work involved whatever system you use. I’m thinking about that as I develop it, and I’ll certainly have ideas in the future (and a forum for people to post their own thoughts). But it means that I’m not limiting my concept of human interaction with the divine to the cleric-paladin model, as I might if I was working with D&D as the defined system.