Someone else's Eberron Remixed

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eberron/comments/eg1h6r/homebrewed_khorvaire_revised_map/

Pretty interesting. I mean, he didn't remix it in the same sense that I am, and I strongly suspect that he's still using regular 5e D&D rules, but he remixed the geography to turn Scion's Sound into a proper, big, epicontinental sea, not unlike the Baltic, as he keeps saying. This allows him to create different strategic and political challenges as well as have proper naval activity and piracy going on.

Plus, it's a nice map. Some of the other changes, like adding more settlements that he pulled from other official sources, and increasing the populations of many of them so that there's a bit more urban centers than the setting otherwise posits, allows for better intrigue and skulduggery too.

Anyway, pretty nifty.

Eberron Remixed vs Dark•Heritage 2

I've spent a fair bit of time the last few days fleshing out the content of my Eberron Remixed wiki page. Much of that is material that I otherwise might have explored on my blog, and I will likely cross-post a good deal of it later once things slow down just a bit. But one thing that I noticed; while going through the mechanics, I thought of a few minor updates that I will almost certainly get around to adding to my Dark•Heritage 2 document, changing the revision from 2.4.1 to 2.5. The changes aren't huge, but they did kind of beg themselves and when I thought of them, I kind of wish that I had thought of them earlier.

The first one is that I realized that an important element of adventuring had been left off; how to deal with suffocating and drowning! I've added a section for that in the Other Hazards part of adventuring.

I also added a new twist to the spellcasting rules for a natural 1 where there is a risk of a permanent decrease of 1 to your Sanity score when you fail a roll badly. You get another chance to not lose the Sanity; i.e., you have to fail a second check to have your Sanity score permanently reduced, but still—it kinda seemed obvious. 

And I modified the Shadow Sword class, making it pretty much exactly the same as the Jedi class that I had originally based it on; i.e., instead of a sneaky minor ability, I gave it a modest suite of psionic powers heavily influenced by the stuff you see Jedi do in the movies. Viola! Although based on the Jedi, it's kind of a combination of the soulknife and the psion in terms of its role in the game, and the only way to bring psionics in at all.

Anyway, I recommend you again to my Eberron Remixed site if you have any interest in that project, because I'm advancing material faster there than here, although I will eventually get around to crossposting my Remixed discussions here too. I'm not 100% sure which of all of these changes will for sure make it to Dark•Heritage 2.5, but probably all of them except the change to the Shadow Sword. And I'm considering even that.

Funny how activity in one area seems to always cross-polinate in another for me. 

Eberron Remixed has its own page

https://sites.google.com/site/eberronremixed/

So far, I've adapted (and by adapted, I mostly mean "copied and pasted" my Dark•Heritage 2 rules with a very few minor tweaks to be Eberron workable; although fitting the Eberron setting into the rules I already had was one of the key conceits and part of what made it interesting to me. I did, however, add the three signature Eberron races that weren't already in DH, and made a reference to Dragonmarks.

More work will need to be done expanding on my early precis for adaptation to the setting half of the site, but that's still in Coming soon... mode for now. That said, check it out!

Revising Eberron Remixed to be compatible with Dark•Heritage 2

Reading through my older blog posts, I was struck by how cool Eberron was with a few minor tweaks to fix some of the niggling issues that it has. I had toyed with this idea in my EBERRON REMIXED tag a couple of years ago. Then, after adopting m20 to be usable for Eberron, I updated it to Fantasy Hack. I could simply leave it there, of course, as a perfectly usable in that mileu, but I've largely left Fantasy Hack to the side, and prefer Dark•Heritage 2 now, as similar already as they are. What would I have to do to convert EBERRON REMIXED into this system, and what impact would that have on my remixing of the setting?

First, let me revisit some of my guiding principles for the remixing project. I'm actually not cutting and pasting, but rewriting and potentially slightly tweaking them here.

• Eberron's high concept was a swashbuckling game of derring-do in a D&D kind of setting. D&D, at least at the time and in the edition that Eberron was developed, was a highly static game of cautious, grid-based tactical combat, which is completely at odds with Eberron's concept. 4e, as near as I can tell, was even worse in this regard, although I suppose that the combat was at least more over-the-top in some ways. I have no idea if 5e is more in alignment here or not, and I don't really care to find out as I have little interest in learning 5e, but the first point of order remains making sure that your system is in alignment with the concept of Eberron and actually supports that concept. I'm quite happy with DH/m20 in this regard. Although I recognize that other systems could also accomplish this goal fairly well, because I've settled on m20 variants, that's the only system that I'll be discussing with regards to remixing Eberron.
• I've come to appreciate over the years the wisdom of the much more humano-centric assumption that Gary Gygax himself would have had, as well as that of the writers that he was creating a pastiche of, such as Leiber, Howard, and others. Eberron spotlights non-human races significantly, and I've rejiggered the setting to be much more humano-centric in its assumptions, with "demihumans" and monsters appearing much less frequently, although still being available as need requires.
• Anything that reeks of wokeness and social justice dogma is remixed out. Eberron, as published in the 3.5 era, was before wokeness was even a term, but the concepts are still there. In general, this means stop pretending that men and women are interchangeable widgets, and changing the sex of potentially a great many important NPCs. (If they were to even show up in my games, which is probably unlikely anyway.) It also means that the Christan church stand-in, the Church of the Silver Flame needs to have its "oh my gosh, so oppressive!" snide insults completely removed from the setting. For that matter, I also prefer to have actual Christianity be the default religion of most people, rather than a stand-in for Christianity. And as an American, rather than a European, I also prefer to focus more on local pastors and whatnot leading congregations rather than big, centralized organizations vying for power. That was one of the main things that the American colonists wanted to escape from, after all.
• Because Eberron was designed specifically to be a setting where everything from D&D potentially had a place, it lacks coherency sometimes. I'm perfectly OK with pruning esoteric D&Disms out entirely and not replacing them, to be honest with you. My design goals for remixing Eberron don't have to be the same that Baker had when he designed it in the first place. Some judicious and occasionally ruthless editing of concepts that never really fit very well is acceptable, and even desireable.
• Eberron is very big; the remixing project is taking a relatively light touch on the details of the setting, focusing instead on big picture stuff. That said, a "protagonist" area would be essential for actually playing the game; y'know, a place where most of the action actually takes place. Here, I think the single best setting element, Sharn, as a place of fantasy noir type stories, is this place. I also know that yeah, zipping all across the continent and beyond is a feature of the setting, the modules, the novels, and what's expected generally from Eberron, but I tend to think that there are more local opportunities for adventure than most gamers realize, possibly because not enough of them get out and experience what the local adventuring possibilities in real life actually are. Sharn and its surrounding environs are therefore where any more detailed localized remixing would take place, although honestly, I probably won't bother too much with that until I'm actually at a point where I care to play with this.

Now, Fantasy Hack, or at least my EBERRON REMIXED version of it, accomodated almost all of the demihuman racial diversity in Eberron. The first thing that I need to do in adapting Eberron into DH is remapping the races from Eberron into the races that exist in DH. The signature races of Eberron need to be present, of course, otherwise it wouldn't exactly be a very good translation of Eberron, but some of the other D&D races that otherwise aren't selectable in DH can be translated into something else. I know, I know--that will make the setting diverge in a number of ways from the setting as published. In fact, it's probably a beachhead into a more thorough remix of the setting than the Fantasy Hack version was. That's OK. If you want something a bit more closely hewing to Eberron as printed, the Fantasy Hack revisions can be seen with the earlier posts that have this same tag, while those going forward from this one will be more of a departure into a different take on the setting. That's actually what prompted me to do this, though--the concept of a more thorough departure sounded intriguing enough that I wanted to start exploring it piece by piece, step by step and little by little. This actually helps with the second goal of the setting remix guiding principles, actually. Some of the demihuman groups will become human, and my demihumans are actually demihuman rather than "non-human." (Gygax seemed to use the word to refer to races that were more aesthetically pleasing, like elves and halflings, etc. rather than to imply that demihumans were actually part human and part something else, like the prefix actually means semantically. Maybe parahuman was really the word he was looking for.)

The Fantasy Hack races list is as follows; I'll start from there and see where I need to diverge.

• Human: +1 to all skills
• Elf: +2 to MND
• Half-elf: +1 MND, +2 to any skill(s)
• Dwarf: +1 STR, +1 to AC as natural armor
• Halfling: +1 DEX and Stealth affinity
• Gnome: +1 to DEX, +1 to MND
• Goblin: +1 DEX and +1 to Subterfuge
• Orcs (and Half-orcs): +2 to STR
• Hobgoblins: +1 STR, +1 to DEX
• Warforged: +1 to STR, +2 to Acrobatics, no stat increases on leveling, but are immune to mind-influencing magic, and do not need to breathe, eat, drink, etc. 
• Shifters: +3 to STR, -1 to MND, +1 to Survival skill, -1 to Communication skill.
• Changeling: Can change form as a single action, +1 to Subterfuge, +1 to Communication
• Kalashtar: Can spend 1 HP to establish a two-way mindlink with a creature it can see, which enables telepathic communication, +1 to Communication, and +1 to Knowledge

The DH5 list is more modest, but of course, it doesn't technically have the Eberron specific races, which could be added (keep in mind that the Wose race from DH5 is both conceptually and mechanically identical to the shifters. Let me post that, and then I'll post a side by side where I map one list to the other and discuss how to do that.

• Human: +1 to all skills.  
• Skraeling: +1 to DEX and Stealth affinity.  
• Orc: +2 to STR.  
• Goblin: +1 DEX and a +2 to the Subterfuge skill.
• Cursed: Racial affinity for Stealth, +1 to Athletics and +1 to Knowledge. 
• Jann: +1 to any 2 skills, and also have the fire strike ability; they can infuse one attack per day with the power of the ifrit and their weapon will burst into flame doing an additional 2d6 damage for 5 rounds. 
• Kemling: +1 to DEX, a racial affinity for Stealth, and the ability to see in the dark with a biological equivalent to night vision goggles.
• Nephilim: +1 to MND and a +1 to Knowledge and Communication.
• Wose: +3 to STR, -1 to MND, +1 to their Survival Skill, and -1 to their Communication skill.

What does DH5 not have that Eberron does?

• Elf. I know that elfs are very much standard to D&D, but I've deliberately not used them in DH5, figuring that they don't really fit. I actually don't think that elves are important to the setting unless you're specifically using Aerenal in some fashion, but if you are, I actually think the Nephilim can stand in for the elves here. Since there are no elves, there also are no half-elves, where a specific race of humans (without differing stats) can replace them. In fact, in the spirit of making the whole thing more humano-centric, maybe Aerenal should be a primarily human nation, with its own Aereni ethnic group, ruled over by an overcaste of the Nephilim.The dark elves of Xen'drik, on the other hand, were represented by kemlings. I'm not sold on this, necessarily, or even the concept of making Xen'drik an important part of the setting that I'd expect people to go to, and there are other places that I like kemlings. But it's possible for there to be two completely unconnected groups of kemlings, I suppose, so maybe it's best to keep it as it is for now. And the Valenar elves can, of course, just be a small faction of Nephilim that left Aerenal, just as the the setting promises anyway.
• Dwarf. Elves and dwarves are the two races that scream "vanilla fantasy" to me. (Especially with that Tolkien spelling instead of the more standard elfs and dwarfs.) I know that both have their roots in old Germanic if not even Indo-European folklore, but they are not presented in fantasy settings, most of the time, as they are in that kind of folklore. If they were, they probably wouldn't be a playable race anyway. Can you imagine the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, for example, from the Dresden Files trying to be translated into D&D with its members as playable characters? If I'm not going to do elfs, I'm not going to do dwarfs either. That said, I have less resonance with the Mror Holds and the notion of dwarfs as the Swiss bankers of Eberron. If we need Swiss bankers, just make them more like the actual Swiss; an ethnic group of humans from the mountains of the Mror Holds.
• Halfling. In Baker's attempt to get away from the "stereotype" of the hobbit and make halflings cool, even though the concept is fundamentally uncool, he made them dinosaur-riding Plains Indians, if you accept a very strange, and kind of hippy interpretation of Plains Indians. I prefer a much more savage and dangerous type of Plains Indian; y'know, the kind that we actually feared and respected, and I'd already decided that the jann were where I'd use them. 
• Gnome. If the halfling already isn't very cool, then gnomes are the halflings' even less cool, nebbish older brother. A nation of spies and gangsters is a little strange to think of on its own (how exactly does such a nation survive, for one thing? They have to have someone to prey on, and that makes them fundamentally unstable as a nation on their own and a threat and enemy to everyone else.) It's an insufficient twist to make the gnomes salvageable. I actually think that replacing the gnomes of Zilargo (and elsewhere) with the Cursed makes some sense, though. It retains the vibe of normal people don't really trust them, even if they don't necessarily have an in-your-face reason not to, and it also works that they've had to develop means other than overt strength to maintain their positions in some cases. 
• Hobgoblin. Orcs and hobgoblins are already conceptually exactly the same thing. I overlooked that with my earlier attempt to translate Eberron into Fantasy Hack and made a unique hobgoblin stat line, but I'm not willing to do that here. The orcs will replace the hobgoblins in Darguun and other areas where orcs and goblins might have association. The orcs of the Shadow Marches will, on the other hand, not be orcs at all, but rather skraelings, which seems to fit them perfectly. Most other pockets of orcs here and there across Khorvaire will also be replaced by skraelings.
• Warforged, kalashtar and changelings need to be actually brought in, as they are in the Fantasy Hack iteration. Being signature races to the Eberron setting, it just doesn't seem right to not include them. That said, warforged can actually be taken out if desired with surprisingly little problems to the setting itself, other than that you don't have the Lord of Blades as a potential villain, and changelings can just be dopplegangers and monsters rather than playable character types, and their frequency reduced without upsetting much of anything either. And kalashtar can be a human group.
• Shifters and woses are already the same thing. Use whichever name you like. I think I prefer shifter for Eberron and wose for DH5, but whatever.

Besides races, what are a few other changes needed? I never actually adapted any Psionics rules to the EBERRON REMIXED project, although I think I probably referred you to the m20 compilation document and m20 Psionics as a suitable replacement. I actually am less intrigued by this than I was at the time; I think that if psionics needs to be in at all, beyond the kalashtar racial ability, they can simply be Shadow Swords to represent their psionic abilities. The Shadow Sword is kind of the Jedi from STAR WARS REMIXED (later AD ASTRA) but with the force powers removed and the lightsaber replaced with a manifestable psionic blade. If you wanted to go to a form that had more psionic powers again, you could always port the actual Psionic Knight class (i.e. fake Jedi) from AD ASTRA since the Shadow Blade is already quite similar. Replace the ability to cloak yourself in shadow with the ability to use Psionic Powers, as listed here. I'm not sure that I necessarily recommend doing this yet—to be honest with you, I always thougth psionics sat uncomfortably next to magic in D&D. Do one or the other depending on what flavor you prefer for your magic in your fantasy setting, but having them both as alternates to each other was always weird. But that said, I think I'd at least allow this if someone really wanted to play a psionic character, pending further review of the concept, where I might decide that it doesn't really fit after all in the future.

For that matter, my magic system is more Lovecraftian rather than Vancian. Doesn't that potentially impact one of the major setting assumptions of Eberron, i.e., very common low level magic applied to objects to make them mimic some aspects of what is done with technology in the real world? Well... yes and no. Yes in the sense that if you really stopped and thought about the implications of such a change, it would make sense that it undercuts that element of the setting. Then again, it would hardly be the first or even the most egregious element of a setting that doesn't make sense if you really think through the implications of including it. And since the PCs aren't meant to be street light makers, or even lightning rail makers, it's kind of a moot point; at no point am I interested in exploring how these things were developed or how they're manufactured and maintained, so there's no point in really trying to worry about it or explain it. I mean, do you know how light bulbs are manufactured and how electricity gets to them? You can probably say something about noble gases and the filament and hydroelectric power and power lines, but the answer is, no, you probably don't, unless you work for a power company directly involved in making sure that it happens. Does that impact your ability to accept the real world because you don't know how that works? Well, it shouldn't with your fantasy world either.

Besides, although I didn't convert them per se, because utilizing d20 elements in m20 is usually a pretty straightforward task, the Dragonmarked feats still exist after all and I've always said as much. One can simply assume that the Houses maintain and create these items, as the setting mostly says that they do, and if the feats themselves don't cover it, you can assume that there are other, higher-level House secret feats that the artificers have that you as a player character don't.

Other than that, for now, I think that my previous conversion of Eberron to Fantasy Hack doesn't need to be supplemented by anything right away beyond what I've detailed here to be further converted into Dark•Heritage. But don't forget, if you were to try and use this, to go ahead and implement all of those changes too. Maybe I'll even create a small little classic Google Site to house this put together in a better format; i.e., not just a handful of rambly blog posts that occasionally over-write each other.

Porting Porto Liure

In looking to make better use of "my assets" I've decided that I'd like to do away with having Porto Liure as a Spanish-like island city and bring it into the mainstream of DH5 somewhere. Because, honestly, by shunting it off to the side away from where I'm working, I've pretty guaranteed that it will play no role in anything in DH5 ever again. On the other hand, I've got a number of cities that need developing in DH5, and I do have one in particular that's supposed to be a little seedy, with all kinds of shady goings-on in the background. A kind of fantasy "Washington D.C." so to speak, in the form of Waychester. In reality, conceptually a little bit more like the London of King George whereas its southern rival Upwater is more all that's good and admirable about British culture, especially and specifically including its breakaway spin-off, American culture. So yeah; it's got ambitious tyrants running around stabbing each other in the backs in the form of the Grand Duke and his rivalry with his Duchess, but more to the point, he's trying to extend his dominion over the entire area and proclaim himself King. He's not a nice fellow; he's ambitious and driven and in a way that has little concern for the rights and way of life of the people in the southern portion of the Hill Country. Basically, he's like the Puritans of New England, who 150 years after their war of aggression against the South are still trying to stamp out and eliminate any vestige of the South that they aggressively and unprovoked went and conquered militarily. In other words, the epitome of a secular, normal villain.

This is a little bit in contrast to how I've seen the Lords of Porto Liure, who are more insular. Rather than ambitious, they're ruthless and decadent, but their games are played with their own cadre of local nobility, and their view is inward rather than outward. This gives plenty of opportunity for noble sponsored skulduggery while maintaining Porto Liure's status quo. That said, I never developed either of those ideas beyond a vague inclination, so making the Grand Duke of Waychester remain as he is while Waychester itself becomes, to some degree, the assets I developed for Porto Liure is fine. The reality is that while the Grand Duke has ambitions on militarily conquering the South, he's got problems closer to home with regards to corruption, sedition and open rebellion, starting with his own wife, who he's locked in a tower, but who's loyal supporters have not forgotten her. So the change is even more subtle.

I'll also have to rename everything, although that doesn't mean that I need to reinvent everything. Porto Liure was originally designed to be a kind of fantasy Tortuga, and it therefore had a lot of pseudo-Spanish nomenclature. Waychester is a thoroughly Anglo-Saxon endeavor, and there isn't any Spanish anything that would give a background of such names, so they'll all need to go. But just because the names of neighborhoods like Castello or Ciutat Viexa are vaguely old-fashioned Spanish sounding (or more likely Catalan, since I heavily used that dictionary to find suitable alternatives to straight up Spanish) or the Castiada crime family can't be used doesn't mean that everything about them except the name isn't still good.

So, for another post in the near future, I'm going to take a few of my older Porto Liure posts and adapt them to Waychester, which will be my new go-to wretched hive of scum and villainy in DH5.

Friday Art Attack

It's been many months since I've done a Friday Art Attack. I'm not quite sure how I fell off that bandwagon, but its time to get back on it! Because I've missed this for some time, I'll try and do a larger than normal one too...

A Conan man-ape. In fact, the Conan man-ape, Thak. Frank Frazetta painted him most iconically, but this is a good character portrait take on him too.

Classic old school "near future" science fiction art of a space station and its traffic. In real life, docking with a space station is a big deal, but in this type of art there's always all kinds of traffic coming and going as if space stations were like gas stations in space or something.

A couple more of these kinds of cheerful views of the future, which sadly has given way to the dystopian nightmare that faces us today for a variety of reasons, mostly poor decisions made by us in terms of who to trust and what to believe about reality. In any case...

I know that Valhalla is out now, but this concept art from the ancient Greek Assassin's Creed game is really cool, and I tend to really like the classical Greco-Roman vibe. It's also one that I often forget to include sufficiently, but the reality is that Western Civilization is built on three pillars, and the Greco-Roman cultural tradition, if not necessarily genetic inheritance, is absolutely one of those three pillars.

Some WAR fantasy art; a sea serpect and a sorcerers in a little boat.

I'm not really into cosplay, although I know that I have a cousin--or maybe even two--who are into the whole 501st stuff. That said, this unique Mandalorian outfit is really, really cool.

More Greek Assassin's creed screenshots.

Some good old-fashioned pulp artwork. Why the girls don't have any clothes on is a mystery to me, but y'know. That's often part of the vibe for this kind of artwork.

I'm not sure who the artist is here, but this is a great Conan piece. Very classic, Frazetta-inspired technique. Even the girl kinda has that "Frazetta girl" face a little bit.

Another interesting piece of old space opera art. 

Vae victis! Barbarian chieftains taking their spoils, in this case, also including Roman girls as slaves.

Speaking of which, here's another Roman and Celtic post-battlefield bit of art. I'm not sure, but that might even be Julius Caesar and Vercingetorix themselves.

I've long had a strange fascination for the "savage humanoids" and seen them as poorly and thoughtlessly underutilized. So seeing them presented as actual characters rather than merely mooks has always been fascinating to me.

A yeti fighting snow leopards. What's not to love?

The Kings of South America; Smilodon populator, the largest cat that ever lived. (The North American species was about lion-sized; this was nearly freakin' bear-sized.)

A more interesting and fantastical takeon the coloration of a sabertooth.

Part of Warhammer's ghoul-kings armies. I'm actually not sure exactly what I think about the big hump on their backs and the bone-spines, but it does make them look extra gnarly, I guess.

A vampire that has lost all control and become a feral monster, something that I've also adopted for DH5, but which has analogs in folklore all over the place. I don't know how that thing is supposed to fly with those wings, or what even keeps the one bone attached to the other given that it protrudes out from the flesh, but whatever. Warhammer art is overly stylized and gnarly sometimes.

A more typical vampire artwork, although not a typical vampire character in some ways.