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.