Eberron Remixed, Second Edition

A few years ago, I had a lot of fun adapting Eberron to Dark Fantasy X as a remix of sorts. Of course, Dark Fantasy X has now evolved into Shadows of Old Night; and that's not just a change in name and a few superficial mechanical details (although it is also that.) More to the point, I've kicked off (and not yet finished) the High Fantasy X project as a fork of Shadows of Old Night, which is another temp name too like Dark Fantasy X was. Not yet sure what I'm going to rename HFX to, but in the meantime, I think it's worth pointing out one salient and interesting detail:

Namely that the setting of High Fantasy X is heavily and deliberately influenced by Khorvaire, the main continent of Eberron. It's also equally heavily and deliberately influenced by Heroes of Might and Magic III, my favorite old computer game from my college days in the latest 90s and early 00s. But one thing that I discovered, accidentally as I was tinkering with ideas for the HFX setting is that Heroes3 and Eberron actually match up shockingly well. All of the Eberron kingdoms (on Khorvaire)—or at least almost all of them—have shockingly close analogs in the factions of Heroes3, especially if you add some of the new Horn of the Abyss factions, like Cove. When I drew my first draft of the High Fantasy X map (which I still need to scan and post) it actually looked quite a bit like Khorvaire, and I was no doubt influenced in many ways both subconscious and conscious when I drew it, like putting the Necropolis-like kingdom in the same location (more or less) as Karrnath, and all of that. It's fair to say that the HFX map is a redrawn, slightly pruned, and renamed/relabeled version of Khorvaire.

This is, of course, because I quite like Eberron. I remixed it, and then I made a pastiche of it as a different setting too.

I kind of want to do two things, one as a step, if you will, to the other. First, I want to take my old Microlite20 Dark Fantasy X EBERRON REMIXED project and create an updated remix of it that more closely matches the HFX rules and races, etc. I'm not going to mess too much with the Eberron Remixed site; I'll leave that alone and redo the pages on it as blog posts with a new tag, EBERRON REMIXED 2e. This means that if I ever want to run Eberron (Remixed) I don't have to go back to an out of date and "primitive" version of my rules. Not that I think that I will ever do that, but y'know. It was fun to remix the setting, so why not remix it again, but better?

After I've done that, it'll be easier to continue transitioning to the even more dramatically "remixed" HFX. I don't consider that a remix at all, although of course it's a setting that is influenced very obviously in some ways by Eberron—except with a darker, Lovecraftian lens applied to it, among other changes. I hope by the time I get that far, that I've come up with a permanent name for High Fantasy X. But if not, I can continue to use the temporary name indefinitely, I suppose.

While, like I said above, the mechanics did change when I migrated from Microlite20 DFX to Shadows of Old Night, the changes are, actually, more modest than you'd think. Sure, sure... I added back in the missing D&D-style ability scores, and rounded out the skills to six as well. I also eliminated the classes, and have an a la carte Feats system which is basically a build-your-own class, just without that label. But what really will change more substantially is that Shadows of Old Night has more races (and a few different ones) than old Dark Fantasy X, which mean that I'll need to remap my Eberron races and nations a little bit to work in this new paradigm. That also gives me an opportunity to revisit some other remix changes that I made to see if they still hold up. Let me first list the races from High Fantasy X, which are a closer match to D&D in some ways—I've got elves and dwarfs back in, for instance—although less so in others, since just because I have elves and dwarfs doesn't mean that they're really exactly like D&D versions of the same, for instance.

I will need to redraw the map; if nothing else, I'd like to add two more minor nations, based (loosely) on Droaam (my remixed interpretation of it, anyway) and Q'barra, since HFX lacks any analog to those. I'll see HFX converge in some ways even closer to my new Eberron Remixed, which will in turn diverge even more from Eberron as printed. 

In any case, HFX lacks the Eberron specific races, so I need to decide what (if anything) to do with them: kalashtar, changelings, shifters and most iconically, war-forged; do I port them to HFX, or leave them off? Probably off, but we'll see. After all, otherwise, why wouldn't I just use Eberron Remixed 2e and not even bother doing HFX at all?

In any case, join me (or don't) as I go through this exercise to re-remix Eberron, and then find out how much of that remixing can translate into useable material for whatever HFX eventually transitions to.