Eberron Remixed 2e: Updated racial mapping

Vol

Because I'm re-reading Eberron stuff right now, I'm interested once again in my Eberron Remixed 2e project, which I haven't really started too much of yet. Honestly, I don't have to remix too much from my first remix, but there are a few things that have changed in the update from Dark Fantasy X to Old Night that make the first remix now obsolete. The most important thing to redo is to map my races to Eberron races, and highlight where Old Night races will replace Eberron races in the Remixed (2e) version of Eberron. This is a slightly more complicated question than the first remix, where racial calques were mostly a one for one replacement. Here, I don't think that's the best way to do it. I'm going to go through the list of Dragonmarked houses and highlight which race the dragonmarks will apply to, and then go through the countries and highlight notable changes in race there, especially for countries like Zilargo or the Mror Holds that are heavily flavored by a single race. But they won't necessarily be the same; just because House Sivis and Zilargo are essentially gnomish organizations in Eberron in print doesn't mean that they will both be the same race in Eberron Remixed, for example. Let me start by creating a list of Eberron races and a list of Old Night races, then I can work on applying them. This will be a working post; I'm actually solving the question as I write it, and the post may be subject to updates as I think of them, even after I post it.

Eberron Races: (by this I mean the PHB races from 3e, the four Eberron specific races, and a handful of MM races that are significant enough that they need to be addressed)

Human, Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, Gnome, Half-elf, Half-orc, Kalashtar, Shifter, Warforged, Changeling, Goblin, Hobgoblin, Orc. Fourteen in all.

Old Night Races: (including appendix races, because why not.)

Human, Grisling, Kemling, Elementalist (Surtur, Triton, Sylph, Dverg), Orc, Goblin, Dhampir, Woodwose, Seraph. Maybe Grendling, if I need them. Depending on how you count them, as few as nine or as many as thirteen in all. Fewer than in Eberron, anyway. I'll probably treat the Elementalist races as completely separate races, which isn't exactly how they work in Old Night, but they can in Eberron remixed.

I know for sure that I have no interest in having elves, dwarves, halflings or gnomes in Eberron Remixed. That means no half-elves either. I also know for sure that I'm not really interested in kalashtar, or any of the Dreaming Dark, Sarlona, Dal Quor stuff. I'm just leaving that out. Orcs and hobgoblins being separate doesn't work for me either; orcs and goblins just go together, not orcs separate from goblins and hobgoblins. Woodwoses and shifters are already essentially the same thing. Warforged, while I'm honestly not a huge fan, or too iconic to the Eberron setting to not have them. Changelings are kind of cool, actually. I like them, although maybe not necessarily in any setting other than Eberron. So let's get to work mapping:

Dragonmarked Houses. In Eberron remixed, because all of the demihuman races were originally human, it is very, very rarely possible for any mark to manifest on any of the demihuman races, and humans can also manifest any of the marks. That said, the race to house correspondence is still strong enough that that's only a footnote, and potentially a plot device when it does happen, not something that anyone expects. 

House Cannith, Mark of Making. Humans in Eberron, same in Eberron Remixed. Heavily into the Cyran ethnicity, whatever exactly that means.

House Deneith, Mark of the Sentinel. Humans in Eberron, same in Eberron Remixed. Heavily Karrn.

House Ghallanda, Mark of Hospitality. Halflings in Eberron. I'm not sure that I even care about having this house, to be honest with you. Running inns and taverns? That hardly needs to rise to the level of a dragonmarked house. I guess if I do decide to actually refer to them, they'd probably be tritons. 

House Jorasco, Mark of Healing. Halflings again in Eberron. Maybe this can be a place for seraphs. 

House Kundarak, Mark of Warding. Dwarves in Eberron. Dvergs in Eberron Remixed, I think.

House Lyrander, Mark of the Storm. Half-elves in Eberron. Sylphs, definitely.

House Medani, Mark of Detection, Half-elves in Eberron, probably surturs in Eberron Remixed.

House Orien, Mark of Passage, Humans in Eberron. Same in Eberron, heavily Aundairan.

House Phiarlan, Mark of Shadows. Elves in Eberron. Kemlings in Eberron Remixed.

House Sivis, Mark of Scribing. Gnomes in Eberron. Probably humans in Eberron remixed, honestly.

House Tarkanan, Aberrant Marks. Any in Eberron. Any in Eberron remixed. Not really a house, of course, or at least not a recognized one.

House Tharashk, Mark of Finding. Humans and half-orcs in Eberron. Humans and woodwoses in Eberron remixed. 

House Thurani, Mark of Shadows, Elves in Eberron. Kemlings in Eberron Remixed. A splinter house from Phiarlan.

House Vadalis, Mark of Handling. Humans in both Eberron and Remixed. Heavily Aundairan in ethnicity, but from the Eldeen Reaches, which is no longer part of the Aundairan nation. Very occasionally manifests on a woodwose.

House Vol, Mark of Death. Elves in Eberron, although there's only one of them left, and she's a lich. But, to quote Malcom from Jurassic Park, "Life, uh, finds a way." In Eberron Remixed, this mark is starting to show up again, curiously on various races, especially tritons. Vol, however, is a human lich. This is mostly confused and mistaken for an aberrant mark, and House Vol doesn't have any organization like a regular house per se, but... something is happening here. 

That's more interesting to me than the Dreaming Dark and kalashtar. I don't have any psionics in my system anyway.

Darguun will be a nation of orcs and goblins. The Shadow Marches will be pretty infested with Grendlings, kinda sorta taking the place of the cultic orcs. Neither of those ever manifest any marks. The Mror Holds is the largest concentration of dvergs (although there's still more humans who live there than dvergs), and Zilargo is primarily a human nation. The Talenta Plains is mostly surturs. I'll eventually redo the racial percentages for each region, but it'll be similar to what I did in the first remix.

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.