Speculation on Eberron: Rising from the Last War

A new D&D book was announced recently! Come November 19^th, Eberron: Rising from the Last War will be available for purchase. This book will contain the official version of the Artificer and other Eberron content, including information relevant to running adventures in the Eberron setting.

In this post, I’m going to give a brief explanation of the Eberron setting, dig into what we already know about this book, and speculate on what else we might see!

What’s Eberron?

Eberron is a D&D setting like Faerûn, Ravenloft, and Planescape. If you’ve played 5e with the setting information given in the Dungeon Master’s Guide or used any of the 5e adventures (except Curse of Strahd, technically), you’ve played in a version of Faerûn (also called the Forgotten Realms).

Eberron’s been around since 3.5e and 4e D&D. WotC ran a contest create a new D&D setting, and Keith Baker’s Eberron entry won that contest. (His blog is a great way to learn more details about Eberron beyond official books)

This setting has themes of pulp adventure and noir-esque intrigue. The Last War led to a nation’s destruction and left countless scars. Magic is everywhere, harnessed to create life in the warforged and to travel the land in airships. There are even family lines that carry dragonmarks—marks on a person’s skin that carry magic within them and grant the wearer power. Eberron brings a steampunk flavor to Dungeons & Dragons.

Wayfinder’s Guide to Eberron came out in July of 2018, officially introducing Eberron to D&D 5e. Eberron: Rising from the Last War will bring new information about the setting, but it will likely also touch on some of the content we’ve seen in Wayfinder’s Guide.

What We Saw in Wayfinder’s

Wayfinder’s Guide to Eberron (this is an affiliate link) explained a lot about the Eberron setting. It gave an overview of the continent of Khorvaire and the Five Nations within it, as well as lands beyond. We learned about the changelings, kalashtar, shifters, and warforged—races unique to the setting, as well as the differences in the Eberron versions of the standard fantasy races.

Unique to Eberron are the twelve dragonmark houses. Members of these family lines have the potential to manifest a certain magical mark on their skin that grants them specific powers. But there are also those who gain an aberrant dragonmark with unpredictable magic outside of the twelve houses.

We also got a chapter containing magic items of various power levels, from common to legendary.

The final chapter in Wayfinder’s Guide delves into Sharn, also known as the City of Towers, as a potential starting place for an Eberron adventure. Readers can get descriptions of the various places in the city and story ideas for an adventure.

WotC has said that the plan is to keep information overlap between Wayfinder’s Guide and Rising from the Last War minimal, but since they deal with the same setting, there’s probably going to be some.

Official Information About Eberron: Rising from the Last War

WotC’s official page for the book has a bullet-point list of what we’ll see in this book. It looks like we’re getting some fleshed-out locations complete with maps and some additions to your DM’s monster arsenal resulting from the magic used in the Last War.

The book will also give us more information about Sharn and “a campaign for characters venturing into the Mournland,” the magic-scarred remnants of the nation destroyed near the end of the Last War.

The official version of the Artificer will also appear in this new book! According to this D&D News video, the Artificer will appear with three subclasses, one less than the most recent Unearthed Arcana article.

New to this book is a “group patron,” which seems like a sort of common organization or quest-giver to the entire party. There will be mechanics dealing with doing work for that patron.

The 16 race and subrace options seem to match up with the options we saw in Wayfinder’s Guide, given that there are twelve dragonmark houses (which constitute either subrace or variant race options) and four races unique to Eberron (the changeling, shifter, kalashtar, and warforged).

As a note, it seems that the art they’re showing as the regular cover for the book is actually a temporary placeholder.

This book will be 320 pages long, which is more than double the length of Wayfinder’s Guide, so we’ll definitely see a lot more in-depth Eberron content.

Speculation

So, it seems like we’ll see more about Sharn, the City of Towers. They’ve pushed this city as a good starting point for adventurers, so we’ll probably get a similar overview to Wayfinder’s Guide with some more details, maybe related to a potential group patron related to Sharn.

I’m guessing that the group patron might work as something of a Background+. It seems like a great way to get the party together and, well, keep them together—after all, they share a common employer. I can see group patron options being among the dragonmark house leaders and other members of the various organizations in Eberron. Actually, this may be a beefier version of faction renown from the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Waterdeep: Dragon Heist.

As far as the races and dragonmark options go, my guess is that we won’t see a lot of deep mechanical changes. We may see some minor tweaks and wording changes across the board to reflect playtest feedback. Now, we didn’t hear anything about the aberrant dragonmark feat, but it would be neat to see more options for characters using those mechanics.

I’m a little sad to hear that the Artificer will only have three subclasses, meaning that one of them has been cut. These decisions are made based off of community feedback, though, so it seems one was less popular than the other three. I’d also guess that we won’t see major spell list or class mechanics changes, but we may see changes between the published subclass mechanics and what we saw in UA.

On the other hand, I’m really excited to see what this Mournland campaign is all about. One of the mysteries of Eberron is how the Mourning, the magical disaster that created the Mournland, came about and whether it will happen again. In the past, it’s been up to the Dungeon Master to determine whether their PCs can solve this mystery—or what the answer even is—so I wonder if this campaign will enforce this ambiguity or hint towards a canonical answer. (Honestly, I hope it’s the former)

What are you excited about for Eberron: Rising from the Last War? What are your hopes and dreams for this new Eberron book? Are you running/plan to run an Eberron campaign, or are you playing in one? I’d love to hear about it!

As a side note—we’ve heard that we won’t see an official, finished psionic class until the Artificer is done. And once Rising from the Last War is published, we’ll have our official Artificer. While it may remain a while away, we’re getting closer to a psionic class for 5e!