Across the run of D&D 3rd edition, the Races of . . . series has been pretty consistent in both its strengths and weaknesses - an ideal format that presents useful, if slightly mundane information about various fantasy creatures, but the creatures themselves are either the same vanilla demihumans we've been reading about for fifty years (elves, dwarves, halflings) or complete randos we have no preestablished reason to care about (raptorans, illumians, and to a lesser extent, goliaths). Races of Eberron (Jesse Decker, Matthew Sernett, Gwendolyn F.M. Kestrel, Keith Baker) breaks the pattern by retaining the series' characteristic strengths while improbably being about interesting creatures with unique mechanical and roleplaying challenges that play an important part in the overall setting . . . and also the Kalashtar.
No, no, that's too harsh. I actually quite liked almost everything about the Kalashtar. . . aside from the fact that they were being presented in a kitchen-sink D&D setting. They, along with their arch-rivals, the Inspired, never stopped feeling to me like one of those stealth pilots that got snuck into popular long-running tv shows, where the regular cast only showed up at the bookends of a story about totally new characters so that the resulting series could be sold to the public as a spinoff. (For my younger readers, this is something that used to happen before content-hungry streaming services started greenlighting a bunch of random bullshit).
I couldn't read anything about the Kalashtar or the Inspired without thinking "this really needs to be its own setting, possibly even its own game." The mystical realm that connects all mortal minds through their dreams is ruled by an evil spirit known as "The Dreaming Dark," and the lesser dream spirits, the quori, serve this malevolent force by sending people nightmares, casting the whole of the mortal world into an age of darkness and suffering. But some quori rebelled and quietly nurtured the hope of a coming age of light in which the Dreaming Dark was finally defeated. Unfortunately, the rebel quori could not defeat their nightmarish rivals and were forced to flee to the mortal world, taking up residence in human minds, which they gently and consensually possessed, leading to the creation of a strange psychic subculture - the Kalashtar.
But the Dreaming Dark was not satisfied with this state of affairs, so it sent its own quori to the mortal world, to violently possess suitable vessels in order to hunt down and eliminate the refugee dream spirits. These nightmare quori subverted the leadership of a mighty empire and manifest generation after generation in a special class of people known as "the Inspired," who are worshipped by the people of Riedra as living gods.
This leads to a shadow war between rival factions of spirit-channeling psychics, where insular and clannish Kalashtar communities follow strict spiritual practices to both oppose the Dreaming Dark and manifest the coming Age of Light, while the Inspired infiltrate governments to oppress an (apparent) ethnic minority, hire catspaws and cuttouts to harass them directly, and send quori spirits to hop from body to body in the hopes of taking them unaware. It's espionage, it's intrigue, it's crime drama, it's science-fantasy driven by new age spirituality, and if it was the only fantastic element in a series set in Victorian England, it would probably be one of my favorite games.
But because it's set in Eberron, I have to shake my finger and scold, "No! You have too much going on! Dial it back a little." I know it's looking a gift-horse in the mouth to complain about this bonus game-within-a-game content, but I imagine myself sitting down to a session 0 and explaining to the table "this is going to be an all Kalashtar game . . . trust me, the payoff will be worth it" and maybe that's a game I'd enjoy running, but it's not a conversation I'd enjoy having.
So not quite in the same boat as the Raptorans, but maybe enough of an analogue to say that Races of Eberron has not entirely escaped the series' weaknesses. But enough of that. Let's talk about the book's strongest content - warforged and changelings.
Not since the genasi from Planescape have I experienced such an instantaneous and total transition from "trademarked invention of a specific campaign setting" to "essential staple of D&D-style fantasy." Like, it's one of those cases where you don't recognize a gap until you see it being filled. Oh, "fantasy robots who are confused by their own emotions" and "nonbinary pansexual gremlins who struggle with the concept of personal identity" . . . of course. It seems so obvious in retrospect.
We get a pretty good presentation of both, though I don't think they escape their Eberron-specific contexts enough to justify the introduction's rhetorical question - "Why is Races of Eberron a core D&D supplement and not an Eberron-specific book?"
The answer given: "Changelings, kalashtar, shifters, and warforged are excellent additions to any D&D campaign, offering fun and unique play experiences and enriching any setting" is at least half correct (I'm embarrassed to admit that I forgot entirely about shifters until just now, but in remembering them, I'm thinking "good vibes . . . yeah, why not" which I guess would make them this book's equivalent to the goliaths), but as a first outing, Races of Eberron simply does not do the work to make that happen.
Also, there's a chapter where they check-in with the Eberron-specific variants of existing fantasy creatures in a way that makes it very clear that this is an Eberron book, despite the introduction's lofty ambitions.
Let's just run through them real quick, no more than a paragraph each:
Dwarves: "Dwarves have dominated banking and finance. . ." eh . . . they're still the proud warrior race guys, and the perfectionist crafter guys, so I think they're still broadly in the . . . challenging intersection between popular fantasy archetype and Tolkien's well-meaning but culturally hindered depiction of Jewish identity. But maybe, just as a change of pace, we could have a proto-capitalist fantasy setting where banking and finance aren't dominated by any identifiable racial group.
Elves: "We are totally not necromancers, we swear. . ." You're cool. I like you. But yeah, you're necromancers and I'm only humoring you because I think you'll look hot when you finally cave and start wearing the eye-liner I picked out.
Drow: They are less indigenous-coded here than they seemed in Grasp of the Emerald Claw, so I'm not ready to write off Xen'drik entirely, but it's also very obvious that someone is trying to "do something" with them, and I don't foresee the payoff as being worth it. Scorpions instead of spiders? Patriarchy instead of matriarchy? Hmm . . .
Gnomes: Why does D&D 3.5 keep trying to make me want to fuck gnomes? Oh, they're spies? They're ruled by something called "The Triumvirate?" They've "dedicated themselves to carefully preserving their image as harmless pranksters and tricksters," but they're actually uptight and manipulative? All that stuff is too sexy. Stop it!
Goblins: Keep doing the Lord's work of chipping away at decades of bias. One day, they will be a core option and you'll be vindicated.
Halflings: It's kind of interesting to see the "we need to de-cutify these bastards" play out a second time, in a completely different direction than gnomes. They're deadly hunters who tame and ride dinosaurs? I guess it's cool that you have some guys like that, but between Dark Sun, the dungeon-punk presentation in the 3e core, and this, I kind of just feel like someone at D&D HQ shorted the waistcoat and clay pipe market and is desperately trying to claw back their investment.
Orcs: "Wise and wild." "Always on the edge of savagery." Okay. You get what people like about orcs. Now all you have to do is present this idea in a way that does not evoke the ugliness of colonialism. I give this attempt a C-. Do more with the steampunk goggles. Those had potential.
And the rest of my notes are just random mechanical observations like "Tactical Feats: make martials jump through hoops to do things that are conceptually interesting." I'm enough of a nerd that I couldn't help writing those thoughts down, but honestly, reviewing them, I hope I'm not such a nerd that I feel compelled to filibuster the internet with them. Y'all are going to have to wait until my next Exalted post for that.
Overall, I think Races of Eberron is one of the stronger 3.5 books I've read. I'm finally convinced that this setting has legs.
Ukss Contribution: Some of the undead who advise the elves of Aerenal are explicitly said to be 26,000 years old. This is, of course, merely a case of fantasy being bad at scaling timelines. The implications of that kind of age are not explored at all. However, it's a detail that really got into my head. Deca-millennia are such an interesting age for immortals because it's on the shallow end of long enough to blur the line between history and evolution. Like, you go back 26 thousand years in the real world and it's arguable that the humans who lived were only technically the same species as us. So what would a ghost from that time be like?
That's a question I wouldn't mind exploring in Ukss.
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