I need to tread carefully with how I handle Shadows of the Last War (Keith Baker). It would be all too easy for me to demand too much from it, given its position as the first new Eberron content after the initial campaign book. "This barely expanded my understanding of Khorvaire," I could say, accurately.
But however accurate and well-observed that complaint would be, I'd nonetheless become imperceptibly less sexy when I was forced to concede that this is merely a 32-page introductory adventure, and so any expansion of my understanding of the world of Eberron would be both surprising and praiseworthy.
Shadows of the Last War very slightly expanded my understanding of Eberron. You know the introductory adventure drill - "Securing this macguffin is step 4 in our 155-part plan to conquer the world in the name of our dark conspiracy! Let us send a half-dozen units of our weakest creatures to mill about various locations where the macguffin might be found! Make sure they split up, so that any plucky adventurers in the area will only encounter one squad at a time!"
Not that this module is quite that transparent about it. But I do think that if, somehow, the Emerald Claw had assigned a second 5th-level character to the case, the PCs wouldn't have stood a chance. It's an acceptible break in verisimilitude, obviously, but if you're in the business of evaluating how an rpg module spends its precious and limited page-count, then you kind of have to write it off as purely functional. Most of these 32 pages are given over to nonsense, and that's expected, but among the nonsense, there was some useful information, which was nice.
We see a little bit more of Khorvaire's magitech - an elemental-powered land cart, which uses the magic of its bound Earth Elemental to roll smoothly over any terrain at a steady 15mph, an enchanted wash-basin that cleans and folds clothes without human intervention, a "hydra-headed eldritch machine that spat white-hot molten glass from its five heads," a series of color-coded crystal keycharms which allowed House Cannith to turn their underground headquarters into a late-90s FPS map.
Taken together, it's not much of anything, unfortunately. But it does suggest the possibility of more radical things to come, so I'll take it. However, whether I will one day look upon this adventure with fondness or with disappointment will be entirely dependent on whether or not future books give a satisfactory explanation for just what the fuck the macguffin actually is.
From the introduction: "[previously, in the campaign book's introductory adventure] the party of adventurers recovered an ancient schema - part of a creation pattern used by the fabricators of House Cannith . . . Creation patterns of all sorts exist, from those used to magically craft mundane items to those designed to craft exceptionally powerful magic items. . ."
And we get physical descriptions of the items in question. A schema is a flat metal object that can come in various shapes (a diamond and a crescent are mentioned in this particular adventure, but I have to assume that they can look like anything) and a Creation Pattern is a flat metal disc with slots for various schemas. The one the PCs find here has four open slots, implying that there are two more adventures after this one (backing that up is the last line of the book "Or you can follow the story line that continues in Whispers of the Vampire's Blade, the second in a three-part series.")
What remains unclear to me is how these items are meant to be used, just as a physical process. I've got some raw materials, a Creation Pattern, and a fabricator (which I've gathered is a job title, rather than some kind of magitech machine) - walk me through the process by which a finished product emerges from these precursors. It is no exaggeration to say that my opinion of Eberron as a setting hinges entirely on whether or not I find your explanation satisfying.
But where does that leave Shadows of the Last War? Well, like most fantasy fiction, I wish it spent less time on fantasy adventure and more time on fantasy manufacturing infrastructure, but it would be absurd of me to make that my "official" "critical" opinion. It's a very good example of the type of book that it is, and that is in no way diminished by my uncouth openness re: my preference for reading an entirely different type of book.
Which is to say, the only thing I'd actually change about this adventure is to make the first way-point closer to the train station. The first thing you're supposed to do after being charged with retrieving House Cannath's lost schema is venture to the city of Rhukaan Draal, which takes 4 days via boat or, you can take the train to Sterngate for three days and then meet up with a caravan to get to Rhukaan Draal in another 12.
It's a small thing, but what are you even doing in Eberron if you're not making a mad dash for the train at the first opportunity? Like, yes, the boat is an elemental galleon and so, in its way, is just as much 19th-century-esque magitech, but c'mon. No one goes steampunk for the boats and we all know it. This is an introductory adventure. You gotta make 'em shake hands with the things that set this world apart.
But that's really a very minor nitpick. Shadows of the Last War actually managed to achieve a fairly remarkable feat - it persuaded me to seek out and acquire the rest of the adventure chain. I may not be particularly invested in the story of Elaydren d'Cannath, but damnit I want to know what those schema do!
Ukss Contribution: The glass-spitting hydra. We actually see the effect of this magical WMD before they players encounter it and it's spooky as hell - an entire village coated in a layer of glass, the charred corpses of the victims held suspended in its cloudy depths, with just a couple of specimens chipped out by the villain, to be animated as some gnarly fucking zombies. Very cool.
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