Oh no, I may be in trouble. Eberron looks like it's shaping up to be exactly the sort of fantasy rpg setting that's guaranteed to activate my worst instincts as a critic - a high-concept subversion of a familiar genre that nonetheless feels compelled to play it safe and reassure readers that it's not going to stray too far from genre conservatism.
While reading Magic of Eberron (Bruce R. Cordell, Stephen Schubert, Chris Thomasson), I experienced a rollercoaster of a moment that exemplified this tension. At the start of Chapter 4, there are three section headers all in a row that seemed ready to sell the high concept: "Life in a Magic-Suffused Society," "Post Medieval World," and "Professional Spellcasters." I saw those in the Table of Contents and I thought to myself, "Aw, yeah, let's fucking go!" . . . Then I noticed that all three sections were on the same page.
"Post Medieval World" was only two paragraphs. And one of those paragraphs was about the setting's resemblance to a medieval world: "The benefits provided by the wide-scale manipulation of magic are not provided by arcane factories of mass production. Instead, Eberron's magical wonders remain the purview of individual practitioners, artisans, and expert crafters."
Nooo! My (hypothetical, implied) infrastructure! If there's no mass production, what is the train for? What are you putting on that train that's worth the expense of maintaining a continental rail network? Maybe passenger service is enough to pay the bills, but that's not the main reason people built railroads historically. It also doesn't say anything particularly interesting about the changing demographics of the urban-rural divide that came about because farm work was getting less labor intensive while manufacturing increased vastly in scale. You know, the very specific sort of "post medieval" where it "shares many elements of a later renaissance society," but none of those elements are things that would make it incompatible with Forgotten Realms.
The story of Eberron is not the story of increasing volumes of cargo traveling increasingly long distances through increasingly complex networks of supply chains. It is not a story of society's adaptation to the changing nature of work. It's not even the story of the transformation of warfare from being dominated by well-armed aristocrats to being won or lost by conscript soldiers wielding off-the-rack weapons with a month's worth of training. Rather, Eberron's story is simply: "D&D, but there's also a train."
And that's sort of what I mean when I say it brings out my worst instincts. "D&D with a train" is a perfectly acceptable thing to be. I'm not sitting here thinking, "actually, I prefer D&D, but with no trains." It's like the airship in the original Final Fantasy - something that should maybe feel industrial but is really just a bit of set dressing.
However, I can't stop thinking that maybe Eberron is afflicted with the same malaise that brought down Planescape - it breaks from one of the core assumptions of the implied setting, in a way that opens up a lot of possibilities, but it can't quite overcome its terror at the fact that in order to do something genuinely new you have to try something genuinely new.
But Eberron has a leg up on Planescape in the fact that its claims of being about a "pseudo medieval culture [that] shares many elements of a later renaissance society" are a transparent, calculated lie. Magic of Eberron is even generous enough to provide a concrete, specific example of this process in action.
Page 91:
"While the streets of many cities are illuminated with everbright lanterns, their magic is individually cast and maintained by ranks of professional spell chandlers."
Vs page 122:
"A House Cannith magewright might use a simple pattern to quickly create hundreds of continual flame stones for use in streetlamps."
It's the same fucking item. Thirty-one pages. That's how long it took to go from "don't imagine mass production" to "here's the magitech they use to do mass production." Now, this is largely explicable as a lack of communication between the different authors, but I also think the system itself is pulling a little trick on us. Because the section on page 122 is about "minor schemas" and minor schemas are not capable of quickly creating hundreds of streetlights. In practice, they act as a sort of reusable scroll you can cast from once per day. The magic that can mass produce items is called "patterns" and while patterns are made out of schemas (both minor and otherwise), Magic of Eberron doesn't actually give us rules for combining schemas into a pattern or for using a pattern to create larger scale effects. We know it's possible, because the book goes out of its way to tell us its possible, but it's not a feat that PCs are meant to replicate.
And I think that's the key to understanding Eberron's genre trouble. It can't present us with any sort of magic that allows individuals (or small groups) to act on an industrial scale, because industrial scale actions are not accounted for in D&D's standard power curve or magic item economy. A 5th level wizard in post-medieval times cannot be any more powerful than a 5th level wizard in a medieval setting. Perhaps just as importantly, a healing potion, a magic weapon, or generalized spellcasting services all have to cost the same amount as in the core book, in both absolute and relative terms. You've got House Jorasco, which is an entire family of people with the hereditary power to cure wounds and remove disease, and they're numerous enough to have a presence in every major city on the continent, but you can't just pop into one of their franchises and slip 'em 5gp to cure your mummy rot. You have to pay the same 150gp you'd pay a spellcaster in the standard setting. The ubiquity of magic hasn't made magic any cheaper.
Which pretty much means that the technological and social assumptions of the core book will transfer over to Eberron, whether they're meant to or not. It's called "a magic-suffused society," but the only specific magical conveniences they bother to list are lanterns and expensive transportation like airships or the lightning rail. They're missing something important about technological change - it tends to make average people significantly more powerful. In the 21st century, a person can pay the equivalent of less than 10gp (approximately 2 weeks wages) to fly halfway across the world and back. I regularly carry in my pocket an amount of computational power greater than existed in the entire world c. 1965. In other words, if Eberron is truly a "magic-suffused society" then there should be types of magic you can buy in a store and just casually use like it's no big deal. Unfortunately, Magic of Eberron doesn't tell us what any of those might actually be.
That being said, it's still a fun and fascinating D&D supplement. You can graft an elemental onto your body, gaining magical powers like immunity to dehydration (because the inside of your mouth is entirely water . . . which hurts my brain to even think about). You can play an Impure Prince, the prestige class that sounds like the title of an r-rated anime (and for good reason - it's a dark anti-hero with a symbiotic relationship to an eldritch monstrosity who hunts abominations from beyond the stars). You can magically conjure a wardrobe full of outfits suitable for any occasion, visit a castle with a giant enchanted windchime that repels invaders with massive sonic attacks, or buy a mechanical arm to attach to your belt and protect you with a shield. Some of this stuff does feel borderline-industrial, but most of it just feels like more D&D (not that that's a bad thing).
Overall, I guess my opinion of Magic of Eberron is that it's a great D&D supplement, but a frustrating Eberron supplement. I love the weird new magic, but I have desperately burning questions about the world's manufacturing infrastructure that stubbornly remain unanswered.
Ukss Contribution: The Green Spire - so-called because "the rock is home to many lichens." I just thought it was a cool image.
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