My first order of business before writing about Secrets of Xen'drik (Keith Baker, Jason Bulmahn, Amber Scott) is determining exactly how many secrets Xen'drik actually has. Because by my least generous count, it's only one and the book should really be called "Secret of Xen'drik."
Although, to be fair, it's entirely possible that I'm just being an asshole and my standards for what qualifies as a "secret" are way too high. Sure, there's no way that the layout of the city of Stormreach is a secret, but you could probably argue that the death giant Prokres doesn't want to advertise his scheme to reassemble the Shard of Arcane Endowment to all and sundry. However, stuff like that is only really a secret in the context of the setting. I kind of feel like the title of the book is something directed at me, the real-world human reading the book, and thus for something to be a "secret" of Xen'drik, it can't just be new information about Xen'drik that I'm learning for the first time, it has to be something that the creators of Eberron already knew before this book was written and just deliberately decided not to reveal until now. And of the stuff I learned about Xen'drik from this book, only one fact rose to a level of "surprising but fundamental backstory" that makes me consider deploying a spoiler warning before discussing it here.
SPOILER WARNING (it's not going to be blocked because I'm going to have to talk about it for a considerable length of time, so this is your last chance at turning back if you're invested in being surprised by Eberron canon):
The very first warforged were created by the quori of a previous age, to use as a weapon against the giant civilization of Xen'drik c. 40,000 ya.
Whoa.
Okay, if you really parse it down, that's actually two secrets in one, because we're also getting the first explicit talk about the cyclic nature of Dal Quor and how each turning of a Dal Quor age sort of "resets" the quori and changes the nature of their existence, with the previous age being centered around "The Dreaming Heart" instead of "The Dreaming Dark." But I'd argue that's less a secret of Xen'drik and more a secret of Dal Quor that just happens to be relevant to a secret of Xen'drik. So really, the title of the book should be "A Secret of Xen'drik and a Secret in Xen'drik and Also Some Useful Information About Xen'Drik for DMs Who Want to Run Games There, Some of Which They May Wish to Keep Secret from Players, but Which Won't Actually be All That Surprising to People Reading the Books for Pleasure 20 Years from Now."
I could just be overthinking it, though. "Secrets" is a fair enough substitute for "information" in casual usage that the title of the book doesn't actually feel like a lie. If I make too big a deal of it, it's just going to look I'm hamming it up for content. . .
(You're welcome.)
Anyway, about that secret. I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, I really, really like that a dangling lore question got a canonical answer. Previous books were oh so coy with their "Merrix d'Cannith claimed to have invented the warforged, but ruins in Xen'drik suggest that something very much like the warforged existed for far longer than the people of Khorvaire believe" so it's both surprising and welcome to get a definitive who, when, and why for this. I understand why rpgs do it, but I always find "the real answer is whatever works best for your game" to be an unsatisfying way to fill these lacunae.
On the other hand, thematically, it's kind of a frustrating reveal. I'd have greatly preferred it if the warforged were a novel invention of the Last War. Because that would have been a genuinely post-medieval story. New inventions leading to new weapons and tactics, with unprecedented destructive potential. Are humanity's knowledge and power growing faster than their wisdom? Yeah, you can do a story that's post-medieval by way of post-apocalyptic and frame it as "humanity reinventing a technology that helped destroy a previous civilization that once thought of itself as powerful, and it appears that they're making all the same mistakes." But that's a 20th century theme, and for Eberron I'd really prefer a 19th century theme.
My real diagnosis is that it's just D&D's genre conservatism sneaking in. If you've got something that looks like advanced technology, it's okay only so long as it is the salvaged legacy of a forgotten golden age. People in laboratories, learning things about nature, and then writing papers about what they learned so engineers can make new inventions based on the papers . . . that's out of bounds. Because nostalgia over a lost past is a fantasy vibe, and abandoning the past for the temptation of the new is a science-fiction vibe.
DAMNIT, WIZARDS OF THE COAST, LET ME PLAY A KOBOLD THAT EXPERIENCES MODERNIST MORAL VERTIGO! Is that really too much to ask?
I have to hope that it isn't, because there is one type of post-medieval story that Eberron seems eager to tell, and it turns out to be kind of uncomfortable when divorced from any potential discussion of technological and scientific hubris - the story of a powerful culture sending its dangerous fuck-ups into the territory of a less powerful culture whereupon they proceed to fuck shit up for the glory of capitalism.
There's a new creature called a Dream Serpent, whose scales and fangs are valuable commodities. One of the sample adventures has an NPC sending you to the Dream Serpent nesting grounds, to bring back said commodities (via more or less indiscriminate slaughter). And one of the obstacles you might face on this mission is a run in with the native Drow or Yuan-ti (depending on the party level) who are violently upset that you ignored the clearly posted sign that said (actual quote) "the ground beyond is holy . . . trespassers will be punished severely."
So, in the real world, we have a term for the activities described in this adventure. It's "the crime of poaching." And we have a term for what the natives are doing when they attack the PCs. It's "enforcing the law against poaching." Yet the PCs will most likely end the adventure keeping the skins and getting paid. There's, like, a good ending where they had the ecological foresight not to kill the young snakes and they're able to negotiate ex post facto with the Drow whose permission they neglected to secure and they get away scott free. And there's a medium bad ending where they kill the hunters sent out to punish them and get away scott free. (The bad bad ending of a law enforcement TPK is only implicit in the structure of the game itself). And in precisely none of these does the book seem at all aware that it's telling a story where the villains win.
I can't say for sure that this sort of story would come off better if the warforged were initially created in a Cannith laboratory. The two subjects aren't technically related, after all. However, my gut tells me that you don't tell the technological story unless you're consciously building a 19th century world, and if you're consciously building a 19th century world, you're going to tell the poaching story much more carefully than you would if you're just building a medieval fantasy world where some magic replicates certain 19th century technologies. Hunting a rare monster for personal financial gain feels very different if you're a peasant trespassing in the king's game reserve than if you're a mercenary tourist fleeing fantasy-WW1 for fantasy Africa.
I really enjoy a certain semi-canonical interpretation of Eberron, but I do not enjoy the way Eberron tries to have it both ways. Humanist enough to treat lycanthropy as a disease worthy of compassion, not quite humanist enough to examine the colonialist hypocrisy of rampantly plundering a continent's natural resources simply because the natives regard them as merely "holy" instead of "valuable" or "critically endangered." I'd tell them to pick a lane, but I don't entirely trust them to pick the right one. So I'll say instead that they should get in the lane I picked out for them - fantasy that reflects the growing complexities of a world fitfully transitioning to modernism and is self-aware enough to question whether certain historical bad behaviors were truly inevitable. The thing that draws me to the series are the occasional glimpses that they might eventually get there. I just have to ignore my common sense intuition when it tells me there's not enough of the series left for them to stick the landing.
Ukss Contribution: There's a lot of good stuff here. Like, I can't deny that there's an element of orientalist exoticism going on with the game's presentation of the "continent of mystery," but one of the frustrating things about D&D is that orientalism is one of the few consistent ways to get the game to pull the stick out of its ass. Stormreach is a city that seems tiny in scale because it's built inside the ruins of a giant city. There's a bird who has magical properties because it feeds on magical flowers. One of the sample maps has you swimming through phosphorescent algae. These are all things that could fit effortlessly into a "standard medieval fantasy" setting, but don't because the authors rarely give themselves that sort of license to invent.
My favorite example of this - lizard folk who fly around in hang gliders. The book makes it a point to mention that they are "primitive hang gliders" and the lizard folk are using them to attack "civilized settlements" (because of the aforementioned orientalism), but I find myself in a position to be considerably more chill about it. Glide away, you beautiful lizard people, Ukss will be waiting for you when you land!
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