Dragonmarked (Keith Baker, Michelle Lyons, C.A. Suleiman) is a good book. It's well-made, it accomplishes the remarkable feat of making its thirteen families of magical capitalists feel both gameable and distinct (even the two families of elf artists/illusionists/spies at least had a reason to exist as separate entities), and aside from occasionally getting a little eugenics-y (mainly in the animal-breeding house, but also in the house of half-elves who were adamantly opposed to any further race-mixing, because apparently their ancestors got the balance exactly right) it didn't step on any rakes, politically speaking.
It's like this - if you picture Eberron, the setting, as a big bucket, and then every individual Eberron supplement as liquid being poured into the bucket, then Dragonmarked brought the bucket from 1.1L to 1.2L. It expanded my knowledge of the setting and was a gross positive all the way across the board. There's nothing in this book I want less of.
Which means, you guessed it, my grumpy ass is going to act all petulant and ungrateful because I'm left wanting more. Yes, you heard me, if I had my way every rpg supplement would be 1000 pages long, written according to some abstruse philosophical or ideological schema, and would meticulously describe everyone's clothes (and the logistics chains and modes of production that made those clothes possible). And if it seems, by that description, that I am quietly comparing every book I read to Mage: 20th Anniversary Edition . . .
Yikes, I really am doing that. I should stop immediately.
I guess I've made no secret of my desire to have a version of Eberron that was more explicitly modern and less . . . D&D, and the longer I let that go on, informing my reviews, the less charming a habit it becomes (I assume you all were initially very charmed), but I swear, sometimes it felt like Dragonmarked was deliberately goading me on.
I just wonder if anyone, during the course of writing this book, realized they were just a half dozen random sentences of Marxist political economy away from making the dragonmarked houses into full-on cyberpunk megacorporations.
They're these transnational organizations that rival states in power and can dictate terms over broad sectors of the economy. And this book focuses on their familial relations, the insular (and sometimes borderline incestuous) consolidation of power, and the methods both natural and supernatural (one of the houses has plenipotentiary law enforcement powers and sells its services as mercenaries, another house is composed bounty hunters who sell the services of ogre mercenaries, etc) through which they pursue their ambitions, the least of which is the reckless pursuit of limitless wealth.
It's all the ingredients for a megacorporation, to the degree that I can't entirely believe the similarity was an accident. And yet, if they were doing it on purpose, I have to believe that they'd do it . . . better.
Not, like, better better. Not objectively better. Just "better at communicating the sort of things the cyberpunk genre has to say." These are powerful economic actors who can dictate terms to states, and House Cannith's niche is "manufacturing." It's so incredible I have to repeat it. The economic niche of this dragonmarked house is manufacturing.
When you consider that House Medani's business is personal protection and private detectives, you can't help but think that all thirteen of these guys were designed somewhat whimsically.
But you could get to megacorporations, if you wanted to. Each of the thirteen houses has its own prestige class and Medani's is The Medani Prophet, who combine their natural dragonmark abilities with divine spellcasting to foretell the future. And some of them "accept long-term positions as advisors for important clients of the house, providing the twin benefits of divination and divine insight." Which is still maybe not on the level of all manufacturing, but is something.
Profane mercenary priests of the god of knowledge, whispering in the ears of ruthless industrialists, telling them secrets gleaned from their miraculous visions, keeping them safe even from the onset of justice. An entire guild of Raincallers who sell their expertise in creating irrigations systems . . . and the rain to fill those systems up. An order of magical healers who take a sacred oath to never heal a patient for free, and it's taken so seriously that they can't even accept services in-kind from their closest friends.
House Jorasco will literally dispatch adventurers to "hunt down healers who have violated their vows." Nobody tell me their policy on preexisting conditions. I don't think my heart could take it.
You could build an adventure arc, maybe even a campaign around House Orien's private security "searching Sharn for black market conductor stones."
Excuse me, what? In just a quick throwaway line, this book is telling me that conductor stones have value on the black market and I'm supposed to just gloss over that? People are stealing small bits of infrastructure from the family of magical capitalists that owns the railways, and they're reselling them for profit. Who's buying them? For what purpose? Are there pirate railways in the shadows of Sharn's megalithic towers? Is the street finding its own uses for things?
How could you do this to me? And more to the point, how could you do this to me and still act like Eberron's target genre is "slightly post-medieval medieval fantasy?"
Although I will confess that the lingering bits of medieval fantasy do bring something to the table. The dragonmarked houses are not megacorporations in the traditional sense because they have their origin in the Kingdom of Galifar, where they were organs of state power, a parallel aristocracy, forbidden to intermarry with the landowning gentry and denied certain traditional privileges in exchange for royal monopolies. There was no neoliberal privatization. Rather, the Last War lead to the government collapsing underneath the dragonmarked and the houses became "independent" and "neutral" (read: the worst kind of war profiteers). Manufacturing, medicine, transportation, even the fucking weather are all controlled by an imperialist rump state that's been retooled to operate exclusively for profit. It's like this world completely skipped the bourgeoise. Feudalism meets neofeudalism.
I can't tell if that means Eberron is a really interesting setting or if it's merely a setting that's just complex enough for me to project my interests onto. Or, in other words, it's exactly what I look for in an rpg, and is shaping up to be one of my favorites.
Looking back, I've done the Thing again. I read a perfectly serviceable workhorse of a book and I got into my own head thinking about what it would be like if they made an entirely different book. So let me end this post with a genuine complaint (that'll show 'em what we think of "perfectly serviceable" round these parts) about the actual book - it doesn't adequately explain what an aberrant dragonmark is supposed to be.
Part of the setting backstory is the War of the Mark, where the dragonmarked houses with their normal, or "true" dragonmarks fought and eliminated all the bearers of these hundreds of different "aberrant" dragonmarks, many of which were (according to the history books) basically magical WMDs. And I always just of assumed that this distinction was political. That the War of the Mark happened for more pedestrian reason and the losers, by dint of not surviving long enough to ally with the Kingdom of Galifar, were labelled "aberrant" as a sort of ex post facto justification for the war's violence. And that the aberrant dragonmarks of the contemporary era emerged in the same way the Houses' marks did originally, but simply haven't been around long enough to form the social identity of a powerful extended family.
However, this book introduces new mechanics for aberrant dragonmarks and talks a bit about them in the abstract, and wouldn't you know it, they actually are different. The behave a bit differently re: inheritance and consistency of appearance, and they're conveniently color-coded so you can always tell an aberrant dragonmark when you see one.
It's clear that there has been some thought put into this behind the scenes. The book ends on an ominous note - the aberrant dragonmarks are increasing in both frequency and power, and though they have little in common with each other, they have a troubling tendency to cluster around "common themes" of "cold, fire, fear, death, and the ability to influence the minds of others." Spooky.
But not terribly useful. The book pitches (or at least hints at) a forthcoming War of the Mark, part 2, but it doesn't tell us what's at stake. The aberrant dragonmarks are explicitly called out as different, but does "different" automatically mean "bad?" I'm sure Eberron would not do something quite so obvious, but I'm very curious what non-obvious thing they were thinking of, exactly.
I gotta count that as a flaw in an otherwise unobjectionable book. Consider yourself officially on notice, early 2000s Eberron, you get only six more chances from me!
Ukss Contribution: The Raincallers' Guild. A corporation that sells weather to people is absurdly frightening in a way that really speaks to our current historical moment. The externalities of that business model are wild to contemplate.
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