It's always a magical time when a fantasy rpg settles in and does a dragon-focused supplement. Dragons are pretty much the quintessential monster. They've got a million different interpretations and are baked deep into the universal palette of fantasy imagery. Even a certified vanilla-fantasy hater like myself will take for granted that a magical world will have at least one dragon. (Seriously, I don't even question it as a trope. Dragons are so fundamental that they're the sort of thing you make tropes about). So when the inevitable dragon book finally comes around, it's a bit of a milestone. How a fantasy setting presents dragons will say a lot about its genre expectations, its fictional influences, and (in most cases) the high end of its overall power curve.
Dragons of Eberron (Keith Baker, Scott Fitgerald Gray, Nicolas Logue, Amber Scott) does not disappoint in this regard. Mysteries are revealed. The political machinations of these nigh-immortal beings are laid bare. We finally get to see Eberron from the perspective of those with the clearest idea of what's going on. The true nature of the world has been made apparent . . . and it turns out that I was right all along. This is a setting that is permanently at war with itself.
And I mean that only about a quarter as negatively as it sounds. At some point, you have to stop yearning for a setting's potential and start loving it for what it actually is. And here, two books away from the end of the line, it is finally undeniable that the conflicted seetting, created by the friction between genres, is always what Eberron was meant to be. In the end, its pulp and fin de siecle influences were important, but "if it exists in D&D, it has a place in Eberron" was its guiding star.
Funnily enough, it wasn't actually the brand-synergy-friendly references to the rules and creatures of Frostburn or Sandstorm that convinced me of this. It was actually the willfully varied use of dragons in different antagonist roles. Early on, the book says, with regards to the secret dragon conspiracy to wield the Draconic Prophecy in pursuit of worldly power, "Such discoveries are part of the tone of Eberron - how much of what you take for granted is the result of draconic manipulation?" Then later, in the "Dragons of Xen'drik" chapter, it says "The iconic image of the lone wyrm in a remote mountain cave atop a heaping pile of gold and jewels does not fit the average sophisticated Argonnessen dragon, nor the cosmopolitan draconic movers and shakers of Khorvaire. Xen'drik is where solitary dragons find a home."
And I guess something finally clicked for me. The "if it exists in D&D" part of the game's mission statement wasn't just referring to weird creatures like the Xephs or unusual classes like the Meldshaper, it was also referring to the game's various tones. You've got dragons as these arch immortals, exploring the most refined realms of magical power, engaging with the humanoid peoples on the scale of nations, because the scope of their plans span entire ages and you've got "big lizard is a 15th level encounter that is basically a lootbox for your ECL 14-16 expected character wealth." Those two ideas coexist in the same world, not necessarily as part of a grand design, and certainly not without genre contradictions, but because it is eminently practical for them to do so.
I don't know how I feel about this. I am a fan of vision, and I can respect pragmatism, but when the vision is pragmatic . . . it really seems like someone is trying to get away with something. You want to say something, but you don't want to cut off all the different things you could have said instead, because some of your audience would prefer to hear something different than what you have to say. It's a very "corporate synergy" way of looking at the world.
I'm brought back to the strange (and as far as I know unprecedented and unrepeated) fact that Eberron was the winner of a Wizards of the Coast contest to find the next great D&D campaign setting. And look, if I'm on that panel, I'm seriously considering voting for it. I've read a few campaign settings over the course of the blog and I think it outright beats Dragonlance and Arcana Unearthed, is broader in scope than Council of Wyrms and Mindshadow, and is significantly less niche than Dragonmech and Midnight. But if I'm on that panel and all seven of these are entries (and I have no reason to assume that the contest didn't attract a hundred pitches that were at least Dragonlance-level of quality), then my strategy for the overall line is probably not "we should go all-in on Eberron, give it more than a dozen supplements in an attempt to make it the next Forgotten Realms," but rather "wow, we should do one of these contests every year." Embrace the compartmentalization of fantasy genre preferences and make a book for every taste. Then you could tell Eberron to be more Eberron because we've already got a "if it exists in D&D, it has a place here" setting and it's called Forgotten Realms.
And maybe that's not very business savvy of me. Maybe I'm just repeating the sickness that killed TSR (although I'm somewhat skeptical that "too many campaign settings" was a significant factor in its demise). But think about what crackerjack fantasy worlds we could have gotten if "magictech ww1," "biopunk USSR," "Council of Wyrms-lite," and "your uncle's uncomfortable throwback to 'classic' adventure fantasy" didn't have to coexist in the same world.
Don't get me wrong. There are ways to make it work. And of all the Eberron books I've read so far, Dragons of Eberron comes closest to tying the threads together in a satisfying way, but, well, Sarlona still feels like a separate campaign world, inelegantly grafted onto the rest of the setting. It gets its own chapter and the introduction is literally titled "A Land Apart," ending with the sentence "Sarlona remains a continent isolated from draconic culture and tradition, cut off from the affairs of Argonnessen and the machninations of the Chamber and Conclave alike."
As much as I try to hold in my mind the fact that the Draconic Prophecy plot and the "Quori age of nightmares/age of hope dream realm cycle" plot are both going on in the same world, I just can't do it. I guess there's no law against it or anything, but one world having two cosmic-level apocalyptic setting arcs just feels wrong to me.
"Even if the worst tales of the Dreaming Dark are to be believed, the dragons once laid waste to the whole of Xen'drik and their power shows no signs of having abated in the long centuries since."
Vs
"A few hold that Sarlona is, in fact, absent from the Prophecy - an empty space at its center that terrifies the dragons because they can't comprehend it."
Is this an interesting conflict or is it a backstage meta-discussion about the direction of the setting that snuck its way into the text because the fundamental contradiction is unresolvable?
Argonnessen, by contrast, could fit with Khorvaire, but it doesn't necessarily benefit from doing so. I think the issue with the Dragon Continent is that it got its start as "the Dragon Continent," and has only been given a little bit of room in which to evolve. There's something here. It reveals (I think for the first time) that Argonnessen has a significant non-dragon population. There are two major humanoid cities, plus the dragons' retainers, plus a designated wild-land called "the Vast" where young dragons go to level up on seeded monsters, practice their political manipulation skills on scattered groups of isolated humanoids, and just generally get the wild dragon lifestyle out of their system before they grow up and become mystic sages of the Prophecy (and some dragons never grow out of this stage and decide to just stay forever, becoming a sort of gadfly nuisance in the hides of the age-based republican dragon gerontocracy).
The only thing that really holds Argonnessen back from being its own complete mini-setting is that it never quite forgets that, from its perspective, Khorvaire is "the Humanoid Continent." So there's very little pressure to make the Argonnessen humanoids compelling in their own right. If humanoid society was more of a factor of the continent's politics and culture, not necessarily as a driving factor, but as a confounding factor, something with its own worth and agency that shaped how the dragons interact with each other, it would be its own uncomfortable but fascinating setting. Like Rome, but every Senator has the personal physical power of a main battle tank and the plebians' main natural predator would be their own patrons. Combine that with an era-spanning mysticism among the aristocracy and you've got a recipe for some great dungeonpunk in the shadows of Argonnessen.
But it doesn't quite do that. The closest it gets is the scholarly city of Io'lokar, which is sort of like the Epic Level Handbook's city of Union, but with a bit more thought behind it. As a center of magical scholarship, patronized by immortal sorcerer lizards, magic use is incredibly common ("a lowly clerk . . . might well be a 7th-level expert/8th-level Adept") and the whole thing is an epic-level adventure hub where the accumulated gold of high level characters is basically worthless because they operate on a labor-theory-of-value-based communist system, made possible by potent civic enchantments (residents can effectively cast fly/dimension door at will, the communal greenhouses can manage a full harvest each and every day, etc). Which would be great . . . if adventurers coming and going were a thing that happened, like, at all.
And more to the point, I've never been a proponent of epic fantasy requiring epic characters. I think you have to build those kinds of settings on the assumption there's something to do at every scale. I.e. if the main conflict in the setting is a war between giants, then there should be a whole campaign about isolated villages in the giants' hair forests, defending themselves against giant fleas (by contrast, the natural place for epic characters is in a lower-powered world, becoming the giants that less powerful characters build their lives around). So I guess my overall feeling about Argonnessen is that it's a great level 4-8 campaign that was unceremoniously squashed because one of the things that "exists in D&D" is level 18+ campaigns, and Argonnessen is Eberron's "place for it."
So where does that leave Dragons of Eberron as a whole? Good? Useful? Beautiful? Funny? Frustrating?
Yes.
Yes to all of those descriptors.
Ukss Contribution: It is a tribute to the complex feelings this book inspired that my candidates for Ukss contribution are all over the place. Usually, what I do is write down a potential candidate in my notes, as I'm reading, marking it with a star. Then, when I look back, I compare the various starred entries and I find one obvious frontrunner with multiple also rans. Or there's a strong candidate that would require a bunch of real-world or genre context, so maybe I'll casually mention it but then go with one of my other less-complex, but still very strong stars.
However, this time, I've got a bunch of starred entries that are all equally strong . . . in competing modes of play.
Do I go with the "ageless dragon sage" mode and pick the Sovereign Paths, where dragons bring themselves into harmony with the underlying archetypes of the Sovereign Host (and you know, weirdly, for a goup of deities that don't necessarily exist, they really get around) so as to ascend to godhood after death?
Or do I go with the "epic dragon aristocrats" mode and pick the mile high pillar riddled with carved out dragon lairs, where hundreds of dragons can nest at once?
Or maybe the "dragons as game-playing manipulators" mode and pick the shapeshifted dragon reporter?
It's not an easy choice. So I'm going to swerve. Choose something only tangentially related to dragons. "Famed arcane cartographer Jolian Dan Jessel promised to present the Library of Korranberg with the first true map of Argonnessen. Before the work was completed, Jolian's workshop was burned to the ground, and the gnome himself taken with trap the soul."
There's something very particular here. You've got a powerful indigenous people protecting their security by going absolutely fucking nuclear on a foreign mapmaker working for a colonialist government. That, I think, is an amazingly succint presentation of what Eberron looks like when it's operating at 100 percent.
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