The Forge of War (James Wyatt, Wolfgang Baur, Ari Marmell) is one of those books where it feels like the authors must have had an absolute blast writing it, to the point that you think maybe the only reason it exists at all is because a bunch of friends were goofing around and decided that if they were going to come up with a bunch of superfluous setting lore, they might as well gather it up and put it in a book.
And I know this sounds real speculative of me, because The Forge of War isn't particularly silly or goofy, but how else do you explain passages like this:
"Cyre brough forth three major bodies of troops. 2,000 elf mercenaries. 1,500 dragoons and more than 4,000 light footmen, all of which arrive by lightning rail at Starilaskur. Brelish troops amounted to 2,000 heavy horse, 500 dragoons, 1,400 light archers and 1,200 foot of the Starilaskur garrison, and 400 mercenary crossbowmen. They were backed by the First Metrol Wands, an elite spellcasting unit. In total, Cyre and Breland mustered more than 14,000 troops."
The only reason you write a passage like that, and definitely the only reason you think someone would want to read a passage like that, is because you are absolutely tickled pink at the thought of your silly 19th-century-inspired fantasy world having its own dry, dispassionate tome of military history, inspired by the 19th century's own peculiar brand of military science wool gathering.
Am I stating this as a negative? Yeah, kind of. I'm glad everyone was having fun and all, but sometimes the book was difficult to read. I just don't like that style of talking about war. It strikes me as missing the forest for the trees. Eliding the horror of the event with a focus on details. I want my fantasy WWI scholarship to be less Clausewitz and more Hemmingway. That being said, I do respect the choice. The voice of the history recap chapter was driven by a vision and I love it when an rpg has vision. For all my disgust with the genre, it is undeniably the exact sort of book the scholars of the five nations would write so I guess I'm just complaining about the presence of roleplaying in a roleplaying book. (Which is not unprecedented. I spent a significant portion of my time with Earthdawn complaining about the same thing).
I did mostly enjoy Chapter 2, though. That was not a history-book-style narrative, but rather a series of encyclopedia-style essays about various Last War-related topics. Some of the entries, namely the ones about national armies or mercenaries, were bogged down by tedious number-listing, but we do learn some interesting tidbits about the Last War.
Like the fact that the various nations got so tired of House Jorasco's monopoly on healing that they "attempted to train cleric devoted not to a deity, but to the philosophies of nationalism and patriotism. This would, ostensibly, have granted them the power to heal as capably as clerics of other philosophies, without splitting their loyalties."
This is a fascinating bit of lore because it's terrible worldbuilding for the genre Eberron pretends it is, but amazing worldbuilding for the genre Eberron pretends it's not.
Like, for "traditional" medieval fantasy with magic item reminiscent of 19th century technology, the idea that "cleric spells don't come from a god, they come from a deeply held personal philosophy" is purely a game mechanic. We, the players in the real-world 21st century are the audience for that information, because we need a justification for corrupt clerics who nonetheless keep their spellcasting abilities. Or at the very least, clerics who can cast spells without the broader setting declaring one particular set of beliefs to be "correct." In setting, people are going to be operating on the theory that divine spellcasting comes from the gods, and they're going to have plenty of evidence to back that up because most of their known divine spellcasters attribute their magic to the gods.
To come up with a plan to substitute nationalism for theism, the characters in the setting have to have some way of inferring the rules of the game. Someone would have had to done a comprehensive survey of spellcasters, with a definitive way of distinguishing arcane from divine magic (remember - bards get the "cure wounds" spells too), found and documented "clerics of a philosophy," and then disseminated that information widely enough that researchers in the employ of nation states could come up with "let's indoctrinate some rando until they believe hard enough to work miracles" as a plausible plan. And that suggests an infrastructure of organized scholarship. But more than that, it suggests the presence of a very un-medieval-fantasy point of view - reductionist empiricism. "The thing all these divine magic users have in common is a set of very strong beliefs . . . so let's reverse the process and give someone very strong beliefs in order to access divine magic." That's like materialist materialist. Beyond even atheism into outright nihilism.
In other words, right at home in a fin de siecle story about how modern war spells the death of innocence and traditional values give way to a rootless scientism. Which makes it all the weirder when Eberron tries to give us knights and castles. Or more specifically, when they try to single out Karrnath as some sort of unique "necromancer kingdom" instead of zeroing in on what's really interesting about their use of undead armies. The story here is the existence of military necromancy and it's about the state's objectification of the individual. Sorry, Tommy, they gave you a white feather and shamed you into joining the corps, but when you gave them everything, that wasn't enough. You'll never rest so long as they have use for your bones.
So I'm of the opinion that fantasy, as a genre, is not connected to a specific technological milieu. You could, in fact, set a fairy tale in a modern city, with cell phones and internet and streetlights and still find a way to make it work. And a corollary to that is that is that you can also tell non-fantasy stories in a "fantasy-type" world. Okay, you don't want guns or artillery in the world of Eberron because the rules and brand identity of D&D are tied up with its medieval pastiche. Fine. That should not stop you from telling a WWI story. But you should understand the role guns and artillery play in WWI stories and realize necromancy is guns.
Although I don't want to present myself as uniquely insightful for noticing this. I'm certain "military necromancy as a shocking transformation in the nature of warfare, sufficient to cause generational trauma on the continent of Khorvaire" was a fully intentional part of the design of Eberron. Likewise, the warforged are also guns, and the slaughterstone eviscerator is a tank, and the airships are planes. It's not a difficult code to crack. I just think maybe the game is chickening out on its themes a bit, avoiding modernism's homogenizing effect on weapons and tactics, in service of giving its fantasy kingdoms their own "hooks."
Necromancy is held back from being guns so that Karrnath can be the "necromancer kingdom," the various nations need hypothetical clerics of nationalism instead of just hypocrites of the Nine because Thrane is the "paladin kingdom," and then Breland doesn't get its own military thing because it's the "vaguely republican" kingdom. Aundair gets to be the "wizard kingdom," because we're not meant to poke too hard at what all this means, and Cyre gets the "oh, we definitely had our own thing, but it's not important now because we were destroyed" thing . . . for obvious reasons. But, of course, they should all have had undead armies and clerics of questionable piety and republican agitators and (obviously, obviously) wizards because all those things are part and parcel of technomagical modernism.
Also, trains are like, super important. The book talks about how House Orien took a beating during the Last War because the lightning rail was constantly getting sabotage, but it fails to talk about how the lightning rail was such a vital piece of military infrastructure, and such decisive advantage to the nations with the most robust networks, that it would have constantly been rebuilt at the governments' expense. That is, unfortunately, a genuine plothole. I don't think any state would tolerate this important bit of infrastructure being under the control of a "neutral" non-state actor. If I'm literally any government in the history of governments, I'm nationalizing the rails the first time House Orien transports enemy troops to my borders.
And while we're at it, I don't entirely believe that House Kundarak would have lost half its wealth financing the Last War. Those debts would undoubtedly still be on the books, and continually serviced, just as a matter of national security. (Unlike the railways, it is very difficult to nationalize a bank whose headquarters are outside your borders, and almost impossible to do it in a way that will encourage them to keep lending you money afterwards). I'd be very interested in learning how those loans were structured. . .
OMG! I was wrong about preferring Hemmingway to Clausewitz! What I really wanted was Lenin!
Nooo!!!
Anyway, the last chapter of the book is also, in its own way, very strange. It starts off talking about historical games, which is a sensible use of the material, moves on to talking about flashback games (where you play two sets of characters, one in the Last War and one in the modern day, in parallel stories), which is maybe less sensible but makes up for it by being admirably ambitious.
And then, to wrap up, it talks about time travel! The book suggests you can use this historical information to tell stories where the party goes back in time!
Time travel isn't even close to a standard D&D campaign model. They actually had to suggest the (so-far unprecedented) existence of epic-tier spells and magical items to facilitate it. I don't have much to say about it as DM advice (I think they did a pretty good job at pointing out all the obvious failure points), but I couldn't let it pass without commenting on it. The Forge of War presents itself as a serious, even somber book, but it is fucking wacky.
Ukss Contribution: Filthy leftist that I am, my favorite detail of the book was the revelation that wealthy families could avoid conscription by paying for the construction of a warforged to go in their stead. That is the plot of an absolutely amazing sci-fi novel and I kind of want to make it the backstory of my next D&D character.
The only issue I have is that the current version of Ukss has no place where this plot would make sense. . .
You know what, fuck it. I like this so much I'll make a place for it to happen.
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