Now, there are two things I want to make clear. First, I don't think it's any special insight on my part to notice that Stormreach is Lankhmar. There are essentially two types of people in this world - those who can recognize the debt Stormreach owes to Lankhmar and those who have not yet heard of Lankhamar.
And the more important, second thing to get absolutely straight - my saying that Stormreach is Lankhmar is in no way meant to diminish or minimize Stormreach. Complaining about a fantasy city being Lankhmar is like complaining that a renaissance painting is just the Pieta or the Holy Family.
But it does put me in a terrible spot as a critic, because "Fantasy city X is clearly inspired by Lankhmar" barely counts as an observation, but it does basically sum up my feelings about the book. It's a corrupt, virtually lawless city, with magical secrets and dangerous gangs/militias that blur the lines between criminal power and civic authority. It's pretty much the perfect place to have sword and sorcery-style pulp fantasy adventures in an urban setting. That's why every fantasy rpg takes a crack at it sooner or later, often multiple times. What am I even supposed to say? Yeah, it's great. If you're at all interested in playing an Eberron campaign, you're going to want this book.
So maybe I spend my time trying to develop some sort of Universal Lankhmar Scorecard that I can apply to Stormreach and Nexus and Kratas and Sigil and Ankh Morpork and all the rest. How engaging are the thieves' guilds? How corrupt and decadent are the magic users? How spooky and irreverent is the Temple District? Are the street names anywhere near as inspired as "Cash Street" or "Cutthroat Alley?"
It's a fun idea, though I think I'd have to make it an Actual Project if I didn't want the whole thing to come off as insultingly reductive. For now, I think I'll have to take a more intuitive approach.
My gut reaction is that Stormreach is probably a B+ Lankhmar. It's got some of the horror edge - buried under the city is a slumbering demon, sealed away by ancient sorcery but recently disturbed by the reckless, greedy delving of House Kundarak. It's got some of the humor. The local gladiatorial games, despite being a terrible atrocity, even by the standards of the genre, are governed by the Blood Council, who hold an annual gala event known as The Feast of Blood. Also, the powerful and mysterious sorcerer who inexplicably maintains a loot-and-monster-filled dungeon underneath the city streets is a kobold, so that's fun. And the criminal gangs are high-concept enough to be memorable, at least - The Bilge Rats, who are governed by wererats and keep dire rats as pets; the Hollow Shards, who forge everything from relics to maps, for both profit and sport; the Golden Lions, who are just bored rich kids playing around; the Shrouds, who are child pickpockets led by the century-old ghost of a child.
There's an endless amount of incredibly seedy adventures, in other words. My main complaint would be that the parts of Stormreach that are most distinctly Eberron tend to tread dangerously close to Eberron's worst quality - its barely deniable laundering of the colonialist tropes of late 19th/early 20th century adventure fiction. Two things we know about the Wayfinder Foundation: it makes the bulk of its money guiding ecologically devastating safaris and artifact-looting "research expeditions," and its members regularly reenact the plot of Heart of Darkness.
That unpleasantness aside, City of Stormreach was a pretty solid fantasy book. I really liked the feathered yuan-ti (not the first time they showed up, but maybe the first time they got playable rules) and the two full pages devoted to the Stormreach art scene. More stuff worthy of comment:
The mysterious Xen'drik precursor to the modern warforged, built by the ancient quori were referred to as "quorforged" which is a delightful portmanteau that feels like it somehow escaped containment from an internet message board.
The silliest thing in the book is the suggestion that you could blackmail a "philanderer" because he "lets his scruples fall by the wayside" at the Feast of Blood. It boggles the mind just to think about it. Whoa! That guy is cheating on his wife! At the event that celebrates kidnapping people and forcing them to fight to the death! Whatever happened to his scruples? Surely it will ruin his life if this blatant immorality was ever revealed.
The book takes a step backwards with regards to alignment by telling us that becoming a wererat automatically shifts your alignment to Neutral Evil and that all of Xen'drik's yuan-ti "truly seem to be evil by nature." It's just disappointing.
Gnomes continue to be used oddly. There's one here who is a champion arm-wrestler whose body is . . . notably described. The idea that Wizards of the Coast was deliberately trying to make gnomes fuckable is seeming less and less like a conspiracy theory with each passing day.
Overall, I'd say I enjoyed City of Stormreach, but as we near the end of the line, I can't help but feel like it was a little too mainline D&D for the setting's penultimate outing. Eberron is at its best when it's offering something you can't get anywhere else, and frankly, you can get a halfway decent Lankhmar almost anywhere.
Ukss Contribution: There was a lot of interesting stuff in this book, but nothing that I found more interesting than the setting's elevator pitch - a human city built inside the ruins of a giant city. Just the coming together of these two incompatible scales, where the new inhabitants have to build scaffolds and rigging just to climb a giant staircase or bridges to cross a giant storm drain . . . it's a really effective fantasy image. I'll probably play it up significantly more than the book did, though.
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