AMA Transcript: June 28th, 2023 (Patreon)

Moving forward, I want to do a live AMA on the Discord server every month for patrons. We had the second one of these the other night, with the topic of Designing Eberron. The IDEA is that these will be recorded and shared, so that even if you can't be a part of the live discussion you can still enjoy the Q&A. However, the FACT is that we had technical trouble and the audio didn't get recorded. 

So, I can't share the Q&A with you. However, a number of attendees did their best to recreate some of the questions and answers here. This is not a perfect reproduction and I don't have time to revise every answer, but it gives you at least the gist of the conversation. Hopefully we'll get these problems ironed out by the next session! So...

What cut or altered aspect of the original Eberron setting submission would you most like to bring back?

I’ve already done it: aquatic civilizations and the planes. The original submission had well-developed civilizations in the Thunder Sea; I finally got to explore these and to expand on the planes in Exploring Eberron.

Were the planes originally meant to be pairs of opposites?

Not exactly. In creating the planes we came up with a list of core concepts that made sense. Some of those things inherently were opposites—life and death, chaos and order. Others evolved more over time. Syrania was very abstract, and I’m the one who later said Shavarath is the Plane of War… Which means Syrania is the Plane of Peace. So in Exploring Eberron I have set them up as sets of opposites, but that wasn’t part of the original design.

There is a particular meme referring to Eberron being an inclusive world, with the tagline "Always has been." Is that a facet that you pushed for and intended or something that developed more organically with the ancestries and peoples of the setting?

I’ve always been interested in exploring identity, and it’s no accident that the ancestries for Eberron all do that in some way. A warforged has to find and forge their own identity. The changeling provides an opportunity to explore the fluidity of identity and the relationship between shape and self. The kalashtar explores the relationship between spirit and body. Beyond that, it was definitely intentional to challenge the traditional depiction of “monsters” and to say that unless their behavior was dictated by magic (IE lycanthropes) intelligent, mortal creatures could always choose their own path—that goblins, orcs, and for that matter, red dragons are no more evil than humans or elves. It was also the case that while there are places in Eberron where we chose to maintain evils we face in our world—colonialism, corporate overreach—because we wanted players to have an opportunity to oppose those things within the world, we didn't want homophobia, sexism, or similar forms of hate and intolerance to be part of the world. 

City of Stormreach seems to be one of the most edgy/dark Eberron splats, maybe even more so than Forge of War. Aside from the kobold bounty, there's the horrors of the Red Ring, slavery in general, the shulassakar paladin hunting yuan-ti kids, the Stormreach equivalent of the Purge, that one really racist guy who hunts shifters for sport, and just general awfulness. Why is this? 

It’s a combination of many factors. Stormreach is supposed to be a pirate hive of scum and villainy—a frontier town where things are generally more dangerous than any city in the Five Nations. Beyond this, Stormreach was always supposed to be a place where we dealt with some of the shitty aspects of colonialism. Eberron is intentionally an imperfect world, and we wanted places in Eberron that echo crappy elements of our life and history… because it’s a world that needs heroes. People have asked why there aren’t labor movements in Eberron, and it’s because I want player characters to start them. The monopolistic power of the dragonmarked houses is intentionally dystopic, but the world won’t solve the problem on its own; I want YOU to face it and deal with it. So with that in mind, Stormreach is supposed to be a city with problems.

Having said that… I wasn’t personally involved with any of the specific things called out here, and some of them I find horrifying. The idea of the kobold bounty—of people being rewarded for casually exterminating sentient creatures—is horrible. With that said, the MMO was already out when we were writing this book and we were tasked to match it where we could, and that bounty might be from the MMO. Beyond that, though: how it typically works is with a book like this, is a number of writers are given certain chapters. Those chapters get written without the writers talking to each other, and those chapters get put into the book, and you can't tell what was written by whom. With that particular book, several of the authors were horror writers, which you can see in the final product. A lot of times a lot of that dark stuff gets written out of the books, but in this case they weren't. I didn't find out about a lot of stuff like the racist shifter-hunter dude until the book came out, just like you.

Could you elaborate on the scrapped syrkarn/karrnath connection?

In my original setting bible there were a lot more nations. Khorvaire had more nations and then, effectively, you had more colonial nations in what’s now Xen’drik. We scaled that down and I’m glad we did, because there’s still so many nations that we’ve never had an opportunity to dig into; imagine if there were twice as many. This is a thing to keep in mind with worldbuilding. More isn’t always better; it’s easier for players to remember and identify with five nations as opposed to twenty five. But in this particular example Syrkarn was an advanced nation that had been particularly skilled with necromancy that had been destroyed long ago. The people of Karrnath traced their roots back to Syrkarrn and the use of undead was calling back to their Syrkarn roots.

In the canonical story, this is largely preserved with the Qabalrin and the Line/Blood of Vol. The Qabalrin are an ancient elf civilization that celebrated necromancy before being destroyed. The Line of Vol built on their recovered techniques, and then the Seekers continued some of the traditions of the Line of Vol. While the name of Syrkarn remained, the connection to Karrnath was dropped.

Do you think the 5e Artificer does a better job of capturing the essence of the class as an Arcane class? Furthermore, if given a second try, should the 3.5e Artificer have been an Arcane spellcasting class?

It’s a challenging thing. The artificer was designed for third edition, and one of the core features of third edition was a very well-defined system for creating magic items; the artificer was designed to interact with that system. Beyond that, one of its core aspects was flexibility. To me, the core elements of the artificer were spell-storing item and armor/weapon enhancement. Spell storing item let you make a one-use wand of ANY spell of up to third level (with a lot of interesting limitations). Lei uses it all the time in my novels. The enhancement infusions let you infuse a piece of equipment with the perfect enchantment. Fighting a dragon? Let’s give everyone dragonbane weapons. It was really about making the perfect magic item for your situation. On the other hand, there were some economic challenges with this, and it also relied heavily on the player’s ability to KNOW the right spell or enchantment; to get the most out of spell storing item, YOU needed to be familiar with every spell list.

So I liked the original artificer just fine. I played an artificer in a number of campaigns, and in my Dreaming Dark novels, everything Lei does could be replicated by an artificer in-game. I really didn’t like the fourth edition conversion of the artificer; it didn’t really keep any of the play experience of the original. Fifth edition is far better than fourth. The Infusions are a light way to gloss over the fact that fifth edition doesn’t go as deep into magic item creation. But it still lacks the flexibility of the original… which is something I tried to bring back in with my Maverick subclass in Exploring Eberron.

When did the Baker's Dozen work its way into development?

It was actually unintentional. It started with the planes and moons—with the idea that the giants destroyed a moon to sever the connection to a plane. So, moons and planes were connected, and there were originally 13 of each but one was lost. When the dragonmarks were developed it seemed logical to echo the number of planes and moons. But that was as far as we originally intended to go with it. But then as we went on, more and more 13-1s appeared (like the Mror clans, etc)... and someone pointed out that 13 was a Baker’s Dozen and we decided to embrace it. But it wasn’t a conscious choice at first.

Are there any Easter eggs or hidden references in the setting that you put in or know where put in by others, places, NPCs etc?

The short answer is yes... Fairhaven Ghallanda, for example, is Eberron's answer to Paris Hilton. There are a ton of them and I’d have to go back through the material from previous editions to find them all, but there’s one that comes to mind I can give you. With the giants we had originally just called them The Giants but as development went on we needed divisions so we developed the Cul’sir, the Sul’at League, and the Group of Eleven; the Group of Eleven stands out from the others and there’s a reason for that. It came from a meeting I had with ten other people at a restaurant and, as it turns out, it’s quite difficult to find seating at a restaurant for a group of eleven. And the server eventually called for "the group of eleven." The phrase just struck with me and when I was creating giant nations I said "How about the Group of Eleven?"

What things do you look back on and ultimately feel like it was either overcooked (given too much focus and ended up being worse for it), or undercooked (really cool idea that didn't get enough room to breathe).

As for undercooked, that one’s easy: the planes. It was a big deal that Eberron had its own unique cosmology instead of just using the Great Wheel. And the planes are supposed to be very important to the setting, because of manifest zones and coterminous periods. And yet, for over a decade all we had to work with were these tiny one-paragraph descriptions. I regularly pushed to get a Planes of Eberron book created, but never got any traction. For me, this was one of the most important aspects of Exploring Eberron — to finally get to add depth to the planes, and to look deeper at their meanings—that Syrania is the plane of Peace, that Risia isn’t just ice but also isolation and stagnation, and so on.

What was the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity offered by adapting Eberron to brand new editions of D&D (4e and/or 5e)?

This has always been challenging as the setting was written with a particular set of mechanics in mind and when those changed some things had to be added, removed, or altered. Making the game accessible to a general audience after 3.5 really demonstrated this need as 4e was drastically different than 3.5. With new editions comes inevitable growing pains and because new editions are published with a “people selling books” standpoint in mind over keeping the integrity of the lore or plot of the setting, some things have to give; this is how you ended up with 4E Dragonmarks being accessible to all ancestries. New races were added and had to be squeezed in, but you can always put new races into Eberron, it’s made that way intentionally so you can add whatever you want, really.

5th edition was fifteen years after the setting was first published and Wizards resolidified that Eberron is distinct from the wider D&D cosmology, it’s not part of the Great Wheel. You can connect it to the rest of the multiverse if you want, but officially it’s its own little microcosm. Throughout the editions we were able to give depth to some of the cultures we’d not been able to in the original material like the Mror Holds and Sol Udar. 5e especially allowed us to lay out the details of rituals and how magewrights do what they do so that players could see how non-player characters and the world at large build and maintain the arcane infrastructure that we see all over Eberron. We were able to put in unique use cases and mechanics for the concept rather than just a sentence or two saying “people do rituals in groups to create large enchantments, build things, etc.”

I find that Eberron as a setting is very inter-connected. Everything has a reason to be there, and each thing has ripple effects, no matter how small, which is something that fascinates me about it. What is your advice for charting out the history of the spots on the map, and how each of those have interacted with each other over the timeline you've been setting up, and making it matter in the big picture of the setting?

When it comes to laying out the details and history of nations, you have to think about how this affects the world as a whole. Everything I put on the map is something I have to be consistent with later, anything new that I’d write about I have to take those interactions into consideration so the setting remains cohesive. This is one reason the maps of Eberron look so empty—because they aren’t supposed to show EVERY TOWN AND VILLAGE. Because there should be HUNDREDS of villages in Breland, but what’s the point of having that many when you couldn’t possibly visit all of them in a game? I don’t WANT to spend all my time as a DM tracking the relationships between a hundred towns. As a result, the key to me is to make sure that for everything I create, I know why it is there and what it adds to a story. Looking to the first point—WHY—why is there a town in this location? Why has it thrived, or is it dying? Knowing why it’s there and why it has succeeded gives you immediate story hooks. This is why in Frontiers of Eberron I’ve moved the road that originally ran from Graywall to Sylbaran thirty miles east and made it the border line between Droaam and Breland. The original line makes no SENSE. Breland doesn’t acknowledge that Droaam exists, so it can’t just be a random line on a map. There needs to be a concrete feature that locals use as a clear guideline—Boranel may argue, but when you go west of the Trade Road, that’s Droaam. And once we have that—a major trade road running north-south through a barren land—that road serves the same role as a river. It’s a source of travelers and commerce. Travelers have needs. And so you will get villages and towns sprouting up along the road. Now I know why they are there—the road—and the next questions are what makes THIS village different from the neighboring village and why I want to tell a story there. So for example, when creating Ardev for Frontiers of Eberron, I decided that they’ve got a giant living there who’s a sort of Paul Bunyan tourist attraction… and that they’ve got Haskal Harrylan’s Empire of Sweets, the only candy store on the frontier!

One of my basic rules of worldbuilding is that I never add something unless I can think of three ways I could use it in a story. Filling up an atlas with places players will never visit just buries the places you’ll actually want to go to. So I’m just saying: when fleshing out a point on the map—like Ardev—think about why that place is where it is and why anyone will want to go there.

What would you like to share about writing Eberron novels?

Writing the novels was a lot like writing the supplements. I would pitch a number of ideas for trilogies, and WotC would choose one and refine it. However, that could change over time. When I pitched the Dreaming Dark trilogy, I originally had the Lord of Blades as a villain in the second book. But when I started WRITING the second book, WotC said “Actually we don’t want you to use the Lord of Blades.” As a result I ended up creating the character of Harmattan, and that ended up being great; I like Harmattan. But he was originally supposed to be the Lord of Blades. This also ties to the cliffhanger ending of the Dreaming Dark trilogy. In my mind the trilogy was like a season of a TV show, and I wanted a cliffhanger at the end to set up the next season. But then when WotC decided they wanted me to pitch a NEW series, that cliffhanger never got resolved. I love the Thorn of Breland books, but if I’d realized there wasn’t going to be be another trilogy with the Dreaming Dark characters, I’d definitely have had a more concrete ending.

What are some of your favorite questions people ask… and what are the most difficult?

I get so many great questions, but sometimes the ones you’d think would be easy are the hardest to answer. For example, someone asked How do the people of the Five Nations prepare their potatoes. I could just make up something completely silly and random, but I take all this very serious. And the problem is that I’m not a cook and know nothing about all the possible ways to prepare potatoes. So before I answer this, I need to take some time to research potatoes, so I can learn about all the possible ways to prepare them and then adapt that to Eberron. This ties to the infamous Thrane tradition of half-cooking potatoes. This is an actual historical tradition—potatoes with the moon—used by cultures where hard-working, poor farmers need to get an ongoing carb boost throughout a long day. A more recent example involved the Wines of Eberron. What’s wine culture like in Eberron? I don’t know anything about wine in OUR world, so I don’t know how to adapt it logically into Eberron and I don’t have time to research. I did give some suggestions, calling out that I’d expect manifest zones to play a vital role—Fernian wine might be like a permanently mulled wine—but I kept it small because I don’t know a lot about the subject and I don’t want to disappoint people with that lack of knowledge.

An important aspect of this is that my sense is that usually, the person asking the question already knows a lot about the subject and is likely better qualified to answer it than I am. And this ties to the point that when you’re worldbuilding in your home game, you don’t have to do it alone. On the Discord server, Rugga has a deep knowledge of fashion and the history of textiles. If I had Rugga as a player at my table and a question involving fashion in Eberron came up, the first thing I’d do is say “Rugga, how do you think this would manifest in Eberron?” One of the coolest things about TTRPGs is that they are collaborative; the DM doesn’t have to do it alone!

When creating a setting, how did you approach making it so open ended for dms to decide the way they want to run the world in terms? How do you keep that balance so that not too much is revealed but enough is put down to still catch readers’ eyes?

I've always created my own worlds. I've never used any of the other official settings. But I'd still often read adventures or setting books to look for interesting ideas—for inspiration. Beyond that, the first TTRPG I wrote for was a system called Over The Edge. It's a modern day setting driven by deep mysteries and conspiracies, but with the major questions it provided the GM with multiple answers rather than one absolute. I thought this was brilliant, because even though I GM'd Over The Edge and wrote for it, I could play in another GM's campaign and not know anything, because I didn't know what answers they'd chosen. 

With Eberron, I carried that forward. I laid out all the lore and hooks in such a way that players could cherry pick things they liked and leave out the things they didn’t to fit their needs. I want it to be the case that if you’ve read every book, every novel, even if you’re me, there’s a chance that I don’t know what caused the Mourning in your world. That way, when I play in your campaign, I can have the full experience, the full mystery, of figuring out your Eberron because your Eberron is completely different from every other Eberron.

And you’re right, it is a fine line to walk. If all you give are questions, then players don’t have a solid foundation on which to build a story; even if they do make things up, if there’s not enough to grab on to, then you’re basically making your own setting. But if you make it concrete, then people can’t be creative because they feel too constrained by the world. If there’s an answer to everything then why play the game a second time? There’s no point in heavily changing a setting, it becomes unrecognizable and at that point you might as well build your own- which is good, but I wanted players to be able to do that within the foundations of Eberron.

How we do this is to use specific details, first pick a few big things that we don’t answer: don’t reveal the cause of the Mourning, don’t give away the powers of the Mark of Death, etc. Find the line to give a partial answer but also leave things open to interpretation and creation. Write just enough to build upon, but not too much, so that every iteration is unique.

So when I was working on Eberron I wanted to use this same approach. The key is that I wanted the setting to inspire people, but still leave them room to make it their own. The first key piece was just to tell people that, over and over and over. It's your Eberron. The second was to leave key points like the cause of the Mourning where there are suggestions but no absolute answers. But it's also something I like to do on a smaller scale. A key example is in the City of Stormreach sourcebook, there are five Coin Lords. I provide you with a list of six secrets about the Coin Lords. One's a Seeker. One's a rakshasa. One's working for the Dreaming Dark. But I don't tell you which is which—that's up to the DM, who also decides which secret to throw out. So when I play in your Stormreach, I don't know which Coin Lord is a rakshasa -- or if that is in fact the secret you threw out! Now here again, the DM could also definitely just make up their own secrets, but the point is that they don't HAVE to. I give them all the answers I need -- but I also give them a way to immediate make it their own unique story.  

For example, in Stormreach there are five coin lords. So we said “Here’s five dudes and six secrets, and you get to decide which secret goes to which coin lord, and which isn’t used at all.” This gives the GM concrete answers to use but when I show up and play in your game, I don’t know which secrets you picked for which coin lord- or you can even make your own! We give out suggested answers in the books because not all GMs want to make their own, or have time to prepare to that level of detail, but still get to have a unique experience regardless of their situation.

We want to give people ideas with the base setting, lay the groundwork, but encourage them to build upon it and make the world their own.

That's it! Thanks to everyone who took part and next month we'll try to have the recording work. But beyond that, thank you all for your support. There's still a lot going on in my life and your support directly determines how much time I can spend in Eberron. Thank you for making this possible.