[OSSR]Races of Eberron

[Ancient History]

OSSR: D&D: 3.5: Supplement

Eberron: Races of Eberron: Colons



It Breeds True!

The first is this book, with a cover like it was part of the “Races of” series of generic D&D supplements, and the second is the same book with a cover like it was an Eberron expansion. WotC tried it both ways to see which would sell better, but it's such a niche product regardless that I'm not sure they got any meaningful feedback out of the deal. I can't think of another Eberron book that they did that with, so I'm guessing it didn't work out.

AncientH:

Yeah, when it came time for "Races of Faerun" they stuck with the Forgotten Realms art.



For those of you who don't remember, at one point in their ongoing splatsploitation of D&D3.5, Wizards of the Coast decided to go from releasing a series of class books (the Complete series) to a series of race books. By itself this isn't a completely terrible idea, since race and class are two of the primary choices in character generation, and more and different options aren't inherently bad, nor is fleshing out existing options with a bit more fluff. But grouping races was done primarily by some ineffable quality (seriously, "Races of Destiny?" WTF?), and in this case they decided to go by "setting." So this book is, as the title says, a book about the PC races in Eberron. Some of them, anyway. The new ones, mostly.

FrankT:

Such that Eberron can be said to have a point at all, it is to provide people with character concepts that they want while rocking the D&D boat as little as possible. So you can play a steam punk archaeologist, but there's no industry in the world and you do all your artificing yourself. This means that everything around you including the other player characters is still the peasants and knights and wizards and shit familiar to D&D territory, it's just that you personally run around with a big wrench and some goggles and fight with a tesla coil or something.

This attempt to not rock the boat extends not only to theme but also to mechanics. And one of the big obstacles in the road between people playing character concepts they want and the way 3.5 D&D handled things is the fact that the monsters as players rules are comically terrible. You pay a huge amount of actual character levels to get monster abilities, and that means you can't even do it in low level games (because you have no levels to spend), and it's horribly weak in high level games (where you're losing the higher and more powerful levels to pay for these generally non-scaling monster powers). It didn't help that the official manner to calculate these costs was literally created with the explicit purpose of screwing players who wanted to use them. The designers have admitted that, it's part of the public record. Eberron's “solution” to that was to simply create new monster races that were much, much weaker than the real thing and tell players that they could play those instead. So the monsters in the Monster Manual are left in an unplayable state, but there are completely new humanoid races that are thematically similar to some of those monsters which are as playable as Halflings and Elves.


Their choice of monsters to give this treatment to is so random that I assume it had to have been based on a list of requests that Keith Baker happened to get in his home game.

So rather than attempt to fix 3.5's well known problems, they attempted to create content bloat to work around it. Eberron was turned into an official setting after winning a “submit a setting” contest that WotC inexplicably claims they didn't realize would get lots and lots of entrants. There has always been a bit of a suspicion that the selection criteria for Keith Baker winning it was “alphabetical” or “picked out of a hat” or “had the most colorful folder” or something equally random. Because let's face it: the setting really isn't that good or that interesting. But considering that the setting also told the D&D writers who were working on 4th edition at the time exactly what they wanted to hear: that they didn't have to fix anything and could solve all player complaints with content bloat and cater to all genres with content bloat... it's entirely possible that it did get a fair shake and won on its “merits.”

The “races” of Eberron are basically a shitty game mechanical kludge. They were written up in the first place because actually fixing broken rules and providing a playable experience for people who want to play monsters is “hard” while reskinning a Dwarf variant as being “kind of like a Werewolf” is easy. But they are central to the pitch of Eberron. And this book was the showcase of exactly how much could be solved with content bloat rather than challenging failed design paradigms. Spoiler alert: not much. Second spoiler alert: three years later they made 4th edition D&D anyway.

AncientH:

The essential idea behind Eberron was not new; TSR had put out a half-dozen or more settings for D&D, including the Forgotten Realms, Mystara, Al Quadim (later absorbed by FR), Oriental Adventures (later absorbed by FR, then replaced by Rokugan), Greyhawk, Ravenloft, Red Steel, Dark Sun, Spelljammer (which connected several of them), and Planescape (which theoretically connected all of them)... Now, some of these settings (Al Quadim, Oriental Adventures, Maztica) were supposed to be specific fantasy locales, to appeal to that type of roleplaying, and some of these (Ravenloft, Red Steel, Dark Sun) were supposed to be specific fantasy genres (gothic, swashbuckling, post-apocalyptic, respectively), and some were kitchen sinks...but the point of all these different settings was always, at least initially, to extend the area of play.

Eberron was no different, in that respect. It was simply one more refluffing, making the old stuff new again. Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and the Forgotten Realms all have drow, for example, but the fluff for each given setting for what a drow does and how it operates is different, even if mechanically it's the same spider-lovin' dark elf. If the fluff is too far apart, you start to get new mechanics...as we see with the scorpion-lovin' aborigine drow in Eberron.


In the words of the great Chris Rock...before he started starring in really shitty films.

FrankT:

In addition to Keith Baker (the contest winner and front man for the setting), this book is written by Jesse Decker, Mathew Sernett, and Gwendolyn Kestrel. These people were WotC's B or C team. Probably C team to be honest. Mathew Sernett last got mentioned as one of the hacks brought in to shit out Tome of Magic, while Gwendolyn Kestrel is best known for her creation of the Book of Erotic Fantasy. Jesse Decker is a bit more complicated he appears to be a corporate “yes man” who tells people what they want to hear, thereby keeping his job at WotC.

In this case, there’s a right answer. Longstrider is a very powerful spell, solely because of its duration.

When Jesse Decker elects to say things to the public at all, it's weird crazy corporate speak like this.

The assumption is that the shit he says inside the company is basically just as vapid. And from all evidence, that appears to be true. Here's a piece from Rob Heinsoo on working with Jesse Decker:

At moments like that, Jesse Decker usually said some-thing like, “You’re right. Think smarter.” He could afford to say things like that because his day job was leading the D&D development team while he was slumming in our designer world. That unfortunately explained why Jesse ended up too busy helping run the department to contribute a lot of design work outside meetings. Inside meetings, he had a knack for keeping us loose while criticizing ideas we thought were okay. Then we realized we could do better. 

Jesse’s other big contribution was mentoring Andy Collins, who functioned in a lead-developer-style role during much of the Flywheel phase. When I did new design work systems like death and dying and healing, Andy worked with me to get it right. Andy worked tirelessly to either get everything right or understand all the angles on each problem. Andy was consciously setting himself up to run development during the game’s final phases. 


So the final tally is: one promoted fan-boy, one mercenary content producer, one crazy person, and one empty suit who regurgitates the company line on demand in order to continue holding his job. Not exactly a team you'd put together by choice if you thought this product had to be any good.

AncientH:

The problem, as Frank mentions, is that the mechanics never supported the fluff they tried to write, and the fluff never really supported the mechanics. For all that Eberron was advertised as a magicpunk setting, where dragonshards and dragonmarks had led to a sort of magic-fueled industrial revolution...the mechanics never supported that. I mean, when Urza and Mishra dug artifacts out of the ground, learned to control them, and then learned to build or summon new ones, that laid a lot of good groundwork, because they learned how to reproduce these machines on a big enough scale for an ongoing war. But in Eberron, everything about D&D magic item creation applies (yes, even with artifice) - so every single magic item costs XP. And XP is in limited supply. And none of the elemental binding or dragonshard shit did anything to the XP cost, or do anything better than regular spells would do. So you don't actually have the magical item assembly lines you pretty much need to have for a manapunk campaign, and they never even tried to make the economy make any sense either, since magic items are still rare enough in Eberron to be stupid expensive.

Eberron is basically the 90s-era Image comics of D&D 3.5. All weird artwork and ooh-wow 1st issues and no substance underneath.


I honestly start blanking on Image titles after a while. They all run together. Just like shitty Eberron books!

FrankT:

One thing that is really quite striking when holding this book is how formulaic it all is. It's literally exactly the same number of pages as Races of the Wild (and some of the people who were “additional design” on that book are the writers of this book). And the chapters have the same headings. Races of Destiny is also fundamentally the same book in terms of length and structure. This book was designed by starting up the Races of Foo proforma and then filling the boxes with text until they got to the end. You could make a computer program that created these books by the hundreds. You could then have an intern comb the outputs for the best collection of races to pimp each month and put out one of these every month. Or you could crowd source it and have fans submit text blocks into the proforma and fill out dozens of these “books.”


Step one: choose the noun for your title to come after the words “Races of”

WotC never got quite that organized. While all the books in the series are shovelware productions made of filling in blanks with hacktext until the proper pagecount is achieved, there are only a handful of books in the series. It's totally optional whether you want to include Races of Faerun as the first book (on the grounds that it has the same number of pages) or not (on the grounds that the format wasn't quite nailed down until Races of Stone). But regardless, we never got a Races of book for Goblinoids or Githyanki.

What's really noticeable of course is that this format is absolutely shit. As Ronald Reagan said “If you're explaining, you're losing.” A racial overview only needs to be 500 words, and anything more you say about them needs to be expanding upon what is interesting about them. And not, for example, repeating the same headings over and over again even when you have nothing interesting to say.

Introduction


Considering that this is the real selling point of the book, I'm surprised none of these assholes got on the cover. It would be like if a book on “Basketball Teams of the 90s” showed representative players from the Golden State Warriors and the Toronto Raptors but not the Chicago Bulls.

AncientH:

What is a Race of Eberron?

I hate whoever wrote this. The little English nerd inside me is screaming. I guess you could rephrase it to say "Who are the races of Eberron?" or "What are the races of Eberron?" or "Why am I supposed to buy this book?" but...what is a. You might as well ask what is a race, full stop. What is a race in the context of D&D? Why do we have races? What is it about Eberron, that we have to talk about them.

Okay, getting out of that headspace...when Shadowrun introduced metahumans, and presented them as "races," they were actually breaking some of the established fantasy work laid down by Tolkien. The thing is that they did not automatically give "elves" and "orks" and shit their own culture; those "races" were derived directly from humans, and pretty much shared human cultures - there were African-American orks and Japanese elves and Seventh Adventist dwarfs and Scientologist trolls and what-have-you. The fantasy cultures being pimped for elves in Tir Tairngire and whatnot was explicitly suspect, because all of these subspecies had cropped up well within living memory; there just wasn't time for elves and shit to create their own culture.

This is important because for D&D, drawing as it did on Tolkien and early planetary fantasy like Edgar Rice Burroughs, when the world was a fuckload more racist than it is today, had zero problems with just assigning culture genetically. It defined races easily, at the drop of a hat, to the point that you could have umpteen different elf subraces with distinct mechanics and fluff...and the distinctions were in pretty much every case completely arbitrary, and even pretty damn silly. Hell, in Conan d20, each human "race" got its own race writeup, and they almost tried to do the same shit in Forgotten Realms.


Remember, according to Tolkien, the dark elves were gnomes.

And the thing is - when Tolkien was writing, when Edgar Rice Burroughs was writing, there were scientific theories out there that split humanity into different "Races" - Mongoloids, Caucasoids, Negroids, etc. - and if you go far enough down that particular rabbit hole, shit gets strange. People in the 1800s actually argued that people in New Guinea evolved from orangutans and black Africans from gorillas.


That's racialist.

By the 1980s, we knew better. (Well, by the 1950s Tolkien should have known better, but fuck it.) So the fact that we're still dealing with "races" in fantasy gaming today is very weird, especially when a bunch of those races can interbreed and probably basically qualify as the same species. Or at least ring species, with humans in the middle of the spectrum between elves and orcs.

FrankT:

The introduction is only 1 page. It has very tiny pieces on: “Introduction,” “What is a Race of Eberron,” “What's in this Book?” and “What you need to play.” Notably absent is any hint of giving the explanation for what these races are for. There are four “new” races in Eberron, and each one of them is a core race that has been reskinned into being thematically similar to a monster but having special powers weak enough that they can plausibly be played as 1st level characters. There are four of them and the monsters thematically copied are: Golem, Werewolf, Doppelganger, and Githyanki. That's... a pretty weird list. It's a list so weird that as I mentioned earlier I am almost positive that it came anecdotally from the monsters that Keith Baker's players happened to want to play over the course of a couple of games in 2001. Any kind of polling or market research would have put Vampires, Tieflings, and Lizardfolk on the list (even 4e got that question right), but with the very small sample sizes that actual games generate, I am willing to accept that those are the ones Keith Baker actually got requests for in meat space from his friends.


Anecdotal input from individual D&D games is weird and useless even by the standards of atypical anecdotes.

But while that could have been a thing they used to build off of, instead they just... didn't. The four races that had Eberron writeups each get chapters, the other basic D&D races get a chapter between them, and that's that. There's no attempt to generalize this race building strategy to let people play characters skinned like Vampires or Gnolls or Demons. The Races of Eberron were procedurally created to begin with, and rather than continue doing that or showing the players how to do it themselves, this book is dedicated to producing shovelware that's supposed to convince you that each of the four sample races is actually totally important and worth talking about.


Races of Eberron gives you four starters to choose from.

Now you might ask yourself how it's supposed to convince people that these races are worth talking about to provide a chapter about them in paint-by-numbers shovelware format. That is a pretty good line of inquiry to go down. This book came out at about the same time as nWoD's Lancea Sanctum book – a paint-by-numbers book about how you were supposed to care about one of the five nWoD vampire organizations that exists because they needed a fifth one. And it has pretty much the same problem: it's very hard to make a case that the reader is supposed to care about the content when the writers so blatantly do not. In both cases the creators of the book just opened up the format and cranked away at the procedural text generation procedure until the book was deemed “full” and then stopped.

AncientH:

Part of the problem in both cases is that the writers had little investment in the setting, and part of it is that D&D books were specifically being designed at this point with lots of mechanical options to draw in players. Put it another way, compare this to the equivalent Earthdawn book(s):



These books are given over almost entirely to fluff. There's very little mechanics involved, it's almost all worldbuildings - legends, stories, life-cycle, language. The point of Denizens of Barsaive was to develop the major nation-groups of Earthdawn, whereas the point of Races of Eberron was to sell you a pile of feats you were never going to use. Even the Master Race's Handbook, which was hamstrung trying to gel the different takes on elves from three or more different settings, at least gave some lip service to what it meant to be an elf from a cultural perspective. It wasn't prepackaged character options with the trappings of race as a discardable wrapper.

FrankT:

I've got the version of the book with a “Races of...” cover rather than an Eberron cover. Part of the introduction has this little bit:

Why is Races of Eberron a core D&D supplement and not an Eberron-specific book?

The answer to this rhetorical question is apparently that if you wanted to put Changelings and Kalashtar into a non-Eberron setting campaign you could totally do that. But there's also a version of this book which is covered like an Eberron-specific book. I genuinely don't know if the alternate version has a different introduction. I suspect that it does not.

The first four chapters are 64 pages between them and are Warforged, Shifters, Changelings, and Kalashtar in that order. Chapter 5 is 32 pages and is “other races” (Dwarves, Elves, Gnomes, Goblins, Orcs, in that order because the alphabet). The remaining 89 pages of the book are various power creep options spread among 3 chapters. We're going to handle this book in four or five chunks: first we'll do the Warforged & Shifters, then
we'll do the Changelings and Kalashtar, then we'll do the “other races,” and finally we'll tackle the crunch chapters in one or two posts.

One thing that does leap out at me is how these people didn't actually understand the format they were working in. The races described come in the order of “most popular to least popular,” which is the order they happened to show up in for both Races of Stone and Races of the Wild. But that was a coincidence. The races in those books are presented in alphabetical order. It's just that from a popularity standpoint Dwarves > Gnomes > Goliaths and Elves > Halflings > Raptorans.


Xvarts are less popular than other races and come last in most alphabetical listings. But Aarakocra come first in most schemes and aren't a whole lot more popular.

AncientH:

One thing you have to get used to in this book is that they continually use the same adjectives to describe the races - kalashtar are "insightful" and "thoughtful," shifters are "feral," etc. Whenever you see this, try to replace it with the name of an ethnic group or nation.


"Chapter 3 delves into the difficulties of Jewish life, highlighting the ways
in which they deal with the distrust that others often show them. Jews deal with their abilities and the mistrust they engender in remarkably diverse ways, and this chapter provides detailed advice on the ways that Jews express their abilities."

Ugh. Okay, now let's try replacing the Warforged with Scots!

This chapter goes beyond the Scots description in Chapter 2 of the EBERRON Campaign Setting, detailing Scottish psychology, with its emphasis on the strange mindset that these living constructs have, the limitations inherent in their recent creation, and many of their traditions and abilities. This chapter also discusses how to act and talk like a Scot and describes what it’s like to spend time immersed in Scottish culture.

Not really any better!

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I want to play a Scottish Warforged now...

[Blicero]

There are four “new” races in Eberron, and each one of them is a core race that has been reskinned into being thematically similar to a monster but having special powers weak enough that they can plausibly be played as 1st level characters. There are four of them and the monsters thematically copied are: Golem, Werewolf, Doppelganger, and Githyanki.

Do you have any evidence that kalashtar were conceived as being to githyanki as warforged are to golems? That's the first time I've ever heard that claim. Do they really have anything in common other than psionics?

[Orion]

Psionics, otherplanar origin (from a plane shaped by thought/dreams), and eternal war with another race of shared origin. It never occurred to me until Frank pointed it out, but that's because the gith used to be a big deal in editions I didn't play.

[Koumei]

The "Chop a monster down until it's a playable race" method isn't automatically bad, it worked a treat for Disgaeagame. Sure, you do need to either replace the existing monster or make it a separate creature entirely. Otherwise people in-setting ask why all of the unfriendly Balors are over 10' tall, automatically have magic weapons, are wreathed in flames and can kill you to death until you fatally die from it just by speaking, whereas friendly Balors are like six or seven feet tall, and are just red-skinned badass looking fighters.

The bit where they choose werewolves, golems, dopplegangers and gith, and then in half the cases make them pretty unrelated to the original and then try to convince everyone to care (rather than the four specific players) is weird. Also IT BREEDS TRUE.

[Ancient History]

Well, except in the case of Warforged. At least when Earthdawn did an asexual player race, they left them some means of reproduction.

[Koumei]

Incidentally, I whipped up a prototype, and if you want a procedural "Races of" generator, then just to randomly pick a theme and four creatures, it's 17 lines of script in Python. 20 lines if you specifically want to remove a creature from the list after it's chosen so you don't get "Races of Cocks: Goblins, Aaracokra, Bugbears, Goblins". I'm not sure if it's ideal to actually do that though, because it's kind of funny if a book is even more of a rip-off by listing three types of fucking Orc.

[Maxus]

Not gonna lie, I like Changelings.

The "always being able to use a Disguise Self which actually alters the body" is a thing a character would always be using, even if it's just to change their hair color today.

Meanwhile Shifters are stuck with "I can contort my body in a natural weapon. Once a day."

[MGuy]

I never really thought of Kalashtar as Gith but that might be why I like their fluff so much.

[Prak]

I'm pretty sure I've bitched about the missed opportunities for interesting gender stuff in Eberron her before

[Orion]

I'll give this book some credit: They printed a wizard PrC that might be worth losing a caster level, and a druid PrC that might be worth not being a druid. You don't see that every day.

[TheFlatline]

Out of all the shovelware that came out of WOTC I think Eberron was the worst. I remember the contest. They announced it, it seemed to go away, and then they announced the winner months and months later.

Which is fine but the big selling point in the initial announcement of Eberron was, seriously, that "every book and monster and option in all D&D supplements totally is at home in this setting and can be used" which got a giant eye roll from me. Of *course* they'd go with the kitchen sink entry as a winner.

I also remember that initial announcement they stated Eberron was the "official" setting of D&D now and forever. We've discussed that here though before and I think that initial press announcement was really the only time they brought some of that shit up.

Anyway, it was pretty much the least interesting D&D setting I've ever looked at.

[JigokuBosatsu]

When I started this thread I thought "I'm going to mention this in a friendly way to Keith Baker next time I bump into him at the game store" but then I remembered this was an OSSR and it went exactly as I remembered.

Which is a good thing. Just puts the whole "friendly contact with an outsider" thought in a different place.

[RufusCorvus]

For a long time, I thought I liked Eberron as a setting, but I finally realized that I really only liked a few things from the setting: changelings, warforged, and Sharn.

I agree with Prak that changelings and warforged were a missed opportunity for a progressive look at gender, but I must be in the niche market that really would like playable golems and doppelgangers.

Sharn was also a really evocative locale. I never realized I wanted fantasy New York until I saw it.

[Prak]

Well, I mean, there was an artificial race, and a race that could change appearance at will, and they shat all over every chance to be even creative with the sex and gender politics of the races. Warforged are almost all masculine-asexual, because people think that male is the average, rather than being completely without sex or gender and taking gender roles/aspects as they pleased as a way of experimenting with what it meant to be living and changelings have "true genders/sexes" rather than being hermaphrodites or able to change their sex at will and having very open attitudes about what gender meant.

[OgreBattle]

Where did the idea for warforged come from? Playing as robot dudes in D&D worlds I mean.

Early things I can think of are sega console RPG's Phantasy Star and Shining Force. There was also Aura Battler Dunbine.

[tussock]

@Ogrebattle, You can play as a rogue Modron in Planescape, I think. Which is also where we get Tieflings and Aasimar and the sheep-centaurs that never made it out of 2e.

--

Though in 2nd edition you could just play anything with hands, as long as what you wanted to play was a low level Fighter that everyone and their dog had a racial hatred for. PC versions of monsters had less mechanical difference from humans then elves or dwarves did, which is insulting on many levels, but that's 2nd edition for you.

Obviously less offensive than the 3e Savage Species approach, which lead to Keith Baker not being allowed to bring his 1st level Golems, Werewolves, Gith, and Doppelganger into the cannon, ... you know, that all makes me think this was his 2nd edition home campaign world, from the 90's. Anyone know?

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Well, I mean, there was an artificial race, and a race that could change appearance at will, and they shat all over every chance to be even creative with the sex and gender politics of the races. Warforged are almost all masculine-asexual, because people think that male is the average, rather than being completely without sex or gender and taking gender roles/aspects as they pleased as a way of experimenting with what it meant to be living and changelings have "true genders/sexes" rather than being hermaphrodites or able to change their sex at will and having very open attitudes about what gender meant.

I may be mis-remembering the book as it's been quite a few years since I read it (and I basically skimmed the fluff anyway as although eberron fluff was interesting sometimes the Races Of fluff tended to be dull), but I was under the impression that there were different factions of changelings, and I was thinking one of the factions was genderfluid since they could literally become anyone.

[Antariuk]

I own a copy of RoE with the "Races of" cover and I didn't even know about the alternate cover till now, but I always found it strange to have an Eberron book without style used for all other supplements... what a weird marketing decision. and I agree that it's probably the weakest of all Eberron releases (except maybe that thin book with mostly pictures and I think 4E's D&D logo that was basically just an expensive brochure).

The kalashtar-githyankii connection kinda blew my mind, but it perfectly explains why I don't like these guys in any way. Since Keith Baker still maintains an Eberron FAQ on his blog and is pretty forthcoming with infos, someone should ask this.

About Warforged not being able to reproduce, how's that a bad thing exactly? Not only is reproduction rarely an active part of adventuring in D&D country but it also puts Warforged in an interesting spot: they are the newest race, but they are also dying off.

[Reynard]

> sheep-centaurs
I thought it was deer, but I was also wrong. Goat-centaurs.


Prak:
> they shat all over every chance to be even creative with the sex and gender politics of the races.
Also green economy and gun control. Yes, that was next two flame debate topics in alphabet order.

Seriously, why would WotC even consider risking Satanic Transgender Panic?

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Races of Eberron

Chapter One: Warforged


Far and away the most popular additional race from this setting.

AncientH:

The idea of giving life to the lifeless has been longstanding in practically every human culture, a power reserved for gods and those who dared at the power of gods, from the myth of Galatea to the Golems of the Ba'al Shem to Frankenstein's monster. The idea of being born full grown, with full faculties, and not suffering through the staged development of childhood brings to mind questions of nature versus nurture, while the artificiality of the sentience derived brings to mind moral and ethical questions - often, in the early science fiction literature, to do with questions of slavery and servitude, and by extension theories of uprising and reprisal - so there are a lot of different very evocative themes that you can get from having artificial people. You can do a fantasy Bladerunner or a fantasy Frankenstein, because the essential story is timeless and the question is, always, what makes a creature human?



Unfortunately, D&D has never quite delivered on the concept before the Warforged. Part of this is because the majority of their golems were based either on medieval magical literature and/or creepy animatronic puppets. Always villains, never heroes.


Also, for the discerning wizard, occasionally really sexy villains.

So "constructs" in D&D were rarely sentient, even more rarely free-willed, and usually overpowered with respect to first-level characters. Not a great combination.


This guy has the emotional response of a toaster and still gets more lovin' than you.

FrankT:

The new races aren't just arranged in order of popularity, they are also arranged in terms of page count. Each chapter is a little longer than the one that comes before it, and the Warforged get five more pages than the Kalashtar. Whether that's because they wrote the popular one first and then ran out of give-a-fuck or because they edited out shit from the middle of the book they thought people wouldn't notice to get things down to the predefined magic number of 192 pages is anyone's guess. In a sense it doesn't really matter, since of course absent this bizarre format there's no reason to believe that you would need to drone on for 19 pages or even 14 pages about any of these assholes. The entire wikipedia article about Hungarians (2881 words) or Bantu peoples (1858 words) would fit into four pages in a D&D book, pictures included. If you just wanted to give information about these assholes, you could have four wikipedia articles worth of subject matter and still have space left over.


Or you could just natter on with word salad until you fill the allotted space. You know, whatever.

Which is a bit of a long walk to say that this chapter doesn't do anything you'd want it to do. It does what it was supposed to do, but that was just to fulfill the contractual obligation to have a chapter of an appropriate length.

AncientH:

Warforged have an additional handicap/interesting plot point that you can read about in their very name - they were designed to be weapons, living weapons that were upgradeable, modifiable, but ultimately disposable and when the war ended, they were fit to be discarded. So it's not just that you have a whole generation of blank slates, you're taking baby fresh from the womb and put them through boot camp, a couple nasty wars, and then tell them to fuck off. The PTSD rate among Warforged must be amazing, but there's scant mention of it here.

Well, I should expand on that. There is an entire section given over to the psychology of the Warforged, but it isn't...great. They start out knowing how to move and how to speak their creator's language, but that's it. Everything else has to be taught to them. The basic concept of "you belong to this guy, do what he says" and "this is a sword, there are many like it, but this one is mine" apparently takes months of instruction, and elaborate war games where newly-birthed warforged are pitted against each other. Which just seems wasteful; the things must cost a fair amount of gold each (strangely, we are never given prices for Warforged creation, which is a shame), and you're going to pit them against each other in mock-battles with real weapons, because magewrights are standing by to reattach any limbs or whatnot? Who thought that was a good idea?

The section on religion, believe it or not, is worse.

All days are holy, or none are.

FrankT:

It is, in retrospect, no surprise at all that of the four Eberron new races that the Warforged are the most popular. Of the four monster substitutes, Werewolf and Golem are universal standards, while Githzerai and Doppelganger are strange D&D-specific things. So if you have a new player who hasn't read the books, there is a decent probability that they want to play a Werewolf or a Robot, but no chance at all that they want to play a Doppelganger or Githyanki (unless they saw the cover of the AD&D Fiend Folio on your shelf right before starting character generation). And while no rules existed or could be acceptably fudged to play Golems, there were a number of character options that might be able to scratch the itch to play as a Werewolf. You might play as an Orc (who is toothy and strong) or a Druid (who eventually gets the power to turn into an
animal), for example.


A four player party of Wizard, Werewolf, Vampire, and Robot is not unreasonable or unusual.

Now obviously there are itches that it would have been even more popular to scratch. Vampire PCs is the obvious one, but probably Demon, Giant, Sprite, and Lizardfolk PCs as well. But of the four that they happened to have for Eberron, it's not terribly surprising that the Warforged was the most popular one by a country mile.

When 3e codified things, it was by and large a good thing. But alas when they codified the rules for Undead and Constructs, things got stupid. For starters, they generalized way too many traits. We ended up being unable to stake Vampires in the heart (because all the non-living creatures got immunity to critical hits whether they had important weak points or not). This is the actual list of Construct traits that every fucking robot got automatically:

[*]No Constitution score.
Low-light vision.

Darkvision out to 60 feet.

Immunity to all mind-affecting effects (charms, compulsions, phantasms, patterns, and morale effects).

Immunity to poison, sleep effects, paralysis, stunning, disease, death effects, and necromancy effects.

Cannot heal damage on their own, but often can be repaired by exposing them to a certain kind of effect (see the creature’s description for details) or through the use of the Craft Construct feat. A construct with the fast healing special quality still benefits from that quality.

Not subject to critical hits, nonlethal damage, ability damage, ability drain, fatigue, exhaustion, or energy drain.

Immunity to any effect that requires a Fortitude save (unless the effect also works on objects, or is harmless).

Not at risk of death from massive damage. Immediately destroyed when reduced to 0 hit points or less.

Since it was never alive, a construct cannot be raised or resurrected.

Because its body is a mass of unliving matter, a construct is hard to destroy. It gains bonus hit points based on size, as shown on the table.

Proficient with its natural weapons only, unless generally humanoid in form, in which case proficient with any weapon mentioned in its entry.

Proficient with no armor.

Constructs do not eat, sleep, or breathe.

Obviously, some Constructs are supposed to be tireless engines of destruction, but honestly a lot of them are supposed to run out of power and have to go “sleep” to charge up somewhere. Obviously some Constructs are supposed to be featureless blocks of stone that have no weaknesses, but other constructs have joints and gears and power sources and shit that are at least as “critical” locations as kidneys and eyes are on a biological person. So the rules for Robots were such incredible works of overreach that making robot player characters was just structurally very difficult. Being a Construct just inherently gave a creature a bunch of traits that would be inappropriate for a player character robot girl to have; and it's so many abilities that the designers wouldn't let you have it without setting a bunch of levels on fire (the basic Monk problem writ large).


Some constructs should have Achilles Heels.

What should have happened was to go back to the drawing board and rewrite the robot rules like K and I did for Undead in the Tome of Necromancy. But actually fixing things was off the table when making Eberron because reasons. So what they did instead was to make a whole new type called “Living Construct” that was thematically similar to the regular Construct type, but had a lot less game effects. I mean, why fix things that aren't working when you can just create explosively more content bloat instead? And ghost is this content bloated! They begin explaining the Warforged' game traits on page seven and they finish describing them on page nine. And there are no pictures in between. They just feel the need to call out all the traits of constructs and humanoids and then explain which version the Warforged actually use (generally neither, but instead some other thing that is supposed to be reminiscent of but weaker than the Construct thing). If you had to read all these rules aloud without stopping to catch your breath you'd pass out. It's a travesty, but it's still the closest thing to a playable golem that we get in official D&D rules, so people will take it.


People wanna play steampunk robot girls and they'll take what they can get.

AncientH:

One of the things that gets people about constructs is that they don't need to eat, sleep, or breath. Which are all qualities that D&D players have quested for, and built magic items to circumvent such mortal conceptions. The thing is, though, that characters need limitations in order to motivate them, and to overcome them. Humans that didn't need to eat suddenly become a lot less interesting, because a fuckload of our nature and society and infrastructure is built around the need to eat. So while I fully understand why the Warforged don't need those things, I think they probably should have either gotten some compensating flaws (like needing periods of communing with each other and receiving programming updates like the Borg) or else had the very weirdness of their state made more real to the readers, possibly by changing out the bedroom and bathroom in warforged apartments with a hot-oil bath and a full-length worktable that the warforged can stretch out on.


Just going down for some routine maintenance, wake me in a cycle.

FrankT:

This book takes a few half-hearted attempts to convince you to use Eberron races in non-Eberron D&D campaigns. They go about this all wrong, presumably because whoever is writing these little bits doesn't understand what these races are for. Like, they don't even seem to understand that these races are kludges to stand in for stuff people want to do that the 3rd edition ruleset refused to allow for no good reason. And so we have this little nugget:

Warforged are particularly appropriate in a high-magic setting where war has been an ongoing feature in the land.

This is actually kind of appalling. Whoever wrote that thinks that the reason people care about Warforged is the backstory about how they were made by house Cannith to fight in a big war and shit. That has about zero percent to do with anything. When actual fans talk about adapting Warforged to other settings, they do shit like this:



Because the popularity of the Warforged has nothing to do with Eberron's lame “there was a big war and that's why you don't have to worry about high level characters sticking their dicks in the mashed potatoes” cop-out
storyline. It has everything to do with the fact that there were finally some playable rules to play a fucking robot or cyborg. When people adapt them to other settings the backstory, the name, and even the “look and feel” get dumped pretty much immediately. The only thing people really really want is official rules for playing a god damn robot or cyborg.


When people import Warforged into Forgotten Realms, they become Gondsmen, who aren't forged by or for any war and don't even look the same.

I'm suspecting that these little bits were put in there by Jesse Decker, because it involves corporate doublespeak, the desire to leverage properties to cross market, and a complete lack of understanding of how the game works or why anyone cares about anything in it.

AncientH:

Every fucking section has a little section called "Roleplaying Application." Like the readers have suffered a serious cerebral event and can't process what they've read into something on the tabletop. It's annoying and stupid. Look at this shit:

Roleplaying Application: Consider giving your warforged character a rank or two in a Craft skill and a hobby such as those described above. Armorsmithing, blacksmithing, gemcutting, and sculpting make excellent choices because you can also use those Craft skills to repair yourself. If you choose not to take a Craft skill, devise some other kind of downtime activity for your warforged character.

FrankT:

Robot robot robot robot.

That's about the depth of the discussion of Warforged life and psychology. They don't need to eat or sleep, so they don't really need to interact with the economy in any way. This is a pretty fundamental design error as far as actually making them be a people that are supposed to have motivations and shit. It's fine for a robot hero, because we normally aren't terribly concerned with how much champions of justice have to shill out for food and rent. But if they were ever supposed to be people in the background, it just shits all over 99% of the motivation you'd care to ascribe to them. The authors of the section do seem to realize this problem, and their suggestion is for the player to have a driving goal for their Warforged character to pursue. But again, this only provides a satisfying answer for the individual hero, there's still no reason for “the race” to be a thing. Because if you can't make collective statements as general as “members would rather have access to goods and services than not” then you don't really have anything.


As good a motivation as any.

The authors lamely suggest that maybe individual Warforged might obsessively whittle or draw pictures in order to... mumble mumble. The problem here is that having done away with basic needs altogether, we really don't have a new hierarchy of needs for them to have.


We are asked to imagine a race that skips all the bottom rungs and goes straight to Self Actualization, which doesn't make any sense and might as well be Fish Malking for all the good it does in a game.

AncientH:

There's a very weird vibe with Warforged and magic and technology I want to discuss:

Warforged are constructs, but they are not machines. Warforged have bodies composed of inorganic materials but also of living magic. In this way, warforged combine technology and magic in an unparalleled manner.

During the Last War, most warforged were discouraged from taking any interest in magic or their own construction. The only practice of magic taught in the House Cannith training halls was that of the artificer, and House Cannith strictly controlled the training of the few warforged selected for that duty. Thus, most warforged think very little about magic and attach no
emotion to it.

Magic and how it interacts with a warforged body hold no interest for most warforged beyond pure practicality. A warforged values magic that aids him, particularly magic that repairs his body. Warforged enjoy the ability to accept magic into their composite plating and to graft particular magic items to their bodies, but few warforged are curious about how or why either process works.

This is...shit. It basically shits on any player that wants their character to be inquisitive or curious in the least degree. Beyond that, it strikes at one of the fundamental issues with the warforged, as the conjunction of magic and technology: people recognize that science works, and can be reproduced, which is the glory of science, and that magic does not work, and nothing it does can be reproduced. That's why magic is not technology. Everything good and reproducible about alchemy became chemistry. But in D&D world, magic does work, and people want to marry that to science in such as way as to gain the benefits of both. There will be some handwaving involved - there will always be handwaving involved - but in this case they basically want magic to provide the unlimited power and true AI that science can't, and have the rest of the Warforged be clockwork. That is very blatantly what practically all players want, and yet this book seems determined not to give them that.


Look, it's not a huge leap.

The thing is, the one interesting aspect of the Warforged backstory is that whatever arcane technology they were made with, it's compatible with the ancient Xen'drik arcanotech. This is great because it gives the Warforged a mythic backstory that they can explore and rediscovery - to learn more about themselves. Unfortunately, it's never explored in this book, and almost never explored in any other book. It's a big dead end.

FrankT:

In the Eberron plotline is that Warforged were given their forty acres and a mule and declared to be a full five fifths of a person two years ago. As such, they don't really have a culture of their own. Fair enough. Always room for blank slate characters in cooperative storytelling. But to give you an idea of how much of a shovelware product this book is, the “Warforged Society and Culture” heading still exists (just as there would be a “Bullywug Society and Culture” heading if this series had managed to drag on long enough to make Races of Giant Frog). And more than that, this section goes on for six pages. Really. Having said “the living constructs have had little time to create a society or culture” the section then prattles on, and on, and on, for six fucking pages.



There is also a subsection on how Warforged treat other races. Which since every Warforged is a special snowflake Fish Malk who gets self actualization from underwater whittling and has no need for food or shelter, is rather a tough sell for me. You might as well be making declarations about the racial prejudices of people whose first name has five letters. But even that would make more sense, because at least those people would all need food, shoes, and blankets and want sex and a TV. The Warforged don't collectively want or need anything.

AncientH:

I don't understand who absolutely zero effort was put into giving the Warforged any culture or social grouping of their own. Like, not even an example. How about a mercenary company that came from a regiment that was disbanded during the last war? How about a warforged bordello?


I would except a Warforged rickshaw mafia.

FrankT:

All of the Races of Foo books have rants about playing the race as different classes. These give horrible advice. Seriously, all of them give advice so bad that most experienced players are conditioned to simply avoid reading the section altogether. I don't know if there's some sort of perverse pleasure to be had in giving laughably terrible advice or if the people writing these bits simply write them while drunk and have no idea what they are talking about. This is either ineptitude on a scale that I can't even imagine or it's malicious pranking of new players. I genuinely cannot tell which it is.

Warforged come with a Charisma penalty and an unremovable Arcane Spell Failure chance. Also, Arcane Magic requires rest periods to prepare spells whether you've bought yourself the ability to go without sleep or not. They are so bad at being Sorcerers that they might as well have a “Warforged cannot be Sorcerers” thing hard coded into their rules.

Despite the warforged arcane spell failure chance, sorcerer is an excellent choice for a warforged character.

Is that parody? Is that someone bristling under the corporate demand that they only encourage and never discourage? Is that an author who has genuinely no fucking clue how the game works? I don't know. I can't tell if this is sarcasm, and I can't tell if it is sarcastic who the intended butt of the joke is supposed to be. Stupid printed word doesn't convey the nuance of body language and tone of voice, so I don't know whether I'm supposed to be laughing with or at the author here.



And I was wrong. We're going to do the Shifters, Kalashtar, and Changelings together in one piece, because we ended up having more to say about the Warforged than I thought. In retrospect, that doesn't seem as surprising as when we started writing this chapter.

AncientH:

Ironically, class abilities like "Armored Mage" (1st level substitution in Complete Mage) can directly bypass the inherent spell failure, so not only is this class advice bad, but it was almost immediately superseded by additional character options.

They also try to cram in a couple "Adventure Hooks" near the end, which is as close as we ever get to actual setting development for the Warforged...and they aren't great. My favorite might be the "Godforged," who think they've been contacted by a construct deity and are building it a giant body out in the Mournlands. That's not really a "hook," but I like the idea of a colossal Warforged stomping about.


On the other hand, maybe that's ripe for a crossover with Dragonmech.

Oh, and one more fuck-you to Warforged players:

Due to their training and their limited use of language on the battlefield, warforged tend to have small vocabularies except in the area of items and terms related to war. A typical warforged would be perplexed by words such as “morose,” “sauté,” and “till,” and even by simpler words such as “depressed,” “fry,” and “plow,” but the warforged would know every term describing the parts of a castle wall and could rattle off.

[Josh_Kablack]

Wait, what?

You built a race of golems to go to war and cooking terms are unknown to them? That's just slightly less credible than claiming they would be confused by profanity.

[ishy]

Out of all the shovelware that came out of WOTC I think Eberron was the worst. I remember the contest. They announced it, it seemed to go away, and then they announced the winner months and months later.

Which is fine but the big selling point in the initial announcement of Eberron was, seriously, that "every book and monster and option in all D&D supplements totally is at home in this setting and can be used" which got a giant eye roll from me. Of *course* they'd go with the kitchen sink entry as a winner.

Well they did get more than 11.000 entries for the contest.

Oh and Warforged and Shifters were apparently not created because people wanted to play them in Keith's games.

Once it made the jump from the ten-pager to the 125-pager, I got to meet with the people at Wizards to hear what they actually liked and didn't like about the idea, so the world went through some major changes at that point, and it was at that stage that many ideas that are now central to the world--things like the warforged and the shifters--came into existence.

[Username17]

Oh and Warforged and Shifters were apparently not created because people wanted to play them in Keith's games.

Once it made the jump from the ten-pager to the 125-pager, I got to meet with the people at Wizards to hear what they actually liked and didn't like about the idea, so the world went through some major changes at that point, and it was at that stage that many ideas that are now central to the world--things like the warforged and the shifters--came into existence.

If true, my interpretation would be that in the original document, Eberron simply had playable Golems, Lycanthropes, Doppelgangers, and Githzerai. When Keith Baker discussed this with the WotC developers, they refused to budge on making playable mechanics for these races, so the compromise of creating new races that were thematically similar was made at that point.

-Username17

[norms29]

We are asked to imagine a race that skips all the bottom rungs and goes straight to Self Actualization, which doesn't make any sense and might as well be Fish Malking for all the good it does in a game.

seriously? I mean I get that their physiological needs are null, but having not read the book, I'm not getting from your description what exempts them from the Safety, Belonging, and Esteem Layers.

In fact, I would think a need for Belonging and/or Esteem would have been necessary to make them act like soldiers instead of fucking off to do their own thing as soon as they were created.