OSSR: Races of Eberron
Chapter 8: Equipment
Armblade.
FrankT:
You wouldn't know it from reading the table of contents (which lists this chapter as the last chapter), but this chapter is only 8 pages long. The ToC fails to tell you that there's a 9th chapter, which would naturally lead you to believe this chapter takes up the rest of the book (21 pages), but it's really only 8 pages. The editor gives about as many fucks about this book as anyone else does.
A mistake this editor will not make.
The really odd thing of course is that
equipment is something that there actually
is a near bottomless appetite for. A tenth level character is supposed to be running around with like ten magic items, and several of them are supposed to be replacement items for other magic items the characters used earlier in their career. So while the actual amount of feats a character can swallow is so small that there's likely no purpose to be had in writing any more, you could fill volume after volume with new magic items and it could be useful and well received. And they
did,
and it was.
3rd edition had a problem in which they created an “expected wealth by level” number to determine how many and how powerful the magic items characters were supposed to have. And this was a
problem, because the numbers involved were
too small. Someone put really a lot of work into putting together a wealth and cost progression table such that the outputs of the treasure table equaled the expectations of the wealth values for characters who had enough encounters to get to the levels in question. And it all works, and it's beautiful. And it's
shit, because costs are
quadratic, which means that while each cost increase is more than the one before it, the
relative cost increase keeps going down. So really crucially, the first jump from +1 to +2 increases costs by 300% and the amount of toys you can afford in the 5th-10th level range is catastrophically small. And since that's coincidentally the levels most people play the game, the cost progressions really bit where it hurts the most.
Now the effects of this were many, and kind of rumbled through the game in slow motion through its entire run. The most obvious effect was that the “gear dependent” characters (Fighters, in other words), were shit. That's pretty well known. Also that DMs ended up handing out Artifacts (which bypassed wealth by level restrictions by not having costs) left right and center. And that there was a constant demand for cheap bullshit items that could stack with other items and bypass draconian wealth restrictions that way. But the most insidious wall it affected the game is by making what should have been the biggest part of this book the smallest. Since characters in the “sweet spot” level range couldn't actually afford level appropriate magic items, there wasn't the kind of demand that there obviously should have been.
Round about 12th level, items start being relatively cheaper – the jump between a +3 item and a +4 item is a 78% cost increase instead of a 300% increase,
and you start getting money faster at that level. So higher level characters would be decked out with magic items even if people weren't doing dress sphere crap where they changed amulets after every fight. But people don't really play the game at that level because other things about the system fall apart. Like how characters at that level have entourages and the challenge guidelines still assume they show up alone (meaning that enemy groups the game tells you are “appropriate” actually get steamrolled by real parties). So it ends up with the magic item system largely unused. Which is a shame, and obviously not what anyone wanted.
AncientH:
Needless to say, magic items don't look anything like a non-magical economy, and even in D&D context non-magic gear sort of gets the short shrift, because you progress too fast from mundane gear to impossibly-better magical gear. The weird magic item trending costs-by-level that Frank mentioned were in part because the designers of D&D understood that magic should be
rare, and for them rare meant
expensive. This made some sort of sense in AD&D, even though absolutely none of the costs made sense - but in D&D3.+, the streamlining of the magic item creation rules meant that PCs could actually
manufacture magic items, some relatively quickly and easily. Eberron especially exploded the magic item economy myth, because it was supposed to be a setting where magic was beginning a quasi-industrial age and so to be much more prevalent...but despite all the magewrights in the world, even low-level magic items were measured in
gold pieces.
The more interesting question about having an equipment chapter in
Races of Eberron is
why have it at all. In the old AD&D days you'd expect something like this in Oriental Adventures, where you can call a sword a katana and a spear a naginata and otherwise have culturally insensitive kitsch like smoke-filled eggs for ninjas and crap. It's the Dragon magazine kind of thing where they could basically fill an article each month with "racial" weapons and gear and people would
thank them for it.
And they did!
But, as I mentioned, this is kind of weird from a
racial standpoint. We've already established that IRL, races are bullshit. In D&D, they basically try to equate race as culture...except when they don't, because they want six flavors of elves or something. And while there might be
cultural trends in weapons, and even
national trends in weapons and styles of fighting, it's not like chimpanzees have developed a unique Chimp-Stick for their secret monk-tastic martial art.
So in a real way, having race-specific arms and armor and crap is a bit weird and offensive. Especially when you will
never use most of it, because it patently isn't better than any of the gear your PCs already have access to, or it
is better and you wonder why everybody isn't using this shit already. It's not like the Drow chitinsmiths have some vast technological advantage over the village blacksmith.
Siderant: Elven chain and other racial gear doesn't have race as a prerequisite to making it. Seriously, the Elven government could be outsourcing its chainmail manufacture to the Shire because the halflings have undercut the local guilds. Some of the racial magic items DO require you to be of a specific race, but surprisingly few of them.
FrankT:
The equipment section begins describing some extra equipment that mostly looks like it was taken from Dark Sun. Armor made from bug chitin and exotic blades that suck monkey ass. How one should go about making new equipment for D&D is an open question, and a lot of D&D authors never got the hang of it. The primary issue is that within the game, items don't have many variables that you care about. And those variables you
do care about tend to just be on a sliding scale between “better” and “worse.” And while long lists of functionally identical weapons and armors that were flavored and themed differently would be
much more interesting than what's in most of this book, they elected to not go there. Instead what we have is just a couple of exotic weapons that are pretty awful and that's really it.
Actual history has a shit tonne of weapons in it that are mild variations of a similar theme, and I'm sure that various knights of the period had long dick wavings discussions about whether a poleaxe was better than a lucern hammer.
We could have gotten a whole deal on how the Kalashtar sword pommels are different from the Elvish ones and Shifter shoes are usually open toed or something. And we could have gotten stuff on cloak styles and even adventuring equipment. Like, I would expect that Changelings could probably do some weird shit with their fingers that would allow them to have lockpicks that looked pretty different from human lock picks. But we really don't get any of that. Like, it seriously
bothers me that this is an entire 192 page book that is primarily dedicated to four groups of people and the entire section on material culture is 8 pages long and discusses two sets of armor made of bug chitin. Considering how fucking
padded the rest of the book is, I am legitimately unable to comprehend why this chapter is so bullshit.
AncientH:
Shadowrun got away with it, but largely because Shadowrun embraced the concept of
gun porn and had a fair number of traits to fiddle with. D&D has played with that, but the problem is they tend to a) go overboard and b) they age out fast. Threat zones for criticals, for example, become less important as magical damages like
fire burst enter the picture; whether you weapon does slashing or piercing damage likewise seems to matter less and less at high levels, because the damage reduction is based on what your weapon is made out of and later how many fucking
plusses it has and what alignment it is.
Lawful good. +10.
FrankT:
“Racial Items” don't really go over well in the modern world. They were kind of embarrassing in the 80s, really embarrassing in the 90s, and now we just don't go there. There's still Elven Chain and Boots of Elvenkind, but we downplay that Tolkienian racist shit. But of course, this book is called “Races of Eberron,” the uniting feature of everything in this book is supposed to be that it has something or other to do with the races. Of Eberron. Where the book
could have gone with this fact was to make a lot of items which were culturally or historically associated with the various races. But that would probably have required too much thought. What they did instead was mostly to have just a completely random set of magic items. There isn't even an
attempt to tie these things to
anything. Dust of Disturbance is just a massively overpriced pile of dust that keeps people from sleeping properly. It seems like the kind of thing a Kalashtar or Changeling might have been involved with (I mean, other than the fact that it's some fucking
dust that costs 90 pounds of gold and doesn't even fucking kill people you hit with it), but what flavor text it has doesn't tie it to anything. The Pendant of Joy is a glowing amulet that makes people happy enough to get extra psionic power points, but there's no mention of the Kalashtar in any part of it. Based on the rest of the book, you'd think they'd care about it, but as far as I can tell no fucks were given when writing these and no attempt was made to tie any of these things to the world or the theme of the book. The magic items, for the most part, are just “whatever happened to be on the desk.”
Now a big exception to all this are the bonus robot parts you can get as a Warforged. Now, this seems extremely obvious. Obviously, you'd want to handle the aspect of upgrading Warforged to have pincers and wings and better armor plating and whatever the fuck as
magic items. Because they have costs and use up slots and that is fucking obviously how you should handle it. And to this book's very minimal credit, it does discuss that option, but doesn't go very far with the concept. Frankly, this is how
all critter powers should be handled. A powerful monster could, as a PC, simply start with less magic items and have less magic item slots to cover its innate magic powers over a Halfling or an Orc. But that's another argument entirely. For the purposes of Warforged, retractable claws and shit are actually items that are actually magic and forged and shit, and there's no reason for them to be anything other than items in game terms. Nevertheless, as you'll recall, a big chunk of the options were converted in as feats and that worked as well as a fork made of dung.
This picture is in here. It is not a joke.
AncientH:
Arguably the big winner here was the
mind blade gauntlet. It's pretty expensive, and requires you to be a Kalashtar or Inspired to actually use it, and you have to be this tall to ride the mind blade gauntlet in the Soulknife class, but it basically adds an extra enhancement to a mindblade
which isn't bad. This sounds like a lot of requirements for a minimal payoff, but that's because they didn't actually think this magic item through very well - because there isn't a limit to the number of enhancements you can load on a gauntlet (if you have the cash and XP to spare), and there's no limit to
what enhancement you can throw on there, because they were too stupid to specify that it only accepts normal mindblade enhancements. So you could theoretically use this thing to turn your mindblade into a function
holy avenger, or add some armor special abilities for your mindshield (hey, you paid enough feats for it), and you could probably even convince Mister Cavern to let it add abilities to your mindbow if you wasted levels on that Prestige Class.
Fuck it, we're all going to die anyway.
FrankT:
You'd think that a book about Eberron that is mostly about fluff and trying to get people invested into Eberron as a concept would write up a bunch of Artifacts. After all, Artifacts are one of the simplest ways to work around the harsh wealth by level limits. But instead of doing that they just kind of don't. One of the few artifacts in here is the Deck of Transformations, which is basically just a Deck of Many Things except all the effects are shitty and you don't care.
Of course, I think it's important to remember that if your DM throws down a Deck of Many Things, that is him telling you that the campaign is over and it's going to end like a David Lynch vehicle.
AncientH:
Can I take a moment to complain that the full "deck" of transformations only has 39 cards? WTF is this, a friendly game of speed Magic?
The other artifacts are unique Warforged components, which is a bit like going into a Shadowrun game and telling the PCs that there are cyberware upgrades they just can't have.
Chapter 9: Magics and Psionics
FrankT:
This 14 page chapter isn't listed as existing in the Table of Contents. But every fucking spell in the chapter
is. Presumably to make the Table of Contents look like it actually covered some ground. But this only works if you're even drunker than I am, because even a cursory view of the words in the ToC prove what a farce that is. There are five entries for page 184, and one of them is for the spell
dominate living construct, which I am fairly certain has never been cast in a real game. The spells here seem to be basically procedurally generated – versions of normal spells tweaked to refer to classes of targets that nominally exist but no one in their right mind would consider giving a fuck about. These spells are the kinds of gibberish you might write if you were familiar with the
rules, but not the
game.
Or word salad.
More generally, the appetite for new spells is much deeper than the appetite for most other kinds of new options. Because a player is allowed to play with a fuck tonne more spells. A Wizard gets two new spells every time they level, and Clerics and Druids just get to instantly learn every new spell that is ever published. Any of those classes can get up tomorrow and prepare completely different spells from what they prepared today (unless someone slipped them some Dust of Disturbance or something). This means that even an incredibly niche spell might still see use, where a feat or character class that is even a little bit narrow in application never ever will.
That being said, Races of Eberron takes this to new levels of bullshit.
Reachwalker's Wariness is a 2nd level Druid spell that lets you know the exact location of every Aberration... within... 30 feet? Seriously? It's a Druid spell, so the fact that it exists at all is an extra option that every Druid has every morning. Technically, it is a raw powerup of every Druid character ever played from now until the end of time. But while it's true that it costs Druids nothing to have that be on their spell list; it's more importantly true that that is a fucking puzzlingly useless spell that no one is going to prepare. Because it is terrible.
AncientH:
If it wasn't retarded, it would be fun to imagine a world where you programmed your feats for the morning. It could have been something for Warforged, sort of like skillwires.
The artificer infusions seem aimed, somewhat strangely, at the actual races involved her. Basically it benefits Warforged, Shifters, Changeling warshapers and Kalashtar monks, all of which have natural weapons, and these artificer infusions buff those.
Bard spells, on the other hand, seem to be almost unfettered crap. I'm against any spell that involves using Action Points just on principle, because it's a stupid tag-on point economy subsystem.
FrankT:
The effects of a new spell being printed are sometimes quite big. On account of spellcasters just being able to know new spells as they get printed. For example,
unseen crafter is a 2nd level spell that lets you set an invisible force to using tools and making shit. The thing is, it lasts for one day
per level. So you can just set a few of those up one day, then prepare your adventuring spells and go off on an adventure. And the whole time, your cobbler elves will keep making shoes and shit. This profoundly changes the way Clerics interact with the world around them, something that doesn't happen when a new feat or racial substitution level gets printed.
The book seems to think you will use Unseen Crafters to repair Warforged characters, possibly because the authors are very unimaginative.
AncientH:
It works for Craft(alchemy) too, which makes me want to have a
bag of holding with an alchemist's workshop and a bunch of unseen crafters down there building shit. It doesn't do Forgery, though, which seems like an oversight - but, such is the D&D3.5 skill system.
They added the "Mindset" descriptor in this chapter. Like the "Ectomancy" descriptor from
Ghostwalk, this one didn't really fly in...pretty much any other book. The thing about Mindset spells is that you gain bonuses just for preparing them (and so can only be learned by characters that can prepare spells); it's pretty much a dry run for a similar mechanic in
Complete Mage, where as long as you have X option online (and the right feat), you get Y minor ability. The whole process was a slow inching away from Vancian spellcasting, and you can tell they really
wanted it to be something like in
Magic: the Gathering where you'd have to juggle the benefit of sacrificing a card for a single moderate effect or continue to enjoy it for a minor ongoing effect. That is a good in-game decision to have to make, but they never really committed to it in D&D3.5, and the costs (feat-wise) for the abilities gained in
CM were way too high - you just couldn't justify the opportunity costs. Same thing for mindset spells, I reckon, although without the feat tax - the shitty bonuses by and large don't justify keeping a spell slot occupied.
The closest one to
good is the Sor/Wiz 2/Clr 3 spell
furnace within, which adds 1 point of fire damage to all your natural, unarmed, and melee (with a metal weapon) attacks while not cast. It's also one of the very few (possibly only) spell that cites "dwarf" as a caster requirement, although the way they did so is a bit weird. There's other spells like that in this chapter, citing "halfling" or "shifter" like it was a focus or something.
FrankT:
The Psionics powers added in this book are so few in number that the entire “chart” of new Psionic Powers fits on the same page as the description of those powers. That means that there's no gain whatsoever in having a chart at all, because 100% of the chart simply directs you to the page you are by definition already reading. The powers on this page are actually really terrible, but also really badly written.
The one I'm going to fixate on is
Primal Fear, because it's a perfect storm of bad design. It's a swift action fear effect psychic power that makes a target Shaken for one round. That's an incredibly small effect, but fear stacks and if you get shaken twice you actually got to
frightened and lose a round running away. The authors seemed to realize that it might actually be useful, so they declared that it doesn't stack with any other fear effect – thus bringing up the possibility that you might be able to hit your
friends with
Primal Fear in order to snap them out of fear effects big enough to incapacitate them because D&D has no clear precedence in situations like that. But I think more to the point is the fact that the authors don't seem to realize that while the Intimidate skill doesn't work on targets immune to fear, it is not itself a [Fear] effect, so you
can still get the double-shaken status out of this and turn it into a stunlock with the booga-booga.
Basically, the rules in this book are terrible and the ones in the psionics page seem even worse written than the book's already offensively low standards would allow.
AncientH:
We get two new domains, but they're both crap and none of their powers are anything you care about. The only thing that really annoys me about them is that there are a couple domain-only spells that...why? For instance,
doppleganger transformation is a Transformation 7 spell which acts as a moderate all-around buff. It's not a 7th level buff, either. It doesn't let you
detect thoughts or change shape or anything. Bizarre.
And on that sad and quizzical note, that's the book. We'll probably wrap up with some final thoughts in another post.
