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Nov23
by "Jester" David on November 23, 2019
Posted In: Gaming Blogs, Reviews

Review: Alien Roleplaying Game

At the gaming table, no one can hear you scream. 

Okay… one to five other players can hear you scream, as well as the GM. But the GM doesn’t care: your screams sustain them.

I’m referring of course to the Alien Roleplaying Game by Free League Publishing, based on the movie franchise of the same name by 20th Century Fox (and now owned by Disney), while also incorporating and acknowledging prequeles by Ridley Scott (the director of the original film): Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. By default, the game is set three years after Alien 3, which means it’s also 200 years prior to Alien: Resurrection.

Free League (also known as Fria Ligan in their native Swedish) is a relative newcomer to the tabletop scene, but they came in with gusto. In the last five years they’ve published: Mutant: Zero, Coriolis , Tales from the Loop, and Forbidden Lands. And in the process they’ve collected a number of awards. They’ve often partnered with Modiphius Entertainment for publishing & distribution.

What It Is

A hefty 392-page book, Alien: The Roleplaying Game is a full colour hardcover with moody black pages, atmospheric art, and the majority of the text in small sidebar-like boxes. The book is basically presented as a lengthy series of largely self-contained sidebars. 

In addition to the book, the game makes use of custom six-sided dice and a deck of cards, but regular d6s and playing cards can be used in a pinch. 

The first dozen pages are a super brief introduction to the world, the tone, and the setting, which pretty much assume you know what the titular “aliens” are. Which is probably safe bet. From there we get 140-pages on characters and the rules of playing the game, including character creation, combat, gear, and the like. 

The book then delves into the setting, dealing with the technology (like FTL travel and cryogenics) as well as colonies and general lifestyle information. The world of 2183. There’s sections here on money, religion, law enforcement, and more. As this section deals with spaceships, there’s also space combat here. 

Then we move onto the 15-page section on “Your Job as a Game Mother”, as the system uses GM but tweaks the meaning. Then the book returns to the setting for 60-pages, with a lore dump on the government, hypercorps, and systems. There are something close to 16 planets briefly described in this section, most with a small adventure hook or a reason to visit. Some are horrible and some are pleasant and one is certain death. This is followed by 40-pages on alien species, including both the Engineers (of Prometheus) and a few new aliens, most of which are insect-based. (Possibly to explain the phrase “another bug hunt” in the early minutes of Aliens.) 

The book ends with a chapter on Campaign Play, with three types of campaign (space trucker, colonial marines, and colonists) followed by table after table for generating occupations, planets, solar systems, and more. Plus a few NPCs for good measure. This chapter includes a few locations and a mico-adventure set in Hadley’s Hope, the colony in Aliens.

The Good

The book features lots of moody art and super high production values. The book is very dark and atmospheric. There’s only a couple images set on brightly lit locations. Most images of the titular xenomorph are heavily shadowed, making it this dark, imposing figure. 

The rules are somewhat similar to the publisher’s earlier success, Tales from the Loop. The action resolution system for both games is seemingly simple: you roll a pool of dice equal to an Attribute + a relevant Skill. As few as 1 die and as many as 10 d6s. If you roll a “6” you succeed. Unlike Tales from the Loop, you only need a single success by default. This means you can just roll and say you succeed, rather than rolling and waiting to see if you hit the unknown target known by the GM.

A side effect of this, is it also allows the degree of success to be described narratively: such as succeeding with flying colours if you roll many 6s, or barely succeeding if you roll 8 dice with only a single 6. There’s also some nice added complexity with stunts, where you can trade additional successes for bonus effects. This might require a cheat sheet for new players (as there’s a lot of different options) but it’s something you can slowly introduce.

Characters are fairly simple. Like Tales from the Loop, characters possess four Attributes and twelve related Skills (three for each Attribute). In this game, PCs also have a few small talents, plus a few roleplaying elements. This is a rules-light narrative-heavy game, but with enough complexity to customize your character. You can specialize, without that choice being strictly flavour. 

The game uses custom dice, with special symbols on the “6” (a success symbol) and Stress dice with a symbol on the “1” and “6”. But easy enough to use regular d6s. I like having fun, customized dice as an option, but hate being forced to buy sets of expensive custom dice for the entire table. Thankfully this isn’t the case.

The game’s Stress mechanic is awesome. This is what really jumped out at me and made me pay attention to the game: as a horror game, you want to put fear and tension at the forefront, but this is tricky when you’re safe at a table with friends. In this game, you can add Stress by pushing a reroll .This lets you roll your entire dice pool again (increasing your chances of the vital success, or trying for more success to use for stunts) AND also adds additional dice to your pool that further increases your odds. However, this added die can cause you to panic when it come up as “1”. This leads to the neat effect that your odds of success get better when you’re stressed, but with the constant risk of total failure. As a system I’m reminded of Hunger dice in the new edition Vampire, but using them is a choice creating a risk/reward element. You’re rewarded for choosing for your character to become stressed, which also adds stress to the player every time they roll. 

Also employing dice is the game’s system of tracking resources, which is also pretty nifty. You track your air, food, power, and water at set times, rolling a number of dice equal to the current rating, which decreases when you fail a roll. Statistically, your resources decline quickly at first, and then slowly near the end, creating some immediate tension. The game doesn’t use the same system for ammunition, but this would be a very simple hack. 

The initiative system is card based, and players draw from a small deck of 10 cards to determine when they act in a combat round. It’s a system I don’t believe I’ve seen before. Cynically, it feels like an excuse to sell another accessory to make more money to pay off the expensive licence, but it has some neat effects. Like how you can swap cards with other players, allowing the limited opportunity to rearrange your initiative. And you can spend successes in combat to swap initiative with an enemy, which opens up some interesting strategic moves. And it’s relatively fast, so you don’t roll and consult or sheet, you just need to draw and display a card. 

It’s hard enough finding time to roll the pretty math rocks with friends, and there are so many amazing RPGs out there, it’s hard to play them all without committing to a long-term campaign. And so many games really excel as campaigns or expect to be your primary game system. The Alien RPG lets you choose if you’re doing a one-shot adventure (Cinematic play) or running a multi-session campaign, with variant rules for both styles of play. This is excellent. While I’m impressed enough by this game to want to try it and do a short game, I also know there’s a lot of game competition and multiple people jonesing to run campaigns, so doing more than a couple sessions of Alien might be hard. The book mostly confines itself to the four “canonical” movies, ignoring the crossovers with the Predators as well as the most comics and novels. It mentions that a few of these exist and gives a short suggesting reading list, and gives nods to a few stories, such as Aliens: Fire and Stone, while also mentioning Sevastopol Station, the setting of the video game Alien: Isolation. And I’m sure there are many more Easter Eggs that went over my head.

The Bad

You only succeed when you roll a six. This means 83.3% of the d6s you roll for a check are irrelevant. You need a dice pool of at least six dice to really feel comfortable with a check, which implies a high degree of competence and skill. According to the chart of probability on page 59, if you have a dice pool of 4 dice, you have a 50/50 chance of success. That said, this does encourage you to push the roll, which encourages the Stress mechanic. 

At 400-pages, the book is large for a one-shot. Large and thus expensive. But it’s not really as dense as you’d expect a 400-page tome to be. It’s really not space efficient. Because the book makes use of text in boxes (which are akin to sidebars) there’s lots of negative space. Each box has its decorative framing, and there’s space between the boxes and within the frame. The words per page is low. 

This sidebar formatting does make the entire book a relatively quick read, and keeps every subject relatively terse and focused, because sidebars rarely continue across pages. As an example, the standard (read: obligatory) “What is an rpg?” section is maybe a quarter-page. 

However, I felt I could have used some more information in a few places. Some clarification or extended examples. There are quite a few rules and mechanical elements listed once and then never really described elsewhere, and I’m uncertain if these are just understated aspects, or remains of vestigial design that never got edited out. As an example, page 103 describes the ways you can gain Stress, and most are fairly obvious and described elsewhere. Except one. You apparently also gain Stress if “You suffer one or more points of damage”. I dislike this, as it partially negates the choice aspect of gaining Stress, but it’s also not really mentioned elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the matte black pages are vulnerable to fingerprints. If you touch a page and haven’t just wiped your fingers on a sterile cloth, you will leave a mark. If you’re highly concerned about the quality of your books and keeping them pristine, you might want to wash often and watch how long you touch a page. Or invest in archivist gloves. 

I’m uncertain how I feel about ship combat being in the chapter on employment and lifestyle. It makes sense it’s by the starships, and it’s useful having it off to the side as an optional side-system. As you don’t expect dogfights or space naval battles in an Alien campaign. But it was a weird transition reaching that. And had I not noted where it was, finding those rules might require a lot of flipping. 

The Ugly

The character sheet in the back of the book looks like the rest of the book: light-grey shaded boxes overtop a black background. It’s the type of character sheet you print when your printer has offended you and you want to punish it.

Edit: There IS a printer-friendly version. It’s just on the Fria Ligan site and not the Alien RPG site. It’s here.

Because the book confines itself to the relatively canonical, it doesn’t delve too much into the fate of the USCSS Covenant nor is its destination planet of Origae-6 detailed, leaving that for a theoretical movie that might never occur. So how the Xenomorph XX121 species gets from that colony to the rest of the galaxy (including Sevastopol Station or even LV-426) is unknown. A side effect of this decision is that there are few good hooks for where xenomorphs or eggs could come from or be encountered, apart from tying them to the one known ship on LV-426. 

The Awesome

The gamemaster is identified as the “Game Mother”. It keeps the same initials, but means the pronouns “she/her” can be used. I like anything that subtly implies women have a role at the game table. Especially in a franchise as largely gender neutral as Alien. Plus, “Mother” is a neat reference to the ship’s computer in the first movie. (Aka MU/TH/UR 6000; which I will admit to having forgotten until I rewatched the film a few weeks back.)

Characters have a lot of little roleplaying hooks. Each character has a “signature item”, which is just this little useful or emotionally significant item. One example is actually a tattoo, so it doesn’t have to have a firm mechanical use. Likewise, each character has an Agenda. This is your goal, but favoured in a nice, ominous way. You’re also expected to have a “buddy” and a “rival” in the party. This does push some PvP aspects, but creates appropriate drama and tension that maps to the movies. Such as Ripley being initially antagonist to Bishop, only to grow to appreciate him.

There are four Attributes, each with three associated Skills. I appreciate the symmetry. It’s the little things that make a neat RPG system…

The need for a printer friendly version aside, I rather like the whole look of the character sheet, especially the landscape format. It’s non-traditional. The paired attributes/ skills also makes for an interesting character sheet with those aspects front and center, right in the middle of the page rather than off in a corner. 

Final Thoughts

A month ago I had little interest in the Aliens Roleplaying Game. It looked okay and sure did get a lot of hype, but I generally thumb my nose at licensed RPGs (despite owning many);  the hit : miss ratio is unfavourable and there have been some pretty bad licensed RPGs over the years. Plus, I always felt the Aliens universe was better off being limited to a couple movies—so the story can have a beginning and an end—rather than being a big, sprawling franchise. 

But then a friend got the book and let me flip through their copy and read the rules.

And I realized I had been so completely wrong. After just a few minutes I was damned if I didn’t just want to get my own copy, but also run a game session or two in the Alien universe. And I knew I had to write a review, sharing my wrong-ness with the entire Internet. 

While the concept of the game is just what you’d expect, the execution blew me away. While I’m an ardent proponent that “system doesn’t matter” and that you can have fun playing any RPG with the right people, this game was a firm reminder that a good system makes you WANT to play that game. You choose to play it over other systems. And this system makes me want to run a story using its rules. 

The feedback system for the Stress mechanic is great, and I want to steal it for my own design so badly. I adore that it primarily relies on player choices and risk/reward to build tension. The growing unease as your character’s stress increases, like a game of Dread with dice instead of the Jenga tower: a mechanic I’ve toyed with a few times but never managed to work satisfactorily. And this game nails it. (This ruleset would work really nicely for many other genres, and I’d like to port the rules into a zombie apocalypse game or other horror genre.) And the rest of the game seems quick and easy to learn with just a dash of customization.

Meanwhile, the book really works hard to capture the diverse types of Alien story, from space horror the action, from blue collar truckers in space to heavily armed colonial marines, while referencing several past sources both film, novel, and comic. The titular aliens are only the beginning.

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website, including a bundle of my Ravenloft books including the newly released Cards of Fate and my FIRST adventure on the Guild, Smoke, Snow & Shadows. Others include my first level 1 to 20 class, the Tactician, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, a book of Variant Rules.

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThurRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (Now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!

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└ Tags: 20th century fox, adaptations, Alien, aliens, disney, Dread, fox, Free League Publishing, movie rpgs, Prometheus, review, xenomorph
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Nov22
by "Jester" David on November 22, 2019
Posted In: Gaming Blogs, Reviews

Review: Eberron – Rising From the Last War

Way back in ye old days of 2002, publisher Wizards of the Coast launched the “Fantasy Setting Search”, a competition to create a new world for Dungeons & Dragons. The winner was Keith Baker’s Eberron: chosen out of the 11,000 entries. Eberron is pitched as “D&D meets Indian Jones and The Maltese Falcon.” Eberron was mashed together with choice elements from the top 3 settings of the search and released in 2004. A minor revision of the setting was released in 2009 for 4th Edition D&D. And now there’s a 5th Edition update, Rising from the Last War. 

For the uninitiated, Eberron is a dungeon punk world. The dungeon punk world really. It’s often mistaken for steampunk, but clearly used magic rather than psuedo-science. It’s a world where magic dominates the world rather than technology, creating many modern conveniences. The setting takes many cues from the 1920s, with a gritty noir aesthetic and a world recovering after a brutal and lengthy war that left no one happy so another war is looming. It’s a nice, big setting where you can have a campaign as urban detectives working to solve crimes in the big city, relic hunters exploring trap-filled ruins for treasure, plucky reporters travelling the continent for the next big scoop, former soldiers trying to find a new life during peacetime, and so much more.

What It Is Rising From the Last War?

This book is effectively an update of the Eberron Campaign Setting, which was originally published for 3rd Edition. Rising From the Last War is your standard full-colour Wizards of the Coast product. It uses a mix of modern and recycled art, pulling a few pieces from the vast catalogue of Eberron art done for 3rd and 4th Edition. These are modern enough it doesn’t stand out as recycled. 

In its 320-pages, Rising From the Last War contains four new races—the changeling, warforged, kalashtar, and shifter—along with reprinting the goblinoid and orc racial entries. There are also twelve “subraces”, which are the various Dragonmark Houses. These let you take the house as your race/subrace, swapping out racial features for the powers of a dragonmark. 

Included is the artificer, a full level 1-20 class with three subclasses: the battlesmith, the alchemist, and the artillerist. This is the first new official class for 5th Edition in a physical book. Following this in the character creation section is Group Patrons, which details allied organizations that could sponsor adventurers. This is a surprisingly hefty 38-pages.

A decent chunk of the book is a description of the setting, which occupies 48-pages. Each nation roughly gets a page of text, with some description of the other continents. There’s a description of the city of Sharn here filling 32-pages. Also in this section is a section on faiths, including different pantheons and philosophies, filling 10-pages. Advice on building adventures that fit the setting fills another 76-pages; this section details the themes of the setting, along with various factions and a few key events and regions. A short introductory adventure for a party of 1st level adventurers takes up 17 pages at the end of this chapter.

There’s also a small 7-page chapter on treasure, with descriptions of Dragonshards, some of the common magic items that make everyday life in Eberron so different, and some magic items for daring adventurers. The book ends with a Bestiatry that contains 30-odd new monster stat blocks, plus 7 new generic NPCs.

And at the end of the book is a poster map, which is bound into the spine and needs to be torn out along the perforated edge. One side has a map of the default setting of Khorvaire, the main continent. The flip side has the rest of the (tiny) globe. 

Wayfarer’s Disclaimer/ Rant

Content Warning: Negativity. If you just want to read a review of the book, skip this section.

In July of 2018, Wizards of the Coast released the Wayfinder’s Guide to Eberron on the Dungeon Master’s Guild. This 175-page e-book was designed to serve as an introduction to Eberron with a price of $19.99 on the Guild and $20 on DnDBeyond.com. WotC hyped it significantly, with WotC staff saying they would update it to include the artificer when that was released and update the races and dragonmark houses in that book to reflect the results of the playtests, before releasing the book as Print on Demand. Staff said that IF they did a hardcover Eberron book, the two products would be complementary, and have a different focus. That while the Wayfinder’s Guide focused on Sharn a theoretical Eberron book would focus on another part of the world or the Five Kingdoms as a whole. 

I snatched up the WGtE immediately. As relatively cheap PDFs seemed like an excellent way of offering support to the many, many past settings TSR released, and enabling those fans to set new campaigns in old settings without having to release numerous hardcovers into stores. (And because I had loose plans to run an Eberron campaign for 5e “eventually”; at the rate I get to play, this will be 2021 or ’22. Likely later.)

However, less than a year later, WotC announced Eberron: Rising From the Last War. A product which also does the deep dive into Sharn. A book which is NOT complementary and does NOT have a different focus. Instead, it largely reprints the material from the PDF, copying large sections of text word-for-word. I effectively paid $20 for playtest material—which was released free on the website. This was effectively early access to the Rising From the Last War, with no reduction on the final price for my $20 investment. Even on DnDBeyond https://www.dndbeyond.com/marketplace/source/eberron-rising-from-the-last-war , which has a system for reducing prices based on past investment & purchases, they’re treated like separate products. (I’ve heard from one person that owning Wayfinder’s Guide gave the buyer a $5 discount on Rising From the Last War, but I’ve seen no official statement from, DnDBeyond on this. But even then, just getting the races and subraces—which are provided by both—would be a $14 purchase.)

This upsets me greatly. First, because there’s so many classic D&D settings that haven’t been updated or received books—some for two or more editions—and we’re getting the same setting twice. Secondly, it makes me feel lied to and deceived by Wizards of the Coast and its staff. It makes me feel like I wasted $20 on a redundant PDF. This also negatively impacts my interest in future setting PDF products, which I almost certainly will not buy. 

BUT, all this drama is unrelated to the actual book, Eberron: Rising From the Last War, and thus is not relevant to a review of that product, and so will go unmentioned. While feeling exploited does impact my opinion of this book, I’m striving to keep my review seperate and focus on evaluating the product itself. 

I’m including this disclaimer in case any extra negativity slips through. If a passage seems extra snarky, this is probably why. 

The Good

I quite like Eberron, and this book is some good Eberron. While not my favourite setting (or even in the top 3), it’s a wonderful setting I’d recommend players old and new. It’s not Dark Sun, which is “D&D for people who hate everything about D&D but the rules”, instead twisting things just a little bit in unexpected ways that still make perfect sense. The setting is a fun mash-up of  Indian Jones and film noir, with a dash of Cthulhu Mythos slipped in for good measure.

In many ways, it’s D&D where it doubled down on a lot of the tropes while pushing others to the side. Alignment is sidelined, while magic and adventuring are turned to 11. And by design there are no established big heroes or high level noble NPCs running around. The PCs are the only heroes one needs to concern themselves with.

It’s also a big world with lots of different stories and adventures. It’s not Dragonlance where the world was designed with one story and one threat in mind, and every other story is added on later. There’s so many different areas and places, each with their own drama and adventures. You could run a half-dozen different Eberron campaigns that are all deeply enmeshed in the world and never touch on the same aspects. 

Most of the races seem more balanced than their playtest iteration. The warforged in general has been brought closer in line with other races (much to the chagrin of anyone currently playing one). The kalashtar retains its psionic flavour despite there being no psion/mystic class available at the moment, which probably helps the race as it works for other classes and archetypes. I’ve always been a fan of the shifter, viewing them as a decent take on the “weretouched” trope, the half-lychan, and these are decent, with some nice diversity among the different types of shifter.

I was initially unimpressed with this iteration of the artificer, but it has grown on me. I think it balances the desire to have the class function as a crafter, without having it churn out magic items effortlessly, or require the Dungeon Master to provide constant supplies of gold so the class can use its key abilities. The ability to just make a free magic item from a limited list works. And while I’m sad the alchemist loses the ability to make flasks of acid or fire,  it’s pretty easy to reflavour the acid splash or fire bolt cantrips. The designers even stepped back from having every build include a pet, which greatly improves the class, and it should appeal to more players.

This implementation of dragonmarks is also workable and balanced. A player won’t be broken or overpowered compared to the rest of the party because they have a dragonmark, nor are they required to sacrifice a rare feat/ ability score boost and they can be acquired at 1st level. By making them subraces, the rules also tie the dragonmarks to the appropriate races who make up that house, which is nice. Prior versions used the feat system, with races potentially being a prerequisite, but there was always this pressure to make the rules more open—as that’s how feats worked in 3e and 4—and there were often ways to qualify as other races. 

Patrons are a nice addition to the campaign setting. These feel like the book’s “new thing”, the addition to the game offered by this product (like the focus on Ravnica’s Guilds).  I like the idea of organizations, which can give players a goal for membership and advancement, while also providing adventuring hooks and easy antagonists. Each listed patron provides their allies & enemies as well as benefits of working with that patron, advice on building appropriate PCs as well as any related information like headquarters or even mission types.

The Bad

I’m less impressed with how the dragonmarked rules intersect with half-orcs and humans, where it feels like an entirely separate race and not  a subrace. Dragonmarked humans have little in common with other humans. You could reflavour the racial traits of someone with the Mark of the Sentinel and turn them into a brand new race (say, wardlings or guardiners) and no one would know. Which sounds silly until you remember the kalashtar, who are an independent race from humans, but are human in every way except mechanically. There’s not much separating how the book handles the kalashtar from how they handle a member of House Deneith (a Deneithian I guess).

(Flagrant Self-Promotion: I have my preferred way of handling dragonmarks. See the Shameless Plugs section at the end for a link.) 

There are no gnolls in the book. While orcs and goblinoids have a big place in the lore, mechanics for these have been released before (twice in the case of goblins). Eberron gnolls can be less evil than in other worlds as they lack the normal demonic ties, which was the reason they were previously excluded from books like Volo’s Guide to Monsters, and they’re a favourite race for many players. This would have been a nice place to slip in some gnoll love. 

The races are generally fine, but the changelings are a little anemic. Their primary power is still their shapechanging, which is almost a flavourful ability. It’s great in game, but doesn’t really affect the character’s balance. And while shifters are probably balanced, their signature shifting ability feels too short and overly focused on combat. I would have liked it to be 10 minutes and include some exploration features, like tracking. 

I’m disappointed by the lack of feats in general and racial feats in specific. Xanathar’s Guide to Everything added these for the races from the Player’s Handbook, but it seems unlikely a later expansion will offer a warforged feat and assume purchasers own this book. With options like the warforged juggernaut removed for players, this could have been a feat. 

(DMs Guild Adepts: Get on this!)

Evaluating the artificer, the base class is fine but I’m not wowed by all the subclasses. The alchemist is so-so: it’s low level feature is awkwardly random, and doesn’t scale well at higher levels. It’s presented as the “healer” subclass, but the amount of hit points it can restore just doesn’t keep up. The artillerist is also weird, being shown as the “wandslinger” in art, but is all about creating magical turrets.

Several of the trap magic items haven’t been changed since playtesting, and new ones added. For example, newly added is the prosthetic limb, which is basically flavour and lets you be an adventurer despite being down a limb. But using the limb costs an attunement slot, so you can use fewer magic items. You’d almost be better off with a mundane non-magical prosthetic. Likewise, the wand sheath is useless. Yes, it prevents the wand from being forcibly removed, but that’s a super niche situation. However, producing a wand from your belt or bandolier is an object interaction, while with the sheath it’s a bonus action. It’s a magic item that requires an attunement slot to make drawing a wand slower with the “benefit” that you can’t be disarmed of your wand. 

The Ugly

The biggest complaint is that there is no index! This is a game reference book. It’s something meant to be used at the table to hastily look up names of famous NPCs or cities. A lack of index makes it harder for DMs to use this book at the table and look up setting details. If using this book is significantly harder than using the Eberron Wiki then this book is problematic. 

Rising From the Last War greatly favours allies and antagonists over world lore and setting details. This is a feature/bug, as more knowledge of opposing forces and the bad guy’s motivations is undoubtedly better for making adventures. But setting details are what distinguishes Eberron from other worlds. You can transplant organizations to other settings (as 5e has demonstrated with elemental cults moving from Greyhawk to the Forgotten Realms) but moving locations and cultures is harder. 

A good DM can invent world details if they desire, but the principal reason you buy settings to avoid having to create the whole setting and locations. Plus, sometimes you’re just not inspired as a DM, and need to look-up details for a location. While you can always choose to ignore the book and invent places, this product doesn’t provide many details for the alternative. This book has significantly less lore and details on each of the Five Nation than either of the 4e and 3e campaign settings. Sometimes less than half as many words. 

For example, say your party of adventures leave Sharn for the adjacent King’s Forest. I can find nothing on the wood. Is it an enchanted forest of fey, and a manifest zone of Lamannia? Is it literally the forest of the king and a nature preserve? Or is a sparse wood that has been heavily felled to build the city?

The patrons are nice, but each takes-up 3 to 4 pages (with art), which feels excessive. I imagine they could have pulled that back to a page apiece, like the dragonmark houses, reducing that section from 38-pages (larger than the section on the nations) to easily half that size. And the adversary entries are also fairly long: I don’t know if we need as many words on the Aurum as on Breland.  

It’s a retcon, but I also wish they would have corrected the scales of the world, added a bit more distance between Khorvaire and Xen’Drik. As presented, the world of Eberron has a circumference of 16,000 miles, opposed to the 24,000 miles of the Earth. It’s under half the size of Earth. It’d be as small as Mars! 

The Awesome

It’s a small detail, but the fonts in this book are different but fun. They have an art deco vibe, that gives this book a very different feel. Just by looking differently than you expect from a fantasy RPG product you know Eberron is something else. 

There are little newspaper sidebars throughout the book, providing the view of the common people on certain dramatic subjects. These also subtly emphasize the 1920s vibe of the setting, and the general tone of the world. They also often provide small like adventure hooks and gossip, that can be common knowledge but may not be entirely reliable. 

There are some amazing pieces of art. There’s a lot of recycled pieces (mostly from the 3rd Edition book), but lots of new works that really show the world and places. Art that provides a tone for the world. 

There’s not only rules and a monster stat block of a jaeger-sized warforged colossus… there’s also a map of the interiour. 

Final Thoughts

If you don’t own a prior edition’s version of the Eberron setting (or the Wayfinder’s Guide to Eberron) but the setting sounds interesting, then I heartily recommend that you buy this book. There’s multiple new mechanical options as well as a great campaign setting that can send you on endless adventures. It’s a great setting and this is a solid introduction. 

Even if you’re just curious or use a homebrew setting there’s a lot of stuff here to inspire you or to steal. Changelings and shifters effortlessly fit into virtually every campaign setting. Even warforged can be made to work with a little imagination, be they tinker gnome created constructs in Dragonlance or twisted hybrids of flesh and steel in Ravenloft. And the artificer is a decent class, and arguably the best official execution of the concept. This is without mentioning the many patrons or antagonists that could be pulled out of the setting and placed in a homebrew world. 

However, while it is an excellent Eberron book, I don’t think it’s the best, let alone the most comprehensive. If you have the 3e Eberron Campaign Setting and/or the Wayfinder’s Guide, then it probably depends on your financial situation. There’s a lot of original content in this book, including more on the various organizations (both good and bad) along with new monsters. But you can find equivalent amounts of world lore in Wayfinder’s Guide, and significantly more lore in books from previous editions. If you have a shelf of Eberron books  then this book is going to give you little that you don’t already know. Ironically, the cheaper PDF might be the better option for those with extensive Eberron libraries. That said, you’re still not going to regret the purchase: it’s an excellent book with a focus on different aspects of the setting. You’re bound to learn something new or rediscover some old fact that you missed the first time. After reading this book you might come away with a renewed appreciation for some faction or look at a patron with a different light or even consider presenting a group you’ve never used before as the adversary of a campaign.

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website, including Spellscars, which doubles as my subsystem of choice for using Ebberon’s dragonmarks. Others include a bundle of my Ravenloft books; my adventure, Smoke, Snow & Shadows; my first level 1 to 20 class, the Tactician; and a book of Variant Rules. I also have a book with new artificer subclasses, a revision of an older product. 

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThruRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (Now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!

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└ Tags: 5e, 5th edition, campaign settings, D&D, D&D beyond, dndbeyond, dungeon punk, dungeons & dragons, eberron, fantasy world, magictech, review, wayfarer's guide to eberron, wizards of the coast, wotc
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