I just received my copy of Eberron: Rising from the Last War and I’m loving it. I bought a copy of the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide recently and while I appreciate the lore, I felt the book was thin on gameplay content. Sword Coast had some interesting subraces, a few new subclasses, and a few new spells. The Eberron book, on the other hand, is chock full of goodies. There’s new races, a new class (Artificer) and tons of other stuff I can’t wait to put into a game. Sword Coast was also physically thin, running to only 160 pages compared to Eberron’s 320 pages. I really feel like I got my moneys’ worth here.
The new information on Goblinoid races is particularly interesting to me. I know it’s a D&D trope that the “good” heroes go beat up on all the “evil” monsters. I’ve always wanted to inject more grey areas into what can be a black and white game. Eberron does just that. Making the Goblinoids into playable races is great. Same with the Orcs. I’d been wanting to make goblins in particular into a more neutral race in my game and Eberron just saved me a bunch of time homebrewing this stuff. I’m going to be dropping the Eberron Goblinoids into my main D&D game holus-bolus. Fortunately, my players haven’t encountered any goblins yet, so no need to retcon anything.
The Artificer class looks fun. I have one evil NPC that I think I will retcon into an Artificer. I had him making constructs in my game, but 5e lacks rules for constructs, so I was just making stuff up. Eberron fills this gap somewhat.
My son has fallen in love with the Warforged race. An intelligent robot like player character, adding a touch of steampunk to the game. What’s not to love? We’ve already rolled up his new character, a Warforged Barbarian Storm Herald, and it will be making its debut in our next session 🙂
