And the new races the Dragonforged!My latest article explores the Morgrave Miscellany, which is now available on the DM's Guild.— Keith Baker (@HellcowKeith)WOOT! So happy to finally release this badboy into the wild!
If you love &, I think you’ll really appreciate everything & I put into this book!Pick up a copy & let us know what you think!— Ruty @ #ECCC (@RutyWoot)Well done – this book looks great! I hope you enjoy it.— Keith Baker (@HellcowKeith)Is this the book that explains how to start at level zero?
It DOES!— Ruty @ #ECCC (@RutyWoot).
A Miscellany by Cariadoc and Elizabeth pdf Version. Front Cover Introduction. This book contains Cariadoc and Elizabeth's recipe collection, plus a collection of articles and poems. Except for recipes, everything is by Cariadoc unless stated otherwise.
Last year I worked my way through the, which brought Eberron into 5e. Keith Baker, Ruty Rutenberg, and a team of other contributors now offer a collection of subclasses and you know what, even summarizing the rest of the content is daunting (that’s a good thing). It’s a ton of different ways to enrich characterization of people, places, and things. The book’s conceit is that it is a discussion of classes available at Morgrave University in Sharn. In effect, this is Xanathar’s Guide to Eberron.Disclosure: I received a copy of from Tribality for free, but as far as I know Tribality paid full price for it. To show my biases in full, I was otherwise going to buy a copy, because I am moderate-to-hardcore Eberron fan and moreover a Keith Baker fan.BarbarianFirst in our alphabetical order and our hearts, this section starts out by redefining “barbarian” for the urbane, magitech setting of Eberron. First off, not all of Khorvaire’s cultures are the highly-developed Five Nations.
Perhaps more importantly, though, you can play the class’s features without emphasizing its class name. This was a thing back in 3.5e as well – one of my friends played a barbarian as a John McClane Action Hero. You can take it as read that the setting description and commentary are well-written and to the point.The new subclass here is the EXTREME EXPLORER (sick electric guitar in the background). It’s very friendly to a Lara Croft concept. Adrenaline Rush lets you spend Hit Dice for something other than short-rest healing – you’re adding its result to an ability check, attack roll, or saving throw, then taking (result – proficiency bonus) damage. I’ve about how barbarians can’t readily use the advantage on Strength checks to be amazing in exploration challenges.
This fixes that – even if you know you’ve passed the ability check, it might be worthwhile to spend a Hit Die and take a splash of damage to keep it rolling. You can’t do that for long, but it could still be a big help. Cunning Artisan harvests monster bits and turns them into tools of last-ditch survival – a club, a shield, a javelin, darts, or blowgun needles.
This is just about the definition of a ribbon feature (flavorful, doesn’t come up much) unless your DM takes all of your gear away on the regular. That can be a fun way to play too!. Adaptive Elements at 6 th level is the kind of feature that maybe should just be something anyone can do? Perhaps it’s distinguished more by positive permission and only taking 10 minutes and part of a short rest. Anyway, you modify your gear (implicitly, only your own gear) so that you’re comfortable in either very hot or very cold environments (pick one at the time of use). How often does it come up that doing this for yourself and not the whole party means it’s okay to go explore an area, rather than we’re screwed, gotta leave as soon as possible? It’s possible that your buddies have their own solutions, but this could be a lot more compelling even for a ribbon feature.
Extreme Rush at 6 th level improves upon your Adrenaline Rush feature, with a separate benefit for ability checks, saving throws, and attack rolls. Instinctive Focus gives you a Jack of All Trades-like half-proficiency bonus to nonproficient Int/Wis/Cha ability checks, if you use Adrenaline Rush on them.
This is interesting but the narrative is kind of surprising for even an Extreme Explorer – other than Perception, Int/Wis/Cha checks just don’t come up that much while you’d also be raging. (But you can decide to rage for the Adrenaline Rush benefit and that’s weird too.). Overwhelming Dominance is a reaction to passing a save that lets you make a melee or thrown attack against the source of the save. At 6 th level, this is just incredible for a barbarian. The trick is either being in melee (you can’t control who’s forcing you to roll saving throws very easily) or having a weapon with the thrown property in hand (which you mostly won’t want to do, because you mostly want to wield a big two-hander).
You also add the HD roll result to your damage. Unbridled Aggression adds your HD roll result to your damage, when you use your Adrenaline Rush to hit with an attack. It’s interesting that the text goes out of its way to make sure you can’t combine this with the Hunter ranger’s Whirlwind Attack, the Battle Master’s Sweeping Attack, or any other means of damaging more than one creature with a single attack – this comes up rarely enough that I think most damage-add features just don’t care. In short, Extreme Rush is incredibly good, but encourages you to spend your HD like water – possibly making you more of a burden to the party’s healers, since you won’t have those HD available for short-rest healing. It’s a lot like how the Berserker’s Frenzy makes them a burden for the rest of the party because the barbarian now wants a long nap, or a greater restoration or better. That’s the serious danger of any mechanic that spends HD for non-healing effects, though. Elevated Exploration at 10 th level gives you a climbing and swimming speed without, you know, giving you a climbing or swimming speed, and increases your movement speed by 10 feet.
(That is, you don’t climb or swim at half-speed.) At 14 th level (I’m sure I don’t see why this needed to be broken up), you also don’t risk climbing as long as you use both hands. Conditioned Endurance at 14 th level further improves your Adrenaline Rush: if (HD result – proficiency bonus) = 0 or less, you don’t expend the Hit Die.
This has the possibly odd result of making a 6 the optimal roll on your Adrenaline Rush. In fairness, the feature is incredibly dangerous to use at lower levels, what with the risk of rolling a 12 and taking 10 damage.Overall this is a very cool barbarian path, though it’s more likely to kill you for just using its features than any other subclass that isn’t Wild Magic sorcery. I like the concept of action heroes pushing themselves to the limit, but holy cow are these guys healing sinks. I’m going to say that either they need a self-healing feature (which could just be “when you receive healing, add X to the result”), or they need some better way to throttle the damage they’re taking through something other than just not using their core feature.BardOkay, I wasn’t going to comment much on flavor text, but I have to highlight this discussion of bards in Eberron for being just surpassingly great.
Worth reading for anyone who cares about fitting bards into any setting in interesting and varied ways. The new bard subclass, the College of Keys, is a concept I wouldn’t have looked for – lockpick bards? – but okay, sure, let’s see where this goes. You gain proficiency in thieves’ tools. Sure, necessary. Key Change lets you use Charisma (anything you have Expertise in) in place of Dex (thieves’ tools). As the in-character sidebar note says, the bard flirts with the door, and the door opens.
It’s kind of a weird idea. Timbre Illuminous (we’re still on 3 rd-level features here) lets you sing, expending Bardic Inspiration, to extract information from a construct or mechanism. Weird idea, again, but I love well-written information-gathering features, so I’m a fan of this too. In fairness to my repeated remarks about how weird this is, the College of Keys would fit really well in my own campaign, where they’d just be dedicated to the.
Cypheric Ostinato at 6 th level lets you spend Bardic Inspiration for disarming attempts and saves against traps or wards. This is the feature I’d expect to see at the core of this subclass more than Key Change.
Master Keynote at 14 th level is sort of a mass knock spell, opening all locks and disarming all traps for a short time, at the cost of a Bardic Inspiration die. This is fine, sort of a single feature to defeat some kinds of complex traps, I guess?Overall, the mechanics deal so narrowly with disarming traps and opening locks that I don’t think this has a lot of legs for most campaigns. You don’t want to put your whole subclass into something that comes up once every few sessions. In the right campaign, it’s great, but it needs diversification into more common areas of gameplay.ClericThe new domain here is Sovereign, for the Sovereign Host of Eberron. What it presents is more of a pantheon servant, a cleric serving gods in a collective way.
This too would be relevant to my home campaign. Solemn Devotion grants proficiency and Expertise in History and Religion. Worldly Focus grants proficiency with martial weapons, and lets you use any weapon as a spellcasting focus.
Note the absence of a Domain Spells list. This is going to matter. Channel Divinity: Omnitheist (there’s a typo listing this at 3 rd level rather than 2 nd) lets you borrow a spell from any domain list for 10 minutes. That’s a lot of flexibility, but be careful with the amount of flipping through the book at the table that this requires. Encouraging Whispers at 6 th level lets you add your Wisdom to concentration saves.
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That’s pretty cool. Divine Balance at 8 th level adds your Wisdom modifier to cantrip and weapon damage. I’ve been saying for years that Potent Spellcasting and Divine Strike need to get paired up, rather than each domain receiving just one or the other. (But with Divine Strike you get a second d8 at 14 th level, so this is shorting you a bit on melee.). Sovereign Vassal at 17 th level gives you five domain spells, one of each spell level from 1-5, as long as they’re taken from some domain’s list.
The text here mentions “your other domain spells,” as if you had others? Maybe it’s referencing Omnitheist in a confusing way?The Sovereign domain is fine, very generic. If you want to play a cleric as a multitool, this is the one for you. Please, for your table’s sake, do the work ahead of time and collect the domain spell lists of every domain you can use. On the plus side, it’s hard to imagine a situation (other than being out of spell slots) where your primary features aren’t useful and don’t present you with interesting choices.DruidThe druid flavor text of the original Eberron Campaign Setting was particularly memorable to me, with its five different druidic orders, so the text here that adds two more cultural orders (Talenta halflings and Valenar elves) particularly interests me.
One of my favorite PCs I’ve ever played in tabletop gaming was a Valenar elf druid, in fact.The new druidic subclass is the Circle of the Arbiter. The flavor text here is vague on what they do, other than preventing something related to the outer planes from happening. It’s kind of about being a Circle that includes every druidic order.
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