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I always loved the old Eberron setting when it was first published back in the heyday of 3.5e. I bought a lot of the early products; in fact, I think I have almost all of the 3.5 era products, including most of the novels (although I don't pretend to have read all of them in detail still.) I generally dropped out of D&D during the 4e era, and played 3.5 with my friends for a couple of years before our group ended up slowly eroding due to people moving, getting too busy, etc. I don't know much about 5e either, because I'd fallen out of active participation in the hobby and didn't really care what WotC did with the brand anymore other than an academic curiosity. My own tastes wandered into super rules-lite iterations of the d20 system, specifically the m20 game. This was a perfect game for me at a high level, and I undertook to adapt it in various formats over the years to some of my various settings, including a somewhat atypical fantasy setting and a space opera setting that would have the same capes and rayguns feel as Star Wars.
But one project that I dabbled with and thought was quite fun was remixing the Eberron setting into m20. This wasn't meant to merely be a conversion of the game mechanics I knew from the 3.5 setting books into an m20 rule-set, it was also an opportunity to remix certain elements of the setting to make them work better. I always thought, for one thing, that Eberron struggled with reaching its high concept because it was a D&D setting that was saddled with D&Disms that had to be included, because it was a D&D setting, but which took it further away from its original vision and high concept. Now, I don't know that setting creator Keith Baker would agree with me; rather, I think it's in reference to how I interpreted the high concept of the setting.
And that's the essence of a remix, right? You give your song to another artist or producer, and they interpret it differently than you did. It's not necessarily meant to replace the original version, of course, it's just another interpretation of the work, and maybe you like one, maybe you like the other, maybe you like both and listen to both of them back to back, like I sometimes do. Maybe one even has a different purpose than the other, and you use it for a different kind of set or mood, or whatever. So, that's what this is. This isn't my conversion of Eberron into m20, although it did indeed start that way originally; it's my full-blown remix of the setting, including a conversion to m20.
However, I didn't convert it to any specifically more D&D-like emulation of m20, although obviously I easily could have. Rather, I converted it to my own house version that was originally intended to be used with my own somewhat esoteric fantasy setting. Why do that? you may ask. Doesn't that dilute the manner in which Eberron is represeted as a D&D setting? Well, sure, it does. But again—that's what it means to be "remixed." I'll be changing a number of things, although many of them are not really quite as substantial as you might think. Before I finish up this introduction and get into the meat and potatoes, let me lay out a few guiding principles that I've used directly to inform what my remix will look like:
Eberron's high concept was a swashbuckling game of derring-do in a D&D type of setting. D&D, at least at the time and in the edition that Eberron was developed, was a highly static game of cautious, grid-based tactical combat, which is completely at odds with Eberron's concept. 4e, as near as I can tell, was even worse in this regard, although I suppose that the combat was at least more over-the-top in some ways. I have no idea if 5e is more in alignment here or not, and I don't really care to find out as I have little interest in learning 5e, but the first point of order remains making sure that your system is in alignment with the concept of Eberron and actually supports that concept. I'm quite happy with Dark Fantasy X in this regard. Although I recognize that other systems could also accomplish this goal fairly well, because I've settled on m20 variants, that's the only system that I'll be discussing with regards to remixing Eberron. And I don't mean generically m20; I mean fitting Eberron into a very specific iteration of m20 is a big part of what made this project interesting to me. It will require a bit of adaptation and shoe-horning here and there, but again—that's part of the reason that I find it intriguing, so that's the way it's going to be done.
I've come to appreciate over the years the wisdom of the much more humano-centric assumption that Gary Gygax himself would have had, as well as that of the writers that he was creating a pastiche of, such as Leiber, Howard, and others. Eberron spotlights non-human races significantly, and I've rejiggered the setting to be much more humano-centric in its assumptions, with "demihumans" and monsters appearing much less frequently, although still being available as need requires.
Anything that reeks of wokeness and social justice dogma is remixed out. Eberron, as published in the 3.5 era, was before wokeness was even a term, but the concepts are still there. In general, this means stop pretending that men and women are interchangeable widgets, for one thing. I'll be changing the sex of potentially a great many important NPCs if they are women who are acting like men or vice versa. (If they were to even show up in my games, which is probably unlikely anyway.) It also means that the Christian church stand-in, the Church of the Silver Flame needs to have its "oh my gosh, so oppressive!" snide insults completely removed from the setting. For that matter, I also prefer to have actual Christianity be the default religion of most people, rather than a stand-in for Christianity. And as an American, rather than a European, I also prefer to assume a paradigm of local pastors and whatnot leading congregations rather than big, centralized organizations vying for power. That was one of the main things that the American colonists wanted to escape from, after all. But this is somewhat of a moot point, as I expect religion to more or less fade into the background rather than be a major set piece of any game I'd run in the setting.
Because Eberron was designed specifically to be a setting where everything from D&D potentially had a place, it lacks coherency sometimes. I'm perfectly OK with pruning esoteric D&Disms out entirely and not replacing them, to be honest with you. In fact, adapting Eberron Remixed into the specific Dark Fantasy X game that I'm using means right off the bat that a number of iconic D&D races will have to be changed to something else because those races don't exist in DFX. My design goals for remixing Eberron don't have to be the same that Baker had when he designed it in the first place. Some judicious and occasionally ruthless editing of concepts that never really fit very well is acceptable, and even desirable. To be honest with you, the fact that it tries to be all things to all D&D players a little bit too much dilutes the themes of the setting anyway; yet another good reason to trim stuff if it doesn't fit.
Eberron is very big; the remixing project is taking a relatively light touch on the details of the setting, focusing instead on big picture stuff. That said, a "protagonist" area would be essential for actually playing the game; y'know, a place where most of the action actually takes place. Here, I think the single best setting element, Sharn, as a place of fantasy noir type stories, is this place. I also know that yeah, zipping all across the continent and beyond is a feature of the setting, the modules, the novels, and what's expected generally from Eberron, but I tend to think that there are more local opportunities for adventure than most gamers realize, possibly because not enough of them get out and experience what the local adventuring possibilities in real life actually are. Sharn and its surrounding environs are therefore where any more detailed localized remixing would take place, although honestly, I probably won't bother too much with that until I'm actually at a point where I care to play with this.
Which I should also point out—this is all an academic exercise at the moment. I don't even have a gaming group currently, and I haven't actually gamed in a couple of years. If I were to find one and start running a game in the near term, it wouldn't be Eberron Remixed, it'd be either my own completely homegrown fantasy or my homegrown space opera setting. So I'm not doing this because I want to run it, at least not in the near term future, but rather just because I find the project intriguing in its own right. And it'll be archived here; maybe someday I will run it. I could certainly see myself doing so at some point in the future.
The site will be divided into two basic halves; rules and setting. The setting changes, if I keep dabbling at this long enough, will eventually be longer than the rules half, but as it stands right now it's probably the other way around. However, I intend to keep the setting changes discussion rather low key and high level. To make sense of them, it's assumed that you have access to the Eberron Campaign Setting source book, and maybe a few other setting books too, like the Sharn book. All from the 3.5 era, since that's the version of the setting that I have. Rather than recreate stuff that's in those books, I'll assume that you can reference them directly and I'll discuss areas in which it makes sense to deviate from what was published as part of my remixing efforts.
And those two halves aren't quite as clear-cut as all of that. For instance, if my race list for player character generation is different than in D&D (and it is) then I'll talk a little bit about why I have that race instead of whatever D&D race I'm replacing, and how that fits into Eberron generally a little bit. But I'll cover that in more depth in the setting area too. There will probably be a fair bit of cross-posting of ideas if not of actual pages and text between the two halves.