Post/Author/DateTime	Post
ampman 07-15-06, 02:20 PM	This question may have been asked before, so my apologies if it is a repeat. I am thinking about starting up another pencil and paper campaign soon (after my group has been on a long hiatus from such, playing World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, and most recently DDO). In general, I like the Eberron setting, but there are some things I would still like to retain from a more 'generic' fantasy setting. The first is deities. If I were to use the 'standard' pantheon from the Player's Handbook, for example, how would you suggest I go about it. Changing the gods of the setting means changing the back story of the setting to a large degree (it seems, at first glance). The deities of eberron seem more impersonal than the deities of other fantasy settings. The second thing is, how would I include 'standard', lolth worshipping drow? I have several adventures from Dungeon magazine, as well as the City of the Spider Queen adventure, that require 'standard' drow. Again, changing the drow (or adding to them) means changing both the deities of Eberron and the history of drow in the world. I would much rather play in the Eberron setting, however changed, than borrowing elements from the Eberron setting to use in a more generic fantasy setting (such as Forgotten Realms or Mystara, for example). Any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks in advance :)
Bruize 07-15-06, 03:10 PM	I think you're going at this all wrong. While admirable to want to chnge your campaign setting, it is much easier to change the modules. The drow in the City of the Spider Queen might be a tribe that have taken up residence in an ancient giant city. References to spiders would be replaced with references to scropions. Etc. References to Driders might become Scorrow (Secrets of Xendrik). If you ran a module that used the core D&D pantheon, change the marks and references to something it correlates to in Eberron. It's really much easier that way. It also makes your players feel a disconnect from Core D&D...seeing something new and maybe exotic.
Nived 07-15-06, 03:26 PM	Many people here are probably going to react badly to your questions. The differences between Core D&D and Eberron, primarily the Drow and to a lesser extent the interation of the gods, is what people like about the setting. That being said. Yes, the addition of the Core pantheon would significantly change things. You either have to change the dieties or change the cultures. Take the elves for example, in Eberron they have no patron god, they use ancestor worship. Adding Corellon would significantly alter the world perspective of the elves. How would he fit in iwth the Undying Court? Similarly in Eberron the Drow are in Xendrik, across the sea from most civilization, you just don't have massive Drow cities in the underdark under Sharn, Wrot, Flamekeep or what not. In annother vein the Underdark isn't what it used to be. Kyber is a prison full of fiends, abberations, and things that should not be. My suggestion if you really want to use Underdark spider worshipping drow... as much as I'm loathe to put them in the setting. Have them in Xendrik, deep in Kyber with Lloth being a spider themed Rajah from the Age of Devils locked deep in Kyber. These Drow, after their escape from the giants went underground and fell under the power and such of said demon. Though really I think you'd be better off walking a new path rather than going down these tired old cliches.
(Psi)SeveredHead 07-15-06, 03:26 PM	This question may have been asked before, so my apologies if it is a repeat. I am thinking about starting up another pencil and paper campaign soon (after my group has been on a long hiatus from such, playing World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, and most recently DDO). In general, I like the Eberron setting, but there are some things I would still like to retain from a more 'generic' fantasy setting. The first is deities. If I were to use the 'standard' pantheon from the Player's Handbook, for example, how would you suggest I go about it. Changing the gods of the setting means changing the back story of the setting to a large degree (it seems, at first glance). The deities of eberron seem more impersonal than the deities of other fantasy settings. They're impersonal. That was the point. A lot of people didn't like the interfering FR deities. PCs can directly interfere with the plans of a religion by going after its clerics and temples. Of course, NPCs can do the exact same thing to a religion they don't like (or support a religion somehow). In some other settings, the only way to topple a religion is to directly interfere with a deity. Most campaigns would TPK if PCs tried to do that... The second thing is, how would I include 'standard', lolth worshipping drow? I have several adventures from Dungeon magazine, as well as the City of the Spider Queen adventure, that require 'standard' drow. Again, changing the drow (or adding to them) means changing both the deities of Eberron and the history of drow in the world. CotSQ wouldn't work in Eberron. There's no Lolth, there's no "silence of the drow deity/pantheon" because there's no such thing in Eberron, and a bunch of other issues. It's an FR adventure and belongs there.
Kid SixXx 07-18-06, 07:02 PM	CotSQ wouldn't work in Eberron. There's no Lolth, there's no "silence of the drow deity/pantheon" because there's no such thing in Eberron, and a bunch of other issues. It's an FR adventure and belongs there. Eh, if you keep the adventure strictly as an incursion and leave out the whole Silence of Lolth nonsense (or include it for flavor's sake, but disguise it as something else. not sure what off of the top of my head.), I'd think that CoTSQ would be one of the easiest modules to give a facelift now that Secrets of Xen'Drik is out: Rehashed plotline of CotSQ from memory with Eberronyness liberally inserted: The Storm Princes bring in the heroes to investigate the typical rash of mysterious deaths & discover that a tribe of Drow, led by a powerful priestess of an aspect of The Keeper (since Kiranseelee is a patron of the undead) is attempting to start an eldritch machine / perform a giant-wroght ritual / ad nauseam that will open a gate to Mabar & release enough negative energy to allow her undead army to wipe Stormreach off of the map. The party forges it's way past the Yuan-Ti or other peril to eventually discover from the Sulatar / benevolent tribe of Abeil / colony of awakened Dream Serpents / Court of Thelanis that our evil Drow Tribe in question inhabits a ruined city deep inside Khyber. On their way to the city of our mysterious Drow tribe, the party has run-ins with the Abeil / Umbragen / Lost Sahuagin Tribe / Name Your Aberration, and find brief refuge with a druid's cabal led by a Landforged Walker (use the subterrainian flavor of the PrC, use Greenbody's stats & name the guy Mycon or some other fungi-related Warforged name) To the party's chagrin, they find out that the Drow tribe has forged a loose alliance with whatever critters you want to roughly correspond to the forces of Kurgoth Hellspawn from CoTSQ. At first, I thought it might be cool to use the Sulatar as the BBEGs because they already have the alliance with the Fire Giants built in (sub for Kurgoth's horde) & you could substitute Fernia for Mabar as the planar effect in question & have the Sulatar use a fire-based army instead of using the undead premise from CoTSQ Having the Sulatar bring about the Promise of Fire as an apocalyptic Final Solution to the forieginer problem might be a good plot device, but I don't think the Sulatar give enough of a hoot about outsiders to make a move to destroy them. The Sulatar have outlived other attempts to encroach Xen'Drik & they'll probably outlive the current age of new settler influx as well, so there's no real motivation for the Sulatar to attack Dar Qat or Stormreach. That & there is already a "defeat the fire-based enemy" plotline found in the Shards of Eberron adventure trilogy found in older editions of Dungeon, so I didn't want to use the same planar effect twice. I'm trying to preserve as much of the original flavor of CoTSQ as possible, so I went with the "negative energy" scenario in CotSQ and used the Mabar manifestation. Anywho, the party then has to sneak past / wipe out / trick the allied elements into fighting the Drow so that they may destroy the eldritch machine with one of the Destiny Arms they stumbled upon on the way to the boss battle / prevent the ritual by killing the Eberron version of Irae T'Serran, whom IMO is a marvelous villain. Liberally sprinkle with other desired elements (Quorforged, more giants) as needed. You could run a tidy adventure path by coverting CoTSQ, but it'd take quite a bit of polishing, because CoTSQ is a very railroady adventure & it's built with clerical support in mind because of the sheer number of undead. I'd have to tinker with it heavily in order to balance it so that even eccentric class combinations would have a reasonable chance of success.
Just another user 07-18-06, 07:13 PM	The second thing is, how would I include 'standard', lolth worshipping drow? I have several adventures from Dungeon magazine, as well as the City of the Spider Queen adventure, that require 'standard' drow. Xen'drik is huge and the drow culture is hardly monolithic, if you want some heavily matriarcal tribes of drows that worship a femal spider goddess just say that there are some and go for it. As long as it clear that those are some drows and not all the drows.
Kid SixXx 07-18-06, 07:20 PM	Xen'drik is huge and the drow culture is hardly monolithic, if you want some heavily matriarcal tribes of drows that worship a femal spider goddess just say that there are some and go for it. As long as it clear that those are some drows and not all the drows. Yep. Just make her an aspect of The Fury & import Driders and / or Yochlol (sp) if you absolutely must. I wouldn't totally change the way Eberron Drow society works unless you're undeniably bound to the Greyhawk / FR system which, IMO, is dispensible.
Just another user 07-19-06, 06:00 AM	I wouldn't totally change the way Eberron Drow society works unless you're undeniably bound to the Greyhawk / FR system which, IMO, is dispensible. My main problem with that is not one of canon but one of - excuse the word - logic/good sense. To say that all the drow in Xen'drik share the the culture, religion or way of life is, well, stupid. As I've said Xen'dirk is HUGE and this even without counting in the Traveller's curse and the drows are not part of a unified kingdom and are never been, they don't have a house Sivis for comunication and their xenophoby is not limited to other races, this even if you don't consider how dangerous is moving around in Xen'drik, the drows there should be found in all sizes and colors (figuratively speaking) from the wandering tribes of 20 members or so with and an adept 3rd as their most powerful spellcaster to the thousand members strong, stable tribe that live from generations in or near at an abandoned giant city complete with magic item caches and epic levels artifacts/eldritch machines. And, if I can rant on, this potential variety is even one of the best parts of the settings, if you look at the ECS you will see that for every thing, from dragonmarked houses to arenal's elven clans, from demon wastes barbarian tribes to eldeen reaches druidic sects it always goes out of his way to make sure that there is always a place for the GM to insert something unusual and that's great and should always be considered when creating/adapting new material for Eberron, rather than "change" the setting, try to add to it, you have a lot of space to do it and Eberron will be better for it IMO. /rant
Ellorin 07-20-06, 01:22 PM	The second thing is, how would I include 'standard', lolth worshipping drow? I have several adventures from Dungeon magazine, as well as the City of the Spider Queen adventure, that require 'standard' drow. Not really, no. I'm planning a conversion of the "City of the Spider Queen" at the moment and I believe that no Loth-worshipping drow are required( besides, it mostly deals with Kiaranshalee worshippers). The Khyber dwellinf Shadow elves, the Umbragen, work very nicely, with some modifications for the original story of course. The general idea is that a group of Umbragen, harried by their enemies in Khyber( Kurgoth's army, although I'll replace him and some of his minions by either Dragon Below or Dreaming dark forces) fled to the ruins of a Qabalrin city(Maemyidra) where , being desperate, they freed an ancient vampire, a cleric of the Shadow( yes, the main villain-can't remember her name at the moment) . She agreed and would do it, but only after gaining complete power over them...which meant a coup. Replace the "Lolth worshippers" with Umbragen fugitives that refuse to yield. Of course, most undead in this scenario are elves, not drow. It even makes the existence of so many high-leveled NPCs more plausible: many or even most of them are ancient undead elves, not drow. Bear in mind that you will need to make a lot of changes to make it stick to Eberron (for examle, the alignment issue-every drow but 2 are diabolicaly evil in the original). The whole thing begs for a threa of its own. But it can work. No spider is required.
Altar_Boy 07-20-06, 01:59 PM	Change Lolth to Vol. Have Vol be quiet since the Day of Mourning. Hundreds of Vol-worshipping Drow = good-times.
(Psi)SeveredHead 07-20-06, 03:40 PM	Change Lolth to Vol. Have Vol be quiet since the Day of Mourning. Hundreds of Vol-worshipping Drow = good-times. Why would so many drow suddenly start worshipping Vol? Seems a bit out of character for them. In the case of alignment issues, while Eberron drow can have any alignment, drow of [insert group here] could all (or mostly all) be chaotic evil.
Romulus LoneWolf 07-23-06, 10:35 PM	Secrets of Xen'drik introduce the Sulatar, a variant Drow culture of fire-worshippers, and also mentions the Umbragen (first introduced in #330 of Dragon). If you ask me, it wouldn't be too unbelievable for there to be at least one tribe of Drow worshipping a spider-goddess (perhaps based on the Fury), and for them to be at war with the scorpion-god worshippers.
DoveArrow 07-24-06, 07:13 PM	I think you've hit up against one of the biggest problems with Eberron. Generic adventure modules just aren't easily adapted to the campaign setting. Sure, you can jury rig them to fit, but it's not as easy as just changing the names of the gods and the cities. You really have to work at it. That's primarily why I write all my own adventures for Eberron. However, with CotSQ, I think the suggestions so far are very good. Also, you might want to take Keith's recent post in the AKB thread might help you get the juices flowing. There's some good stuff in there, particularly about the Qabalrin. Maybe this particular drow cult were somehow associated with the Qabalrin and began worshipping some dark creature from Mabar instead of Lolth. Just some thoughts.
Altar_Boy 07-26-06, 10:21 PM	I hope you're not suggesting "City of the Spider Queen" is generic. From what I've heard of it, it's based in the Forgotten Realms, and is highly influenced by a temporary plot twist in the ongoing metaplot of Lolth. But to be fair, FR drow and Eberron drow are very different. It might just be easier to replace it with another race altogether.