Finally had our first Eberron game. Session 0, a little break, and Thursdays are back to being D&D.
Did a lot of explaining, exposition, Q&As to get the players (all still fairly new to D&D in general) comfortable with the dense setting of Eberron. Thankfully the books for 5e are proper setting books, so they can read what I as the DM has to read to get the world built around them. This group has mostly played the 5e modules before with me. So they're looking forward to a more open ended style campaign. But, the choice paralysis was real.
As a more improv minded DM it's really fun kinda sitting back and listening to the players kind of finding their footing. Yet, I as the game runner also have a lot of tools to ease that.
During our session 0 I gave them a plethora of patrons to choose from. Whether they cultivate that option as a source for things to do later on will be up to them of course. But I had a few goals for these first few sessions to aid them in finding their grounding.
1. I wanted them to see and be in Sharn.
2 I wanted them to interact ic-ly with quite a few of the Dragonmarked Houses.
3. Get them on the Lightning Rail.
Gendrick Tribeard was the patron they chose. He's a dwarf who, along with his family, worked as arms dealers for House Cannith out of Cyre during the Last War. The Day of Mourning happened and this caused a bit of introspection from the middle aged dwarf. He's now a member of an Adventuring Guild with a side project to try and undo a lot of the evil he's perceived he perpetuated during the conflict. He's hiring aspiring adventurers to look in to illegal arms proliferation during this era of post-war peace.
Sharn has been the staging point for smugglers who are looting the Mournland and bringing these unaccounted for weapons to the various criminal factions in Sharn. This sent the party to eastern Breland to watch a possible route along the border with Zilargo for these evil do'ers.
The thing is, the smugglers are a few Warforged who are just trying to find their place in the world. In typical D&D, you murder the thieves and split the spoils to gain some XP. Presenting a more nuanced moral dilemma is one of the tenants of a Eberron campaign. So that's where we started.
As a DM I had to weave their motivations for doing what they're doing (the PCs and the NPCs) together in a pretty brief amount of time. While trying to achieve my goals... I'll share the results of that in another post shortly. I'm up way past my bed time.
