Cut For Space: Original Art! (Patreon)

Sooooooo.... It turns out that something I THOUGHT had been cut for space from Rising From The Last War actually was in the final book after all! Thanks to Rat Queen for pointing that out. But I really wanted to give you all something new, since Jorasco has been delayed. So here's something I KNOW was never in a book: Art by Lee Moyer, commissioned for my original Eberron story bible.

What you can see here is that A LOT OF THINGS CHANGED! This first image was a mock-up of what an ancestry section of an Eberron book MIGHT look like... with three species that are all somewhat different than the species as you know them now!

THE INSPIRED image is the Kalashtar! In the original pitch, "Inspired" was the blanket name for all humanoids bonded with quori; the Kalashtar were a rebel faction of the Inspired, but they were still described as Inspired (though again, they WERE called Kalashtar!). You can see the original concept -- handsome human, but slightly angular, slightly elfy. This predates Steve Prescott's design for the pela headress, which came to be an defining element of both Kalashtar and Inspired.

THE SPELLBORN was the original name for the Warforged. Again, this predates Steve Prescott's iconic design, and as you'll see in an image below, at this point the thought was that these sentient constructs were custom built and all unique. We adopted the name Warforged—along with Prescott's design—when we decided that they'd been mass produced for the war.

THE SHIFTER is the same idea, but the first pass was more like a lycanthrope—rather than being a distinct species, they were individuals with the ability to assume a fully animal form, essentially a limited wildshape.

All the names were made up by Lee when he did the piece -- so the fact that the Inspired is "Lord d'Sarac" is COMPLETELY UNRELATED to the d' tradition of the Dragonmarked Houses!

Here's another Lee's concept images—a Spellborn Alchemist Artificer. Here you see again the idea that the Spellborn were very different from one another in appearance. With that said, we explored this possibility when developing the Warforged for the Eberron Campaign Setting! The first draft of the Warforged had the ability to integrate magic items into their bodies and a range of feats that allowed for dramatic modifications—including extra limbs. As I've mentioned before, the original concept of the Lord of Blades was that he had two additional arms with armblades that he usually kept folded up on his back! Ultimately we decided to stick with the simpler, mass produced core design. Still, you get a little bit of this idea now with the Envoy warforged—warforged produced for purposes other than war.

A final concept image by Lee. When I submitted Eberron I pitched two new classes. The Artificer is the arcane engineer we all know and love. But one of the original ideas of Thrilling Tales of Swords and Sorcery was that player characters should have a way to beat the odds—something replicating pulp heroics. This ended up being the action point system of 3.5 and ultimately evolved into the Inspiration system of 5E. In the initial pitch, I proposed a class that did more with Action Points. From the original proposal: "One of the central elements of pulp novels is the innocent bystander – the seemingly normal person who gets swept into the action and somehow survives against the odds. In Thrilling Tales this is represented by the journeyman – a professional in a peaceful field who possesses an almost supernatural level of luck." If you look waaaay back, the 3.5 Unearthed Arcana sourcebook introduced Action Points and included a bunch of other things you could spend action points on -- ensure a critical hit! Make an opponent drop their weapon! Those were originally developed as abilities for the Journeyman. But in the end, the concept simply didn't feel as compelling or concrete as the Artificer, and it was dropped from the setting.

So there you are—a tiny glimpse into a moment before Eberron was actually called Eberron!