Hey foks. some general notes regarding subtle changes to the game taht is mostly just flavorwise for the setting..

--elves make use of the akasha... they live long and the unliving longer. the akasha help them keep looong memories sorted out.

--dragonshards enhance access to the akasha. don't ask me yet how statistically... its generally believed to be true.

--again, warforged were created for the last war, but it turns out they make gret vehicles for dead ancestor's spirits.this makes them comodities to those that want their family to stay around after dying... not everyone really buys into that, but karrnath do. it's rumoured everywhere else... the warforged are running like hell to the mournlands to escape such fates.

--the mournlands create living spells and bad creatures that will leave the mist as the opportunity arises. Breland's floating citadel patrols that border almost exclusively. Droaam readily captures anythin they can for their own use, and the taleta plains/karrnath use undead and dread necro guerrilla teams to kill anything appearing on their side.

--the city of sharn and the floating fortress are actually made from a substance called, "floatstone". It is EXTREMELY expensive, and House lyrandar shipwright's guild has exclusive access to it. They say its from far off shores of xen'drik, but rumours spread that it's from another world altogether. Rocks that float. a one ton chunk of floatstone actually requires 1 ton of weight to keep from floating away. a ton of normal rock mortared to a ton of floatstone literally weighs nothing. with good leverage, a child could push it. that is how the floating citadel floats, and how the spires of sharn grow so high, and how the cloud city orbits those towers. Many nations and organizations are very interested in floatstone, but it is so expensive, it is difficult to become abundant. on a related note, House lyrandar has been purchasing huge amounts of mercenaries from Droaam and Valenar to travel with them... but they don't come back. "we're setting up a safe zone over seas" is the official answer. Droaam and Valenar aren't complaining: Lyrandar is paying three times the normal campaign rates.

--anyone can produce a dragonmark of any type at any time... just spend the feat. about once a month someone on eberron has a new mark... 80% of the time it's a newborn, 20% of the time someone just spontaneously manifests one. 9 out of 10 times, they are part of the appropriate heritage, but at least once a year it's someone completely random. the appropriate house does all they can to find and claim those "rogue marked" to retain control of the mark... kids get stolen, grown men get kidnapped, the rogue marked goes to the appropriate family or they end up getting killed. If there is an exception to the rule, they are hiding the fact VERY well.

There is still no example of anyone having more than one mark ever.

--of course, the normal eberron planes have been replaced with my spirit world model, but the three dragons legacy still exists, at least as folklore-- syberis, eberron, khyber. Whether it's more than folklore at this point is hard to say.

--no one who has set sail acros the sky for the belt of syberis rocks in the sky has ever returned. We don't know why.

--everything else is pretty much as laid out in the books... I'm just incorporating these extra doozies to give it my preferred taste. Last war same as before, dragonshards, same as before.

Thank you to all of you that pushed me to explore this campaign setting. It's delightful. Do your best to make it our own.

Surreal - Will we be at much of a disadvantage if we do not know much about the Eberron setting? I do not own the books, though I can get access to them. As much as I'd love to familiarize myself with the setting, between being a full time grad student and two part time jobs, there isn't much time left for leisure reading. I suppose at the very least I should just read up on the region from which I'm from.

Another concern is that while a rich setting is nice, I wonder if it may complicate things in a PbP as the pace is already slow and things may become hard to follow if they are too complex. I have no experience with PbP though, so I could be wrong about this.

I do really appreciate all the work you're putting into this Fil, so I apologize if I'm stepping out of bounds. I'm just worried that the scope may be starting out too big, and think it'd be easier to start off a little simpler and see how things develop from there.

Surreal - So you're saying that a spirit can placed into a Warforge body correct? Do warforged themselves have spirits, or are they "just machines"? (that could be an interesting side philosophical aspect) If warforged do possess spirits, are those shoved out and replaced? What happens when that spirit is then exorcised?

Warforged use racial pc souls to be created.. basically a different type of undead, when you think about it. regular constructs use nature spirits to be powered, and never were alive to begin with.... possessing them is not an easy process. warforged, however, are dead souls trapped in bodies. it's as easy for a ghost ot possess a warfporged as a regular person, but the warforged don't remember their former life as a flaw to the forged process. There are lots of philosophical debates about this amongst those that believe and understand it. (an astral construct is the general exception to all rules, as usual, and can be possessed as well)

I'll provide all the real necesary info regarding the game in a brief essay that will help set the time and place for the aprty... I only have the core settin book myself, so I can't get too deep into the campaign's mythos either... I'm pretty good at keeping epic stuf localized.The big picture is my problem until you look at it.

PbP is fantastic... it can move very fast, or very slow. it depends on how the team writes... we've all heard the analogy "RPG is like wriing a novel" but in this case, it's literal. I'd recommend posting in third person, like yer an actual author. the team will decide how assumptive we are of each other's reactions and filling in minor details.it's gonna take trust and some intuiton on yer parts, and I can't have thins set in stone. the plot can move incredibly fast if we let it... combat, as usual, is the slowest part o the game. I won't random encounter too much. Again, posting itself is worth xp, and social challeges are CR;s like a fight is. you can get 3000 xp for convincing a dignitary to assist you in a few posts. kudos! when you fight, it's because it's fighting time.

again, this is very simple, that can go very deep with one player and stay simple with another. I function well at all levels, and will learn to post in response with the team's fun.,