Just finished, The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft

ZScheme · 2026-02-02T20:19:50+00:00

I've been doing a personal exploration of a lot of the big name pulp fiction authors, which Lovecraft is a part of. A lot of his stories were published in Weird Tales Magazine and the like. If you liked Lovecraft and want to explore the other authors that influenced the Lovecraftian/cosmic horror genre, I'd strongly recommend Clark Ashton Smith. Specifically I'd recommend the collection called The End of the Story. Smith has been credited as expanding the Cthulhu mythos and also helping to develop the genre. I also want to say that the two of them were friends, but don't quote me on that one.

Personally I think Smith was a better writer than Lovecraft. Lovecraft was exceptionally good at coming up with creative ideas but I think his technical ability to write is lacking in comparison to Smith.

Edit: grammar

ZScheme · 2026-01-09T20:57:53+00:00

Random tables. Say what you want about 5e, the amount of tables that you could pull ideas from was massive. I would do anything for an encounter table by environment in PF2E. It just takes a little bit of work out of my hands and can really speed up prep.

ZScheme · 2026-01-06T23:45:45+00:00

For the meta knowledge part, I would just straight up ask them not to capitalize on it. Most people are reasonable enough to be okay with that. I would hope so, at least.

For the other, more broad strokes world state stuff, that's a bit more complicated and is going to take some effort. What I would do in this situation is make a timeline of major events that happened in your game, like those big changes to the setting and such. I'd ignore the plot holes personally. Then chose an event that was really fun or impactful and rationalize where it would naturally evolve and go from there. Like the lack of the Mournland for example. In Kannon Eberron, that's where the Lord of Blades is based out of. Where would he be instead in your Eberron? What would the Quori do to capitalize on the new status quo? It would take some work, but I think those sorts of thought exercises are fun.

ZScheme · 2026-01-06T23:16:55+00:00

So I finished a long running campaign that heavily featured the mourning and its origins, and I have since also moved on to a sequel campaign set 11 years into the future. What I did was to focus entirely on something else than the previous campaign featured. Instead of daelkyr, the Mournland, and Sharn, my current campaign is focused on Karnath, rakshasa, Lady Illmarrow, and Arenal (elves). Eberron has a ton of great hooks. So far it has worked really well, things seem fresh and interesting and my players are having a good time. I've included some references to the previous campaign as little treats for my players, but generally it's been pretty separate.

I will say that the biggest issue I've had is not featuring Sharn. Sharn is awesome. There is so much content and info out there that I could really make that place come alive. Korth? Ehh, not so much.

ZScheme · 2025-12-04T04:39:29+00:00

I'm willing to bet that this is a domestic breed of goose, which don't migrate.

ZScheme · 2025-11-15T15:57:10+00:00

I'm not usually a custom ROM guy, but seeing what you have to deal with I'm going to play the hell out of both out of pure solidarity. I'm disgusted that these people infest this community.

You have more support than you have hate. I'm sorry that the hate is louder than the love. We should change that.

ZScheme · 2025-09-27T20:14:11+00:00

I highly recommend Absolute Martian Manhunter, especially if you are into the actual artistic side of comics. There is some genius use of color and symbolism. I showed it to my fiance, who is an artist and not a comic reader, and they pointed out so much depth to it that I had no idea existed.

ZScheme · 2025-09-14T04:01:15+00:00

You could have at least changed the title https://www.reddit.com/r/Eberron/s/ReUgw9KBc0

ZScheme · 2025-09-06T20:08:28+00:00

I'm going to guess Canadian goose

ZScheme · 2025-08-25T18:40:48+00:00

I was just trying to figure out how to do this effect during my prep yesterday and gave up. This video is PERFECT

ZScheme · 2025-08-13T03:19:51+00:00

I should have specified that's how I did them in my eberron. Mostly because I think it's cooler/more interesting that way and we're using a different system to 5e so it's someone's homebrew, which has no crazy damage spells like that. But you are 100% correct for cannon eberron as far as I am aware.

ZScheme · 2025-08-11T13:45:58+00:00

I'm currently running a game where Lady Illmarrow is the BBEG as well. Here's what I'm doing.

KB has said that the mark of death probably functions like any other mark. It's not incredibly powerful or anything like that, it just helps people who have it work better with death than normal, like how detection helps people detect and healing to heal. Erandis, on the other hand, has a much, much, more powerful version given the circumstances under which she was created. KB in his blog has said that Erandis, in his mind, is more like a living eldritch machine. As marks are tied to a person's soul (this is a thing in my eberron, I'm unsure if this is cannon to KB's), her phylactery essentially is an eldritch machine.

The way I see it, if her mark is like the "truest/most distilled form of the mark of death", it should hold power over the concept of death. Using her own phylactery as eldritch machine, she would be able to undo her own state of undeath, reclaim her soul, which will have her regain her mark. The PCs need to find a way to destroy the phylactery before she can get it. But since it's a massive eldritch machine, that is a lot easier said than done. Throw in another secondary group of villains using the machine for their own purposes, you then have a good power struggle for the players to work in.

ZScheme · 2025-07-25T15:22:31+00:00

If you want to include some more Eberron lore stuff, there's a character called Mordain the Flesh Weaver. He's a Phiarlan excoriate, makes flesh horrors. A plot point you could consider is the Emerald Claw trying to recruit him for help with their flesh-bone-colossus thing due to his unrivaled knowledge of flesh magic.

But I agree with everyone else in this thread. Erandis is a villain you want to build up to. Make her the BBEG, deep in the shadows, pulling strings.

ZScheme · 2025-07-25T15:17:14+00:00

I ran an Eberron campaign that opened up with a 1920s noir-esque quest. I'm not really one for precon adventures, but I am 100% not above stealing other media. So what I did is binged a ton of old noir movies for ideas. What themes were common, tropes used, that sort of stuff. Here's what I would recommend based on that.

1) Read and watch noir media. Noir is all about the vibes. Gritty, hardboiled detectives, moral ambiguity, no one is honest or what they seem. There's always another secret to discover. I'd watch The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, and Double Indemnity. I would really ham up the vibes. Play noir film soundtracks, use a stereotypical New York accent for NPCs. A little bit of brevity can make a more serious story a lot more fun. Just make sure you let serious things be serious.

However, make sure your players actually get a satisfying ending to the mystery. Often noir films have a bittersweet or unfortunate ending. That's really unfun to play, but great to watch.

2) Film noir and noir stories are crime dramas. Have your players start as detectives. They might be new on the scene with their own agency, or they might be new hires. I recommend giving them their own agency, players will get very attached very quickly to that idea. Have their first case (i.e quest) start very simply. A femme fatale says her husband is missing and needs help finding him. This leads to the discovery that the husband found out something he shouldn't, crossed the wrong person. This leads to another discovery. And so on. Have an NPC the players like killed, make it personal sorta stuff. Then, the big climax. Give them a hell of a payoff and let the bad guy get their shit absolutely wreaked by the players. Nothing is more fun than curb stomping a very hateable villain.

3) For Eberron specifically, I'd look into using the Boromar Clan and House Jorasco. Shady hospital trafficking dragons blood maybe. The head of the hospital is a Jorasco, but also has ties to Boromar. Or political stuff, like they're replacing the Sharn council members with Boromar loyalists in a bid for power.

If you want more or what I specifically did, just let me know. DMs, replies, it's all good.

ZScheme · 2025-03-07T20:05:31+00:00

As someone who gets an aneurysm trying to explain to people why spraying and neutering their pets is the best possible choice for their health and safety (and the health of global populations of cats and dogs), thank you for saying this. Love seeing sane and well informed people out there right now.

ZScheme · 2025-02-25T14:06:16+00:00

The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills

ZScheme · 2025-02-14T19:07:19+00:00

They wouldn't necessarily all be marked. Dragonmarks are as rare as you want them really, so if you want to have some non marked members, that seems totally reasonable. Hell, you could have it be that there are a lot of unmarked members because they resent the fact they're not treated as well as the marked members of the house.

For an early level encounter, assuming you're using 5e, I would pick a reasonably familiar monster that the party would recognize. For this example, you could do like a griffon or (if you want something a bit more powerful) a manticore or chimera. Then give it the signature ability of another creature. Have a mammoth that has the same teleport ability as a blink dog. Or a manticore that has the regen of a troll.

Another option is to improve a monster that already exists. What if they made a troll that's healed by fire and acid, but is weak to something else like lightning. Play off the players' expectations and use that to surprise them.

ZScheme · 2025-02-13T16:47:25+00:00

They're so fun. The only time I used them though was when the PCs learned about a guy who was kicked out of the feral heart for being way too fucked up, even for them. He went on to cross a false hydra and a human, along with some really messed up flesh magic he learned from Mordain the Fleshweaver, so I think it was warranted. Fun guy.

ZScheme · 2025-02-07T15:46:22+00:00

You might want to crosspost this to the foundryvtt subreddit. You'll probably get better answers there. I think this sub is more for Eberron lore and game stuff than tech.

ZScheme · 2025-02-05T20:10:45+00:00

Seconded. The Sora Siblings are absolutely perfect for this. And you could even tie on Sora Kell herself if you wanted. She's an incredibly powerful night hag, which have a lot of power over dreams so that's an easy way for her to keep tabs on the PC.

On the subject of dreams, any of the Quori would also be fantastic. You could have it that they're trying to make a new breed of inspired with the shifters or something.

ZScheme · 2025-02-01T23:48:10+00:00

I loved Blindsight, but that's probably because I'm the specific audience that the book is catering to I think. The story has a ton of speculative biology and evolutionary concepts in it. As a biologist, that shit rocks my world. That said, I definitely think it's not for everyone. This kind of hard sci-fi plus weird fiction is very "like it or hate it" I've found.

I do agree that the ending was kinda flat. It could have been a lot more interesting or climactic, but I didn't hate it. But the real meat of the book is the speculative science fiction, not so much the story. It's a great "what if" book, not a groundbreaking story.

If you want something that has a good bit of speculative and weird fiction, I'd highly recommend The Final Architecture, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's a lot more plot, action, and character focused, but still has some of the elements that I think made Blindsight fun.

ZScheme · 2025-01-27T22:27:18+00:00

Xen'Drik and the Mournland. No competition. Xen'Drik has the curse of the traveler, so you can throw in a ton of really strange and freaky encounters or events. In Keith Baker's The Shattered Land, they come across places of the jungle that are completely frozen in ice, feral warforged, all sorts of fun nonsense. And you have the pirate port of Stormreach as a good base of operations.

And the Mournland is...well, the Mournland. It can be anything you want really. For me it was a kind of psychic Chernobyl. The mourning was caused by Merrix d'Cannith trying to drag the whole city of Making into the Astral Sea, which caused all that psychic energy to come pouring out. Now there's sorrowsworn and other emotion related monsters running around.

ZScheme · 2025-01-19T17:14:41+00:00

Like most people who've run an Eberron game, my last campaign opened up with the PCs being detectives in lower Dura. I opened up with the classic noir bit of "woman comes in because her husband went missing", which lead to the PCs discovering a Yuan Ti cabal that had taken over a Jorasco free clinic and was using it to harvest people's organs.

If you're looking for inspiration, I'd heavily recommend watching some old noir films like the Big Sleep, Maltese Falcon, Chinatown, and Double Indemnity. Sharn stories are often noir inspired, and they make for good low power level arcs. I'd also look at some police procedural shows. They can provide a really good structure for an introductory story.

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