As far as I can find, it's 1) druids, 2) shifters, 3) fey in the Twilight Demesne, and 4) shadows, wraiths, etc in the Gloaming. Plus a random monster or Dragon Below cult. This seems kind of boring!
Consider this: the Eldeen Reaches' history is so rich and interesting with betrayals on the tail end of the events of the Last War that turned this place into a kind of isolationist little island. Rangers and Druids perhaps coming to a kind of symbiotic relationship concerning the hunting of wildlife; it just screams for interaction of some kind with that dynamic.
Well ... druids aren't just druids, are they? Druids are basically just clerics with treants. There wouldn't be just random groups of druids, there'd be the faithful too, towns and villages and other communities of people living in closer bond with nature than those of say Breland or Aundair.
Also, druids aren't around just for the people, so with enough druids there might be a very noticably wild nature, brimming with bears and wyverns and .. you know, any sort of untamed and dangerous wildlife, including dinosaurs and treants and so on. Including vermin and insects and so on.
Depending on your view of what sort of nature druids prefer, there might be serene and beautiful glades - or, as I prefer, nearly impenetrable thickets full of thorny and tangled brush and poisonous vines and worse, and when you finally push through, you find a deep, stagnant and smelly pool in which resides a nameless freshwater cephalopod from before time itself.
Fey also aren't to be sneezed at - fey could be literally anything. The thing to remember about fey is that they're not slightly weirder elves, they're just as likely to be kobolds or spirits or whatever - at least if you're feeling folkloristic about things. Fey steal human babies and replace them with foxes and whatnot. As far as I've been able to determine, in folklore kobolds are fey.
Undead are - to me - largely uninteresting. I've done particular things with the undead of my campaign world (there's no such thing as a 'free willed' undead, for instance), but the reasons why they are undead are often quite interesting indeed. I don't know why the gloaming is full of undead - but I could cook up any number of interesting reasons. I'd need to know more about the gloaming to come up with any good ones, tho. I checked - it's crap. I'm not going to write up an entire thing now, but it's certainly doable.
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Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
The Eldeen Reaches do strike me as one of the emptier areas, but I think you may be underestimating the Fey a little. I'm not huge on them in most settings, but I like Eberron Fey a bit more. They apparently kind of run on story/fairytale logic in-universe, and Keith Baker often suggests using them to implement creatures and concepts that don't fit neatly in other parts of Eberron. (I recommend Baker's DM's Guild books; "Exploring Eberron" has a more detailed writeup on the planes, including Thelanis, which explains this in more detail.) I think I recall an example being that a classic "Hoards gold and kidnaps princesses" dragon wouldn't fit very well in Argonnessen, but could easily come from Thelanis if you assume that's become a trope of in-universe folklore due to your average person not understanding dragons very well.
(Personally, I actually do like undead under the right circumstances, but you're probably better off using Karrnath than Eldeen if you want to focus on them.)
Finally, there's the political tensions caused by Aundairian revanchism to play with. The more settled areas of the Reaches are probably very tense at the best of times and have a fair amount of espionage going on. I could imagine Breland, Karrnath, and Thrane all having reason to want to play the Reaches and Aundair against each other to keep Aundair focused on local problems instead of warmongering among the Five Four Nations. That has less to do with the Towering Wood, but it's a pretty good plot hook.
For that matter, on the other side of Eldeen is the Demon Wastes. Perhaps the Twilight Demesne has problems with the Lords of Dust?
Well ... druids aren't just druids, are they? Druids are basically just clerics with treants. There wouldn't be just random groups of druids, there'd be the faithful too, towns and villages and other communities of people living in closer bond with nature than those of say Breland or Aundair.
Umm, no, Druids are not "Clerics with treants". Nature Clerics are Clerics with treants. The idea that a Circle of Druids lives in isolation and rarely if ever interacts with nearby villagers or living somewhere that lacks further humanoid is very common.
Umm, no, Druids are not "Clerics with treants". Nature Clerics are Clerics with treants. The idea that a Circle of Druids lives in isolation and rarely if ever interacts with nearby villagers or living somewhere that lacks further humanoid is very common.
They kinda are?
Nah, there are two things wrong with my statement. First, there's not a lot in RAW (maybe even nothing, I couldn't say) that equates druids with treants - and second, druids aren't clerics. But there's an underlying statement too: That they should be.
I mostly think almost everything the publishers put out is sadly mistaken, underwhelming, poorly executed, ill-conceived, unimaginative - and so on. And while it may seem that I'm also saying I'd do everything better than the publishers, at least I'm not quite that arrogant. I can certainly do almost everything more to my liking than the publishers, but then I'm a very small market to target for a large company. Not worth it.
Back to my point though, obviously the druidic faith has common followers - just like absolutely every other faith out there. Yes, there are villages of druidic followers. Are they human farming communities, like Homlet or Shadowdale? Meh, yea but no. They'd be closer to nature. But anyways, mostly they wouldn't be human settlements, they'd be elves, goblins, gnolls (I do not subscribe to the official gnolls - nor, btw, the official elves or goblins).
Anyways, this derails into pointlessness rather quickly, because you end up arguing against my rather subjective interpretation - and I'm not about to change that, but within my own framework, it all makes sense.
I never - or let's amend that to rarely - argue the rules, I argue the fluff. Fluff can and should be subjective. Cause the official stuff is .. sadly mistaken, underwhelming, poorly executed, ill-conceived, unimaginative =)
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Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
There are two problems with my statement. First, there isn't much in RAW (perhaps nothing) that equates druids with treants - and second, druids aren't clerics. But there's also an implied statement: That they should be. dordle
As far as I can find, it's 1) druids, 2) shifters, 3) fey in the Twilight Demesne, and 4) shadows, wraiths, etc in the Gloaming. Plus a random monster or Dragon Below cult. This seems kind of boring!
Consider this: the Eldeen Reaches' history is so rich and interesting with betrayals on the tail end of the events of the Last War that turned this place into a kind of isolationist little island. Rangers and Druids perhaps coming to a kind of symbiotic relationship concerning the hunting of wildlife; it just screams for interaction of some kind with that dynamic.
Well ... druids aren't just druids, are they? Druids are basically just clerics with treants. There wouldn't be just random groups of druids, there'd be the faithful too, towns and villages and other communities of people living in closer bond with nature than those of say Breland or Aundair.
Also, druids aren't around just for the people, so with enough druids there might be a very noticably wild nature, brimming with bears and wyverns and .. you know, any sort of untamed and dangerous wildlife, including dinosaurs and treants and so on. Including vermin and insects and so on.
Depending on your view of what sort of nature druids prefer, there might be serene and beautiful glades - or, as I prefer, nearly impenetrable thickets full of thorny and tangled brush and poisonous vines and worse, and when you finally push through, you find a deep, stagnant and smelly pool in which resides a nameless freshwater cephalopod from before time itself.
Fey also aren't to be sneezed at - fey could be literally anything. The thing to remember about fey is that they're not slightly weirder elves, they're just as likely to be kobolds or spirits or whatever - at least if you're feeling folkloristic about things. Fey steal human babies and replace them with foxes and whatnot. As far as I've been able to determine, in folklore kobolds are fey.
Undead are - to me - largely uninteresting. I've done particular things with the undead of my campaign world (there's no such thing as a 'free willed' undead, for instance), but the reasons why they are undead are often quite interesting indeed. I don't know why the gloaming is full of undead - but I could cook up any number of interesting reasons. I'd need to know more about the gloaming to come up with any good ones, tho. I checked - it's crap. I'm not going to write up an entire thing now, but it's certainly doable.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
The Eldeen Reaches do strike me as one of the emptier areas, but I think you may be underestimating the Fey a little. I'm not huge on them in most settings, but I like Eberron Fey a bit more. They apparently kind of run on story/fairytale logic in-universe, and Keith Baker often suggests using them to implement creatures and concepts that don't fit neatly in other parts of Eberron. (I recommend Baker's DM's Guild books; "Exploring Eberron" has a more detailed writeup on the planes, including Thelanis, which explains this in more detail.) I think I recall an example being that a classic "Hoards gold and kidnaps princesses" dragon wouldn't fit very well in Argonnessen, but could easily come from Thelanis if you assume that's become a trope of in-universe folklore due to your average person not understanding dragons very well.
(Personally, I actually do like undead under the right circumstances, but you're probably better off using Karrnath than Eldeen if you want to focus on them.)
Finally, there's the political tensions caused by Aundairian revanchism to play with. The more settled areas of the Reaches are probably very tense at the best of times and have a fair amount of espionage going on. I could imagine Breland, Karrnath, and Thrane all having reason to want to play the Reaches and Aundair against each other to keep Aundair focused on local problems instead of warmongering among the
FiveFour Nations. That has less to do with the Towering Wood, but it's a pretty good plot hook.For that matter, on the other side of Eldeen is the Demon Wastes. Perhaps the Twilight Demesne has problems with the Lords of Dust?
Medium humanoid (human), lawful neutral
Umm, no, Druids are not "Clerics with treants". Nature Clerics are Clerics with treants. The idea that a Circle of Druids lives in isolation and rarely if ever interacts with nearby villagers or living somewhere that lacks further humanoid is very common.
They kinda are?
Nah, there are two things wrong with my statement. First, there's not a lot in RAW (maybe even nothing, I couldn't say) that equates druids with treants - and second, druids aren't clerics. But there's an underlying statement too: That they should be.
I mostly think almost everything the publishers put out is sadly mistaken, underwhelming, poorly executed, ill-conceived, unimaginative - and so on. And while it may seem that I'm also saying I'd do everything better than the publishers, at least I'm not quite that arrogant. I can certainly do almost everything more to my liking than the publishers, but then I'm a very small market to target for a large company. Not worth it.
Back to my point though, obviously the druidic faith has common followers - just like absolutely every other faith out there. Yes, there are villages of druidic followers. Are they human farming communities, like Homlet or Shadowdale? Meh, yea but no. They'd be closer to nature. But anyways, mostly they wouldn't be human settlements, they'd be elves, goblins, gnolls (I do not subscribe to the official gnolls - nor, btw, the official elves or goblins).
Anyways, this derails into pointlessness rather quickly, because you end up arguing against my rather subjective interpretation - and I'm not about to change that, but within my own framework, it all makes sense.
I never - or let's amend that to rarely - argue the rules, I argue the fluff. Fluff can and should be subjective. Cause the official stuff is .. sadly mistaken, underwhelming, poorly executed, ill-conceived, unimaginative =)
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
There are two problems with my statement. First, there isn't much in RAW (perhaps nothing) that equates druids with treants - and second, druids aren't clerics. But there's also an implied statement: That they should be. dordle
Is it just me, or is there an echo in this room?
Medium humanoid (human), lawful neutral