Well, my last post certainly raised lots of questions. reviewing the sixty-odd messages, the following questions seem to come up a lot:

1. How do the eladrin, tieflings, and dragonborn fit into the world?
2. What about the traditional Eberron races? What's the deal with changelings and doppelgangers?
3. What about gnomes and half-orcs?
4. What's going on with the planes?
5. Artificers! Dragonmarks!
6. How is the world changing?

Having talked with the folks at WotC, there's limits on how much they want me to say until we've actually completed work on the 4E ECS, and there's a lot of good reasons for that. The fact of the matter is that nothing is 100% certain, and things could change. So don't expect a long LJ post on the theory behind planar cosmology in 4E Eberron. However, what I can certainly say is watch DDI. This month has the fully expanded warforged, along with a piece of mine on Mordain the Fleshweaver. Next month you'll see a basic version of the artificer. There's limits on what I can say, because it's NOT official, and it gets confusing if I give out one piece of information and gets contradicted later; but what shows up in DDI is a preview of the world to come.

With that in mind...

The thing I really want to know is to what extent Eberron will be shifting to fit the changes 4th edition has brought to key elements of the world, and whether the intent will be for those changes to be retroactive, or actual historical shifts in the eberron timeline.

While I can say nothing with absolutely certainty, I believe that the goal of the design team is to minimize the impact to the world - to have changes expand the world rather than transform it. The fact that gnomes aren't in the PHB and tieflings are doesn't mean that tieflings suddenly have a dragonmarked house and Zilargo, and that gnomes have vanished from Eberron. Dragonborn, tieflings, and eladrin all have roles to play in Eberron, but these don't come at the expense of what has come before; on the contrary, eladrin use the same role that's been mentioned for them in the past in 3.5 Eberron, and we're just building upon it. There may be changes here and there, but by and large the flavor text of the 3.5 Eberron books you own will remain accurate, and for now I would base your 4E Eberron campaign on that foundation. The next time I post I'll talk a little more about simple, basic requirements for running a 4E game in Eberron, looking to races, Dragonmarked Houses, and such. There's limits on what I can say, but I can give a few tips.

Before that, however, I do want to point to a few of the things that I think work especially well in Eberron. Dr. Tectonic mentioned the Investigate feat in the 3.5 ECS. The Skill Challenge system of 4E is a perfect way to handle an inquisitive campaign. Searching a room? Perception and Insight may be base skills, but Streetwise can help you get info from the locals, Heal may make some sense of the patterns of blood you discover, and History may bring up stories of similar murders. There's a lot of ways to use Skill Challenges - interrogation, chase scenes, even a wrestling match in the Red Ring - and I love working with them.

Rituals are something else that works well with the basic themse of Eberron. Rituals are an excellent match to the intended role of the magewright - a mystical professional filling a specific niche in society. While the final form of the magewright is still under development, a simple way to address it in the interim is to say that a magewright learns to perform one or two rituals without the need for a ritual book (though still using the same time, skill, and components). So the professional arcane locksmith is just that, and you can't beat him up and take his ritual book; he's learned how to perform a specific ritual. Where does he learn to perform his ritual? More likely from a dragonmarked house, in exchange for service in the house guild. So Jorasco enclaves aren't filled with clerics, but they do have healers trained to perform cure disease and remove affliction, and most healers are tied to Jorasco because they have the best teachers. Here again, the mechanics have changed, but the idea remains the same: magewrights provide specific magical services to the public.

I'd also like to take a moment here to talk about Jorasco healers. A key thing to remember is that the 4E system is not intended to be a photorealistic world simulation; much of the flavor is geared towards swashbuckling action, and to simplifying book-keeping. A key feature of this is that PCs heal fully after an extended rest. This doesn't mean that NO ONE IN THE WORLD EVER GETS SERIOUSLY HURT. People can still break bones, suffer internal trauma, etc - and these things will require extended treatment at a Jorasco house. It's just that PCs don't tend to suffer this sort of affliction. So the PC will probably show up to get a disease removed or curse lifted - but Jorasco does good business on more mundane injuries.

Anyhow, next time I will get down to a few of the more practical questions. Again, however, for now my best advice is to trust the flavor of the 3.5 books and watch DDI for new material.