D&D General Eberronspace (Or: Connecting Eberron to the rest of the D&D Multiverse)

[wingsandsword]

I've returned to playing the MMORPG Dungeons and Dragons Online the last couple of months. It's mostly set in Eberron (with some high-level adventures in Forgotten Realms and Ravenloft, via planar travel).

Yesterday, I saw at least a passing nod to Spelljammer though. In the game, guilds can have airships as their sort of "clubhouse", and you can have various amenities and crew to provide services for guild members. The guild I am in added an Illithid navigator to our airship, and if you click on him, the flavor text he gives as idle chatter is to talk about how his last job before this was as a crewmember on a 35 ton Nautiloid until it was wrecked in an encounter with a Giant Space Hamster, leaving him stranded on Eberron.

I had to stare at it for a moment. . .a Spelljammer reference? An official D&D product putting a spacefaring, spelljamming Illithid NPC in Eberron? It was definitely the first time I'd known of any official D&D work mentioning Eberron as being in the Spelljammer cosmology of the Prime Material Plane.

I've always been a fan of the concept of the D&D multiverse, that all the official settings are tied together via Planescape and Spelljammer, even if some worlds are harder to reach from others.

The times that Eberron had been tied to the rest of the multiverse via planar travel that I knew of was an article in Dragon #371 that discussed using Warforged in other settings, and out of 4 suggested an origin stories, one was that the character was originally from Eberron, but accidentally found a portal to Sigil and from there could go to other world. . .and they can't seem to find a portal back to Eberron (the article seemed to imply that portals to Eberron were rarer than ones from that world, it's easier to leave than to come back). The Menace of the Underdark expansion for DDO in 2012, the one that introduced the Realms to the game, came up with a plotline about Lolth trying to forcibly gain divine access to Eberron (and to prevent the reincarnation of Mystra back on Toril so she could be the new Goddess of Magic), with the only lasting change after her plans were thwarted being a planar connection being blasted from Eberron to the Demonweb and to Toril itself, for characters to travel through. The Mists of Ravenloft expansion from 2018 added Ravenloft (Barovia specifically) and the idea that the Mists can reach Eberron without any problem.

Has anyone else seen official works tying Eberron into the rest of the D&D multiverse/cosmology or run a crossover game that's used methods like planar travel (or spelljamming) to connect Eberron to other world?

 

[Bitbrain]

Well, aside from that one section in Eberron: Rising from the Last War, I’ve never noticed any overt references to the other D&D settings from within Eberron.

Now, with regards to home games? Yes, absolutely.

EXAMPLE 1
The first 5e campaign I ever played in was Tyranny of Dragons, with Curse of Strahd thrown in the mix.

The DM also had Tiamat establish a transdimensional portal between faerun and khorvaire. The FR dragon cult was using this portal to trade draconic hybrids for House Cannith technology.

Okay, technically it was Jarlonna’s Faction within Cannith, but none of the players (myself included) knew enough about Eberron at the time to put the pieces together.

EXAMPLE 2
In my own game, most D&D settings (and some Magic settings that appeal to me) are just parallel universes of each other.

Oerth, Mystara, Krynn, Toril, Athas, Eberron, Zendikar, etc.

Anyway, my current Eberron campaign’s Big Bad is actually from one of the other universes. Dude wants to recreate his 3,000-year-dead civilization on Eberron, overtop the bones of khorvaire’s current nations.

 

[DWChancellor]

Keith Baker has mentioned numerous times that Eberron is in the multiverse but is somewhat sealed off from it.

If you've seen the trailer for Baldurs Gate III you'd also notice a very Nautiloid encounter right in FR. Baldurs Gate, of course, had Minsc's miniature giant space hamster. So it is quite canon that the two coexist.

There have been a number of official articles and mentions of Eberron being in the multiverse and Spelljammer too... so it is canon that both exist together. In theory Spelljammers could penetrate the bubble around Eberron. I think Keith may have written about that in his blog too... and it doesn't get more official Eberron than Keith Baker.

 

[Urriak Uruk]

So to be clear, D&D Online is definitely not canon. So that line of text is really more of an Easter egg nod to Spelljammer than an actual confirmation of Eberron's cosmology.

That said, Eberron content does leave open the possibility of the crystal sphere around Eberron weakening, which could allow a Nautiloid ship to ship through and crash on its material plane. It definitely would not be common, at least compared to Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms, but it is technically possible.

 

[wingsandsword]

So to be clear, D&D Online is definitely not canon.

Is that your personal opinion, or is there an official statement from WotC on the matter?

 

[Mirtek]

If you've seen the trailer for Baldurs Gate III you'd also notice a very Nautiloid encounter right in FR. Baldurs Gate, of course, had Minsc's miniature giant space hamster. So it is quite canon that the two coexist.

For FR that's not unusual. It has always heavily played on it's connections to the D&D multiverse via Planescape and Spelljammer. It even had it's own Spelljammer supplement (Realmspace)

 

[Urriak Uruk]

Is that your personal opinion, or is there an official statement from WotC on the matter?

I don't think there is actually an official statement. D&D canon is not stringently enforced like canon for say Star Wars or Marvel. However, the unwritten rule (and this is from the rules prominent/stringent D&D wiki seem to use, like Forgotten Realms wiki) is that video games are considered canon unless they contradict content from other official publications.

So for example, the game Neverwinter Nights has a plotline where Mephistopheles attempts to absorb Toril into the Nine Hells to create a 10th Layer, superseded Asmodeus and becoming the new king of hell. He invaded both the Underdark and Waterdeep in pursuit of this goal.

Now, technically by the unwritten rules, this is canon. However, such an event is not mentioned in recent books like Dragon Heist, despite it being a pretty insane event. So is it canon or not?

My intuition would say probably not. But nothing directly contradicts it, so it's not.

Anyway, my point is you shouldn't really use something from a video game as proof something is canon, unless it has been confirmed in other sources.

 

[Horwath]

If you want, you can add anything from Ebberon to Forgotten Realms or any other setting.

Just say that it was always there and come up with some story about it.

Warforged are perfect slaves for Red Wizards of Thay for instance.
They can be their inventors in FR

Shifters can be numerous in Moonwood/Glimmerwood of the Silver Marches

Dragonmarks can be tied to to noble houses Waterdeep, Neverwinter, Baldursgate, Evereska, Myth drannor etc...

 

[ChaosOS]

Keith says DDO isn't canon, just like his novels. I don't think there's ever been an explicit WotC statement on the matter, but the design guideline for Eberron for at least the last decade has been

1. No official timeline advancement
2. Only WotC sourcebooks are canon - not adventures, not novels, not spin-off games like DDO and Dragonshards.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If you've seen the trailer for Baldurs Gate III you'd also notice a very Nautiloid encounter right in FR. Baldurs Gate, of course, had Minsc's miniature giant space hamster. So it is quite canon that the two coexist.

Even further back, the FR mentioned spelljammers very early after Spelljammer came out. I can't remember if it's Forgotten Realms Adventures (1990), Ruins of Undermountain (1991) or Menzoberranzan (1992), but one of those has a spelljammer dock in it, somewhere deep underground, and the dock belonged to Drow or something. Other FR stuff from the early '90s references it too. The FR always had a magpie's eye with regards to cool stuff from other settings. I mean, as soon as Planescape happened, the FR started filling up with Planescape-style portals (i.e. invisible but you need a key, which might be a thought or an object), tieflings started appearing in the FR, and so on.