I don't want to count chickens before they hatch, but one of my old dungeon masters, who ran the campaign with my Eldritch Knight, has said she's planning on a new Eberron-set campaign/adventure, and folks, I'm already falling down the rabbit hole.
I've never actually played in an Eberron-set game of any sort, but I'm familiar with its general premise:
Originally introduced in 3rd Edition as the winner of a design competition for new settings, Eberron was created by Keith Bakker. The Eberron setting primarily focuses on the continent of Khorvaire, which is reeling from the catastrophic fallout of The Last War, a conflict that saw most of its kingdoms and nations clash with one another, and one of them, the onetime dominant nation of Cyre, feel to a profound catastrophe: the Mourning, a moment where every last person within the kingdom died.
Inspired largely by 1930s pulp adventure fiction, the geopolitical situation is also reminiscent of that interbellum period. While Cyre must be considered the ultimate victim of that war, no other nation can claim to have emerged as a true victor, and while the "Last War" moniker is one given out of hope that such madness would serve as a warning to the people of Eberron that such a bloodbath should not be repeated, there's every possibility that war might return (and if it's anything like our world, that second conflagration would be even worse than the first).
One of the most notable aesthetic distinctions of Eberron is its technology. While the technology is all underpinned by magic (lest the fantasy purists worry we've gotten into sci-fi territory,) it is a world where airships and trains convey people across the world, and magic is said to be "broad but shallow," where everyday people might know a cantrip (or at least some of the functions of one) but very few people are fully capable of advanced spellcasting.
The primary 5E sourcebook for Eberron is Eberron: Rising From the Last War. This book gave us the Artificer. It also includes four playable species, the Shifter, Kalashtar, Changeling, and probably the most iconic and most tied to this setting, the Warforged.
The Warforged have a pretty interesting story: essentially sentient, sapient golems created to fight the Last War, now that the war is over, Warforged are trying to figure out what they're supposed to do with their lives. Meanwhile, in some places they've become pariahs, tricked into working as scabs for powerful people who don't want to pay workers who need to eat or sleep.
And speaking of powerful people, we also have the Dragonmarked Houses. While the nations of Khorvaire are all jockeying for power, the true power behind the scenes that transcends national borders is the Dragonmarked Houses, powerful families with a magical empowerment that gives them guild-like control over certain areas of commerce. One house runs transportation, and has monopolistic control over air and rail travel, while another controls all the forges that create the Warforged.
It's interesting, because given its 1930s aesthetic, it's not precisely in the same genre/aesthetic as Steampunk, but it's closely related - perhaps more in the realm of "dieselpunk" (though I've also heard the term Magepunk or Dungeonpunk).
Bizarrely, the best example of that aesthetic that I can remember is a Disney cartoon show from when I was a very little kid called Tail Spin. If you're too young to remember this (I have to remind myself that I'm pushing 40, and so stuff from my early childhood would feel like ancient history to a 20-year-old,) the, frankly, bizarre premise to this show was that Baloo, the bear from The Jungle Book, is now working as a freight pilot somewhere in the south Pacific on a seaplane. King Louie runs a bar on one of these islands, and Sher Khan is the evil corporate executive behind some weird plots. Baloo has a young bear sidekick (Mowgli is nowhere in sight - there aren't any humans) named Kit Cloudkicker, who has a kind of boomerang-shaped board that he stands on, tied to the plane by a rope.
Frankly, I think there's very little daylight between this kind of 1930s pulp adventure and your classic steampunk story, except that the Steampunk one might have wax cylinder records while the Pulp one will probably have the vinyl disks, and of course, in the latter, we've already fully started using petroleum-fueled engines.
Eberron, of course, is also mixing in the explicit supernaturalism of D&D.
In 3rd edition, there was less of an emphasis on the idea of unifying the various D&D settings as a cohesive whole, and so Eberron comes with its own planar system quite different from the Great Wheel. Thirteen planes orbit the world, and can wax and wane in their overall influence on things as they pass by. Furthermore, the world is defined by three primordial dragons: Siberys, Eberron, and Khyber. Siberys died and became a barrier that protected Eberron from other planes (i.e., the larger D&D multiverse) while Eberron became the land, and Khyber became a sort of underworld out of which fiends and other horrors emerge.
Anyway:
I believe (though I should confirm this) that this campaign will allow us to start off with the 2024 rules. While I've been wanting to play an Artificer for some time, and it would feel pretty appropriate in Eberron, I've also been very excited to play some of the revised classes from 2024, the Monk and Fighter being my foremost options.
In the latter case, though, the character I played with this DM previously was a Fighter, and I'm tempted to hold off on that in case we get a chance to revisit those characters (and I'd like to rebuild that character slightly to make him a Great Weapon Master).
Thus, Monk is probably the way I'm likely to go.
I actually have a character kind of figured out already as my initial character to play with the 2024 rules, which is a Cloud Goliath Elements Monk. The thing is, I've been wanting to play a Warforged character in something other than a one-shot ever since Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron came out - the pdf-only precursor to Rising from the Last War.
I'll need to get a bit more detail on what kind of campaign she wants to run: she said she has an adventure she'd like to run, and I suspect that means she already has a relatively strong sense of how things will go, so I don't want to write too heavy of a backstory if it's not going to be easy to make my plot leads line up with what she wants to run.
My initial concept was a Warforged Monk who survived the Mourning, but also witnessed the assassination of the Cyran army scientist/researcher he was assigned to serve shortly beforehand. That's a bit on the angsty side (he'd be called Char, not as his original designation, but because half of his face was deeply burned by the explosion that killed the scientist).
Another is to go closer to the Goliath character's backstory and have someone who worked on an airship (likely taking the Sailor background). While the Goliath character has a whole story about a mysterious dreadnought that destroyed his original ship, I might have this character be someone who saved his ship by replacing a broken part of the ship (maybe one of the struts that binds the elemental matrix) with his own arm, and he's navigating the dissonance of being hailed as a hero but also kind of discarded following the war.
I'll also need to see what other players are planning on. I think with four years and counting on my Wizard, I'm fairly satisfied in my pure spellcaster experience, and I'm eager to play something a little more martial and gear-focused (though admittedly the Monk is not terrible gear-focused. Give me my Wraps of Unarmed Prowess and my Bracers of Defense and I'll be a happy monk).
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