I wrote Burning Dragonmarks - Design Thoughts on Dragonmarks. I never did playtest that. This afternoon while the household napped, I revisited that post and spent a bit of time penciling in some ideas for an Burning Wheel Gold 📖 set in Eberron 📖.
In this post, I go over another take on the concept of Dragonmarks from the Eberron Campaign Setting 📖 and Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron 📖.
Dragonmarked Emotional Attribute
Your Dragonmarked emotional attribute opens at B3. Pick your idiom from the list below, noting that you may only ever have one idiom:
- Detection
- investigation and insight
- Finding
- perception, observation, scavenging, and hunting
- Handling
- interacting with animals
- Healing
- tending to wounds
- Hospitality
- charm and generosity
- Making
- repairs and crafting
- Passage
- driving and piloting
- Scribing
- writing and translating
- Sentinel
- guarding something
- Shadow
- legerdemain and misdirection
- Storm
- acting in inclement weather or operating maritime vehicles
- Warding
- working with physical security measures
You may spend a Fate to receive help from your Dragonmark. Your Dragonmark will only help on tasks that are congruent with it’s idiom. Note, when your Dragonmark helps, record the test for it’s advancement.
You may also invoke your Dragonmark to perform idiomatic magic and miracles. Describe your task and intent using your Dragonmark. The Game Master (GM 📖) will determine the Obstacle (Ob 📖) . Test your Dragonmark attribute; this is an open-ended roll.
On a failure temporarily tax the Dragonmark exponent by the degree of failure. For each point their Dragonmark would drop below zero, they take physical damage equal to the obstacle of the miracle multiplied by the number of points below zero in “pips” on the Grayscale. The character recovers from this tax at a rate of one point per two hours.
When your Dragonmark exponent reaches 10, at the end of the session your character merges into the Draconic Prophecy and leaves play.
Design Discussion
In Ebberon, those with Dragonmarks are better at their idiom. In my original musing, the character could FoRK 📖 their Dragonmark into a test. In this version, I went with help. I like the idea that doing idiomatic things advances your Dragonmark. I drew inspiration from the Corruption emotional attribute found in the Burning Wheel Codex 📖.
Now, I haven’t playtested any of this, but I think it provides some solid guiderails. I leave the idiomatic magic and miracles
up to further playtesting.
One thought I had was to use the Dungeons and Dragons: Fifth Edition (5E 📖) spells for each idiom to help calibrate the Ob; let’s say an Ob of 1 plus the spell level.
I also thought about triangulating against the Divine Intervention tasks in the Faith chapter of Burning Wheel Gold.
And last, I had even considered picking bits and pieces from the Art Magic and Spirit Binding chapters of Burning Wheel Codex.
Next Steps
For now this is enough of a place holder for Dragonmarks, because, if I’m interested running an Eberron campaign in Burning Wheel Gold, I may need to consider other things. I’m definitely not going to make lifepaths for the various stock. Like I scratched out in Burning Warforged - A New Stock and Lifepaths for Burning Wheel.
Instead, if I run an Eberron game in Burning Wheel Gold I’m going to work with the players on their character concepts. Then we’ll perhaps skip the Character Burner and create characters based on their concept. One of the functions of the lifepaths in the Character Burner is to create “setting.” That is not something as vital when re-purposing an existing setting.
I also think that I will limit the game to two or three players. First, I would be running the game online, and I’ve found that four players and a GM is the absolute limit. And in the case of Burning Wheel Gold my experience leads me to seek a smaller group.