Fans have spotted an oddity in the new D&D book, Eberron: Forge of the Artificer, which brings the Artificer D&D class into the updated ruleset, and suggests several campaign ideas for playing in Keith Baker's legendary D&D setting.
As Reddit user EarthSeraphEdna points out in a thread on the r/dndnext subreddit, the book has a slightly strange idea of how a D&D campaign should play out. Specifically, it seems determined that every campaign concept should span the full breadth of available character progression, starting from level 1 and finishing at level 20.
EarthSeraphEdna argues that sometimes the book is able to suggest a suitably epic arc for the final levels of a D&D campaign, like the uncovering of a horde of demons threatening to end the world. But sometimes its ideas seem much more suited to a smaller campaign.
For instance, there are several campaign suggestions about taking on human enemies, from criminal gangs to rival houses. Since D&D characters are practically superheroes by level 15, it seems odd for them not to have thwarted the adversaries they were investigating from levels 1-5.
Based on a screenshot of a discussion shared by EarthSeraphEdna, Eberron's creator, Keith Baker, seems to agree with them. "I think the suggested arcs are fine as arcs," he apparently wrote. "But I don't see them as logically using the suggested character levels, and I wouldn't expect 20th level adventurers to still be working as street-level inquisitives"
He added that if you took the same ideas and tied them to different levels, they'd be fine.
It's a well-known truism that most D&D play takes place before level 10. That's when a lot of the big character progression milestones occur. It's the point where many D&D parties start to run out of stamina, and where finding appropriately epic challenges for the high-level party starts to be an increasingly taxing task for the DM.
Wizards of the Coast and third-party publishers know high-level play is less popular, so they tend to create fewer high-level adventures, which then fuels the pattern, in a self-perpetuating cycle.
All this is to say that we can't be too hard on Eberron: Forge of the Artificer for having a slightly warped view of what high level play should look like.
The campaign suggestions aren't the focus of this pretty short book, anyway. That's definitely the artificer additions, and these have been super fun to talk about - from the cartographer that might be better if multi-classed, to the alchemist, which got a much-needed boost, but could be even better.
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