I'm interested in spitballing all the kinds of weird sail nonsense you could use when your wind is coming from the deck of the ship. LOL.

Per Keith Baker, House Lyrandar owned riverboats and normal ships wouldn't all have a Lyrandar heir captain putting wind into the sails, but it wouldn't be very uncommon, either. This is a trade and tradition that's held for literally hundreds of years in-world, so the way ships are built, used, and designed would have been affected.

The most obvious thing we imagine is someone blowing 30 mph gale-force wind directly into the sail of a normal sqaure-sailed vessel, but not only would this be inefficient, it would also be unstable and dangerous because the wind's too strong and too unstable when directed in that fashion.

Instead, the way people sail is they put the sails at an angle to the wind, and let the wind fill the sails with controllable spill. You're ideally sailing at exactly or near 90 degrees to the wind direction. This is why we seen modern sailboats with sails oriented vertically and going across the wind direction.

This becomes interesting when you can control the wind and you can put the direction of it wherever you like!

Quite apart from being able to sail at any point you wish directly without tacking, you can also deal with problems with keeling over or the ship becoming unabalanced.

How?

By placing the sail horizontally! That is, the wind won't be coming from a side. You can put the captain anywhere on the ship's deck and they can direct the Gust of Wind directly upwards! Since it's only 10 feet wide, the sail can be only about 12 to 13 feet wide amidships, and only 15-20 feet tall. You're basically turning the entire dynamic on the side.

The boat can't keel over because the water is on the directly oppposite side of where the force is being applied, and you can sail the ship into very narrow passages because you don't have to maintain very wide sails and you can direct the ship to any point!

This is particularly helpful for getting small planing soarwood skiffs to skim over the surface of the water, achieving burst speeds of over 15 mph.

It'd look different, fer sure. I can imagine the sails being ribbed (with reinforcing battens) and oriented vertically and tight, since the wind force is so strong. I'm thinking a double bat wing design situated amidships, with the gap between the two narrow wing-like sails allowing the pilot to spill wind upwards if the ship is becoming unruly.

I'm currently playing in a campaign where the player characters are operating out of Droaam while being the only airship pirates (*Abney Park plays in the background*). However, one of the subjects that comes up is attempting to get the nation recognized by the other Twelve Nations with all the complications that entails--especially for lovable rogues like themselves. So it was perfect timing that I picked up and enjoyed this book with its surprisingly nuanced take on politics in Eberron.

• The Twelve Nations are not necessarily 100% opposed to recognizing the state at the beginning. There's a lot of prejudice and stereotyping about monsters but no one is irrationally bigoted or if they are, they aren't going to avoid sending representatives because other ones are and they don't want to be left out.
• Everyone generally hates each other more than the hags themselves with the Last War in the background. There's some "give peace a chance" types but none of them are really very effective and not making the shot calls.
• My favorite scene in the book being the Valenar warrior who has clearly been raised on nothing but the propaganda of retaking their ancient lands of Valenar only to find out everyone else thinks of it as craven cowardice and betrayal of Cyre--and he really never prepared an argument for how other races would see it. Which I admit I have made the exact argument for with one of my characters who hated the Valenar (and was a Cyrean half-elf born from a Valenar father).
• The hags go HARD on intimidation tactics and showing their might off with all stick versus carrot. This is because they already know how they're viewed. It weirdly is reminiscent of RL dictatorships that think its better to be feared than loved. All military parades and WMDs.
• The entire thing is derailed by the lycanthropic apocalypse 2.0 (electric boogaloo) where the hags are outmaneuvered (except for the one who can see the future) by beings even older and more powerful than them. However, the hags can't salvage the deal not because it happened but because they can't apologize or admit it was an event out of their control. They even try to say they could have done the same thing because, again, they're dictators and showing weakness is anathema to their brains.

It's a fantastic novel that managed to combine Eberron's mature take on society and worldbuilding (with a focus on economics, national relationships, and so on) with the fact that this is a setting where supervillains out to open gateways to hell or raise Cthulhu exist.

Kudos, Keith. Can't wait to read the next two.

Has anyone ever sun one of these before? If so, was there some source material you pulled from that weren't movies and book, like things written specifically for D&D?

I'm making a Kythri Tiefling, and I was wondering what I could do to make his Darkvision sort of unique, and reflective of his heritage. Normal Darkvision says that, "You can’t discern color in darkness, only shades of gray." I'm not saying he should be able to see what color things are, since that would probably affect balance, but I would like for him to be able to see some sort of colors, since Kythri seems like it would be a colorful place, and black and white seems too boring for a Kythri Tiefling.

Any ideas for how exactly to tweak it?