From the beginning, I've approached all these Plane Shift projects as if I were tinkering in a workshop like the inventors of Kaladesh. I believe that some of the great beauty of Dungeons & Dragons comes from its tremendous flexibility, which includes not just the ability to make stuff up out of whole cloth, but also the ease with which you can take the existing pieces of the game apart and reassemble them into something new.
That approach of combining pieces of different rules to form new rules continues for Kaladesh. As one of the designers of the artificer class for Eberron back in 2003, I tinkered for a long time with possible designs for such a class in Kaladesh, but I ultimately came to a couple of important conclusions. First, invention on Kaladesh is fundamentally democratic—it's a skill anyone can learn, and it shouldn't be restricted to a single character class. And more importantly, designing an entirely new class is far beyond the scope of what I've set out to do in these articles.
The D&D team works like the Consulate: they take a serious approach to the job of crafting a class, testing it for balance, sharing it for public playtest, and fine-tuning it before final publication. I'm more like a renegade inventor (having left the D&D team for the Magic team a couple of years ago), fiddling around in my workshop and unleashing my inventions on the public without the same degree of safety testing. But with that said, the D&D team has just released an artificer class for playtesting, and you should feel free to tinker with that class to adapt it for your Kaladesh campaign.
Of course, you'll find a lot of information about aether-powered devices and invention in this document, in keeping with the spirit of Kaladesh. But it's more along the lines of rearranging the building blocks and altering the appearance of existing magic items, rather than creating a lot of new things. If you want your character to look like the guy on the Dispersal Technician card, just give him a ring of the ram.
As always, the starting point for this document was The Art of Magic: The Gathering—Kaladesh. This document is designed to help you turn that book's adventure hooks and story seeds into a resource for your campaign with a minimum of changes to the fifth edition of the D&D rules, which you can find here. And even without the book, you can find lore about Kaladesh on the Magic web site.
Happy inventing!
