Any thoughts? I’ve been thinking of changing gaming worlds because the Forgotten Realms now has 15 years of prior-campaign-history baggage that is getting a little unwieldy.
For those not in the know, TSR had a contest a while back for people to submit new campaign settings. They got about 11,000 entries, and the one that won is Eberron, by Keith Baker. So far, the sourcebook and a module have been released; there’s going to be a major city book published in November and a series of modules from low to high level which take players through the various aspects of the campaign world.
It’s supposed to be “pulpy,” “noir,” and other things that seem, on the surface, to add up to “we put everything we could think of into this game setting.” So, too much? Too weird? What?
Eh. My www.tsr.com shortcut still gets the job done, so…
I’m just wondering about the all-things-for-all-people aspect of it. The message boards at WotC are all full of questions about half-dragon/half-warforged (golem) PC artificers, dragonmarks (magical tattoos with nigh-godlike powers), making flying ships, and all manner of weird stuff goin’ on. Guess I’m still stuck in 1st edition. I just wanna see fighters, wizards, clerics & thieves…
One unique thing about Eberron is its theology. Unlike other D&D settings, the gods don’t live on the known planes of existence; in fact, no one is really sure if the gods exist at all. The clerics could be drawing power solely from their own belief systems. Also, there’s only one afterlife plane similar to the Greek underworld where everyone goes, good or bad. Some believe that you eventually leave and join the gods after a time, but again, no one really knows. It’s definitely interesting, but I prefer the Planescape model where you can book skiing vacations on the mountains of Heaven.
Looks to me like it’s supposed to be a bit of a high renaissance/early industrial setting, except with magic as the motive force to progress, instead of science. I’m very intrigued, as most of my homebrew game worlds are along similar lines, but I don’t have the cash for the book right now. I’ll almost certainly buy it sometime in the next couple of months, just to pillage it for material for my own games, if nothing else.
Bought it, read it, yawned a lot. If I wasn’t so lazy, it’d be on E-Bay already.
It’s a perfectly fine campaign setting that doesn’t really shake anything up. I appreciate the effort made to make it useable with all the existing 3.5 stuff (by not saying something like “but orcs, bulettes, cockatrices and yuan-ti don’t exist in this world”), but it just isn’t different enough to be compelling.
I can’t help but wonder why, out of all the hundreds or thousands of entries WotC got for their contest, this one made the cut. Sure, it has some fine ideas, but it’s just not very interesting.
In all fairness, it may just be that the book is a bit too dry to really give the world its due, but I’m certainly not going to rush out and buy any future Eberron books based on my first impression. As far as published campaign settings for 3.x D&D go, I found both the **Scarred Lands ** setting from Sword and Sorcery Studios and the **Iron Kingdoms ** setting from Privateer Press to be a lot more innovative.
I haven’t checked it out yet, as we’ve never really used a ‘setting’ but made our own up as we went.
The owner of our favorite gaming shop knows we’re D&D players and gets all excited and bouncy when we come in and he’s got something new. So he was hopping when he had just unpacked Eberron and we came in.
