I bought the 4e book and it was indeed very lame.

I have never enjoyed industrial magic.  So the sales pitch for Ebberon drove me away immediately.

It was okay.I enjoyed it yet found it very average as a setting. Some of the fanbase was toxic and obnoxious about it containing low level npc. Claiming it was better than Forgotten Realms because of that. Then were made to look like idiots because the nature of the player characters require that the vaunted low level npcs become higher level. Or the players would walk all over said npcs. Yes does FR have too many high level npcs yes. If as a fan your main selling point is low level npcs while forgetting that your players level well you look DUMB.

I found and still find Ravenloft highly overrated as a campaign setting. I would not say no to playing that world. Yet see nothing that makes it stand out really as a setting.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1070330I have never enjoyed industrial magic.  So the sales pitch for Ebberon drove me away immediately.

I was never a fan either yet that part won me over as finally a high magic world actually uses the magic as opposed to limiting themselves in the use of it.

Quote from: jhkim;1070284I was just introduced to it this past November, but as a newcomer to it, I had a great time with it. I haven't read all of the details of the setting yet, but I liked how it facilitated Western , pulp, and Victorian tropes within a fantasy environment.


I don't see evil/good as an issue, but then that's been the norm for most of my games as I'm not usually a D&D player. People and monsters can still be evil, it's just not labelled "evil" in big capital letters.

I love Eberron. It is one of my favorite settings from WOTC, (The other being Forgotten Realms). I have all the books except for the Dragon book, however have not run a game for it in years. My group is getting ready to start a new D&D campaign this spring, perhaps I should run it in Eberron.

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So, D&D 3x in Eberron.

A Traveller campaign set in the verboten Judges Guild Glimmerdrift Reaches Sector.

a D&D 5x campaign set in Darthon (Homebrew Setting).

a 0D&D campaign set in Tal Chernas (Another homebrew setting).

a D&D 5x Forgotten Realms campaign.

What sounds good?

I really love Eberron. It does a good job of including everything D&D (3.x) but recasting it to be new again. The pulp feel was spot on for how 3.x did D&D. Various plot threads from the Emerald Claw to the Aberrant invasion to the Warforged terrorist group... all were fun creative ideas to kickstart adventure.

In the end, it doesn't really matter what the creator says. You can have as many gay people you want (or not). I ran a campaign in Eberron. I don't recall any overt suggestion to that effect in the books. Lots of creatives like to look back and comment on their works, seeing it through the lens of a new time. Just because KB is liberal, or wants Eberron to be more inclusive to the LBGTQ folks, doesn't make the setting inherently more or less LBGTQ. Most of us here are comfortable adding those elements in where we feel they apply or ignoring them where we feel they have gone too melodramatic.

I wouldn't toss Eberron out because of KB's politics. It stands on its own merits.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;1070292I really like Eberron. The feel, the magic as industry, it's all good.

As far as no one being good or evil? It throws out the default racial alignments. Meaning that a Gold Dragon might be a complete fuckwit, while a Red Dragon might be a noble philosopher.

Agreed here.  The only moral relativism is that mortal races don't (normally*) have fixed alignments and that Good people can make mistakes and do Evil things while Evil people can sometimes achieve Good ends.

*Lycanthropy is a major exception and the fact that cursed Lycanthropes get their alignment twisted is a motivation for the Silver Crusade, where a lot of... Mistakes were made.

Quote from: Manic Modron;1070344Agreed here.  The only moral relativism is that mortal races don't (normally*) have fixed alignments and that Good people can make mistakes and do Evil things while Evil people can sometimes achieve Good ends.

*Lycanthropy is a major exception and the fact that cursed Lycanthropes get their alignment twisted is a motivation for the Silver Crusade, where a lot of... Mistakes were made.

It also doesn't help that lycanthropes freak out at the full moon, and Eberron has 12 moons.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1070330I have never enjoyed industrial magic.  So the sales pitch for Ebberon drove me away immediately.

Eberron's specific blend of steampunkishness and magic just didn't click for me.  Like, at all.

Blades in the Dark?  Works great.

Dishonored?  Works with fucking style.

But I can't put my finger on what doesn't work with Eberron.  I'm sure someone feels exactly the opposite way (Eberron rules and Dishonored sucks).  Such is life.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;1070352It also doesn't help that lycanthropes freak out at the full moon, and Eberron has 12 moons.

Thankfully some people made a calendar for that sort of thing that tracks it all for you.  So if your campaign is were-heavy you can have PCs know when the really bad nights are going to be and when there will be respite.

Quote from: Manic Modron;1070380Thankfully some people made a calendar for that sort of thing that tracks it all for you.  So if your campaign is were-heavy you can have PCs know when the really bad nights are going to be and when there will be respite.

That's much nicer then how I handled it. I figured there was a full moon roughly every 4-5 days so make you save and unslap your shit or things would be going south, fast.

I like Eberron pretty well. I like the post-war vibe, as a mix of The Fall of The Roman Empire / 100 Years War / War of the Roses.

Does the economy make sense if you nitpick it? No. Does any D&D economy make sense when you nitpick it? Lol - no. The monetary system is designed from the ground up to make PC progression feel right - and that's how it should be. D&D is an adventure RPG, not Fantasy Econ Simulator 3000.

Though for the magical message thing - they did have those setting specific wands which could do low level spells a few times each day and never run out. I always figured that they used those. Or some wondrous item - which Eberron has coming out of its ears. In the long term they'd more than pay for themselves.

Quote from: jhkim;1070284I was just introduced to it this past November, but as a newcomer to it, I had a great time with it.

By coincidence* I first encountered Eberron in November at a convention; the game I volunteered to run had no players and the organizers asked me to run a short Eberron module with about 30 minutes to prepare. So I don't have much knowledge of what the setting is like in general, but the module was pretty fun. It didn't seem that different from, say, Dragon Heist (competing criminal organizations in Waterdeep) with bigger scale and more politics. After some infiltration and exploration, it had an NPC fleeing from the players with something they needed, which ended with a showdown in a magical train car where anyone using obvious magic would have lost (a civilized setting with so much magic would have to have a lot of enforcement). So the NPC and one of the PCs sat side by side trading an interesting series of spells while the other two PCs prepared a diversion and potential escape; the NPC's attempt to incapacitate the PC caster and force a confrontation with the other PCs fell short.

*Probably not that much of a coincidence, as Wizards started releasing AL modules set in Eberron this fall.

Quote from: Charon's Little Helper;1070385I like Eberron pretty well. I like the post-war vibe, as a mix of The Fall of The Roman Empire / 100 Years War / War of the Roses.

Just in general, I like that they chose to do something genuinely different. As much as I like Mystara, it is for the most part Greyhawk without the IP, but then with more and more fantasy kitchen sink thrown on top (so really just Forgotten Realms done right). Krynn much the same with results halfway between the two. Dark Sun and Ravenloft are definitely new and different, but kind of the next-obvious-choices (making 'let's make it more post-apoc' and 'let's make it more horror-story' are reasonable, but predictable, choices). I am glad they decided to take a stab at something new. The actual results are a little more, 'hmmm. Okay, thanks for the attempt, but it isn't what I personally want.' Mind you, most of those things come down to personal preferences rather than downright bad decisions (I wanted a lower magic setting, but how would the designers have known that, even if my opinion were paramount?).

QuoteDoes the economy make sense if you nitpick it? No. Does any D&D economy make sense when you nitpick it? Lol - no. The monetary system is designed from the ground up to make PC progression feel right - and that's how it should be. D&D is an adventure RPG, not Fantasy Econ Simulator 3000.

Agreed here. D&D is not a viable economic model, and those times when you need it to be (domain management games), you've already gotten to the wealth-point where GP have stopped being GP and are just 'economic unit X' with little backwards-relationship to how many swords you can buy with them.

Scale, OTOH, I am a bit annoyed with. I like wilderness adventure/hexcrawling, and I want the maps to make some sort of sense in terms of distances between things and the like (if two towns are supposed to be 20 days apart by merchant caravan, or the like, the rule-structures and maps should be set up that it would actually be, on average, 20 days). I don't recall how good or bad Eberron was at this, but other peoples' complaints suggest it was a problem.

Quote from: SHARKwhat are your thoughts on the Ebberon Campaign setting?

I'm not interested in it.

Quote from: SHARK;1070285Greetings!

Hi Arcanuum! How has Keith Baker been pandering to the SJW's, Arcanuum? Pandering to SJW's is always a bad thing. I imagine that doing so will rapidly run the campaign setting into the ground.

On the whole "Noone is good or evil. The evil creatures are just misunderstood." Geesus. You see, Arcanuum? That right there is Moral Relativism. That's the product of our stupid fucking universities pumping this kind of philosophical post-modernism shit into us. Gee, have you fucking morons read the fucking newspaper? Like, *yesterday* maybe? Yeah, that's right...tell me that "Noone is evil..they are just misunderstood!" What fucking nonsense that is, you know, Arcanuum? Oh, how about the millions of people slaughtered in the genocides sponsored by the Communists Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot? And the genocide pursued by Hitler, and the mass slaughters, experiments, enslavement, tortures and rape pursued by the Japanese of Imperial Japan? Oh, haven't heard of THE RAPE OF NANKING? A whole population of Chinese were murdered--and something like 400,000 of the city's women and girls were brutally mass raped, over and over again, by the conquering Japanese Army. (The city had an enormous population when the Japanese Army conquered it.) Yeah, there's no *real* evil, Arcanuum. Geesus, that kind of post-modernism jello makes my teeth grind, Arcanuum!:) LOL

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

I haven't played Eberron so I can't say how it handles morality (though a lot of the discussion here appears to be based on secondhand knowledge anyways). But I think there is a lot of blurring in this argument. Having moral complexity or even a morally gray works isn't the same as moral relativism. And even if the world itself is the latter, I don't really see the big deal. I like Lord of the Rings but I can also handle a film or book that presents a setting where there are not objective forces of good and evil, or competing moral ideologies where the right path isn't clear, or even amoral nihilistic worlds. I think in the case of sympathetic monsters, that can certainly be overdone but it isn't the same as moral relativism. A world of misunderstood monsters just means they are mistaken for evil, not that evil doesn't exist (in fact that their misunderstood nature is the point, suggest an 'ought' in the world, otherwise you could just kill them and not have to understand them---so not very relative morality).

In terms of the designer's political ideas getting into the game, as long as he is making the setting he wants, I think it is fine.