Keldryn
Adventurer
I absolutely love the Eberron setting, although I have yet to be able to actually run a substantial campaign with it.
I strongly dislike the idea of advancing the timeline if a 5e version of the setting is published.
Every campaign setting that I can think of which has had an official timeline advancement has suffered for it, in my opinion.
The Forgotten Realms is the poster child here, and so much has been said about it that I don't really need to go into too many details. The original "grey box" set was pretty great, as were the first several books in its original supplement series (FR1 Waterdeep and the North through about FR5 The Savage Frontier). As soon as the Time of Troubles became an official part of the setting in order to justify the rules changes in 2nd Edition and the events of novels were incorporated into the advancing timeline, the setting lost a great deal of its appeal to me.
Dragonlance isn't pointed out as often, but it's a worse offender in my eyes. The original setting of Ansalon in and around the Chronicles and Legends books was a good setting with its own flavor. The setting was somewhat small and limited in scope, but usable even without running the original War of the Lance. The continent of Taladas as detailed in Time of the Dragon was awesome and thankfully mostly untouched. The official timeline of the Dragonlance world now goes something like this:
The Mystara setting was always one of my favorites, back from when it was simply The Known World. It's not a terribly coherent setting, but it always feels like home to me. Wrath of the Immortals advanced the timeline and dramatically altered the world, including the destruction of entire nations. I didn't like the changes, and unfortunately I had sold my old Gazetteers (stupid, stupid, stupid), so I was stuck with the 2e boxed sets.
The Dark Sun revised setting incorporated events from the novels which completely undermined the nature of the setting. The original boxed set had set up the world in a perfect state of oppression, ripe for the PCs to rebel against.
Greyhawk probably suffered the least from the official timeline advancements meddling with the setting, although I know many old-schoolers will disagree.
Post-ROTJ Star Wars is now a universe with conveniently force-resistant aliens possessing Geiger-esque biotech, a dozen superweapons even more powerful than the Death Star (it can blow up an whole solar system!), and Jedi turning to the dark side and then back to the light as a semi-regular occurrence. No, no, no. Just no.
D&D 4th Edition didn't turn out to be the right game system for me, but the Eberron and Dark Sun settings were perfect examples of how to update a setting for a new edition. Don't advance the timeline. Go back to the core definition of the setting, but keep the best ideas from the last edition's supplements. Be flexible and re-imagine parts of the setting in order to incorporate the new rules (Dark Sun did more of this than did Eberron). Don't include in-universe justifications for why things are different. I don't know what the ratio is of gamers who convert a campaign to a new edition versus those who start a new campaign when a new edition comes out, but given the hassle of converting, I suspect there would be more of the latter.
So that's an emphatic NO to advancing the timeline. I like the idea of outlining possible future timelines and how PCs can drive the campaign forward. Advancing the timeline seems to primarily happen in order to give people who own previous versions of the books a reason to buy the new one. I'd buy the new one just to avoid referencing multiple books.
If you want to make significant enough changes to get people to re-buy the books, perhaps truly fixing the map scale of Khorvaire would be a good place to start? Or including a couple of different detailed starting locations other than Sharn. I'd buy an Eberron boxed set on day one, especially if it included special Dungeon Tiles for building Sharn towers & bridges and some lightning rail and airship battlemaps. And a cloth map of Khorvaire.
I strongly dislike the idea of advancing the timeline if a 5e version of the setting is published.
Every campaign setting that I can think of which has had an official timeline advancement has suffered for it, in my opinion.
The Forgotten Realms is the poster child here, and so much has been said about it that I don't really need to go into too many details. The original "grey box" set was pretty great, as were the first several books in its original supplement series (FR1 Waterdeep and the North through about FR5 The Savage Frontier). As soon as the Time of Troubles became an official part of the setting in order to justify the rules changes in 2nd Edition and the events of novels were incorporated into the advancing timeline, the setting lost a great deal of its appeal to me.
Dragonlance isn't pointed out as often, but it's a worse offender in my eyes. The original setting of Ansalon in and around the Chronicles and Legends books was a good setting with its own flavor. The setting was somewhat small and limited in scope, but usable even without running the original War of the Lance. The continent of Taladas as detailed in Time of the Dragon was awesome and thankfully mostly untouched. The official timeline of the Dragonlance world now goes something like this:
- The Cataclysm: the gods are angry and throw a mountain at the world, radically reshaping it. Then they leave.
- 350 years later: the gods return!
- 33 years after that: Chaos returns and there's another cataclysm! The gods leave again! Now it's the Age of Mortals.
- 39 years after that: Wow, that was short. The gods are back!
The Mystara setting was always one of my favorites, back from when it was simply The Known World. It's not a terribly coherent setting, but it always feels like home to me. Wrath of the Immortals advanced the timeline and dramatically altered the world, including the destruction of entire nations. I didn't like the changes, and unfortunately I had sold my old Gazetteers (stupid, stupid, stupid), so I was stuck with the 2e boxed sets.
The Dark Sun revised setting incorporated events from the novels which completely undermined the nature of the setting. The original boxed set had set up the world in a perfect state of oppression, ripe for the PCs to rebel against.
Greyhawk probably suffered the least from the official timeline advancements meddling with the setting, although I know many old-schoolers will disagree.
Post-ROTJ Star Wars is now a universe with conveniently force-resistant aliens possessing Geiger-esque biotech, a dozen superweapons even more powerful than the Death Star (it can blow up an whole solar system!), and Jedi turning to the dark side and then back to the light as a semi-regular occurrence. No, no, no. Just no.
D&D 4th Edition didn't turn out to be the right game system for me, but the Eberron and Dark Sun settings were perfect examples of how to update a setting for a new edition. Don't advance the timeline. Go back to the core definition of the setting, but keep the best ideas from the last edition's supplements. Be flexible and re-imagine parts of the setting in order to incorporate the new rules (Dark Sun did more of this than did Eberron). Don't include in-universe justifications for why things are different. I don't know what the ratio is of gamers who convert a campaign to a new edition versus those who start a new campaign when a new edition comes out, but given the hassle of converting, I suspect there would be more of the latter.
So that's an emphatic NO to advancing the timeline. I like the idea of outlining possible future timelines and how PCs can drive the campaign forward. Advancing the timeline seems to primarily happen in order to give people who own previous versions of the books a reason to buy the new one. I'd buy the new one just to avoid referencing multiple books.
If you want to make significant enough changes to get people to re-buy the books, perhaps truly fixing the map scale of Khorvaire would be a good place to start? Or including a couple of different detailed starting locations other than Sharn. I'd buy an Eberron boxed set on day one, especially if it included special Dungeon Tiles for building Sharn towers & bridges and some lightning rail and airship battlemaps. And a cloth map of Khorvaire.
