wingsandsword
Legend
When Eberron came out, everything I heard about it made me want to stay away. It seemed like it was a setting full of magical elemental-powered railroads and similar magic-as-technology anachronisms, Coruscant-like supermetropolises, magic items and enchantments made so mundane that it is almost comical, a setting which was a fairly thinly disguised analogue of 1920's Europe, and loads and loads of new races and funny-sounding terms (Daelkyr?). Basically from the old marketing and buzz it sounded so much like old pulp adventures and sci-fi just grafted onto D&D that it didn't sound like D&D anymore.
I made a conscious choice from what I'd heard and read to avoid the setting like the plague. The Eberron books were the only 3.5 books I completely avoided, and I generally came to think of it as everything wrong with modern D&D.
Then a while back, I'd heard that DDO was "free to play". Dungeons & Dragons Online had changed to a business model that the basic game was free, but you could pay to unlock some classes (Monk and Favored Soul) and some races (Drow, Warforged, ect), or pay for access to some higher end dungeons ect. My only trepidation was that it used the Eberron setting. I'd also vaguely remembered hearing that when it came out, it was designed to be almost impossible to solo and you had to have full parties (fighter/rogue/wizard/cleric) for most dungeons.
Well, I was pleasantly surprised to find it is quite soloable (character creation even had advice on what classes were best for soloists: clerics and Paladins: good, necromancers: bad.). I then braced myself for the Eberron setting, figuring I would be fighting Nazi-esque golems on the roof of a magical train or flying around a city 10 times bigger than Ancient Rome at it's peak in an airship (as I'd had Eberron explained to me by some friends who really liked it).
Imagine my surprise that the setting was much more like D&D than I ever thought. The opening "newbie island" plotline is a small tropical island (with a persistent problem of a sahaguin lead dark cult marauding the area) plunged into an unnatural winter through what you find out is a powerful white dragon being mind controlled by an illithid using a psionic crystal macguffin, which you find and smash, letting the dragon destroy the illithid and return the island to normal as it flees for more appropriate climates. A pretty decent plot for a low-level D&D adventure.
Beyond there, on to the main city of Stormreach, it is clearly a little more magical than typical D&D settings (taverns that float in the air, ect), but had a lot more of a feel of being D&D than I ever expected it to be. The warforged are not quite the goofy pseudo-robots I thought they were, and making them pay-to-play means they are relatively rare for PC's. I find myself learning more about the setting from a first-person perspective and while it has a different feel than Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, or even other "different" settings like Dark Sun or Spelljammer, it doesn't have the "not D&D" vibe I had always assumed I'd get from it.
I made a conscious choice from what I'd heard and read to avoid the setting like the plague. The Eberron books were the only 3.5 books I completely avoided, and I generally came to think of it as everything wrong with modern D&D.
Then a while back, I'd heard that DDO was "free to play". Dungeons & Dragons Online had changed to a business model that the basic game was free, but you could pay to unlock some classes (Monk and Favored Soul) and some races (Drow, Warforged, ect), or pay for access to some higher end dungeons ect. My only trepidation was that it used the Eberron setting. I'd also vaguely remembered hearing that when it came out, it was designed to be almost impossible to solo and you had to have full parties (fighter/rogue/wizard/cleric) for most dungeons.
Well, I was pleasantly surprised to find it is quite soloable (character creation even had advice on what classes were best for soloists: clerics and Paladins: good, necromancers: bad.). I then braced myself for the Eberron setting, figuring I would be fighting Nazi-esque golems on the roof of a magical train or flying around a city 10 times bigger than Ancient Rome at it's peak in an airship (as I'd had Eberron explained to me by some friends who really liked it).
Imagine my surprise that the setting was much more like D&D than I ever thought. The opening "newbie island" plotline is a small tropical island (with a persistent problem of a sahaguin lead dark cult marauding the area) plunged into an unnatural winter through what you find out is a powerful white dragon being mind controlled by an illithid using a psionic crystal macguffin, which you find and smash, letting the dragon destroy the illithid and return the island to normal as it flees for more appropriate climates. A pretty decent plot for a low-level D&D adventure.
Beyond there, on to the main city of Stormreach, it is clearly a little more magical than typical D&D settings (taverns that float in the air, ect), but had a lot more of a feel of being D&D than I ever expected it to be. The warforged are not quite the goofy pseudo-robots I thought they were, and making them pay-to-play means they are relatively rare for PC's. I find myself learning more about the setting from a first-person perspective and while it has a different feel than Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, or even other "different" settings like Dark Sun or Spelljammer, it doesn't have the "not D&D" vibe I had always assumed I'd get from it.
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