D&D (2024) 2024 PHB/DMG/MM art/layout: like or dislike?

Of the campaign settings, Ravenloft and Eberron are the most "modern". Ravenloft has domains that are very much in the 1800s, and Eberron is vaguely in a Post World World I situation but maybe not technologically at WWI, there's magical telegrams, but not necessarily magical telephones.
 

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Of the campaign settings, Ravenloft and Eberron are the most "modern". Ravenloft has domains that are very much in the 1800s, and Eberron is vaguely in a Post World World I situation but maybe not technologically at WWI, there's magical telegrams, but not necessarily magical telephones.
I don't really get the whole "post-WWI" claim about Eberron. The Last War was a hot-and-cold war that lasted a century. Like Europe's Hundred Years' War or similar. If I had to place it somewhere on Earth's historical timeline, I'd put it in somewhere in the first half of the 19th century between Napoleon and the American Civil War. But it's not trying to emulate any particular real world time period, so it's got all sorts of anachronistic elements like every other D&D setting does.
 

I don't really get the whole "post-WWI" claim about Eberron. The Last War was a hot-and-cold war that lasted a century. Like Europe's Hundred Years' War or similar. If I had to place it somewhere on Earth's historical timeline, I'd put it in somewhere in the first half of the 19th century between Napoleon and the American Civil War. But it's not trying to emulate any particular real world time period, so it's got all sorts of anachronistic elements like every other D&D setting does.
It mostly comes from the author explicitly saying so in multiple places. But the industrialized war, the between two wars intrigue, and pulp action-adventure vibe really cement the vibe.
 

I don't really get the whole "post-WWI" claim about Eberron. The Last War was a hot-and-cold war that lasted a century. Like Europe's Hundred Years' War or similar. If I had to place it somewhere on Earth's historical timeline, I'd put it in somewhere in the first half of the 19th century between Napoleon and the American Civil War. But it's not trying to emulate any particular real world time period, so it's got all sorts of anachronistic elements like every other D&D setting does.
Eberron is a bit of a mixed bag. It doesn't have everything a post WWI setting would, but it has trains and zeppelins and telegraphs. So it's a bit of a pastiche of about a century of real world technology, from the Napoleonic Wars at the start of the 19th Century to World War I in the early 20th, all pasted together and with outfight fantasy elements mixed in.

Funny enough, while a lot of settings (TTRPG and otherwise) have followed in Eberron's footsteps by embracing a wide magic style, few seem to have copied the early industrial pulp adventure trappings. Either they go earlier, where magic is somewhat common but it's still pre-industrial, or much later, where it's more similar to a cyberpunk setting but all magic powered. Which probably says something about how classic pulp adventure settings remain relatively niche, compared to some of the alternatives.
 

I like like the diversity of representation in the art. That’s great to see.

I’m not a fan of the art mostly being the same style. D&D is more than high-powered, high-level, high-fantasy stories. The art should reflect that. If that’s the tract they wanted to take, fine. But they should have gone with anime-style art that’s more in keeping with the younger fans’ expectations and preferences.

Once you get away from the problematic nonsense of “all members of a given race are inherently X alignment,” it’s hard to do much more than make them humans with pointy ears, beards, or tusks. It’s wildly more interesting when you treat non-human races as “just different kinds of people” instead of truly alien.

Anyone expecting a D&D book to be historically accurate hasn’t been paying attention to the contents of D&D books over the last 50 years. The 2E historical series is the exception that proves the rule. It’s anachronisms all the way down. Always has been.
 

Anyone expecting a D&D book to be historically accurate hasn’t been paying attention to the contents of D&D books over the last 50 years. The 2E historical series is the exception that proves the rule. It’s anachronisms all the way down. Always has been.
This is so true.
 

Here is my take: A fictional, non-Earth world cannot have "anachronisms," or be "historically inaccurate," since it has no real history or chronology to adhere to.

Just because the zipper was invented relatively recently in the real world doesn't mean that a fictional civilization couldn't have figured out how to fasten cloth with interlocking projections of metal at the same time they invented catapults, or what have you. Especially one with magic.

It's useful to take the real world as a loose guide, but even then some people confuse the middle ages with existing fantasy literature, or insist on exclusively European discoveries and inventions.

Another example: some people chafe at clockwork devices in D&D, saying that clockwork did not exist until the rennaissance, or whatever. Well, let me take you to Baghdad in the 900s where the palace of the Caliph featured an entire clockwork tree made of silver and gold, complete with little clockwork birds that sang, and leaves that twirled as if in the wind.

Sounds like Eberron, almost. But this was hundreds of years before Da Vinci.
 

Another example: some people chafe at clockwork devices in D&D, saying that clockwork did not exist until the rennaissance, or whatever. Well, let me take you to Baghdad in the 900s where the palace of the Caliph featured an entire clockwork tree made of silver and gold, complete with little clockwork birds that sang, and leaves that twirled as if in the wind.
There's also the Antikythera mechanism of ancient Greece.
 



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