teitan
Legend
For this review I am going to look at the latest campaign setting offering from Wizards of the Coast. Eberron was a result of an open call for submissions that Wizards of the Coast (WOTC from here) put out a few years back. WOTC received over 11,000 entries in the search and Keith Baker’s Eberron was selected from among those entries. Eberron has been controversial from the beginning due to a few missteps from WOTC about a year before the release of the book, from over use of the word “extreme” to sour grapes from people who saw it as a contest or thought it was too similar to their own entries.
What you get when you purchase the Eberron Campaign Setting is a 320 page full colour book with excellent use of space and margins for 39.95. RPG product have been increasing in price since the advent of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition but this price is comparable to the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting and Dragonlance Campaign Setting Sourcebook. The book does require the use of the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual and it is strongly suggested that you also possess the Expanded Psionics Handbook though not required. Psionic elements of Eberron can be easily ignored or integrated at a later date with zero work on the part of the Dungeon Master.
The artwork of Eberron is simply stunning and fans of Judge Dredd or Chuck Austen’s The Eternal will recognize the vaguely Mignola influenced work of Kev Walker in some of the chapter frontispieces. The cover is by the incomparable Wayne Reynolds who did a lot of the concept art for 3rd Edition D&D long before Eberron was released and his work can be found to grace all the core rulebooks released to date by WOTC. Other artists to grace the pages of Eberron include: Kalman Andrasofszky of Abnett and Lanning’s I Candy, Sam Wood, one of the lead artists on D&D3, Tomm Coker, formerly of Stormwatch: Team Achilles and Vanguard. There are quite a few artists listed but these are the names that would stand out to a comics fan but the artwork would be nothing were it not for an excellent concept team like Dana Knutson, Steve Prescott and Mark Tedin. Looking at the art on the WOTC website (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/eb/20040618a) one gets a real sense for the feel of Eberron and what makes it differ from traditional offerings like Dragonlance or the Forgotten Realms and third part products like White Wolf/Sword & Sorcery Studios Scarred Lands line of products. The entire look is very stunning. I especially enjoy the artwork provided for the various races and the look at Sharn, the city that almost EVERY setting requires as a headquarters for the adventuring parties.
Aside from gorgeous artwork what does Eberron offer the Dungeons & Dragons group? There are many things that separate Eberron from other settings available since the advent of the D20 license (http://www.wizards.com/d20) from technological levels to magic to religion and I will touch on each of those in a moment.
What Eberron offers more than anything else is a world where the standard clichés of fantasy role-playing games and D&D in particular seem to actually fit into the whole picture but also takes the tropes of the 3rd edition of the rules and runs with them. If it is in D&D you CAN find a place for it in Eberron. This especially applies to the core rulebooks and even lesser used books like the Book of Vile Darkness. What is most striking about this though is that WOTC made it makes sense. For example, the Forgotten Realms, currently the king of the D&D settings pile, always seemed like things were just placed on the map willy nilly, a desert meets a glacier, renaissance. Things really didn’t make sense, even with a magical explanation it just didn’t fit. Eberron doesn’t seem to have these errors in verisimilitude that the Forgotten Realms possessed. The world feels logical in its setup. To compare it to Dragonlance, Eberron is very inclusive whereas Dragonlance is known for what it excludes.
The overall tone and feel of Eberron also actually fits the hype. For those who didn’t see or hear it, Eberron was hyped as “dark fantasy, pulp noir and cinematic” with a range of influences from the Lord of the Rings movies to the Mummy to the Maltese Falcon to Sleepy Hollow. When WOTC first started the hype it was pretty hard to swallow but wow, did they deliver the feel in spades. The world of Eberron is a very dark world, just coming off of a war that lasted 102 years and many fans have said feel almost like the first World War. Technology is a little farther advanced as the result of the war resulting in awe-inspiring inventions like the airships of Zilargo and the Warforged, a race of sentient constructs. The thing is Eberron is a world infused with magic, this isn’t a steampunk setting and what it actually does is take the very best elements of Final Fantasy VI and IX and shake them up with D&D. The technology of Eberron is a logical progression of the magic system prevalent in 3rd Edition D&D taken to the next level in the same way that Forgotten Realms took the tropes of 2nd Edition AD&D and pushed them to their limits and beyond, but, at least in this book, Eberron doesn’t come packed with some of the unplayable concepts such as Chosen of this god or that god and outrageously high level NPCs running around stealing the thunder from the players and DMs who run the game. Most of the bid bads were destroyed in the Last War, which means Eberron NEEDS heroes like the player’s characters.
Which brings me to next topic, the one that excited me the most. Religion in D&D has always been a bit of an issue for me. Oftentimes there are too many gods to have to remember in a given fantasy world and clerics could only choose to worship one god. The alignment system made it hard to believe that player A would pray to Evil Storm God before setting sail from city Z because of several reasons, the two most prominent being A) the importance of alignment to D&D and B) the gods were always very active in the world so why pray to a god who isn’t going to listen to you when he would rather see you dead because you have seen or heard of the very real actions of the god. In Eberron nobody knows if the deities are real, clerics do not even have to choose a deity to serve, just a concept or ideal and FINALLY you can elect to worship a whole pantheon of deities as opposed to picking one and sticking to it. What also is really an excellent advance in the play of religion is that now you can have an evil cleric of a good deity whereas before your alignment had to be one step away or the same which led to religion in these settings having a very black and white, good versus evil feel to it.
Eberron features two major pantheons: The Sovereign host, good or sort of good deities and the Dark Six, those cast out of the Sovereign Host like Satan from Heaven. Also included are smaller cults and the religion of the Elves of one of the continents of Eberron. The last is a very cool idea. The Elves of Aerenal worship their ancestors, who still live among them in a deathless state, giving the elves a very dark and sinister feel but not evil. The Deathless creature type is introduced as a new type of undead of a good alignment and fueled by the worship of their descendants. Overall religion becomes a nice simple affair as opposed to the labrynthine nightmare of some campaign settings.
The Magic of Eberron is simply amazing. Keith Baker and company really deserve a lot of kudos for a well thought out implementation of D&D magic in a fantasy setting. Magic has become technology and replaces technology. What looks like a train in Eberron is actually powered not by steam, but by bound elementals whose energy drags the “train” or Lightning rail, along a series of conductive stones that lead from city to city. The “train” gets its name from the crackles of electricity that surround it as it moves from place to place. The airships of Eberron are also powered by bound elementals and coupled with the lightning rail, the world of Eberron is open to world spanning escapades whereas before most campaign settings with such varied cultures and ideas would be HUGE and travel from kingdom to kingdom seemed impractical and most campaigns tended towards a vanilla flavour, plain jane with the magic being a nice chocolate syrup that occasionally was accidentally sprinkled on. Eberron is like a banana split in that regard.
An interesting element of Eberron is the Dragonmarks and the Dragonmarked houses. The Houses are mercantile entities that control trade throughout the main continent of Khorvaire (Eberron entails 4 continents, Khorvaire, Xen’drik, Sarlona and Argonessen as well as the pseudo-continent of Aerenal). Each house is associated with a particular mark, of which there are 12, but 13 houses, 2 houses share the same mark. The Marks allow their bearer to use simple magical spells that can be improved by taking Dragonmark feats that improve their capabilities and the prestige class Dragonmark Heir also helps to improve the capabilities of a bearer.
Other than the handling of religion and magic in Eberron what else is new? Well we get four new races: The Changelings, Kalashtar, Shifters and Warforged. The Changelings are a race of shapeshifters known for their natural inclination towards espionage and criminal activity. They descend from the cross breeding of humans and doppelgangers. The Kalashtar are a psionics heavy race, designed to take advantage of the options from the Expanded Psionics Handbook and to help keep Psionics from looking like the bastard red headed step child of D&D. The Shifters are very, very nifty. They are also referred to as the were-touched and are the result of breeding between the ancient and near extinct “true lycanthropes” and humans. The Shifters have the ability to manifest an animalistic trait so many times per day for a number of rounds. The Warforged are another VERY neat concept. The Warforged are a race of constructs and they are the newest race to come to the world of Eberron because they were first created by one of the Dragonmarked houses about 30 years before the campaign starts and most of them are less than 5 years old. The Warforged are sort of like golems in that they are created and find sentience, kind of a Frankenstein’s monster meets Iron Man from Black Sabbath. They were originally created to be warriors in the Last War and when the war was over they were granted full privileges of the other races as a part of the treaty that ended the war.
One of the things that really stands out in Eberron is the new Artificer core class. The Artificer specializes in magic item creation without being a wizard or cleric. As opposed to spells an Artificer receives infusions, a list of what are essentially spells that an Artificer can use to infuse the parties items with magic. Artificer do not get a lot of infusions to start with but as they progress in level they get more powerful infusions and more infusions per day.
Action points make their way over to Eberron from the excellent D20 Modern and Unearthed Arcana. Action points are points you can use at appropriate moments to do multiple things such as add a D6 die roll to your check. As you improve in level you capabilities with Action point also improve, such as at higher levels you roll up to 3D6 and use the highest die rolled. Action points also fuel some of the new feats and abilities included in Eberron and really lend the setting a pulpish, cinematic feel. I like this addition to the D&D game very much.
The geography section of Eberron is simply outstanding. The world is nicely fleshed out but it is disturbing that there aren’t any maps of some of the towns and cities in the book. This is a criticism I had of the Forgotten Realms book as well. I know as a DM I do no always have time to map out every location in a given town or city but with the settings emphasis on Sharn as a major location for adventuring characters, a map would have been nice to have so a DM doesn’t contradict information in the upcoming Sharn: City of Towers sourcebook (November 2004). Overall though, the geography section stands out above most settings available in the amount of material presented and the depth of that presentation, providing multiple ideas for future adventures not just in the section that it is devoted to adventure ideas but in the very information presented in the general description of each country!
Next, unlike the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting Sourcebook, Eberron presents a full fledged adventure of 10 pages that will provide a good session or two. While the FRCS did include a couple of adventures, both were more like side treks and not that useful to a new DM like the Forgotten Forge in the Eberron Campaign Setting.
The maps in Eberron are the usual outstanding fair that I am used to from a Wizards of the Coast product. The mapping style is reminiscent of the same style used in the Forgotten Realms book but more organic with terrains fading into one another a bit more. The problem with the maps is that they A) Don’t always match up and B) Are sometimes hard to place without looking over the Khorvaire map on pg. 135. Even then the Khorvaire map isn’t as detailed as the smaller maps, but the scale isn’t the same on the smaller maps throughout the geography section so it is a forgivable. Which brings me to another point of contention on the map issue similar to the city map issue, which is this: Eberron needs a poster map and not just a poster sized reproduction of the map on pg. 135. It needs a map that shows the trade routes and the path of the Lightning Rail because these are more important in Eberron than in previous campaign settings, especially with the emphasis on the Dragonmarked Houses. Exactly how does the Lightning Rail meet up Sharn in Breland and Korth in Karnnath? What is the exact route? Of course a creative DM (and what DM worth a salt isn’t creative) could figure them out by looking at the country maps but a larger map would have saved my books binding from a lot of damage.
Eberron presents some interesting new monsters but outside of the Deathless nothing stands out as exceptional, mostly just some cool ideas and interesting new concepts like Horrid Animals and the emphasis on the unique types of constructs available in Eberron. This is not to say the new monsters are bad, but the coolness of the Deathless and Horrid Animals really stand out, the rest of the monsters would be excellent were they not in the shadows of these two concepts.
Now, I haven’t really addressed much that is wrong with Eberron, sounding like a hype machine, but there are some issues within the book. Now, unlike some recent products, I haven’t noticed a hell of a lot of typos, not really any on my initial cursory read through and I haven’t noticed a need for extensive errata either. This is a bonus in my book because a lot of recent WOTC products have been pretty errata heavy lately in comparison to the pre 3.5 relaunch.
Again, the map issue really stands out to me. I understand the reasoning of the increased cost for the book if a map were included but at the same time, WOTC should have made a purchasable map available as well in order to help keep the cost of the book down. They did try to patch up the map problem because the newest issue of Dungeon Magazine, 113, includes a poster of the map on page 135 but this map is woefully inadequate in the overall needs of an Eberron DM. I don’t think it make Eberron unplayable BUT I feel it does detract from the book a small bit.
The art, which I really enjoy, has issues with consistency. While the feel of Eberron really comes through in each and every piece, they also have varying styles like a very anime-ish Gnome on page 15. It does tend to pull the reader out of the material on occasion because of the sudden change in art styles but it does not detract from the product but gives you an idea of the varied influences of Eberron.
Finally, in the sucks but understandable category, is the emphasis on Khorvaire. Eberron, unlike other campaign settings, fully embraces a global feel in that it provides some detail on all of the continents on the planet. The continent of Khorvaire is the special emphasis and there is some detail provided on Aerenal, where the elves worship their deathless ancestors. Sarlona, Argonessen and Xen’Drik receive only 2 pages each and this sucks but you only have so much material you can provide in a 320 page book so it is understandable but I would love to see more information on the other continents, Xen’Drik especially as it seems to be an important adventuring zone and is also the site of the upcoming Real Time Strategy game from Liquid Entertainment. Xen’drik just seems to important to leave with so little detail and some chapters could have been cut back a bit to make room for at least another page on such an important area of the world, second only to Khorvaire by my own impressions in reading the book. I shouldn’t lament the fact too much because obviously we will be seeing more on Xen’drik in the future but I would be wary of placing an adventure there without at least some descriptions of SOME major landmarks to use in my own maps.
What you get when you purchase the Eberron Campaign Setting is a 320 page full colour book with excellent use of space and margins for 39.95. RPG product have been increasing in price since the advent of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition but this price is comparable to the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting and Dragonlance Campaign Setting Sourcebook. The book does require the use of the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual and it is strongly suggested that you also possess the Expanded Psionics Handbook though not required. Psionic elements of Eberron can be easily ignored or integrated at a later date with zero work on the part of the Dungeon Master.
The artwork of Eberron is simply stunning and fans of Judge Dredd or Chuck Austen’s The Eternal will recognize the vaguely Mignola influenced work of Kev Walker in some of the chapter frontispieces. The cover is by the incomparable Wayne Reynolds who did a lot of the concept art for 3rd Edition D&D long before Eberron was released and his work can be found to grace all the core rulebooks released to date by WOTC. Other artists to grace the pages of Eberron include: Kalman Andrasofszky of Abnett and Lanning’s I Candy, Sam Wood, one of the lead artists on D&D3, Tomm Coker, formerly of Stormwatch: Team Achilles and Vanguard. There are quite a few artists listed but these are the names that would stand out to a comics fan but the artwork would be nothing were it not for an excellent concept team like Dana Knutson, Steve Prescott and Mark Tedin. Looking at the art on the WOTC website (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/eb/20040618a) one gets a real sense for the feel of Eberron and what makes it differ from traditional offerings like Dragonlance or the Forgotten Realms and third part products like White Wolf/Sword & Sorcery Studios Scarred Lands line of products. The entire look is very stunning. I especially enjoy the artwork provided for the various races and the look at Sharn, the city that almost EVERY setting requires as a headquarters for the adventuring parties.
Aside from gorgeous artwork what does Eberron offer the Dungeons & Dragons group? There are many things that separate Eberron from other settings available since the advent of the D20 license (http://www.wizards.com/d20) from technological levels to magic to religion and I will touch on each of those in a moment.
What Eberron offers more than anything else is a world where the standard clichés of fantasy role-playing games and D&D in particular seem to actually fit into the whole picture but also takes the tropes of the 3rd edition of the rules and runs with them. If it is in D&D you CAN find a place for it in Eberron. This especially applies to the core rulebooks and even lesser used books like the Book of Vile Darkness. What is most striking about this though is that WOTC made it makes sense. For example, the Forgotten Realms, currently the king of the D&D settings pile, always seemed like things were just placed on the map willy nilly, a desert meets a glacier, renaissance. Things really didn’t make sense, even with a magical explanation it just didn’t fit. Eberron doesn’t seem to have these errors in verisimilitude that the Forgotten Realms possessed. The world feels logical in its setup. To compare it to Dragonlance, Eberron is very inclusive whereas Dragonlance is known for what it excludes.
The overall tone and feel of Eberron also actually fits the hype. For those who didn’t see or hear it, Eberron was hyped as “dark fantasy, pulp noir and cinematic” with a range of influences from the Lord of the Rings movies to the Mummy to the Maltese Falcon to Sleepy Hollow. When WOTC first started the hype it was pretty hard to swallow but wow, did they deliver the feel in spades. The world of Eberron is a very dark world, just coming off of a war that lasted 102 years and many fans have said feel almost like the first World War. Technology is a little farther advanced as the result of the war resulting in awe-inspiring inventions like the airships of Zilargo and the Warforged, a race of sentient constructs. The thing is Eberron is a world infused with magic, this isn’t a steampunk setting and what it actually does is take the very best elements of Final Fantasy VI and IX and shake them up with D&D. The technology of Eberron is a logical progression of the magic system prevalent in 3rd Edition D&D taken to the next level in the same way that Forgotten Realms took the tropes of 2nd Edition AD&D and pushed them to their limits and beyond, but, at least in this book, Eberron doesn’t come packed with some of the unplayable concepts such as Chosen of this god or that god and outrageously high level NPCs running around stealing the thunder from the players and DMs who run the game. Most of the bid bads were destroyed in the Last War, which means Eberron NEEDS heroes like the player’s characters.
Which brings me to next topic, the one that excited me the most. Religion in D&D has always been a bit of an issue for me. Oftentimes there are too many gods to have to remember in a given fantasy world and clerics could only choose to worship one god. The alignment system made it hard to believe that player A would pray to Evil Storm God before setting sail from city Z because of several reasons, the two most prominent being A) the importance of alignment to D&D and B) the gods were always very active in the world so why pray to a god who isn’t going to listen to you when he would rather see you dead because you have seen or heard of the very real actions of the god. In Eberron nobody knows if the deities are real, clerics do not even have to choose a deity to serve, just a concept or ideal and FINALLY you can elect to worship a whole pantheon of deities as opposed to picking one and sticking to it. What also is really an excellent advance in the play of religion is that now you can have an evil cleric of a good deity whereas before your alignment had to be one step away or the same which led to religion in these settings having a very black and white, good versus evil feel to it.
Eberron features two major pantheons: The Sovereign host, good or sort of good deities and the Dark Six, those cast out of the Sovereign Host like Satan from Heaven. Also included are smaller cults and the religion of the Elves of one of the continents of Eberron. The last is a very cool idea. The Elves of Aerenal worship their ancestors, who still live among them in a deathless state, giving the elves a very dark and sinister feel but not evil. The Deathless creature type is introduced as a new type of undead of a good alignment and fueled by the worship of their descendants. Overall religion becomes a nice simple affair as opposed to the labrynthine nightmare of some campaign settings.
The Magic of Eberron is simply amazing. Keith Baker and company really deserve a lot of kudos for a well thought out implementation of D&D magic in a fantasy setting. Magic has become technology and replaces technology. What looks like a train in Eberron is actually powered not by steam, but by bound elementals whose energy drags the “train” or Lightning rail, along a series of conductive stones that lead from city to city. The “train” gets its name from the crackles of electricity that surround it as it moves from place to place. The airships of Eberron are also powered by bound elementals and coupled with the lightning rail, the world of Eberron is open to world spanning escapades whereas before most campaign settings with such varied cultures and ideas would be HUGE and travel from kingdom to kingdom seemed impractical and most campaigns tended towards a vanilla flavour, plain jane with the magic being a nice chocolate syrup that occasionally was accidentally sprinkled on. Eberron is like a banana split in that regard.
An interesting element of Eberron is the Dragonmarks and the Dragonmarked houses. The Houses are mercantile entities that control trade throughout the main continent of Khorvaire (Eberron entails 4 continents, Khorvaire, Xen’drik, Sarlona and Argonessen as well as the pseudo-continent of Aerenal). Each house is associated with a particular mark, of which there are 12, but 13 houses, 2 houses share the same mark. The Marks allow their bearer to use simple magical spells that can be improved by taking Dragonmark feats that improve their capabilities and the prestige class Dragonmark Heir also helps to improve the capabilities of a bearer.
Other than the handling of religion and magic in Eberron what else is new? Well we get four new races: The Changelings, Kalashtar, Shifters and Warforged. The Changelings are a race of shapeshifters known for their natural inclination towards espionage and criminal activity. They descend from the cross breeding of humans and doppelgangers. The Kalashtar are a psionics heavy race, designed to take advantage of the options from the Expanded Psionics Handbook and to help keep Psionics from looking like the bastard red headed step child of D&D. The Shifters are very, very nifty. They are also referred to as the were-touched and are the result of breeding between the ancient and near extinct “true lycanthropes” and humans. The Shifters have the ability to manifest an animalistic trait so many times per day for a number of rounds. The Warforged are another VERY neat concept. The Warforged are a race of constructs and they are the newest race to come to the world of Eberron because they were first created by one of the Dragonmarked houses about 30 years before the campaign starts and most of them are less than 5 years old. The Warforged are sort of like golems in that they are created and find sentience, kind of a Frankenstein’s monster meets Iron Man from Black Sabbath. They were originally created to be warriors in the Last War and when the war was over they were granted full privileges of the other races as a part of the treaty that ended the war.
One of the things that really stands out in Eberron is the new Artificer core class. The Artificer specializes in magic item creation without being a wizard or cleric. As opposed to spells an Artificer receives infusions, a list of what are essentially spells that an Artificer can use to infuse the parties items with magic. Artificer do not get a lot of infusions to start with but as they progress in level they get more powerful infusions and more infusions per day.
Action points make their way over to Eberron from the excellent D20 Modern and Unearthed Arcana. Action points are points you can use at appropriate moments to do multiple things such as add a D6 die roll to your check. As you improve in level you capabilities with Action point also improve, such as at higher levels you roll up to 3D6 and use the highest die rolled. Action points also fuel some of the new feats and abilities included in Eberron and really lend the setting a pulpish, cinematic feel. I like this addition to the D&D game very much.
The geography section of Eberron is simply outstanding. The world is nicely fleshed out but it is disturbing that there aren’t any maps of some of the towns and cities in the book. This is a criticism I had of the Forgotten Realms book as well. I know as a DM I do no always have time to map out every location in a given town or city but with the settings emphasis on Sharn as a major location for adventuring characters, a map would have been nice to have so a DM doesn’t contradict information in the upcoming Sharn: City of Towers sourcebook (November 2004). Overall though, the geography section stands out above most settings available in the amount of material presented and the depth of that presentation, providing multiple ideas for future adventures not just in the section that it is devoted to adventure ideas but in the very information presented in the general description of each country!
Next, unlike the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting Sourcebook, Eberron presents a full fledged adventure of 10 pages that will provide a good session or two. While the FRCS did include a couple of adventures, both were more like side treks and not that useful to a new DM like the Forgotten Forge in the Eberron Campaign Setting.
The maps in Eberron are the usual outstanding fair that I am used to from a Wizards of the Coast product. The mapping style is reminiscent of the same style used in the Forgotten Realms book but more organic with terrains fading into one another a bit more. The problem with the maps is that they A) Don’t always match up and B) Are sometimes hard to place without looking over the Khorvaire map on pg. 135. Even then the Khorvaire map isn’t as detailed as the smaller maps, but the scale isn’t the same on the smaller maps throughout the geography section so it is a forgivable. Which brings me to another point of contention on the map issue similar to the city map issue, which is this: Eberron needs a poster map and not just a poster sized reproduction of the map on pg. 135. It needs a map that shows the trade routes and the path of the Lightning Rail because these are more important in Eberron than in previous campaign settings, especially with the emphasis on the Dragonmarked Houses. Exactly how does the Lightning Rail meet up Sharn in Breland and Korth in Karnnath? What is the exact route? Of course a creative DM (and what DM worth a salt isn’t creative) could figure them out by looking at the country maps but a larger map would have saved my books binding from a lot of damage.
Eberron presents some interesting new monsters but outside of the Deathless nothing stands out as exceptional, mostly just some cool ideas and interesting new concepts like Horrid Animals and the emphasis on the unique types of constructs available in Eberron. This is not to say the new monsters are bad, but the coolness of the Deathless and Horrid Animals really stand out, the rest of the monsters would be excellent were they not in the shadows of these two concepts.
Now, I haven’t really addressed much that is wrong with Eberron, sounding like a hype machine, but there are some issues within the book. Now, unlike some recent products, I haven’t noticed a hell of a lot of typos, not really any on my initial cursory read through and I haven’t noticed a need for extensive errata either. This is a bonus in my book because a lot of recent WOTC products have been pretty errata heavy lately in comparison to the pre 3.5 relaunch.
Again, the map issue really stands out to me. I understand the reasoning of the increased cost for the book if a map were included but at the same time, WOTC should have made a purchasable map available as well in order to help keep the cost of the book down. They did try to patch up the map problem because the newest issue of Dungeon Magazine, 113, includes a poster of the map on page 135 but this map is woefully inadequate in the overall needs of an Eberron DM. I don’t think it make Eberron unplayable BUT I feel it does detract from the book a small bit.
The art, which I really enjoy, has issues with consistency. While the feel of Eberron really comes through in each and every piece, they also have varying styles like a very anime-ish Gnome on page 15. It does tend to pull the reader out of the material on occasion because of the sudden change in art styles but it does not detract from the product but gives you an idea of the varied influences of Eberron.
Finally, in the sucks but understandable category, is the emphasis on Khorvaire. Eberron, unlike other campaign settings, fully embraces a global feel in that it provides some detail on all of the continents on the planet. The continent of Khorvaire is the special emphasis and there is some detail provided on Aerenal, where the elves worship their deathless ancestors. Sarlona, Argonessen and Xen’Drik receive only 2 pages each and this sucks but you only have so much material you can provide in a 320 page book so it is understandable but I would love to see more information on the other continents, Xen’Drik especially as it seems to be an important adventuring zone and is also the site of the upcoming Real Time Strategy game from Liquid Entertainment. Xen’drik just seems to important to leave with so little detail and some chapters could have been cut back a bit to make room for at least another page on such an important area of the world, second only to Khorvaire by my own impressions in reading the book. I shouldn’t lament the fact too much because obviously we will be seeing more on Xen’drik in the future but I would be wary of placing an adventure there without at least some descriptions of SOME major landmarks to use in my own maps.
