In an old
post from 2005, Mike Mearls and Keith Baker debated which sort of stories they want players to find, experience, and tell, as they adventure in Eberron.* Concretely, they debated Eberron's core story--the kind of core experience they want players to experience in the setting.
The reason the new ECS falls flat is that investigative journalism hasn't ever been a core story of Eberron. Journalistic engagements on Khorvaire may make for the occasionally stimulating mission: they just don't afford a lense through which to view the entire setting.
Even in Paizo's Golarion, chroniclers don't relay back
tabloid news for the
non-adventuring folks back home - for the equivalent of gossip-hungry retirees in Sharn. Instead, chroniclers record maps and intense reports for fellow adventurers.
Now
that is a fitting vehicle to help would-be players get a feel of what it's like to
adventure in a world.
Remember that passage from
Fellowship where one of the hobbits in Moria starts to read alout of the
drums in the deep, and
they are coming? The chroniclers' diaries and reports you see in
Classic Monsters Revisited are of that kind. They're written so well that I remember them over ten years later. Though I have an awful feeling that some of the prose in the new ECS will be remembered too, ten years down the drain, if less fondly.
In-game prose of live-reports are an amazing vehicle to make the setting come alive. When, that is, it succeeds at the levels of angle, register, and writing quality.
The problem isn't just that the in-game writing in the new ECS connects readers with material that's not been connected to Eberron's core story.
The problem is that it's delivered in what others, on this very page, liken to "celebrity gossip" and "trash writing." If that was deliberate, I find it a spectactular mis-assessment of the setting's core strenghts.