D&D General Eberron - why don't you run it? [-]

[earthsea_wizard]

I've got a + thread going about the Realms, thought I would even it out with a - thread! I recently fell for Eberron after mostly ignoring it for 21 years, but am curious what it is by 2025 that has people not enjoying it? It is now more difficult for me to look at most other D&D fantasy settings without considering how applying the Eberron approach is so much more immersive and gameable. I've seen people say Eberron ruined every other setting for them because of this, and I can see why. But still, I know many aren't into it.

I can guess at some of the general turnoffs, most of them probably aesthetic (that was my hurdle), but lets hear it.

 

[Desdichado]

I've always liked Eberron, but my biggest hurdle in running it has been its focus on themes that I'm not interested in pursuing. I've actually found that "remixing" Eberron to something that is Eberron-like but not exactly Eberron works better for me. That's largely true for every setting, honestly; I take a lot of the elements of them and hang them in a new context with new names (I did the same thing with Ustalav from Golarion; treating it as its own setting, but remixing it into my own horror-themed fantasy setting called Timischburg) for the same reason; either the themes aren't quite right, or too many details need to be changed for it to work. So I take the elements that I like, rename them, and recontextualize them with different themes.

Honestly, I've often thought that Eberron doesn't even feel like it's trying to be a D&D setting at all. It feels like it really demands its own system that facilitates a pulp and noir tone and feel.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

I love it, but running it at least somewhat close to how it's intended by either WotC or Mr. Baker requires pulling from a lot of tropes that may have been familiar to 30something gen Xers in the early 2000s, but with another 20 years of development of media and culture I feel its inspirations have been left behind.

New, young 5e players would be excited by a world that blends magic and technology... and they're expecting steampunk "No!" everyone shouts. "Eberron is not steampunk! Leave that at the door!" That already scares some people off from the concept; they like the netflix show Arcane, for instance, and no one gets mad at them if they call it "Steampunk".

And then you might go on about the pulp inspiration of Eberron; and it is pulp and pulp is great, and pulp is also an inspiration for "generic" D&D... but when was the last time anything "pulp inspired" blew up in pop culture? There was a revival in the mid 2000s with stuff like Sin City, around the same time Eberron was being worked on by men of that same generation, but certainly Frank Miller's The Spirit, Jason Momoa's Conan and Disney's John Carter of Mars bombing harder than Hiroshima hammered the nails in pulp's coffin.

And then the thing I love about Eberron, how it takes D&D "magic by way of mechanics" to their logical conclusion and integrates things like monster biology or spell slots into the economy or culture of nations, lots of players feel like you'd need multiple advanced degrees to really grok that kind of stuff. They want to kill harpies and loot their nests, not consider how a medusa petrifying a herd of cattle can undercut the stone quarry industry.

Again, I love it, and maybe I just suck at getting newer younger players interested in the setting, but basically no one I know who started playing after 3.5e (which means they tend to be geriatric millennials at the youngest) seems to have any affinity for the cultural elements that make it unique.

 

[el-remmen]

1. I only run homebrew settings, so avoiding it is not specifically about Eberron.
2. I am just not into magitech, artificing, warforged as PCs, and several of the other things that come to mind when I think of Eberron.
3. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't steal stuff to use from Eberron, (like Dragonmarks, maybe), but I have never even had the opportunity to look through an Eberron book (aside from a quick store flip through back in the day), so not sure what else there is to steal.

 

[Aldarc]

Lack of time. Other games I want to run and play.

 

[jolt]

Nowadays, I prefer homebrew which is easier to tweak for me.

At the time, I was a little irked about the whole 'open setting design contest'. If you're just going to pick an already established writer, why have a contest at all? I don't necessarily blame them for that, but it's not really an open contest if a newbie can't win (just reach out to established writers and have them submit ideas).

Ultimately, there was nothing about Eberron that bothered me, it just didn't do anything that I cared about. Not enough was changed enough from a generic fantasy setting, and what was (like magitech) didn't peak my interest at all.

The problem I have with a lot of settings now, is that they get into too much granular detail. The more a setting does that, the more the setting sets the tone and themes of your game (or the more work you have to do to modify that tone).

 

[Gorck]

My reason is simple, but boring: I grew up with the Forgotten Realms books and video games so I know it better. After watching Critical Role for several years now, I’ve gotten to know it well so we’ve switched to Exandria.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I LOVE Eberron as a setting and have run a pair of campaigns there before... but I have always known of and have had to try and reconcile the one fatal flaw of the setting:

Eberron is meant to be a wide setting when it comes to magic-- magic is everywhere and everyone uses it in their everyday lives... but it is not deep. There are exceedingly few high-level magic users in the setting, which is why magic items and magewrights/artificers are so prolific-- they are creating objects that allow for the more powerful magics to be wielded by many more people, because there just aren't enough actual magic-users able to wield that powerful magic themselves...

...except for the three to six members of the D&D party playing the game that are the stars of the show.

This has always been my stumbling block with the setting. How is it that we are supposed to make groups like the Dragonmarked Houses (for example) meaningful to the players and their characters-- groups that the party should want to deal with and interact with-- when those PCs will out-level them all and end up more powerful than every single other NPC person, group, or organization that they might ever come into contact with? It's hard to make the party want to interact with members of House Jorasco for healing when the Cleric in the party has more spell slots for more healing and more varied and powerful recovery options then any dragonmarked member they would ever interact with in a casual manner from the House. The issue of standard D&D leveling and character advancement completely runs counter to how characters within the world of Eberron are meant to be. At least in my opinion.

I honestly think Eberron as a setting is one that really should be run as an E6 game-- a game where no character advances past Level 6-- so that more powerful magics always remain out of reach of the party and then would require them to have to interact with the few and far between NPCs that have those powerful magics they need, or the magic items they can acquire. If teleportation circles remain only in the hands of dragonmarked members of House Orien and not at the party's beck and call just because we as a table were playing Eberron with standard D&D advancement and the PCs are now all 9th level... it would do a lot better to maintain the aesthetics of the setting.

 

[Mind of tempest]

I only ever want to run homebrew

 

[Stormonu]

I was turned off to Eberron when it was first released because it felt too "high magic" and modern, with the likes of Lightning Rails, Warforged (robots), common feather fall tokens in Sharn, skydisks and the like, and was concerned it was going to spill into core D&D as the default. Luckily, it did not and I've come to appreciate Eberron more now, having run a few adventures in the world.