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

[pukunui]

See for me, I tend to pick one theme and run with it rather than do all of them. I've done pulp exploration in Xen'drik, high seas swashbucklers in Lhazaar, noir political intrigue in Sharn and now Western cosmic horror in Quickstone. Eberron supports these all, but like any good ice cream bar, adding all the toppings at once just gives you a belly ache.

Yeah, I've seen Keith Baker give similar advice: pick one main theme / villain and maybe sprinkle in a few others as window dressing, but don't try to do everything everywhere all at once!

For the Eberron campaign I'm currently running, I mainly wanted to run the Keys from the Golden Vault adventures, but I didn't think those would be enough for a whole campaign, and I wanted a bit more variety than just heist after heist. So the premise began with a group of Cyran refugees in Sharn who have recently joined the Clifftop Adventurers Guild. Through the guild, they join the Golden Vault. Since then, I've added in Nafas and the Infinite Staircase as well. I've tossed in a few other adventures, including some from the Oracle of War campaign. It's been great!

That being said, most of the individual episodic adventures peter out around levels 10-11, so I am planning to run Vecna: Eve of Ruin for the second half of the campaign, subbing in Vol for Vecna. (I've talked about this in more detail in the Enhancing Vecna thread.)

If I do have one complaint, it's that Eberron is great for running a variety of very modernistic style adventures, but kinda bad for running generic medieval D&D. The fact most of the common species are "... With a twist" means it's harder to just plop in an adventure featuring a elven forested village being beset by orcs under the control of the cult of Baphomet. You gotta do a lot of work to make that pretty standard hook work with Eberron. It's refreshing as a change of pace, but requires a lot more work than other kitchen sinks like The Realms or Greyhawk

Yes, this is something I've grappled with, even when the adventure provides a suggestion on where to place the adventure in Eberron.

Another adventure that's hard to put in Eberron are typical D&D-style dragon-centric adventures. Dragons are so much more behind-the-scenes in Eberron. Yes, I know that KB has said you can still have "rogue" dragons that go on random rampages in Khorvaire etc, but it still feels like the setting doesn't really want you to do that. I think the Dragon Delves adventures would be just as difficult to run in Eberron as the Radiant Citadel ones are.

 

[Vael]

Mainly because I want more support / official adventures in Eberron. Love the setting, want to write fiction in the world, but I'll admit I'm more a pre-published adventure guy when running DnD, and while there's material from older editions that I have access to, I'd like more content. And while one could adapt other adventures into Eberron, honestly 9 times out of 10, better off starting from scratch.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well first of all, I run homebrew campaigns exclusively. But even considering that, I got interested in all my favorite campaign settings during 1e and 2e. By the time Eberron came around I didn't feel like adding another swath of books to my collection (beyond the core setting), and that's how I roll. Beyond that, I don't like the warforged aesthetics, or the whole "wood and metal not-really constructs" thing. I love robots, and I want robots.

Artificers are pretty cool conceptually.

 

[TheHand]

Eberron had always been an interesting setting to read about but it just never pulled me in as a game setting.

But I still wanted to give it the ol’ college try. I ran one of the premade adventures set in Sharn for our group to get a taste of it. It was a good little murder mystery one shot involving dragonmark houses. We all had fun but no one was interested in diving any further. However if someone in my circles were clambering to either play Eberron again or run their own game in the setting I wouldn’t say no.

 

[Clint_L]

Eberron belongs too much to its author to ever feel like my world.

I loved Greyhawk because it left so much room for you to make it your own. Now I love Exandria because, despite being arguably developed in more detail than any other D&D world (and yes; I am aware of all the Forgotten Realms books; I think they pale in comparison to the hundreds upon hundreds of hours of Critical Role), the sourcebooks leave tons of space open for the DM, while being more high fantasy than Greyhawk.

So I can admire Eberron while having no desire to set a campaign there.

 

[Fifinjir]

How it defined “pulp adventure” and “noir intrigue” did not really grab me as main themes to build a campaign around. And I have to agree it’s clearly meant for lower levels, a game with a shallower advancement curve would be more fitting for the setting.

 

[nevin]

I probably wouldn't mind running or playing it but I over the years haven't been able to find a full table that wan't to play it. It just crosses some threshold from what most people want out of thier fantasy. Maybe it feels too advanced and modern not sure but I do know it just doesn't seem to appeal to most people.

 

[GM Lent]

I absolutely adore Eberron as a setting; once i got over the fact that my submission in the setting search contest didn't win (and in truth, it absolutely did not in any way deserve to), I was really curious as to what did. The Eberron previews they published in the runup to the setting made my mouth water, and when they released the setting book it was verything I could have hoped for.

I devoured everything; Baker's Dragonshards articles, chats online, all of it. I loved every piece of it.

I don't run it now because I started playing/running DCC in 2018 and have never looked back. I can easily incorporate bits of Eberrone (shifters, goblin and orc cultures, etc) into my games with ease, but time being limited as it is I mostly just run modules, tweaked to provide an ongoing narrative for my groups. And sadly, ther are no Eberron-set DCC modules.

 

[Simon The Hunter]

We played our 4E campaign with Eberron bits in it as my first PC was a Dragonborn and we there were a bunch of other stuff pulled from the setting by our GM. I never played any 3.0-3.5E unfortunately so never had any major exposure to it. For me it's an impressive setting, but I've never run anything myself as a GM in it.

I must admit, I'm not a huge fan of mech based PCs (which I tend to equate to Eberron, perhaps incorrectly, happy to be corrected) for some reason, I really don't know why, I am not averse to steampunk or noir so... shrugs

 

[Clint_L]

We played our 4E campaign with Eberron bits in it as my first PC was a Dragonborn and we there were a bunch of other stuff pulled from the setting by our GM. I never played any 3.0-3.5E unfortunately so never had any major exposure to it. For me it's an impressive setting, but I've never run anything myself as a GM in it.

I must admit, I'm not a huge fan of mech based PCs (which I tend to equate to Eberron, perhaps incorrectly, happy to be corrected) for some reason, I really don't know why, I am not averse to steampunk or noir so... shrugs

Yeah, lots of Eberron stuff has made its way into my campaign. Because it's cool!