Eberron

[Mentat55]

Completely agree! I love Eberron and consider it one of the best 3.5 settings published.

The only knock I have against the setting is that the WotC competition that Eberron was created for required that everything in the Monster Manual be included. Which is how we got halflings riding dinosaurs.

Oooh, I forgot about halflings riding dinosaurs. That is pretty wicked too

 

[karlindel]

Eberron is my favorite published D&D setting.

A few things that I like and that set it apart from other settings:
The impact of The Last War on recent history leads to a lot of interesting campaign ideas.
An industrial feel to magic and its use.
Nationality is usually more important than race.
Few deities, and the deities are not strongly involved in the world, although the churches often are.
Just the right level of variety in power groups for my taste.
Goblinoids have interesting and deep cultures.
I think dinosaur riding tribal halflings are fun.

 

[Cyronax]

Some important differences in Eberron to Traditional D&D is: 1. Grey Morality. Alignment has no presidency in determining a characters actions. For instance you have a NG queen who wants war so that she can attain the throne of Galifar, and you have a LE vampiric tyrant who wants nothing more than peace, and to rebuild his crumbled nation to splendor. You have a LG organization who almost completed a genocide against an entire group of creatures who weren't all evil to begin with. You could have a CE character who really is just a rebelious teenage punk, who likes to break minor rules, and cause mayhem, but could never kill anyone or cause anyone serious harm. Does he need to be punched? Probably, but he doesn't deserve to be beheaded or anything. He'll probably grow out of this phase anyway.

Another thing to keep in mind is that monsters aren't bound by traditional limits to alignment. For instance you could have a gold dragon who is a horrid, sadistic villian, while you have a red dragon who is a noble, kind soul with a love in his heart for all of the creatures in his domain. I mean a black dragon, and a group of orcs helped to save the world from cosmic horrors, and bound them to Khyber. Probably the only other race to sacrifice more to save the world than the orcs, are the Coutl.

Yeah I would have to agree. Despite all of Eberron's clear divergences from most D&D worlds, it is the moral relativism that strikes me as one of the salient features of the setting. It makes Eberron feel pretty modern as a setting actually.

I also like the endless diversity of organizations in the world. For instance, I like that Eberron went so far to build up a fantasy university education system. I like the idea of adventurers as pawns of academic rivalries. Makes Indiana Jones style adventures easy to come up with.

 

[delericho]

Eberron is surprisingly awesome.

What I like most about the setting is that, in the 3.5e incarnation at least, there's just enough lore to give the setting some real depth, but not so much that you can't buy, read and absorb it all.

In all honesty, with the exception of the "Adventurer's Guide to Eberron", I would recommend just getting all the books. There's nothing that's required beyond the core, but there's some really good stuff there.

(I was very lucky, in that my FLGS bought up their distributor's entire stock of unsold 3.5e books, including most of the Eberron books, and then resold them at knockdown prices. So, I got most of the setting for very little. Only "Secrets of Xen'drik" proved to be difficult to find.)

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Eberron made 3.x gnomes not suck. That's awesome.

Eberron Drow. They're like regular drow, but... uhh... they like scorpions instead of spiders. And they're... uhh... they're a patriachal society! Yeah, that's it. Oh, and their driders are actually drorpions. So, totally different from regular drow. Yeah.

They're not always evil sadists. That's a significant difference. But maybe even better, they pretty much never leave Xen'drik.

 

[Dedekind]

Two hallmarks of Eberron make a DMs life a little different from FR. First, traditional monster/NPC alignments can differ and so the DM has to fight assumptions about a monster/NPC. Second, it is difficult to stay true to the pulp feel the world is intended to have.

Neither may be a problem for you, of course, but I know every time I play, those meta issues come up.

 

[amerigoV]

Eberron is my default setting. I'll work about anything into it unless the material is very tied to another setting (Expedition to the Demonweb comes to mind as one that I would not put in Eberron, and I am running an Olde Skoole Expedition to the Ruins of Castle Greyhawk in Greyhawk for nostalgia's sake).

If you want a detailed example of putting something in Eberron and having it enhance the material, see the link below to my design diary on running Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. Tying Strahd in with the current political machinations really helped in my opinion (basically Kiaus and Strahd had a Truman/MacArthur event at the end of the War).

Savage Ravenloft | Design Diary | Obsidian Portal

Some fun stuff that I have run in the past that I wish Eberron had been available when I ran it:

1. Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil - All the Madness/Tharizdun material fits perfectly into the banish Plane of Madness (the cult awakening Tharizdun is literally bringing the plane co-terminus with the Prime)

2. Banewarrens - that massive old Spire would fit nicely in Sharn - a lost tower that everyone avoids. It was the only tower to survive the Dragonmark Wars (I think that was the name) and Sharn rebuild around it.


Check out the Stormreach book. You put that with the XenDrik books and you have a great campaign sitting right there. Stormreach is a "mini-Khorvaire" in its makeup, and you have a ruin continent right outside the door.

 

[Cyronax]

Another thing I like about Eberron was the potential to use the dragons' continent of Argonessen (sp?) as an updated type of 'Council of Wyrms' campaign.

I think the Draconic Prophecy is one of the coolest things about Eberron.

I was batting around that concept to pitch to my group as a side campaign for 4e. I think it would be relatively easy to accomplish -- just take the hatchling or young metallic dragon stats from Draconomicon Mettallic and use that as a baseline. Then work in some narrower class options, but more or less keep the spirit of 4e.

C.I.D.

 

[CAFRedblade]

Things that I wish were a little different...

• Eberron Drow. They're like regular drow, but... uhh... they like scorpions instead of spiders. And they're... uhh... they're a patriachal society! Yeah, that's it. Oh, and their driders are actually drorpions. So, totally different from regular drow. Yeah.

Although not listed in any of the RPG source-books that I recall, these drow are only one clan/family amongst several on Xen'Drick. One other clan/family mentioned in the novels are elemental fire worshipers, and are at war with the scorpion worshipers.

 

[Wik]

When I ran Eberron, it was as a magical variant to world war 2. My history degree gets used rather heavily when I run an Eberron game, which I like.

For example, in my last campaign, the PCs were in the city of Karlakton, an industrial city that I would compare to the city of Dresden. There was a doomsday cult, an uprising of warforged peace activists, and a communist-style work force that were trying to seize control of the industrial plants. I stole rather liberally from some ww2 studies classes I had taken, that third-year Russian history course I had been convinced was "useless", and pretty much every history of humans rights course I have ever taken.

(To be honest, though, all of my campaigns borrow heavily from those history of human rights courses. It just seems to always pop up).

And then I threw in some pulp elements, with every faction in the game following the "shades of gray" philosophy. I made sure that there were no clear cut good guys or bad guys. There were spies galore, decadent noble families, meddling watchmakers, political philosophers, and (of course) a vampire cult that was strangely sort of on the PCs' side. There were guards that the PCs sided with who were also known to take the occasional bribe. And there were violent criminal lords who also ran orphanages and soup kitchens.

A few words of advice:

1) Change the scale of Khorvaire. The kingdoms should be smaller - they are way too huge as presented. Breland should be the size of England, not the united states.

2) Always look towards historical analogs. Breland is England/The U.S. The Eldeen Reaches is Canada in the 1920s (fighting to be seen as independant against their queen). Aundair is a mix of france and medieval england. Karnath (is that the name?) is German with a touch of Russia. Thrane is pretty much every fundamentalist religious state. And so on.

3) Use real world names. Eberron names go crazy with apostrophes and whatnot. I really think you'll get a better effect with real world names - Duncan, Edward, James, and the like. We played it that way, and it really seemed a lot cooler than "Tr'kinn the Gambler".

4) Avoid dungeons. Eberron can do dungeons, but it works much better for "Shadowruns".