Forgotten Realms VS. Eberron. Which should I run?

[MerricB]

I'm a Realms fan, I make no secret of that, so I'll tell you what turns me off from Eberron.

No real personalities. I think it was supposed to be a selling point of Eberron that their aren't any major, powerful NPC's, but I see that as unrealistic and frankly a little boring. Eberron seems highly contrived to make PC's the center of the entire world, even if they shouldn't be. They should be the center of the game, but not of the entire campaign world (unless it's an Epic game).

In fact, Eberron definitely has personalities. It's one of the stronger features of the world. What it doesn't have is 23rd level Wizards or similar running around.

Instead it has lower-level characters with influence. If you annoy the head of House Jorasco, your access to healing magic will be cut off pretty much entirely...

A good Eberron campaign should make use of recurring NPCs. Patrons, enemies, allies and the like.

In the first three Eberron adventures - The Forgotten Forge, Shadows of the Last War and Whispers of the Vampire's Blade - the idea of recurring NPCs is used, and very effectively. The meetings with the party's patron, Lady Elaydren, are entirely different in feel, and provide much impetus for the adventures that follow.

Then too, you have mysterious characters like Baron Merrix d'Cannith. Grandson of the original creator of the warforged, we know that he's somewhere in the depths of Sharn maintaining the illegal manufacture of warforged, but he doesn't step out onto centre stage - but his activities do, as seen in a Dungeon Magazine adventure.

With Sharn: City of Towers, several new NPCs have been added to the mix. From politicians such as the Lord Mayor, to important religious figures such as Archierophant Ythana Morr, to the artists like the satirist Kessler, Sharn gives a new look at Eberron and at how the NPCs can relate to the PCs. Although Eberron can easily be run in a standard D&D style, it also has plenty of material for politics and intrigue.

Personalities? Eberron has them. It's just that they have to be subtler than just being able to kill the PCs. Thus, they will attempt to gain the allegiance of the PCs, because whoever influences the PCs will have influence over one of the major forces of Eberron.

Cheers!

 

[jester47]

While technically an anachronism really only refers to something out of place in time; i.e., Julius Caesar consulting his wristwatch to get the exact time of Vercingetorix's surrender or something like that, in common usage (especially in fantasy) it's used to refer to any element that's out of place. There's really no better word for it either.

Yes there is:

Non sequitur
-OED definition #2: A thing that is not in harmony with its surroundings; an incongruity.
-OED definition #3: An inference or a conclusion not logically following from the premisses; a response, remark, etc., that does not logically follow from what has gone before.

An anachronism is a nonsequitur with respect to time. Since fantasy is ahistorical, it does not and cannot have anachronisms except in its own continuity. It can however have non sequiturs, and in fact these often are what make fantasy interesting as the non sequitur is what generates surrealism. Surrealism is what makes fantasy fun.

The Glacier next to the Desert is a classic non sequitur that generates surrealism. Thus is fully acceptable in the fantasy genre.

As for Anarouch and the Great Glacier- Anarouch is an artifically created desert. The Glacier is an atificially enhanced glacier (From the neaklace of an Ice God). The lattitude of Waterdeep is about at the 45th parallel of Toril. Anything north of that is generally cold, even Anarouch It is noted in the materials that the northern reaches of Anarouch are very cold in the winter, and fairly warm in the summer as per a cold desert at that lattitude. The glacier is sustained by a god. And even if it wasn't the mean annual temperature at that lattiude in a dry climate would have a hard time denting a glacier of that size.

And cold deserts are not too far removed from reality. If I drive 3 hours east of Seattle, I am in one. Spokane gets into the 100s in the summer and is in the deep freeze in the winter. Aside from the river valleys there, Eastern Washington State is a desert in most places. The Mongolians agree, they have some deserts that get really cold and really hot right next to glaciers forests and mountains. Washington is very much the same in that if I were hiking I could make it from a glacier into a desert inside of 3 days.

Anarouch and the High Ice/Great Glacier are quasi-non sequiturs. They have reasons for being there and the weather and temp patterns around them are explained in a believable way. I am not sure how much realism you can expect from a genre built on the non sequitur and the plot device.

A) An ineptly cobbled together, bloated pantheon of disparate gods, many of which were lifted from the Deities and Demigods book without further reflection or research (e.g., there is no Keltic "Sylvanus"--that's a Roman name)

This description is applicable to the Wilderlands and to an extent, Greyhawk also... perhaps you don't like borrowed pantheons... anyways, why care about real world research in a FANTASY world? It doesn't really matter.

B) Nonsensical geography, such as a huge glacier coterminous with a hot and dry desert.

Anarouch aint all that hot in the north bucko. This is debunked above, in FR background and in real world examples.

C) Anachronisms, such as an Ancient Babylonian culture and an Ancient Egyptian culture coexisting with High Middle Age cultures.

Even though anachronisms in fantasy have been debunked above, I really don't see what is wrong with this. Babylonian and Egyptian culture existed in our world and the people of these places were brought to Faerun (a Medieval style culture) from Earth. Its not that they developed historically that way, magic was involved.

E) Lack of verisimilitude--FR doesn't even attempt what Walt Disney called the "plausible impossible."

F) Annoying, 2-D uber-NPCs

Both of these are the dominion of the DM, no matter the setting. If I want annoying 2D uber PCs in my Eberron game, guess what? Eberron becomes the twink uber NPC world. I just have to make them up. The same is true for Versimilitude. Its the DMs call. If you have a problem with the Campaign setting doing this then you probably have a problem with your DM and don't know it. When you see non-sensical geography there is ussually a reason in the world for it.

Dissing FANTASY campaign settings based on lack of versimilitude and non sequiturs is stupid. THEY ARE ALL GOOD. Each one offers different variations on the same things. Enjoy them for what they offer. People should not be so intellectually arrogant that they can't have fun with them.

Aaron.

 

[Bobitron]

I think Baker and the rest of WOTC have done an amazing job with Eberron, and there is finally a "generic" D&D world that is not without flavor. It is currently my second favorite setting after, of course, the incredible Iron Kingdoms. I will always have a soft spot for FR, but I don't expect I will ever start a new campaign there.

Edit: Hi Gundark! Nice to see another face from the PP boards on here

 

[Christopher Lambert]

Heh. Altho, magic isn't really so overly common in FR, just in some places, and of course, at the higher end of the scale. Commoners are just as poor as anywhere else and you can even play low-magic campaigns fairly well in many regions of the realms.

Magic is very common in 3e. As a 3e-designed setting, Eberron fits the rules better.

And those NPCs are really rather irrelevant. If you don't want them you don't use them. Never had a problem with that.

Bye
Thanee

Easier said than done. You know they're there, and they can do your job better than you. There's little point of playing an adventure such as "City of the Spider Queen" when the Chosen of Mystra could do the job for you.

I don't know why so many people point to "a recent catastrophic war" as something interesting in Eberron. So many campaign setting feature "recent global catastrophes" (The Greyhawk War, The Time of Troubles, The Cataclysm, et al.) that it's become a cliche.

FR has suffered many such crises. These catastrophic events tend to be unpopular, however. (See the Dark Sun thread, and the anger about the Prism Pentad novels, or ask DragonLance fans what they think of so many Ages in so few generations.) The Time of Troubles is probably the least popular aspect of FR.

PS IMO the FR pantheon is too big and redundant. (Err... and someone kill Eilistraee. Please.) The Eberron deities are much better. They don't interfere, they will never create a Chosen, they will never appear as an avatar, they rarely (if ever) talk, they don't spark racial wars over petty dislikes, and they won't possess a certain drow wizardess who I will not name so she can kill her chief rival because she's too much of a wimp to do it herself, and then throw the deity away with no consequences whatsoever!

 

[Gez]

There's little point of playing an adventure such as "City of the Spider Queen" when the Chosen of Mystra could do the job for you.

They could. But can they? Don't they have some other work to do? In my homebrew setting, there are several very powerful characters, too. They don't interfer with the players' adventures, they're too busy fending off attacks from malafides, ethergaunts, kaorti, illithids, and similar threats to the whole world. No time to fight a petty dictatorship or an ogre infestation.

All the PCs have heard of them were pretty vague stuff (things like "Caleor the Elder's knowledge about planar anomalies is awe-inspiring, matched only by the demented gynosphinx Kelarie of the Mysteries' lore"). They have no idea what they do, and it'll stay that way.

And it was the same in the FR campaigns I played in. Sure, everyone has heard of Elminster, the legendary sage. But he's somewhere in the Nine Hells, for whatever reason, and can't help right now.

And it's the same in Eberron. You have A CONTINENT FULL OF ANCIENT DRAGON LOREMASTERS, for Aureon's sake! That's not exactly wimpy. And they have an excellent reason to know of that Daelkyr plot to polymorph any object the whole friggin' planet into a needle: they knew it through the Prophecy, and their Chamber spies. Why don't they take it on themselves?

Because it's not their job. It's an adventurer's job. And they aren't adventurers. That's why.

 

[ReignMan]

For someone who has no interest in Epic rules, wouldn't that be a bonus. A setting where PC are the penlutimate powers without needing another rulebook to do so?


THe only "negative" I've ever had with game world is it's ubiquitousness. Like a muzack song that played too long, you sorta wish the background music would change at least once in a while. Overall, I am in the "DM who doesn't need continuity-fan players know more about the game world than he does" catagory.

I agree - if you want High Profile & High Power at low level then Eberron is great. It's a good setting but not to everyones taste. I personally like it, and, more importantly my PC's do.

 

[jester47]

Magic is very common in 3e. As a 3e-designed setting, Eberron fits the rules better.

I dunno I think this is an interpretive illusion. I don't find magic to be very common in any 3e game. I think the commonality of magic is simply part of the story the DM develops.

Easier said than done. You know they're there, and they can do your job better than you. There's little point of playing an adventure such as "City of the Spider Queen" when the Chosen of Mystra could do the job for you.

Yeah, great idea, at work I will stop doing stuff because my boss can do web application security better tham me. I figure he can do the job for me. Oh wait, he has other, bigger fish to fry, like really complicated exploits. Hrm. Maybe I should keep doing stuff. The flaw in the above logic is that while it correctly assumes that there is a number of dogooders of varying skill level, it fails to consider that there is an equal and opposite number of dobadders. The assumption being that the only problem in the world is one confronting the players.

This is a result of metagame thinking. The player knows that in real life the DM probably only has one problem to throw at the player characters. So what the player does is projects this real world knowledge into the game and assumes that said challenge is the only one of consequence at the moment in the game world. This is when the question as to why the uber characters are not taking care of said problem arises. If we re-examine the nature of the world we find that there are many other problems pressing the resources of those who fight for "good" in the forgotten realms.

Lets see, we have the problems with City of the Spider Queen, we have the Phaerimm, we have the Zhents up to their old tricks, we have King Olbuld Many Arrows prepping to take over stuff in the north when millions of march out of the Spine of the World because there is not enough food in the mountains, we have the machinations of the behind the scenes events of the Thayans, The Yuan Ti, and the Xanthanr's Guild, we have the cult of the dragon consolidating power around the Well of Dragons, we have Cormyr in chaos because the king is 3 and too many people want the throne, and the list goes on.

Yeah, the Uber characters can handle all that. Sure. /sarcasm. If it were just one guy with a lot of power causing the big problem, then yeah, the chosen or whoever could take care of it. But almost all of the operations listed above are happening on an organisational or distributed scale. There are just too many evil doers for 12 really poerful people to take on.

Its the age old superman question. If you are superman, who do you help first? You are not going to be able to get everywhere and stop every evildoer or save everyone. The same is true for the Uber NPCs. Achilles can only kill one man at a time. He still needs an army to win the war.

PS IMO the FR pantheon is too big and redundant.

Well see thats the problem. There is no FR pantheon. There are the FR Pantheons. The gods in FR are made up of pantheons that have clashed, been absorbed, killed off and mixed up. In truth this is very realistic its a pattern that shows up all over our world. I mean Mithras was Babylonian but he was worshiped by many many Romans. The Romans did not all worship the Roman gods. There were numerous cults from different cultures all over the empire.

(Err... and someone kill Eilistraee. Please.)

Trust me my friend, FR gets a lot better if you look at the game setting and the novels as two different worlds. When you do this, you get control over Eilistraee, because none of that stuff in the novels ever happened. I would suggest not reading the novels if they make it hard to separate your game from the author's imagination.

I like reading the Drizzt books, they are fun. But don't think for a minute I am going to let it change my FR game.

The novels do not advance the setting. The setting books do. The setting may draw on some of the stories of the novels, but it comes down to what the setting book says. For example, if you try to use the novels and the setting books to figure out what happened to Tilverton, you will get about 3 different stories. All of them vastly different. I get to choose what happens also. If I don't like the Shadowvar coming back, they don't come back. If I don't want Cormyr in Chaos, the chaos gets sorted out right quick.

TRust me, forget about the novels. Think of it as published fanfic cause thats what it is.

The Eberron deities are much better. They don't interfere, they will never create a Chosen, they will never appear as an avatar, they rarely (if ever) talk, they don't spark racial wars over petty dislikes,

But the reason Greek mythology is so great is because the Greek gods do all the stuff you said the Eberron gods didn't. Oh wait we were talking about the FR deities... who behave the exact same way. Hmmmm...

Aaron.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I strongly disagree that Eberron has only one tone. I think it actually presents hooks for more sorts of adventures than the typical D&D world does, and I've read most of them since the days of 1E. Everything from "All Quiet on the Western Front" to "Raiders of the Lost Arc" to "Mad Max" to the more FR-iffic LotR analogues are totally viable.

Heck, they've even found a way to make psionics fit (which still amazes me), make the clunky "aberrations" category at least as compelling as the demon or devil categories (more, actually, in the native cosmology), make pirate adventures a comfortable fit (they never really worked for me in Faerun) and hell, they made GNOMES cool without changing the race (on the surface) an iota. That alone is a pretty remarkable achievement.

They even broke drow out of the traditional mold. They're still there -- and can be quite ubiquitious in games, in a very natural way, if the DM wants them to be -- but no more D3-by-way-of-Salvatore bits, at long last.

Eberron is not what its detractors -- or even an unbiased cursory glance -- would make it out to be. It really is possessed of a lot of interesting depth and is definitely set up for both high adventure (pulp) and very mature RP gameplay (noir).

It's hard to over-recommend it.

 

[ecliptic]

I got bored of Eberron quickly, sold all my books. I simply didn't like it.

 

[Christopher Lambert]

They could. But can they? Don't they have some other work to do? In my homebrew setting, there are several very powerful characters, too. They don't interfer with the players' adventures, they're too busy fending off attacks from malafides, ethergaunts, kaorti, illithids, and similar threats to the whole world. No time to fight a petty dictatorship or an ogre infestation.

High level characters don't fight off petty dictatorships or ogre infestations... certainly not the latter.

All the PCs have heard of them were pretty vague stuff (things like "Caleor the Elder's knowledge about planar anomalies is awe-inspiring, matched only by the demented gynosphinx Kelarie of the Mysteries' lore"). They have no idea what they do, and it'll stay that way.

So they haven't heard how one mage runs a city and has never lost a mage duel and, oh yeah, is a superlative adventurer to boot?

Elminster, Storm and the SImbul are also known as powerful troubleshooters.

And it's the same in Eberron. You have A CONTINENT FULL OF ANCIENT DRAGON LOREMASTERS, for Aureon's sake! That's not exactly wimpy. And they have an excellent reason to know of that Daelkyr plot to polymorph any object the whole friggin' planet into a needle: they knew it through the Prophecy, and their Chamber spies. Why don't they take it on themselves?

Because they're not good aligned and they don't adventure ... unlike the Chosen of Mystra, Drizzt, and the umpteen number of high-powered good aligned NPCs running around Faerun.