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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 3348670" data-attributes="member: 18832">Eberron.About the only thing I can't promise you is beardless dwarves; the dwarves of Eberron are the closest to their "roots" as any race in the setting gets. On the other hand, they did claw themselves up from barbarism relatively recently, historically speaking: no "ancient kingdom under the mountain" here.But the other Tolkienesque races? Elves In Name Only, Halflings In Name Only, Orcs In Name Only (almost). The two dominant elven cultures are the Aereni, who revere their greatest ancestors so much they preserve them as deathless and have established them as a living gestalt deity, and the Tairnadal, who strive in all things to emulate the deeds of their heroic ancestors and are therefore glory-seeking warmongers. Halflings, famously, ride dinosaurs in their nomadic bands of plains-dwellers. There are tribes of barbaric orcs corrupted by the evil which lurks in the world below, but they were also the first druids and saved the world from invasion by unspeakable planar horrors.The other thing that's great about Eberron is the fact that there are significant minorities of all the non-human races who consider themselves to be first and foremost members of the majority-human nations - an elf in the city of Sharn in Breland considers herself a Brelander, most likely, and probably has a family history in that nation as long as your average human's. Also, half-elves consider themselves their own race, having been around and breeding true since the days of the first human-elven contact thousands of years ago.Eberron is a setting of grey morality, where you can be a noble hero but you can also be a cynical, war-weary anti-hero. The world's just pulled itself out of a century-long war that could break out again at any moment; there's espionage and film noir-like intrigue aplenty, but also a lot of room for pulp adventure a la Doc Savage or Indiana Jones.I loathe Tolkien's setting and the way his conventions have dominated fantasy and fantasy roleplaying for thirty years, and I love Eberron for all the ways it takes a different, contemporary approach to the genre.I really think it's the best anti-Tolkien setting that still supports the standard D&D experience. You can get further from Tolkien with post-apocalyptic settings like Dark Sun, or spacefaring settings like Spelljammer, or reality-hopping settings like Planescape, but if you want a world with kingdoms and continents and all the "standard features", yet wholly unlike Tolkien, Eberron is what you want.</blockquote>

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