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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nlogue" data-source="post: 3441561" data-attributes="member: 41806">The above is a truly excellent boiled-down treatment of what makes Eberron not only pulpy, but also unique and interesting as a campaign setting.  The differences should be obvious.  In FR you ain't never gonna be Elminster.  In Eberron there ain't no Elminster...you get to become him.Action Points are such a breath of fresh air...they let you do stupid stupid pulpy action-adventury things without getting creamed for it.  They remind me of the old Top Secret S.I. Fate Points (I think?) and that is truly awesome in my opinon.  C'mon, how many times have you wanted to say "I leap off the cliff and try and jump on the dragon's back!" but then thought "well there is no way I can make the Jump check so why bother?"  Well, with action points you might make it just this one time, cause the fates, or adrenaline or the needs of the story are on your side.  Excitement ensues.  In my Eberron campaign out here in Hawai'i one of my friends plays a halfling extreme explorer...he can't fight as well as anyone else in the group...but he is the star of every gaming session...cause he gets to use all those action points to do incredibly awesome things that burn into the imaginations and memories of the other players (and me).  Action points are a great mechanic...very pulpy, and also just plain loads of fun.The political machinations of Eberron are nothing like those of FR (both are great in my opinion).  There are tons of secrets in Eberron that most of the world is simply not privy too.  There are no Harpers running around everywhere spying on the baddies for you.  Great forces of evil are working against each other in Eberron and you are caught in the middle of conflicts between The Dreaming Dark, The Lords of Dust, the Aurum, the Blood of Vol, etc.  To say nothing of the Dragonmarked Houses (I like to think of them as family-owned mega corporations with a little Shadowrun feel to them), which really has no equivalent whatsoever in FR or DL.  The alignment "problem" (as I am fond of calling it) in D&D gets a real breath of fresh air in Eberron too.  I hate the racist tropes set up in D&D that "all goblins and all red dragons" are evil.  That's just stupid and has no place in the complexities of society...and more importantly the This Race All Evil take removes any real sense of tragedy to an adventure's story.  If they are evil just killa-kill em.  It's much more tragic when the people  you have to kill aren't always evil, they just believe in something that directly opposes your beliefs...this is the backdrop for seriously awesome drama (or dramma, as I's like to call it).   Lastly as Glyfair pointed out - the atmosphere of Eberron is totally unique.  The Last War is completely different from the other wars you mentioned from DL and FR.  It was a war that consumed most of the civilized world that went on for a very long time, and as Glyfair pointed out, it didn't really end as much as it went from boil to simmer.  The legacies of the war are so rife with roleplaying flavor and adventure hooks.  The Last War played a huge factor in the lives of most of the PCs in my campaign out here and the hostilities/regrets/nightmares they deal with from the War really drive their characters' storylines.  Pulp is very connected to WWII and post WWII.  The connection here is obvious too, and more importantly, even if it weren't pulpy (which it definitely is) it would still be really really cool (and it definitely is).Let me close with this:I HATED Eberron when it first came out.  I held almost all the same opinions expressed by Rounser above and a lot of other vocal opponents of the setting.  Then I picked it up in my FLGS, sat down there and read it...I was converted.  It is really a brilliant work of game design.  Read it if you haven't.  You'll see.</blockquote>

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