Now that you have Eberron - will you run it?

[Kanegrundar]

I just got my copy in yesterday, and I have to say that it's pretty darn good. Kudos to Keith Baker in winning the Setting Search, I'm not entirely sure that my submission would have came anywhere close to the shear "coolness" of Eberron.

I doubt that I'll run a campaign in the setting, but I will mine the heck out of it for my homebrew world...just like I do with all the setting books that I buy. (At least I do that with the ones worth keeping!) There are some excellent ideas in Eberron that I know will help to further spice up my own home setting.

Kane

 

[reanjr]

Not much new

There's nothing in this book that an experienced DM couldn't come up with over a week or two.

The extra rules (feats, action points, races) are all either stolen (from something free online), derivitive, or simple. None of the rules, other than Action Points really add anything to the setting.

Warforged are a unique race, but don't again don't add anything to the setting. If the Last War had taken place 300 years ago and the warforged were a dying race; rusting, uninspired, unneeded machines of a war nearly forgotten, struggling with the mediocrity of peaceful lives, aching to find meaning whether it be through adventure, mercenary work, or looking for one of the forgotten machines that would help replenish one's race. THAT would have been interesting.

Instead, they're T-100s, programmed to kick ass, but able to have a hearts. It's glossed over that they are still considered slaves or property in some cultures, which may have been a good story element. The designers seem to realize that there is nothing really that special about them; so they blitz you with little sections pertaining to Warforged wherever they could reasonably (and sometimes not so reasonably) be justified to do so.

The other new races are lackluster and uninteresting.

The prestige classes don't seem to be Eberron-specific in any way. They're all just excuses for filling the book with more rules (as if D&D needed them). This is not abnormal, though. Almost every d20 publisher assumes we need seventeen new prestige classes per book. What they really assume is that they can slap a number on the back of the book (18 New Prestige Classes!!!) and fill countless pages with meaningless content.

Now I'm not against Prestige Classes in general, just the ones that have no prestige (those related to some kind of particular campaign ideal) and no class (those that fill in a necessary niche that cannot be adequately described with multiclassing).

On the other hand, Eberron's got one new full class that's great. The magewright fills a niche that previously didn't exist and it is perfectly suited to the high-level of magic in the campaign. This is one of the best examples of someone actually taking a moment to create something thoughtful in this setting.

Dragonmarks are another nice unique touch to the setting, but for something that really isn't important (it has been suggested that the DM could easily remove them from the campaign without any harm), they take up a HUGE amount of space that could be used for their primary deficiency:

Setting.

There is almost no Setting to this campaign setting. There is not enough information on any particular place or idea to utilize it in any useful manner. They spent way to much space on pretty pictures instead.

Not a very good product. ESPECIALLY considering the $40 price tag.

Wait for the supplements so you can have the full campaign setting instead of just the introduction.

 

[Wombat]

My FLGS has sold 3 copies since it has come out, and two of those had to be exchanged due to the "Missing Page" problem. **sigh**

This does not bode well for my FLGS remaining as a game store.

I am not picking Eberron up, not because of anything inherently against Eberron, but strictly because I prefer to create my own game worlds. I wish very good luck to those who have picked it up -- it hope if fulfills your expectations and more!

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Warforged are a unique race, but don't again don't add anything to the setting. If the Last War had taken place 300 years ago and the warforged were a dying race; rusting, uninspired, unneeded machines of a war nearly forgotten, struggling with the mediocrity of peaceful lives, aching to find meaning whether it be through adventure, mercenary work, or looking for one of the forgotten machines that would help replenish one's race. THAT would have been interesting.

Instead, they're T-100s, programmed to kick ass, but able to have a hearts. It's glossed over that they are still considered slaves or property in some cultures, which may have been a good story element. The designers seem to realize that there is nothing really that special about them; so they blitz you with little sections pertaining to Warforged wherever they could reasonably (and sometimes not so reasonably) be justified to do so.

I haven't gotten hold of this book, but...

When I read about the Warforged, I think about the sf setting Transhuman Space, which has also has plenty of completely artificial life forms - artifician intelligences and bioroids, which are basically biological constructs, with a role similar to the Warforged (well, the bioroids can be a bit more flexible - I don't know it there are all that many Warforged pleasure slaves in Eberron... ).

And there are plenty of ideas and issues surrounding the rights of bioroids and their roles in society in Transhuman Space - so I imagine I could steal many of them for Eberrron.

In other words, I do like the idea of sapient constructs as a PC race quite a bit - it's great if you want to play something different, and it provides plenty of adventure ideas, too...

 

[d10]

Love Eberron so much, thats the only setting I'll ever use again. I'm actually thinking of burning my FR books now....they just pale in comparison to me.

No supreme wizards/warrior NPC's is a biggie with me.Also, the setting is just rife with freshness. So much so that you can smell it. You read the book and adventure ideas just go a mile a minute through your noggin. Its great.Its got me excited about D&D again.

 

[Flyspeck23]

I had no interest in Eberron. All the pre-release hype was falling on deaf if not hostile ears so far as I was concerned. I heard that Eberron was going to have firearms, and all kinds of other crazy stuff, and I just wasn't interested. I even ran across the book pre-release and walked right by, didn't even look at it.

The a buddy picked it up, so I looked through it, and before I knew it, I was hooked. Some of the crazy rumors were true (dino riding halflings), others were not. Most of whats in the book has impressed me. It's almost totally opposite of what I normally run, but I really like it. I'm not running though, my buddy is.

I could've said that too, with one notable exception: I'll be the DM, and wouldn't want it any other way

 

[Caliban]

The poll is missing an option:


I have the book and will start a campaign in eberron, but will also continue my current campaign.

 

[Scharlata]

Answer Option 1 is distorting the results; so no voting for me

Kind regards

 

[pigi314159]

In my experience, the question is unfair. Different campaign settings appeal to different people for different reasons. I have a friend who is a Ravenloft cultist. I have another who is a Dragonlance fanatic. I'm more partial to Faerun. And I have yet another friend who wouldn't be caught with anything that wasn't a homebrew. And most of us swear that we'd never run anything that another loves because we don't like it. (or that it's too much work to acquant yourself with campaign specific rules/creatures, etc. etc. etc.)

So...to this question I say, chacun ses gouts(to each his own). Like what you do, dislike what you don't, and steal other people's good ideas if necessary.

-Cheers!

 

[Astraldrake]

I have to admit, I was one of the people that rushed right out and bought a copy of Eberron. Not because I was drooling mindlessly from the hype, of which there was far too much, but because I wanted to see what won the setting search.

Frankly, I have a hard time believing that they actually looked through ALL of the entries and ended up picking three finalists who just happened to be professional game designers or close enough... I'm not saying my submission was the coolest thing since sliced bread, but I would have expected at least one completely unknown designer to have surfaced from all of this.

I'll loot and pilage from the Eberron book, sure. I think there is a lot of potential for use in FFG's Dragonstar setting and a couple of other short runs I have planned. But as a setting, I think Eberron could have offered a lot more.

I yearn for the days of the greats- the grandiose unexplored worlds like FR, Dragonlance, Greyhawk and Birthright. When they came out, they were new, powerful and exciting. You wanted to go exploring in them. Yes, there were big, world shattering NPC's that came later on, like Elminster, but I'm willing to bet Eberron will suffer the same fate soon enough. I was hoping for a release such as Birthright or Planescape that made me want to make a character and get going, but Eberron left me flat.

I hope WotC releases another setting within the next few years that has more of a hardened fantasy slant, with majestic heroes, a moderate magic level, and no guns. I'd also like to see more of the other 10,996 submissions (not counting my own) that got passed on, if they really exist, and if they were ever taken seriously.

For whatever reason, I can only really use Eberron as a sourcebook, and little else. I'll stick to my "homebrew" material until something better comes along.